Slashdot Mirror

• Fosil frog found in Madagascar
• It's big - about the size of a bowling ball and estimated at 10lb - or around 5Kg for scientists
• It's not like modern Madagascan frogs but more like South American ones which raises issues about lineage and land masses at the relevant (non specified - and why not - millions of years ago isn't very precise) era

On this side of the pond, the government use spy satellites on the farmers, where there is no cctv.

"In January the project team met with Chris Procter and Martyn Silgram of the ADAS Environment Group. They discussed current arrangements for satellite monitoring of cross compliance under the single farm payment scheme in the UK. Chris and Martyn gave comments on a survey of awareness and experiences of farmers towards satellite monitoring, which UCL plans to undertake as part of the AHRC project."

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/environment/satellites/index.shtml?events

Bless you WD, for being enlightened and motivated ... Hey, what do you think about this http://www.hqrd.hitachi.co.jp/arle/optical.cfm http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/genri-2.html http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/index.html http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research/photonics/research/topics/tomog/tomog.htm http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Arridge/ToastOverview.html http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research/borg/research/topography/index.htm

Bless you WD, for being enlightened and motivated ... Hey, what do you think about this http://www.hqrd.hitachi.co.jp/arle/optical.cfm http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/genri-2.html http://www.hitachi-medical.co.jp/info/opt-e/index.html http://www.imperial.ac.uk/research/photonics/research/topics/tomog/tomog.htm http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Arridge/ToastOverview.html http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research/borg/research/topography/index.htm

Automobile usage is a fairly inelastic behaviour.

Here are the numbers for a 10% increase in fuel prices (from 'Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with Respect to Price and Income: A Review', http://www.cts.ucl.ac.uk/tsu/papers/transprev243.pdf):


(a) Volume of traffic will fall by roundly 1% within about a year, building up to
        a reduction of about 3% in the longer run (about 5 years or so).
(b) Volume of fuel consumed will fall by about 2.5% within a year, building up to
        a reduction of over 6% in the longer run.
(c) Efficiency of the use of fuel rises by about 1.5% within a year, and around 4%
        in the longer run.
(d) Total number of vehicles owned falls by less than 1% in the short run, and by
        2.5% in the longer run.


It may be inelastic, but these falls are not trivial.

Perhaps I'm just a huge geek, but I find Celestia fun. And I've never tried Orbiter, but it looks neat as well.

I think there's a good bit of potential for a NASA game. I'll be interested in seeing what they come up with.

Actually there is already an excellent Free Space Flight Simulator, its called Orbiter http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk//, you can play the Apollo missions, you can pilot the space shuttle Atlantis, you can do the HST orbit deployment, use the robotic arm. There is even a futuristic plane, the delta glider, which can take u any where in the solar system. i hope maybe this time i can get a +3 informational moderation?, come on this is interesting, wait.. where are u going, im talking to u, I WANT +3 Whatever u want pleeeeease. Thank you very much :) Imagination is more important than knowledge @ Albert Einstein

Did you mean http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/? I'm getting an 'under construction' page with your link. It looks quite interesting so far, thanks for pointing it out!

Anyone thought of contacting Martin Schweiger over his Orbiter Simulator?

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html

I would **LOVE** to see the ideas implemented in his simulator (real Newtonian physics, Multi Function Display orbital computers, Interplanetary transfer orbits, great physics engine) implenented in a MMO environment.

More photos here, including a Firefox easter egg.



Bonus goatse easter egg

More photos here, including a Firefox easter egg.



Bonus goatse easter egg

More photos here, including a Firefox easter egg.



Bonus goatse easter egg

http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~nwright/iphas/rosette_dustlanes.jpg

Thats a great eye catching image (1.8Mb) but the notes on the website are sketchy. Does anyone know more about what to look for? Is there any kind of annotated image labelling the key parts and giving more info on why they are important?

Damn! Use the prehistorical EE (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/is/unix/ee.htm) with full ASCII support and let you write pretty good "README" and let yu use BACKSPACE!

I term this reverse confirmation bias: if many people have tried and failed, it must be impossible.

But what credit is there to that? Many were the claims to transmute lead into gold. What proved impossible by chemical means was by no means impossible within the framework of the right technology. I think you need to study the "Four Colour Corollary". This theorem states that the truth or falsity of the theorem is entirely independent of the number of bozos who publish unfounded and incorrect speculations disguised as purported proofs. Furthermore, we still don't have a proof that could possibly have been discovered before the computer era, so the deck was stacked towards impossible ... until it wasn't.

The same thing happened within the field of AI. This still annoys me. A lot of grand claims were put forward in the 1960s, and it all fell far short of what was promised. Nevertheless, there has been an unbroken stream of solid and important results, if not yet worth writing home about. Weren't the smart people silently expecting it to play out this way all along?

I feel the statistical results are the most important:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/robotillusions

And there recent is progress even in the long discredited field of automatic proof:
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_01_05.html

Guess what? Computers are now checking computerized proofs. Does this series converge, or not?

As for this new blood test, the human genome was sequenced a scant seven years ago, the explosive shock wave of proteomics is expanding almost at the limiting wave velocity, and we are now beginning to disentagle some of the fundamental neurochemistry involved. If there are any correlates in the blood whatsoever, it would be shocking to not find them at the present time, or in very short order.

Concerning percentage prediction rates, have we learned nothing? If you have a population of size N which you wish to classify into two distinct groups, given prior p and (1-p), the information required to achieve this is N * H(p), using Shannon's information measure. If this test provides any additional information beyond the prior, one can formally determine the ratio of the unknown information this test provides. If the test is worthless, the ratio will be zero. If the test is perfect, the ratio will be one. If the ratio comes out negative, you just assume the water goes the other direction (by metaphor with electrochemistry), and substitute the absolute value.

The interesting term is the cross entropy between what the experts can determine and what this test can determine. If the cross entropy is 100%, then either test gets you to exactly the same place, and it will probable come down to a matter of economics, which the cheaper approach prevailing. If the cross entropy is significantly less than 100%, then one will likely employ both tests, possibly using the cheaper test to screen the more expensive test, depending on tolerance rates for false negatives and false positives.

Given that they have included 18 elements in this test given a small positive sample size (they don't state their negative sample size), it's almost certain that some of these 18 factors are bogus, and will be eliminated as the sample size increases. If this test is bogus, the factors remaining will dwindle to zero, as the predictive rate also dwindles to nothingness. If the test is fundamentally predictive (to some ratio of the information content) as the bogus factors are pared out, the predictive ratio will likely improve by some marginal amount, maybe enough to be worth doing, maybe not.

In the 1970s one could make easy sport of predicting that any given claimant of the "four colour proof" was wrong and pat yourself on the back for an unbroken chain of confirmations. Great work: you've managed to predict that the world is full of de

I just turned 50 this summer, and I've never felt more appreciated as an engineer than the last couple of years.

As other people here have commented, the real secret is to simply be _very_ good at what you do: Keep up your old skills, and make sure you learn (i.e. teach yourself) something brand new every year or two.

Over the last 5+ years I've been the "IT Fire Brigade Chief" in the Fortune 500 company I work for, i.e. I get all the really interesting problems, all the cases that none of the others can figure out, and all the bleeding edge stuff that doesn't fit nicely into one of the existing departments.

I also get to spend discretionary time writing and optimizing system code, so I really don't see any reason to complain. (I've worked on one of AES contenders http://www.adastral.ucl.ac.uk/~helger/research/aes/, the windows port of NTP http://ntp.org/, HD-DVD decoding, Ogg Vorbis optimization as well as lots of other kinds of code. I am also the Scandinavian coordinator of the Confluence Project http://confluence.org/.)

My role model within the company retired a few years ago, 67 years old, and he's still enthusiastic about brand new technology.

OTOH, living in Norway I also know that it would be effectively impossible to fire me, unless I completely stopped coming into work, and started doing drugs instead.

Terje

We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.

While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.

My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.

That's not what they're doing, but for what you want you can try orbiter. It's free, and it's supposed to be extremely realistic, although I have no experience with the real thing for comparison purposes. You don't get to drive Lunar Rovers, but you get to dock with Hubble and Mir (which is still there thanks to the magic of software). You can also travel and orbit the moon, as well as other planets if you spend enough time to figure out how to plan trajectories and whatnot.

GSM systems using SIM cards were highly advantageous in allowing users to keep a single (expensive) phone and to purchase multiple SIM cards in different countries if they were moving around Europe.

The SIM card provides a supplementary advantage, in that when you change phone you just swap out the SIM card. With CDMA you have to call the support desk if you wish to change phones. Other than cost, convenience is big factor that drives any market. Any time you call the support desk of any corporation you often made to face the dark side of the company, so by being able to swap out the SIM card without having to ask permission helps you forget that there is this dark side.

GSM G3 supports CDMA (as in the encoding method, not as in Qualcomm CDMA), so there coverage area in GSM vs CDMA becomes moot. As to why GSM was developed in the first place you need to understand the history of cell phone networks in Europe. The story I have always been told is that with the old analogue networks you were faced with incompatibilities between networks and the inability to roam. GSM was devised as way of avoiding this issue in the digital era. In doing so this made the life of everybody simpler, since it is always much cheaper to develop a lot of the same thing, than something of everything.

While there are a lot of takes on the history of GSM, this one seems to explain things well: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.pagtzis/wireless/g sm/history.html

I'm in the same boat. It's funny too, because just yesterday I was bemoaning the death of the space sim to some colleagues here at work.

You know the best space flight sim ever is free and even works with WINE? Try it!

I've just set up a tiny pilot project at home in the UK:

http://www.earth.org.uk/solar-PV-pilot-summer-2007 .html

The manufacturer's warranty on the solar panel is 25 years IIRC.

(The numbers I have for energy payback for the cell/equipment manufacture is around 6 years, BTW, see: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00002642/ )

Rgds

Damon

I have learned that past sky-high CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals. If we have hit peak oil, I doubt we will ever be able to reach these levels.

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

This data is available from a variety of sources, with interesting commentary:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

There is a great rejection of the global warming panic in the scientific community (it is unlikely that "big oil" funds have "bribed" so many faculty members of such prestigious universities, despite a smear campaign). Because of the tremendous expense of implementing Kyoto, should we pause in global warming remediation efforts that may border on the alarmist? It is not in any way difficult to find distinguished scientists who reject all calls for panic.

Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming... If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.

Ok Ok. But I think I found REALLY prior art.

I call BS. They may have done some neat work but they are not the first. This is just PR for a prototype to get funding.

This genetic hardware evolution link is from 1998.

There has been plenty of news about one researcher who has done a lot of work on evolving organic circuits. The evolved circuit is sometimes far more efficient that what a human designer would make but extremely hard to figure out (they are trying to figure them out for clues to better human design).

Very often these evolved circuits exhibit mysterious activity that seems to take advantage of electromagnetic field effects generated in parts of the circuit. Also they sometimes exhibit temperature dependence (only working in a narrow temperature range).

Also the "anything can be done in software" people are both wrong and right. Theoretically yeah, but you'd need to simulate all of physics first. The whole point of this is to discover new circuit designs. On the other hand, such sensitive "tricks" as mentioned above might not be desirable in a circuit that has to be robust in many environments. So it might be goodf to do this in software too. Actually the below article also mentions this (two modes, one virtual and one in FTPAs).

I don't have time to find the link now but one that is probably related is below, 2004 from NASA about using programmable transistor arrays in evolved hardware. They mention temperature dependence and another neat idea I didn't know which is hidden processing.

NASA link

Unfortunately I think my head bangering days are over now ... too old :( ... but I think this reporter could also be a head banger?

I found another article by him, which shows he has been watching (and knows) this same cultural group of people for some time and this article also explains (more than a few) rock chicks I've met over the years. :)

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0701/07011 905

While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe.

My main area of surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today, as revealed in the interview below:

RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of Minnesota
JC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

I have come to learn that these past carbon dioxide concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

I have also seen a great rejection of the global warming panic in the scientific community (it is unlikely that "big oil" funds have "bribed" so many faculty members of such prestigous universities):

Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming... If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.

And I have also seen a growing political backlash against scientifically-unfounded runaway global warming panic:

Politicians who build campaigns around "alarmist" global warming claims are themselves becoming quite alarmed because of growing skepticism, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said.

When I see interviews such as

It does have it's advantages, according to Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of Minnesota:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level... When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

As reported by Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of Minnesota here:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

In reality, DNA modification is no different than selective breeding and cross breeding, it just works a hell of a lot faster.

It is here.

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

JPG: Xiaoyun Wang

If you want to learn more about how it works, and have a lot of fun at the same time, I can recommend that you play around with Orbiter. It really helped me understand for the first time exactly how it works (and also how wrong it is to call the place where the ISS is "space". :-) ).

Uh, what... Time to switch to a more modern Shuttle sim perhaps? ;-)

Orbiter (more info and screens)

... are very interesting. A part of it [highearthorbit.com]: "The details are fairly light, but it seems as though NASA is building a VR game on space exploration (remember Microsoft's Space Simulator [planetmic.com], or the free and open-source Orbiter [ucl.ac.uk]?). I wonder why NASA is rebuilding their own engine rather then picking up and using existing simulators (like Open-SESSAME [sf.net]) on top of the Unreal graphics/physics engine."

it's not like you'll be able to [...] add some nanorust, and have fresh sparkling drinking water. [...] the key is ensuring factories and agriculture do not dump their waste into the drinking supply (one of the big problems in India), that the sewage and drinking systems are separated, and that modern filtration units are used.

Unfortunately the deep sediments contained naturally occurring deposits of arsenic. Nobody realised this until local doctors noticed a large increase in arsenic-related health problems such as cancers, hair loss and skin lesions among young Bangladeshis. The drinking water from the tube wells was then tested and found to have dangerously high levels of arsenic. This arsenic contamination is caused by natural microbial degradation of peat, not by industrial pollution. Some people have unsuccessfully argued that the foreign experts involved in providing tube well advice in the 1990s were negligent in not having done any arsenic tests.

Because arsenic is cumulative and the local people have no alternative but to continue drinking the tube well water, the health problems from the arsenic are continuing to worsen and now affect over 13000 people. New more affordable arsenic filtration technologies are badly needed. Current technlogies are not practicable due to their very high maintenance costs.

I've been fiddeling around with Orbiter lately. Sadly, I haven't managed to get a shuttle to orbit yet. Really good to get an impression of the scale and principles of spaceflight.

See if you can do it yourself, orbiter is a free space flight simulator and there are others less technical but most are out of print since the late 90's.

Well, the government screwing up itself is one matter, it's just as I've noted before, it seems that the UK government likes to outsource its IT failures, and I'm sure the US is no different. It strikes me as plain bizarre that an entity in as good a bargaining position as a government can't get a good deal, and that they keep on hiring the same few consultancies who are clearly incompetent.

I agree; people should be developing games with new gameplay concepts, and forgetting about improving the graphics any further for a while. As for doing a realistic spaceflight sim, see Orbiter. I've looked into Sierra's "Outpost" games, which were meant to be fairly realistic space-exploitation sims but got panned as horribly flawed. How about an RPG based on Kim Robinson's Red Mars, or an action/adventure version of David Brin's Startide Rising using the engine from the Dreamcast game Ecco the Dolphin? A computer RPG based on World Tree? A version of The Ur-Quan Masters with more detailed planet exploration and diplomacy?

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past had a near-ideal control system: one button for Talk, Grab, Throw, Swim, Read etc., all context-sensitive. The other extreme is the otherwise-interesting realistic survival game Unreal World, where there are different commands for "Fell Down a Tree," "Chop Log Into Blocks," "Chop Block Into Firewood," etc.!

Pattern recognition can be done without translating it into something audible. The pattern is there, regardless of the frequency range.

Would you say the same about a histogram or a scatterplot? Visualisation is widely accepted as a way of discovering and demonstrating patterns in data - the patterns are still "there" if you don't visualise the data, but you might never know it. The same applies to sonification; the only difference is that visualisation is universally accepted by the scientific community, whereas sonification is often dismissed with comments like the one you just made.

I recently went to a very interesting talk given by Florian Dombois, who's using sonification to study earthquakes. By shifting seismogram readings into the audible frequency range, he's discovered patterns in the data that were not previously noticeable.

As scientists, we ought to be familiar with the idea that different representations of the same data can yield different insights. Our brains are not well adapted for dealing with columns of figures. It's therefore surprising and disappointing that so many scientists dismiss sonification out of hand.

The Moon is an incredibly usefull platform hanging out there in the Sun's orbit. The Moon is a great place to learn how to survive in space. Without an atmosphere on the Moon, or space ships en route to other celestial bodies, we will need to learn how to survive the Sun's onslaught of energy bursts. The Moon also provides a great place to coordinate and assemble large missions to Mars. It would be a lot cheaper to ferry large components of a space ship to the Moon's Orbit and then use the Moon's prograde velocity (re: Earth) to fall back down to Earth apollo style and make a trans mars injection burn at Earth Pe. Doing this adds extra kinetic energy to the propellant you use and you actually make a more effecient ejection from the Earth system. Not to mention you wouldn't have to launch as heavy of payloads from Earth.

For those who might not think that is true, you can actually simulate this for yourself if you like by using the wonderful Orbiter Simulator program available at http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html

Be careful though, it is not a game, but a simulation. Orbiter requires a fairly steep learning curve to master the advanced navigational tools and a pretty hefty understanding of Orbital mechanics to use properly. If you are a space and physics geek like me, you will love it though.

Since when is this a new idea? I heard about people doing stuff like this years ago.

http://neuralnets.web.cern.ch/NeuralNets/nnwInHepH ard.html
http://www.particle.kth.se/~lindsey/elba2html/sect ion3_5.html
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Gorse/research/pRA M.html
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/neuronet/about/roadmap/hardwa re.html

Karl Popper argued against discretionary powers in The Open Society and its Enemies : "The use of discretionary powers is liable to grow quickly, once it has become an accepted method, since adjustments will be necessary, and adjustments to discretionary short-term decisions can hardly be carried out by institutional means. . . . governments live from hand to mouth, and discretionary powers belong to this style of living--quite apart from the fact that rulers are inclined to love these powers for their own sake." This concise description of the problem with New Labour's method of government was written in 1943.

Yes, a downloader. Even downloaders can have UIs. (Unless you use wget/curl all of the time.) All interface with the user needs to be friendly, usable and well designed. *All* of it. Even a downloader.

Of course, but this isn't "Ten OS X Apps with a User Interface", it's the "Ten Most Beautiful". And check out this screenshot:

http://www.mathgamehouse.com/images/phillryu/acqui sitionfull.jpg

Does that strike you as particularly "most beautiful" of all OS X apps out there? To me, it looks busy and uninspired... and that's supposed to be the fourth most beautiful app? More beautiful than, say, Google Earth on OS X which didn't make the list even though it's freeware as well? Screenshot:

http://saya.s145.xrea.com/archives/images/GoogleEa rth.jpg

The "extremely eye-pleasing" P2P app they mention doesn't look much different than Safari's download panel with a couple of colorful buttons thrown on top. Compare:

P2P app: http://www.mathgamehouse.com/images/phillryu/trans missionfull.jpg
Safari: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/is/diary/mac/SafariDownloadMa n.jpg

I'd say the list could perhaps qualify as top ten nice OS X application icons.

Ok, WEP is flawed as it is. If a person encrypts their wireless, it will only prevent the average computer user from using it. Even if 128-bit encryption is used...it can still be cracked in real time. Check this article out which I found a few days ago. http://tapir.cs.ucl.ac.uk/bittau-wep.pdf And we give out flyers about STD's. Does it work? Not as it should. Will people really attempt to protect their wireless?

fMRI is still young, its only about 10 years old now. It measures the hemodynamic response in the brain over time. The hemodynamic response to brain activation starts around 6 seconds and dies out after around 15 seconds. It is possible to measure activations to stimuli that occur 1-2 seconds apart.

There are many many different ways to analyze the data. You can use a program like SPM (statistical parametric mapping) to model what you expect to see, and determine how close statistically your actual data is to that. Its also possible to use independent component analysis to find patterns of activation. Currently there are NO sure-fire ways to use fMRI to determine anything clinically significant.

fMRI is also never useful on an individual basis. It only works with large numbers of subjects to find what areas of the brain activate on average for a given task.

For more information on fMRI, check out these sites: http://www.nrc-iol.org/ and http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/

This paper and some related articles mention that the Greek unit of measure, the Greek foot (est. 12.164") is based on a measurement of the earth that is more exact than we had until about 100 years or so ago. Basically, ten Greek feet, times the fourth power of 60, equals the mean circumference of the Earth.

Check out the paper: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/nk/stade.pdf

It's got nothing to do with the US being better than China - the Chinese delegation is trying to portray it as a national issue, but actually it's about open standards. 802.11i is a published, peer-reviewed standard based on published, peer-reviewed encryption algorithms. In fact the driving force behind 802.11i is the flaws that were found in 802.11b by people outside the IEEE. If 802.11b had been a closed-book standard like WAPI, those flaws would still have existed but they might never have been made public.