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Technically, blocking those isn't censorship. It's simply following the law.

Since when are law-following and censorship mutually exclusive? In China, for example, failure to censor is illegal. In the US, look up the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which made it illegal to criticize the government. So, again, censorship was following the law.

Even now, censorship is following the law. The Communications Decency Act, when it was in effect, was a legal censor. Legal censorship is not even always "bad": one could argue (correctly, I think) that anti-child-porn statues are a form of censorship, but I'm inclined to agree that preventing the exploitation of children to young to know what they're doing is worth the limits these laws place on freedom of expression.

I'm distinctly reminded of this:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/nazsov/nonagres. htm

As for the field of displaying quantitative information, the recommended books are Tufte . It is actually quite hard to create intuitively understood data visualisations because our eye-brain can only measure simple things like intensity, distance, etc. That's why things like pie charts where the angle is directly proportional to the propoertion works. All the other data visualisation techniques (parallel coordinates, tensors, etc) require a fair amount of training and patterning before you can pick up the meaning. A geologist (or related discpline) would be able to look at a contour map and be able to "see" in eir mind's eye the slope and elevation. Lesser mortals would probably require a pan of a 3D VRML model and even then have difficulty in recalling specific features. Adding extra layers or texture maps might be aesthetically pleasing (cough*QUAKE*cough) but doesn't really add any extra information.

LL

This Slashdot lameness filter is reeally bothering me due to "junk character post", so here is just a link to a more scientific article just search for "Sheldon Schultz" on it.

In case this link was too much for you, how about a summary?

Despite the huge losses suffered by the 33-year-old US, they won rights to the Northwest Territory.

How did you rate a +5 with your lame, superficial opinions? The United States "is such a big place", and you've only seen Bangor! Try New York City, or Philadelphia, or Dallas.

*Yawn*

Okay, this is probably a troll anyway, but worth replying to just for the hell of it. Zeroth of all, you can't disprove creationism. Proof of the antithesis tends to do this for most people, but the article was crap anyway.

First of all, read a fucking book (and yes, I've read a considerable number of creationist screeds. I have not yet read Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box", but I will try to soon- at least he's a biochemist, not a fruitcake who thinks Sunday school is a substitute for real physics, geology, chemistry, and biology courses). I suggest "The Diversity of Life", by Edward O. Wilson, one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of our time. "Evolutionary biologist" in this case means "someone who studies organisms from an evolutionary perspective", not "dogmatic anti-religious Richard Dawkins wannabe". Wilson presents the best model of evolution and speciation I've ever seen. Or, if that's a bit too biased and scientific for you, try a description of evolution by reasoning alone (well, that's all the proof you have for the existence of a God)- Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura", published 2000 years ago.

Second of all, take some classes. Doesn't your local public 4-year/community college offer extension courses? As I mentioned above, basic and organic chemistry, fundamental geology (okay. . . I haven't taken that yet either), calculus-based physics, basic biology, genetics, and biochemistry are really a must. Then you can shut the fuck up about "Second Law of Thermodynamics contradicts evolution".

Third of all, why don't you give *any* proof of the bullshit statements you just made- like dating techniques being inherently unreliable, or the strong evidence of "young earth theory". I've heard arguments for the first (whose only valid point is that yes, dating techniques are fallible), but the second is pretty loopy.

I welcome your flames. Bring it on.

Nat

Not to mention that the DMCA is just the implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty that the US signed, along with many other countries. So there's a lot of political motivation to not overturn DMCA.
--

But suffice it to say that even if DMCA is struck down, there will be a lot more fighting to do.
--

There's an great writeup by eries at kuro5hin about this issue. It also has a very interesting poll accompanying the article on how many k5ers would be willing to donate to the cause.

The Centre for Advanced Instructional Media at Yale has published a book in both online and paper form. It is entitled Web Style Guide, and has been an invaluble resource to me and my students (i'm an IT Technologies instructor).

It assumes you already have some understanding of many of the topics it covers (i.e. it's not a guide for rank newbies) - which is one of the things that makes it good. It covers everything from interface design, to information chunking, and beyond. Best part? Free.

What it isn't, is an HTML guide. You'll learn no HTML as a result of this manual. What it is, is a theoretical and conceptual (with practical examples and follow-through) look at what designing for the Web is all about.

I would definatly recommend that every web designer, or anybody who works with the web, give it a read. If you're interested in making a government website, you should find a lot of the manual speaks to the types of concerns you have.


.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

The Centre for Advanced Instructional Media at Yale has published a book in both online and paper form. It is entitled Web Style Guide, and has been an invaluble resource to me and my students (i'm an IT Technologies instructor).

It assumes you already have some understanding of many of the topics it covers (i.e. it's not a guide for rank newbies) - which is one of the things that makes it good. It covers everything from interface design, to information chunking, and beyond. Best part? Free.

What it isn't, is an HTML guide. You'll learn no HTML as a result of this manual. What it is, is a theoretical and conceptual (with practical examples and follow-through) look at what designing for the Web is all about.

I would definatly recommend that every web designer, or anybody who works with the web, give it a read. If you're interested in making a government website, you should find a lot of the manual speaks to the types of concerns you have.


.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

The Centre for Advanced Instructional Media at Yale has published a book in both online and paper form. It is entitled Web Style Guide, and has been an invaluble resource to me and my students (i'm an IT Technologies instructor).

It assumes you already have some understanding of many of the topics it covers (i.e. it's not a guide for rank newbies) - which is one of the things that makes it good. It covers everything from interface design, to information chunking, and beyond. Best part? Free.

What it isn't, is an HTML guide. You'll learn no HTML as a result of this manual. What it is, is a theoretical and conceptual (with practical examples and follow-through) look at what designing for the Web is all about.

I would definatly recommend that every web designer, or anybody who works with the web, give it a read. If you're interested in making a government website, you should find a lot of the manual speaks to the types of concerns you have.


.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

It absolutely is. However, First amendment rights don't apply in schools. Whether or not this is a good thing is debateable, but it has been held in court that in a school, freedom of speech can be revoked if there is justifiable educational benenefit. More information along these lines can be found at http://www.freedomforum.org/FreedomForum/resources /hs_and_coll/Youth_Guide_to_1A.htm l. If the link doesn't work, copy the text, for some reason Slashdot is adding an extra space in html... I don't know why.

Another interesting reading can be found at:

http://www.yal e.e du/ynhti/curriculum/units/1992/1/92.01.08.x.html

Basically, the school can do whatever it wants. I personally disagree with what they have done in this case. I am opposed to the idea of a homecoming king and queen altogether. I support this kid, what he did was impressive. However, I think he's may find difficulty in the legal department. Granted, his case is less severe than the examples I've referenced, but there is a precendent that is not in his favor.

Captain_Frisk

The actual paper discussed in the article can be found here .

(1) proteins are not static structures, they tend to change conformations in response to stimuli like binding to a ligand, or changes in the electrostatic microenvironment around them.

(2) many proteins don't like to fold in isolation, they require the presence of other proteins that they naturally interact with.

(3) protein sequence is linear (so-called primary structure); while local structural details may be predictable with some reliability (the so-called secondary structure, things like alpha helices and beta sheets), ultimately it is the final 3D fold with long range interactions (tertiary and higher structures) that form the final structure. You can imagine that the longer the protein, the harder it is to fold, due to the increased number of potential tertiary interactions.

determination of the structure of a protein, and even relatively large protein complexes is not as technically challenging as it used to be for biophysicists these days. Tom Steitz's group at Yale has managed to crystalize and solve the structure of the large ribosomal subunit (a **HUGE** molecule as far as the average biological molecular complex goes) at 2.4 angstrom resolution, which in itself is a monumental feat. I would not be surprised if Steitz is in contention for the Nobel prize for this work.

The holy grail is eventually being able to reverse engineer a protein or ligand that is able to bind to part of a particular protein, using rational design. This is much harder than solving a structure. Pharmaceutical companies would love to be able to design this type of molecule for use as designer drugs, since it would take away much of the cost of R&D through trial and error. Big companies such as Merck basically screen for drugs the way Thomas Edison used to test materials; by having a warehouse full of stuff and testing it all.

That being said, it's still a cool project :)

The man was a genius. End of story.

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 14,...
Reading about his house and habits reminds me of my childhood-favorite biography of Thomas Edison.

I should have expected that from 'timothy'. Try reading more history and you'll find that Edison's biographies are often inflated ego trips for the man, and mysteriously choose to avoid talking about Nikolai Tesla. Check out this, this, and this to understand why. If it were up to Edison we'd have *no* electricity because he wanted us to use a DC system simply because it was his idea. 'NIH' (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a bad thing.

Of course MS Research uses boxes running varieties of Unix as well as MS operating systems. Why on earth shouldn't they? They also use GNU Emacs under both Unix and Windows 2000. Again, why not?

If you want to see some more freely available source code targeted at a range of operating systems and written by the MSR Cambridge people, head over to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler page. While you are there, check out the Hall of Fame.

Paul

Second is that half of the pieces that go into a big library management system (including the catalog part) are really generic business systems: EDI, invoicing, accounting, etc., but they haven't been abstracted out of the realm of our systems vendors. So the level of standards followed there is minimal so those modules generally don't interoperate with our trading partners (i.e. internal payment systems and external suppliers). Lots of redundant keying and more crappy systems to maintain there, all of which is typically deeply and proprietarily tied into the catalog data.

All that said -- and to our vendors' credit they are tending to get better these days -- we've been sharing catalog data like hackers are sharing code for over 100 years. We've been doing it online for about 35 years, but the way we do it now is pretty much the same way we've been doing it for those 35 years. i.e. largely dependent on one of two .orgs/vendors to be a clearinghouse for sharing catalog data. But those folks disappear if they can't sell the data back to us after we create it for them. So nobody running a library wants them to disappear. Especially because we've got to handle one-of-a-kind rare items in big research libraries as well as unusual local items in public libraries and so on.

Imho the solution is to first outsource all the standard business stuff to vendors+free software that can do the same job with existing standards-based tools. Then abstract away as much as possible of the catalog data into free references sources shared and maintained by the library community (think: you could run your own amazon.com recommendations site, etc.). This is what we're trying to do (shameless plug alert) with the jake project for journals. Same thing applies for books, although there are probably >=100M records to normalize.

If we can get that done, then anybody could hack up a gtk+ front end to the free, shared catalog, and pick and choose the items you have yourselves. It would work sorta like dict.org or jake. Just imagine how much easier it will be to search for ebooks in gnutella once this is done... :)

author: Pulina Borsook
publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1891620789
pages: 256
rating: 8/10
summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech

I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.

This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.

Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.

To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.

After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.

One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."

As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?

I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.

Haskell has CGI and animation libraries, as well as a system for writing music. There are foreign library interfaces and highly optimizing compilers, database interfaces and graph visualizers.
Libraries and Tools in Haskell
Haskell in Practice
Here are some books and papers about how to program in Haskell and functional languages in general.
I particularly recommend Hudak's book; Paul himself is a very clear teacher and lecturer, as is Zhong Shao, who does research in ML (Standard ML of NJ). I think SML is the only functional language around whose semantics are completely specified.
Follow these links and learn about Erlang (in massive production use at Ericsson), high level abstraction through functions defined via structural induction over datatypes, monads, layered functionality used to build parsers (via parser combinators), and a type theory for object-oriented programming.

Haskell has CGI and animation libraries, as well as a system for writing music. There are foreign library interfaces and highly optimizing compilers, database interfaces and graph visualizers.
Libraries and Tools in Haskell
Haskell in Practice
Here are some books and papers about how to program in Haskell and functional languages in general.
I particularly recommend Hudak's book; Paul himself is a very clear teacher and lecturer, as is Zhong Shao, who does research in ML (Standard ML of NJ). I think SML is the only functional language around whose semantics are completely specified.
Follow these links and learn about Erlang (in massive production use at Ericsson), high level abstraction through functions defined via structural induction over datatypes, monads, layered functionality used to build parsers (via parser combinators), and a type theory for object-oriented programming.

From the Yale Directory

David Gelernter - gelernter-david@yale.edu

name: David Gelernter
title: Prof Computer Science
email_to: gelernter-david@yale.edu
department: Computer Science
office_phone: (203)432-1278
office_location: AKW 107



So, yes, as hard as it may be to beleive, this guy is a CS prof. Maybe he teaches those ethics classes that most schools seem to be requiring of seniors nowadays...

From the Yale Directory

David Gelernter - gelernter-david@yale.edu

name: David Gelernter
title: Prof Computer Science
email_to: gelernter-david@yale.edu
department: Computer Science
office_phone: (203)432-1278
office_location: AKW 107



So, yes, as hard as it may be to beleive, this guy is a CS prof. Maybe he teaches those ethics classes that most schools seem to be requiring of seniors nowadays...

The only truly new paradigm I've come across in a while is called lifestreams, which is based on the ideas of Yale's David Gelernter. It basically replaces the spatial metaphor, on which conventional "desktop"-type GUIs are based, with a chronological one. Interesting.

Ever thought how modern computing would be different if it was women dominated by the start?

I always find these postulations ridiculous. Human nature is similar enough between genders and external factors are constant, so it's not like we would program computers by arranging flowers on screen and all computers would crash once a month. The only difference that would matter is that we would all be reading an article about how guys don't want to be geeks.

And if you are interested in the influence on early computing by a woman, look up Grace Hopper. Of course geeks might not be too happy about her support of COBOL.

I don't understand why people bother simulating nuclear reactions. Now, before you think i'm being facetious, let me explain. Nuclear physics is hard (as if you needed me to tell you that). Most of the theories as to how the fundamental interactions work are flawed. For example, the liquid drop type models (on which most current simulations are based) are incredibly simplistic. They don't even take into account the Pauli exclusion principle, instead relying on a fudge factor to ensure that their particles follow the Fermi-Dirac distribution.

Thus, my argument is: you're better off doing the experiment.

I would like, if I may, to bring to the forefront a historical document which I feel has particular bearing on this matter.

Most especially each party shall have a right to carry their own produce, manufactures & merchandise, in their own or any other vessels to any parts of the dominions of the other, where it shall be lawful for all the subjects or citizens of that other, freely to purchase them; and thence to take the produce, Manufactures & merchandise of the other, which all the said citizens of subjects shall in like manner be free to sell them, paying in both cases such duties, charges & fees only, as are or shall be paid by the most favored nation. Nevertheless the king of Prussia and the United States, & each of them, reserve to themselves the right where any nation restrains the transportation of merchandise to the vessels of the country of which it is the growth or manufacture, to establish against such nation retaliating regulations; and also the right to prohibit, in their respective countries, the importation & exportation of all merchandise whatsoever, when reasons of state shall require it. In this case the subjects or citizens of either of the contracting parties shall not import nor export the merchandise prohibited by the other; but if one of the contracting parties permits any other nation to import or export the same merchandise, the citizens or subjects of the other shall immediately enjoy the same liberty.

This is Article 4 of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1785. This is not revisionist history - it is directly quoted from historical documents. Make of it what you will. Seeing as the U.S. government played a rather conspicuous role in the development of the internet, I would encourage everyone to take a look at this treaty, which bears information that is relevant to current internet law.

Everybody knows that France has faced a similar problem for years. The French People keep using English words like "internet" and "computer," which goes against their policy of having a Perfect Language.

Thank goodness somebody found a solution. Simply declare the language dead and all is solved.

Now, of course the article is just the opinion of the writer, and not worth the electrons it's printed on until some judge reads it and finds its arguments swaying. (If any lawyers are reading this, I'd be interested to hear what you think of that article.) But it's interesting to take a look at the precedents involved.

Actually. The professor isn't teaching OS this year. This was last year :)

This year, we're working in nachos. Class homepage

Take a look here.

While the Beowulf patches come out of NASA, there's a whole bunch of stuff out there which isn't written in the US at all. For example, the best session clustering technology for Linux is MOSIX which is put out by Hebrew University in Isreal. To my knowledge this isn't export restricted at all, and is released as a set of patches against the main kernel tree. Anyone with basic System Administration skills could set up a Mosix cluster pretty quickly.

If you're less interested in interactive clustering and need computational load balancing instead, there's a whole slew of batch queuing packages available from GNU QUEUE to the many derivatives of NQS out there. Here's the a href="http://www.cmpharm.ucsf.edu/~srp/batch/syste ms.html">Yahoo Batch Queuing Page" for a short list of many popular packages.

I don't think the US government could stop any nation from purchasing commodity hardware manufactured from around the world, installing a basic Linux or BSD distribution, and setting up a batch queue or other type of basic cluster. Never mind that a sufficiently serious government could just up and write their own... in my department at BBN (Speech and Natural Language Processing) we use an internally written batch manager which is surprisingly simple... all written in C.

What would be really interesting to see would be a book discussing Telsa's patents from a technical and technology impact point of view, and say with a companion volume that has copies of all said patents. Here is the URL of a page at Yale which deals with the Tesla issue.

GOBBLE A DICK

BOTS CLICK HERE. Q MEANS QUEER - WHICH IS YOU. I AM EREETO.

just in case that "aya" is spam prot

1. IMO, The Star Wars Crap Made Out of Legos is clearly some of the most interesting and best made of the new generation of Star Wars Crap.
   
2. The mark of a good operating system is not "tight code" but "tight design." What follows is a list of design points, with OSes having interesting solutions in parentheses where relevant.
   
   • Does the kernel manage system resources properly? [Win9x and MacOS What security model does the kernel present? [EROS]
     
   • Does the kernel manage time well? N.B. "Time" means both "latencies" as well as "handing events and doing work over time." [BeOS]
     
   • What namespace abstraction is presented to software in a system and/or to a user of a system? [Plan 9, Lifestreams]
     
   
   And the list goes on... but this should get the idea across. While this system may be free, what does it offer that the community needs?
   

Of course, it is about RNA, and not DNA, but still, the article wasn't basically wrong.

Regards,

January

The problem is that most of the really exciting research results don't work above liquid nitrogen temperatures, and some don't even work above liquid HELIUM (4K) temperatures!

But I actually saw the quantum dot working, and helped perform some of the analysis of it (on some good old VAX hardware!) I also helped construct a custom I-V trace unit which used a wiggle voltage to produce better curve traces of the results. Some of these novel quantum semiconductor devices (see, for instance, the I-V trace of this one are actually capable of operating in more than just one single state -- the multiple plateaus in the 9 T graph show that this device can operate as a trinary logic device if you know what you're doing. Then again, it requires a 9 Tesla field to bring out these characteristics...

As I've said before on /., we need to solve the temperature and interconnect issues. Interconnect may have a new solution, per that article on molecular computing posted a few days ago here. Our materials science friends, though, need to keep making progress on materials which possess these unique characteristics at room temperature.

I read the article and came up with more questions than answers... How does it work? What are the 'off' and 'on' states? How do you read/write it? How fast can you cycle it?

I followed the link from the article to 'Mark A. Reed', one of the scientists mentioned. A quote from his personal site (deep breath): "My areas of research are quantum electron device physics; tunneling and transport phenomena in semiconductor heterojunction and nanostructured systems; reduced dimensionality effects in nanostructures; resonant tunneling transistors, circuits, and novel heterojunction devices; investigations into the physics and technology of quantum-confined electronic devices; investigation of resonant tunneling physics in a variety of heterojunction systems and materials, including 0D quantum dots and resonant tunneling transistors; and molecular electronics, nanotechnology."

...wheeze...

OK, now I know as much as I did before, and am buzz-worded to death besides. So I drilled deeper into the site and found some pictures of his current work that do give some clues. Most interesting is the illustration titled "Molecules in nanopores."

And, of course, there is his List of Publications which I probably wouldn't understand anyway. Even if they were online... Perhaps someone more competent can read these, and peruse the 'Break Junction Lab' description for us.

My take at this point is: the guy probably knows what he is talking about, but I still don't have enough information to determine if the end result would work well enough to actually be useful in '3 to 5 years'. The thing is, there are plenty of technologies that work. But only a few of them have survived the true test of fitness in the marketplace.

Jack

I read the article and came up with more questions than answers... How does it work? What are the 'off' and 'on' states? How do you read/write it? How fast can you cycle it?

I followed the link from the article to 'Mark A. Reed', one of the scientists mentioned. A quote from his personal site (deep breath): "My areas of research are quantum electron device physics; tunneling and transport phenomena in semiconductor heterojunction and nanostructured systems; reduced dimensionality effects in nanostructures; resonant tunneling transistors, circuits, and novel heterojunction devices; investigations into the physics and technology of quantum-confined electronic devices; investigation of resonant tunneling physics in a variety of heterojunction systems and materials, including 0D quantum dots and resonant tunneling transistors; and molecular electronics, nanotechnology."

...wheeze...

OK, now I know as much as I did before, and am buzz-worded to death besides. So I drilled deeper into the site and found some pictures of his current work that do give some clues. Most interesting is the illustration titled "Molecules in nanopores."

And, of course, there is his List of Publications which I probably wouldn't understand anyway. Even if they were online... Perhaps someone more competent can read these, and peruse the 'Break Junction Lab' description for us.

My take at this point is: the guy probably knows what he is talking about, but I still don't have enough information to determine if the end result would work well enough to actually be useful in '3 to 5 years'. The thing is, there are plenty of technologies that work. But only a few of them have survived the true test of fitness in the marketplace.

Jack

I read the article and came up with more questions than answers... How does it work? What are the 'off' and 'on' states? How do you read/write it? How fast can you cycle it?

I followed the link from the article to 'Mark A. Reed', one of the scientists mentioned. A quote from his personal site (deep breath): "My areas of research are quantum electron device physics; tunneling and transport phenomena in semiconductor heterojunction and nanostructured systems; reduced dimensionality effects in nanostructures; resonant tunneling transistors, circuits, and novel heterojunction devices; investigations into the physics and technology of quantum-confined electronic devices; investigation of resonant tunneling physics in a variety of heterojunction systems and materials, including 0D quantum dots and resonant tunneling transistors; and molecular electronics, nanotechnology."

...wheeze...

OK, now I know as much as I did before, and am buzz-worded to death besides. So I drilled deeper into the site and found some pictures of his current work that do give some clues. Most interesting is the illustration titled "Molecules in nanopores."

And, of course, there is his List of Publications which I probably wouldn't understand anyway. Even if they were online... Perhaps someone more competent can read these, and peruse the 'Break Junction Lab' description for us.

My take at this point is: the guy probably knows what he is talking about, but I still don't have enough information to determine if the end result would work well enough to actually be useful in '3 to 5 years'. The thing is, there are plenty of technologies that work. But only a few of them have survived the true test of fitness in the marketplace.

Jack

I read the article and came up with more questions than answers... How does it work? What are the 'off' and 'on' states? How do you read/write it? How fast can you cycle it?

I followed the link from the article to 'Mark A. Reed', one of the scientists mentioned. A quote from his personal site (deep breath): "My areas of research are quantum electron device physics; tunneling and transport phenomena in semiconductor heterojunction and nanostructured systems; reduced dimensionality effects in nanostructures; resonant tunneling transistors, circuits, and novel heterojunction devices; investigations into the physics and technology of quantum-confined electronic devices; investigation of resonant tunneling physics in a variety of heterojunction systems and materials, including 0D quantum dots and resonant tunneling transistors; and molecular electronics, nanotechnology."

...wheeze...

OK, now I know as much as I did before, and am buzz-worded to death besides. So I drilled deeper into the site and found some pictures of his current work that do give some clues. Most interesting is the illustration titled "Molecules in nanopores."

And, of course, there is his List of Publications which I probably wouldn't understand anyway. Even if they were online... Perhaps someone more competent can read these, and peruse the 'Break Junction Lab' description for us.

My take at this point is: the guy probably knows what he is talking about, but I still don't have enough information to determine if the end result would work well enough to actually be useful in '3 to 5 years'. The thing is, there are plenty of technologies that work. But only a few of them have survived the true test of fitness in the marketplace.

Jack

Ever since then, D has been quirky. Talks, but awkwardly, and always and only just about things that interest her -- tiedye and wiccanism and such. She's pretty clearly brilliant, but always fixated on this or that to the point that it gets frustrating.

You have to understand that Asperger's doesn't mean Rain Man; the "high functioning" modifier is important. In D's case, she has held down jobs, lived on her own, done well in school, had boyfriends, etc. She's 25 or so now and we've only realized there could be a clinical explanation for her oddities for a few months now. Alot of the people that have this condition, if they are anything like D, would for most purposes blend right in with "normal", functioning society.

And this has nothing to do with "labelling the geek phenomenon." Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that there are people -- some but not all of them programmers -- that have a condition and can seek help for it. No one is trying to "weed out the geeks" here, sorry, but you're paranoid.

And in response to Bruce Parens' points -- again, it does not mean non-functional behavior. Aspberger's patients function more or less just like "normal" people -- in the case of D, it took 25 years or so for anyone to realize that there was anything unusual here. Don't associate this with previous conceptions of autism, because on a functional level it seems to be quite different. People with Asperger's are likely to talk just as much as anyone else -- the difference is more in what they will talk about, that mainly being themselves and the things they are interested in and not much else.

For more information, you can look at a study from CMU that deals with Aspberger's patients & computer usage, or a more general explanatory link on the condition at Yale University.

In particular, he notes that

When we write programs that "learn," it turns out that we do and they don't.

This goes along nicely with Douglas Hofstadter in his book ``Creative Analogies and Fluid Concepts'' where he outlines areas that are critical to language translation that happen to be real tough to even think about algorithms to process.

Hofstadter asks the question: ``What is the Chicago of Russia?'' which does not admit unambiguous results. I have parallelled this somewhat with the question What is the Moscow of New York? which has too many potentially valid answers for comfort.

I think "Star Trek Computing" is about as near as "Star Trek Economics," which is to say, no way soon.

There are certainly things to be learned; it's mostly humans that are doing the learning, not the computers...

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You mean, I assume, Grace Murray Hopper.

It was very interesting to see this post, as I am attempting to use the internet for just such a campaign -- http://www.yale.edu/gaso

It seems to be a fantastic medium (Marshall McLuhan, anybody?), in many ways the perfect means for a zero/low budget effort to be effective against enormous budget opposition. However, I wonder if Mesrrs. Seiger and Safda have an obvious solution to an obvious logistical problem -- those people who make the effort to visit a political webpage are either (1) predisposed to agree, and the visit was therefore largely commiserative, or (2) the effort's opponents who are performing reconnaissance, and aren't likely to be converted. In order for a webpage to make any difference, it must be visited by those who are "on the fence," and even more difficult, the apathetic. As visiting the webpage takes active effort from the audience, it seems that it can only be effective if it is coupled with in-your-face advertising, which (1) I despise, (2) seems to defeat much of the point of having used the web in the first place, and (3) precludes small budget efforts from having the voice that they had at the beginning of this post.

Is there an obvious approach that I'm missing?

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World Wide Web pages are different from books and other documents in one crucial respect: hypertext links allow users to access a single Web page with no preamble. Thus Web pages need to be more independent than pages in a conventional book.

There's more info at the site, if you want to read it. It's an excellent resource for basic HTML design principles.

Pardon me if I'm stepping on someone's Intellectual Property for not linking to their home page or asking permission before I included the link here.