The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
I haven't looked at this study, but yes, it's routine to select only right handed subjects for MRI studies.
Can you cite a reference that links corpus callosum thickness with handedness and Stroop task performance?
NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
Off-topic, but what about Link-Belt? They've been around for over a century.
But some of them ARE obscure. It's impossible for two-letter codes based on a mixture of languages not to be obscure in spots---and different spots for different people, of course. "FU" makes sense for "smoke" in French but not in English. I've never learned the etymology of "BR" for mist, but "Baby Rain" makes a good mnemonic, I suppose. And so on. PO? GR? BC? MI?
Anytime it takes an extra application of brainpower to encode or decode a message, mistakes can happen. As an example---I was flying out of Latrobe, PA a month ago and the METAR got mistyped somehow. What was "10SM" (10 statute miles visibility) got written "10SAM" instead. The briefer at Altoona AFSS read that quickly and said "Scattered 1000" when clouds everywhere else were up at 4K or so. We were still baffled and called the tower to see what they thought it meant---after they confirmed with us that there wasn't any 10 sand minus nearby they eventually figured out what went wrong.
So the bobble made the briefer say something wildly inaccurate, made us delay to play it safe and figure out what was really up, and got the tower pestered.
My advice: leave the code to the computers and make the decoded data an official weather product, generated from standardized decoding schema tailored to whatever languages/display types you need. The less thinking you have to do, the sooner and better you can process the info and the less likely you'll be to make mistakes.
I will admit that two letter codes are handy for transcribing ATIS broadcasts, though.
I suspect that one of the causes of this incident is the use of arcane codes like RHW or what have you. Ask anyone who's had to read a METAR---these brief weather reports are short enough to fit on the teletypes for which they were originally designed, but the more obscure codes will trip you up occasionally or send you scurrying off for a list of abbreviations.
It's 2005. There's very little cost to writing out "thunderstorm" or "mist" or "radiological alert". I bet this mistake would never have happened if these had been choices in a drop-down menu.
Except most navaids now broadcast in English as well.
No, they don't. Maybe in Washington they do (judging your location from your e-mail), but here in the eastern US nearly all of them are plain old Morse. A few have TWEB or HIWAS, but even then they'll only say the name of the facility occasionally---if you were unlucky, you'd have to listen to the whole HIWAS first before you ID'd it. Instead I just press the ID button, and I hear the morse immediately.
Take heart---the problem you're contemplating has been fairly well studied.
I remember a professor here at CMU saying that you could do localization for forklifts by pointing a camera at the floor. Most warehouse floors have enough scratches and marks on them that as you wander around, you can get a pretty good idea of where you are by comparing them to a map (using techniques like Monte Carlo localization---google it!). Combined with encoders on the forklift wheels, you may be able to get the resolution you need.
Don't you like it when maths back up common sense ?
The equation in the post is a model---an invention for the purposes of prediction and description. It's effectively a mathematical restatement of common sense insights and (hopefully) statistical tendencies derived from psychological and economic studies. So to say that this work backs up common sense is missing the point to some extent: most of the meat was there first as common sense, and the math just expresses it more precisely and more in keeping with observed data.
Note that F=ma and the rest of Newton's laws also form a model in the same way that this equation does. What made them so revolutionary was that the ideas behind the models were very powerful, making the models themselves extremely accurate. We'll have to wait and see whether this Murphy's Law model is backed by similarly potent insights.
I think I'd read anything by a guy that is able to make a mathematical plot out of the main character's labido. (sic.)
Something Thomas Pynchon also did in Gravity's Rainbow. (Scroll to "Poisson Distribution"). Also google for "slothrop poisson" (no quotes). Pynchon is worthwhile reading, IMHO, though a little bit harder to get through than anything Stevenson wrote...
there is no such thing as a charactertistic power spectrum in natural images.
You can fault me for not reading the research under discussion, but before you make this claim, I recommend a glance at these papers:
D. L. Ruderman and W. Bialek, ''Statistics of natural images: scaling in the woods,'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 814-817 (1994)
J. Huang and D. Mumford, ''Statistics of natural images and models,'' in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, Calif., 1999), pp. 541-547.
It's true that individual images will have divergent power spectra (otherwise what, exactly, would Torralba be doing in his work, e.g.?), but on the whole, natural images reflect certain statistical tendencies (again, what, exactly, would Torralba be doing otherwise?). Whether this is discernible enough on the level of single images to help detect forgeries is something I can't reliably say, this not being my research focus. But it wasn't as bad a guess as you thought.
Let's face it, if the math says it's an original, the human eye will be fooled, which is the goal of most video game design.
Don't be so sure about that!
I don't know what these researchers are doing, but I can venture a guess. You can think of an image as being composed of a large set of superimposed sine waves---they look like this. To figure out what sine waves make up an image, you do a Fourier Transform, which is well documented on Google.
Natural images contain a characteristic power spectrum: some frequencies--lower ones--tend to occur quite often, while others--higher frequencies--are less common. The spectrum is actually pretty regular across an image set. I'm betting, though, that fake images don't respect this power spectrum and lead to detectable anomalies.
But beware! You can have completely bogus images that also respect the power spectrum. Some researchers at MIT (Torralba et al.) use power spectra to successfully detect different image environments, e.g. indoors, outside in a city, out in the country, etc., but in the papers they show some images that have been reconstructed from their spectral models.
You would not be fooled. They look like finger paint pictures.
Robots are single function machines like the ones ford uses. The multipurpous ones shaped like a humanoid are called androids
I disagree.
I'm getting a graduate degree in robotics. My school has a few humanoids. We call them robots. We've got arms. We call those robots too. Same with the trashcan-shaped research robots, the Segway-platform robots, the AIBOs, the helicopters, the farm equipment, the cars, the blimp, and so on. All robots. Nobody here thinks the term "robot" refers to "single function machines", huge arms, industrial robots, or anything you find in an ordinary automated factory. It's a much more general category.
"Androids" are, I guess, a subset of "robots", but nobody here uses that term very much. I suspect it won't be very popular until we have robots that are more like Data.
On using this technology for large-scale real-world localization with camera phones, an AC says:
you might not need it if you look at the fucking street signs!
Which may be a good point, but if you don't have a map yourself, you don't get much from knowing that you're at the intersection of Locust and Hawthorne. If you use a cell phone-based mapping service, you need to get your location data into the phone somehow.
You could key in the street names, but that has problems: are you on 10th, Tenth, or 10? What if you can't find a street sign conveniently? What if you're at the intersection of Northumberland and the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Parkway? Who wants to type all that in?
You could photograph the street sign, but chances are that the vision algorithm will have an easier time recognizing the buildings than the street sign lettering. Besides, you can take pictures of buildings anywhere along the street!
You're lost on a street. Take a photo with your camera phone and send it to the service. Characteristic image features are used to recognize the buildings, which are cross-referenced with addresses and GPS coordinates in the database. The service tells you where you are and how to get where you're going.
The recognition technology for this application is already in development.
Of course, if your phone is a GPS phone, you might not need this.
The RFC includes an itneresting statment about 'user input from keyboard, Lincoln Wand, etc.'. It appears that a Lincoln Wand is what we now call a stylus.
I had never heard of it before either, but if you read more carefully, it appears that the Lincoln Wand is more like a 3D mouse. It's basically an ultrasonic microphone that picks up signals from four ultrasound transmitters--the delay caused by the speed of sound is used to determine the wand's location in space. A quote:
An ultrasonic position-sensing device has been designed which will allow a computer to determine periodically the x, y, and z coordinates of the tip of a pensized wand.
Back in the early 80's a small town - Times Beach, Missouri was found to have dioxin sprayed on the dirt streets and caused the government to buy out the whole town and relocate everybody.
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
Contaminated soil and other debris from Times Beach was completely incinerated by 1997. The buildings and houses were leveled years before that. Know what you mean, though--when I was a kid, I used to hold my breath when we drove by on 44.
Googling for "times beach cleanup" turns up this PDF summary. A quote:
The Times Beach cleanup has been completed. All residents and businesses were permanently relocated, the purchase of the remaining parcels by FEMA has been completed, and the ownership of the parcels of land has been conveyed to the State of Missouri. The demolition and disposal of the structures at Times Beach has been completed. Excavation of dioxin-contaminated soils, interim placement in temporary on-site storage, and final destruction of site contaminants by incineration has been completed. Thermal treatment of dioxin-contaminated soils from Times Beach and other sites was completed in June 1997, and the site has been restored to a state park.
Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances.
You can see some of these pipes at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian, in their communications and computers exhibit on the first floor. They really are like plumbing! The exhibit shows something like a joint between two pipes--both pipes taper gracefully down to the joint from a diameter of about 3cm to 1cm.
P.S.: I scooped this Slashdot story on Metafilter about a year ago! *gloat*
My 15 year old PC is a classic and goes for $9,000 on Ebay.
In 1989, a top-of-the-line PC was a 386 or something. How in the world does a 386 command $9K on eBay? I guess you're exaggerating. But by way of comparison...
A glance at my posting history reveals a more than passing interest in the Apple Lisa. The Lisa 1, an especially rare collectible computer, goes for around $10K whenever it shows up.
Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since.
In May, 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, an expensive personal computer with a GUI, multitasking, memory protection, and virtual memory. See this page, check out my screenshots, or just use Google.
It wasn't a success, but it did beat the Amiga to market. As if that matters.
Two button mouse anyone? i don't see apple catching up there.
A comment like this leads me to suspect that the Amiga is older than you.
building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.
I find that unlikely. Among other quirks, the Apple Lisa has a home-grown MMU, developed in house by engineers who empirically determined what 68000 instructions could be restarted after a page fault, and how. The 68000 was not designed for virtual memory, you see, so the Apple folks had to experiment and create their own software and hardware to make it happen.
I would be surprised if anyone put that much that effort into a class. If you built a 68k computer with a bitmap display, then you have something there, but it's not a Lisa. Don't think that just because the Lisa came out before the first Mac that it's a more primitive system--in fact it's quite the opposite.
the source for their 3d ranging application would be very beneficial to many people. I mean, the rovers are able to compute their surroundings in 3d using only 2 cameras. The degree of success and repeatability of these 3d measurements far exceeds any other available 3d ranging software.
Are you certain of this?
MER's stereo imaging and navigation software is indeed well made. Still, I suspect it's incorrect to claim that it is the best ever written. Stereo imaging and 3-D structure from motion are very well established fields, and improvement is ongoing. It would probably be straightforward for you to find some recent conference papers and code up something in MATLAB that works better than the rover's flight software.
The quality of the 3d ranging results from Mars are impressive, but for more reasons than you might suspect. I spent summer 2002 interning at JPL. One day, Mark Maimone, the MER mobility software engineer, mentioned to me that images of Martian terrain (with scattered rocks, etc.) are just about mathematically optimal for stereo ranging. (He wrote his thesis on this stuff.) On Mars, it's easy to find correlations between pixel patterns in images. Now imagine how well it would work if the robot were staring at a blank wall--no vision algorithm can handle that!
So--don't think that the success of the imaging is just the well-made software.
JPL has a lot of experience in robotics and the gain in knowledge when such code is released is sure to be great for anyone in the field of robotics.
True, to a point. Bear in mind that while JPL does work on novel robotics research, they're also extremely concerned about preserving expensive, hard-to-replace robot systems. As a result, a lot of the software is based on well-established systems that, in the research world, have been surpassed a while ago. The rover autonomous navigation software, for example, is related to navigation software written here at Carnegie Mellon some four or five years ago.
Furthermore, a lot of the research advances made by JPL are presented at conferences and published in journals. It's not like they work in isolation and keep everything quiet. In fact, some of my fellow grad students work on large projects alongside JPL researchers and researchers at other institutions. So, in an academic sense, there's already a lot of sharing going on.
Slashdot Mirror
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
I haven't looked at this study, but yes, it's routine to select only right handed subjects for MRI studies.
Can you cite a reference that links corpus callosum thickness with handedness and Stroop task performance?
NONE of the steam shovel companies that were in business in the 1940s survived past the 1950s because they didn't see the benefit of selling what they saw as inferior technology, which hydraulics definately were in the beginning.
Off-topic, but what about Link-Belt? They've been around for over a century.
But some of them ARE obscure. It's impossible for two-letter codes based on a mixture of languages not to be obscure in spots---and different spots for different people, of course. "FU" makes sense for "smoke" in French but not in English. I've never learned the etymology of "BR" for mist, but "Baby Rain" makes a good mnemonic, I suppose. And so on. PO? GR? BC? MI?
Anytime it takes an extra application of brainpower to encode or decode a message, mistakes can happen. As an example---I was flying out of Latrobe, PA a month ago and the METAR got mistyped somehow. What was "10SM" (10 statute miles visibility) got written "10SAM" instead. The briefer at Altoona AFSS read that quickly and said "Scattered 1000" when clouds everywhere else were up at 4K or so. We were still baffled and called the tower to see what they thought it meant---after they confirmed with us that there wasn't any 10 sand minus nearby they eventually figured out what went wrong.
So the bobble made the briefer say something wildly inaccurate, made us delay to play it safe and figure out what was really up, and got the tower pestered.
My advice: leave the code to the computers and make the decoded data an official weather product, generated from standardized decoding schema tailored to whatever languages/display types you need. The less thinking you have to do, the sooner and better you can process the info and the less likely you'll be to make mistakes.
I will admit that two letter codes are handy for transcribing ATIS broadcasts, though.
I suspect that one of the causes of this incident is the use of arcane codes like RHW or what have you. Ask anyone who's had to read a METAR---these brief weather reports are short enough to fit on the teletypes for which they were originally designed, but the more obscure codes will trip you up occasionally or send you scurrying off for a list of abbreviations.
It's 2005. There's very little cost to writing out "thunderstorm" or "mist" or "radiological alert". I bet this mistake would never have happened if these had been choices in a drop-down menu.
Except most navaids now broadcast in English as well.
No, they don't. Maybe in Washington they do (judging your location from your e-mail), but here in the eastern US nearly all of them are plain old Morse. A few have TWEB or HIWAS, but even then they'll only say the name of the facility occasionally---if you were unlucky, you'd have to listen to the whole HIWAS first before you ID'd it. Instead I just press the ID button, and I hear the morse immediately.
Wow, what a post! I typed the whole thing into teco and it played the Star Spangled Banner on my DECwriter III !
Take heart---the problem you're contemplating has been fairly well studied.
I remember a professor here at CMU saying that you could do localization for forklifts by pointing a camera at the floor. Most warehouse floors have enough scratches and marks on them that as you wander around, you can get a pretty good idea of where you are by comparing them to a map (using techniques like Monte Carlo localization---google it!). Combined with encoders on the forklift wheels, you may be able to get the resolution you need.
Here is a paper describing technology like this. In the results they say they get accuracy down to a millimeter.
So, those talking about painting a grid on the floor have the right idea---but perhaps you don't even have to do that!
Wired had an excellent long article about the Xanadu project in 1995---great storytelling. Seen here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr. html.
Don't you like it when maths back up common sense ?
The equation in the post is a model---an invention for the purposes of prediction and description. It's effectively a mathematical restatement of common sense insights and (hopefully) statistical tendencies derived from psychological and economic studies. So to say that this work backs up common sense is missing the point to some extent: most of the meat was there first as common sense, and the math just expresses it more precisely and more in keeping with observed data.
Note that F=ma and the rest of Newton's laws also form a model in the same way that this equation does. What made them so revolutionary was that the ideas behind the models were very powerful, making the models themselves extremely accurate. We'll have to wait and see whether this Murphy's Law model is backed by similarly potent insights.
--Tom
Note the byline above:
from the everybody-loves-roland dept.
It seems Michael is at least hearing the criticisms.
--Tom
I think I'd read anything by a guy that is able to make a mathematical plot out of the main character's labido. (sic.)
Something Thomas Pynchon also did in Gravity's Rainbow. (Scroll to "Poisson Distribution"). Also google for "slothrop poisson" (no quotes). Pynchon is worthwhile reading, IMHO, though a little bit harder to get through than anything Stevenson wrote...
--Tom
there is no such thing as a charactertistic power spectrum in natural images.
You can fault me for not reading the research under discussion, but before you make this claim, I recommend a glance at these papers:
D. L. Ruderman and W. Bialek, ''Statistics of natural images: scaling in the woods,'' Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 814-817 (1994)
J. Huang and D. Mumford, ''Statistics of natural images and models,'' in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, Calif., 1999), pp. 541-547.
It's true that individual images will have divergent power spectra (otherwise what, exactly, would Torralba be doing in his work, e.g.?), but on the whole, natural images reflect certain statistical tendencies (again, what, exactly, would Torralba be doing otherwise?). Whether this is discernible enough on the level of single images to help detect forgeries is something I can't reliably say, this not being my research focus. But it wasn't as bad a guess as you thought.
--Tom
Let's face it, if the math says it's an original, the human eye will be fooled, which is the goal of most video game design.
Don't be so sure about that!
I don't know what these researchers are doing, but I can venture a guess. You can think of an image as being composed of a large set of superimposed sine waves---they look like this. To figure out what sine waves make up an image, you do a Fourier Transform, which is well documented on Google.
Natural images contain a characteristic power spectrum: some frequencies--lower ones--tend to occur quite often, while others--higher frequencies--are less common. The spectrum is actually pretty regular across an image set. I'm betting, though, that fake images don't respect this power spectrum and lead to detectable anomalies.
But beware! You can have completely bogus images that also respect the power spectrum. Some researchers at MIT (Torralba et al.) use power spectra to successfully detect different image environments, e.g. indoors, outside in a city, out in the country, etc., but in the papers they show some images that have been reconstructed from their spectral models.
You would not be fooled. They look like finger paint pictures.
--Tom
Robots are single function machines like the ones ford uses. The multipurpous ones shaped like a humanoid are called androids
I disagree.
I'm getting a graduate degree in robotics. My school has a few humanoids. We call them robots. We've got arms. We call those robots too. Same with the trashcan-shaped research robots, the Segway-platform robots, the AIBOs, the helicopters, the farm equipment, the cars, the blimp, and so on. All robots. Nobody here thinks the term "robot" refers to "single function machines", huge arms, industrial robots, or anything you find in an ordinary automated factory. It's a much more general category.
"Androids" are, I guess, a subset of "robots", but nobody here uses that term very much. I suspect it won't be very popular until we have robots that are more like Data.
Until then,
--Tom
On using this technology for large-scale real-world localization with camera phones, an AC says:
you might not need it if you look at the fucking street signs!
Which may be a good point, but if you don't have a map yourself, you don't get much from knowing that you're at the intersection of Locust and Hawthorne. If you use a cell phone-based mapping service, you need to get your location data into the phone somehow.
You could key in the street names, but that has problems: are you on 10th, Tenth, or 10? What if you can't find a street sign conveniently? What if you're at the intersection of Northumberland and the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Parkway? Who wants to type all that in?
You could photograph the street sign, but chances are that the vision algorithm will have an easier time recognizing the buildings than the street sign lettering. Besides, you can take pictures of buildings anywhere along the street!
--Tom
You're lost on a street. Take a photo with your camera phone and send it to the service. Characteristic image features are used to recognize the buildings, which are cross-referenced with addresses and GPS coordinates in the database. The service tells you where you are and how to get where you're going.
The recognition technology for this application is already in development.
Of course, if your phone is a GPS phone, you might not need this.
--Tom
I had never heard of it before either, but if you read more carefully, it appears that the Lincoln Wand is more like a 3D mouse. It's basically an ultrasonic microphone that picks up signals from four ultrasound transmitters--the delay caused by the speed of sound is used to determine the wand's location in space. A quote:
--Tom
Any locals from St. Louis area care to elaborate further and update what is going on and if the town is still there?
Contaminated soil and other debris from Times Beach was completely incinerated by 1997. The buildings and houses were leveled years before that. Know what you mean, though--when I was a kid, I used to hold my breath when we drove by on 44.
Googling for "times beach cleanup" turns up this PDF summary. A quote:
The Times Beach cleanup has been completed. All residents and businesses were permanently relocated, the purchase of the remaining parcels by FEMA has been completed, and the ownership of the parcels of land has been conveyed to the State of Missouri. The demolition and disposal of the structures at Times Beach has been completed. Excavation of dioxin-contaminated soils, interim placement in temporary on-site storage, and final destruction of site contaminants by incineration has been completed. Thermal treatment of dioxin-contaminated soils from Times Beach and other sites was completed in June 1997, and the site has been restored to a state park.
--Tom
Microwaves travelling in underground copper pipes could carry a modestly high bandwidth signal for long distances.
You can see some of these pipes at the American History Museum of the Smithsonian, in their communications and computers exhibit on the first floor. They really are like plumbing! The exhibit shows something like a joint between two pipes--both pipes taper gracefully down to the joint from a diameter of about 3cm to 1cm.
P.S.: I scooped this Slashdot story on Metafilter about a year ago! *gloat*
--Tom
My 15 year old PC is a classic and goes for $9,000 on Ebay.
In 1989, a top-of-the-line PC was a 386 or something. How in the world does a 386 command $9K on eBay? I guess you're exaggerating. But by way of comparison...
A glance at my posting history reveals a more than passing interest in the Apple Lisa. The Lisa 1, an especially rare collectible computer, goes for around $10K whenever it shows up.
--Tom
Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since.
In May, 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, an expensive personal computer with a GUI, multitasking, memory protection, and virtual memory. See this page, check out my screenshots, or just use Google.
It wasn't a success, but it did beat the Amiga to market. As if that matters.
Two button mouse anyone? i don't see apple catching up there.
A comment like this leads me to suspect that the Amiga is older than you.
--Tom
building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.
I find that unlikely. Among other quirks, the Apple Lisa has a home-grown MMU, developed in house by engineers who empirically determined what 68000 instructions could be restarted after a page fault, and how. The 68000 was not designed for virtual memory, you see, so the Apple folks had to experiment and create their own software and hardware to make it happen.
I would be surprised if anyone put that much that effort into a class. If you built a 68k computer with a bitmap display, then you have something there, but it's not a Lisa. Don't think that just because the Lisa came out before the first Mac that it's a more primitive system--in fact it's quite the opposite.
Please substantiate your claim!
--Tom
the source for their 3d ranging application would be very beneficial to many people. I mean, the rovers are able to compute their surroundings in 3d using only 2 cameras. The degree of success and repeatability of these 3d measurements far exceeds any other available 3d ranging software.
Are you certain of this?
MER's stereo imaging and navigation software is indeed well made. Still, I suspect it's incorrect to claim that it is the best ever written. Stereo imaging and 3-D structure from motion are very well established fields, and improvement is ongoing. It would probably be straightforward for you to find some recent conference papers and code up something in MATLAB that works better than the rover's flight software.
The quality of the 3d ranging results from Mars are impressive, but for more reasons than you might suspect. I spent summer 2002 interning at JPL. One day, Mark Maimone, the MER mobility software engineer, mentioned to me that images of Martian terrain (with scattered rocks, etc.) are just about mathematically optimal for stereo ranging. (He wrote his thesis on this stuff.) On Mars, it's easy to find correlations between pixel patterns in images. Now imagine how well it would work if the robot were staring at a blank wall--no vision algorithm can handle that!
So--don't think that the success of the imaging is just the well-made software.
JPL has a lot of experience in robotics and the gain in knowledge when such code is released is sure to be great for anyone in the field of robotics.
True, to a point. Bear in mind that while JPL does work on novel robotics research, they're also extremely concerned about preserving expensive, hard-to-replace robot systems. As a result, a lot of the software is based on well-established systems that, in the research world, have been surpassed a while ago. The rover autonomous navigation software, for example, is related to navigation software written here at Carnegie Mellon some four or five years ago.
Furthermore, a lot of the research advances made by JPL are presented at conferences and published in journals. It's not like they work in isolation and keep everything quiet. In fact, some of my fellow grad students work on large projects alongside JPL researchers and researchers at other institutions. So, in an academic sense, there's already a lot of sharing going on.
--Tom
Does anyone know why we still have official telegrams? Seems a little obsolescent.
--Tom
This entire post is a direct quote from the New York Times.
And, just so nobody misses it (since everyone's pointing it out), the poster's username is "Eric S. RayRNond".
--Tom