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Campus Crusade for Christ
UCI

don't be silly, anyway they're talking about the net, not the web, ie, the infrastructure, not format's of files that could be transfered over it.

No. IETF spends more of their time on file content than byte-pushing "infrastructure". For example, the HTML format is IETF RFC 1866. Any file that's mainly viewed over the internet is potential IETF fodder.

(Flash is too old and too intentionally openness-hostile to ever become an IETF standard, of course. But it'd be good if it could be replaced by something which is a standard, maybe SVG)

I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.

It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...

Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.

The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.

Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.

Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.

Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)

Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.

realizing that you have limited space to work with ...would it have occurred to you to put the cardholder's language preference in there?

The iso codes for language only require two letters be used to represent a language. So, you're talking about 2 bytes. I understand about limited space, but 2 bytes isn't very much.

Something like this has been tried; Pierre Baldi has worked on neural network approaches to playing Go. I don't know how much progress his group has made on the problem, though.

An initial dig brings up terms like "EXPTIME-complete" which doesn't match anything I remember from my undergrad algo class. Apparently, there is a rule modification that makes EXPTIME-complete games EXPSPACE-complete. This makes even less sense to me. Explanations in lay speak are appreciated.

...scripting is a terrible way to handle form input. It just doesn't scale...

This is just plain wrong. The current use of forms over HTTP scales beautifully because it separates the user-agent (browser) from the application. No tightly-bound system in existence can handle the load that web applications handle [and you doubters best remember that the green-screen mainframes use request-response protocols almost exactly like HTTP].

See Roy Fielding's work on REST to understand why web applications DO scale so well. And here's a simple example of REST.

Denmark would probably be cheap but I doubt they could afford to buy out LegoLand !!!!!!

Come to think of it, if MS go through with their "threat" I bet this will be dismantled pretty quick.

• The Complexity of Sliding Block Puzzles and Plank Puzzles
• The Nondeterministic Constraint Logic Model of Computation
• Generalized Rush Hour is PSPACE-complete
• Computational Complexity of Games and Puzzles

Is this the same Knuth that wrote along with Morris and Pratt the famous string matching algorithm?

Works for me!

According to this Press Release from University of California Irvine (also covered by many news media), men's and women's brains are more different than almost anybody thought. The difference may explain why women are generally better at tasks requiring so-called "relational intelligence" and men are generally better at tasks requiring single topic focus (math, engineering, etc.) Computer programming in general falls into the topical domain.

From the press release:

"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

The press release also notes that these two processing models have similar intellectual performance. This is very interesting to me:

"These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

According to this Press Release from University of California Irvine (also covered by many news media), men's and women's brains are more different than almost anybody thought. The difference may explain why women are generally better at tasks requiring so-called "relational intelligence" and men are generally better at tasks requiring single topic focus (math, engineering, etc.) Computer programming in general falls into the topical domain.

From the press release:

"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

The press release also notes that these two processing models have similar intellectual performance. This is very interesting to me:

"These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

Hare are his:

• Academic home page
• SF author home page
• Wikipedia entry.

From now until March 19 they're exhibited at the University of California, Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology. Free admissions.

My girlfriend works at a gallery on the UC Irvine campus called the Beall Center for Art & Technology and they currently have an installation of some of the LEMUR "robots". Frankly, I was a little disappointed as they are more funky MIDI instrument than robot, but if you're in or near Orange County, CA, go check it out.

Ice makes a pretty good Cerenkov radiator. Just ask the folks on AMANDA and RICE.

I thought a number of insect species had the ability to adapt rather quickly to such diasters. The ability to reproduce in large numbers and a quick (short) life span and changing environment allows evolution to works at its optimum.

That said, don't bees hibernate during winter too?

Also, haven't they also reseached cockroaches as being the only survivors after a nuclear holocaust? Or was that a joke?

I was at a lecture by Evelyn Fox Keller, and she said that there has been a paradigm shift and we're moving from breaking up biology into tiny parts, to seeing the whole picture. Whether theres 100,000 or 20,000 genomes seems rather trivial.

In addition to the late Professor Reines, F. Sherwood Rowland received one in Chemistry the same year (1995) as Professor Reines.

(Late) Frederick Reines at the School of Physics and Astronomy at UCI:

1995 Nobel Laureate Frederick Reines [1918-1998] Distinguished Professor Emeritus Elementary Particle Physics

Professor Reines earned his M.E. and M.S. degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1944. He was a member and then Group Leader in the theoretical division of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1944 to 1959. He was a Professor and Head of the Physics Department at Case Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1966 and Professor and founding Dean of Physical Sciences at UCI.

Professor Reines' work has been recognized by membership in the National Academy of Sciences and many other awards including the National Medal of Science. He was known for his work on the detection and study of the neutrino. We all mourn his passing in 1998.

(Late) Frederick Reines at the School of Physics and Astronomy at UCI:

1995 Nobel Laureate Frederick Reines [1918-1998] Distinguished Professor Emeritus Elementary Particle Physics

Professor Reines earned his M.E. and M.S. degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1944. He was a member and then Group Leader in the theoretical division of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1944 to 1959. He was a Professor and Head of the Physics Department at Case Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1966 and Professor and founding Dean of Physical Sciences at UCI.

Professor Reines' work has been recognized by membership in the National Academy of Sciences and many other awards including the National Medal of Science. He was known for his work on the detection and study of the neutrino. We all mourn his passing in 1998.

If you like this stuff, and especially if you like it explained, be sure to pick up a copy of Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman. By far the most interesting scientific prose I've read in years.

If you like this stuff, and especially if you like it explained, be sure to pick up a copy of Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman. By far the most interesting scientific prose I've read in years.

The self-promoting, ever-insistent, look-at-me, look-at-me inventor of hypertext, the world, and everything?

Personally, gentoo is my Go distro... but all the ebuilds are not available...

Anyways, I use Gnugo with gGo which is the interface to pandanet and gnugo. Sometimes I also use kombilo.

http://gobase.org/ is a wonderful website
http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/go-unix.html has many Go related soft.
http://goproblems.com/ The name says it all
http://gtl.jeudego.org/ Is the Go teaching ladder where you are paired with someone stronger than you, to learn go from a stronger human....
http://www.joseki.com/ Again the name says it all...
http://playgo.to/index-e.html is a website that has a nice intro to go.

Go keeps the mind healthy...

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Actually, of those three only Benford is actually employed as a scientist. Brin quit science for full-time writing a couple of decades ago (although he still seems to dabble a bit in various fields), and Reynolds recently did the same.

Here.

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educ ators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Populatio n_Growth.htm
http://www.cmu.org.uk/demography/05pop/pop_index.h tm
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec16/b65 lec16.htm#HUMAN%20POPULATION%20GROWTH

, even.

"The e-books and e-newspapers of the future will be portable and wireless and reprintable in an instant. They are likely to make use of an emerging technology--digital ink currently under development at Xerox PARC (with 3M) and MIT's Media Lab. The prototypes are card stock flexible pieces of paper with laserprint quality text that can be reprinted millions of times. Couple this with the 300-Mbyte microdrives the size of quarters stored in the spine of the book and the reader has instant access to the information currently housed in whole libraries. Students are likely to carry very small e-books--about the size of a spiral notebook. However it will contain all the curriculum resources they need for all of their classes for many years. The books will show words, images, movies and sounds. The Internet will be one of many distribution and sharing resources for new learning materials." Digital ink. Pulp Fiction.

Fine.
Done.
Here you go.

Does this mean we get to stop listening to you whine now?

I'm anxious to hear what antennas actually matter.

Since the plane is mobile, a fixed directional antenna won't help much (though one that directed most energy upward from the ground station and one that pointed generally down from the plane would be better than an isotropic radiator). A moving antenna that tracks the aircraft's transponder or an APRS device might be reasonable, but difficult to build. What might work better is to use a 200 mw card (like one from zcomax or senao - most cards are about 35mw to allow greater spacial reuse). Or you could use an external 1 watt amplifier.

I'm more interested in the routing protocols for connection handoffs between base stations. AODV and DSR were shown experimentally to handle extremely high mobility of large numbers of nodes.

-jim

You could probably write a script to use the data from the machine learning database collection from UCI.

Some are large, some are interesting, some are simple, but plenty of data.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLSummary.html

I personnaly like to use hnb (Hierarchical NoteBook) which you can use for todos but also for writing and managing lots of small notes.

Another app along those lines is woody, though it doesn't have as much todo support as hnb.

hnb/woody work differently than tdl/devtodo, though. The former two are todo list editors - you call them up and then manipulate your list from within them. The latter two are todo list, hm, commands. Everything is done directly from the command line. Which is why I use tdl--the immediate nature of the program (new item? 'tdla "get some widgets"' done.) better fits the way I work. Other people (including you, I suspect) work better with everything in a single environment (either that or just work better with the features that hnb has but tdl doesn't).

When I entered high school, ahem public high school, there was 1 computer for every other student. We were forced to take simple applications classes and do projects using internet sources routinely. This sort of education made it possible to have a 90+% graduation rate and close to a 70% college attendance rate. Our school also put out alot engineering majors.

I don't mind paying the tax, the problem with education and IT is the lack of knowledge most older teachers have. I personally think the tax gives interested students a better edge on the foreign competition.

Interesting link containing facts about technology in public schools

"Microsoft uses DCERPC, an extension of TCP/IP, as a transport mechanism."

and this is relevant how?

it is *another* protocol in the sense that nobody would be running it if it weren't for Svn

WebDAV is an open standard that plenty of products support, including your precious arch. I'd hardly describe it as a lame duck.

Note that now they've given up on getting everyone to install Apache2 and use DAV/SSL, the recommended protocol is svnserve, which was invented from scratch.

do you have any idea what you're talking about, or do you just make things up as you go? they seem to still think that DAV is still an option. And how is it possibly bad that they give you the option of a standalone server (as well as tunelling via ssh, or filesystem access)?

the same Anon Coward

"Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and make deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat...apart from inquiry...individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention."
-- Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993)

Professor Alfred Bork has, for the last 30 years, stated that the educational system that we use around the world is out of date. That the way we use technology today is a waste of money. He supplies a solution, but not in the old framework that teachers and politicians think. Not in the teacher orientated system which was thought out in the 12 century Italy and is still practiced today. Just think about that. We use a system that's almost a thousand years old in a world with 6,5 billion people!

A drastic overhaul of the global educational system is needed. Professor Bork has some very decent thoughts about this on his site: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bork/papers.html but first read the interview with Alfred Bork: The Future of Learning

(...No no no, he isn't part of the collective.)

The Lienhards have done an outstanding job. I tried to get NSF funding to assemble and put texts online four years ago. My proposal was declined, but I've kept assembling the books in my spare time online anyway. There are three of them: Natural Aerosols, Radiative Transfer, Particle Size distributions, all GFDL's and available here. Enjoy!

So Monsanto used GM agricultural products to screw a farmer through the patent and legal system.

Ignoring the fact that similar "piracy" and "theft" issues may exist for future nanotechnology, the main thrust of the argument was that containment of GM crops and their polllen is a huge problem, and the legal system doesn't seem to consider contamination of crops to be damage done to the farmer but theft by the farmer. There are plants being created today that produce drugs which are not safe to enter the general food supply. It contamination issues are not taken care of with the burden resting on the creators or buyers of GM food crops instead of the victims of contamination, there could be serious consequences.

What the grandparent was no doubt referring to is that nobody has ever suffered physical harm (illness or injury) as a consequence of GM foods. I can't think of a counterexample; I'm curious if anyone knows of one...?

Sure. Roundup ready crops are a fine example of a dangerous and irresponsible use of GM crops. Essentially, glyphosate is already an environmental contaminant in the US that has received far too little attention. Monsanto's Roundup Ready Soya (RRS) promotes even more use of the chemical which Monsanto makes a fortune selling. Glyphosate is known to cause kidney and liver problems in rats and is the 3rd most common cause of pesticide-related illness in agricultural labor in California. Roundup has never killed anyone, but an increase in its use will lead to greater subtle harm to workers and US consumers. This is a direct consequence of using RRS.

first off, there's no (practical) way to detect a single atom of anything in a reaction

Hmmm... Sandia and several other US government labs seem to think different. Exactly *what* class of computations can a linux cluster not handle?

UC Irvine

University of Cyprus

Linux supercomputer for Los Alamos

AMD Tapped for Gov. Linux Clusters

Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

And more....

Yes, actually your information is definitely out of date and inaccurate. UC Irvine has actually launched, in some capacity, the program you were talking about in collaboration with UC San Diego. Information can be found here.

You use HTTP to transmit your stylesheet. So the HTTP RFC helps.

b4n

Agreed. In fact, when I was at UC Irvine, the Therac-25 incidents were required reading. One of the required courses was called something like "Social Impacts of Computing," and issues ranged everywhere from privacy concerns to life-and-death situations.

[Windows 95] did one thing that the Mac OS hadn't (and still doesn't, being icon-centric in navigation of apps)--allow a quick way to launch an application.

Ummm, ever hear of a little thing called the Apple menu?

And if the Start menu is so great for launching apps, how come there are still a million or so commonly-used apps that throw a shortcut on the desktop when you install them? Is it because over time the Start menu gets wildly out of control and it's too much of a hassle to navigate through all the accumulated shit to find the one item you want to launch? I think so.

"The big Chill" - the Ice Age froze 'em all. Popular among scientists.

I'm really skeptical that a mammoth extinction caused by an Ice Age is popular among scientists. Mammoths seem to have been well adapted for the cold and died off when the climate became warmer.

"The big Kill" - hunted to death by humans, little evidence exists for this, popular with the tree hugging set.

There is plenty of evidence for human involvement in extinctions of mammals such as the mammoth. The models demonstrate that it doesn't take a whole lot of hunting to drive a population of large mammals to extinction.