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GME: The Generic Modeling Environment

"The Generic Modeling Environment is a configurable toolkit for creating domain-specific modeling and program synthesis environments. The configuration is accomplished through metamodels specifying the modeling paradigm (modeling language) of the application domain. The modeling paradigm contains all the syntactic, semantic, and presentation information regarding the domain; which concepts will be used to construct models, what relationships may exist among those concepts, how the concepts may be organized and viewed by the modeler, and rules governing the construction of models. The modeling paradigm defines the family of models that can be created using the resultant modeling environment."

StarUML: The Open Source UML/MDA Platform

"StarUML - The Open Source UML/MDA Platform
StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal of the StarUML project is to build a software modeling tool and also platform that is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as Rational Rose, Together and so on."

Recommended book:
The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software

"Phil's first book covers in depth the issues he has been exploring in his The Business of Software column in Communications of the ACM, namely that software is best thought of as a knowledge storage medium and software development as a knowledge acquisition activity."

I didn't see anywhere in the article that stated the information came from a press conference or a press release. I was unable to search the abstracts on the www.retroconference.org/2006 database (the link is either broken or for conference attendees only) but either of the professors quoted in the article may simply have been submitting there. Bob Mims is a well-known senior journalist for the Salt Lake Tribune.

Paul Savage is a well-published and notable researcher. http://people.chem.byu.edu/pbsavage/publications.h tml

Derya Unutmaz is no different.
https://medschool.mc.vanderbilt.edu/facultydata/ph p_files/show_faculty.php?id3=915

Your accusations of "PR Bullshit" and the lack of "real scientists" are baseless supposition given the dearth of information currently available.

In fact, that proof (.999999... == 1) is a necessary property of decimal expansions that is integral to defining real numbers in terms of basic arithmetic axioms, see:
http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/courses/t hereals/

It's okay to kill animals that aren't cute, for any reason. For example, the Almiqui, this mole, the opossum, and most toads. You won't see any of those on the PETA website. All bugs fall into the ugly category (except butterflies.. awwww), so it's fine to kill them.

Flat fees range from $100 to over $10,000, while royalties to recording owners range between half a cent and three cents for every copy of the track sold. Musical composition licenses typically give "the copyright holder a percentage ownership in the new work's musical composition copyright," as well as an advance of a few thousand dollars on the expected publishing income.

"The idea is neat, though such ideas often come with their own problems--specifically, version control and change management, when the models can't be easily treated as flat text."

Well since for most tools the model is basically an XML file behind-the-scenes. Something like CVS is possible. Just as image-based languages .i.e. Smalltalk can have version control.

There are open-source tools that help one do MDA, like GME, StarUML, and Openmdx. The missing part to all of these is of course TDD (test-driven-development).

For you I'd recommend GME (read the tutorials first) and finish up with Martin Fowler's Language Workbenches

Then I would recommend a DSL and an appropriete support environment(PDF)

*sigh*

These are the real figures from sources other than the Soviet goverment. I'll say again, the death figures have been highly overstated by the media.

Try telling something as stupid and cruel as "Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated" to my grandfather, whose tumorous thyroids were removed earlier this year.

My best wishes to you and your grandfather. I hope his recovery has been swift and as painless as possible.

I realize that you and many others have personal feelings on the issue. What the Soviet government did with Chernobyl was NOT a good thing. Especially to the fire fighters and soldiers who weren't told what the problem was. Or the people allowed to gawk at the pretty lights coming out of the reactor building. Or allowing people to remain long enough to eat and drink from the local resources. Or a million other things the Soviet Union did completely wrong to make the situation worse.

But nothing is gained by overstating the event.

Consider the case of Alexander Yuvchenko. He was in the reactor itself, and suffered FAR worse effects from the event than yourself or your grandfather. Here's what he has to say:

Q: What do you think about nuclear power?

A: I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.

Considering what he has been through, he's a truely amazing man.

In my school (Vanderbilt University), we teach both C++ and Java as part of the CS curriculum, and programs have to be written in LISP and ML as well. We have an entire class dedicated to the basics you mention as part of the required curriculum, and almost all the advanced courses have references to those things. We also have a class specifically about what happens on the CPU level (including writting both bytecode and assembly using -- ha! -- iJVM), and a class specifically about what happens on the OS level (both courses have optional follow-ups that go more in-depth). I don't get the impression our CS curriculum is that unusual. (If you care, the exact requirements are in this PDF under "Computer Science.")

In my school (Vanderbilt University), we teach both C++ and Java as part of the CS curriculum, and programs have to be written in LISP and ML as well. We have an entire class dedicated to the basics you mention as part of the required curriculum, and almost all the advanced courses have references to those things. We also have a class specifically about what happens on the CPU level (including writting both bytecode and assembly using -- ha! -- iJVM), and a class specifically about what happens on the OS level (both courses have optional follow-ups that go more in-depth). I don't get the impression our CS curriculum is that unusual. (If you care, the exact requirements are in this PDF under "Computer Science.")

Immoral, fearless and don't forget:

Smart

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/reporter/?ID=1421 [vanderbilt.edu]

And Regenerating

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/tales_ of_the_x_mice/ [pharyngula.org]

When is someone going to attach laser beams to their heads?

Perhaps the fault with that observation is you have a very small sample space. I attend a top 20 university, and such speech is certainly not uncommon among those who attend here, even those with excellent grades and hard schedules. Nor does Vanderbilt draw upon a large "Valley Girl" population, with a geographically diverse set of attendees. Here, as with most college students that I personally know, the focus on communication is efficiency, not obeying some unfortunate set of rules spawned more by history then clarity. The few professors remaining who focus more on grammatical correctness then on the strength of a student's arguments find themselves with lighter schedules.

My original assertion, though, remains valid. The language of my grandmother (who was a teen in the '30s) is quite different from even the language of my mother (a teen in the '70s), and it certainly bears even less in common with the language of my generation (teens in the '90s). That social pressure evolves the language we all speak is a view with plenty of historical precedent. Have you attempted to read Beowulf in the original Old English recently? If this evolution is understood and accepted, why should we cast doubt on the notion that language would evolve at a much more rapid pace today, as the rate of technological and social change is many times greater then that of the dark ages? Those who resist these changes are often stereotyped as conservatives, and I will shamelessly do the same here: isn't the conservative ideal a laissez-faire free market? If so, why should the evolution of language not be subjected to an intellectual market -- those ideas that survive will obviously have merit, and the contraposition must also hold: those ideas without merit will surely not survive.

See the more informative article here.

FT"It turns out that these were crystals of cadmium and selenium that contain either 33 or 34 pairs of atoms, which happens to be a "magic size" that the crystals form preferentially."

I wonder if the 33-dots shine differently than the 34-dots. If so, I wonder whether material of pure 33-dots (or 34) will have even more useful proprerties, like emitting perfectly predictable spectra. Currently, I believe we use only either lasers or relatively expensive pure-metal machinery for those applications. Such pure white light and reflective ceramics could have interesting architectural and informational applications, especially if they remain as cheap and efficient as the research material.

A second significant difference, according to Rosenthal, is that it should be considerably easier to use the magic-sized quantum dots to make an "electroluminescent device" - a light source powered directly by electricity - because they can be used with a wider selection of binding compounds without affecting their emissions characteristics. Other research groups have reported stimulating quantum dots to produce light by applying an electrical current. Of course, those produced colored light. So, one of the projects at the top of Rosenthal's list is to duplicate that feat with magic-sized nanocrystals to see if they will produce white light when electrically stimulated.

Although they are considerably more expensive than ordinary lights, they are capable of producing about twice as much light per watt as incandescent bulbs

http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/images/news/arti cle_main/quantumdot_led_5.jpg

http://www.google.com/search?q=Michael+Bowers+Vand erbilt+University

http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_quantu mdot_led.htm

The last part of that sentence indeed summarizes the chief obstacle to longevity of any monument.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that such a time-scale has been deliberately studied. A while ago the U.S. Dept. of Energy actually commissioned a study into the problem of marking a long-term nuclear waste repository (WIPP in New Mexico, Yucca Mountain if it ever opens) so as to prevent unintentional intrusion and possible spread of contamination.

Physicist and SF author Gregory Benford was on the team, and his account appears as the first chapter of his book, Deep Time. The book is, it seems, out of print, but still available on Amazon. There is a slightly garbled copy of that chapter online, minus the cool illustrations of several marker concepts. Some illustrations appear in the excerpted report of the WIPP Marker Panel. Fascinating and slightly unsettling stuff.

I realize this is /. humor, but some might be interested in a 50-year longitudinal study called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), hosted currently by Vanderbilt U. It is the longest-term study of its kind, designed to track boys and girs through a 50-year period, and is now in its third decade. The study has spawned over 300 research articles, and is considered by many to be the best collection of data in existence concerning intelligence differences betweens males and females.

Of course, I might be biased since I was a participant in one of the first cohorts, but it's certainly worth a look if you're interested in this kind of thing.

Exactly what 'western country' took over Japan at the beginning of the 20th century? Perhaps you're referring to the Meiji era, in which Japan made efforts to establish itself as a world power. In doing so, they made efforts to embrace more western ideals and customs, as well as moving forward technologically. Censorship is typically acknowledged to have its roots there (although some would rightly argue the motivation was to appear more 'civilized' to the more sexually conservative European countries).

One of the more common myths bandied about is that the US imposed sexual censorship laws on Japan after WWII. The constitution that McArthur mostly wrote had provisions such as the separation from church and state, a right to privacy, and bans on censorship. Article 21 protects secrecy of any means of communication: "No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated." Ironically, the US occupation forces routinely violated these censorship provisions, which makes a certain amount of sense, being that they were occupying forces in a formally hostile nation, I suppose.

It was the Japanese themselves that established precedence for allowing censorship of material deemed to be of a pornographic nature (Article 175 of the Penal Code) by a publisher printing a translated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the case Koyama v. Japan.

I get a bit tired of this constant politically-correct anti-western civilization crap. At the very least, get your facts straight.

http://law.vanderbilt.edu/journal/35-03/Gilmer.pdf
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.htm l

They would send out the same catalog to the same address but would have different prices for the same items depending on how much you had previously bought or were male or female. People began to figure this out and complained.

Link 1 about this issue and another link from a 1998 Forbes article on the issue of price discrimination.

For a more in-depth look at price discrimination, see this link which is a muli-page essay from the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology from 2001.

uhmmm...yeah, so I RTFA and I'm really curious as to where the X-ray laser demo is going to take place... X-ray lasers aren't like pocket laser pointers. There are only a few places in the world that can achieve them. Either you use a MASSIVE laser which focuses on a piece of metal forming an ultrahot plasma that can lase superradiantly (without a resonator cavity because the gain is so high in the lasing plasma) for a few nanoseconds (first demonstrated on the NOVA laser at LLNL in 1984) OR you use a huge ass particle (electrons) accelerator to form a free electron laser with a magnetic undulator. In fact, I don't think X-ray FELs have been achieved anywhere on earth yet, period. I would guess that the only lasers in europe capable of making an X-ray laser are the Vulcan at the CCLRC in the UK and maybe LULI in France. So how is this happening in Brussels?

Hostages to ensure no harm befalls the participants. From an analysis of the Godfather:

http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/mike.shor/courses/ game-theory/docs/lectures078/Godfather.html

The issue may have been already covered on Slashdot. At any rate, these were the findings of the study "Maintainability of the Linux Kernel" http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~srs/preprints/linu x.longitudinal.preprint.pdf at the Vanderbilt University, Nashville:

"We have examined 365 versions of Linux. For every version, we counted the number of
instances of common (global) coupling between each of the 17 kernel modules and all the other
modules in that version of Linux. We found that the number of instances of common coupling
grows exponentially with version number. This result is significant at the 99.99% level, and no
additional variables are needed to explain this increase. On the other hand, the number of lines
of code in each kernel modules grows only linearly with version number. We conclude that,
unless Linux is restructured with a bare minimum of common coupling, the dependencies
induced by common coupling will, at some future date, make Linux exceedingly hard to
maintain without inducing regression faults."

Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?

I'm familiar with journals like Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and American Economic Review (AER), which do have some paid staff, paid for through the American Economics Association dues and subscriptions. I'm also familiar with journals like the IEEE Spectrum and the American Statistics Association American Statistician (AMSTAT), which are glossy magazine with ads, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), which has few or no ads.

Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.

If you were fortunate enough to be attending Vanderbilt University at the time, you could have seen it displayed at the Vanderbilt Computer Store (now out of business).

Infact, there is an update notification. It's not great, perhaps there should be a more obvious one, but here's a screenshot of what I got [on 1.0 PR]

Just one more plug for the Dance Marathon - - it is a great program that does a lot to help sick kids in need.

Just one more plug for the Dance Marathon - - it is a great program that does a lot to help sick kids in need.

Good catch!

I think we've identified "Dianne" as Lindsey from the Vanderbilt Kappa Delta sorority.

Her tag says Lindsey. And the treasurer of Kappa-Delta is named Lindsey Herrel http://www.vanderbilt.edu/KappaDelta/. Apparently she is the organiser of the local dance maraton: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/dance_marathon/. Some slashdotters should go there and check it out for us.

Her tag says Lindsey. And the treasurer of Kappa-Delta is named Lindsey Herrel http://www.vanderbilt.edu/KappaDelta/. Apparently she is the organiser of the local dance maraton: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/dance_marathon/. Some slashdotters should go there and check it out for us.

This woman "Dianne" in the blog is found here from the Vanderbilt Kappa Delta site. Here name is...well, you can figure it out.

This woman "Dianne" in the blog is found here from the Vanderbilt Kappa Delta site. Here name is...well, you can figure it out.

Here you go people.

First a picture from "I Found Some of Your Life"

Dianne

Now a picture from KappaDelta

Lindsey

That's basically the comment that got deleted.

And those are the same person!

One of the comments posted on the blog identified this sorority as the source from another picture of one of the girls that was posted on their site.

This isn't about turning programmers into factory workers. It's about raising the level of abstraction to provide programmers with domain-specific model-oriented languages to program with instead of generic high-level languages like Java.

While domain specific languages are great to use, they are expensive to develop. The Software Factory is supposed to be a high-speed development environment for domain specific languages that will lower the cost of their development.

This work is Microsoft's "embrace and extend" offshoot of the OMG's MDA and a free metaprogrammable domain specific modeling framework from Vanderbilt University called GME.

Learn a little about the relevant technology before you scream "They're turning programmers into assembly line workers!"

The thing about a pulse is the blood vessel valves need only open at the peak pressure of the pulse. The rest of the time the blood pressure can be quite low. On average the blood will still flow the right way.

Whereas for a pulseless heart the blood pressure has to be at the peak continuously.
There are also other issues to do with general plumbing - I read somewhere that heart surgeons have found putting a slight twist in a bypass vein makes it less likely to clog up. Theory is that it causes the blood to swirl and that could help keep the vessels clear and healthy. I can't find the original article (New Scientist) but you can read about it here.

Quote: "They discovered that the smooth shear stress caused three genes to become more active (New Scientist, Science, 5 October 1996, p 17). Two of these code for enzymes that reduce blood clotting and protect cells from damage. The third gene produces a protein vital for the synthesis of nitric oxide, which inhibits the development of thrombi--blood clots--and prevents the surrounding layer of smooth muscle cells from overgrowing the endothelial layer. But the activities of these genes were barely detectable in cells that felt turbulent shear stress or no stress at all. Some stress, it seems, is a good thing. "

So without a pulse it is likely that the cells may not behave correctly.

Well at least you might have some fun with the old-style lie detector tests :).

At least that explains her stories about all the people who "stayed after the evacuation". There's been a careful, ongoing international study done on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Her claims just didn't fit the facts of that study.

Of course, the inconsistencies didn't tip me off either. I just thought that she was stretching things a bit. *shrug*

Dark matter is normal matter.

Depends on which theory of dark matter you subscribe to. I don't think WIMPs could be considered "normal" matter.

Really it depends on what you mean by "normal"....

Compared to dark energy, WIMPs are normal.

In the extremely simplified model of matter I was talking about, I was only considering one parameter-- the equation of state parameter, or, the ratio of the pressure to the energy denstiy. For normal non-relativistic matter, this is zero. It's also zero for cold dark matter. So, as far as this parameter goes, cold dark matter is just like "normal" matter.

For radiation or relativistically moving matter, this parameter is 1/3 (their pressure is 1/3 their energy density in the proper relativistic units).

For dark energy, this parmaeter is something less than -1/3, giving you negative pressure. Vacuum energy-- one possibility (perhaps the leading one) for dark energy has a parmeter of -1.

-Rob

(And in case you wonder if I know what I'm talking about, see http://brahms.phy.vanderbilt.edu/deepsearch/hstpap er/)

What's the problem with sniping? You're given X amount of time to put in a maximum bid you'll pay. If someone else wants to pay more, they'll pay more be it by sniping . . . .

If the seller is using a separate account to drive the price up at the last moment, then this may also be criminal. I'm sure in auction case law there is something to be said for when the seller enters into an auction with intent to drive the price up. At the very least he is not dealing in good faith.

For those of you who despise the Music Industry of colluding to keep the prices artificially high, then out of principle you should be opposed to bid sniping because it supresses competition. Bid sniping suppresses competition the same as price fixing. So, another problem of bid sniping is that it is unfairly (unethically?) suppressing competition.

Interestingly, the issue is brought up that online auctions should not be comparable to real auctions. The suggestion is that, in real auctions when a new high bid is established, the duration of the bidding period is extended. Also, in the vanderbilt link above, ther is mention of the same facet and its solution by "introducing a 'soft ending' mechanism, the company changes the rules of the bidding process so that any offer made in the last hour automatically triggers an extension of the deadline, removing the incentive for sniping."

Radiation levels are currently lower than the background radiation in Norway. The real problem is the insides of buildings which still contain trapped radioisotopes. Also, the nearby groundwater has a higher level of radioisotope contamination than normal. You get some radioisotopes in your food and drink all the time. The issue is that a higher dose of these isotopes you get, the higher your risk of cancer.

And comparing the stuff from a power plant to the stuff from a nuke is kind of stupid. Nukes are meant to make the biggest BOOM possible. They try to use the least materials to do it, and the force required tends to break the materials down into fairly non-dangerous stuff.

If you'd like to convince people of your point of view, perhaps starting out defensively with "Maybe the fact I am not as big a linux nerd as you" is not such a good idea either.

After you've had a couple of years of college, which I venture is still in your future, you may want to check out the IPCC reports here.

In the meantime, you will be happier if you stop demeaning yourself and aggrandizing your opinons. Here's a suggested alternative:

I've heard a lot about climate variations. What makes people think today's changes are anything special? Is it true that 15,000 scientists signed a petition against the Kyoto accord? Doesn't that show that all of this is nonsense?

I suspect this is all overblown fearmongering, just like Cold War rhetoric.

If you had said something like that I'd respond:

Well, both the cold war and climate change are longer stories than I care to go over right now. To be sure, there was overblown rhetoric in both cases, but notice that in the cold war, a nuclear exchange was in fact very narrowly averted on at least one occasion we know about.

The infamous 15,000 signatories, though, is a story that needs retelling. See here and herefor the whole story. Essentially if you send out a big enough bulk mailing, you'll get a few signatures, especially if you pretend to have more authoritative evidence than you have. In fact very few actual scientists are known to have signed the petition.

In fact, though, while this is a big problem for the world, it's not your problem as I see it. If your lack of self-respect even shows up in your Slashdot postings, real life must be awfully hard for you, especially if my suspicion that you're still in high school is true.

Please stop it with the "kick me" signs and try lightening up a bit on your opinions. Try to remember that life is, if not a miracle, at least a highly improbable stroke of good luck, and cheer up, okay?

Actually, there is scientific evidence that not only is low-level radiation exposure harmless, it is actually good for you, and the optimium level is well above the normal background radiation.

Here Here and here for example.

It is true that any ionizing radiation can damage cellular material, but the human immune system seems to derive benefit from practicing fending off such low-level damage.

The evididence is not conclusive for low-level radiation benefits, but there are several good studies that suggest that it is, and not one scientific study that suggest the opposite as far as I know. If so, I would like to see it. Nearly all nuclear radiation threat assesments is based on extrapolation from high-level radiation exposes.

Just look at what happens when we allow people to make an infinite number of choices. You suddenly find that they can chop up a sphere and rebuild it as two. That's not right!

I didn't even see the pdf link on that page, hence the apology for lack of detail.

Many people are campaigning to get the plant closed down though. The argument is that it is a bad idea to ship very radioactive materials around the globe. There has also been some trouble with governments not wanting to take their waste back from us as per their contractural obligations. Some links below.

Pollution crossing international borders

Might not make any money

Deliberate falsification of reprocessing records for a MOX shipment to Japan.

Quoting chapter 6:

Some tell that 400.000 dead, soyuzchernobyl report of 300.000 people that died since 1986 and this is not over, in 30 years people will still die

These numbers are WILDLY inflated! The number of deaths from radiation are probably rather in the dozens. Check here, or here

However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community.

BSD licensed projects are often funded by loose consortiums of companies who want to able to build proprietary products on top of the open source project. One example that comes to mind is ACE and TAO which has many corporate sponsors and is incorporated into several products - both open source and proprietary. IIRC, Doug Schmidt, the project leader (and author of gperf - so he certainly understands both the GPL and BSD licenses), felt that a GPL license for ACE would have made it harder to attract corporate sponsors.

This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this.

In practice, while consortium members or other users may want to use the BSD'd product in a proprietary product of their own, they still do not want the headache of maintaining a local fork of the BSD'd code. Most are more than happy to return bug fixes and enhancements back to the the BSD'd code maintainers even though they are not strictly required to.