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FWIW, I happen to be the organizer at York University, which is where it's being held. I'd be happy to answer any venue-related questions that anyone has. Just post them in a reply to this message.

Keep in mind that I don't anything about the conference proper (nor do I use Debian). Joe Drew left his e-mail in the article and I'm sure he'd be happy to answer any questions about conference content, etc...

It's pretty straightforward. Before an unvoiced consonant (t, p, th in throw, s, vs. d, b, th in they, z) the [aw] sound ([a] is to all intents and purposes the first vowel in father) is "raised" to the above-mentioned [Vw] sound. This means just what it sounds like. The tongue is at the bottom of the oral cavity for [a] and in the middle for [V]. It also happens with [aj], the diphthong in ride, but that phenomenon is also common all over the US. Anyway, it's there, and with a little training, it'll make you giggle too. Sound clips.

I believe that it is not just the luminosity that makes it tough to read red text on a blue/green background. The focal length of any lens depends on the wavelength of the light passing through it. which means while red light will be focused on the retina the blue region (higher wavelength) is out of focus. This puts strain on the eye and it becomes tough to maintain focus. (This effect is more pronounced when viewing red over blue / blue over red since they differ in wavelength). You might have observed that viewing red text over blue give some sort of funny feeling and your eyes get tired pretty quickly.

More on Chromatic Aberrations here

i forgot to mention that Wily is available now for a unix or unix clone near you

here's it's homepage
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/

plan9 is http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9

I think that you would probably find that most (if not all) universities do offer these services, just not as classes. Where I go to school we have a Career Services department which does exactly the things you outlined. They have luncheons/breakfasts with potential employers and network, they have tutorials on what employers are looking for in resumes and interviews. In fact they even have a service where they set up mock interviews for you and give you feedback on your performance.

Notwithstanding that, there tend to be other things on campus (and off) as well. I'm heavily involved in the computer club at my school and we have speakers who talk about almost all the things you mention within the context of computers and IT. I'm also involved with the the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference, which assuming you're a canuck and in a CS-like program, would be great for you too. On their schedule they have a job fair for attendees, they have seminars with people in industry where you can actually speak with them afterwards and a bunch of other things. I highly recommend people in university check out these sorts of things. Thus far a bunch of my friends have scored jobs directly through that conference.

In the end, you really do have to do this stuff yourself.

There's a running joe that James' century old work represents basically everything cognitive scientists know today. In other words, not much new progress in the last 100 years. :) Anyways, to quote from James' book, chapter 11 (emphasis mine):

[p. 409] If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, not easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Caesar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,[9] there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but we attend to them collectively when we conceive the whole which they form.

When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of fine work has been done in this field, of which I must give some account.

It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent; although in reality the two may have been contemporaneous events...

Chad Loder
Rapid 7, Inc.
The next generation of network security products

It depends on the test. Mensa requires that you score 98th percentile or better on a standardized intelligence test. There are many different tests that they accept. Ten years ago when I took the tests, I know that included the Cattel Test and the California Test of Mental Maturity. I took both, and interestingly enough got the exact same percentile even though the tests are quite different. Many tests have different scales, so the number doesn't really count. 180 is quite high on some scales, such as this one where 131 will put you at the 98th percentile.

So, IQ is really just a number for braggarts to toss around, it's the percentile that counts, if that counts at all. I used to be in Mensa, but I never quite understood what they were all about. It was a little bit social club, a little bit of pimping for the idea of intelligence tests, and a lot of people with big egos. In some ways it was OK, but I'd rather hang out with intelligent people who aren't getting together just because they're intelligent, so I'll take a user group or some other fun gathering over a Mensa meeting any day.

But I suppose I'll get flamed now for trying to act cool by saying "I could be in Mensa, but I'm not". I just hope it's a good flame and not a boring goatse.cx link. 8-)

a typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per inch. This doesn't really equate to pixels, but, pixels can be changed into pixels per inch, and that should be close enough.

If you look at where the money is, you can see that many monied interests wanted to improve things for themselves, often with no regard for others [I am positively shocked by this idea! Aren't You? Say it isn't so!]

Take a look at this summary of Psychology and Industrial Efficiency by Hugo Münsterberg (1913). As Münsterberg himself put it: 'We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business.' This is not unusual for that period.

In a modern context we have the example of the microserfs and Microdroids, as seen here

Even during the DotCom Craze we have examples of the tremdous loyalty seen at one time at Amazon.com, as documented on slash here (Original site here) Another example are the Romans who prosecuted anyone who who not do pagan sacrifice for the cult of the Emperor (the state). This was bad news for the Christians for a while.

Bottom line, the cult of the current belief systems, as expressed by the dominant powers, hates anyone who would or could be a threat to them. This applies to Romans, business men, the Spanish Inquisition, politicians, and for that matter whatever clique of individuals that has control in an area.

Of course taking this too far, what we do is discredit ideals like friendship and loyalty. Who deserves your loyalty and friendship, ever? Who indeed?

To only see the mechanism in the thing you love to hate most is small minded indeed.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

I wonder what useful would come of making up your own axioms...

Well, assuming you pick good axioms, quite a few things actually. Euclid's 5th(?) postulate was proved to be independent of the others. This means that it can't be proved from any of the others. So you can either accept it or choose its contverse as an axiom. Accepting the postulate leads to Euclidian geometry accepting its converse leads to non-Euclidian geometry. Depending on how you phrase it you get either hyperbolic or......I forget, but another type of geometry. Both are fascinating from a purely mathematical perspective, and one is essential to the construction of general relativity.

Another example is the so called "Axiom of Choice" usually first encountered in upper division undergraduate math classes. It essentially says that given any collection of sets you can say "Take one element from each set" which is a common step in proofs. For finite sets this is obvious and for countable sets ( the natural numbers 1,2,3..... for example) it is pretty simple too. But notice there is nothing in it about the size of the collections. There are several commonly used equivalents to the axiom of choice as well:
Zorn's Lemma, the Well Ordering Principle and
Tychonov's Product Theorem: any product of compact topological spaces, when equipped with the product topology, is also compact.
I had to look up the statement of Tychonov's theorem since it's been a while. If you care, I found an interesting article regarding the equivalences here.

Anyhow, it was proved (by Gödel I think) that this axiom is independent from the other axioms of set theory meaning you can accept it or accept its converse and still be as consistent as you were before. There was a big debate about this back in the day when it was discovered that using it you could take a sphere, take it apart and reassemble it into 2 spheres the same size as the original. Eventually it was accepted by the mathematics community and rejected by the physics community. One of the consequences of the axiom of choice is that there exist sets which are not "Lebesgue measurable" which has a big affect on the integrability of functions on these sets. Every non-measurable set I've seen is totally pathalogical, so the physics people who actually have to do integrations save themselves the step of seeing if their domain is actually measurable before they start integrating by rejecting the axiom. The converse of the axiom can be stated in this case as "There are no unmeasurable sets".

So, yes it could be useful to make up your own axioms, but it isn't easy to pick the "right" ones.
---CONFLICT!!---

I agree - we have traditionally considered Pluto to be a planet, but it behaves so strangely that it counts just as well as something else.

That reminds me of the near-earth object (Asteroid 3753 Cruithne) that was considered for "moon of Earth" status...

The "other" moon of earth is not gravitionally captured by earth. Instead its movement around the sun is synchronized with the earth in a way that make it looks like a moon, as seen from earth.

A link is here . And if you got a lot of time to kill, you could also visit this place.

See: here

D'artagnan:

http://www.students.yorku. ca/~kipper/dartagnan/dart.html

Please note that they took a LEISURELY three days to set the whole thing up. Not three 20-hour, CmdrTaco-esque, caffine-powered, loss-of-sleep days -- Three relaxed days in which they DAWDLED over the process. The utter ANTIHESIS of the Linux user-experience!

The point here isn't about the raw performance of the cluster, although it's fairly respectable performance at that. The point is that anyone can set one of these puppies up, and administering one is a no-brainer. Plug 'n' Play folks! Three steps on a half-sheet of paper versus a 230 page "introduction". Apple's got ease-of-use DOWN! Whole point of the excercise.

<disclaimer>
A close reading of the Appleseed G4 benchmarks reveal that the AltiVec processor spends a good deal of it's time just idling away, waiting for other processes to finish. The code is sub-optimal in this respect (it could be faster), but also some of this is due to the nature of the AltiVec instruction set. With some tinkering, it could be improved upon. The code's in FORTRAN fer cryin' out loud! It could stand to have about 10% (the most used routines) hand-optimized in machine code.
</disclaimer>

<flame>
I'm preparing to target my home-built ICBM on the next lamer who complains that Macs are more expensive than PC's. Generally these comparisons involve "generic no-name" Intel or AMD boxen. It's unfair, and you know it. Compare instead comparable machines from Dell or Compaq. This isn't about price either! You can spend as little as $800 for a bottom-of-line iMac (from a mail-order house), OR you can have Apple custom-build you a tricked-out G4 with 150G of RAM (no, I'm not kidding) and spend $15,000 (or more). As far as I can see, Apple has all the price ranges covered.

You want to be a Linux-advocate, great. So do I. However, FUD is not advocacy.
</flame>

I wish they had the option of leaving off the graphics card, though. In the context of an Appleseed cluster it's a waste.

I want "flavored" G4's too. That slate grey is boring.

--B

That test grew into the classic Stanford-Binet test, which is still in use. That's a one-on-one test, usually given by psychologists. It has more range than the more popular paper-and-pencil tests, which lack resolution for the bottom and top 5% of the population. It's expensive to give, since it takes hours of psychologist time. It does test non paper-and-pencil skills, like this proposed new test. But the Stanford-Binet test is individual.

Scoring an individual acting as part of a group, as that new test tries to do, has reliability and bias problems. But it's a concept that's been made to work by the U.S. Marine Corps. The Marines have a scheme called the Crucible for testing recruit group problem-solving skills. The Marines do it the hard way; they get the troops hungry and exhausted, then test them. It works for them.

A recent book on the measurement of intelligence, The G Factor, is worth reading. The big "g" controversy revolves around whether it's meaningful to have a single measure of "intelligence". The answer from research in the field seems to be yes, in that different measures of "intelligence" are strongly correlated, but the results are so politically incorrect that desperate attempts are made to avoid accepting this fact. Here's the problem, as a reviewer on Amazon writes:
Indeed, much of the opposition to IQ testing and heritability would probably disappear if it were not for the stubborn and unwelcome fact that, despite extensive well funded programs of intervention, the Black-White difference refuses to go quietly into the night. Chapter 11 of The g Factor fully documents that, on average, the American Black population scores below the White population by about 1.2 standard deviations, equivalent to 18 IQ points. (This magnitude of difference gives a median overlap of less than 15 percent, meaning that less than 15 percent of the Black population exceeds the White average of 50 percent). The difference between Blacks and Whites in average IQ scores has scarcely changed over the past 80 years (despite some claims that the gap is narrowing) and can be observed as early as three years of age. Controlling for overall socioeconomic level only reduces the mean difference by 4 IQ points.

That's the basis of the controversy.

My point whas that it has to be closed. No planet or asteroid is in a perfect ellipse.

I recieved an email from someone trying to debunk what I said. He referenced a webpage that is very informative. http://www.asteroid.yorku.ca/.

This shows the asteroid's true colors. It does not orbit Earth. It orbits with Earth, much like the trojans around Jupiter, but a little more funkily. It is not a moon. That is what threw me about the "horseshoe" orbit.

Wiegert is Canadian, and works with Innanen in York University in Canada. Innanen and Mikkola are Finnish, and Mikkola works in Tuorla Observatory.

The asteroid has a homepage:
http://www.asteroid.yorku.ca/

I think the British researchers photographed the asteroid in 1988, found it from the film plate, and possibly even made observations of its subsequent locations. They did not, however, calculate its orbit, and thus did not actually "discover" the asteroid as "second moon" of Earth. However, according to the rules, they were given the right to name the asteroid.

It should be noted that there are probably thousands of asteroids which have been photographed, but have not been identified as asteroids. For example, Pluto was photographed in the Tuorla Observatory some 8 years before it was photographed and identified as a planet in U.S. There might be several hundred asteroids which have been identified, and their positions have been measured, but the orbit has not been calculated.

770 years to complete is pretty unusal

(ok it might decay in 5000 years according to the story)

the possibility of a collision over at least the next ten thousand years is nil.

The orbit is not unstable; according to the Cruithne FAQ, it will be stable for at least 10,000 years. The FAQ does not say if anyone has projected Cruithne's orbit back in time, let alone what the results were. Given the chaotic nature of 3-body interactions, we probably cannot determine the origin of Cruithne from its orbit alone. We will have to determine its composition to get an idea of where it came from, and send a probe past it to get some idea of its bombardment history (and thus where in the solar system it's spent most of its past). From this we might... might... be able to make some good guesses as to how long it's been Earth's orbital partner.
--

The orbit is a series of spiraling loops that form an overlapping horseshoe, with the Earth in the overlap. This orbital pattern therefore revolves around Sol along with Earth. Very strange, and pretty unusual (actual rarity is difficult to establish).

Here are some decent drawings and explanations of the phenomenon.

However, This link says this asteroid actually shares an orbit with the Earth around the sun.

Now, I know that this object has a rather unusual "orbit" of the Earth, but what exactly qualifies it as a bonafied Satellite rather than just a near Earth meteor?

"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"

http://www.asteroid.yorku.ca/

Exactly. Before anyone goes around talking about things they know nothing about (oops, too late), look at this.

Just for informational purposes, the asteroid was discovered in 1986, and the paper on its orbit was published in 1997.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

Of course, this technically shouldn't be termed a moon. This body shares an orbit with the Earth about the sun, and does not in any usual sense orbit the Earth. Instead, their orbits coincide so that Cruithne can occupy the same orbital region as the Earth over long periods of time without being ejected by a close approach.

Evidently, this isn't entirely a new revelation. A quick altavista sear ch returned this (among others), which is older than this article (hasn't been touched since '98) but goes into a LOT more detail on this thing. This may be out of date for all I know, but it was kinda hard to tell from the posted article which had breathtakingly little real information in it... Too bad, too, this looks like some interesting stuff. I wish I knew enough on the subject to have some guess as to whether this is really an exciting thing, or just somebody trying to generate some publicity...

I agree. here is a diagram that compares the two character sets from a paper comparing the two.

Obviously, the goal of Graffiti was to develop a system that was learnable. It appears to me based on the simplicity of the vowels, that the primary goal of Unistrokes was to limit total pen strokes. One way Unistrokes achieves this is by relying on the vector of the stroke so the writing can ONLY be read by the input device since the characters for M & N, U & V, C & D, E & T, A & I and K & Y, are identicle pairs if the system is used on paper. Another argument, is that there is no penstroke in any Graffiti character that is the same as a pen stroke from the corresponding Unistroke character, that isn't already part of the letter it represents.

The fact that Graffiti is a "unistroke" system (ie you make contact with the writing surface just once for each character) can't in itself make it a patent infringement, otherwise the Unistrokes patent would be invalid based on cursive handwriting being prior art.

If Xerox wants to make a case, it should go after the use of pen-input (to call Unistrokes handwriting is too much of a stretch) for PDA's which they might be able to establish based on their development of the PARCtab starting in 1992.

(Full Disclosure Notice, I own a small ammount of 3COM stock)

I agree. here is a diagram that compares the two character sets from a paper comparing the two.

Obviously, the goal of Graffiti was to develop a system that was learnable. It appears to me based on the simplicity of the vowels, that the primary goal of Unistrokes was to limit total pen strokes. One way Unistrokes achieves this is by relying on the vector of the stroke so the writing can ONLY be read by the input device since the characters for M & N, U & V, C & D, E & T, A & I and K & Y, are identicle pairs if the system is used on paper. Another argument, is that there is no penstroke in any Graffiti character that is the same as a pen stroke from the corresponding Unistroke character, that isn't already part of the letter it represents.

The fact that Graffiti is a "unistroke" system (ie you make contact with the writing surface just once for each character) can't in itself make it a patent infringement, otherwise the Unistrokes patent would be invalid based on cursive handwriting being prior art.

If Xerox wants to make a case, it should go after the use of pen-input (to call Unistrokes handwriting is too much of a stretch) for PDA's which they might be able to establish based on their development of the PARCtab starting in 1992.

(Full Disclosure Notice, I own a small ammount of 3COM stock)

The URL posted on the Ig Noble site should be http://www.yorku.ca/ dept/histarts/gradhist/grad_cv/penfold.htm

imabug

Let's see, your country would have pulled itself out of its horrible economic slump no matter what he did. Economic behaviour is cyclic.

He did succede in getting tax cuts through. The rich were very pleased with this. The poor just got poorer: he created a huge transfer of capital from the poor to the rich.

While he maybe helped end the cold war, much of the credit must of course lie with Mikhael Gorbatchev.

Ask what the Nicaraguans think of Reagan.

See also http://www.dumblists.com/list-reag anairport.html and also "American conservatives love to take credit for the 'fall of Communism". (Scroll down to the bottom).