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Domain: uva.nl
Stories and comments across the archive that link to uva.nl.
Stories · 9
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Now Published: Study Showing Pirate Bay Blockade Has No Effect
First time accepted submitter Neelix21 writes "Last week a Dutch court decided that the blockade of the Pirate Bay website was ineffective and disproportionate. The academic study that measured this effect has now been published: 'This paper studies the effectiveness of this approach towards online copyright enforcement, using both a consumer survey and a newly developed non-infringing technology for BitTorrent monitoring. While a small group of respondents download less from illegal sources or claim to have stopped doing so, no impact is found on the percentage of the Dutch population downloading from illegal sources.' The torrent monitoring technique also shows that if you are downloading a public torrent, anyone can find out." Happily, the linked paper is not paywalled. -
Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets
An anonymous reader writes "Even humans sometimes fail to recognize sarcasm and irony; can machines do better? An algorithm that identifies sarcastic tweets (PDF) on Twitter and sarcastic sentences in product reviews on Amazon will be presented next week in the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, DC, and in the Computational Natural Language Learning in Sweden in July. A team from the Hebrew University, Israel, has developed an algorithm that identifies sarcastic sentences by using a machine learning technique in which a small number of sarcastic sentences act as seeds for the software to learn and generalize upon. The algorithm can then identify sarcastic sentences that are nothing like the examples. The variety of recognized sarcastic sentences is impressive, though the results are not perfect. But again, we don't do it so well ourselves, do we?" -
The End Of Gravity As a Fundamental Force
An anonymous reader writes "At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscopic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations." Here are two blog entries discussing Verlinde's proposal in somewhat more accessible terms.
Update: 01/12 04:48 GMT by KD : Dr. Verlinde has put up a blog post explaining in simpler terms the logic of the gravity from entropy paper. He introduces it with: "Because the logic of the paper is being misrepresented in some reports, I add here some clarifications." -
The End Of Gravity As a Fundamental Force
An anonymous reader writes "At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscopic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations." Here are two blog entries discussing Verlinde's proposal in somewhat more accessible terms.
Update: 01/12 04:48 GMT by KD : Dr. Verlinde has put up a blog post explaining in simpler terms the logic of the gravity from entropy paper. He introduces it with: "Because the logic of the paper is being misrepresented in some reports, I add here some clarifications." -
Problems in Computer Conservation
sobachatina writes "The Computer museum at The University of Amsterdam has an interesting page with examples of the problems that they run into maintaining 20+ year old hardware such as rubber rollers from card readers melting or mold growing inside CRT terminals.I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!" -
Problems in Computer Conservation
sobachatina writes "The Computer museum at The University of Amsterdam has an interesting page with examples of the problems that they run into maintaining 20+ year old hardware such as rubber rollers from card readers melting or mold growing inside CRT terminals.I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!" -
Problems in Computer Conservation
sobachatina writes "The Computer museum at The University of Amsterdam has an interesting page with examples of the problems that they run into maintaining 20+ year old hardware such as rubber rollers from card readers melting or mold growing inside CRT terminals.I hate it when I get mold growing inside my monitor!" -
What GUIs Came Before X11?
Avi Bercovich asks: "We all know the base facts about X11. Built by Scheifler and Gettys et al at MIT and DEC, for look 'n feel impaired, networked bitmap displays. But what about the details? Now it would seem from what I've read that it has roots in X10 and something called W. But I've had a hard time finding out anything online about these ancestral systems. Where are there articles published on these systems? So who's got the lowdown, URL-pointers or juicy personal stories on our GUI/Windowing pre-history?" (There's more...)"I'm sure that X11/10 and W weren't the only windowing systems around. I know there was something called NeWS - a sort of windowing postscript - that according to legend - duked it out with X11 and lost. Even earlier there where 'sketchpad' and the famous Engelbart 5 fingered mouse demo, but I think that those systems were developed even before we where blessed with Unix. And what _was_ XEROX up to when Jobs & Co. came to visit? Either way, there must've been a whole bunch of proprietary and/or research GUI windowing environments out there before X and its extentions swept the Unix board."
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Fred Brooks wins Turing Award (Nobel of Computing)
pjones writes "Many of us know Fred Brooks from his book, Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, and from his coining of the term "computer architecture." He is also famous for Brook's Law which every manager should learn and be forced to repeat daily. So it's good news to report that Brookes has been awarded the Turing Prize from ACM. Brook also managed the development of the IBM 360 Operating System." I also heartily recommend Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution which he co-wrote. An excellent look at how the efforts of the '60s influenced later developments.