Domain: unizh.ch
Stories and comments across the archive that link to unizh.ch.
Comments · 54
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Re:Ultimately
HERE IS YOUR FUCKING RAW DATA (because you are unvilling to search it for yourself -- and call yourself a skeptic...):
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2 [noaa.gov]
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/ [noaa.gov]
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/ [ucar.edu]
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER [antarctica.ac.uk]
http://eca.knmi.nl/ [eca.knmi.nl]
http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/content/view/35/1 [zamg.ac.at]
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/atdd [nasa.gov]
http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/mirador/presentNavigation.pl?tree=project&project=SORCE [nasa.gov]
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/ [colostate.edu]
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/data.html [pol.ac.uk]
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/dataexp.html [unizh.ch]
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~ttchen/argo/gmap.htm [csiro.au]
http://icoads.noaa.gov/ [noaa.gov] -
Re:Are climate researchers....
YOU IDIOT!
Here you are, PLENTY of RAW datasets:ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER
http://eca.knmi.nl/
http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/content/view/35/1
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/atdd
http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/mirador/presentNavigation.pl?tree=project&project=SORCE
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/data.html
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/dataexp.html
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~ttchen/argo/gmap.htm
http://icoads.noaa.gov/Let me repeat:
YOU IDIOT -
Re:Data thrown awayHere's a small portion of the data which is opensource: (see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Climate_data_raw)
- GHCN v.2 (Global Historical Climate Network: weather station records from around the world, temperature and precipitation)
- USHCN US. Historical Climate Network (v.1 and v.2)
- Antarctic weather stations
- European weather stations (ECA)
- Satellite feeds (AMSU, SORCE (Solar irradiance), NASA A-train)
- Tide Gauges (Proudman Oceanographic Lab)
- World Glacier Monitoring Service
- Argo float data
- International Comprehensive Ocean/Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) (Oceanic in situ observations)
- AERONET Aerosol information
You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.
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It's not about flicker rate.It's about Electromagnetic Interference.
A typical unshielded CFL puts out more electromagnetic radiation than your TV set, your microwave oven, and certainly your cell phone.
--Though, cell phones can afford to be low-power emitters, since you have to hold them right up to your head for your nervous system to be affected.
Yes, there are a hundred and one arguments out there which tell us that cell phone EM is non-ionizing and therefore totally safe. This is only half true. Low power EM won't cause heat damage to your brain, but this certainly does not mean that they are totally safe. There are more ways to have an effect upon the nervous system than to simply burn cells with microwaves.
Humans are affected by EM radiation. There is more information available on this now than ever before, but many still resist looking at it. The arguments I have seen against have been, without exception, flawed, limited by bias and willfully ignorant. Fair enough. While the arguments for include hysterical and scatter-brained claims, it is silly to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. There are many far more serious studies which show that the brain is indeed affected by EM. (Here are a few from a simple Google search.)
The question in my mind is not whether EM radiation can affect the behavior of brain cells and perception, but how CLF's are doing it. --Because, given GE's long, long track-record of psychopathic tendencies, health and environmental violations and lying to the public, and above all, their long standing association with the military, it would be foolish to assume that they are not deliberate in their efforts to flood every Western household with harmful EM. --Granted, all their technicians and engineers need not be 'in on it', but that's how you make secrets work. You compartmentalize. I would be surprised, for instance, if many employees at GE were aware that the basic wall socket electrical current was a source of trouble.
Robert O. Becker wrote a definitive book which deals with EM pollution and its effect on the human mind and body. I have taken the liberty of scanning the pages which I think are highly relevant in terms of social engineering, specifically, the notes on , which illustrates how 60 htz AC current plays a role in keeping people lightly medicated with Lithium on a nearly permanent basis.
Population control is entirely real, and it has been around for a long time. Science has known for many decades that reality and certainly human awareness are entirely the results of electromagnetic wave forms, and that manipulation within the EM spectrum is a great way to control people.The CIA's experiments in radio control of the brain are based on the development of the EEG in the 1920's. In 1934, doctor's Chaffee and Light published a pivotal monograph, "A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System". Work along the same lines allowed Dr. Jose Delgado of Cordoba, Spain to climb into bull-ring and, with the push of a button, trigger an electrode in the head of a charging bull and stop the beast in it's tracks.
Further groundbreaking advances were made by L.L. Vasiliev, the famed Russian Physiologist and doyan of parapsychology, in "Critical Evaluation of the Hypnogenic Method". The article detailed the experiments of Dr. I.F. Tomashevsky in remote radio control of the brain "at a -
Re:Whatever happened to...
Some high-speed interconnects like SCI and Dolphin are designed to be deployed in ring based structures (hypercube is based on a bus). The multidimensional analog to the ring is the hypertorus, and many clusters based on SCI and Dolphin use a hypertorus topology.
For instance:
http://krone.physik.unizh.ch/~stadel/zbox/start -
Debunking the debunker...
Take a look at the first sentence:
The closer to the metal you can get while programming, the faster your program will compile -- or so conventional wisdom would have you believe
As others have already mentioned he seems to use the term 'compile' oddly. This sentence would say to me that the time to take program and turn it into object code (assembly, byte-code, etc) is smaller the more similar your language is to the object code. I think it's difficult to disagree with that statement. However since the author seems to spend most of his time talking about program execution speed (and by the look of the comments here on SD that's what everyone else thought too) it seems safe to assume that he meant 'The more similar your language is to object code the faster it will run'.
In this article, I will show you how high-level languages like Java aren't slow by nature, and in fact low level languages may compile less efficiently.
The wierd bit here is he seems to take the idea 'high-level languages are slower than low-level languages' and assume it's being stated in the ABSOLUTE case. In other words that there is no case where a high-level language can be faster than any low-level language. I doubt even the hardest of the hard-core assembly language folk would say that. Now like his mistake above we might be tempted to believe that he isn't saying something so ridiculous. The problem with that POV is that he only provides a few cases where he believes his thesis is true (at least one of which is wrong). The only argument a minority of cases can refute is the absolute one above. So either he doesn't make his case or his he's attacking an argument that could hardly be called common wisdom.
But hey you might just say that he's giving a few examples for the sake of brevity. Except that...
Now consider a slightly higher-level language, FORTRAN (which predates C by more than two decades, incidentally). FORTRAN has a vector datatype, and operations on it.
The problem here is if we take what appears to be his definition of a high-level language. FORTRAN could (AFAIK he's speaking hypothetically) produce faster object code than his C implementation because it implements a abstraction that is close to object code. IOW it is (in that instance) operating at a low level. How does this make his point?
A lot of people complain about the overhead of Java bytecode being interpreted. This argument isn't entirely fair, for two reasons. The first is that Java doesn't have to be interpreted at all
Again this is just odd reasoning. True it doesn't have to be but for the most part it is. So again it seems like he's trying to refute kind of an odd case.
The reason for this improvement is that a virtual machine could perform some categories of optimization that weren't available to a static compiler.
Anyone else amused that his first reason and second reason are mutually exclusive? ( IOW: You can't compile Java AND have JIT optimizations).
Now here at least is something that approaches a useful argument. Sure there are kinds of optimization that can only be done at run time but the question of what is generally faster isnt' really answered. For example an in-lined function can easily cause performace to drop if the inlining also causes a cache miss. I'm also somewhat skeptical of this auto-inlining being 'impossible' to implement in C. It would appear that some people have discussed it at least : http://citeseer.ifi.unizh.ch/chang92profileguided. html
His final idea about compilers becoming more advanced is true. However again we run into the issue of "What argument does this actually refute?". Is it the general case? It's hard to say, it's also hard to say how this aligns with his thesis. One example of a compiler that can produce pretty significant speed increases is Intel's C compiler. So it would seem that 'lower le -
Re:woo
Your assertion contradicts the data. Can you give me a reference to back up your claim?
Here is the real data: http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb8/sum0203.html As you can see, Iceland's glaciers are in a state of retreat. -
rat curled
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Computational Linguistics
Based on the fact that you posted this to Ask Slashdot, you probably need to start by studying the work that has already been done in the field of computational linguistics. Read the journals. Then figure out how to apply your knowledge.
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Better link
The original webpage for the Neanderthal facial reconstruction is here, and the image is somewhat better.
They probably looked much like modern homo europeanus. -
Re:Corporate usesThere is a paper here with more detail. Note the conditions:
Exclusion criteria for participation were significant medical or psychiatric illness, medication, smoking more than 15 cigarettes per day, and drug or alcohol abuse. Subjects were instructed to abstain from food and drink (other than water) for 2hr before the experiment, and from alcohol, smoking and caffeine for 24hr before the experiment.
Subjects received a single intranasal dose of 24 IU oxytocin (Syntocinon-Spray, Novartis; 3 puffs per nostril, each with 4 IU oxytocin) or placebo 50 min before the start of the trust or the risk experiment.
It would seem unlikely that this would work for advertising if it required 50 minutes to take effect. It might work better for things like political rallies, where people are present for longer periods of time, but it's not clear how you would administer it to a crowd of people - would it be effective just released into the air? What kind of concentration would it need?
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Re:this only hurts their descendents
You are aware of the fact that in 1999, English was only third in the list of languages spoken natively by people around the globe?
http://www.unipublic.unizh.ch/magazin/gesellschaft /2001/0195/
(It's in German). Even if you take the non-native english speakers, mandarin still wins. -
Re:nice work boys, but...
We built an interactive floor in 2002 as part of our playful interactive space Ada. Check out the Ada pages or for more technical information my little floor page. Had >500k visitors over 5 months summer of 2002.
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Re:Global Warming is a serious threat.
I followed your link and went to the link "data", and selected the first glacial data link I could find.
While the statement "some glaciers are receding, some aren't" is certainly not wrong, as in any year you can certainly find at least one glacier, which hasn't receeded this year.
However, looking at the graph above, I think the statement "glaciers are receeding" paint an fairly accurate picture of the general situation.
The antarctic glaciers, however, are certainly receeding,
> its coastal ice pack is thicker than ever.
Maybe because of the receeding glacier, the coastal lines calves the thinner ice shelves, and only the thicker parts of the glacier remain?
> Global warming would [...]. Global cooling, on the other hand, [...]
What makes that scenario more likely than the reverse? From an Alaskian point of view warmer weather probably means better agriculture. But from an African point of view, I guess the reverse is the case. -
zBOX 2
http://krone.physik.unizh.ch/~stadel/zBox2/tender
. html
CPU requirements scream AMD64 -
Great pictures
Everyone, take a look at those pictures. No, not of the results, but of the computer itself. The page goes over how they built the thing, with pictures of assembling the nodes, the frame, and the completed box. That's a sight to see, all the internal guts forming that piece of computing power.
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zBox ancient design shape
Prettiest Swastika* you'd ever seen.
http://krone.physik.unizh.ch/~stadel/pictures/zBox InitialPlan-small.gif
* The emblem of Ganesha, the Hindu god of good luck. -
Re:Slashdotting knows no borders....
Site is up, the main page with press release, pictures and movies here:
http://krone.physik.unizh.ch/~moore/
now then, will it withstand 40Mb movie downloads? -
The NAZI Computer?
Or why else is there a "Hakenkreuz" on the right upper corner of the plan.
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Photo Story
http://krone.physik.unizh.ch/~stadel/zBox/story.h
t ml
The 3D temperature monitor is really cool. -
Re:I dont understand! marked|pt
I generally agree with you; Apple has made a very nice system, but there are still shortcomings that need to be addressed. We're not going to get anywhere if people aren't willing to openly criticize flaws in the operating system.
The FTP support is TERRIBLE in OS X, and while Panic Software found a niche to fill (offering a 'good enough' FTP client), I certainly hope Apple wakes up and offers something like FileZilla for the Mac.
So far, the best thing I've found is CyberDuck, a free (beer, speech) FTP/SFTP client, it has pretty much everything I needed.
I still wish someone with more coding skills than I ported FileZilla to OS X, though. -
A glacier is much more likelyhttp://www.glacier.rice.edu/land/5_antarcticicesh
e etlast.htmlDuring the period from about 120,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago, the Antarctic Ice Sheet grew much larger than it is today. This was the last glacial phase. Since about 20,000 years ago, the ice sheet has been retreating to its present size. This marks the present interglacial phase of the cycle. A similar change occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, with ice sheets expanding across large areas of North America, Asia, and Europe. Shifts in climatic conditions occur across the globe accompany these cycles. This cycle of advance and retreat of the ice sheets in the Northern and Southern hemispheres has occurred many times in the past and will occur again in the future.
All but small remnants of the continental ice sheets retreated from North America thousands of years ago. Although it may appear that the Ice Age has ended, many scientists argue that our present relatively warm period represents but a brief interlude and that the glaciers may again advance in the future.
A glacier covering much North America, Europe, and Asia seems like a more serious (and more likely) problem than a mega tsunami. -
Re:It is a fairly easy transition.Drdink's list of apps is a good start. I have a list of OS X software I made for two of my "switcher" friends, and now that you are in the same boat, here it is.
These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:
WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.
DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.
PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.
Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.
MorphX: Morphs one image into another.
SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).
Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.
LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..
And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.
CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).
Onyx: A must-have system utility.
MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.
Books: A library software (book database).
Xnippets: A decent information organiser.
Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)
A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:
ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).
EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)
Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.
Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)
Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.
Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)
cheers- raga
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Re:And the short answer is...Hello Mr. Anonymous,
to be contrary, you don't know what you are talking about. Standard Linux is not a real time O/S. DOS however, while not originally intended as a "commercial real time O/S", has been used many times in the past, as well as the present, to program real time applications on.However, people have adapted Linux (meaning it is not "standard" Linux) to work with real time and embedded systems. Then again, even before Linux was being adapted to real time systems, DOS, and variants of DOS were being created for the same task, and still are.
A quick search provides a number of to links back me up on this, including this one:
Linux Journal Article - Using Linux in Embedded and Real-Time Systems
QUOTE: Although Linux is not a real-time operating system (the Linux kernel does not provide the required event prioritization and preemption functions), several add-on options are available that can bring real-time capabilities to Linux-based systems. END QUOTE
This link from the University of Zurich (Einstein's alma mater) lists a number of variants of DOS as types of real time systems. It also includes download links for threading libraries for DOS so that you can write 'real time' applications: Embedded and Real-Time Systems - DOS and Windows multitaskers / others
While DOS itself is really single threaded (or even "no threaded"), there is nothing that says you can't write multi-threaded code to provide a 'real-time' application.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is a good operating system, and when they can get most things right with it, including working sound drivers for my laptop (so that I don't have to screw around to make it work... I am more interested in using my laptop for it's intended purpose, not to screw around on it playing configuration games), then it will be ready for prime time. In the meantime, I will use Linux as a practice/R&D tool, since I program systems on Unix/Linux systems, and use WinXP, for my entertainment and Java programming O/S.
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Re:There's another reason: electric Impedance
How neurons encode information is NOT - repeat, NOT - a known process. There are several theories regarding whether coding is purely based on spike frequency, spike synchrony, or some other coding systems we haven't discovered yet. I've spent the last two weeks listening to some of the world's brightest and most knowledgeable experts on neural coding, auditory system, visual system, etc at the Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop and the best thing that can be told is that there is more going on than spike rate, but there is no consensus on exactly what that code is. If you know more and better, then you should be here next year. Contact the organizers.
What I DO know, and what actual experiments have shown, is that auditory neurons fire in synchrony with the incoming audio signal up to a few kHz. Beyond that, there is no correlation between the phase of the incoming audio signal and the spike train from the neuron. The neurons continue to fire, but not in phase with the audio signal. Of course higher frequencies are being detected and passed on to the brain; but absolute phase information, as far as anyone can tell, is not preserved beyond that few kHz limit. Again, your evidence to the contrary is welcome. Try to be specific and cite research wherever possible. -
CTask22dCTask is a public-domain, C multitasking library for MS-DOS. It includes pre-emptive multitasking, support for serial ports, and a few other goodies. Alas, the last update was in 1993 and I don't know if FreeDOS can run it, but I'll throw it out here anyway.
I used it about 10 years ago to write an embedded robot controller for a small company. It's compatible with either the old Microsoft or Borland DOS compilers. I used Borland 3.1. IIRC, there were a few, small bugs in it though.
Download it here.
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CTask22dCTask is a public-domain, C multitasking library for MS-DOS. It includes pre-emptive multitasking, support for serial ports, and a few other goodies. Alas, the last update was in 1993 and I don't know if FreeDOS can run it, but I'll throw it out here anyway.
I used it about 10 years ago to write an embedded robot controller for a small company. It's compatible with either the old Microsoft or Borland DOS compilers. I used Borland 3.1. IIRC, there were a few, small bugs in it though.
Download it here.
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Free Software for OS X
For Mac OS X, I recommend the following free software:
Audacity . Audio Editor.
Colloquy. An IRC Client.
Cyberduck. FTP client.
Fugu. FTP client.
Shiira. Web browser written in Cocoa.
Camino. Web browser.
Firefox. Web Browser.
Mozilla . Browser/E-mail/Composer/Address/Chat.
Thunderbird. E-mail Client.
GnuPG for Mac. GNU Privacy Guard for Mac = Encryption for the people!
Give the kids choices. All of the above are free as in freedom as well as gratis. -
Re:SSH/SFTP
Could you perchance recommend an SSH/SFTP client for an iMac?
The command-line 'ssh' should do you just fine for remote logins and tunnels and such. But for SFTP, I'd highly recommend Transmit. It's an awesome FTP and SFTP client - probably the best solution you'll find short of Apple getting the Finder fixed up for real FTP access.
If you don't like shareware (Transmit is $24.95) my runner-up recommendation would be Cyberduck. It has a rather nice UI, development is rather rapid (bug fixes and feature refinements every month or so), and it is open source under the GPL. It's not as speedy as Transmit, and it has a ridiculously ugly rubber duck icon, but it's still a nice FTP and SFTP client.
:-)Hope that helps!
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Re:What everyone is interested in...
You might like CyberDuck (GPL) or RBrowserLite (no-cost).
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Latent Semantic Analysis
After reading through the comments here, it is obvious that there are some misconceptions about what Apple is doing.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was invented by Deerwester et. al. [1] as a method of reducing the dimensionality of a text corpus by finding a low-rank approximation of the term-document matrix.
The singular value decomposition (SVD) [2] factors a matrix A into the product of two orthogonal matrices and a diagonal matrix, A = U'SV. To find a rank k approximation of A using this factorisation, create matrices U^, S^ and V^ where S^ contains the first k rows and columns of S, U^ contains the first k rows of U and likewise for V^. Then, let A^ = U^'S^V^. The difference in Frobenius norms [3] of A and A^ is minimal for a rank-k approximation of A (least squares).
Rather than storing the full matrix, A^, in practice it is much more common to save U^ and S^ and project the columns and rows of A into a k-dimensional space. This allows both terms and documents to be clutered together and helps to associate keywords with documents.
You can do many things with these approximated document vectors, clustering, classification, document retrieval. Apple is probably using a k-nearest neighbour classifier [4] to determine how a message is to be filed.
I would be most interested to see Apple's updating strategy. There are several algorithms that allow you to add new rows and columns to a matrix where you know the full SVD, but none that I know of for the truncated SVD.
For one of my graduate-level courses, I wrote a little search engine that uses LSI to cluster 1000 newspaper articles. You can play with it here. My favourite query is "Rowan Gorilla." The Rowan Gorilla is an oil rig that frequents Halifax harbour. The search engine returns articles on the oil and gas industry that contain neither the word "Rowan" nor "Gorilla" but are still topical.
[1] Scott Deerwester, Susan T. Dumais, George W. Furnas, Thomas K. Landauer, Richard Harshman. Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis. Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 1990.
[2] Singular Value Decomposition -- from MathWorld. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SingularValueDecompos ition.html
[3] Frobenius Norm -- from MathWorld. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FrobeniusNorm.html
[4] Artificial Intelligence Wiki: NearestNeighbour. http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/ailab/aiwiki/aiw.cgi?Neare stNeighbor -
Cyberduck?
Cyberduck?
http://icu.unizh.ch/~dkocher/cyberduck/ -
Re:Biting the fodder with KOffice
For a GPL'ed SFTP/FTP program try out Cyberduck. It rocks
:) -
Re:Great!
Really? And is your "robot" able to not crash into firm immovable objects without you turning the steering wheel and pushing the pedals?
Yes. -
Flight control using insect vision
Some experimental aircraft and rotorcraft use insect vision for flight control
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Re:Bah, the GPL is not the "core of the ... moveme
I suspect the developers of Apache and its related tools, not to mention Perl, Python, and the various BSD-derived OSs might disagree with you.
Why? People are generous even when they expect no one else will be, but there is plenty of evidence to support the claim that they are more generous when they have some assurance that their generosity will be reciprocated. You only have to read some of the writings of people who write free software to see that many of them are motivated by the ideal of freedom that the GPL protects. -
Re:Where the hell is America
OK, I'll bite.
Aren't you being a little too smug here?
Think about the stranglehold Swisscom had (and still has, can you say "letzte Meile"?) on our telecom infrastructure.
And concerning stupid IP laws, Switzerland is rapidly catching up with the US. Non-RC2 DVD imports are forbidden by law since August 1 this year. We do not have a DMCA yet, but proposed changes to Swiss copyright law are at least equal to the DMCA, and as this paper implies, would make the possession or operation of a "codefree" DVD player illegal.
> Over here we think (at least 90% of the ppl i know) that america makes a lot of shit.
The 90% you cite might be a result of the type of people you know. There are enough US-bashers over here, but the attitude is IMO generally more positive that you depict it. Why is it so en vogue lately to rename companies to be called something like "Swiss Dairy Food" instead of "Emmy"? Why do we have "Chief Financial Officers" instead of "Financhefs"?
> Think about this, learn more of other places that are on this blue ball and you may see a bit clearer out of your eyes.
May I suggest we do the same over here instead of blindly bashing the US? Every nation has its share of problems, and neither Switzerland nor the USA are exceptions. Blind nationalism won't help solve any of those problems.
Raymond (Zurich, Switzerland) -
Re:AI through simulation?
Speed is in fact important. Human level intelligence is not a symbolic mathematical problem just can just simulate. Instead you have to "do it", that is replicate it in a real environment. A brain without a body makes no sense (even though I liked that Steve Matin movie). During evolution the brain and body of the human co-evolved and they remain totally dependant on each other. Unfortunately those clasically symbolic manipulators, among who you can count Dr. Richard Wallace, who calls their research Artificial "Intelligence" are still stealing headlines. What they do might be interesting from a matematical point of view but has no interest if you want to understand human level intelligence. The brain doesn't work by manipulating rules to infer an answer. Wheater you do that on a pocket calculator or a supercomputer makes no difference. You won't get it right. The brain needs a body which interacts with a physical environment in order to show intelligence. A physical environment follow the laws of physics which is why speed _is important_. You can't speed up the physical laws. In 1986 Rodney Brooks published a paper called A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot in order to get AI research on the right track. He was only partly successful, but at least at MIT where he is now the leader of the AI lab, people are doing interesting research now. Another good pointer is his resent book Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. More information on embodied intelligence - a brain needs a body - can be found in the very good by Rolf Pfeifer (leader of the AI Lab in Zurich) called Understanding Intelligence". Please stop making a fuzz about talkbots and stuff like that, it's really not that interesting.
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AI and the real world
Early AI assumed they could define the input output relations of their systems ignoring the details of the real world. I.e. people would write programs to pass the turing test. Wouldnt it make much more sense to build systems that learn from radio or video. Such systems might one day be able to learn to imitate people without any supervision.
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sorry, but this is just stupid
if they would have developed this 20 years ago, i had probably found it advanced cutting edge technology as what regards a.i.
from today's research perspective, the concept of "expert systems" in a.i. is just old-fashioned nonsense. expert systems will never be able to produce or simulate intelligent systems. instead, the concepts of new a.i. might offer a perspective to do this.
for information about "new ai", take a look at unizh ai lab (switzerland) or mit ai lab (usa). they both teach it. -
read "understanding intelligence"
i recommend all users of lego mindstorm the following book:
understanding intelligence by pfeifer and scheier. mindstorms are nice for these researches. i have read it and i promise you that you will laugh at traditional robotics research afterwards ;) see amazon -
Forget H, what about Orbital Mind Control Lasers?
I want these. I already have the Gnomes of Zurich and the Shriners. Soon my hierachy will be complete, oh yes. -
Re:Antecedents of this game
Couldn't find it in the Economist, it was one of those articles they have in a little box possibly related to another article.
I did manage to dig up this though, written in 1999 by one of the Authors (Ernst Fehr) of today's story. It seems related to what I was talking about, but either a) it isn't, b) the Economist developed it further, or c) I remembered badly. -
Re:Antecedents of this game
Couldn't find it in the Economist, it was one of those articles they have in a little box possibly related to another article.
I did manage to dig up this though, written in 1999 by one of the Authors (Ernst Fehr) of today's story. It seems related to what I was talking about, but either a) it isn't, b) the Economist developed it further, or c) I remembered badly. -
URL of Research Group
The EE Times article mentioned that a lot of the work is coming from Bruce Wheeler's research group. This is the home page:
http://soma.npa.uiuc.edu/labs/wheeler/home.html
And click on "featured work."
Also, if you're an electrical engineer you might be interested in "neuromorphic engineering," in which circuitry is designed with biological inspiration. A few places to check out are:
Caltech Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering
Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering
And this Introduction to Computational Neuroscience
- Gregg Favalora -
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Goddamn do you read submissions?Jesus guys, do you read submissions? I already researched this for you!
The Institute that is doing the research has more information here. I believe the guy doing the actual research has more research here.
Next time you get multiple submissions, try picking the post with more info than the rest instead of attempting to summarize. Especially when you leave out the important links.
--
Gonzo Granzeau -
Goddamn do you read submissions?Jesus guys, do you read submissions? I already researched this for you!
The Institute that is doing the research has more information here. I believe the guy doing the actual research has more research here.
Next time you get multiple submissions, try picking the post with more info than the rest instead of attempting to summarize. Especially when you leave out the important links.
--
Gonzo Granzeau -
Goddamn do you read submissions?Jesus guys, do you read submissions? I already researched this for you!
The Institute that is doing the research has more information here. I believe the guy doing the actual research has more research here.
Next time you get multiple submissions, try picking the post with more info than the rest instead of attempting to summarize. Especially when you leave out the important links.
--
Gonzo Granzeau -
original article
Check out the original article, in the letters to nature section. Rodney Douglas' web adress www.ini.unizh.ch/~rjd/
Enjoy
Jan-Jan -
Additional information
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice /nr/2000/machinebrain.html - The MIT news page on the project.
http://zig.ini.unizh.ch - The Zurich Institute of Neuroinformatics homepage.