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All I can find is their list of publications and their 'Homeland Security' website. Apparently UM is very 'prepares' - or they've just made a bunch of lists with staff people's names on them.

Apparently you can.

Strictly speaking the Stern-Gerlach experiment: passing a beam of electrons through a magnetic field and detecting the two resulting beams, doesn't flip the spin it sorts electrons based on their spin.

Controlling the spin of electrons is hard, if you work with an electron beam, perhaps one you filtered to contain only one spin orientation, you have to insulate the beam from the environment to make sure the spins don't interact and change orientation later on. Furthermore the electrons within the beam themselves will interact and a beam of purely one spin state will eventually contain both spin states unless you put energy in the system to keep your spin state energetically favorable, usually by passing the beam through a constant magnetic field, but that will deflect the beam since electrons are charged and that puts limits on how far the beam can travel before it hits something or intersects itself.

Working with electrons bound to atoms is a little easier, you don't have to worry about maintaining a magnetic field along the path of a beam since the electrons aren't going anywhere. On the other hand in a bulk material to have electrons which are free to change spin state they have to be unpaired and atoms or molecules with unpaired spins tend to be highly reactive. Thus they will tend to combine with other atoms or molecules to form combinations whose spin cannot be measured.

This leads to the most common technique of spin manipulation which controls the spins of atomic nuclei in bulk material. Because the electrons shield the nuclei they tend to remain in one spin state for a little while, in fact because the local environment of each nucleus in a bulk material is determined by the combination of a known external magnetic field and the local electron environment you can get information about molecular structure from NMR. To be precise though magnetic resonance techniques both electron and nuclear depend on the fact that in an external magnetic field there will be a slight population difference in spin states for a bulk material. The individual spins will still transition between states due to interactions with the environment but you can hold a large enough number of them in a particular state for long enough to be able to manipulate spins in the desired state for a little while before they decohere.

So to answer your question, the cheapest practical spin manipulation device is an NMR spectrometer. I'm having locating one for sale for cheap, there used to be a couple of companies selling 60MHz and tabletop permanent magnet NMRs for educational use but I can't find any of them now. You can build one yourself for on the order of $2,000, all you need is time, some soldering skills, a permanent magnet in a solenoid configuration, an oscilloscope which is probably the most expensive part, and a circuit diagram for 60MHz oscillator. Or you can use software to simulate NMR experiments.

The holy grail of spin manipulation of course is to trap and manipulate a single atom or molecule, or a small ensemble of such in an entangled state, which is of course what the research article reference above is about.

Recently I was interviewing for a SRE position at Google and everything was going allright, until an interviewer asked me how to implement a singleton in Java. Then I explained the standard pattern using a static initializer and told him the so-called "double check" pattern a lot of developers use doesn't work in Java (this is well documented here). Since the interviewer didn't have a clue about that problem, he spent some 15 minutes fighting my point, and in the end of the interview he even said the correct way of implementing it is to use a double check, although I have explained him 10 times the Java memory model makes that construct break. I even told him to search for "java singleton problem" in Google to understand what I told him, but maybe this was a bad idea, he seemed to be already in a bad mood in the beggining of the interview, this made him even more poignant. Guess what? They sent me the "raw dismiss letter" after that interview...

Then here goes my advice for you if you're going to apply for google: pray for luck! If you get a *single* dumb interviewer in your way, you'll be out. It's not a fair process, they don't care about giving feedback for you promptly (expect at least 1 week to have feedback after any iteration with them), and sometimes the interviewers don't know exactly what they are talking about. Be warned.

Never would have held up in court - in fact, the Confederacy would probably be alive and well today if they didn't fire first.

Yeah, it's pretty much a no-go these days, but mostly because of Texas v White which resulted in the revocation of any possibility of secession... and Texas getting $150M in Reconstruction bonds (halfway down).

Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.

You're forgetting various local dark ages. EG, the decline of the Egyptian empire from Saharan desertification, for an easy example. Progress was on a downturn for a while.

Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds.

More importantly, you're presuming we can find economical replacement(s) for geo-petroleum in the requisite timeframe. Our current infrastructure is highly dependent on it, and the time frame left before the anticipated global Hubbert curve's decline in production rates is small. Solve that problem, and the future looks bright. If we fail to solve it, then "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

The jury is still out.

More on her from HCIL at UMD
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/soh/bios/lamone.shtml

Linda H. Lamone was named State Administrator of Elections on July 1, 1997. Ms. Lamone serves as the Chief Election Officer for Maryland and by statute is charged with maximizing the use of technology in election administration. Since her appointment, Ms. Lamone is overseeing the second development and implementation of a statewide voter registration system and a mandate for a uniform statewide voting system. Other technology projects under Ms. Lamone's direction include advanced statewide candidate, campaign finance and election management programs. Ms. Lamone is the immediate Past President of the National Association of State Election Directors and serves on the Advisory Committee of the federal Election Assistance Commission. She is also Vice Chair of the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland and Chair of the Character Committee for the Fifth Appellate Circuit and the Select Committee on Gender Equality.

I would suggest perhaps that the "recitation instructor" as you described it is more important to student learning than the lecturer, and that one is wasting very valuable (or at least very expensive) "expert" time in having the lectures at all - particularly since there is no student interaction. Video tape them once and revise as needed if you think they are actually providing any benifit and you would at the very least save some instructor time that could be better spent in the lab if that is what is wanted.

You are correct that most "big" universities hire and promote based largely on "reaserch ability", however virtually all institutions claim that they desire their students to learn lots of stuff, and that the a major purpose of the institution is to help the students do so. There is a lot of evidence however that their instructional practices are not as effective as they could be. In most cases, student learning comes in spite of these instructional practices rather than because of them.

In answer to the original question of "should we post the podcasts" I would suggest that they should post them, and then TRACK attendance, podcast use, and student outcomes and base future decisions something a bit more objective then opinions of a bunch of yahoos like us. :-) Heck, someone might get a few papers out of their efforts.

I think you want to know about:
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/

which is an attempt to modify gravitational theory to account for the issue rather than using dark matter.

Thanks, where the Enlightening mod when you need one?

Though in practice, the dark matter nebula they claim to have found could simply be a much finer dust made up of former neutron star particles?

• Estimate the number of hairs on your head.
• How many notes are played on a given radio station in a given year?
• How many pencils would it take to draw a straight line along the entire Prime Meridian of the earth?
• How many golf balls can be fit in a typical suitcase?
• How tall is this building?
• How much milk is produced in the US each year?
• How many flat tires are there in the US right now?

A lot of decorative plants are somewhat poisonous, which is why it's a good idea to wash your hands after watering or pruning them. If you experience eye irritation or swelling of the eyelids, then poisonous sap is a likely cause.

Poisonous and Allergenic Plants - University of Maryland
Canadian Poisionus Plants Information System - Reference

I was most surprised to learn how poisonous Wisteria seeds are. I hope gardeners don't all get treated as terrorist suspects though.

Seriously - if the idea is to protect children, let's ban churches. Think how much safer children would be if their parents didn't force them to go to somewhere like church where there are thousands of acknowledge child molestors in positions of power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_sex_a buse_cases). Or the boy scouts, home of the homophobic child molestors (http://www.newsline.umd.edu/Boyle/shonor1.htm).

Thank god for election year politics.

Chris Reynolds studies black holes for a living. Of course he's skeptical.

You may have a point, we should stick to ITU codecs like perhaps, g722 http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~desin/Speech1/node3.htm l Oh waddya know! its a wideband codec! yay does that mean we can use it now???? Not exactly pointless, You can do conferencing, ivr, voicemail and media proxy calls from a SIP phone all at 16khz Mostly only client applications have been able to operate at this rate. Now we actually have a switching platform that will allow people to interact with the calls. The goal is not to make the pstn 16khz it's to make devices that are better than legacy phones able to do all of the same things *without* the PSTN.

You show me where that has happened that didn't involve fraud and we'll talk again.

SOX is too new for there to be a big long history about it. But let me refer you to a book that will list more examples (all properly researched) than I could ever hope to produce from a quick google search on people convicted on similiar laws.

I am giving you links to reviews of the book from two clearly non-libertarian more scholarly sources, just so you don't complain that is it "Just Libertarian Propoganda". I highly suggest you read the book, even if you disagree with the premise.

http://www.nhbar.org/publications/archives/display -news-issue.asp?id=2243
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews /healy305.htm

i believe parent was talking about 1024 cpus on a chip.

ps, using all 1024 threads was indeed hard.

Rockwell numbers are kind of arbitrary. What the hell does 57 on Rockwell C mean in real-world terms? Think about what Rockwell and the like test: you apply a known force to a ball or diamond of a known cross-section and measure the resultant deformation. Force per unit area... is PSI. Or KPa. Those are non-arbitrary terms, or at least they're one level less arbitrary than Vickers or Rockwell numbers. "The yield strength in tension is about 1/3 of the hardness" and yield strengths are measured in KPa (if you're in a civilized country) or PSI (otherwise).

You can look at hardness as being a combination of deformability -- which is precisely elastic modulus -- and resistance to abrasion, which is a really complicated thing to measure. Wikipedia defines:"hardness is the characteristic of a solid material expressing its resistance to permanent deformation" which is also the definition of the yield strength: the point at which a material does not return to its original form when applied stress is removed.
For metals, an approximation is that "The yield strength in tension is about 1/3 of the hardness".
Stiffness is distinct from hardness: elastic modulus is largely independent of alloying, depending almost entirely on the base metal, but actual stiffness is determined mostly by the shape, thickness, cross-sectional area of the beam.

Actually, most gold worn by people in the US, at least, is 14kt or 18kt, which is about 60% or 75% pure, the remainder being taken up by hardening alloys. Silver, however, is almost always 92.5% pure. Some 18kt gold is pretty hard stuff, and platinum is QUITE hard. Nothing like hardened steel, but it sure takes a while to saw through thick platinum ringstock, when you're used to silver.

Yeah, the alloy and heat treatment make an enormous difference. I think there are aluminum alloy/treatment combinations that increase the material's yield strength by well over 10:1 compared to the base metal, and I think I remember reading about a weird Aermet steel that was similarly nearly 10x low-carbon steel.

Art is not "story." Computer games can tell a story, or they can chose not to tell a story. There are many great works of high art that tell no story at all. What stories are told by:

Michaelangelo's "David"
Monet's "Water Lilies"
Wright's "Falling Water"
Calder's "Mobile"

To be hung up on computer games because they are inadequate for conveying a story is to forever relegate them to a second-class medium. Despite the fact that designers and gamers continue to strive for a great narrative, computer games and story are, in fact, directly in opposition to each other. Games demand interaction; narrative forbids it.

A story is a one-way mechanism; it can be argued that a narrative is, in fact, more limiting from the perspective of the freedom it offers the audience than forms like sculpture, music, or painting, due to the fact that it leaves much less to the imagination or interpretation. Narratives literally "spell out" what the audience is supposed to experience. Comic-strip narratives even leave less to the imagination, as the creator has control over not only the words & description, but what the mind would use to fill in the blanks.

Whether computer games are "Great Art" or not is irrelevant; computer games, are, unequivocally, an art form, just like sculpture, architecture or clothing design. Let's get past the obsession with story, and maybe we'll start seeing a lot more of what computer games have to offer artistically, instead of constantly trying to be a wanna-be movie medium.

-BbT

This article from doing actual measurements found a highest strength of 63 GPa:

Strength and Breaking Mechanism of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes Under Tensile Load.
SCIENCE, VOL 287, p. 637-640, 28 JANUARY 2000
http://bucky-central.mech.northwestern.edu/RuoffsP DFs/science-9.pdf

This report showed actual measured tensile strengths up to 150 GPa:

Direct mechanical measurement of the tensile strength and elastic modulus of multiwalled carbon nanotubes.
B.G. Demczyk et al.
Materials Science and Engineering A334 (2002), 174, 173-178.
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~cumings/PDF%20Publication s/16.MSE%20A334demczyk.pdf

  Both of these studies were done on multiwalled tubes since they are larger and it's easier to make attachments with them.
  In the earlier study in Science, the authors from SEM imaging noted that it was actually the outer single-walled nanotube that broke first therefore it was carrying the load. This would make sense from the way the attachments were formed which could only form a bond with the outer surface of the multiwalled tube. Therefore the numbers quoted were for the strength of this outer single-walled nanotube using as thickness only that of this single-walled nanotube.
  However, in the later study in Materials Science and Engineering, the authors believed the attachments were made to all the layers of the multi-layered nanotube, which would explain their higher measured strength.
  The prevailing theory is that the range of strengths is due to the number of imperfections in the nanotubes. So we should be able to look at the nanotubes at the nanoscale using SEM,'s, STM's or AFM's and find which ones have the least imperfections. These should be the strongest tubes.
  In the Science study, 1 out of 21 of them, 5%, have the best strength, 63 GPa. At a production of millions of tubes at a time this should still be feasible economically and technically.
  The lengths of the nanotubes in these studies were however, were at the micron scale though. Nanotubes have been created at the centimeter length scale, but as far as I know the strength of these have not been tested.
  Note that the reported strengths of centimeter long or longer "fibers" made of nanotubes being less than 1 GPA are not measuring the strength of individual nanotubes at these lengths. This is because the fibers are composed of the nanotubes stuck together end to end by weaker Van der Waals forces, rather than the much stronger carbon-carbon bonds that prevail in individual nanotubes.
  Here is one study that detects, characterizes defects in the nanotubes at the nanoscale:

Resonant Electron Scattering by Defects in Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.
Science 12 January 2001, Vol. 291. no. 5502, pp. 283 - 285.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/291 /5502/283

  Methods such as this might make it possible to find the nanotubes with the least defects beforehand and therefore automatically select those of the highest strengths.

      Bob Clark

The research i've been doing in P2P networks (due to my involvement in the okopipi project) has shocked me. In file sharing, we're living in the STONE AGE. Yes, even with bittorrent (which depends on centralized servers, and there's practically no privacy. And anonymous bittorrent like mutorrent is closed source, who knows if they got a backdoor in there).

EDonkey uses MD4 for hashing, it depends on central servers, and has no anonymity at all. And without mentioning queue # 4892 for a popular file.

Unfortunately for filesharers, file sharing networks based on modern P2P architectures is very scarse. The supernodes / ultrapeers approach is obsolete, easy to disrupt both denial of service and eavesdropping attacks.

The future of P2P is Overlay Networks.

From an architectural point of view, I would recommend the KAD p2p network, which bases its architecture on the relatively-new kadelmia network (See Technical paper on Kadlemia, 2002).

Even then, Kadelmia could be improved because it's based on a Pastry network topology - compared to other topologies like De Bruijn Graphs, proposed by a recent paper in 2003.

And more research is being done dealing with load balancing, anonymity, trust, reputation, etc.

As I said, current peer to peer networks are in the stone age. Someone needs to design a file sharing network based on the latest research, and publish it.

Oh, you brave doer of great research! What an idiot.

A simple googling of "LDS evolution" results in the following: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~seanl/stuff/Evolution.html

If you were to bother to read it (I find that highly unlikely), you would discover that Mormon declarations on the matter were 16 years BEFORE the Scopes trial.

Oh brave scientist and doer of great research! You rational one! You bastion of knowledge!

Here's my proposal. Everyone on slashdot with a clue (see item 3) participates in an ISS Takedown. The International Space Station is what's wasting a lot of money, and it's also part of the road to further money-wasting projects like a manned trip to mars. How will the takedown work? I dunno, I was thinking lots of very big mirrors on sunny days, around the world, focused with the help of DIY semi-automated tools coordinated through the Internet, could maybe stress the cooling systems just enough to send it over the brink and require all the occupants to return home. Then it's just a matter of time. Is this feasible? I doubt it. Maybe prayer and waving dead chickens would help.

How does this achieve NASA's education objectives? It would be a huge story, not only because the ISS would be done with, but the entire program would have to be rebooted. They'd get coverage everywhere, and people would learn about their projects and programs.

File extensions are primarily there for program associations. 99% of programs DO check that the file format is correct before processing, many programs, such as image viewers, media players and archivers can automatically use the correct decoding algorithm, even for files with incorrect extensions.

Reminds me of a few years ago when I renamed all my .mp3 files to .xyz and configured WinAmp to work with them to bypass the silly global network MP3 file scanner.

A lot of people make assumptions about file extensions. Remember back when the .SHS file extension was used as a virus payload that Windows was hard-coded to hide in Explorer? Even some of us that were "in the know" about file extensions were bitten by that one!

I always loved the Sade Mode dialog box. They couldn't just have a button for "safe mode" and one for System Restore.

---
watch funny commercials

Not even that, actually.

In C, it tells the compiler that the read or write to memory can't be reordered. If you do a read, it has to get it from memory right then, rather than reusing one from before that it might have stuck in a register. It doesn't tell the CPU anything about synchronizing its cache or executing the instruction in order, however. You've gotta have both.

In Java, it actually depends on the version of the language. third edition (Java 1.5, I believe). second edition (the first is the same; so Java 1.1-1.4). It appears to say what you said, but I don't buy it. Look at this article by a bunch of Java synchronization experts on double-checked locking. In particular, this sentence:

The consensus proposal extends the semantics for volatile so that the system will not allow a write of a volatile to be reordered with respect to any previous read or write, and a read of a volatile cannot be reordered with respect to any following read or write.

This change might have made it into the third edition. The second and first read like it provides this guarantee, but if these guys say not, then I'm not going to be depending on that without reading all of the chapter on thread interactions (not just the one section on volatile), reading everything they say, and doing some experiments. If that means my software runs 0.5% slower because I have more synchronization overhead than I need, then so be it.

I think everyone sees the "crap" software out there because it's all "crap" to a certain extent.

Usability is definitely not a problem specific to OSS, but it's something that OSS hasn't helped. The author's post uses Windows as the standard of usability that the Linux desktop needs to match. From the work I see in both GNOME and KDE, it's clear that Windows (with a bit of Mac OS X) is also the standard for which the OSS community is aiming. The problem with this is that the Windows/Desktop metaphor probably outlived its usefulness a long time ago. A quick read of Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface may convince you of that.

If OSS is going to be successful with normal end-users, it needs to aim higher. Let's not ape Windows and Mac, let's come up with something genuinely new and powerful. Let's now spend our time on building yet another window manager, yet another media player, yet another word processor or yet more eye-candy (XGL anyone?). The academic community has been doing lots of exciting research into usability for a long time (check out the University of Maryland's HCIL). We need to stop pouring effort into commodity software and outmoded interaction metaphors and figure out how to use the power of the OSS development model to bring these ideas from academia into the mainstream.

I think that efforts like the Linux Standard Base are a step in the right direction, but a part of me wants to throw out everything but the lowest-level graphics routines and start fresh, and with the amount of vested interests in an effort like the LSB, that's going to be impossible.

Researchers are now using remote control facilities to peer through the world's largest telescopes, without traveling thousands of miles. The high-speed connection that Internet2 offers make it unnecessary for researchers to make the trip to the telescopes, and also provides real time alerts of when to log on for optimal stargazing. For example, at the University of Florida, Astronomer Charlie Telesco uses an Internet2 link to view the eight-meter telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii via a video conferencing application on his office computer.

Applications drive the networks by allowing communication and cooperation between researchers. The primary applications are tele-immersion, virtual laboratories, digital libraries, and distributed instruction.

This is slightly offtopic, but I'm hoping some people will catch this question and give me their advice. Please resist the temptation to mod it down.

I work full time as a software engineer (eg, I design and write software). I graduated with a degree in CS and Economics a year and a half ago from a well-ranked state school, but my GPA wasn't very good. Getting married, getting a job, and growing up a bit has changed me a lot, though, and I want to increase my education.

I'm thinking of trying to get a Masters of Software Engineering (MSwE) from UMUC. I don't have the time or financial situation to go back to regular UMD for a MS in CS full-time, much as I would like to, and I've heard anecdotes that the department doesn't like to waste time on part-time students. And, frankly, I don't really care for another two years of algorithms - that's not what I'm interested in as a professional (although, obviously, I try to keep on top of new developments).

Is this worth my time? I don't want to spend 3 years on this, and then find out that employers see it as a joke degree, and actually have it _devalue_ me. But I would like to go back and get some graduate education, even if the school is less than stellar.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Erwos

What AMD appears to be trying isn't the same as superscalar processing, but it might run into a similar problem.

Where superscalar requires a good dispatcher to minimize branch prediction misses, AMD appears to be making decisions, not about dispatch, but about how to do locking of shared memory (think critical sections).

Critical section prediction might prove less expensive than branch prediction in practice even if they are similar in theory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/Doub leCheckedLocking.html shows the problem, which already is an issue on 64-bit hardware).

I know you said "without attending to classes", but I'd suggest you reconsider. I'm taking a class at the local community college and finding it well worth the time and money. (A class at a community or commuter college may be much better suited to the part-time student - the intro Japanese class at UMCP is six credit hours, which would be difficult to fit into my schedule, while the one I'm taking is only three.)

I was motivated to finally take a class after my second trip to Japan last fall. After meeting one Spanish woman who spoke four langages, and a Polish woman who was there teaching English and studying shodo, I was embarassed that after twenty years of karate training in a Japanese style, and shiatsu training, and two brief trips to Japan, I knew only enough Japanese to say "thank you", "excuse me", and "please bring me a beer". (Well, and "roundhouse kick to the neck", but that's not a phrase that comes up much in polite conversation.)

The class is sociologically interesting, though - a bunch of 18 and 19 year old anime fans, and me at 36.

http://ndrd.gsfc.nasa.gov/ndrdres/natural-disaster s/Atmospheric_Carbon_Dioxide.html

https://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0505d&L= ecolog-l&P=5239

You might want to check these out.

This article is just one of many that makes the mistaken assumption that a device with more features, in this case a phone that does nearly everything, is superior to one that has fewer features but does them well.

We see this argument frequently from iPod competitors, who contend that their device is better because it has X feature, while the iPod does not. "Why would anyone buy an iPod when the :MK5-2A player has an integrated FM tuner and takes voice notes?" The assumption is that the quality of product is in the sum of its features, regardless of the fact the addition of these features usually increases the complexity, and reduces the usability, of the device.

Recent research explains why we see this feature creep. In an article called, "Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing," researchers found that consumers responded to sales pitches that emphasized the number of different features. Features, in short, are good marketing. The addition of more features, however, often leads to a less usable product. In this study, once the consumers had a chance to actually use the products for a while and were asked to re-evaluate their purchase, they tended to choose a simpler product with fewer features.

Here is a relevant paragraph from the article: "Consumers can now purchase a single product that functions as a cell phone, game console, calculator, text-messaging device, wireless Internet connection, personal digital assistant, digital camera, MP3player, and global positioning system. However, although purchasing this highly complex product may give the consumer bragging rights, each function the consumer does not actually use adds to the difficulty of learning to use the product without providing any functional benefit."

This research helps explain why the iPod generates such high levels of customer satisfaction. Apple's excellent marketing, and word of mouth from happy iPod users, overcomes the arguments of competitors that the iPod lacks features. Once people own an iPod, they are not overwhelmed by its complexity. It does what they really want and does it well. This is what separates Apple from most consumer electronics companies.

My cell phone is not an mp3 player. It can't even take grainy photos. It makes and receives calls quite well, on the other hand, and the battery life is good. I like it!

The study I cite is here:

http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/marketing/pdfs_docs/Art icle%20-%20Feature%20Fatigue.pdf

Ghandi never struck me as the kind of guy who trashtalks others. Well you learn something new everyday, I suppose.

"This is a photomanager with a twist. Rather than just viewing you pictures one at a time, you spread the pictures out over your desktop and can manage them in a much more natural way."

How's this any different than PhotoMesa?

Nice summary. Actually, SWT, Swing, and AWT aren't your only choices in Java, though. There are a lot of small toolkits out there that each have some fascinating features, such as using the 3D graphics accelerator, handling zooming or animation better, etc.

The company I work for years ago branched one called "Jazz" (which has since been renamed Piccolo and mostly moved to C#: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/ ) and basically developed our own Java graphics toolkit. This let us make the things that are important to use very, very fast (Yes, GUIs in Java can be extremely responsive) and give us control over our own bugs and glitches. I don't think it's unreasonable for people writing Java applications for a living to have an engineer or two reserved for just maintaining graphics issues, at which point having your own toolkit that tracks one of the major or minor ones on the market becomes feasible.

One thing that starts to become a necessity for this sort of thing, though, is the ability to embed a component of a different toolkit inside your own for compatibility with everyone else in the world. In our toolkit, embedded Swing components are impossible to get 100% right (because Sun made some of the event system "private"-- even the getters) but not hard to get 98% right. SWT is much harder.

1. Nobody can detect any direct, or any other indirect evidence of the existence of this substance.
2. It does not scale down to explain why the Voyager probes are closer to the sun then they should be.
3. Fantastic claims (this stuff makes up 90% of the universe?) need extrodinary proof. Very lacking here.

You are absolutely right about the group that foiled the initial attempts a few years ago.

Their research has not only been on breaking these systems, but also making them more robust. Check out Min Wu's page:
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~minwu/

Here is an excellent tutorial paper on the subject:
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~minwu/public_paper/Jnl/04 03FPcollusion_IEEEfinal_SPM.pdf

You are absolutely right about the group that foiled the initial attempts a few years ago.

Their research has not only been on breaking these systems, but also making them more robust. Check out Min Wu's page:
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~minwu/

Here is an excellent tutorial paper on the subject:
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~minwu/public_paper/Jnl/04 03FPcollusion_IEEEfinal_SPM.pdf

There's a basic explanation of the known forces (Strong, Electronmagnetic, Weak and Gravity

There are quite a few ideas kicking about:

scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG)

Modified Newtonian Dynamics
General Relativity,
Quantum Gravity,
The http://www.halexandria.org/dward155.htm">Zero-poin t Field,
Superstring Theory,
M-theory,
Inflation/Cosmology,
Yilmaz gravitation, and
Membrane Gravity

Law of Universal Gravitation,

And there's also Intelligent Gravity

Unfortunately, there is no one simple experiment to prove any of these either true or false.

But if we look at the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it really isn't that interesting. All it is saying is that previous experience colours our view of the world and affects the ease of picking up new information according to how closely related it is to our previous experience.

Clarifying question - are you suggesting that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has weaker forms in publication, or that there are less extremist ways to interpret and apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? You are suggesting that prior experience is the active force here, but another interpretation of these types of results is that epistemology affects learning (in chemistry, physics, and biology [PDF or "View as HTML"]). Within this framework for science education research, cognition is modeled from a "knowledge-in-pieces" perspective, wherein certain cognitive resources are active when a mind is thinking in a particular context about some particular concept or field of content. So, although prior experience certainly shapes the development of personal epistemology and personal epistemological cognitive resources, these aren't actually prior experiences, they are "filters" that, in a very "Kant-ian" sense, determine what information is "read out" from the environment and also affect the way that information input is processed.

That's so obvious that it almost goes without saying! Everyone knows that someone who studied maths in school will likely pick up new mathematical concepts more easily than someone who studied art or history. Everyone knows that we have cultural and political biases from our background which affect our ability to interpret new information.

So, to continue looking at this from an epistemological perspective, we can see that it's much more complex than just prior experience, even within a given domain. If a student has taken a bunch of math classes, but has had horrible experiences in those learning environments, they won't necessarily be any better at learning new math than someone who doesn't have the same experience in the subject. Of course, you can substitute just about any subject in for "math" in the above scenario. I would argue that it's more appropriate to think about culture and political frameworks as influencing personal epistemological development than it is to say that they affect cognition directly.

The weaker hypothesis just really doesn't say anything interesting. And the strong form is ridiculously bad logic (a language where it is you have a concept that can't be understood by someone without pre-existing knowledge of that language, is a language that can't be learnt, and therefore can't exist. After all, nobody is born knowing a language!)

I'm not sure that I agree here, either. Imagination is a powerful cognitive resource. There is a further "extreme" to your logic game, and that's at the level of generating language itself. I think your argument breaks here, and the reason is that we can imagine, and then use analogy to build the new image for another brain. See recent developments in mirror neuron research.

So in the end, we are left with the weaker form that is almost a truism, and doesn't give us any predictive power towards the boundaries of previous experience as influence on new information

Flipping a coin would be a more accurate lie-detector test that traditional polygraphs.

http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn041803.html

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/rel/tao/TaoTeChin g.html

U cAn BeLIve WhAt U WanT! Although it may not get you what you desire!

As it has been the case for the past thirty years, the description of the prowesses of the system are still written in the conditional form: "...IBM technology can be used to control computers and devices..." rather than the active form: "is being used"...

Ben Shneiderman is the person who, in my opinion, articulates the best the limits of speech recognition.

One of my favorite phrases to explain this issue is: "You don't want to speak to a computer, because you can't speak and think at the same time". More precisely, speech utterance makes use of some modules in our brain which are required for planification too. Hence, you can't plan as well what to do next when you speak, which is a big hurdle in the type of intellectual activities one carries with a computer.

When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?

Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.

Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.

Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).

What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.


Usability in Website and Software Design
AskTog Interaction Design Section
The Raskin Center for User Interface Design
Human-Computer Interface Institute at CMU
Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
Bibliography of Human-Computer Interface Studies
Usability Tips and Tricks
Overiview of GOMS Analysis
Us

This comes as a surprise? I was fortunate enough to have one of the early pioneers (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/) in the field as a professor and discovered just how far off ones paternalistic "I know what's best for the user" attitude could be. I've been trying to put the science back into "computer science" ever since.

I wonder how many CS students or IT professionals have actually taken a serious course in human factors. In over twenty years in this biz I've only run across one other colleague who has (he had the same professor too).

Of course, with salesmen (who tell the customer/user) running the major corporations I guess this sorry state of affairs should be expected.

That's a cool hack. Here's another, speaking of the Newton, from an interesting e-mail about porting one of the early versions of Java to the Newton. See the last paragraph.

Someone in the LinuxBIOS project wanted to be able to boot other OS's, but needed BIOS emulation.

Bochs already had a BIOS written, but needed a wrapper layer. Such a wrapper now exists and is called ALDO, and is part of the LinuxBIOS V1 source tree. From what is mentioned, it's not in V2 simply because no one wants it currently.

From what I can gather, ALDO is actually just an ELF executable, so it's quite possible that EFI could load it off disk - Viola, you've got a BIOS.

The Security Enhanced Bootloader for Operating Systems - Phase 2 page covers detail on how it all works (not a detailed explanation).

That's EXACTLY what I was thinking:
"Hmmm...I wonder where all that lightning could be coming from..."