Slashdot Mirror

>> US Jobs Dropped By 33,000 In September, Likely Due To Storms

It's likely to be caused by this storm : http://droit-public.ulb.ac.be/...
Does this storm have a name already ?

Reductio ad absurdum I must not live in Europe. In my country, college is neither free nor you have to accumulate debt nor you have to earn spots (There are some exceptions but not the general rule). You just pay your tuition (For example, 835€ a year for UE student but 374 € for low income and in some cases 0€, you may even receive money and a place to live).

Europe educational and social system is far from being uniform. You cannot say "There's a dirty little secret regarding the European 'free college' program": there are no such thing as an European College Program. There are a multitude of programs in Europe with various systems. And there are a lot of countries were just a secondary school (high school, I think for US) diploma is required, for example, in Germany.

Whatever, you just seem to have in mind "(nearly) free tuition" is impossible/wrong/... for idontknow wich reason and any lie seems good to support your preconception.

I remember 68000 programming on the Atari ST, where some of the instructions had various 32-bit pointer source and destinations which took 32-bits each. Thought the instruction command itself was 32-bits. VAX had even larger and more complex instructions which included polynomial evaluation.

Longest instruction with Intel is 15 bytes or 120 bits

I've seen how much data it takes to download a single slashdot page - around 500K . At the time (2005) I was staying out in the boonies with relative, I cobbled together an old GPRS modem, a PAYG sim card, and some satellite modem device drivers for Linux. Was able to surf the web without a landline, but had to pay mobile phone data rates. It was worth it, just for the independence of not needing a telephone line or power cable.

Compared to the 1990's media storage, 500K would fill half a 1.44Mbyte 3.5" floppy disk drive. Funny to think we used to be able to back up an entire hard disk drive using those

I did have a word processor for the Atari 800 - Paperclip by "Batteries Not Included". 5.25" Disk drives then could only store 360K of memory, Out of the 64K total memory, only about 34K was left after the OS, system state, framebuffer and font bitmap took their share.

Look at the work of Burt, Granovetter or Podolny (head of Apple University) and tell me again that sociology isn't scientific. That social network analysis has informed biology and physics and vice-versa speaks to how ridiculous it is to try to divide the hard sciences from the soft sciences. Critique the article on its merits.

This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.

How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences :)

Hey, it already exists and in widespread use... It's called the ants algorithm.
It was developed by Marco Dorigo at the Free university of brussels http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/HomePageDorigo/

There are several very interesting optimization algorithms based on swarm behavior, such as particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization. These methods have a similar ability for non-linear optimization (and pattern recognition) as neural networks.

Here are the images from NASA and the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

http://www.ulb.ac.be/sciences/cvl/homereef/homeree f.html

Mirror: http://www.ulb.ac.be.nyud.net:8080/sciences/cvl/ho mereef/homereef.html

I won't pretend to understand it all... my math isn't that great. However, it seems that they've taken a pretty good understanding of the current models of gravity and simply fit them together over varying intensities of fields. Essentially, they 'fit the curves' for all observable gravitational fields (using pretty good coverage of physics and math). Now, again, I'm no expert, but I don't think they've been able to find anything observable that does not fit their function, which accounts for the curvature of galaxies.

Here's the link to his (short) preliminary paper.

The last bit I found interesting:

"As two final remarks, we note (1) that multiply imaged gravitational systems present a challenge to all MOND/TeVeS interpolating functions (cf. Zhao et al. 2006) and (2) that the dark matter potential is fundamentally different from the scalar field, although the two are sometimes degenerate in fitting rotation curves. Indeed, there is no equivalent of EFE in dark matter; hence, the dark matter potential enjoys more freedom."

It's interesting to me for a couple of reasons: As this thread has mentioned his humility is refreshing, and the paper doesn't discount dark matter entirely. This last is why I replied to your post. I thought that you'd like to read the paper and I thought that you'd like to know that dark matter isn't discounted-- probably for the reasons that you pointed out (I don't know).

Here is the publication that won't be ready until april?

http://www-astro.ulb.ac.be/Publications/bf_Zhao.pd f

The article can be found at (pdf):
http://www-astro.ulb.ac.be/Publications/bf_Zhao.pd f

No problem!

Fusion: well, in anything we would actually call a fusion reaction, the nucleus changes. As a result of that change, usually something happens, such as the emission of a photon or other particle. For example, taking a look at one of the deuteron fusion reactions: D + D => He3 + neutron, when the two deuterons fuse, the energy level is raised. Now, during the very brief time before it emits the neutron, the deuterons have the possibility of tunneling out. In such a case, nothing has really reacted and we don't count that as a reaction. The correction for that 'unreacting' possibility is rather small if I remember correctly, because the time frame in which it would have to occur is so short. What is more likely is that a neutron will tunnel out, and then we have our reaction. Basically, all that we really care about is when the reaction occurs and the fusion results in the emission of the helium-3 and the neutron. There are other possible reactions which occur with deuteron-deuteron collisions (D + D => H + T being the other main one) and each reaction has a particular reaction cross section which is measured in barns (10^-28 m^2). The reaction cross section for each reaction varies with the energy with which the two deuterons are collided.

Interference:

I think most of your questioning can be answered with the concept of the wave packet. Real waves generally do not extend infinitely in space; most of the time we are dealing with waves of finite extent, or wave packets which are composed of a superposition of infinite waves. With this is mind:

1) Yes, a downconverted wave packet interacts as a wave packet of the lower frequency. So, yes, your synthetic 100 MHz wave packet should pass through the water with less loss than the 60 GHz signal. Keep in mind that if you are sending information, the modulation frequency will cause your signal to occupy a bandwidth, rather than a single frequency.

2) It is important to keep track of all 3 directional vectors of the wave packet at each point in space you are interested in. Yes, two waves can interfere at one point in space and then separate and not interfere at a different point. However, in order to do this they generally have to not be traveling in the same direction, and because of that, they may not 100% interfere at the 'interference point'. Treat each wave as a vector, and calculate your interference one dimension at a time (x,y,z).

3) Your description sounds something like the Aspect experiment. When quantum effects are taken into account, you have to add something to the 'analog' wavepacket description given above - namely that particles are discrete units with conserved quantum numbers. In other words, you cannot interfere the wave packets from two electrons and somehow end up with zero charge or spin. Ain't gonna happen. You can't merge two beams perfectly (like, across the length of the universe) but you can align them close enough for lab work. Whether they show interference or not has little to do with their alignment and more to do with quantum effects and "measurement", which is a subject too big for this post. If you really want to know more about that, I would recommend some of the earlier papers by this guy: http://quic.ulb.ac.be/members/ncerf/

• Mac Cowhand-A.
  "Mac/Cowhand-A is a proxy Trojan for the Mac OS X platform. The Trojan may copy itself to the user's Preferences folder. In order to run itself on startup, the Trojan may add itself to the user's Startup Items. The Mac/Cowhand-A Trojan horse allows remote hackers to use an infected computer as a proxy to connect to the internet. By using the Trojan hackers can disguise their real location because the connection can only be traced back to the infected computer." Appeared in April 2005.
• http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/aplsfromr a.html
  "AplS/Fromr-A is an OS X AppleScript Trojan that attempts to delete all files recursively in the user's home directory." Appeared in 2004.
• MP3Virus.Gen
  "Dubbed MP3Concept (MP3Virus.Gen), the Trojan horse exploits a weakness in Mac OS X where applications can appear to be other types of files, according to the company. Intego told MacCentral today that the code is hidden in the ID3 tag of the MP3 file. The code will only activate when clicked, but once it is, Intego warns the Trojan horse has the potential to delete all of a user's personal files; send an e-mail message containing a copy of itself to other users; and infect other MP3, JPEG, GIF or QuickTime files." Appeared in 2004.

Note that these viruses exploit some of the same classes of vulnerabilities seen under Windows. The first one relies on a MacOS X hole that allows any unprivileged program to specify that a program should be run at startup. The second comes from implicit script execution. The third is a file type spoof. Those are all very similar to Windows attacks.

Note that these are all "Mac features", not "UNIX features". Apple put in "ease of use" features without considering security, just like Microsoft.

He isn't the inventor of "swarming". I have followed Marco Dorio and his work for some years. It is an application of the "ant algorithm". http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/ACO/ACO.html

He is not the inventor of "swarming". It is an application of the "ant algorithm" and associated techniques developed by Marco Dorigo.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~mdorigo/ACO/ACO.html

you do not know how threads work, what SMP is and what HyperThreading really is.

I'll bite for the benefit of those reading at home. A process is defined here as well as elsewhere. Symmetric multiprocessing refers to running one process on one core and another process on another core, dividing kernel tasks roughly evenly among processors; multicore refers to SMP within one PGA package, especially on one die. Threads are like processes that share their code, globals, and heap. Simultaneous multithreading, such as Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, inserts one thread's instructions into another thread's idle functional units. Cache capacity makes a processor using SMT run faster when it runs processes that share memory; this is true of multicore as well in implementations that share cache. Which did I get wrong?

This is a newsworthy story as the this guy is going to be one of the first to use ISS to test crystal growth . . .

Okay, I'll be nice since you said "one of the first". I just want to point out that ESA has already flown a crystal growth experiment to ISS three times. The experiment is called PromISS from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. The PromISS experiment box and samples were sent to ISS via Russian Progress and Soyuz modules. PromISS operates inside the ESA built Microgravity Science Glovebox within NASA's Destiny Laboratory.

PromISS first flew on the Odissea Mission, also known as the Belgian Taxi Flight, in 2002. PromISS-2 flew again in 2003 on the Cervantes Mission (Spanish Soyuz Mission) and the third set of experiments is currently being performed on ISS as part of the Delta Mission (Dutch Soyuz Mission).

- charboy

Been there. Done that. These types of algorithms are not exactly new, and what this paper describes is no more "self-assembling" than any other distributed routing/discovery protocol - examples of which have existed for over twenty years. Of course, lots of things are new to the Slashdot editors that are old to the rest of us.

This leads me to believe that PowerPC does run of the mill PC-relative addressing, so that, for example, branches only take one instruction width, rather than having to store an entire 32-bit address in another location, etc. I'm confused by the purpose of the article, but I think the point was that PC-relative addressing forces the compiler to compute the address of a branch target in a function call to a fully-linked part of the binary. I don't think that address computation of that sort is responsible for a 10-15% performance hit, because wouldn't full time absolute addressing require more memory access on the already saturated MPX bus? If I'm incorrect in this, please tell me, and I will look for more information.

Congratulations, you just described the basic alghorithm of ant systems :)
There is also a negative feedback involved: the scent (pheromones) evaporate over time to avoid getting stuck in a local optimum too soon.
A lot of literature is available on ant colony optimization and ant systems. A starting point might be the homepage of Marco Dorigo.

Originally they were released for free on the net. There is still some site that has the first four books available online.

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.

I know a hard-core scientist who is subjectivist: Bruno Marchal.
You can read his thesis (in french) there : http://iridia0.ulb.ac.be/~marchal

If we can one day run a computer simulation of our brain, I think extropians would be the firsts to try (I would like to, even if I'm not extropian). Maybe that's why Extropians are related to subjectivism, and also why Giordano Bruno is a hero amongs Extropians.