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The really fundamental advances take a long time to be fully explored. There is little significant that doesn't build upon earlier work.

Check out Conformal Geometric Algebra, which is the basis for the company Geomerics' Enighten software for real-time global radiosity lighting for games. (Now part of ARM / Silicon Studio).

See the lectures linked from the first link, in particular lecture 7 on CGA. These are by Chris Doran, one of the founders of Geomerics, a member of the Cambridge GA group. Also see Leo Dorst's GAviewer CGA tutorial for interactive visualization and a better idea how this can be used in computer graphics. GA is also a lingua franca for physics and simulation that subsumes vector algebra, imaginary numbers, homogeneous coordinates, quaternions and a zillion ad-hoc hacks that have made graphics far more complicated than it needs to be. The papers in the field are nearly all written to be understood and require little background knowledge.

Erm, by 1996 we had Linux 1.2, which had loadable kernel modules and a full development toolchain, and Solaris 2, which included "no C compiler, not even a crippled one" *

This was typical of Unix distributions of the era. Development tools for pretty much all the major Unix flavors cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. User space tools tended to be relatively primitive compared to their GNU equivilents (e.g. tar often supported only the old v7 or ustar variants which imposed path and file type limitations). Daemons that are not considered standard (sshd, ftpd, httpd) were often expensive and usually third party.

And yes, many commercial Unix variants of the time still required relinking the kernel. OpenServed still required it up until 2005.

* http://www.science.uva.nl/pub/...

.Giving a shitty algorithm to solve a problem, and then saying that it would also solve SET COVER, does not imply that any algorithm for solving the first problem can be used to solve SET COVER via a Karp reduction.

Btw, SET COVER is relevant for some learning problems. Constructing a fastest learner for finite identification of a finite class of finite languages (`preset learner') is equivalent to SET COVER, see page 6 of
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~dickdj/submission_COLT10_NGDdJ.pdf

This demand from BREIN comes hot on the heels of a University of Amsterdam research (in Dutch) which shows that the blocking the Pirate Bay URL and IPs on certain ISPs has no noticeable effect on torrent downloading activities. Taking down proxies is probably not going to make much of a dent in that either.

This demand from BREIN comes hot on the heels of a University of Amsterdam research (in Dutch) which shows that the blocking the Pirate Bay URL and IPs on certain ISPs has no noticeable effect on torrent downloading activities. Taking down proxies is probably not going to make much of a dent in that either.

I think Geometric Algebra (GA) has a better formulation than the traditional tensor way of doing relativity. It's not only easier to understand, but it's easier to use and the same math can also be far more easily applied in other areas of physics.

A capsule: There are 4 basic dimensions, (usually denoted "e_n" with n from 0 to 3) but let's call them: x,y,z and t. The squares of the first 3 are negative, but the square of t is positive. These basis vectors can be combined to create bivectors: the regular planes of rotation xy, xz, yz, as well as xt, yt, zt. The latter three are still planes of rotation, but due to the mixed sign of the squares, the rotation is hyperbolic rather than circular - calculations use sinh and cosh instead of sin and cos. The interesting thing is that these planes of rotation involving t are velocities (Lorentz boosts). Velocities are hyperbolic rotations, and the speed of light is a 90 degree rotation. GA has a simple way of handing multiple rotations which allows easy solution of problems that are seldom even attempted using the conventional approach.

"A Survey of Geometric Algebra and Geometric Calculus" by Alan Macdonald
Gives a good introduction to the basics and applications of GA, including relativity. You would need to at least get through the section on rotations before skipping down to the section on Spacetime Algebra. Also see "General Relativity in a Nutshell"from the same author, which gives a mathematical but not dense introduction to General Relativity in 100 pages, not using GA.

"Gravity, Gauge Theories and Geometric Algebra" by Anthony Lasenby, Chris Doran, Stephen Gull
General Relativity using GA - interestingly, curved space-time is not required using GA.

"Primer on Geometric Algebra for introductory mathematics and physics" by David Hestenes
Another good intro, much less dense than Macdonald's, with more diagrams and basic applications.

"Geometric Algebra Primer" by Jaap Suter
Gives a gentle introduction and reference for the basic GA operations.

"3D Euclidean Geometry through Conformal Geometric Algebra (a GAViewer tutorial)" by Leo Dorst & Daniel Fontijne
Gives a hands-on, step-by-step tutorial using the free open-source GA visualization software GA Viewer. This tutorial uses the conformal model which is more advanced than the regular 3-D model. Other tutorials are available at the same site. Their book Geometric Algebra for Computer Science, an Object Oriented Approach to Geometry" is also highly recommended, and can be previewed at Scribd.

I think Geometric Algebra (GA) has a better formulation than the traditional tensor way of doing General Relativity. It's not only easier to understand, but it's easier to use and the same math can also be far more easily applied in other areas of physics.

A capsule: There are 4 basic dimensions, (usually denoted "e_n" with n from 0 to 3) but let's call them: x,y,z and t. The squares of the first 3 are negative, but the square of t is positive. These basis vectors can be combined to create bivectors: the regular planes of rotation xy, xz, yz, as well as xt, yt, zt. The latter three are still planes of rotation, but due to the mixed sign of the squares, the rotation is hyperbolic rather than circular - calculations use sinh and cosh instead of sin and cos. The interesting thing is that these planes of rotation involving t are velocities (Lorentz boosts). Velocities are hyperbolic rotations, and the speed of light is a 90 degree rotation. GA has a simple way of handing multiple rotations which allows easy solution of problems that are seldom even attempted using the conventional approach.

"A Survey of Geometric Algebra and Geometric Calculus" by Alan Macdonald
Gives a good introduction to the basics and applications of GA, including relativity. You would need to at least get through the section on rotations before skipping down to the section on Spacetime Algebra. Also see "General Relativity in a Nutshell"from the same author, which gives a mathematical but not dense introduction to General Relativity in 100 pages, not using GA.

"Gravity, Gauge Theories and Geometric Algebra" by Anthony Lasenby, Chris Doran, Stephen Gull
General Relativity using GA - interestingly, curved space-time is not required using GA.

"Primer on Geometric Algebra for introductory mathematics and physics" by David Hestenes
Another good intro, much less dense than Macdonald's, with more diagrams and basic applications.

"Geometric Algebra Primer" by Jaap Suter
Gives a more gentle introduction and reference for the basic GA operations.

"3D Euclidean Geometry through Conformal Geometric Algebra (a GAViewer tutorial)" by Leo Dorst & Daniel Fontijne
Gives a hands-on, step-by-step tutorial using their free open-source GA visualization software, "GAViewer". This tutorial uses the conformal model which is more advanced than the regular 3-D model. (2 extra dimensions, of a very odd but useful type) Other tutorials are available at the same site. Their book Geometric Algebra for Computer Science, an Object Oriented Approach to Geometry" is also highly recommended, and can be previewed at Scribd. (The 2nd edition is worth getting on paper. It has some very useful reference pages not available online, and many corrected errata.)

Take a look at Geomerics. Most of the visual quality that raytracing is supposed to provide is really better handled by radiosity, and Geomerics real-time radiosity and dynamic lighting is the best I have seen. It is being used in the new version of EVE Online and Battlefield 3. CUDA acceleration was just released for the SDK, which should bring radiosity lighting calculations down to less than 3ms/frame.

  It is based on "geometric algebra" (GA,real-valued Clifford algebra) which without any exaggeration is the most general and elegant form of math that can be used to describe physics and geometry. It works in any dimension of any signature, (5D "conformal" with two null-square dimensions being common for graphics) and allows operations and primitives which aren't effectively possible in conventional computer geometry. About half the top people in the GA field founded Geomerics.

One of the rare experts in GA in the UK who didn't join Geomerics is Ian G.C. Bell who co-wrote Elite, the seminal 3-D and space trading game from which Eve is descended. Ian has a free book, "Maths for (Games) Programmers" online, but the encoding of the HTML math requires using something like Netscape 4.79.

A far more usable introduction is Leo Dorst's free, small GA Viewer program and its associated pdf tutorials, which include the conformal model. This allows playing with the math visually (and it is fun), while also having rigorous but comprehensible instruction.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with analog computers.

Really? Because the Fine Article from the OP, says:

Internally, Lyric's probability gates are essentially analog devices typically working with analog values called pbits that have a digital resolution of approximately 8-bits although the approach is applicable for different resolutions as well.

"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.

While electronic analog computers are primarily considered rare artifacts these days, analog electronics still exist, and continue to be used in various applications where an embedded computer is either overkill (no need for a re-programmable computer, application is trivial in analog), or less suitable (few very simple evaluations at very high speeds).

I think Frank Zappa put it well ...:

"This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws that haven't been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be performing which could eventually lead to *The Death Penalty* (or affect your parents' credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things...and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSIC!

"Our studies have shown that this horrible force is so dangerous to society at large that laws are being drawn up at this very moment to stop it forever! Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described in tiny paragraphs so they won't conflict with the Constitution (which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate THE FUTURE).

"I bring you now a special presentation to show what can happen to you if you choose a career in MUSIC...The WHITE ZONE is for loading and unloading only...if you have to load or unload, go to the WHITE ZONE... you'll love it...it's a way of life...Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...Hi, it's me, I'm back. This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...The WHITE ZONE is for loading and unloading only...If yah gotta load, or if yah gotta unload, go to the WHITE ZONE. You'll love it...it's a way of life. That's right, you'll love it, it's a way of life, that's right, you'll love it, it's a way of life, you'll love it. This, is, the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER!"

-- Source

Not a differential, but two: an adder-subtractor.

Found here:
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~leo/lego/diff.html, apllied here: http://technicbricks.blogspot.com/2008/09/tbs-techtips-17-adder-substractor.html

Thanks for that explanation. Verlinde himself has clarified his paper a little more here: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~erikv/page18/page18.html

It's UNIX-like and licensed under the GNU's Not UNIX General Public License. It is not UNIX.

And in that moment, the student was enlightened. Or at least, was given the opportunity. You can lead a whore to Vasser, but you can't make him think.

it's not nearly as bad as the myriad names for "*" (asterisk, star, splat, bang, etc)

"Bang" is another name for the exclamation point (!), not for the asterisk. Or, that's what the Jargon File told me when I was first getting on the internet. ( http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/b/bang.html ) I've never heard it used to describe an asterisk.

But if it wasn't....

I'm thinking that a plaster cast of Armstrong's, uh, boot would be one of the most meaningful things in human possession. I, for one, want as many lunar missions as necessary in order to ensure that a plaster cast of the item is successful, to preserve it for an eternity of gawkers and onlookers.

Unless, of course, he declines to be enshrined, in which case the whole point is moot anyway.

Looks even more like a dong on the euro coins

That reminds me - am I the only one in the world that thinks the Amazon logo contains a representation of an erect human phallus?

No? Hm.

Looks even more like a dong on the euro coins

You can always fill it out with Sphereland.

Good book. Everyone should get credit for reading anything Rudy Rucker has written. More high weirdness than math, though.
___
Here's a bunch of really good stuff:

Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Million-Lancelot-Thomas-Hogben/dp/0393063615
Review
"It makes alive the contents and elements of Mathematics" -- Albert Einstein"

http://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Beyond-Lillian-R-Lieber/dp/1589880366/
Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), Barry Mazur (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)

http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Theory-Relativity-Fourth-Dimension/dp/1589880447/
The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), David Derbes (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)

http://www.amazon.com/Quantity-Real-Imaginary-History-Algebra/dp/0452288533/
Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (Paperback)
by John Derbyshire

http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869 The Fractal Geometry of Nature
by Benoit B. Mandelbrot

http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick

Rather than just reading a book, installing the following software and working through the following tutorials should be worth beaucoup extra credit:

Geometric Algebra (GA) is one of the most exciting developments in Mathematical education and Mathematical Physics. It presents in a unified mathematical language vectors, complex numbers, quaternions, spinors, and more.

GA handles rotations easily (because it includes the quaternion algebra) and also provides a mathematical description for projective geometry. Because of this, GA is being used more and more by Computer Science (virtual reality modeling, simulation, computer vision) and Robotic Engineers (arm/body movements). ...

Geometric Algebra is also called Clifford Algebra.

Geometric algebra software GAViewer for all major OSes: http://geometricalgebra.org/gaviewer_download.html

http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/files/GABLE15plus.pdf

In this tutorial we give an introduction to geometric algebra, using our GAViewer software. In the geometric algebra for 3-dimensional Euclidean space, we graphically demonstrate the ideas of the geometric product, the outer product, and the inner product, and the geometric operators that may be formed from them. We give several demonstrations of computations you can do using the geometric algebra, including projection and rejection, orthogonalization, interpolation of rotations, and intersection of linear o set spaces such as lines and planes. We emphasize the importance of blades as representations of subspaces, and the use of meet and join to manipulate them. We end with Euclidean geometry of 2-dimensional space as represented in the 3-dimensional homogeneous model.

http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/tutorials/CGA/

This tutorial introduces the conformal model of 3D Euclidean geometry, to date the most

You can always fill it out with Sphereland.

Good book. Everyone should get credit for reading anything Rudy Rucker has written. More high weirdness than math, though.
___
Here's a bunch of really good stuff:

Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Million-Lancelot-Thomas-Hogben/dp/0393063615
Review
"It makes alive the contents and elements of Mathematics" -- Albert Einstein"

http://www.amazon.com/Infinity-Beyond-Lillian-R-Lieber/dp/1589880366/
Infinity: Beyond the Beyond the Beyond (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), Barry Mazur (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)

http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Theory-Relativity-Fourth-Dimension/dp/1589880447/
The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension (Paperback)
by Lillian R. Lieber (Author), David Derbes (Foreword), Hugh Gray Lieber (Illustrator)

http://www.amazon.com/Quantity-Real-Imaginary-History-Algebra/dp/0452288533/
Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (Paperback)
by John Derbyshire

http://www.amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot/dp/0716711869 The Fractal Geometry of Nature
by Benoit B. Mandelbrot

http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick

Rather than just reading a book, installing the following software and working through the following tutorials should be worth beaucoup extra credit:

Geometric Algebra (GA) is one of the most exciting developments in Mathematical education and Mathematical Physics. It presents in a unified mathematical language vectors, complex numbers, quaternions, spinors, and more.

GA handles rotations easily (because it includes the quaternion algebra) and also provides a mathematical description for projective geometry. Because of this, GA is being used more and more by Computer Science (virtual reality modeling, simulation, computer vision) and Robotic Engineers (arm/body movements). ...

Geometric Algebra is also called Clifford Algebra.

Geometric algebra software GAViewer for all major OSes: http://geometricalgebra.org/gaviewer_download.html

http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/files/GABLE15plus.pdf

In this tutorial we give an introduction to geometric algebra, using our GAViewer software. In the geometric algebra for 3-dimensional Euclidean space, we graphically demonstrate the ideas of the geometric product, the outer product, and the inner product, and the geometric operators that may be formed from them. We give several demonstrations of computations you can do using the geometric algebra, including projection and rejection, orthogonalization, interpolation of rotations, and intersection of linear o set spaces such as lines and planes. We emphasize the importance of blades as representations of subspaces, and the use of meet and join to manipulate them. We end with Euclidean geometry of 2-dimensional space as represented in the 3-dimensional homogeneous model.

http://www.science.uva.nl/ga/tutorials/CGA/

This tutorial introduces the conformal model of 3D Euclidean geometry, to date the most

My largest dislike for Java is that there are solutions to almost all of the problems with it, and people defend them because of that, while they really should not have been there from the beginning.

For instance, to even HAVE a typed language without Generics/Templates/something equivalent is just silly. Yes, I know they have it since 1.5, but it should have been there from the beginning.

Also, the way Java tends to encourage complete and misplaced trust in the GC to save the world, to the point where plain old destructors to clean up after yourself is hardly available. Finalizers, allegedly are not guaranteed to run even at a normal exit, (Wtf is that all about?) making them quite useless as a cleanup-mechanism. One fine example is deleteOnExit(). Try Googling it and you'll find a part of the core library API that has little other effects than being one big memory leak. (I just spent hours debugging memory leak in a mission-critical app that turned out to be just that.)

All this turns out in suboptimal solutions, giving me Cobol fingers instead of letting me do something more useful with my time.

I used to have a Highscreen Bluenote in 1994. That was what a full-size laptop was back then! I used to do use it on my 2h ride on the train to go to University each week.

It was pretty compact, probably still a bit larger than the EEE, and the screen was a 8" colour LCD at 800x600. You could work quite well on it (OS/2 ran on it wonderfully) One of the RAM modules went back, and back in those days laptop RAM was proprietary.

It sure was heavy and thick though.

So, why this post: to tell you, yes, I am toroughly convinced that the EEE PC is just right for train-travelling people wanting to type in an assignment or read some webpages/PDFs. Back in the time we all did (at least those that could afford it *grin*)

His lecture data was completely convincing (I'm a physicist, and can read graphs with the best of them). Furthermore, this guy is not a corporate figurehead; he explicitly states that he is for all the energysavings we can think of, he just hates the current media hysteria around global warming, and the fact that it's supposedly all our fault.

Bart

His lecture data was completely convincing (I'm a physicist, and can read graphs with the best of them). Furthermore, this guy is not a corporate figurehead; he explicitly states that he is for all the energysavings we can think of, he just hates the current media hysteria around global warming, and the fact that it's supposedly all our fault.

Bart

There have been attempts to do that in multiple fields, including Marketing "Science". However, if you're going to bet on a system that can predict box office sales, I'd put my money on a computer science approach. Here's an interesting paper from 2006: Predicting movie sales from blogger sentiment.

You're right, that is better, but I'm a bit unclear still. This really sounds like a microscopic and magnetic version of delay line memory. Is that really what this is?

I'm still amazed that delay line memories were ever used in consumer products (like calculators).

Here it is. Unfortunately, they marked the bug report WONTFIX.

You can run linux on beige toasters.

The dimensions may not be quite what you think. This paper sounds to me very like technology which is already being used in games engines and robotics applications, eg for lighting models and collision detection.

The idea is that there are various things that make rotations of objects much nicer to handle than translations. But if you add some extra dimensions, you can turn the translations into rotations. It's to do with conformal projection. Translations on a 2D plane are difficult to handle (at least in the framework of Clifford algebra), but if you map that plane onto the surface of a sphere in 3D, then you can identify the 2D translations with rotations on the surface of the 3D sphere. Similarly, you can exchange 3D translations for rotations in 4D, if you create a new dimension which allows you to have an origin for your rotations which is lifted outside "real" 3D space. It turns out to be nice to be able to do rotations about a point at infinity, too, which you can achieve by doing the same trick to go up to 5D. A consequence is that each no-D point in 3D gets represented by a 2D surface in the 5D, a line gets turned into a 3D hypersurface, etc.

The nice thing about rotations is that you can do them with spinors, and you can use spinors to rotate lines and planes directly without having to break them down into points. In the 5D system you can also use geometric algebra to compute directly whether and how different hypersurfaces meet, again without having to compute points and normals and things, which is good for collision detection.

It looks to me that this article is doing pretty much the same trick, turning 4D into 6D, that the geometric algebra people are using turning 3D into 5D.

Here's a paper from a group at Amsterdam university discussing some of this stuff, using it for a ray-tracing program. See also the previous two papers in the series, here. They've also just got a book out, "Geometric Algebra for Computer Science" (links to Amazon etc).

There's also a company called Geomerics based in Cambridge in England that has used the technology to develop a new lighting engine, which it has just released for the Unreal platform.

The dimensions may not be quite what you think. This paper sounds to me very like technology which is already being used in games engines and robotics applications, eg for lighting models and collision detection.

The idea is that there are various things that make rotations of objects much nicer to handle than translations. But if you add some extra dimensions, you can turn the translations into rotations. It's to do with conformal projection. Translations on a 2D plane are difficult to handle (at least in the framework of Clifford algebra), but if you map that plane onto the surface of a sphere in 3D, then you can identify the 2D translations with rotations on the surface of the 3D sphere. Similarly, you can exchange 3D translations for rotations in 4D, if you create a new dimension which allows you to have an origin for your rotations which is lifted outside "real" 3D space. It turns out to be nice to be able to do rotations about a point at infinity, too, which you can achieve by doing the same trick to go up to 5D. A consequence is that each no-D point in 3D gets represented by a 2D surface in the 5D, a line gets turned into a 3D hypersurface, etc.

The nice thing about rotations is that you can do them with spinors, and you can use spinors to rotate lines and planes directly without having to break them down into points. In the 5D system you can also use geometric algebra to compute directly whether and how different hypersurfaces meet, again without having to compute points and normals and things, which is good for collision detection.

It looks to me that this article is doing pretty much the same trick, turning 4D into 6D, that the geometric algebra people are using turning 3D into 5D.

Here's a paper from a group at Amsterdam university discussing some of this stuff, using it for a ray-tracing program. See also the previous two papers in the series, here. They've also just got a book out, "Geometric Algebra for Computer Science" (links to Amazon etc).

There's also a company called Geomerics based in Cambridge in England that has used the technology to develop a new lighting engine, which it has just released for the Unreal platform.

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/

Wiki is easy to cite, I could go hunting through the literature, and discuss direction and causation as a function of quantum mechanics, human social interaction, law, evolution, etc., but for what major reason on Slashdot. And as you know from where I cited, you also have been tarnished by the ick of ease. You are correct, I was thinking about the sign of the coefficient. The philosophical problems from college that I have been left with come from using direction with causation and defaulting into the realm of time. i.e. Correlation is the study of a relationship as it exits, causation is the determination if the variables affect each other, which requires a time period to study. There are some interesting philosophical arguments about backwards causation (http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/archives/fall2001 /entries/causation-backwards/) and Aristotles description of Final Causation v's Efficient Causation. I'm not sure that moving into the area of metaphysics discussing the relationship of direction, causation and time is one that could be easily had here. To be honest I'm scratching the ground of my memories for these concepts, thus the brevity in earlier emails. My very first post intended to simply say that I believed the GP was correct when saying "The bottom line is the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well known". It is a well known correlation. I saw no reason why the GP should have to go look up the definition of correlation.

Sy Borg, the model XQJ-37 Nuclear Powered Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker, says you are oppresing eirs rights with that kind of anti-robot negative body image hate speech.

I thought I had posted this before, but it seems as though Slashdot ate my post...

Anyway, information about PaperBytes is available here. They also made a more sophisticated, 2D version of it, PaperDisk (circa 2001). It had a data density of around 140 bytes per square centimeter, or around 84,461 bytes on an 8.5x11 inch page.

Correct me if I'm wrong but GPL was made for code, not audio.

The reason for this is because there is no free Speech Corpora in a form that can readily be used to create Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition Engines.

Correct me if I'm wrong but GPL was made for code, not audio.

The reason for this is because there is no free Speech Corpora in a form that can readily be used to create Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition Engines.

I made a copy, with images: http://student.science.uva.nl/~sschroev/junk/myspa ce.html
(If the server does not manage I will remove the page)

This study concludes the Flynn effect is a matter of how you tweak the numbers. It's weak enough it's not really worth talking about. Other studies have shown IQs have been declining in the West since the mid to late 90s.

LOL, I guess nobody knows.

Moodgrapher plots the mood levels reported by LiveJournal users in their posts during the last days, updated every 10 minutes. Two numbers are reported by Moodgrapher: the percentage of posts reporting a certain mood (the dashed, black line below), and the "rate of change" of a mood -- the difference between the usual amount of posts with this mood and the amount in a given hour (this is the continuous red line below).

Looks like they are doing this :
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/MoodViews/Moodteller/

what, like Moodgrapher? I don't understand what's so new?

It seems that their mood sensor must not be working, 'cause the "dorky" index for blogspace isn't increasing.

According to their page, under "Which moods are hot?" they list "high"

http://ilps.science.uva.nl/MoodViews/Moodgrapher/? high

Notice the sudden spike in the "high" mood on 4/20? I thought that was interesting.

AFAIK, they're looking at Live Journal tags and then comparing it to their analysis of the posts' text.

I'm not sure how innovative this is, without actually knowing how they guess at the mood. Maybe it's something as simple as training a Bayesian filter and then saying "gosh, look at how accurate the predictions are!" The application would be innovative, but not the method.

It would make for some great targeted advertising:
Feeling depressed: Shop online for clothes!
Feeling in love: Buy your sweet heart some flowers.
etc

AFAIK, they're looking at Live Journal tags and then comparing it to their analysis of the posts' text.

I'm not sure how innovative this is, without actually knowing how they guess at the mood. Maybe it's something as simple as training a Bayesian filter and then saying "gosh, look at how accurate the predictions are!" The application would be innovative, but not the method.

It would make for some great targeted advertising:
Feeling depressed: Shop online for clothes!
Feeling in love: Buy your sweet heart some flowers.
etc

The article focuses on the moodview, which analyzes the tags that bloggers use. While this may lead to some interesting data manipulation procedures, I think that Mood Teller is more interesting, it actually scans the text, and makes a guess on the mood. Then it compares its guess to the actual data that was gathered using the blogger tags.

This can't be right.. the website is still up. Perhaps that is because no-one can find the link To the actual moodviews website.

I can't decide if I should feel guilty for posting this..

Here you go, a picture of four 62PCs sitting on shelves, hooked to an IBM System/34 (IIRC).

http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/s34_dis ks.gif

Note that two are facing the camera, and show the transparency. I can also try to get a few pics of the one @ my college.

If I had written such a poorly argued piece I wouldn't want to put my name to it, much less give my professional credentials. Take the argument about innovation. It's based on a single example! Yes, Linux is not particularly innovative. It originated as a clone, so of course it wasn't innovative. Insofar as open source attempts to replace proprietary software, there has to be a good deal of cloning. That doesn't mean that open source software is intrinsically non-innovative, just that there has been a lot of catching up to do.

Even so, software intended in the first instance to clone proprietary software has often been innovative. Many examples are to be found in the GNU project. GNU "clones" of standard Unix tools are often considered to be superior to the originals. Not only is the implementation superior (typically in having fewer bugs and fewer arbitrary limitations), but they often extend the capabilities of the original tool.

The other place in which innovation is readily seen is in areas in which there is little or no cloning activity because there is little or no proprietary software to catch up to. In my own field of linguistics, for example, there isn't a lot of proprietary software because there isn't much of a market for it. Linguists can't afford expensive software. The more interesting linguistic software that has been coming along is mostly free software. For example, the most advanced database for annotated text is emdros. It isn't a clone of anything. In phonetics the acoustic analysis program of choice currently is probably Praat. It compares favorably to commercial products. (Phonetics software is a bit different from linguistics in general in that it overlaps to a considerable extent with software for use in areas like speech pathology, where there is money to be made.) As a third example, I'll cite my own program redet, which is a regular expression search tool. It has a few features of particular interest to linguists, such as widgets for entering the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ability to intersect user-defined named character classes (which enables matching over feature matrices), but in most respects it is a regular expression tool of the same sort that programmers and various other non-linguists use. There are a number of similar free tools and at least one proprietary commercial product. However you may judge it in comparison to the others, it is unquestionably not a clone. Among its innovative features is the fact that it determines the properties of the regular expression engine that it uses empirically, by running a set of tests.

Basing a sweeping generalization on a single example is a poor practice in general, but in this case it is especially bad because Linux is an atypical example. Much open source software is innovative, and much proprietary software is not.