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Watch your step there, friend! There are apparently two journals with that name, quite different from one another.

The traditional academic journal, apparently out of UT Austin's philosophy department: Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science

Then the online journal: Apeiron, Studies in Infinite Nature.

This paper was published in the UT academic journal, not the (somewhat questionable looking) online journal.

Beyond that, I have no experience with the UT publication or its track record.

I can believe it; you get some oddball universities that have a campus near nothing much at all.

It's worth noting, the US has a bit more than 7 universities, so more variation (and getting an outlier in student population and remoteness that's extreme enough that this happens is therefore more likely): http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/state/

You're sure there are abuses? well so am I. In fact I have no doubt personally that the abuses far outweigh any possible good that can come of the classification system. Time after time throughout history the US government has classified information for the sole reason that it's embarrassing to those currently in power. Until we require a judge to review every classification for legality (and I mean every one from presidential orgies to black ops) the abuses will continue. The government's record on this is absolutely unacceptable.

The United States didn't sign the addtional protocals mainly because

Wrong. "the United States (..) signed it on 12 December 1977". However, the U.S. has not ratified them. Nevertheless, "a number of the articles contained in both protocols are recognized as rules of customary international law valid for all states."

Also note of the 4th Geneva Convention: "In 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted a report from the Secretary-General and a Commission of Experts which concluded that the Geneva Conventions had passed into the body of customary international law, thus making them binding on non-signatories to the Conventions whenever they engage in armed conflicts." The United States is a member of the U.N. Security Council.

... the Russians wrote this section during the Cold War, so they do not apply to this.

What are you talking about? The Protocols were written by experts in the law of war and were endorsed by Ronald Reagan.

Oh, that is a nice link to a Bush-Cheney War Crime website.

The text itself is a direct copy of the original source. Here's the same text on Wikisource

(I linked that particular site because it is one of the first search results I found for the citation from Google, but this is really irrelevant - the text of the Convention is what is important.)

I ves a beet cunffoosed by thees soobmeessiun, becoose-a it seems tu hefe-a beee trunsleted qooeete-a puurly! Loockeely zee erteecle-a itselff helpffoolly leenks tu a trunsletur, su here-a is zee soommery dune-a reeght:

Furty-three-a yeers egu, beffure-a must peuple-a hed ifer heerd ooff zee Mooppets, IBM cuntrected veet Jeem Hensun fur a sereees ooff shurt feelms thet it used tu idoocete-a und interteeen its seles steffff. Zeese-a leettle-a-knoon mufeees — sume-a ooff vheech feetoore-a cootteeng-idge-a ooffffeece-a ootumeshun iqooeepment sooch es fery ierly vurd-prucesseeng systems — remeeen fresh, foonny, und soorpreesingly irreferent. Und oone-a ooff zeem feetoores zee furst eppeerunce-a ooff zee Cuukeee-a Munster, vhu gut hees beeg breek oon Seseme-a Street a cuoople-a ooff yeers leter.

I have found that cell phone users have actually tried to run me down on the motorcycle. Hold the phone, don't hold the phone, there is little difference once any thought provoking question is asked. The person on the phone is no longer giving operation of their vehicle proper attention. I would like to see the Driving Under the Influence laws modified to include cell phone usage. Anyone using one for non-emergency use while operating a vehicle should be subject to DUI laws and the appropriate insurance penalties. Want to make a call? Pull over so others won't be killed.

The conclusion of that Mythbusters episode was that using a cell phone was as impairing as drunk driving. If you do not believe Mythbusters, check out the NTSB (staff usage ban), NTSB (2006 CDL recommended ban), NTSB (2005 teen ban) or the Center for Transportation Research News. They know what the rest of us survivors do, that these people are dangerous.

I agree, you might try contacting someplace like David Rumsey Historical Map Collection to see if they would be interested in helping, or might otherwise make recommendations.

A collection of other links that might be of interest:
Historical Map Web Sites

Further, I had no trouble finding plenty of citations that agree with me; a study is considered a blind study if either the participants are unaware of the study/hypothesis or are unaware of what group they are in. I maintain my original assertion that a study in which the children are unaware of the experiment and the researchers are unaware of which participants are in which group would be considered a double-blind study even by a strict definition of the term.

So, the primary concern about nuclear power is what to do with all the waste. Reprocessing will get you pretty far. But the best solution is to destroy the waste. This can be done with a fusion-fission hybrid system.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/
In a normal fission reactor, isotopes of heavy elements break apart, producing neutrons which can cause other heavy elements to break apart. But some isotopes are easier to break down than others, and eventually, you break down most of the "easy" isotopes, and there isn't enough density of high energy neutrons to continue a chain reaction with the "hard" isotopes, aka the sludge.
We have the technology to build fusion reactors... the problem is that they currently require more energy to operate than we can harvest from them. This is likely to change soon with NIF breakthroughs and ITER being built, but we cannot yet use pure fusion as a power source.
But we CAN currently use fusion as a powerful neutron source, and these neutrons can be use to fission the sludge from the normal fission reactor. It will cost some energy to produce the neutrons, but it's more than made up for by the energy from the fission reactions.
The best part of this is that the long-lived heavy isotopes are mostly destroyed. You still have fission byproducts and secondary nuclear waste, but this will drastically cut down on the amount of waste to deal with.

For you construction folks...
The time and money it takes to add another outlet to that wall will end up being larger than just starting over with a new house....
....Ahhhhh, maybe NOT!

Rewriting something that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because it's hard to maintain would look wasteful and ridiculous to anyone that didn't work with software but it happens all the time. This is what made me realize that programming is still an immature field. I keep a copy of Edsger Dykstra's (or Dijkstra) lecture to University of Texas computer science students in 1988 on my desktop and read it every time I feel the urge to work for a software company again. His premise is that if you teach people how to write code before you teach them the discrete math and logic framework that applies to programming you cripple them. By not giving them the tools to write formal specifications that anyone with training could read and comprehend fairly quickly, you end with the industry situation we have now. The next programmer will either get a textual description of the functionality that is incomplete and not detailed enough or just get a copy of the source code. Since the code mixes WHAT is supposed to be done with HOW it is supposed to be done it can be incredibly difficult to follow.

This means that the poor smuck that has to maintain someone else's code has to spend a huge amount of time reading and/or stepping through the code to try and understand how it works before any actual "code maintenance" can start. It's ALWAYS possible to reverse engineer code and start drawing diagrams or commenting the code to help understand how it works. Unfortunately, many programmers think they can do better and push hard for a refactoring of the code. This is usually pure folly since the pressure to get something working will be even greater because there is already code available that mostly works so the odds of the next iteration getting any better is incredibly low unless the current code is TRULY a pile of excrement.

Since I've never been in a position to force a company to use formal methods for writing software specifications, and none of them thought they needed it, I've grown weary of watching new programmers thinking they are smarter than the people before them and choose to rewrite code. This usually ends badly. As a System Test engineer for a number of years who has written "black box" and "white box" tests, I can say without a doubt that you can't create quality code through testing, especially in a commercial environment. All you can do is cause the release date to slip until the really awful and obvious bugs are fixed.

As a researcher in the academic side of the Information Security field, I can't help but notice a significant increase in the level of puffery and misleading promotion of research results. Self-promotion obviously isn't new, it's just that as the amount of newspaper-assisted promotion increases, the level of accuracy has dropped significantly. And more importantly, researchers seem much less apologetic about it. It's generating some real blowback.

The best recent example I can think of is Vanish, a cryptographic system for "destroying" data that was proposed out of University of Washington. It's not just that the system was broken a few days after it was presented, it's that this relatively minor result got more press than all of the perfectly legitimate crypto-systems research that was going on at the time. In fact, during the same time period a guy named Craig Gentry solved a major open crypto problem --- namely, how to compute on encrypted data --- and it got a fraction of the press coverage.

Not that I'm saying these researchers specifically asked to have their invention described as an "effectively perfect" solution to preventing spam --- which I guarantee you 100% it is not --- but that by going out on a University-encouraged PR junket, they've more or less encouraged this kind of coverage. This kind of stuff is damaging; people should describe their work as what it is. They've developed a technique that is highly effective at filtering /current-gen/ spam generators, in the lab. It won't stop all spam, and it's not effectively perfect, since spamfiltering is by nature an arms race. But of course that's not how it's going to be presented. In the long run this'll just make people more jaded with our field.

It is the programmers fault. Dijkstra is smarter than you.

The programmers could have chosen to add bounds checking, etc. to their programming. However, they did not, because that shit is slow.

People have been trying to create a new language that made all their problems disappear for 5 decades. It's not going to happen. It's the height of naiveté to believe otherwise.

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2010/01/06/brain_self_perception/

Discrete math is "easier" because as someone who has written programs, you already have an intuitive understanding of some aspects of formal logic and set theory and the higher level stuff in that class is within reach of where you probably already are. If that class has anything to teach you, it will be immensely useful, in a fundamental way. Nobody manages to be a good programmer without understanding at least some of that stuff but a fair amount of it comes to you if you program. If it were 1870, that material would be just as hard to learn.

The other material is probably great and would be useful to many programmers but I had no use for any of that stuff. It's certainly a bit removed from pure CS which adds that mystique.

That said, there's no total ordering over knowledge. Take both. And read some EWD's while you're at it.

....or even better, Real the Documents!

You can find Reagan's 1983 Executive Order on the subject here. In my reading of the text, it puts INTERPOL under the rules of the International Organizations Immunities Act in all areas except for customs duties and tax. Obama's Executive Order (which is here) appears to put INTERPOL under the remaining rules that Reagan didn't do. If one wants to blame Obama for giving INTERPOL unlimited immunity, then Reagan should be blamed as well since he put the organization under this Act to begin with.

I'm a geology grad student doing a thesis on tectonic geomorphology. I read this article with great interest; my research is on mountain rivers/streams so I know a bit about this kind of thing.

Your alternate theories don't really work, for a variety of reasons. I'm not an expert on all these topics, but I'll explain as best I can and hopefully anyone that might know better will correct me :)

The glacier theory doesn't work because glaciation did not, in fact, reach that far south. The area has stayed at a relatively stable latitude for the past 250 million years at the least (check out a plate reconstruction for 30 Ma compared to the present - the site has earlier reconstructions as well). Even during ice ages, glaciation never got that close to the equator. This is beside the fact that you can actually distinguish between a glacial valley and the kind of thing they're saying this is - based on the shape, type of sediments, and so on.

Tectonic movement doesn't operate on the same time scale as erosional and stream processes. Tectonics has a major influence on the way rivers operate - in fact that's what my research is about - but not in the way you're speculating. You might be surprised how well preserved rock formations are compared to when they originally formed - it sounds like this one is more or less the same as when it was deposited, which is common in most areas. Tectonics is constantly shifting the crust, yes, but not as much or as fast as you're supposing, and even then this is a relatively inactive area.

Now, your final theory is actually about right, but if you change it to follow how river erosion actually works, then you're basically saying what the researchers here are saying. Their description is a bit misleading, depending on how long you think this took to occur (and I would lean more towards it taking longer - two years as they say, or even a little more, but I don't know the specifics of where they came up with that figure).

The valley shape and sediment type suggest a braided river system, with multiple small, fast streams covering a broad area, constantly shifting left and right. As they drop sediment and fill in depressions, the areas where water is not flowing become the new depressions, so the streams shift back and forth, filling the area with sediment evenly. The coarse of meandering rivers (which are more mature and have slower flow rates) can change on sub-decade time scales, and braided rivers are constantly shifting. Now, the important thing is that these braided streams don't carve v-shaped valleys - they spread themselves out broadly, eroding laterally.

Thus, the initial break would have carved a v-shape valley, but it would quickly erode laterally. Most of the initial deluge would not be recorded - it simply wiped everything away. What's left is the wide valley that got flushed out, and the coarse deposits that filled the valley from the braided streams that existed near the end of the deluge, when flow rate was still high but not enough to wipe away absolutely everything.

One of the most interesting things about this research is that it supports the idea that these things can happen catastrophically. In the 1800's, during the early days of geology, there was a huge debate surrounding whether geology happened catastrophically or gradually. Now, the theories those guys were pushing were ridiculous (although a lot of fun), but the question of time scales is still relevant. It became clear by the early 1900's that gradualism is more realistic, and all of geology is essentially based on that - almost anything can happen if you give it enough time. It's the same conceptual leap that you need to understand biology and evolution, but with geology there is even more time to play with, and physics can easily explain how rocks are affected by forces over long time periods.

This led eventuall

I'm a geology grad student doing a thesis on tectonic geomorphology. I read this article with great interest; my research is on mountain rivers/streams so I know a bit about this kind of thing.

Your alternate theories don't really work, for a variety of reasons. I'm not an expert on all these topics, but I'll explain as best I can and hopefully anyone that might know better will correct me :)

The glacier theory doesn't work because glaciation did not, in fact, reach that far south. The area has stayed at a relatively stable latitude for the past 250 million years at the least (check out a plate reconstruction for 30 Ma compared to the present - the site has earlier reconstructions as well). Even during ice ages, glaciation never got that close to the equator. This is beside the fact that you can actually distinguish between a glacial valley and the kind of thing they're saying this is - based on the shape, type of sediments, and so on.

Tectonic movement doesn't operate on the same time scale as erosional and stream processes. Tectonics has a major influence on the way rivers operate - in fact that's what my research is about - but not in the way you're speculating. You might be surprised how well preserved rock formations are compared to when they originally formed - it sounds like this one is more or less the same as when it was deposited, which is common in most areas. Tectonics is constantly shifting the crust, yes, but not as much or as fast as you're supposing, and even then this is a relatively inactive area.

Now, your final theory is actually about right, but if you change it to follow how river erosion actually works, then you're basically saying what the researchers here are saying. Their description is a bit misleading, depending on how long you think this took to occur (and I would lean more towards it taking longer - two years as they say, or even a little more, but I don't know the specifics of where they came up with that figure).

The valley shape and sediment type suggest a braided river system, with multiple small, fast streams covering a broad area, constantly shifting left and right. As they drop sediment and fill in depressions, the areas where water is not flowing become the new depressions, so the streams shift back and forth, filling the area with sediment evenly. The coarse of meandering rivers (which are more mature and have slower flow rates) can change on sub-decade time scales, and braided rivers are constantly shifting. Now, the important thing is that these braided streams don't carve v-shaped valleys - they spread themselves out broadly, eroding laterally.

Thus, the initial break would have carved a v-shape valley, but it would quickly erode laterally. Most of the initial deluge would not be recorded - it simply wiped everything away. What's left is the wide valley that got flushed out, and the coarse deposits that filled the valley from the braided streams that existed near the end of the deluge, when flow rate was still high but not enough to wipe away absolutely everything.

One of the most interesting things about this research is that it supports the idea that these things can happen catastrophically. In the 1800's, during the early days of geology, there was a huge debate surrounding whether geology happened catastrophically or gradually. Now, the theories those guys were pushing were ridiculous (although a lot of fun), but the question of time scales is still relevant. It became clear by the early 1900's that gradualism is more realistic, and all of geology is essentially based on that - almost anything can happen if you give it enough time. It's the same conceptual leap that you need to understand biology and evolution, but with geology there is even more time to play with, and physics can easily explain how rocks are affected by forces over long time periods.

This led eventuall

In this respect, I think "clarity" is improved much more by using constructs from mathematics than from "english".

Indeed, Djikstra had written such a paper about that issue many years ago. On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

A "usage profile" for a user ID is also considered illegal if the user hasn't opted in or it is at least clear that the data is being collected. This is because those stats are not really anonymous. If they were, Google wouldn't be interested in them. It has been shown repeatedly that tracking back "anonymous" profiles to a RL user isn't hard if you have enough data.

Yes it has, most recently on the netflix dataset: "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

It sounds like you're claiming that Kuhn didn't believe that a new paradigm offers more accurate results than the last, which he almost certainly didn't.

If he said something controversial along those lines, he might have meant that our perceptions don't actually reflect reality as it really is, so as we are trying to mold science into our reality, we aren't necessarily molding it into a model of actual reality.

Sokal may have been correct that Kuhn didn't make the distinction, but that doesn't mean Kuhn didn't have a valid concern that our scientific reality is socially-constructed. Again, I don't know if Kuhn actually believed this, I'm just guessing based on my reading of Kuhn that he wouldn't have said something as controversial as what you've implied.

Kuhn did not deny that sciences progresses, however he did subtlety deny that we are progressing toward anything - such as closer approximations to the truth or objective reality.

Read Weinberg criticisms here

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/weinberg.html

The project was cancelled by the Reagan administration the day the facility was finished.

Reagan had a total hard-on for the destruction of ANYTHING that looked even remotely green. Barely a week after he was in office, he wiped out the entire solar initiative-including the panels on the roof-turned up the thermostat and eliminated ALL price controls on domestic oil, which set us up for the biggest oil glut the world had ever seen. Executive order 12881

The popular phrase for such folks, is "They couldn't be more X if they tried!" Well, Reagan was anti-green, and he was bloody well proud of it, making it a specific point to expend as much effort as possible to BE anti-green. The phrase "Nuke the whales" wasn't just a song by the Fleshapoids in his world-view.

From the JiveSpeak Translator

"To 'esist o' not t'exist, dig dis: dat be de query. Slap mah fro! Dat's whut de famous Hamlet soliloquy might look likes if subjected t'Amazon's newly-patented System and Medod fo' Markin' Content, which calls fo' ' honky codematically substitutin' synonyms into distributed text content,' includin' 'scribblin's, sho't sto'ies, product reviews, scribblin' o' movie reviews, news articles, edito'ial articles, technical sheets, scholastic sheets, and so's on' in an effo't t'uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its descripshun uh de 'invenshun,' Amazon also touts de use uh 'alternative misspellin's fo' selected wo'ds' as some way t'provide 'evidence uh copyright infrin'ement in some legal acshun.' Afta' all, anti-piracy measho' nuffs should trump kids' ability t'spell co'rectly, shouldn't dey?"

Oops ... just killed the patent.

http://www.utexas.edu/research/cem/Energy%20Storage%20Composite%20Rotor.html

The University of Texas at Austin Center for Electromechanics (UT-CEM) has developed a 2 kW-hr flywheel battery for energy management on a hybrid electric urban bus. The battery will recover braking energy and store excess energy generated by the prime mover. The flywheel rotor, fabricated from high-strength composites, spins at 36,000 rpm at full charge (~825 m/s tip speed), and is housed in a vacuum enclosure to minimize windage drag. A cross-section of the flywheel system design is shown. Ensuring flywheel safety is a major issue that must be addressed in using flywheels for transportation applications. In support of this activity, the durability tests performed under Phase IV of the DARPA Flywheel Safety Program, focused on this flywheel design.

And how is this anyone's fault but yours? I checked out the rates at a public undergraduate institution:
http://www.utexas.edu/tuition/attach/2009_10_Fall_Spring_Undergrad_Tuition.pdf

That's $4662 per semester for a full load in a top engineering program. So after paying just $38k in tuition total you could have gotten a quality education.

It was your choice to go to an undergraduate school with a $30k per year (!) tuition, and it was your choice to go directly into grad school knowing you'd accrue more interest on your loans. Had you gone to an affordable school then entered the job market for five or ten years, you could have paid off your loans and built a nest egg to fund your grad work.

To me, your argument sounds about the same as me buying a $95k car then complaining that my monthly payments and interest are way, way higher than those of a person who bought a $15k car, and I even have to pay interest when I have the car in the shop to upgrade the sound system.

The main point is that this quote from the article referenced by Slashdot, "Commercial biofuel from algae still 7 to 10 years off", is a lie. It cannot be predicted when a scientific breakthrough will occur, if ever.

From the University of Texas: Algae as tools in studying the biosynthesis of cellulose, nature's most abundant macromolecule.

Lol... its not in the future, the breakthroughs are already here. it is the delivery and funding of the infrastructure that only need to be rolled out.

If you don't know this already, you're not looking. JC Venter's SGI is rolling out plants that will be producing for us NEXT YEAR at the cost of $50/barrel.

Welcome to the truth.

The main point is that this quote from the article referenced by Slashdot, "Commercial biofuel from algae still 7 to 10 years off", is a lie. It cannot be predicted when a scientific breakthrough will occur, if ever.

From the University of Texas: Algae as tools in studying the biosynthesis of cellulose, nature's most abundant macromolecule.

Those all have holidays already Teacher's day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachers'_Day Doctor's Day: http://www.holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/March/doctorsday.htm World Social Worker's day: http://www.ifsw.org/p38001263.html World Science Day: http://www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/declaration_e.htm Mathematicians day:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day (I know it's a stretch) Firefighter's day: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/100886d.htm Initernational Artists day:http://www.internationalartistday.com/ For good measure: Sysadmin day:http://www.internationalartistday.com/ Programmer day:http://www.programmerday.info/

There's a new idea right now, called Fusion-Fission hybrid, which is capable of destroying almost all of the of the long-lived nuclear wastes.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/

The problem with recycling nuclear fuel is that you start to accumulate more unfissionable transuranic elements ("sludge") with each reprocess, because some of the uranium gets used up and the sludge that is left over gets reprocessed in with the remaining uranium and accumulated.

You need a critical amount of neutrons to maintain the fission reaction, and fissioning sludge doesn't produce enough neutrons to make a self-sustaining reaction.

The idea is to put a small fusion reactor inside a fission reactor. The fusion reactor will produce extra neutrons which are capable of causing the sludge to fission.

Well, you still have short-lived radioactive waste, but those will be gone in (only!) a few hundred years.

And your statements about reliability? In what sense can a logic circuit be "guaranteed" free of defects? Did Intel know about this method of quality assurance back when they were designing the Pentium? It seems to me that simple logic circuits can be guaranteed free of defects because the human mind can readily model the whole system and intuitively decide it is correct. When the system is complex, that is no longer true.

There is some progress being made towards "guaranteeing" the correctness of circuits, such as:

this. Centaur Technologies (VIA) uses theorem proving tools to guarantee the correctness of parts of the VIA Nano processor. I'm sure with a little digging more references to this sort of thing can be found.

Intel appears to be actively working in the area of formal verification also, e.g. this - although this doesn't directly deal with low level circuits.

So, it is possible to guarantee some correctness, although I suspect it rests on the correctness of the theorem prover you're using also.

What about Bevier's 1987 dissertation, "A Verified Operating System Kernel." ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/boyer/diss/bevier.pdf

At least, that was what worked in Alien Rescue http://alienrescue.edb.utexas.edu/, a problem based learning game.

BAC .40% - .50%: You are probably in a coma. The nerve centers controlling your heartbeat and respiration are slowing down, and it's a miracle if you survive.

So, you drive like you're in a coma? Strange...

Please...How does that become insightful? Sure the places where cursive are necessitated are dwindling but that's the case with lots of skills. For example many places that required manual or mental math have now been supplanted with cheap calculating programs. But nothing in the real world using it...please you've had significant parts of your brain removed and just haven't noticed it yet.
One very obvious example... signing things. Handwritten signatures are still the defacto solemnization act for a wide variety of business transactions. As a manager I'm required to sign a number of documents every month. My wife, who's a doctor is required to sign dozens of documents each day. Your first argument is dead wrong...and by asserting it (with way more emphasis than you likely have evidence) publicly you've probably made the world just a little more stupid. Congratulations.

The third is at least debatable, given that I've had at least one opportunity to write my name on hundreds of documents and during which I distinctly recall having to switch to cursive in the process. However one sample does not a argument make however it does dispel the idea (present in at least one reading of your moronic drivel) that the relative speeds are universally similar.

As for "harder to read", "personal variation", "harms children". I call shenanigans - most of those terms are pretty vague to begin with. Add to that I'd strong suspicion even with better definitions these are difficult to control or execute properly. I.e. Seemingly 'harder to read' is difficult to define objectively. Since it seems reasonable that someone who has never seen cursive (but can print) will have more difficulty reading it than printing and likewise someone who has never seen printing (but can write cursive) would have more difficulty in reading it than cursive. So if these experiments were indeed done I would expect them to be of the kind where the results that are - at best - *suggestive* rather than conclusive....and I don't expect you to be able to tell the difference.

That said: I do find it interesting that this: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF which was probably written in your lifetime might be difficult or even unreadable to you or your peers.

For a relevant discussion of fair use and fair dealing and international copyright norms, you might want to check out Global Warming Trend? The Creeping Indulgence of Fair Use in International Copyright Law, 17 Tex. Intell. Prop. L.J. 267 (2009) (abstract only). Full disclosure: I the chief articles editor in charge of editing this article, so I may be biased on how good it is. :)

In general your best bet would be to use an image quality metric that takes into account how the human visual system works. The 2D frequency response of the human eye looks something like a diamond, which means that we see vertical and horizontal frequencies better than diagonal ones.

In fact, most image compression techniques (including JPEG) take this into account, however, conventional ways of determining the noise in images (minimum mean squared error, peak signal to noise, root mean squares) don't factor in the human visual system.

Your best bet is to use something like the structural similarity method (SSIM) by Prof. Al Bovik of UT Austin and his student Prof. Zhou Wang (now at the University of Waterloo).

You can read all about SSIM and get example code here: http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~z70wang/research/ssim/

Or read more about image quality assessment at Prof. Bovik's website: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/index.htm

If you don't care about how it works, and just want to use it, you can get example code for ssim in matlab at that website and C floating around the net. The method is easy to use; essentially the ssim function takes two images and returns a number between 0 and 1 that describes how similar the images are. Given two compressed images and the original image, take the SSIM between each and the original. The compressed image with the higher SSIM value is the "best".

It sounds like for your problem you might NOT have the original uncompressed image. In that case you might try checking for minimal entropy or maximum contrast in your images.

Essentially entropy would be calculated as:

h = histogram(Image);
p = h./(number of pixels in image);
entropy = -sum(p./log2(p));

You will need to make sure you scale the image appropriately and don't divide by zero! Or better yet, you should be able to find code for image entropy and contrast on the web. Just try searching for entropy.m for a matlab version.

Good luck!

Oh no, now they'll be forced to used the much more refined, albeit more involved for the psychologist, Holtzman test instead. It's terrible that they'll have to use the newer test that was designed based on experience with the Rorschach test and addresses nearly all the controversies and difficulties surrounding it. The best excuse for sticking with the older and deeply flawed Rorschach test is lazyness.

A different approach to Inkblot testing was undertaken by Wayne Holtzman and his colleagues who developed the Holtzman Inkblot technique (HIT) to overcome limitations in the Rorschach. Unlike the Rorschach, which uses only 10 inkblots, the HIT is a more extensive set of 45 inkblots in the test series plus two practice blots. The inkblots were drawn from a pool of several thousand. While retaining the sensitivity of the Rorschach blots, the HIT is scored for 22 characteristics that can be objectively defined, reliably scored, and efficiently handled by statistical methods.

It is important to remember that the Inkblot test is only one of many tests that psychologists use to help them learn about an individual's personality.

http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/inkblot-perception.html

It is important to note that even the sources describing this newer and more extensive test acknowledge it is merely one in a large array of tools. Taking away the older and outdated version of it does not diminish the ability of a psychologist to diagnose a patient.

They were both lawyered. Unlike you fools, I've spent the last three years of my life building up an immunity to NewYorkCountryLawyer. ;)

Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.

That's a cute one-liner, but if only it were true. The UW-Madison in-state tuition ($8020 for 2009-2010) is about the same as the state subsidy per student ($9379, 2008-2009). This doesn't factor in the additional $8040 per student for room and board. Nonresident of Wisconsin/Minnesota tuition is about $22,000 plus room and board.

In any event, you should be pointing to here or (better yet!) here if you want people to actually get to see good ol' EWD's (in)famous letter.

But you should probably be looking at this instead.

Sad. I remember seeing it as a child, but since then light pollution has slowly strangled the beauty out of the night sky.

I've lived within a mile of this intersection all my life, and thanks to Route 295 and all of the unnecessary yuppie subdivisions, 'seeing' has really declined. Most nights I'm lucky to see delta Ursae Majoris (Mag 3.32) clearly. I love watching satellite passes, and mag 3.3 or brighter really limits the ones I can see.

Compare This 1969 topo map of the area with a current one, and you'll see the changes in roads and land use.

I tell my wife all the time that one day all cars at least in the cities and major highways will be automated and she doesn't believe me. But it would be a huge deal, saving many lives and a ton of time for everyone. Imagine that when you are stuck at a red light behind 50 other cars you don't have to wait for the reaction time of every individual car until you got to go. All the cars could simultaneously start driving. Or even better not stop at all: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kdresner/2004aamas/sixbysixres.html (Parent page: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kdresner/2004aamas/index.html)

I tell my wife all the time that one day all cars at least in the cities and major highways will be automated and she doesn't believe me. But it would be a huge deal, saving many lives and a ton of time for everyone. Imagine that when you are stuck at a red light behind 50 other cars you don't have to wait for the reaction time of every individual car until you got to go. All the cars could simultaneously start driving. Or even better not stop at all: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kdresner/2004aamas/sixbysixres.html (Parent page: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kdresner/2004aamas/index.html)

***Way to fuck over the native ants, Texas. Not to mention any other unpredictable side-effects, which, when talking about introduced species, are /ALWAYS BAD/.*** A bit too absolute perhaps. Phorid flies are picky eaters. Part of the problem is that phorids that attack the native fire ants -- which are not considered to be much of a problem (in the US) -- don't find the non-native fire ants -- which are a problem here -- appealing. The proposal it to release phorids that are the natural enemies of the non-native fire ants and do not attack the indigenous species. I suspect that if you had ever encountered Solenopsis wagneri, your opinions on the introductions of natural controls might be a bit less rigid. see http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~gilbert/research/fireants/faqans.html#which

The impetus behind Dijkstra's original essay was not that GOTO itself was a fundamentally bad language construct. It was that this construct was overused and abused.

Have you even read Dijkstra's paper?

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF

Just to quote the beginning, a bit:

Since a number of years I am familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. Later I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disasterous effects and did I become convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming langauges (i.e. everything except -perhaps- plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to that discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so."

Seems pretty clear to me that his intent was that goto statements be eliminated. The paper goes on to explain why in more detail.

Just search and replace in a text editor.

And no, there is no check character in HTML.

For those who care, TIPLJ has a scholarly article in their latest issue about Jacobsen v. Katzer. Robert W. Gomulkiewicz, Conditions and Covenants in License Contracts: Tales from a Test of the Artistic License, 17 Tex. Intell. Prop. L. J. (Forthcoming 2009). The abstract:

The Federal Circuit upheld the Artistic License in Jacobsen v. Katzer, establishing at long last that open source licenses are enforceable. Although that outcome received most of the headlines, the caseâ(TM)s greater significance lies elsewhere. Jacobsen v. Katzer teaches valuable lessons about conditions and covenants in license contracts, lessons that apply to licenses of all persuasions. Moreover, the case raises an important question about the interplay between contract and intellectual property law: Can licensors manipulate the distinction between covenants and conditions in such a way that upsets the delicate balance in copyright law? This article explores the lessons taught by Jacobsen v. Katzer and the open issue that it leaves, concluding with a proposal that supports the business model innovation characterized by open source licensing.

Hi. I'm one of the authors. Please read our FAQ. It answers that very question. In short, our de-anonymization algorithm applies to far more than public social networks like twitter, including some very sensitive ones.

We have an FAQ about this paper. It answers many of the misconceptions expressed in the comments here. In particular, our algorithm applies to much more than public social networks like twitter and flickr. A variety of networks including the phone call network are being shared behind your back in anonymous form, and our de-anonymization techniques apply just as much. You'll probably agree that people expect more privacy there. See my blog for a variety of demonstrations and thought-experiments of de-anonymization.

So, because you haven't observed Oil form in less than a thousand years, it can't possibly form in such a short time frame?

No, actually, it's possible to form useful fuel in much less time... if you use unrealistic temperatures and pressures with carefully-chosen starting materials. However, that oil doesn't have the same isotopic fractions as what we find in the ground, different proportions of hydrocarbon chains of different lengths, etc. Plus the chemistry of the oil we find is tied into the geologic history of the reservoir it's found in. See, for example, here. "The value of such a compilation is to show how common patterns start to emerge in basins that share common tectonic environments: even though those environments are separated by thousands of kilometers or tens of millions of years. What appears initially as a hopelessly tangled geologic history starts to become simpler and more understandable once you fully mine the regional geologic databases and reconstruct the basin at the time of the giants' formation."

In other words, yeah, the oil that we find couldn't have formed in that way, in that place, that fast. In other words, "about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could". If you've got a new branch of chemistry that predicts otherwise, publish. I'm pretty sure there's a Nobel in it for you.

Now, the other part of your response:

To which I respond, have you ever observed a member of a species born with a mutation, sexually incompatible with the rest of the species, yet robust enough to survive, and actually better adapted than the rest of the species so that it outlives and out reproduces the remainder of the population? No? Then I taunt you, "you're crazy! no one has ever seen it!"

No, I've not seen that. Fortunately, that's not how evolution predicts that species form.

For an example of gradual changes leading to the creation of new, separate species, we have several examples of so-called "ring species". Consider the Herring Gull around Great Britan. It can interbreed with the American Herring Gull. Going further west, the American version can interbreed with the Vega Herring Gull on Pacific coast of Russia. Moving west again, the Vega can interbreed with Birula's Gull, and so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull, which is found in Scandanavia but also Great Britan too. The Lesser Black-Backed Gull cannot interbreed with the Herring Gull.

Are they really the same species now? No one particular monumental change has happened to render them infertile with each other, just the gradual accumulation of small changes. But they look different, sound different, and have slightly different lifestyles. Now, what if one of the intermediate links, e.g. the Vega Gull, were to go extinct for whatever reason? Would they be the same species then? If there were no gene flow at all between the populations, what could possibly stop even more changes accumulating?

These changes were accumulated gradually, due to radiation of an ancestral population gradually spreading across diverging environments. Fortunately in the case of ring species those environments still exist and we can still see (and cross-breed) all the intermediate steps. When environments change over time, it's harder to see (you need fossils and so forth) but the principle is exactly the same. You need to actually read about evolution - individuals don't evolve, populations do.

Might I suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution for Everyone"? Lucid, straightforward, and covers exactly the ground I suspect you want covered.

It depends on where you are: http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/huebner/Spring2004/grg325/maps/religion.gif Near the border, you have Catholic majorities. In the north, you have Baptist majorities. In the center, you have no majority but with a Lutheran plurality.

This is due to who settled the areas of Texas: the border was settled by Catholics from Mexico (who got their religion from Spain); the center was settled by Germans who brought Lutheranism with them; I'm not sure of the history of Baptists in the US, so I can't explain why the north is Baptist majority in TX: it's likely similar to the Mormon migration west.