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I'd assume that it will be paid mostly by CERN member states.

Well don't do that. The precedent has been to rely on considerable funding and resources from the US:

The US provided one-third of the cost of each detector, about $165 million to each. A lot of this was built in the US, funding US hi-tech jobs.

The US also contributed $200 million to the accelerator.

The US contributes about a third of the cost of running the detectors.

Pretty good for a mere "observer" state. Doubtless the US will be invited to observe a few billion into Future Circular Collider as well.

This is really a population level meta-analysis rather than universal recommendations for individuals.

To illustrate a specific population that is under study that is not captured in a broad assessment like this there is the University of California Irvine study of the "Oldest Old".

Researchers from The 90+ Study have published many scientific papers in premier journals.
Some of the major findings are:
People who drank moderate amounts of alcohol or coffee lived longer than those who abstained.
People who were overweight in their 70s lived longer than normal or underweight people did.

A very interesting thing about the alcohol consumption part is that it is not just a correlation. It was effective as an intervention -- that is people who did not drink, but started moderate alcohol consumption after the age of 70 (which this study investigated) lived longer than those who never drank!

But maybe you need to wait until you are 70.

Also the benefit from coffee appears to actually be the benefit of consuming caffeine and does not matter what form. You get the optimum benefit consuming 100 mg a day.

There is one super special kind of person who exists on the internet. This particular one who makes claims however provides absolutely no information to back up his claims. Furthermore, believes that somehow, his own positions are validated by making snide comments validates their own idiocy.

Simply put, ISP's do not, without a special contract in place, shape your traffic. They also do not provide QoS on anything without a special contract, except for THEIR OWN traffic.

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~sjord...

Provide a link to a single ISP that provides QoS service on ingress/egress of their network. Just one major provider.

Except for Tri Alpha Energy:

Tri Alpha plans to fuse protons (otherwise known as hydrogen nuclei) with boron-11. This reaction produces no neutrons at all, and both elements are plentiful and naturally occurring. “We’re always saying, if you want to buy our plant,” Binderbauer says, “we’ll give you a lifetime supply of fuel for free.” The reason hardly anybody else is pursuing it is that proton-boron-11 fusion requires much higher temperatures, insanely much higher: 3 billion degrees Celsius.

I'm not on RescueTime; I'm on, like, Boulder Golden Durban Goat Poison Oh Jesus Chem Kush got-any-crackers time. I can't imagine trying to flip my neurons to a new thread 300 times a week, much less 300 times a day. Isn't there some research that says that it takes people 20+ minutes to get fully engaged after an interrupt or task switch?

I love C. That's first. Second, I haven't read this TechCrunch person's post, but I am generally not inclined to believe anything on TC beyond their analysis of the industry (if I even believe that!).

HOWEVER,

I wanted to share this paper from HotOS 2017 about formalizing type safety in Rust:

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~aburtsev/doc/crust-hotos17.pdf

I thought it was interesting. In light of this discussion, I thought someone might find it useful!

Will

ASLR randomizes the general offset.

This randomizes the object file order.

Selfrando randomizes every single function.

https://github.com/immunant/se...

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~perl/...

https://developers.slashdot.or...
https://developers.slashdot.or...
https://developers.slashdot.or...
https://developers.slashdot.or...

Doesn't cover all the philosophy or mechanics, but should do for starters. Ask specific questions where more information is needed.

Oh, and Fielding's writeup from his work on HTTP, natch:

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~field...

All good on the theory, hopeless on worked examples for actually testing if your interpretation actually matches his intent, but guess that's how academia rolls.

BTW, if you're wondering why not even the dog will kiss you, it's because you have a mouth like an open sewer.

That was GCHQ with their implementation:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ics54/...

Here are some points that the OP needs to understand.

1. There are two different levels of expertise with working on machine learning: either as a library/tool user, or as a ML algorithm developer. It is EXACTLY analogous to how one approaches SQL: You can make a great living being a SQL user and knowing how to write efficient queries and build indexes, or you can go deeper and build the SQL engine itself along with its query optimizer, storage layer, etc. If you want to use ML as a library/tool user, you can have a great career as long as you know what tools and algorithms to use. If you want to be a ML algorithm developer, that means you want to work on the innards, such as using new SVM kernels or building new deep learning networks; for this role, you'll usually need a PhD-calibre background heavy in math. I personally started out as a library/tool user with Weka and Mallet, but as I used them more, I was able to understand the math behind them.

2. ML is an abstract field, and it's best to approach it from an applications point of view. Pick a problem that needs ML, such as natural language processing or image recognition. It's important to pick a problem that has an abundant amount of labelled data. There are some fields such as voice recognition where it is terribly difficult to get real labelled data. For NLP (aka computational linguistics), you can start with some basic problems such as document classification (e.g. for this document, is it about sports, business, entertainment, etc.?) or sentiment analytics (e.g. for this Twitter tweet, is it positive or negative?). There are lots of good datasets in the NLP field.

3. You can explore datasets from the Kaggle competitions and the University of California, Irvine, repository: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

4. Pick a tool and stick with it. I have used Weka, Mallet, and R. You can also use Python and Matlab.

5. When you read the literature, you will find two nearly-synonymous terms: "machine learning" and "data mining". Both are closely related. Machine learning historically comes from the AI community and generally focuses on building better ML algorithms and solving supervised ML problems. Data mining historically comes from the database community and generally focuses on using tools and solving unsupervised ML problems (e.g. finding clusters of similar customers).

6. At the end of the day, creating a better solution does not come down to the ML algorithms themselves. Rather, the better solution comes from the amount of data and what features you are able to extract. As for the many ML algorithms for supervised learning: at the end of the day, your main responsibility will come down to picking the one that best suits your application. It is just like picking which sorting algorithm to use: when do you use Quicksort, and when do you use Mergesort?

7. Here are some really good books that I have personally read:

Beginner level:
- Programming Collective Intelligence by T. Segaran.
- Introduction to Data Mining by P.-N. Tan and M. Steinbach.

Intermediate level:
- Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools by I. Witten and E. Frank. (goes with the Weka tool)

Advanced level:
- Artificial intelligence: A Modern Approach by S. Russell and P. Norvig. (touches on all aspects of AI, such as tic-tac-toe algorithms with minimax and First Order Logic)
- Introduction to Machine Learning by E. Alpaydin

PROTIP: How to tell if you're reading an advanced machine learning book -- if the index contains reference to Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension or shattering, then the book is hardcore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/

Some of the corrections in there look like they're putting upwards of a .6 C temp bias on the sat data.

Sorry, you'll have to explain to me where in that link you're seeing hard figures for satellite corrections. You're not assuming "Global Temperature Anomaly" is a correction factor, are you? (it's the difference in temperature results from a mean value). All I see is that graph of those results, and some figures for trends. I followed some of the source links, but the methods they use are complex, and some of them only have abstracts available.

I have a big problem with the units you're using in that graph... Zeta Joules? Why aren't you citing this as temperature?

It's NOAA's graph, not mine, and they use joules because it's a measure of total energy change. This is helpful for discovering how much solar energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases and subsequently absorbed by oceans. Temperature is a less useful figure because it's dependant on the volume of water and thermal mass, but will show the same ongoing trend.

It's true that El Nino and La Nina cycles directly affect ocean heat, but these are relatively short cycles and can easily be smoothed out by averaging data over decades; similarly for solar cycles. There are also geologic cycles as you say, but those have a much slower effect, and can be accounted for by measuring the change in their causes (e.g. orbital changes). While we can't discount the effect of an undiscovered long-term climate cycle on what we're seeing now, nobody has yet found a natural cause that would result in such a relatively rapid change - but the effects we're observing match quite closely with the calculated effects of the rise in atmospheric CO2, so that's a sufficient and far more likely cause than postulating an unknown factor.

Similarly for sea level rises. Of course it has changed much more drastically in the past, and sometimes very rapidly too, but nonetheless the level of rise we're seeing helps confirm our hypotheses, and is still of concern to our many coastal communities.

show me the error I made here

Yeah, you're off by a factor of 1 million - 195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water is actually 195.7 cubic kilometres of water (there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres in a cubic kilometre). Though because the ice is freshwater, 200 Gt of ice would be closer to 200 km^3 when melted, or about 0.55mm when spread out evenly. There are of course other sources of meltwater than just Greenland + Antarctic, and thermal expansion is about 25% of the total rise too.

Where in there do they show any calculations?

The last link was to the IPCC AR5 paper; they don't do the calculations there, they summarise the conclusions of the papers that do, and cite those papers. (The link I gave you was actually a draft and was missing diagrams, so here's the relevant section of the final report).

If you look at section 13.3.6, that discusses the contributing factors to the total sea level rise, and cites a number of papers for their sources, including Shepherd et al 2012 (better link than earlier) and Church et al 2011a.

Hope that helps.

Since you don't have to implement ever aspect laid out in Mr. Fielding's dissertation to be RESTful, I think your second paragraph is a bit too strong.

One thing that's probably not clear from your comment is where you talk about forms. A RESTful API doesn't provide forms, but it may support POST/PUT HTTP verbs, actions that are most often exercised by using forms.

There is, in fact, evidence that your concerns are well founded. I wish I had a reference for it but the research demonstrated an uncomfortable likelihood that a search against a large pool of DNA profiles would nearly inevitably return several false matches.

And that was before considering that few DNA samples are perfect in the first place.

A lot of people would have a lot less confidence in DNA matches if they knew that really only a tiny sampling of the DNA's characteristics are spot checked for a match. They definitely do not match them up codon by codon like many people imagine.

deja vu all over again

"Latent print examiners have long claimed that fingerprint identification is "infallible." 1' The claim is widely believed by the general public, as evidenced by the publicity generated by the Mayfield and Cowans cases, with newspaper headlines like "Despite Its Reputation, Fingerprint Evidence Isn't Really Infallible.' 12 Curiously, the claim even appears to survive exposed cases of error, which would seem to puncture the claim of infallibility.'" Such cases have been known since as early as 1920 and have not disturbed the myth of infallibility.' 4 Today, latent print examiners continue to defend the claim of infallibility, even in the wake of the Mayfield case.' 5 For example, Agent Massey commented in a story on the Mayfield case, "I'll preach fingerprints till I die. They're infallible. 16 Another examiner declared, in a discussion of the Mayfield case, "Fingerprints are absolute and infallible."' 17 http://scholarlycommons.law.no...

"The rhetoric of infallibility proved helpful in establishing the admissibility of forensic DNA tests and persuading judges and jurors of its epistemic authority.7 It has also played an important role in the promotion of government DNA databases. Innocent people have nothing to fear from databases, promoters claim. Because the tests are infallible, the risk of a false incrimination must necessarily be nil. One indication of the success and influence of the rhetoric of infallibility is that, until quite recently, concerns about false incriminations played almost no role in debates about database expansion. The infallibility of DNA tests has, for most purposes, become an accepted fact-one of the shared assumptions underlying the policy debate.
In this article, I will argue that this shared assumption is wrong. Although generally quite reliable (particularly in comparison with other forms of evidence often used in criminal trials), DNA tests are not now and have never been infallible. Errors in DNA testing occur regularly. DNA evidence has caused false incriminations and false convictions, and will continue to do so. Although DNA tests incriminate the correct person in the great majority of cases, the risk of false incrimination is high enough to deserve serious consideration in debates about expansion of DNA databases. The risk of false incrimination is borne primarily by individuals whose profiles are included in government databases (and perhaps by their relatives). Because there are racial, ethnic and class disparities in the composition of databases, the risk of false incrimination will fall disproportionately on members of the included groups.8,9" http://www.councilforresponsib...

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~mue...

[citation]

although the article doesn't provide examples of what kinds of diversity are possible whilst maintaining the program logic, nor what kind of attacks would be prevented with this approach."

I don't know if TFA actually didn't, but the UCI group has published some papers on the multicompiler work, including this one from CGO last year. The main goal for this is to provide defence against return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks, where you chain together 'gadgets' (small chunks of code that do a little bit of computation and then return). One of the things that they do is insert NOPs to reduce the number of gadgets. This is an x86-specific thing, because the variable-length instructions mean that a single binary sequence can be several different instruction sequences depending on the byte offset where you start reading it. They also try to ensure that gadgets are in different places in every program build. This means that a ROP exploit has to be tailored to the target - you can't just have one byte string that, when pushed onto the stack, will exploit everyone.

Oh, and for anyone who says 'ASLR solves this!', take a look at the Blind ROP paper from Stanford.

We're currently investigating incorporating the multicompiler into the FreeBSD package build infrastructure.

Okay, this technology is described in depth in a 2013 paper called librando: Transparent Code Randomization for Just-in-Time Compilers. There might be even newer information available somewhere, if Mr. Franz or his colleagues have continued the research.

You're trying to get me to agree to a ridiculous sounding oversimplification of my position

No, that's *literally* your position as stated.

"If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice."

You are *literally* asserting that warmer temperatures decrease salinity, and therefore cause a mitigation of the typical freezing point depression, and therefore cause more ice.

They said it's going to be fairly slow for the next century or so and didn't hide the fact. How is that hype?

I'll quote the article I cited:

"As seems to always be the case the climate fear propaganda news media have completely mislead the public once again regarding climate related issues this time by alleging claims of 4 meter high future sea level rise increases supposedly addressed in two recent studies which performed analysis of glacier melt behavior of six large glaciers in West Antarctica.

One study was published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and titled “Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013“. This study is available here:

http://www.ess.uci.edu/researc...

The second study was published in Science and titled “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica“. This study is available here:

http://sciences.blogs.liberati...

Both studies evaluate the relatively recent melt rate history of these glaciers with one focusing on the use observed satellite data to estimate melt rate behavior while the other uses computer models to estimate melt rate behavior.

Amazingly enough and considering how the press manufactured headlines about sea level rise increases being determined from these studies neither of the studies addresses or make any claims about the impact of their research results on specific future sea level rise projections.

In fact GLC study mentions nothing specific about future sea level rise projections while the Science study clearly notes that their research models “are not coupled to a global climate model to provide forcing nor do they include an ice-shelf cavity-circulation model to derive melt rates. Few if any such fully coupled models presently exist (13). As such, our simulations do not constitute a projection of future sea level in response to projected climate forcing.”

Also unreported by the same climate alarmist propaganda focused media were the significant qualifications, limitations and cautions noted in these studies concerning their glacier melt research findings.

The GRL published study noted for example the following qualifiers regarding its analysis:

“These observations are a possible sign of the progressive collapse of this sector in response to the high melting of its buttressing ice shelves by the ocean.”

“Until numerical ice sheet models coupled with realistic oceanic forcing are able to replicate these observations, projections of the evolution of this sector of West Antarctica should be interpreted with caution.”

The Science published study contained the following similarly related qualifiers regarding its analysis:

“Although our simple melt parameterization suggests that a full-scale collapse of this sector may be inevitable, it leaves large uncertainty in the timing. Thus, ice-sheet models fully coupled to ocean/climate models are required to reduce the uncertainty in the chronology of a collapse.”

Why aren’t these significant research finding qualifiers regarding the preliminary nature of these studies results addressed by the main stream media?

The main stream media manufactured numbers alleging sea level rise projections not addre

It's not only the Python interpreter but also the C extensions that you use that have to be ported to Python 3. For example, Pygame (Python bindings for SDL 1.2) doesn't have official Windows packages for 3.3 or 3.4 on its download page. (It instead relies on what appears to be an unofficial page.)

The idea that you can just throw tech at education problems is so common its got a name: 'digital utopianism'.
It's failure was seen with the OLPC project: in Uruguay all school children have an XO laptop but only about a fifth of teachers use it in the classroom daily, similar statistics apply to Alabama. Even the OLPC now admits you need to combine technology with teacher training and community buy-in

Also there is a simpler analysis of the above article

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

I research hard AI. In my view thinking through and tackling example problems is the best way to explore a topic. If you require your system to mirror our current understanding of neuroscience, then you're essentially researching the algorithms of the brain.

If you're specifically looking into epilepsy and related, consider checking out William Calvin's website. He's an experimental neuroscientist from University of Washington, who wrote many books that explain the neurological foundations of the brain in readable form with good detail.

(1) What are some interesting computational neuroscience simulation problems

Pretty much anything AI falls under that category. Go over to Kaggle.com and check out some of their competitions, including their past competitions. Check out the Google AI lab and see what they're doing, and check out recent publications to see what people are trying to solve. Ask yourself: Are humans better than the computer, and can it be done better?

Here's a video of a system that uses neuron simulation (of a sort) to recognize hand-written digits. A hand-written digits dataset is in the UCI archive below.

(2) Is it easy for a non-academic to get the required data?

Generally, yes. UCI has a repository of machine-learning datasets. The researchers supporting Kaggle competitions frequently release their data.

I've found that researchers are generally approachable, and will give away copies of their data (I have 4 datasets from researchers). As a personal anecdote, last week a researcher from this very forum sent me his dataset of Mars altitude images - I'm trying to come up with an algorithm to recognize craters.

(3) I am familiar with (but not used extensively) simulators like Neuron, Genesis etc. Other than these and Matlab, what other software should I get?

In my view, pick a computer language that has a wide support network of libraries, and code things from scratch.Something like Perl or R. At some point you will want to break open the box and see what's actually happening inside, and familiarity with the system (having constructed it) is key. You will want to insert trace statements, print out intermediate results, and so on. Most of the pre-built systems don't have what you will ultimately want, and building simulation objects isn't terribly hard.

(4) Where online or offline, can I network with other DIY Computational Neuroscience enthusiasts?

Please let me know if you find any (by posting a response).

I've found that most AI enthusiasts are really "big data" enthusiasts, and most of them are all about business rather than AI. The IRC AI chatrooms are all but dead, and most of what is there are students asking for help with their homework. (Although to be fair, the lurkers there know everything about AI and can answer questions and make suggestions if you're stuck.)

The NEAI meetup in Cambridge is mostly spectators - people who want to find out about AI or how to use AI ("how can I use AI to improve the performance of my financial company?"). I hear there's an AI meetup out on the West coast that's pretty good.

See if there's a meetup in your area for something related, or start one and see if anyone shows up.

Yes but I could pick another example, the nutrino and say it sounds like that too:
"In 1930 Wolfgang Pauli proposed a solution to the missing energy in nuclear beta decays, namely that it was carried by a neutral particle " ( http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html )

It makes perfect sense. You have theories that test to a high confidence in every way you can test them, then you find an anomaly in specific instances. Whats the response? Take those theories and attempt to narrow down the properties of what would cause the anomaly.

It obviously doesn't always produce a hypothesis that pans out as correct, but, can you really say that Aether theory was so bad? It was wrong, yes, but, it lead to the creation of experiments that answered new questions and ultimately, shaped the theories that came after it.

and...at the time... that is, after light was shown to be wave-like AND before we knew that there was no motion relative to its "medium", postulating Aether made a lot of sense.

"Court Martial" (and other episodes). They can't maintain orbit without engines.

Guess what, no object in orbit can maintain it's orbit without propulsion. Space isn't a perfect vacuum.

References
D. A. Vallado, et. al.
Australian Space Weather Agency
M. M. Moe et. al.

Now a ship the mass of the Enterprise and low cross-sectional area, won't have a decay time on the order of hours like they show in the show but it's orbit is always decaying.

Now the JJ Abrams Star Trek is riddled with errors.
In the first one there is no way a faster than ship should have problems escaping the gravitational pull of a blackhole if it has not crossed the event horizon yet.
In the second, when the enterprise is falling to earth, all of the crew should have been weightless.

It mentions that it's up to 80% efficient if it's used in a cogeneration mode - so I wonder if that 25kw is pure electricity or also heat?

On the other hand, the specs don't mention 24kW at all. It mentions 80kW@60% efficiency. Maybe it's more efficient at a lower capacity? What's with the cogeneration, which is mentioned in the forbes article, but not elsewhere? Details people, I'd like some!

Whatever, without some solid price estimates, it's hard to say. I believe that an OOM cheaper for the system would make it competitive with diesel generators price wise, which combined with higher efficiency and comparable lifespan would quickly kill the diesel generator market.

Let's see, the NFCRC has some info.
1. Stationary power market, fuel cells are 'competitive' if they reach $1.5k or less per kW.
2. Current cost is $4k+ per kW
3. Vehicular use is competitive at $60-100 per kW.

Going by the Forbes article, that would translate to $400+ per kW, which would indeed slaughter conventional power generation systems, which tend to be ~$1.5k+ per kW for high reliability sources of power. The Diverse Energy 'Powercube' seems to be a different product entirely - using ammonia as a fuel source, as opposed to the listed NG from Forbes, and NG, Propane, Diesel, biomass, and JP-8 listed on the product website. The Maryland Tech site mentions they're at 650F, 300F is still being developed. In either case, that's a handy heat source for various uses.

Given that I pay some of the highest cost electricity in the country, I think I'd love to have one of the 5kW systems mentioned. I already have a fuel oil tank in the ground for heating, I could get electricity for substantially less than what I pay with this system.

Here's an example of the sort of thing of thing I'm talking about: New Target for Treating Wide Range of Cancers: Promising Binding Site On Mutant P53 Protein. This is a major breakthrough on the path toward finding treatments for a wide range of cancers. The team is led by what appears to be one of these so-called free-riding immigrants, an Austrian. If you read the names on this publication list you'd be forgiven for thinking this was in a foreign country. Meet some of the team members who are f'ing curing cancer - a sizable percentage of them are "foreigners", and many are probably immigrants who are supposedly being "given" an education at the "expense" of the US. I bet the jerks who are so eager to kick all "foreigners" out of America would gladly accept that cancer cure when it comes round, when they get cancer from sitting on their lazy asses eating junkfood. I really think we benefit from this ... this example is just one, but you can look at just about any leading-edge research to find the same pattern.

Here's an example of the sort of thing of thing I'm talking about: New Target for Treating Wide Range of Cancers: Promising Binding Site On Mutant P53 Protein. This is a major breakthrough on the path toward finding treatments for a wide range of cancers. The team is led by what appears to be one of these so-called free-riding immigrants, an Austrian. If you read the names on this publication list you'd be forgiven for thinking this was in a foreign country. Meet some of the team members who are f'ing curing cancer - a sizable percentage of them are "foreigners", and many are probably immigrants who are supposedly being "given" an education at the "expense" of the US. I bet the jerks who are so eager to kick all "foreigners" out of America would gladly accept that cancer cure when it comes round, when they get cancer from sitting on their lazy asses eating junkfood. I really think we benefit from this ... this example is just one, but you can look at just about any leading-edge research to find the same pattern.

You don't need a course to be a "MOOC". In America many Universities offer videos of their lectures and some offer notes and exercises too. Buy the textbook - secondhand, show some gritm put aside the time and you can learn anything. If you get stuck there are forums like 'mad scientists' where people will help you. Connect with others interested in learning the same thing. If you get stuck on a particular concept, check another textbook for an alternate explanation or check out Kahn Academy. Many tutors post short clips explaining concepts on Youtube too.

Some people ask if you get credit for these. Of course you don't, and I question the motives of those people: If you're more interested in buying a piece of paper, then buy the piece of paper. But if you want to learn, yes, it can be done.

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
http://ocw.uci.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/education?category=University
Some universities only make the podcasts available only on ITunes, but there are alternatives to Apple's walled garden: http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php


Can I add: A Pox on Australian degree factories (also known as 'Universities') who won't make their content available online because they are more interested in squeezing every last cent out of their students. The idea of accidentally helping someone terrifies them.

Yet this is what it takes to power ONE BUILDING. JUST ONE

Yes, one datacenter containing what are surely thousands of AC-cooled servers. By another comparison, this 20MW solar farm would provide enough electricity to meet the annual needs of nearly 15,000 homes (in California, using about 6000 kWh per household annually. The US average is higher).

http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/actions/HouseholdEnergy.html

GRACE can resolve nearly uncorrelated mascons that are blocks 400km on each side with a noise floor of ~1cm equivalent water height. (This is latitude dependent because GRACE's denser ground tracks near the poles allow for better resolution.) Each mascon has a mass of ~1.6 gigatons, and a fully-loaded coal train is ~10 kilotons, so GRACE falls short by about five orders of magnitude.

The improved laser ranging on the GRACE follow-on will increase sensitivity, and David Wiese analyzes improvements due to lowering the satellites' altitude and/or adding more satellites to the GRACE system.

You're right to suspect that detecting a tiny change in local gravity is limited by uncertainties in models such as atmosphere dynamics. I've discussed how GPS occultation data (among many other data sources) can be used to reduce these uncertainties.

Other anthropogenic effects such as groundwater depletion can already be detected with GRACE. Rodell et al. 2009 (PDF) and Tiwari et al. 2009 (PDF) observed this in northern India, and Famiglietti et al. 2011 (PDF) recently observed similar groundwater depletion in California.

Its creation is an achievement because gliders were previously thought to exist only in regular cellular automata, such as the most famous one, the Game of Life

On wikipedia that would get flagged as weasel words (or the whole article deleted for non-notoriety). Who thinks gliders should only exist in regular automata? If anything my opinion is that modern automata thought was the other way around, expecting them to exist.

Note that gliders are not rare or unusual in automata. Some of the first original researchers thought that only gliders/spaceships that exist lived only in Conways GoL but further research a long time ago showed they're ridiculously commonplace in other rulesets. As seen below. So the tone of this discovery is more accurately described as "much as we suspected, but never bothered to prove, until now" rather than the stereotypical serendipitous discovery tone of "that result looks weird, WTF, who ever would have guessed"

This is separate from the penrose tile thing, which I don't follow. It might, or might not, be the case that a glider in the very specific ruleset of penrose tiles is a hard problem. But in the wide universe of all rulesets, gliders/spaceships and stuff seem very widespread. As a general rule if a ruleset is terminally boring then it definitely does not have gliders, but if its not terminally boring then almost all of them have either chaotic and/or glider-like behavior.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/ca/

".... I have investigated whether gliders exist in many semitotalistic rules similar to Life, where the behavior of a cell depends only on its own state and the number of live neighbors. The results show that the existence of gliders is commonplace ....."

http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/genaro/rule54/glidersRule54.html

".... We displayed all gliders of Rule 54 including two new glider guns (also extensible) ... "

Rule 54 has nothing to do with the famous rule 34. Well I guess there are self replicating patterns in CA rule 54 which could be interpreted as pr0n by another one dimensional cellular automata, I guess.

This is great technology, but it isn't news, no matter what the BBC thinks.

UC Irvine's machine learning repository has had a set of Parkinson's and non-Parkinson's voice prints up since 2008. (Astute readers will note that it's based on Max Little's work, as is the BBC article. But it's not news.)

Actually the numbers I've seen indicate that gay men (research usually focuses on gay men for whatever reason instead of lesbians--I suppose lesbianism is a little less contentious?) actually earn significantly less than our non-gay counterparts. For instance, this analysis says

...same-sex behaving men experience a statistically and economically significant income penalty on the order of 23-30 percent

I'm not really sure what the cause is. Workplace discrimination? Less interest in careers, more interest in sex (dubious)? Less impetus to earn a lot to support your family? Less education partly because of crappy high school experiences? I dunno, I'm just guessing. The only targeted advertising I've gotten that comes to mind as relevant is for gay dating/hookup/porn sites and gay vacations--the vacations are the only pricey thing, and they're relatively rare. I don't think advertisers on the whole think I have money burning a hole in my pocket.

Unless you honestly thing there were controlled experiments to establish the attraction of objects proportional to their mass in Newton's time.

On this point, John Mitchell, in 1750 (23 years after Newton's death) used a torsion pendulum to measure the density of the earth. [1] Of course the ones used in modern experiments [2] are quite different, but the basic principle is still used.

So, to say that the experiments were not conducted is accurate, but doesn't convey the entirety of the situation when it comes to talking about gravitational attraction.

[1]: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1391714/posts search for John Mitchell.

[2]: http://www.physics.uci.edu/~glab/papers/Bern2008.pdf[PDF].

Actually it's not clear what it says!

From page 4 of the study:

Our analysis [5] of the smartphone value chain showed that carriers in fact earn gross profits over the life of a typical
2-year contract several times those earned by handset vendors.

Footnote [5] is "The Distribution of Value in the Mobile Phone Supply Chain", which on page 32 shows the Razr Cingular/AT&T making over 3x the gross profit as Motorola. The more recent study citing that one says iPhone patterns are the same as the others, like the Razr.

But neither of those studies give the full complement of comparisons, in comparable terms, necessary to say "Carrier profit X%; Apple profit Y%; Handset vendor profit Z%; Components vendors profit N%".
to China
And its biggest point is that the China/US trade deficit implications are that the deficit numbers are vastly wrong since China keeps only a small amount of labor revenue from the large total revenue of the devices. But the study doesn't give meaningful details explaining the discrepancy.

This looks like just the kind of BS study that Forbes loves: China isn't so bad, the US is winning, we shouldn't want the manufacturing jobs shipped to foreign competitors that make some American investors much richer - all underwritten by at best incomplete logic.

"My question isn't so much "what could possibly go wrong", but rather "What right gives you to make such a decision for the whole world to live by".

The best source that I can find is Scientific American, and from what I've been reading over the last couple hours I wouldn't be surprised to see a book written on this project. It's got everything: oooh scary genetically engineered mosquitoes! Exotic and tropical locations! International intrigue in law, politics, academia! Skulduggery, intellectual theft, backstabbing! And possibly world-changing success in eradicating dengue!

The quick summary is that there are multiple parties involved: the Genetic Strategies for Control of Dengue Virus Transmission, an international and public-private organization that is behind the GM mosquitoes. Key members are Prof. Anthony James at UC-Irvine, and Dr. Luke Alphey at Oxitec, a UK-based biotech company. While sterile insect technique has been used in the past to eradicate one species of screwworm in the US, that same technique did not work on mosquitoes. James' group identified a gene specific to the female of the mosquito species that if targeted via genetic engineering could have a sterile insect effect analogous to the screwworms. Actual engineering of the mosquito was contracted out to Oxitec, who according to SciAm were the ones responsible for the release of the GM mosquitoes on Grand Cayman island without the knowledge of other members of the dengue control group. Prof. James apparently didn't know until Dr. Alphey publicly disclosed it 14 months after the fact. Where the regulations come in is complex. As a US-based academic researcher Prof. James is subject to ethical and biosafety guidelines of his department, UC-Irvine, the state of California, and the Federal government, plus that of the agencies that granted the funds for his research and the government of whatever country he is conducting research in. UK-based Oxitec has to play by the rules of the UK at least for work done in the UK, but the initial release of the mosquitoes was in the Caymans. Environmental regulations regarding GM mosquitoes didn't exist there according to one source I read, according to another they were brand new and it was implied that Oxitec had some involvement in their crafting. The other researchers are pissed, and Oxitec's actions threaten the extremely careful, conservative, and highly regulated GMO work that has been done in the US and other parts of the world.

There's energy-efficient and cost-efficient. Electric heat is the former but not even remotely the latter.

1kWh is equal to 3,413 BTUs. At $0.1109/hWh, that's 9.0kWh/$, or about 31,000BTU/$.

As of April 11, natural gas cost $11.02/1000ft^3. At 1030BTU/ft^3, that's about 94,000BTU/$.

According to Consumer Reports, a "typical gas furnace made in the early 1970s has an AFUE of about 65 percent.", so your $1 of natural gas would get you about 61,000BTU of heat. Compared to a perfectly efficient electrical heat source, that ancient furnace would be approximately half as expensive to run. Newer furnaces can reach upward of 97% efficient, or about one third the price of electric heat.

Electric heat is only efficient in terms of energy conversion. In terms of wallet-to-warmth conversion, it sucks.

Professor Gregory Benford has papers on it. http://www.physics.uci.edu/faculty/benford.html There are several papers here going back several years discussing geo-sequestration of carbon in a manner non returnable to the atmosphere. The proposal here does not lock the carbon away.

You are arguing against purchasing American goods manufactured in China. Foxconn is responsible for much more than iPods and iPhones but let's use the iPod as an example (because we can extrapolate fairly easily that what holds true in this case will remain true in similar cases). It is well known that the iPod is produced in China, but how much of the value of an iPod do you think remains in China? You might be surprised.
Do you honestly think that the companies would all of a sudden up and close shop in China and start manufacturing in America with labor? They would automate as much of the process as possible. Finally, a recent paper shows that because of wage imbalances, the actual amount earned by American workers far outstrips that of non-US workers. PDF Link
And as a final prod - how much do you enjoy the low prices available from newegg or wherever in order to build your own machine? That doesn't happen without globalization. Your option would not only displace Chinese workers, it would also not help a substantial amount of American workers in the long-run.

There are no zombies?

Constructing the Haitian Zombie: An Anthropological Study Beyond Madness

Persons identified as zombies are to be found among the inhabitants of Haiti, an impoverished and politically unstable Caribbean country with unique cultural characteristics. Using the lens of the anthropologist, an investigation into Haitian zombiism reveals not only a basis for the bizarre phenomenon of zombiism itself, but also the underlying characteristics of Haitian society that have fostered and it. While zombiism may be fundamentally understood in terms of mental illness, particular theories related to madness are useful in further illuminating the subject, including Sigmund Freud’s signature theses on melancholia, Frantz Fanon’s views on the psychological effects of colonialism, and Emily Martin’s ideas about the performance of mental disorders. The resulting analysis will demonstrate that Haitian zombiism constitutes a cultural construct of madness that thoroughly fits within its post-colonial population, where a bereft people have transformed zombiism into a reality.

PASSAGE OF DARKNESS: THE ETHNOBIOLOGY OF THE HAITIAN ZOMBIE

Are there really zombies in Haiti? Wade Davis devotes two long sections to this question. He first looks at the popular views and then explores cases where there have been some attempts to carefully and more scientifically determine the status of suspected cases. His key candidate for zombiehood is Clairvius Narcisse. In spring, 1962 Narcisse "died" at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti. His death was verified by the hospital staff. 18 years later Narcisse turned up alive and well, and claimed to be an escaped zombie.

No, I did not read through those articles. I just remember watching an interview with some scientist that researched out the sposid myth. So I knew therw was legitimate research into it.

Maybe he really wants a 21' monitor:
http://hiperwall.calit2.uci.edu/

Thanks. I just found some equations that appear to reinforce what you said.

Since the oscillation frequency is proportional to the difference of the squared masses of the mass eigenstates, perhaps it's more accurate to say that neutrino flavor oscillation implies the existence of several mass eigenstates which aren't identical to flavor eigenstates. Since two mass eigenstates would need different eigenvalues in order to be distinguishable, this means at least one mass eigenvalue has to be nonzero. There's probably some sort of "superselection rule" which prevents particles from oscillating between massless and massive eigenstates, so both mass eigenstates have to be non-zero. Cool.

When someone tries to bash a cleanly designed RESTful interface as being "too complicated", you know it's a sad state of affairs. If this can lead to even one person reading chapter 5 of Fielding's dissertation, maybe some good can come of it after all...

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Fielding

"Developer", meet HTTP..

You have to deal with projector image overlap. Doable; but not trivial.

The commercially available setups all tend to require specialized software and one or more cameras(for automatic feedback and correction). This raises the cost substantially above that of the projectors alone. Always a bad sign about the price when you can't find a price sheet...

Hopefully, things like Eyefinity, and the falling costs of projectors and webcams, will drag this stuff down into the realm of the affordable at some point in the fairly near future. The software required for edge and geometry correction, particularly automatic machine-vision based stuff, isn't trivial; but it really only has to be written once(the core logic, probably a lot of nasty platform-specific glue that will need doing repeatedly) and the cost of decent projectors and cameras good enough for automatic calibration purposes has been falling over time. If it can go from niche to mass-market, it could become fairly cheap.

From our own history the native populations were responsible for wiping out nearly every large land animal in prehistoric times including driving the Nenaderthals into extinction. The only reason the Indians had any horses to ride in North America was because the Spanish reintroduced them.

The reason large animals were quickly wiped out by man in these areas is that when humans came the animals had not had time to evolve a healthy fear of our ancestors. See here.

With IEEE you can't get the article in question anywhere else.

Thats a myth. Yes Its true in some cases (even research going back into the 80's!) but sure you can get it elsewhere, especially when it comes to quality research. One example of many will cost you a cool $30 from IEEE. But why pay IEEE's extremely high, no value added gatekeeper taxes when you can get the same research from a better source, for free (as it should be).

Interesting side note: AFAIK all physics research is open access - at least the physicists have got it right - you would think that at least the computer scientists would have been the ones to get a clue and stop supporting these scams. But then I suppose they did invent http.

IEEE is one of the worst offenders of paywalled search results clogging up my google searches and making my information searches slow and painful. I would so love to have them drop off the face of my search results...

"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. " -- William Gibson
People are still awaiting ubiquitous computing to come, but for some countries (Singapure, Korea), it is already here. G Bell

But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...

Here's something that won't help you do it: http://www.physics.uci.edu/~observat/Physical_Scales.html

how come all the climatologists predicting global warming based on man's CO2 emission failed to predict that temperatures would remain steady and fall slightly after 1998

Perhaps because they hadn't included that El Nina of 1997/8 raised temperatures before declining slightly? Eleven of the warmest years recorded were in the past 13 years.

So until a year ago, they hadn't factored in something that occurred in 1997/8. What else haven't they figured in? You list the "warmest years recorded. How long do we have recorded temperatures? That are global enough to actually tell us what the temperature was around the world?
You want me to accept the word of people who tell me that polar bears are dying off at a time that there are more polar bears than ever before recorded?

how come all the climatologists predicting global warming based on man's CO2 emission failed to predict that temperatures would remain steady and fall slightly after 1998

Perhaps because they hadn't included that El Nina of 1997/8 raised temperatures before declining slightly? Eleven of the warmest years recorded were in the past 13 years.

Oh yeah, what is the relationship between the temperature rise on other planets circling our sun and that of Earth?

"Recently, there have been some suggestions that "global warming" has been observed on Mars (e.g. here). These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a "global" change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars (e.g. here and here). But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data."

Falcon