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I'm working on a project like this right now, but I can't say much about it. The main difficulty is developing a semantic ontology to work with and designing algorithms that produce readable text from fragments. The material I work with is naturally broken up into sections, so I can afford some discontinuities.

Sample IP Contract
Large List of IP Contracts Between Companies
Another sample IP contract

I still wouldn't worry about that. According to the GP (or GGP) poster from Here even if the galaxies collided, we probably wouldn't be effected in a catastrophic level. Meaning, even if you were alive in 3 billion years, playing your X-Box 360 version 1.5e30 you would still be playing it.
The article say our solar system may get darker (from lack of stars) OR it may get very bright (enough light to make a night at the country-side look like a night in the city of downtown Toronto)

According to Here Our sun will still be burning brightly.
According to the article, it should happen in about 3 billion years

On a side note---considering the lifespan of planets, galaxies, universis - it is kind of depressing we won't be around to see spectacular things (i.e. Star Trek space travel). Ah I need to find me a "Q" and get them to let me join up :)

Wouldnt matter too much...our Milky Way and Andromeda are on a slow collision course anyway - by the time an ejected star got here, the rest of the galaxy would be right behind it. But no need to go hide in a cave just yet, we've still got about 3 billion years.

What happened to the Newton, the eMate, Clarisworks? What is the state of HP printers in the printing market? Your comparison is highly selective. In theory you should be correct, but what stategies has Microsoft pursued. What strategies does Walmart pursue. Besides Apple, what successful companies can you name that look far ahead and keep customers "happy?"

http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/lee/Responsib leshareholder_SJLBF.pdf

since i heard that its possible to breaking up large hailstones into smaller pieces with a chemical called 'Silberjodid' (in German) http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/people/list/ ctech.htm i have no idea what else is possible.But what does most of the U.S. policians say in these days mostly ....? ...this is one of the things that could be discussed later.... cheers

That's not my understanding. What I've read and seen, is that the larger Andromeda Galaxy will plow through the MilkyWay, tearing both apart, with some of the galactic arms being shorn off and dismemebered and tossed into intergalactic space, with the two larger destroyed galaxies colliding again and then collapsing into a giant active galaxy, similar to M87.

Simulation HERE

What's left and flung out of the galactic collision would be of little consequence, as it would be stripped of most gas and not be able to do any second generation star formation.

Of course, that's all goign to happen in about 4 billion years, and only about 18 billion years after that the whole fucking shithouse is going to go to flinders thanks to the BIG RIP.

RS

Just wait until the collision happens: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/

I'm sorry, all medical "science" does is stumble around in circles until they land on top of something remotely approaching the truth.

Are we talking about the same medical science that eradicated smallpox (a sickness that killed up to 40% of the afflicted and caused the death of about 2 million people in only in the year 1967)? The same medicine that reduced the cases of polio in the world from 350000 in 1988 to 759 in 2005 (till now)?

I'm sorry, but your complaints about margarine and/or eggs don't seem very significant when compared to those successes. So, medicine messes up sometimes. What science doesn't? The whole thing about sciences is that established beliefs are challenged again and again, and, when found faulty, they get replaced. Medicine is more exposed to distrust: few care whether fire is caused by an exothermic oxidation reaction or by phlogiston leaving the burning log; but when their health is in the balance, people get very interested. And I agree that many medical practitioners and researchers could do with learning better statistic and experimental methods. But let's not discard the whole thing because it can't give us exact guidance on margarine.

Third. Degree. Burns. Do you know what third-degree burns are? Probably not, so here are some links to help. This is not normal from spilled coffee, especially over 6% of your body.

Moreover, McDonald's served the coffee at that temperature at their drive-throughs. They claimed in court that they expected people to take the coffee home and drink it. What kind of BS is that? You buy coffee in a drive-through because you don't have time to take it home to drink it, and McDonald's knew that perfectly well.

Don't be so quick to deny the value of intellectual debate on zombies. There's plenty of research money to go around!

http://www.unb.ca/
http://www.utoronto.ca/

Because Canada is more fun.

The purpetrators of this attrocity are the faceless, and I would suggest faithless (because no one could truthfully commit such acts in the name of any God) terrorists, and their aim is to spread, rather obviously, terror.

The WTO meetings a few years ago were similarly done in the media. The media in the US said not a word about what the meetings were about, yet had time daily to focus on the arrests.

More recently, many countries have had huge protests condemning the current war US vs Iraq. Two years ago, in some countries there were record turnouts for each successive protest. The city I was in had about 17% of the population out on the streets for one, yet no coverage was given except that Bush cancelled visits to cities with protests.

Body scanners aren't going to help anything except the bottom line of the scanner companies. They may even increase general tension and anxiety through longer lines, delays and safety factors. Anyway, it's all a distraction from the G8 summit's agenda which covers notably discussion about climate change, sustainable development, peace and stability in Africa and the Middle East, etc.

Good coverage. For those in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area, there are events being held @ the UofT. http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/ 04-05/string-theory/strings2005/ for more info =)

On further research, it looks like I was wrong. According to U of T's Copyright policy the university holds the copyright to anything "created by an Author in the course of the Author's employment by the University." On the other hand, "For the purposes of this Policy, research and instruction, or the creation of instructional Works, including Instructional Software, undertaken by members of the University's Teaching Staff or librarians shall not be deemed to be made or undertaken in the course of their employment by the University." This leaves me thoroughly confused, which is about par for the course.

However, in another twist in this dramatic story " Computer Software that is not Instructional Software will be deemed to be an "Invention" under the Inventions Policy, and the rights and obligations with respect to such Computer Software and the disposition of revenues therefrom shall be in accordance with the Inventions Policy." This Invention Policy says that the university essentially everything you make in your office.

So, we're no different than anyone else, but damn if we don't have the best student union in the greater Canadas.

On further research, it looks like I was wrong. According to U of T's Copyright policy the university holds the copyright to anything "created by an Author in the course of the Author's employment by the University." On the other hand, "For the purposes of this Policy, research and instruction, or the creation of instructional Works, including Instructional Software, undertaken by members of the University's Teaching Staff or librarians shall not be deemed to be made or undertaken in the course of their employment by the University." This leaves me thoroughly confused, which is about par for the course.

However, in another twist in this dramatic story " Computer Software that is not Instructional Software will be deemed to be an "Invention" under the Inventions Policy, and the rights and obligations with respect to such Computer Software and the disposition of revenues therefrom shall be in accordance with the Inventions Policy." This Invention Policy says that the university essentially everything you make in your office.

So, we're no different than anyone else, but damn if we don't have the best student union in the greater Canadas.

I'm in the process of writing a report for the University of Toronto and recommendations for releasing research as open source. I was told not to even concentrate on convincing them to do it, they're already leaning towards that, but rather to make recommendations on licences. As far as I can tell, no department at U of T says that they own research, and profs and grad students generally have a free hand to release their research as they want.

U of T is also home to the Knowledge Media Design Institute, which is a huge proponent of Open Source. This year they ran a lecture series called Open Source | Open Access which was entirely on the place of open source within the academic community. They're also offering grants to students to work on open source software!

I'm not sure how good the math program is here, as the maths frighten me. From walking around campus, I do know that we have something called the "Fields Institute for Mathematics", which seems very official and such not. Give it a look, there are worse places to be than downtown Toronto.

Give me an e-mail if you want some more info on U of T

@ Northcomp.com

@ University of Toronto

(5mb approx)

This is typical of the articles I've found on scholar.google.com. (This was cited a lot.)

Here is from nature(!) reviews:
Intelligence research is more advanced and less controversial than is generally realized.

Let us make this easier -- can you give references that show that intelligence measurement has fallen out of vogue among the real researchers? (What is the majority opinion?)

I am not in that field, but I have never heard anything like that has happened.

Again, you claim that Gould wasn't full of sh!t. Well, he did make large claims. They should be visible in the literature. I can't find any, but I'm not a researcher.

(In case you don't understand why I am arguing. I don't really care about IQ measurements. What gets my goat is intellectual dishonesty. I don't really care that much about politics. My strongest opinion is a hate for religion.)

Forget all the nonsense about "emotional IQ" and other such. There are many reputable studies. I wouldn't put forth Scientific American as a valid source, but here's a link to a starting point taken from SA:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/courses/int elligence/cache/1198gottfred.html

In addition, here's a link with some comments on "The Bell Curve": http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.html

How about some sources for your view that improvement in mental capacity is unbounded?

Accessibility has been the main focus for recent release of KDE.

A few links to relevant pages:

• The KDE 3.4 Announcements which stresses improvements for partially sighted people.
• The KDE Accessibility Project
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)LARS
• The GNOME Accessibility Project
• The Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group

The general tendency is close cooperation between the various projects. No songle project currently offers a complete accessibile solution on Linux, but by combining the different solutions, a lot is possble, and closer cooperation will make even mor ethings possible in the future.

A lot of this cooperation was kicked of at the Unix Accessibility Forum last sumnmer, which the KDE project organised as part of the KDE World Summit.

We are currently busy organising a follow-up event during LinuxTag 2005.

Olaf Schmidt, co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project

Having said that, one does see obviously illegal-import gaming 'guns' for sale at markets and stuff from time to time, and at least one online store in Australia claims to have stock of this PistolMouse, so some folks are sneaking under the radar.

Vertical mice aren't anything new though. I've been using the 3M 'Renaissance Mouse' for years now - I've got four of them in various places at home and work. A couple of random images courtesy google image search here.

A key point I've found with the 3M mice is that they're pretty hard to control for a few days, and you never really regain the fine control that you have with a regular horizontal mouse. I can't help but wonder if the relative lack of control will be a problem for gamers. Remember, this 'gun' must slide around on the surface of a table, so it's going to operate like a vertical mouse, not a free-moving gun. I often keep two mice plugged into my computers - one of these for long-term comfort, and a regular mouse for when I need fine control, say with photoshop or the Gimp.

This, according to an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, speaking at the 2005 McLuhan Lectures on Evolution as a Medium.

Basically, his argument is that for any new technology, there are groups that won't or can't adopt it. Among those groups, there may be those who have genetic mutations that will enable similar capabilities to those of the adopters, and thus will be biologically favoured. This has happened in relatively recent history, as in developing lactose tolerance in adult populations, and social cooperation.

Yes. Quantum mechanics should eventually get superceded by something else which accounts for physics under a much wider range of conditions. As you say, doesn't mean QM was wrong as such, just that there are more complete descriptions out there. And physicists are still looking.

But I'd be careful making an alchemy/astrology comparison... A key difference between alchemy/astrology and chemistry/astronomy is that the former are occult systems where metaphors are evaluated subjectively, and the latter are scientific fields where knowledge is shared freely and metaphors are tested by repeated and independent experiments.

Now, prior to the scientific revolution, they were the same thing.

What happened with the development of the scientific method was that even though they started in the same place, chemistry/astronomy rapidly differentiated itself because the most erroneous ideas didn't last long under empirical scrutiny. In response, alchemy/astrology necessarily rejected the idea of an objective reality that could be empirically tested.

So, it doesn't really matter whether a theory seems subjectively mystical or not (though that can be a warning sign). The important questions are "can it be tested?", "has it been tested?", and (as you very rightly point out) "is it the simplest theory?" (i.e. have the simpler theories been tested and failed?)

In the case of particle spin, it's been observed that, although much of the math is superficially similar to the angular momentum of a spinning sphere, particle spin is quantized.

Electrons, for example, have only been observed with two possible "spin" directions (called "up" and "down", though there's no reference to an absolute up and down), and no possible intermediate angles between them, which appears to hold true regardless of where they are observed from[1].

This (among other things) indicates that thinking of them them in terms of literal rotating spheres (which can have any spin orientation), while superficially simpler and more intuitive, isn't useful.

---

[1] Check out the Stern-Gerlach experiment for one way to demonstrate this. If there were intermediate spin states, the electrons would fan out rather than exactly split into two neat streams.

There were quite a few of these unsung heros. I remember another story about a group of researchers at the University of Toronto who were contacted by Grumman to determine the conditions needed to allow for the explosives to be set in order to separate the lunar module and the command module. The funny part about this story is that the team at UofT simply thought they were one of several teams working on this problem and that NASA was looking for consensus on the parameters. It turns out they were the only ones working on the problem and their recommendations were what was going to be used.....

http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/gopher/Aug21-95/ne ws.htm

Many universities have back doors, side doors, and open windows - all for getting in. Just don't use the front door. There are many ways to get into university without a high school diploma, or even with shitty marks. Here, I'll give you an example:

University of Toronto:

Academic Bridging at U of T allows people who haven't been in school for a little while to take one course, and if you get a 63% you're in part time, and if you get a 73% you get in full time.

Even people who haven't been in school for a long time and didn't even finish high school, there's a transitional year program that you can do that will give you the skills necessary to get into first year.

Another university in Ontario, Canada (Guelph University) doesn't have any requirements for part time courses. So you could do 4 courses from their university and then apply (provided you have decent marks, but at least the chance is there).

And I'm sure there are many other loop-holes and other ways to get into the many other universities across the globe, just do a "port scan" of 'em and you'll find something. :)

Now this isn't exactly what you're asking for but I assume the main goal is to get into a post secondary institution which requires some grade point average to get in. The best way to achieve the goal of getting into one of these institutions is to really check out all the different options and trying to look for some of these bridging programs or loop holes or anything else.

Any guesses who was responsible for this bug? It was a stupid human who forgot to enter five values in the Pentium's lookup table (Matlab Digest). All computer errors can be traced to human errors, unless you think there are errors in nature. So if computer verification doesn't count because computers can make errors, then neither does human verification.

I think that in far future all science will be done by AI, because knowledge will be too complicated and complex to understand for even most inteligent human on chemical boost/genetic engineered/stuffed with chips.

I think the empahsis has to be on far future, if science will ever be done by AI. AI can't even consistently beat chess master in a simple game like chess, even though it calculates more moves per second than Kasporov is able to think in a life time. If AI can't even handle something as simple as chess as well as one human (and there has been a fair amount of research into making effective algorithms in chess, and even Big Gene got help from human chess experts that tuned the code while playing Kasparov), then AI isn't even yet on the level of simple arithmetic, not to mention real maths.

The Abel Prize and Fields medal will be going to human researchers into the far future, that is for sure.

Applets and other software that demonstrates mathmatical principles.
http://www.edinformatics.com/il/il_math.htm

http://smard.cqu.edu.au/Database/Teaching/JavaMath .html

[Physics]
http://faraday.physics.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/Fl ash/

Quantum causality, and stuff. Y'know.

One million geeks thinking about maybe getting around to reading an article...maybe later or something. And there may or may not be something keeping them from actually READING the artice. That could have a powerful effect on the cosmos, I suppose.

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Har rison/Locality/Locality.html

Link goes to explanation of quantum cause and effect.

I think sanskrit is the ancestor of all European languages as well, which is why so many languages are grouped under the "Indo-European" language family.

Here's an illustration from the American Heritage Dictionary showing the relationships.

When I read the headline and noticed PBX I was thinking about Lego Mindstorms. Guess my mind was in bad weather to... as Mindstorms has a RCX not a PBX.

Or does it ??? lego pbx

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the double-slit experiment, there is a very clear, non-technical explanation here.

It was a University of Toronto student who was involved in the unfortunate accident.

Yes, there are some safety concerns with the solar cars, but the biggest safety concern stems from the simple law of physics - conservation of momentum - the solar cars are just not heavy enough. However, the same safety concerns apply also to any motorcycles on the road, or the those Smart cars.

Solar cars already travel in a convoy consisting of a lead and chase vehicle with amber warning lights. With extensive driver training, good route planning, and some common sense, I think they can be safely raced.

The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.

McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."

Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?

*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.

What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe.

If I'm not mistaken, the Milky way and the Andromeda galaxy will collide

You are correct. And a simulation of that can be found here in mpeg format.

I thought last year they found four "drawf" galaxies in vicinity of the Milky Way, about to be absorbed.

The big Kahuna of course will be the merger with Andromeda about two billion years hence. Our mutual gravitational attraction is drawing us together. In practical terms, both galaxies are essentially empty space. However Andromeda will grow from its present size in the sky of six full moons (192 arc minutes; but just a faint smudge) to fill the entire sky. See the collision simulation here.

Of course, you're assuming that they are using current commercial technology for the project. The delay could be overcome using some tangled quantum pairs. But, then again, if they were using those why would they need a sattelite?

...God Damn environmental ... "The polar caps are melting."...
If you think that the polar caps aren't melting then you has better catch up on your facts. I think it is pretty obvious that they are melting (satalite imagrey anyone?) and anyone that doesn't think they are is just being selfish, all about the present with no regard for future generations.

http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bin1/010221a. asp

There, if you don't believe me. That is from the University of Toronto, a highly regarded university, if you don't believe them you wont believe anyone.

BTW, I am not a random AC, my username is taylortbb , however I'll bet some crazy mod who thinks like you will mod this down.

Let me set the record straight. This site has links to various recent studies on this topic.

The U.S. Government does not want you to know this, but all the studies that have been done regarding the effect of marijuana on driving show that it has very little impact on driving performance.

UK: Cannabis May Make You A Safer Driver (2000)

University Of Toronto Study Shows Marijuana Not A Factor In Driving Accidents (1999) (To be fair, this one is a "study of studies")

Australia: Cannabis Crash Risk Less: Study (1998)

Believe it or not, there's even one from the United States!

The CTV lacks imagination - the press release talks more indepth about the technology. To be honest, it's not what the CTV spin claims. Rather, the quantum dots are more photosensitive to infrared light than previous materials. The upshot is that any infrared application, from military wide-aperture night vision goggles to solar cells to clothing which detects injuries.

Quantum dots,incidentally, are fingered as one of the most exciting nanotech material configurations, but don't get as much play as buckyballs or carbon nanotubules. They're also far older. Medieval glassblowers used quantum dots made from rubidium molecular rings - albeit unknowingly - to produce a glass with irridescent properties. For a time it was fashionable among the rich to buy these.

For more information about Quantum dots, look up a guy named Moungo Bawendi at MIT. He's pretty much 'the man' for quantum dots right now. http://www.electroline.com.au/elc/feature_article/ item_022003a.asp

There's also some interesting reading in the books "Hacking Matter" and "Nanocosm".

1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/

2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.

3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.

A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.

The medium is the message, , Marshall McLuhan said. I remember watching a film in high school and was baffled.

Today, I'm more aware.

People are gullible as they wish to trust news from a higher source. That is, they will trust what they see on the TV because the information came from the TV. Never mind that the television or radio itself is not a guarantee of truth. Never mind that your neighbor's story may not be as strong in your mind, despite the fact that they are directly involved in the story and have first hand information.

The Internet is generating a cult of self-truth, a desire to seek information at will. However, most of us lack the logical means to determine the value and authenticity of gathered information, relying on someone they see in a suit on TV. Advertisers play with this concept to sell product often with actors that play attorneys and doctors. Actors themselves believe their OWN play-image as they speak at congressional hearings on matters of which they have no professional skills or experience. Merely because they pretended to be something makes them credible in the eyes of many.

Many believe the information on the Intenret is valid because it is simply ON the Internet.

I'm completing a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( U. of Toronto) and work as a researcher with the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology-a non-profit institute within the university. What you are talking about is rather in our area, so if you'd like to contact me, I'd be glad to help out. (dphilip@oise.utoronto.ca)

Basically, there are two approaches that would be useful. One is to simply ask the students. However students may not know the full spectrum of possibilities, so that approach might not produce the desired results.

A second (better) approach is to identify a set of real-world science problems, present those to the students, and find out which ones might interest them. Then try to provide the resources to assist them in understanding the problem(s) and to work with their ideas towards possible solutions. But remember: no make-believe problems. These have to be real problems of some significance.

I think this is a great start, There's incredible profit here too, universities spend millions for catalogue systems. If I could use one interface to search for books, chapters, and articles on a subject, I could spend more time actually learning, and less time looking at the same damn "no results" page on GeoWeb. Grrrr.

Now my U2 iPod blinks out

DON'T PANIC!

instead of the circle with the line through it!

This rocks!

Anyone have a good small image of a sphere with his tongue sticking out for me to overwrite the Apple icon with?

p.s. I used the image from here to start, changed the background to black, changed the red to white (mine is b&w), then shrunk to the 64x64 size for icon #67 in my firmware. Did the little revision trick memtioned above, updated, and... where's my towel? And my salty snacks? Ford?

I did a quick search and couldn't find much; I suspect my professor (name escapes me - i would have recognised it on the faculty list though!) retired as i took the course ~1996 and he was in his late 50s at the time.

UofT's department of ancient and middle eastern studies has a website. I'm happy to see that the summer international program has been now extended to undergraduates and is no longer just a Masters option. This was the program that completed the 'proof of concept' pyramid (and other structures) building project.

UofT International Summer Program

I remember my prof remarking that it was a very inexpensive tour. Since you were focused on using only natural implements and materials, they had to make their own tools -- how cost effective was that? :)

The one thing people forget about Egypt was that it was an 8 month growing season, and a 4 month flood season. Most of the egyptian structures were built in the 4 months of downtime. Think of it-- if you're a pharoah, you want to keep your people as busy as possible. Starving peasants have a tendency of rebelling... "idle hands are the devil's work". So the pyramids served a religious function, but also served a population control function as well. 4 months x 1500 years of free labour can accomplish some pretty impressive things.

You'd think you could google.

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

Good grief, do you understand the difference between an irritated palate and a third-degree burn? [links go to images of 3rd degree burns--not for the faint of heart]

What would you say about a parent who knowingly and without warning served their daughter pasta that was hot enough to give her a third-degree burn in a matter of seconds? Would you call that responsible parenting? Would you call it child abuse?

What would you say about a restaurant that knowingly and without warning served food that was capable of inflicting a third-degree burn in a matter of seconds?

Is this really the same thing as "Ouch, I burned the roof of my mouth!" to you? Is the concept of "degrees of severity" foreign to you?