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Some of that's going on with the big new campus in San Francisco. The dude's in love with digital media, and he's lost interest in the model-making that is still at the heart of most space opera SFX. You won't find a model shop at the new campus: that group remained behind in the industrial park in San Rafael. Now digital media is certainly cool -- but anybody who's seen Sky Captain will tell you that virtual sets are not quite ready for prime time!

Because with a command line you can execute commands that the designer didn't think of creating a command for?

Basically, *yes*, because since the commands which do exist were designed to work together in synergistic ways to create new ones. This turns out to be very hard to do with a GUI, although it has been a holy grail of sorts -- remember DDE, and OLE and OpenDoc? What we've ended up with is some heavyweight component architecture systems, but not very much in the way of tools that *work* the way the Unix command line environment does.

You can create inadequate command line tools just like inadequate GUI tools. The interface used doesn't dictate the coverage.

Well, *maybe* the problem is just that no one has made very good GUI tools yet. But, based on the evidence, I see, it's just plain intrinsically harder.

What's that got to do with HDRI

See that chrome ball in many of the images? It's photographed at several different exposures with the camera, then the samples of varying brightness are assembled (using a program like HDRShop) into a panoramic "light probe" which interpolates between them. This light probe can be used in high end 3D rendering software for image-based lighting, or IBL, of the scene.

The multiple photographs from the camera at different settings serve to capture the--wait for it--dynamic range of the lighting in question infinitely better than any single photograph could otherwise hope to. Once you have assembled a high dynamic range light probe of the scene, you can adjust the exposure "virtually" in the host software.

The end result here is that the positioning and intensity of the highlights, as well as the color casts on the 3D models is contiguous with the real life scene they're superimposed into. It's arguably subtle, but so is real lighting. It was one of the most difficult aspects of comping 3D renders into real life environments prior to the advent of IBL, and even then, only recently is the technique reaching a widely accepted "usable" point.

IANA3Dprofessional, just a hobbyist kid with an interest in the technology, so DISCLAIMER GOES HERE. Excuse me if I'm horribly off about any of it.

The highest wave in recorded history happened in Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958. The wave was created by a huge landslide after an 8.0 earthquake. See this page for details and some amazing photographs.

If you're interested in more details, read Philip L. Fradkin book Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay.

Lenna is one of the many "standardized" images used in image processing research, akin to the well-understood strains of Norway rats used by medical researchers all over the world so that their peers can reproduce their experiments. For more examples of standard research images, see the USC-SIPI image database.

Operation D-Elite is being conducted jointly by ICE and the FBI as part of the Computer And Technology Crime High Tech Response Team ("CATCH"), a San Diego task force of specially trained prosecutors and law enforcement officers who focus on high-tech crime.

Grooooooove is in the heeaarrttttt... aieeee aieeee aieeeee.

Grrroooooove is the heartttt.. aieee aiee aieeeee.

errr. i'm sorry I don't know what came over me..

It's used to decipher the (possibly nefarious) intentions of Internet surfers. Look at Google's cache at UIR Alert Agent : An alert system for identifying suspicious web-site browsing. The full PowerPoint is at UIR Alert Agent : An alert system for identifying suspicious web-site browsing.

Here's a diagram of Earth's layers:
http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/images/plate% 20tectonics/Earthcore.jpg

My only question is what if the enormous amount of pressure from the mantle forced tons of lava to shoot into the ocean? Or in reverse what if the pressure of the ocean was greater and we open a giant drain in the middle of the atlantic?

Would the lava/water contact just harden to rock instantly and allow nothing more through?

Probably quite ignorant fears, but still worth asking.
--
Fairfax Underground: Message boards and Chat for residents of Fairfax County and Northern Virginia

Actually, if you watch the videos, he does have some trivial ideas for dealing with electrical, plumbing and reinforcement.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/RP/CC/Utilities.w mv

... with animations ... (up o 49MB :)

Quote:
Contour Crafting is a fabrication process by which large-scale parts can be fabricated quickly in a layer-by-layer fashion. The chief advantages of the Contour Crafting process over existing technologies are the superior surface finish that is realized and the greatly enhanced speed of fabrication. The success of the technology stems from the automated use of age-old tools normally wielded by hand, combined with conventional robotics and an innovative approach to building three-dimensional objects that allows rapid fabrication times. Actual scale civil structures such as houses may be built by CC. Contour Crafting has been under development under support from National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research.

CC.

There are some libraries that you can use to do DBC in C/C++ using Eiffel's semantics and have more or less the same syntax (require/ensure/retry, etc). One of them (the one I use) is BetterC:

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~moissetd/betterc/

There was another one called GEFF or something like that. I could not find it.

I hope you're right about desalinization. In general, I'm a believer in the market place as being an engine for creativity, but the market follows it's own rules, and won't hurry up if there are millions suffering if those millions can't pay.

Also, market forces have a way of diverting water to those best equipped to pay for it. I live in Los Angeles, a city which owes a great deal of it's growth to tricking the people of the Owens Valley out of their water. (The movie Chinatown is loosely based on facts.)

I don't think you can completely tease apart the population problem and the pollution problem. The two are extremely intertwingled.

Without the EPA, the public will demand clean and abundant water and the industry will bend to that will.

I think you're overestimating the economic power (to say nothing of the cohesiveness) of "the people" vs. the economic power of corporate polluters. If a majority is unaffected, it is doubtful that they will come to aid the minority until it's already to late. This is why some regulation is good, and why Bush's plans aren't. Under Bush's plan, polluters would be able to pollute one place so long as their average pollution was within acceptable limits. So, a polluter could wipe out your town, so long as that, on the average, their pollution met some average.

No longer. You must have done the intern hosting a while back. Now, if a foreign student is not employed but is merely enrolled, SSNs are not issued. See this page

No your mistaken Anonymous cowards who don't want to have credto answer for the things they post do that.

People willing to say "I said this, based upon infoprmation I've learned" agree. Science has said that the Little Ice age was a global event.

Uni of Southern California/A>
Uni of Korea
Sindh Agriculture University
Over 100 peer reviewed articles on the little ice age in North America.


How European centric to thing that the LIttle Ice age only effected one small area of the US.

There is another article here with some extra details. http://www.isa.org/PrinterTemplate.cfm?Template=/C ontentManagement/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=42102&F useFlag=1 I supposed what he is doing is trying to devise NEW methods to allow chips to work properly if they have errors. That is why he is getting the big grant money. For example in data transmission if you miss a bit it can be filled in with parity checking. I am of course guessing that it could be done this way. But the point is that it is not some conspiracy to trick you into buying crappy videocards. Firms know very well that the market will prevent that or they don't get to produce.

One of the reasons it was abandoned (other than being very difficult to make any bigger - the concrete needed to build increases with the square of the house diameter, not even taking stress and strain into account - but the accoustics were horrible: everything echoed and made daily life quite ... unique.

Ah yes, here's the link: http://www.usc.edu/calendar/events/19404.html

The airform house was a unique form of low-cost housing he developed between 1934 and 1941. It was a dome-shaped structure made of reinforced concrete that was cast in place over an inflatable balloon. Although the design did not find favor in the United States it was used for mass housing projects in West Africa, Egypt and Brazil during the 1940s and 1950s.

-L

It would be worthwhile for the parent to read the introduction to get better understanding of the context of the chapters, rather than quoting out of context. Please read the Introduction to the chapters.. that might do you some good. Here is the link from usc

The Koran does sanction jihad and does delineate the world into dar-al-Harb and the abode of Peace(dar-al-Islam), a form of permament war until all non-muslims are under the land of Islam paying the jiyza poll tax for their very right to existence under Muslim lands.

008.007
YUSUFALI: Behold! Allah promised you one of the two (enemy) parties, that it should be yours: Ye wished that the one unarmed should be yours, but Allah willed to justify the Truth according to His words and to cut off the roots of the Unbelievers;-
PICKTHAL: And when Allah promised you one of the two bands (of the enemy) that it should be yours, and ye longed that other than the armed one might be yours. And Allah willed that He should cause the Truth to triumph by His words, and cut the root of the disbelievers;
SHAKIR: And when Allah promised you one of the two parties that it shall be yours and you loved that the one not armed should he yours and Allah desired to manifest the truth of what was true by His words and to cut off the root of the unbelievers.

009.029
YUSUFALI: Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
PICKTHAL: Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.
SHAKIR: Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

Remember Nick Berg who was decapitated, that is sanctioned in the Koran as well:

008.012
YUSUFALI: Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."
PICKTHAL: When thy Lord inspired the angels, (saying): I am with you. So make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite the necks and smite of them each finger.
SHAKIR: When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.

My source is the following website which contains side by side three of the best English translations of the Koran.

So mr. lying muslim, I do not need to read some stupid website to tell me what the Koran thinks. I have read the Koran, not only that but there is many translations of Koran on the internet so I can easily bring up the relevant verses without need to type them myself.

Gee, thanks! I was just missing the word "buzzword" in my bingo game! http://isd.usc.edu/~karl/Bingo/

There's no such thing as pointless art.

Expand your horizons, man.

There's more art out there besides Seurat.

No, it just shows that you know how to use Google.

i) The propagation mechanism for Rossby Waves
ii) The primary sources of deep water formation in the Atlantic
iii) How a western boundary current is formed
iv) What Meddies are.
v) What a pycnocline is.

Yes, it's surprising Jon Postel's name is still so rarely even mentioned.
In Vinton Cerf's words:
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2468.txt
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/sprin g99/Postel/postel.html

$45k over for years for USC? Try $30k/year

This isn't actually even the first game design program at USC. I am currently in the track for a video game programming minor from the information technology program, which also offers a minor in video game production and design. The cinema school also runs an interactive technology minor. The head of the Information Technology Program, who is also one of my professors has talked about possibilities in creating a Masters in video game design. The news in this article seems to be just the chair that was endowed. For better information, see USC Information Technology Program.

http://www.bostonretinalimplant.org/
http://bmes-erc.usc.edu/index.htm/

Otherwise known as the "hope Sega does not see this and sue!" release.

says Rick White, CEO of Realm Systems.

Bullshit! say I, followed by "Remember the censorware project! and don't forget the other thing - you know - Davy Crocket, Santa Anna wotsitsname - that Texas thingy".

I would recommend reading atleast chapter 1 of this book on tawheed by Bilal Philips for a different perspective.

Dawkins is either very short sighted or just ignorant. Major religions (atleast Islam afaik) believe in the after life along with belief in God. Accepting the temporary nature of this life and believing in final justice and recompense in the hereafter is always a source of hope and prevents despair no matter what.

Learn basics of islam

observations
Theres some interesting observational research, Oscillations and Chaos in Ant Societies, R.V. Sole, O. Miramontes, and B.C. Goodwin, J. Theor. Biol. 161, pp.343-357, 1993.

In David Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance, Brian Goodwin (author also of, HOW THE LEOPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS) made some interesting observational discoveries with ants. Synchronous emergent behaviour arose when individual *chaotic* ants reached a certain density. Goodwin concluded that ...

• ... living near the edge of chaos gives systems, the complex systems, maximal adaptability, the capacity to respond adaptively to a constantly changing and unpredictable world ... Brian Goodwin, The Sacred Balance, Episode 1, Journey into New Worlds.

simulation
You can see a simulation of the ants behaviour begin modeled here. You can find more about cellular automata and ants by Akira Kageyama. The source code (java) is here.

limitations
But there are limitations in trying to model living systems with computers. Some things just happen in nature that cannot be modelled. I remember reading Bart Kosko (Fuzzy thinking) and in it he describes how modelling animals nature for example doesn't take into account things like breaking bones. Sure you could assign probability of a bone breaking, describe the forces on the bone when it breaks. But in nature it just happens.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/sprin g02/alumninews/alumni_profile_Cannes.html/

Yes, I'm also trying to win an ipod. You can too: http://www.freeipods.com/?r=12669514/

you can make a thousand copies of a digital archive very quick, and store them in geographically distant places for free; the libraries will be happy to keep a copy safe. If you send a copy to every major library in the world, and encourage them to make copies, it's more unlikely for the digital archive to get destroyed

The issues go beyond just destruction of the data, however. NASA's problems included losing the knowledge and/or software to interpret that data. If the library chooses, through misadventure or unscrupulous lobbying, a proprietary or DRM format - even one as apparently harmless as PDF - then we are likely screwed down the track.

Imagine how disastrous it would be if a major digital film archive chose Windoze Mediocre Player as their distribution/archive medium?

But there is plenty to worry about even without meddling monopolists:

'Digital files that were supposed to last for several decades are turning out to have a shelf life of just five to 10 years because of changing formats, obsolete hardware, and deterioration of the medium ... "There is still nothing in the digital world like acid-free paper," noted Stewart Brand, president of The Long Now Foundation (see "Marking Time" p. 41). A book or fine art print set on acid-free paper, housed in the proper conditions, will last half a millennium. A pair of eyes and a knowledge of the text or pictures is all that's needed to decipher the material. ' link

'organizations like NASA are so overloaded with data that the backup backlog is pushing the agency to a state of oblivion. ... in a few years NASA will fall so far behind that it's unable to copy the tapes before they deteriorate. "It may take 20 years to read all that data," Halem says. "But the lifetime of the tapes is less than 20 years." ... Before long, the crisis will hit the next wave of large data-intensive organizations, from the Social Security Administration to banks and insurance companies. ... Weather studies from satellites launched in 1979 were placed onto tape that almost immediately became obsolete. It took two years and what Halem calls "a Herculean effort" to save them. They contained ... evidence of global warming and the first complete measurements of the 1983 El Niño' link

'In 1999 Dr. Miller asked NASA for the original data on the Viking experiments and was chagrined to find the data was missing. After several months NASA finally turned up the data tapes, but found they were "in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died,'' according to Miller. Luckily NASA found printed records of the data' link

seems like a lot of the comments for this story are right on the mark - who wants to watch people in realtime?

im working on a mfa thesis (titled 'iam') at usc to try and get around that problem. with storage and bandwidth increasing, we are going to end up with more and more people moving from text to video. (sure, there are a lot of other problems with it, but i cant fix everything in a year. plus i am more interested in an experience than passing along 'data')

the elevator pitch looks like this:
iam is:
24/7 point-of-view video,
published to the web as serialized metafictional video blogs,
in a layered/drill down UI,
exploring narrative possiblities and new types of personal filmmaking.

iam thesis proposal

You'd think you could google.

NATO document affect on local climate human impact reference ref ref ref ref ref ref ref

From what I've read, children in most environments develop one of the languages as 'dominant' and are usually quite capable in that one - despite the best efforts of parents. Some children do develop as you describe, but in studying them long term it has been discovered that these same 'slow' children on average outpace their one language peers in the shared dominant language later because of their additional linguistic skills. Learning a second language early seems to give children the ability to abstract at an early age the concept of language itself. I'd go on, but actually a lot of research has been done on this topic. Here are some links. Enjoy!

http://www.cal.org/ http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/earlychild.htm l http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/CMMR/home.html http://www.nabe.org/

Ask a linguist if you like:
http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/

A drawing tool.

Anyway, Here are some movies of the RMP running the Player Robot Server (GPL, naturally). If you want to try programming a Segway RMP, but haven't got one sitting around, you can use the Gazebo robot simulator with Player - your code won't know the difference.

(Please, please somebody mirror these movies before we brown-out Southern California. Sorry Andrew...)

I was under the impression that the Little Ice age followed the Medieval Warm Period. Why do you suggest that the "ice age" half of it is the only salient aspect of the two events? The fact that it got cold after it got hot doesn't change the fact that it got hot. Is this page for the Geology 150 course at the University of Southern California incorrect in metioning the two on equal footing? Are all these links when one googles "The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period" wrong because they find the former as relevant as the latter?

"The technology that watches you watching IT"

Department of Homeland Security Approved

For $50 million, Viterbi of Qualcomm got a whole engineering school in his name . I am sure $20 million for a building isn't that bad. But, I'd have preferred it to be named after Turing. Even Raj Reddy , Turing Award Winner wouldn't have been a bad choice. He's alive and still active in research, but then, so is Bill Gates.

I mostly write technical documents. troff takes less effort to write, I'll continue using that instead of AbiWord/OpenOffice/MS Word. WYSIWYG is generally not that useful if you do mainly structured documents or if you need fine control of typesetting. Typesetting languages with the right scripts are generally the easiest. If you need purely structured documents then DocBook-SGML is not a bad route to go. (SGML is fancier and more human-friendly than XML, which is what you really want if you are manually editing tags)

Also when doing resumes you really have to make sure that the resume looks correct in Wordpad, Word97 and Office2k/XP. Seems that these are what recruiters use (wordpad appearing to be the most common). Hint: save as word97 RTF and rename .rtf to .doc. This will make it load correctly in wordpad, without getting too fancy/bizarre on the formatting that Office2K likes to put in.

Recruiters seem to hate PDFs (I guess they prefer file formats with macro viruses). Although I've had a great deal of luck with HTML. Mostly I just do my resume in troff and provide it as PDF to the manager/engineers and HTML to the recruiters and everyone is happy.

Guide to doing your resume in troff (and taking advantage of macros to painlessly customize your resume).
Your Resume: Part 1 Your Resume: Part 2

If you do a lot of technical documents these tools work well with troff (or LaTeX):
Graphviz for doing automated diagrams
Gnuplot for doing scientific graphing (it can output postscript and ascii)
TGIF a 2-d drawing tool with a light-weigh intuitive UI.
gEDA for schematics and pcb layout
xcircuit extremely powerful 2-d drawing tool. originally designed for schematics, but is useful for any sort of diagram.

Also if you were wondering: Résumé == Curriculum vitae (CV)

Surah 9: Historical context: After the Peace Treaty of Hudaibiyah, while batteling against the polytheists (idol worshipers) in Mecca.

5:51: I have here three different translations, and none is writing "this freindship makes any Muslim a enemy of their own and deserving of the same fate as the unbeliever."

Sura 4:89 To complete the quoted sentence "But if they turn renegades, ..."
And following sura:
4:90 Except those who join a group between whom and you there is a treaty (of peace), or those who approach you with hearts restraining them from fighting you as well as fighting their own people.

Sura 2:187-189, I found it in 2:191, enclosed by
2:191 Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.
2:193 But if they cease, Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful.
2:194 And fight them on until there is no more Tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.

Book 8 AL-ANFAL is about, how to fare war. This tactic is nowadays called Shock and Awe.

And no, I'm not a Muslim. I am a real unbeliever and not a Christian or Jew, which, according to some readings of the Quran are considered believers (not with all bell and whistles, but anyway).

That's not exactly how a non-profit works. Non-profits are allowed to 'make' money. It just has to be put back into the project. Think of private universities. I went to USC, and their financials are available online (too lazy to go looking again, but they are there). USC pulls in something like $2.5B/year - including funding from govt contracts. Their expenses do not equal $2.5B/yr. The reserves of cash are used for building new... buildings, and for paying into scholarships funds, etc. CA could make money (which is just taxing w/o immediate spending - the actual generation of revenue would only come if they produced something for sale), as long as it eventually goes into paving roads or building schools - at some point. So, saving money now should equal better freeways/public education, shorter DMV lines (HA!), etc., in the long run. Saving money doesn't equate to blowing the remainder in another area just to make the books balance to zero right now. In the short term, it's not a zero-sum game, only in the long term is that supposed to be to true.

-bZj

There are many programs under ITS, one of which, the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative includes research efforts at hands-off driving,. Hands-off driving was first tested on an Interstate Highay in 1997,

On an 11 kilometer stretch of Interstate 15's isolated High Occupancy Vehicle lanes, the National Automated Highway System Consortium (nahsc.volpe.dot.gov) embedded magnets in the surface of the road. Along the shoulder, radio beacons were installed. Test vehicles were outfitted with optical sensors, radio communication equipment and computers. On August 8, 1997, these vehicles were driven by an experimental automated highway system along the test track. Human "drivers" sat behind the wheel, but it was the computer that dodged obstacles, merged vehicles and braked to stop.

The cars moved in two basic formations. As "free agents," each vehicle traveled independent of the others. As a "platoon," several cars followed each other within a few meters, forming an "auto train" that could grow or shrink as vehicles left and joined the platoon.

(Disclaimer- I have worked on more than a few ITS projects :)

cheers- raga

The problem with your argument is that the Koran specificly instructs believers to make war on and conquer all non-believers. You don't have to do anything but not be a muslim. Don't take my word for it though, look up Surahs 4:89, 9:123, 8:59-60, 8:39, and 5:51.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/ is a site with a few translations placed together so you can look at a few translations of each verse at once.

As far as I know there isn't a bible verse that says "go out and kill or conquer all non believers". Do you know of one???

Well, maybe is not a fully know process, but as you seems to know, there's a of lot work done in that area, and my expressed opinion is quite common in the field, so I don't understand why you try to emphasize firing rate as a limiting factor.

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."

I've never pretended that phase information is preserved, just that is not irrelevant, quite the contrary.

Again, your evidence to the contrary is welcome. Try to be specific and cite research wherever possible.

Easy, take a look at the work of Liaw and Berger on adaptative synapse simulation.
Now, could you please indicate some research work that provides some facts about the limits of neuron firing phase shifts effects?, Note that the work I've cited specifically adresses that point, and strongly (succesful and patented simulations) suggest the contrary,specifically read the work on computational capabities of pre and post adaptative synapse behaviour.

The Americans backed the mujahideen, not the Taliban. It was the mujahideen who were the "freedom fighters" in Afgahanistan. Seems that your bias is coming through.

You may want to read up on the taliban in Afganistan.

Rumbaugh, Booch, and Jacobsen started on UML in the mid 90s.

According to this, UML 0.9 was from 1996, UML 1.0 was 1997.