Slashdot Mirror

I'm more curious about this from the link: "NOvA requires a high intensity neutrino beam." I thought we couldn't really control neutrinos. We can't redirect them and can't block them. We can only detect a few in a billion (or probably more) and produce them as result of nuclear reactions.

Many fewer than a few per billion. The mean free path of a neutrino is light years - in lead: http://www.ps.uci.edu/physics/news/nuexpt.html

Manmade neutrinos aren't just fission byproducts - particle collisions can also create neutrinos. One of the links mentions this neutrino beam results from proton collisions at the accelerator at Fermilab: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/images/NOVA-LookingNorth.jpg

Control the protons - control the neutrinos.

Two projects that do what you say that I know of:

http://flashback.calit2.uci.edu/apache2-default/

http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/2009/04/firecoral-iptps/

What if there were a way to shrink the effective size of the plates before pulling them back?

This would be similar to the way ducks paddle--the feet fold up for the forward stroke, then open up for the back stroke.

      Interesting idea. Unfortunately, the situations are quite different: the Casimir effect occurs in a field which can be roughly described by a potential gradient (which means, among other things, that the field is _conservative_ over most conditions of non-relativistic movements); each position/size/orientation of the plate is a state function, and there's no way to get from one state to another without doing the same amount of work.
      The ducks' feet case occurs in a flow regime (referring to the fluids through which they move) governed by high Reynold's numbers. This means that the motion is dissipative, and fluid turbulence carries fluid energy and entropy away from the duck's feet. The foot position and shape is *not* describable by a state function, and the motion is *not* conservative (it's analogous to a ratchet movement, which happens preferentially in one direction if heat can flow from the ratchet to the surroundings).
      A better fluid flow analogy for the Casimir plate effect is that of a bacterium swimming. At that size, the situation is in the low Reynold's number regime, and things are very nearly reversible (a human shrunk to the size of a bacterium, or even quite a bit larger, could not make headway in one complete stroke cycle when swimming -- you'd go backwards just as much as forwards). A good exposition on this is here: http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.html.

Check out HiperWall technology:

http://www.hiperwall.com/technology.html

Poke around the literature--this technology came from UC Irvine Calit2 research center between 2005 & 2008. There's a primitive overview at:

http://hiperwall.calit2.uci.edu/?q=node/26

I submit that back in those days, they really did not know any better; as with everything else there's a learning curve and you'll have to start out with "drafts" something you know in advance is less than ideal but the best you can currently do.

Let me just take this opportunity to mention Deep Time*, a quite riveting article about a vast underground nuclear waste facility. They surely have learned something since the 40s, but it seems there's still quite a ways to go to the top of that learning curve.

* Sadly, I only know of Part 1. If anyone knows of any sequels I'd be happy to hear. Thanks.

FINALLY. After reading the comments all the way down (just about to rtfa) somebody, namely theheadlessrabbit, finally said something that addresses something important.

Cities are _designed_ to pull your attention in a thousand ways. Capitalism causes that. If you pay attention to someone or something you're more likely to give that someone or something money, so cities, which are far more money-centric than less population dense areas, will always be more attention hungry than everything else. Even the wildest jungle (to follow the hyperbole). We spend billions on marketing (the art of getting and keeping people's attention), so naturally we're going to be good at it.

The jungle, on the other hand, doesn't give two shits what you pay attention to. Sure there's lots to choose from, but the choice is yours. And you get to focus on whatever you want for as long as you want (ie no commercial interruptions in every sense of the phrase).

Of course, the jungle hyperbole was just a /. invention, but I'll leave it to you to realize this applies even better in safer natural environments.

And since brains tend to get better at things they do often (no I'm not going to cite anything for this, but go ahead and find me someone who disagrees), you'd expect that in places where you get to choose and focus your attention people will be better at paying attention to things they care about than people in places where their attention is going like a speed-freaked superball. To say it more concisely, OF COURSE forcing people to hyperactively shift their attention will teach them to be ADHD. DUH.

Think about academia. Lots of good, focused, thinking goes on at colleges all over the world. Now think about the types of schools that generally produce the major thinkers within the group of thinkers. What is their layout like? I'll tell you that I've never seen a picture of a campus with a 3lane each way road, nor of a 10+ story building, nor a subway system...

That being said, I always though Microsoft's weird fascination with these things went a little too far

I thought of Clippy a lot while reading the 1998 book The Media Equation. Here's a review. In short, the researchers' hypothesis was that human interaction instincts like politeness are wired into our brain in such a way that they do not get suspended when using computers. Examples are given in that review.

It's a believable-sounding hypothesis, and the authors then present a stack of experimental data that corroborates their hypothesis.

If you look at book pate 33 it says: "How do you enter or leave a social situation? In any face-to-face conversation, people don't turn around and leave. First, they indicate intent and then ask permission to leave, at least implicitly. The opportunity to break this rule in media is legendary. In a famous interface project, a character suddenly disappeared from the screen due to a bug in the program. Users became disturbed, the designers noted, because they felt that the character was angry and had left as a result. Users did not view the disappearance as a problem with the technology. Characters that leave the screen should always take leave by saying "good-bye" or at least making a sound or gesture. They shouldn't evaporate into the digital ether."

If you still have access to an old copy of office, get Clippy up, then get rid of it. You get a short 'goodbye' animation before the character disappears.

There's a testimony at the start of the book: "Nass and Reeves have spent the last decade working in the area of social responses to technology. We brought them into our team, and they have shown us some amazing things." -- Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft Corp.

Clippy was a reasonable-sounding social sciences hypotheses, corroborated by experimental data, and realised as a commercial software product. Whether Clippy's failure was a failure of the hypothesis or of the implementation is hard to tell.

[C, java, python] are really all the same class of languages

Really? For three "identical" things, I think they're quite far apart.

C doesn't have native support for object-oriented programming. If you want to teach the students that, you need to embed pointers to vtables everywhere, you need parent-objects-as-members and you need massive hacks.

Java doesn't have higher-order functions; you have to put your function pointer arguments inside classes. [C at least has function pointers]. By insisting that everything is put inside an object, procedural programming "looks OO" and might distort the students' view of what "real OO" is.

Python doesn't have static types. On the other hand, it lets you teach procedural and object-oriented each in their most natural ways. It also lets you teach ideas that will recur in functional languages, such as higher-order functions, closures and lazy lists.

More importantly, python lets you teach things without having to introduce a lot of overhead: "Why must closed-over variables be final? Why is it smart to feed my own anonymous Function class to MapIterator--a for loop is much shorter? Higher order--but it doesn't take a function, it takes an object! ..."

I'd advocate python first, because it allows you greater flexibility in the choice of what to teach. Also, it's good for teaching algorithms: http://www.ece.uci.edu/~chou/py02/python.html

"The most encouraging part was that more than a few students wanted to implement the algorithms that were not assigned as homework problems. The students said they wanted to see the algorithms run and test their own understanding."

That's an argument? There are only two ways of interacting: reason or force? That's the most blatantly wrong statement I've seen in a while. What about:

• Appeals to emotion?
• Mind-altering substances?
• Trickery or deceit?

The list could go on for miles. In direct contradiction to Maj. Caudill's premise, I would argue that very little we do is truly the result of either reason OR force. Here's a good article that shows exactly that:

Nisbett & Wilson, 1977

Most often, we make choices in the "heat of the moment" -- not based on an honest evaluation of reason or force, but just on "gut feeling". The rest of his arguments are just as laughable. If by "force" you mean "threat of bodily force to myself alone" -- that's a stupid definition. Take his statement: "The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded." That's just not true. First, I would say that under his own definition, there is no difference between persuasion and force. I could choose to be beaten up, shot, or worse. Second, what if I had 5 friends pointing guns at you, telling you to put your gun down? Would that not be the threat of force making you surrender your weapon?

"It removes force from the equation...and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act." What? No, it ADDS force to the equation. Just instead of the force applying to YOU, it's applying to someone else. Not to mention, if you hold the position that carrying a gun is a civilized act, you would naturally assume it civilized for all people to carry guns. Does that remove force from the equation? Here are the scenarios for a force-based altercation:

1. Neither person has a gun. Likely, either nothing happens, one person gives the aggressor what he wants, or one person is slightly injured.
2. One person has a gun. Most likely, the person with the gun gets what he wants. If the non-carryer is not persuaded by force, he may be shot. Additionally, gun accidents are more common than successful gun defenses. This could be the aggressor or the defender. In a "civilized" society, this would seem rare, since it seems that the Major is espousing general gun ownership as a rule.
3. Both parties have guns. Almost certainly, somebody gets shot. If I am armed and my opponent has a gun, I am practically obliged to shoot to kill.

How, exactly, is forced removed from ANY equation in ANY of those scenarios? The crazy part is that I theoretically support gun ownership -- this is just the stupidest argument I've ever heard for it.

The theories behind tracing optimization were pioneered by Dr. Michael Franz and Dr. Andreas Gal, research scientists at the University of California, Irvine.

Hey that's my old compilers professor and my school!

This PDF looks like the paper the article is referencing.

I don't think the author really understands what TBL's original vision was, except in the narrowest of contexts. The idea of code on demand was certainly described as part of REST.

The problem with JavaScript standardization arguably comes down to vendor politics (as do most standards efforts). We're in a wave of proprietary "innovations" being pushed, like MS Silverlight, Adobe AIR, Sun JavaFX, etc. It's not in these gorilla's interests to commoditize a richer browser experience before they try to take over a portion of the web on their own.

You know, I opened this news item specifically to see if someone referenced Deep Time, or to mention it myself.

I must say that I haven't read his book, only his paper which is itself very interesting and thought-provoking (and makes you feel utterly small).

It's not just law suits, you know. Consider that the "total life cycle" is a tad longer than for most human endeavours. It really is about safe long-term storage.

Do you think that something like this comes cheap?
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html

First, it's very very heavy. You need a thick lead shield to block cosmic rays, but that's not the biggest problem.

Neutrino (antineutrinos work the same, but give off a different signal) collisions are very rare. The device needs to be close to the source, so that many neutrinos pass through the device. The density of neutrinos fall off as the square of the range (inverse square law). If you double the range, you get one quarter the number of collisions. Even close to the reactor, they are rare enough that it's hard to tell collisions from the local reactor versus background noise (the sun and other reactors are probably the biggest sources). This why it takes them hours to figure out when the reactor has turned off. The whole thing relies on the statistics of a very low probability event. From space, the background noise would easily swamp the signal from a specific reactor.

You might be able to tell which part of the earth is releasing more neutrinos if your orbit was low enough, but it would be very tough to pinpoint a source to a specific country. It would be very hard to get both decent spacial resolution and time resolution.

Unlike this detector, then neutrino detector at South Pole, Amanda, can tell which direction a neutrino came from. It uses the Earth for shielding and many kilometers of ice as the collision target. I assume they detect neutrinos from reactors, but probably not often enough to tell exactly when they are on (just a guess).

I suppose you think that the history of Europe, and later the US, turning up in a country and taking all of its natural resources by force isn't cheating. Hmmmm. Exactly how and when did Europe and US take all the natural resources? Yes, back in the 1600-1800's, Europe was conquering all, but nearly all territories had been let go more than 50 years ago. In addition, taking all natural resources? Would that be like what China did Taiwan (which was an independent island before 1900's, when china took over and pillaged ALL of it). Even now, China is destroying the south china seas, and invading oceans all over the world.

Taking away large amounts of the population of those countries to use as slaves: not cheating.
Well, yes, back in the 1300-1700's, Europe did obtain slaves from around the world and sell them. Interestingly, America, who seems to be ripped the most, was NOT the slavers. We did BUY them, but only from ppl of that same area or from Europeans. Interestingly, the vast majority of black slaves that American bought were bought from black slavers. And it was relatively few slaves that were brought to America. It was less than 50K, and IIRC, it was actually less than 10K. And of course, China has had slaves FOREVER. In fact, they still have a serious issue on this.
The outsourcing of manufacturing and now services that takes advantage of the cheap labour and the complete lack of civil rights to the detriment of the wests' own workforces: not cheating.
I somewhat agree with you on this. Are the Chinese ppl cheating? Nope. They are simply competing. I think that the issue resides with 2 groups; the Chinese gov that fixes the yuan to make it impossible to compete, and the companies that have move jobs to there. Finally, I blame those companies like GE, Intel, etc that have screwed over the world on this.

The simple fact is, that the wealth of the west was NOT due to plundering other nations. Plundering did occur in the 1800's and prior, but overall the vast majority of the wealth was not built that way. To say that it was, is ludicrous at best.

Though this is different from the OP's areas of excitement, I'd suggest taking a look at the architecture of the web, and Roy Fielding's (quite readable, IMO) thesis on the development of that architecture while he was working on HTTP 1.1. A major factor behind why the Web has become successful is that it focuses on the data, not the roles of the participants. Similarly, this is why systems like UNIX pipes are so useful -- a uniform interface provides for many benefits (at the cost of some tradeoffs, such as latency). Unfortunately the mainstream seems to have missed this, though times are 'a changin'

I've read that it appears that the mammilian placentia may have "learned" how to share life-giving fluids between baby and mother without the immune system complaining via a virus that knew how to disable the immune system for its own needs. I'll see if I can find the article.

This is not the same article I originally read, but generally states the same thing:

http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~faculty/villarreal/new1/erv-placental.html

Quote: "It is widely accepted that viral agents act a negative selecting force on their host. However, [embedded] viral agents [studied] have very high mutation and adaption rates. This character led Salvador Luria to speculate early on that perhaps viruses contribute to [beneficial] host evolution (52)."

I swear a bunch of you still want to read web pages on Lynx, think the web is a glorified shared file system, and were happier with 1200 baud BBS'.

Life changes; get a helmet.

Web 2.0 is not just marketing drivel. It shouldn't be viewed pedantically as a "revision two-point-oh" of a piece of software. Mostly it's a label for the new wave of investment into the web, that mostly stopped in 2001 after the bust. Many stopped caring about the Web as a fertile ground for new experiences or businesses. So, Web 2.0 is a useful label for the qualitative change that's obviously happening on the Web today if you actually looked around at how many ways that *many more people* are interacting.

Just because we had interactivity in 1998 with Slashdot doesn't make it a "trend" that the mainstream users understood. It was a nerd site!

Consider
- Web 1.0 was the "World Wide Wait". Many more people have broadband now. That changes the design centre of web sites.

- Slashdot, BBS', etc. were not really used by your average teenager in the 1990's. They were used by techies. Today, almost every teenager is on Myspace or Facebook, or Youtube.

- With blogs & trackbacks, we're actually seeing a decentralized discussion forum on almost *every* piece of content on the web. That's quite different experience than centrally submitting stories to Slashdot's editors.

- With web 1.0, all the hype was how it was going to be like TV. Turns out that's not the case, it's much more participatory. Obvious to a techie, but Web 2.0 is the rest of the world waking up to that fact.

- In 1997, *most* techies who thought they knew better were trying bloody hard to turn the Web into CORBA. Today, that would sound ridiculous. The REST architectural style was ignored for years, it's now becoming recognized as a major factor in the web's success.

- Most people didn't really "get" hyperlinks 10 years ago. There were lawsuits as to whether you could deep link! People wanted to force you onto their website, and keep you there, like a TV channel. Today, with Wiki's, Blogs, etc., everything is much more decentralized.

Interestingly, something like Facebook has pulled off an interesting balancing act, where links are pervasive, but you still stay on the Facebook site while exploring the games & applications that are all integrated.

Anyway, with any trend, the hype often outstrips the reality. The only important thing is that Web 2.0 implies "The Web is Back".

> The existence of atoms is not certain. Granted, we can build equipment that takes measurements which seem to confirm that they do exist, but that is all based on extrapolating observations from our experience.

I'm not really sure what you mean. You know that we can practically "see" an atom with a scanning tunnelling microscope? http://www.physics.uci.edu/~wilsonho/Physics%20Today%20On%20The%20Web%20-%20Search%20and%20Discovery_files/chasfeb1.jpg for example

If you feel that this is just "extrapolating observations from our experience" then you can say the same thing about, well, anything. You can't trust that the Sun exists, that that arms exist, and so on.

How does that saying go? It's always worth having an open mind, but not so open that everything falls out :-D

> The thing I find funny about so many "experts" is that they will argue that a model is fact and ridicule anyone who questions it.

Who argues this? I bet you can't find any (real) scientist saying this.

There seems to me some (a lot?) of FUD mixed up in this article. (surprise surprise...)

It starts out with the fact that public key encryption relies on the existence of one trapdoor one-way functions. Now in practice we mainly instantiate these functions with the RSA function (f_e(x):=x^e mod n with trapdoor p,q such that pq=n). But there is no reason to believe this is the only possible example of trapdoor OWF! Admitedly in the 80s when this concept was first being explored there were quite a few failures when trying to base implementations on NP-Complete and/or NP-Hard problems (think knapsack for example). But since we already had RSA with all it's nice properties (efficiency, elegance and simplicity) the research community was not overly motivated to find others.

There have been and to this day still are other lines of research. Take Ajtai and Dwork's work in the direction of basing PKE on worst-case hardness of the shortest vector problem (SVP) or Micciancio's work on generalizing the knapsack problem such that average-case hardness of approximating the answer can be reduced to worst-case hardness of certain lattice based problems.

Another general direction has been to come up with groups and fields over which solving the DLP is difficult. (For example torus-based crypto and generalized Jacobian groups). AFAIK for most of these candidates there are no (known efficient) reductions from the DLP problem over Z_p or elliptic curves to the DLP in these new groups. Thus it is not immediately clear how or if Schorr's algorithm would break such systems.

In any case there is reason to believe that there can not be (or that we can't find) good candidates for trapdoor OWFs in the quantum computational model. After all there is such a thing as Quantum P and Quantum NP. Though the inequality of these set's of problems doesn't directly imply the existence of quantum trapdoor OWFs it is a good indication there of.

So basically the message is : Relax! The PKE world is by no means on the brink of an apocalypse. At most (and best in my opinion) we're in for a bout of some serious foundations research. to me that just sounds like more funding for applied mathematicians and complexity theorists from various corners and a WHOLE bunch of new candidates and interesting results. :-) i'm down with that.

It seems very related to a work published in the USENIX Technical Conference 07 as well as an SOSP 06 one. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~msirivia/publications/dand elion-usenix.pdf http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lorenzo/papers/bar- gossip.pdf

The sister screen at UCI can be viewed at here.
^
that's an old site,

The correct one is here http://hiperwall.calit2.uci.edu/

There are two of these screens. One in San Diego, as mentioned in the post above, and one here at Irvine: http://cg.calit2.uci.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Resea rch_Projects:_HIPerWall

People who are dismissing as just a wall of monitors are mistaken. It takes dozens of computers to run that resolution, which is no trivial task. This is not a theater system, so complaining about seams misses the point entirely. If they were just looking for a semi-large seamless screen, any shmuck could just use a single projector.

This system allows groups of researchers to review large amounts of visual data in both macro and micro scale. If you want to see the micro scale, you simply walk up to an individual monitor. Review can be done simultaneously among many people.

For a seamless, 100 million pixel projection screen (this is also not trivial, as removing seams requires real time brightness and color correction along edges) can be viewed here. In comparison, an IMAX theater uses a very large single projector unit weighing nearly 2 tons.

The sister screen at UCI can be viewed at here.

People who are dismissing as just a wall of monitors are mistaken. It takes dozens of computers to run that resolution, which is no trivial task. This is not a theater system, so complaining about seams misses the point entirely. If they were just looking for a semi-large seamless screen, any shmuck could just use a single projector.

This system allows groups of researchers to review large amounts of visual data in both macro and micro scale. If you want to see the micro scale, you simply walk up to an individual monitor. Review can be done simultaneously among many people.

For a seamless, 100 million pixel projection screen (this is also not trivial, as removing seams requires real time brightness and color correction along edges) can be viewed here. In comparison, an IMAX theater uses a very large single projector unit weighing nearly 2 tons.

The sister screen at UCI can be viewed at here.

Don't forget that the gap needs to be bridged from both sides: while it will indeed take some cultural changes in the medical community to use computational / predictive tools in choosing therapy, it will also require cultural changes in the modeling community to facilitate this. Furthermore, doctors' trust in computational tools must be earned by a well-validated track record of results by the mathematical / engineering community. Interestingly, these cultural changes are underway and can already be observed.

My primary field of research is developing computational tools for modeling cancer progression and angiogenesis, primarily using a PDE point of view where I model nutrient transport within the body and uptake by tumor cells, some simple biomechanics, the degradation and remodeling of the extracellular matrix by the tumor, and the resulting motion of the tumor boundary within the tumor. In fact, this was my dissertation topic just a little over a month ago; the interested reader can see my publications here and some animations of cancer simulations here.

In the several years I've been doing this work, I've seen interesting changes on both sides of the aisle. The mathematical models of cancer have grown in sophistication and realism at an incredible speed. Five or six years ago, models would only examine a single, isolated aspect of cancer growing in homogeneous tissues that were more idealized than even simulated in vitro petri dishes; today, they model many aspects of cancer and the interaction between those aspects. Several years ago, the models were little more than interesting mathematical objects with simplified, spherical solutions that weren't very interesting outside the mathematical community; today, we're simulating complex tumor shapes in fairly realistic tissues, and the results are shedding light on current problems in cancer biology that are otherwise difficult to understand.

Several years ago, it was difficult to even get doctors, oncologists, and others to even look at our research (in our field in general). Today, we're building a track record of results that makes the work easier to trust. Mathematicians and engineers are also realizing the need to acquire the "vocabulary" and biological background necessary to communicate with doctors and biologists, and they're making moves to bridge the gap and collaborate. In the meantime, more cancer biologists are realizing that it takes more than studying isolated cells to understand cancer systems, and they're reaching out to mathematicians to model these complex systems.

The result: very rich and exciting collaborations between doctors and mathematicians to develop helpful predictive tools. My group (at the UT Health Science Center in Houston, with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center) is doing exciting joint work with oncologists, biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to combine experiments with well-calibrated models of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Sandy Anderson and Vito Quarnata are doing similar joint mathematical/biological work on breast cancer at Vanderbilt and the University of Dundee, and their work has been featured on slashdot before.

So, it really requires growth toward collaboration from both sides, but fortunately, the need for this has been recognized by both communities and is occurring as we speak. It's a very exciting time in cancer systems biology and computational / predictive oncology! -- Paul

Don't forget that the gap needs to be bridged from both sides: while it will indeed take some cultural changes in the medical community to use computational / predictive tools in choosing therapy, it will also require cultural changes in the modeling community to facilitate this. Furthermore, doctors' trust in computational tools must be earned by a well-validated track record of results by the mathematical / engineering community. Interestingly, these cultural changes are underway and can already be observed.

My primary field of research is developing computational tools for modeling cancer progression and angiogenesis, primarily using a PDE point of view where I model nutrient transport within the body and uptake by tumor cells, some simple biomechanics, the degradation and remodeling of the extracellular matrix by the tumor, and the resulting motion of the tumor boundary within the tumor. In fact, this was my dissertation topic just a little over a month ago; the interested reader can see my publications here and some animations of cancer simulations here.

In the several years I've been doing this work, I've seen interesting changes on both sides of the aisle. The mathematical models of cancer have grown in sophistication and realism at an incredible speed. Five or six years ago, models would only examine a single, isolated aspect of cancer growing in homogeneous tissues that were more idealized than even simulated in vitro petri dishes; today, they model many aspects of cancer and the interaction between those aspects. Several years ago, the models were little more than interesting mathematical objects with simplified, spherical solutions that weren't very interesting outside the mathematical community; today, we're simulating complex tumor shapes in fairly realistic tissues, and the results are shedding light on current problems in cancer biology that are otherwise difficult to understand.

Several years ago, it was difficult to even get doctors, oncologists, and others to even look at our research (in our field in general). Today, we're building a track record of results that makes the work easier to trust. Mathematicians and engineers are also realizing the need to acquire the "vocabulary" and biological background necessary to communicate with doctors and biologists, and they're making moves to bridge the gap and collaborate. In the meantime, more cancer biologists are realizing that it takes more than studying isolated cells to understand cancer systems, and they're reaching out to mathematicians to model these complex systems.

The result: very rich and exciting collaborations between doctors and mathematicians to develop helpful predictive tools. My group (at the UT Health Science Center in Houston, with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center) is doing exciting joint work with oncologists, biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to combine experiments with well-calibrated models of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Sandy Anderson and Vito Quarnata are doing similar joint mathematical/biological work on breast cancer at Vanderbilt and the University of Dundee, and their work has been featured on slashdot before.

So, it really requires growth toward collaboration from both sides, but fortunately, the need for this has been recognized by both communities and is occurring as we speak. It's a very exciting time in cancer systems biology and computational / predictive oncology! -- Paul

just wondering, but have you actually read what the harvard president said? I find most people haven't. what he did say was much milder than anything like girls are stupider than boys and unfortunately, this backlash really kills an interesting line of study.

It was well known that men tend in much greater numbers towards genius and retardation. Part of his reasoning was that there may just be a smaller pool to draw from for the very top coupled with fundamental differences in brain development between the sexes. for example, it's now known women have far more white matter and far less gray matter than men do and some people beleive this man be a reason why men tend to excel in teh mathematics realm(due to the differences in how these areas of the brain approach problems). quick link: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1 261

I say more research is needed, but people shouldn't be surprised if they find later on that they basically crushed a good man's reputation because of some idea of political correct bullshit. it's said common sense is just a set of biases we develop by the time we are 18; maybe we'll find one day that men and women are just built to process (and therefore excel) differently.

No person, whether or not acting under color of law,
shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate,
interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person in the free
exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her
by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or
laws of the United States because of the other person's race, color,
religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender, or sexual
orientation, or because he or she perceives that the other person has
one or more of those characteristics.

China can't stop an orbital nuclear attack, or even ICBMs or sub-launched nukes.

China has no Navy - not one that can survive a handful of US subs. Our cruisers can take them out from beyond visual range.

** That's why they haven't even invaded little baby Taiwan. **

We know where all their major production factories are and can be done with them with a handful of strike bombers that they can't even see, much less shoot down. Failing that we can hit them from orbit.

What is more likely is that China, if sufficiently provoked, will fsck us up economically. But they'll play that card ONCE. That will bring the offshoring universe crashing down as Americans learn how vulnerable it makes us. We'll not make that mistake twice and China will lose its biggest customer. We'll produce our own stuff from then on and China will choke and asphyxiate and get sick and die in its own industrial filth.

We could move in and take over, although the pollution clean-up and dead body disposal might make that unfeasible for decades. :)

Oh and for those stupid enough to argue with me:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/200 6/06/06/pollution_problems_cost_china_over_200b_a_ year/
http://www.forbes.com/logistics/2006/03/21/america s-most-polluted-cities-cx_rm_0321pollute.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-01/1 1/content_511271.htm
http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~sustain/suscoasts/krismin. html

I have a copy of Joan Miro's Mercury Fountain in my house. Do I need to call the EPA when I'm ready to trash it?

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pix/bar/miro/Alma den1.html
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/spain/barcelona /fundmiro/calder.html

Poor article. Even the Wikipedia article is more "exhaustive." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression

Even two minutes googling for "data compression" will get you more useful and better "compressed" information.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dan/pubs/DataCompression.h tml

http://datacompression.info/

http://www.maximumcompression.com/

http://www.compression-links.info/Link/248_Markov_ Predictive_Coders_PPMZ.htm

This?

I don't think the problem is as big as you think. Nuclear power plants take extreme precautions for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I think it's importaint to point out that according to the 2000 census there were slightly more women living in the US then men. Also in general men are slightly more likely to enlist in the US army, and since the country is at war then that would leave even more women outnumber men in internet use.

Once you've thought about that, think of all the initiatives trying to get women interested in computers and computer sciences:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wics/
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/wccce/program04/Papers/mark.h tml
http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/club/girls.html
http://www.awc-hq.org/

We're defiantly not doing those things for young men.

Then due to a natural progression, if you're going to use a computer at all you might as well be online. So of course there's more women using the internet than men.

And don't forget that population of young women addicted to those "women run alt-pornography sites" like the suicide girls and gods girls etc.

No, it's not what your looking for, just interesting and informative regarding the technical problems.

HIPerWall is a 200 Megapixel display, based on 50 Apple 30" Cinema Displays driven by 25 Dual G5 PowerMacs plus one controller. It's a project at the University of California to explore very high resolution displays. HIPerWall is short for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The PowerMacs are connected and act as one large display, allowing even video to be split over the whole area. The main problem they seem to have solved is the software to split the display over several separate machines, a problem you will also have if you try this with Windows and laptops, therefore this might be a good place to look for some experience. Apple has a nice project description in their science section.

Where do these magical american stipends come from, I wonder?

From America's government, among other places. Example: http://www.scholars.uci.edu/prestigiousweb.asp?pid =9

There are at least 2 solutions doing a similar thing. The open source binarytranslator.org/PearColator offers x86 and PowerPC emulation:
http://binarytranslator.org/
There are attempts to integrate this into the JNode open source Java OS to make a JNode/GNU stack.

There is also the VEELS/JXEmu system:
http://nil.ics.uci.edu/~gal/?page=VEELS
which appears not to be publicly available.

First, it's just a radix sort [well that's my take]. Second there are too many google ads on that page. Third, merge sort is O(n log n) time, hard to beat for random data. Fourth, most people use variations of the QUICK SORT not merge sort.

For comparison searches, O(n log n) is not just hard to beat it is IMPOSSIBLE to beat.
See http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960116.html.

Of course, radix sort is not a comparison sort, but has its own limitations as others have noted.

And Quicksort technically has a O(n^2) worst case (reversed list) but is more often picked over Merge Sort because on avg it is nLogn and doesn't require the extra memory merge sort requires.

this is the same thing, except this one is developed by students. http://sourcerer.ics.uci.edu/ it crawls sourceforge and lparses the code, the creator, etc. ITs in beta stages of course, but it has great potential.

Well, it's not ants. The Anteaters are UC Irvine.

"Suppose we have another Alexandrian library fire (maybe thanks to Islamicists this time) and we collectively forget about the nasties buried deep underground - until some enterprising miners in a newly emerging industrial society find out the hard way."

this immediately reminded me of a material i was reading some time ago. after a long search i found the text - but it had pictures, envisioning different designs and concepts. the design was pretty awful (and current text page also is badly formatted ;) ), but it was the content that was very interesting.

so, here's the text only :
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
if anybody knows where this material could be found with the images of concepts, please, post here. the images really help to better envision the magnitude of the problem (though the text is very good and descriptive, too).

it seems that something from those suggestions is accepted :
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0115.sht ml

Some of my colleagues (e.g., Vittorio Cristini) have been modeling the potential benefits of nanoparticle drug delivery for a couple of years now. As has been known for some time (e.g., see papers from R.K. Jain), the blood vessels that grow to supply tumors with nutrients (the tumor-induced neo-vasculature) are different than regular, non-pathological vessels. They tend to be more tortuous and leaky, with larger holes than regular vessels.

This is where the nanoparticles come in: one can design nanoparticles that encapsulate cancer drugs in particles that are too large to exit normal blood vessels but can pass through the leakier, tumor-induced blood vessels. This naturally targets cancerous tissues.

However, there are other issues to consider. Due to the high pressure inside tumors (due to the rapid proliferation of cells within a confined area, among other factors), along with the leaky vessels, blood flow can be very poor inside a tumor, and so while the drug may be targeted toward and delivered to the tumor, it may not actually penetrate very far into the tumor. Some great work has been done by Steven McDougall, Sandy Anderson, and Mark Chaplain in this area. In particular, look at their DATIA (dynamic adaptive tumour-induced angiogenesis) papers.

One way around this (suggested by R.K. Jain and Vittorio Cristini, among others) is to use targeted anti-angiogenic therapy to prune out the worse blood vessels and improve flow within the tumors, thereby also improving drug delivery and penetration.

Lastly, on the therapeutic aspect of blocking up tumor blood vessels with the nanoparticles, the work we've done (see this paper, which will appear in the Journal of Theoretical Biology soon), indiscriminately cutting off the nutrient supply to a tumor can increase tumor invasiveness by increasing morphological (shape) instability. (See some of the animations here.) So ironically, while more tumor cells may be killed, those that remain may spread farther and initiate new tumors. Given that hypoxic tumor cells are more likely to be resilient to further treatment (e.g., hypoxic breast cancer cells), this is a problem worth keeping in mind when planning anti-angiogenic therapy.

If you're interested in these topics, please do check out the paper above. (You can also download it at my website without any special memberships.) Even if you don't like it, we have a lot of references you may find handy. -- Paul

Some of my colleagues (e.g., Vittorio Cristini) have been modeling the potential benefits of nanoparticle drug delivery for a couple of years now. As has been known for some time (e.g., see papers from R.K. Jain), the blood vessels that grow to supply tumors with nutrients (the tumor-induced neo-vasculature) are different than regular, non-pathological vessels. They tend to be more tortuous and leaky, with larger holes than regular vessels.

This is where the nanoparticles come in: one can design nanoparticles that encapsulate cancer drugs in particles that are too large to exit normal blood vessels but can pass through the leakier, tumor-induced blood vessels. This naturally targets cancerous tissues.

However, there are other issues to consider. Due to the high pressure inside tumors (due to the rapid proliferation of cells within a confined area, among other factors), along with the leaky vessels, blood flow can be very poor inside a tumor, and so while the drug may be targeted toward and delivered to the tumor, it may not actually penetrate very far into the tumor. Some great work has been done by Steven McDougall, Sandy Anderson, and Mark Chaplain in this area. In particular, look at their DATIA (dynamic adaptive tumour-induced angiogenesis) papers.

One way around this (suggested by R.K. Jain and Vittorio Cristini, among others) is to use targeted anti-angiogenic therapy to prune out the worse blood vessels and improve flow within the tumors, thereby also improving drug delivery and penetration.

Lastly, on the therapeutic aspect of blocking up tumor blood vessels with the nanoparticles, the work we've done (see this paper, which will appear in the Journal of Theoretical Biology soon), indiscriminately cutting off the nutrient supply to a tumor can increase tumor invasiveness by increasing morphological (shape) instability. (See some of the animations here.) So ironically, while more tumor cells may be killed, those that remain may spread farther and initiate new tumors. Given that hypoxic tumor cells are more likely to be resilient to further treatment (e.g., hypoxic breast cancer cells), this is a problem worth keeping in mind when planning anti-angiogenic therapy.

If you're interested in these topics, please do check out the paper above. (You can also download it at my website without any special memberships.) Even if you don't like it, we have a lot of references you may find handy. -- Paul

Some of my colleagues (e.g., Vittorio Cristini) have been modeling the potential benefits of nanoparticle drug delivery for a couple of years now. As has been known for some time (e.g., see papers from R.K. Jain), the blood vessels that grow to supply tumors with nutrients (the tumor-induced neo-vasculature) are different than regular, non-pathological vessels. They tend to be more tortuous and leaky, with larger holes than regular vessels.

This is where the nanoparticles come in: one can design nanoparticles that encapsulate cancer drugs in particles that are too large to exit normal blood vessels but can pass through the leakier, tumor-induced blood vessels. This naturally targets cancerous tissues.

However, there are other issues to consider. Due to the high pressure inside tumors (due to the rapid proliferation of cells within a confined area, among other factors), along with the leaky vessels, blood flow can be very poor inside a tumor, and so while the drug may be targeted toward and delivered to the tumor, it may not actually penetrate very far into the tumor. Some great work has been done by Steven McDougall, Sandy Anderson, and Mark Chaplain in this area. In particular, look at their DATIA (dynamic adaptive tumour-induced angiogenesis) papers.

One way around this (suggested by R.K. Jain and Vittorio Cristini, among others) is to use targeted anti-angiogenic therapy to prune out the worse blood vessels and improve flow within the tumors, thereby also improving drug delivery and penetration.

Lastly, on the therapeutic aspect of blocking up tumor blood vessels with the nanoparticles, the work we've done (see this paper, which will appear in the Journal of Theoretical Biology soon), indiscriminately cutting off the nutrient supply to a tumor can increase tumor invasiveness by increasing morphological (shape) instability. (See some of the animations here.) So ironically, while more tumor cells may be killed, those that remain may spread farther and initiate new tumors. Given that hypoxic tumor cells are more likely to be resilient to further treatment (e.g., hypoxic breast cancer cells), this is a problem worth keeping in mind when planning anti-angiogenic therapy.

If you're interested in these topics, please do check out the paper above. (You can also download it at my website without any special memberships.) Even if you don't like it, we have a lot of references you may find handy. -- Paul

Or, consider this example from the paper Algorithm Education in Python:

Here is the Insertion Sort algorithm exactly as presented in Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms":

Insertion-Sort(A)
    for j <- 2 to length[A]
        do key <- A[j]
        i <- j - 1
        while i > 0 and A[i] > key
            do A[i+1] <- A[i]
            i <- i - 1
        A[i + 1] <- key


Here is the same algorithm, implemented in Python:

def InsertionSort(A):
    for j in range(1, len(A)):
        key = A[j]
        i = j - 1
        while (i >=0) and (A[i] > key):
            A[i+1] = A[i]
            i = i - 1
        A[i+1] = key

I haven't left anything out. Paste that into a Python interpreter and run it:

>>> x = [2,7,3,8,1] # create test case
>>> InsertionSort(x) # call routine
>>> x # look at result
[1, 2, 3, 7, 8]

There are about a thousand other cool things, and of course there are inevitably some warts and poor design decisions too. Bottom-line for me, at least, it's the power of Perl, but at the extreme other end of the spectrum in terms of readability. The Google folks think so too.

I'm the source of the original story. (Thanks, Clif, for choosing my post!) What I submitted was much longer and what I was really interested in unintended resuse of Open Source code and the emergence of tools to support such practices. You can see the unabridged version on my lab's web site.

I'd like to respond to a few of the comments.

I'm not trying to float an idea, I'm just making some observations of what people are currently doing.

Yes, reuse is old. Reuse is sometimes bad and sometimes good.

But what is new, I think, is the wholesale use Open Source systems as components, and the way in which people trawl the web for source code. We've had libraries, DLLs, Perl modules, classes, and the like for ages, but these were designed to be reused. But these Open Source systems were built as stand-alone systems, that people are turning into components ad hoc. When people start designing a system, they start with the idea, see what's available out there that they can reuse, and continue the design process from there. I was trying to ask some speculative questions about what software tools are needed in these situations.

In particular, there has been a proliferation of search engines for code on the web, such as koders.com, krugle.com, Google Code Search, and Sourcerer, here at UCI. (I'm just a university researcher and not affiliated with these sites in any way.) I have a suspicion that people need features other than the ones built into these tools and that people are being very creative with existing web resources to locate the code that they want. I am a conducting a web survey to find out whether this is the case.

I had been told that Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky," contains more detail about zones of thought and complexity, and it's sitting on my shelf. But I didn't want to insert a gratuitous reference to a source that I have not read. Look elsewhere on this topic for a more detailed discussion of Vinge's ideas.

The comments have been really interesting. Some went in directions that I didn't anticipate and others provided insights that were new to me.

I'm the source of the original story. (Thanks, Clif, for choosing my post!) What I submitted was much longer and what I was really interested in unintended resuse of Open Source code and the emergence of tools to support such practices. You can see the unabridged version on my lab's web site.

I'd like to respond to a few of the comments.

I'm not trying to float an idea, I'm just making some observations of what people are currently doing.

Yes, reuse is old. Reuse is sometimes bad and sometimes good.

But what is new, I think, is the wholesale use Open Source systems as components, and the way in which people trawl the web for source code. We've had libraries, DLLs, Perl modules, classes, and the like for ages, but these were designed to be reused. But these Open Source systems were built as stand-alone systems, that people are turning into components ad hoc. When people start designing a system, they start with the idea, see what's available out there that they can reuse, and continue the design process from there. I was trying to ask some speculative questions about what software tools are needed in these situations.

In particular, there has been a proliferation of search engines for code on the web, such as koders.com, krugle.com, Google Code Search, and Sourcerer, here at UCI. (I'm just a university researcher and not affiliated with these sites in any way.) I have a suspicion that people need features other than the ones built into these tools and that people are being very creative with existing web resources to locate the code that they want. I am a conducting a web survey to find out whether this is the case.

I had been told that Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky," contains more detail about zones of thought and complexity, and it's sitting on my shelf. But I didn't want to insert a gratuitous reference to a source that I have not read. Look elsewhere on this topic for a more detailed discussion of Vinge's ideas.

The comments have been really interesting. Some went in directions that I didn't anticipate and others provided insights that were new to me.

I'm the source of the original story. (Thanks, Clif, for choosing my post!) What I submitted was much longer and what I was really interested in unintended resuse of Open Source code and the emergence of tools to support such practices. You can see the unabridged version on my lab's web site.

I'd like to respond to a few of the comments.

I'm not trying to float an idea, I'm just making some observations of what people are currently doing.

Yes, reuse is old. Reuse is sometimes bad and sometimes good.

But what is new, I think, is the wholesale use Open Source systems as components, and the way in which people trawl the web for source code. We've had libraries, DLLs, Perl modules, classes, and the like for ages, but these were designed to be reused. But these Open Source systems were built as stand-alone systems, that people are turning into components ad hoc. When people start designing a system, they start with the idea, see what's available out there that they can reuse, and continue the design process from there. I was trying to ask some speculative questions about what software tools are needed in these situations.

In particular, there has been a proliferation of search engines for code on the web, such as koders.com, krugle.com, Google Code Search, and Sourcerer, here at UCI. (I'm just a university researcher and not affiliated with these sites in any way.) I have a suspicion that people need features other than the ones built into these tools and that people are being very creative with existing web resources to locate the code that they want. I am a conducting a web survey to find out whether this is the case.

I had been told that Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky," contains more detail about zones of thought and complexity, and it's sitting on my shelf. But I didn't want to insert a gratuitous reference to a source that I have not read. Look elsewhere on this topic for a more detailed discussion of Vinge's ideas.

The comments have been really interesting. Some went in directions that I didn't anticipate and others provided insights that were new to me.

PS: I should have mentioned an example when I wrote this post. See problem 2 in this homework solution from a numerical analysis class. -- Paul