In the last 100 years, we have seen the most explosive growth rates in history, and in some geographic areas, some of the lowest growth rates in history.
It is the global growth that matters. Humanity continues to grow exponentially worldwide. Some localities may show a decrease in population, but this includes effects such as emigration.
It is inevitable that we will "solve" the population crisis somehow. At the current growth rate the mass of human flesh will equal the mass of all life on Earth in a thousand years or so - this clearly won't happen. The question is whether we will choose the manner of solving the problem or rather whether we will see war, disease and famine of biblical proportions. Whatever the solution will be, it won't include mass transport of humans to other worlds.
bjourne points out: "They assume that alien civilizations would grow exponentially like humanity. To maintain exponential growth the civilization would inevitably have to colonize other planets, other solar systems and even other galaxies."
What they really assume is that the laws of physics apply broadly across the cosmos. Darwin and Malthus do the rest.
The real question is how hard it is to jump the gap from one world to the next. Science fiction authors assume this is not only possible but relatively easy, because otherwise they would have no story to write. Travel (of the few) within the solar system seems plausible. Travel (of the many) to neighboring stars is far beyond daunting.
Consider Malthusian growth: Our population today is 6.602 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Numbers are a couple of years old - it doesn't change the result.) Do the math.
Today there were 210,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 210,000 more. The day after - another 210,000. In six months that will be 211,000 per day - in a year, 212,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space travel to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 210,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move at least that 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years.
"pet concept that happens to be empirically testable but isn't what the word actually means"
This assumes that there is a stable (if perhaps complex) concept denoted by the word - and that all share that concept. The whole point of this discussion is that some dispute the definition. The other traits you mention map pretty well onto Gardner's classifications - and just to select one, "love" has its own rich class distinctions from eros to agape. (See also "Galatea 2.2" by Richard Powers.)
I believe Gardner himself was ambivalent to referring to the traits he was discussing as separate "intelligences". The heart of your assertion appears to be that this is more a political choice of words than anything else, and I agree with that assessment.
Emerson referred to language as fossil poetry. It falls flat when communities co-opt terminology mostly because they tend to be rather tone deaf to the poetry of organic usage. (But see also Steven Pinker.)
IQ and intelligence are concepts rather devoid of meaning, however - but asserting survival itself as a better meaning seems pretty limp reasoning.
There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means
Point taken, but you are confounding two separate issues yourself. The notion of Howard Gardner's so-called "multiple intelligences" is well presented in Stephen Jay Gould's book, "Mismeasure of Man". Gould's thesis is that IQ is a meaningless measure, and that intelligence is a meaningless notion that doesn't correspond to a single measurable entity in the first place.
You suggest a definition "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information", but this begs the question by assuming its own premises. In the first place, you describe a composite entity comprising multiple skills (there's Gardner's multiple intelligences) as well as something ("ability to acquire, retain, and use information") that seems itself like a circular definition.
So yes, there is a bit of academic slight of hand in reusing the word "intelligence" to represent something other than "what people commonly mean", but the fundamental point is that what people commonly are trying to express is a bunch of hooey.
That said, this statement from the referenced article: "survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence" seems evolutionarily extremely suspect. Survival is the dependent variable in Natural Selection. Phenotypical traits like intelligence, whether multiple or singular, are the independent variables driving evolution.
We've just seen governments worldwide deliver a trillion dollar windfall to their corporate masters. No attempt was made to hide the fact that this money was an explicit reward for mismanagement and stupidity. The logic - what there is of it - behind the giveaway depends utterly on the implicit assumption that a healthy economy requires cancerous growth. The decision-making process for this bailout proceeded with lightning speed over the space of a few months.
Meanwhile, scientists have spent the past three or four decades patiently building the case for climate change. Scientists have persisted in continuing this research even though there is no personal reward to speak of, and even given the spittle spraying them in the face from rabid industrialists and climate change deniers. The case for climate change has been made many times over. More evidence is piling up even with a budget of a few hundredths of one-percent of the corporate bailout. Our climate is a shared resource for the entire world with far more economic impact than 100 Goldman Sachs.
Consider two alternatives:
1) The industrialists and/or the fundamentalists are right. That is, either we could burn dioxin laced sulfurous coal in vast piles on every street corner and Mother Earth would thank us and beg for more - or, the rapture is fast approaching and the faithful will be sucked up to heaven leaving the damned to clean up the mess.
2) The tree huggers are right. The Earth is fragile and we're fast approaching (or already past) a tipping point that will usher in climate change of a scale that hasn't been seen for millions of years. In the mean time, we are permanently degrading our stores of natural resources. It will be hard to recover from an ice age when all the fossil fuel has been burned.
What to do? What to do? Given these two choices, what to do?
Well, look at it this way, if #1 is true then what's the harm in advocating, adopting and implementing prudent environmental policies? All that happens is that the children of the rich get better water and air and parkland and healthier and more plentiful food along with the rest of us. (Or perhaps that when the rapture comes, we hand over the keys to a planet that has been better tended.)
Whereas, if there's even a small likelihood of #2, a society would have to be insane to continue to permit unregulated industries to squander resources and to pollute and to cheat on paying the full lifecycle costs of their operations (http://dieoff.org/page95.htm). One doesn't have to believe that an airtight case has been made (yet) for manmade climate change - one just needs to recognize that no coherent case at all has been made against manmade climate change.
Environmentally conscious policies are simply common sense. Don't ask how good the case for manmade climate change has to be to justify taking environmental action, ask rather how good a case would have to be made against climate change to justify doing nothing.
This is a familiar discussion, although the assertion about not being able to cite your own work is bogus. I suspect that everybody in academia expects a new online publication model to emerge, but this is certainly taking a long time to converge.
The absolutists here may want to consider a couple of complications. First, what about the very frequent case of multiple authorship? Without a third party such as a journal to whom to reassign copyright, the authors would constantly have to squabble between themselves about who - jointly, severally or individually - would retain copyright and in what proportions. Second, most corporate or educational institutions require their staff to sign over ownership of intellectual work products as a basis for employment in the first place.
There is no simple Platonic ideal of "property", let alone something called "intellectual property". The laws that exist (at least in origin) were primarily intended to defend the rights of the body politic, not of the individual "creator". Further, the notion of a truly individual creator is a fantasy. Newton saw further because he stood upon the shoulders of giants. (Or should I have quoted that 382 years after his death?)
The point is that not only does Jupiter protect the terrestrial planets now, but that Jupiter has protected Earth from the birth of the solar system. This is one reason that Earth isn't yet another gas giant.
Jupiter is by far the largest planet and has by far the largest such effect. A lot of the reasoning in the comments has caused one to question how well Astro 100 courses are being taught, but perhaps it is ok to venture one simple statement for why Jupiter preferentially protects the inner solar system. The comets that threaten us originate in the distant Oort Cloud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud). They visit the inner solar system, but their orbits all begin far outside. It is thought that external perturbations play a role in causing them to plunge inwards. Jupiter (to oversimplify outrageously) stands between us and the bombardment.
Fundamentally this is the famous "three body problem". The equations describing Newtonian gravity are straightforward to solve for two bodies, and impossible to solve precisely for three or more. Relativistic corrections add a bit of spice. As a result planetary mechanics requires numerical integration.
NIST presumably charges on a cost recovery basis. They keep the data updated (latest version appears to be v3.2 as of 2007) and have to pay for the due diligence of keeping up with the scientific literature. Presumably either the DB (STPLIB2) or the documentation or separate publications describes how the data are accumulated and vetted. The software appears to permit the values to be updated by users (undoubtedly also familiar with the appropriate journals and research) in between releases.
You could consult the same papers and accumulate the same data. (And don't forget the subtle physical algorithms and numerical techniques embedded in the code.) This would not be a trivial exercise. More to the point, NIST exists precisely to serve as a reliable source of such information. Few other organizations have the resources to gain such trust. Should your customer trust you as much as NIST?
There is a frequent disconnect in scientific programming between the science and computing requirements. Many of the comments here focus on the niceties of programming, but neglect the underlying scientific reasoning. It isn't enough to get an answer - or even the answer - one must also construct a chain of deduction from the peer reviewed scientific literature to the resulting decision-making (for whatever purpose).
As far as choice of programming language, mature programmers appreciate the characteristics of each language like the bouquet of fine wines. Some languages are indeed "corked", but FORTRAN is not one of them. Think of a fine old brooding cabernet. C is a cheerful chianti, suitable for most situations - ideal (by design) for none.
The technical issues here have nothing to do with programming, per se, but rather system architecture. Clearly what is needed amounts to a small multi-platform relational database - mySQL or what have you - along with a portable library with multi-language bindings to allow the algorithms to be accessed from tailored applications. The NIST could then continue to sell their own general purpose application. The marketing issue is whether it would turn out that everybody would continue to use the NIST's application even given its apparent limitations.
But the real issue is sociology. One presumes that "Thermophysical Properties of Hydrocarbon Mixtures" implies a resource of interest to "Big Chem". Perhaps the reality is just that Exxon and Shell and BP and 3M and Monsanto and BASF create and maintain their own proprietary codes for such purposes?
Buridan's principle describes a type of race condition intrinsic to all decision-making systems. Lamport's paper is on the short list of documents that everybody in the slashdot community should read.
In a nutshell, macroscopic real world systems are continuous. Thus the mean value theorem applies. For every go/no-go decision, there is one threshold before which decision A is clearly valid and another threshold after which decision B is valid. By the MVT, somewhere between those two thresholds is a point where the decision crosses the axis between A and B.
Driving requires a sequence of decisions. It isn't too much to say that driving is a sequence of life-and-death decisions. Anything that distracts us moves the decision-making thresholds - e.g., the 3 second rule for following cars should lengthen for distracted drivers. Buridan, for instance, is a likely culprit in railroad crossing accidents. The driver could stop and be safe. The driver could cross expeditiously and be safe. The driver vacillates. Kaboom!
Cell phones aren't just a distraction - cars and roads are full of distractions. Cell phones are an unnecessary distraction.
Re:Kids and Real Science don't mix
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The Geek Atlas
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hogwash!
Not everyone gets to sit at an observatory looking for some celestial wonder. Most live in Excel spreadsheets and databases.
Indeed - including most astronomers. Experimental design is not boring just because it has evolved to include digital cameras and computer networks and a remote operations paradigm.
Kids need some reality
Encouraging a bit of hopeful imagination about their futures is dramatically more realistic than your fatalistic world view. As regards science in particular, your premise is absurd. Science is all around us. A forensic accountant may "live in Excel and DBs", but uses the principles of science just the same. A baker is a chemist. An auto mechanic a mechanical engineer. And both may use spreadsheets and databases regularly - and those databases and spreadsheets, if well organized, will save them a lot of time they would otherwise spend sitting at a desk crunching numbers.
A child who is encouraged to visit museums and libraries and Geek travel sites and to participate in "Science Olympiad" or "Destination Imagination" and to build LEGO robots and electronics kits and chemistry sets - is going to have a heck of a head start no matter what career they eventually pursue.
I've judged (with many others) at my local science fair for the last ten years or so. I can personally attest to having seen hundreds of "Real Science" projects successfully conducted by kids over that time. Successful by your restricted definition of success, meaning with neat, complete lab notebooks and pertinent graphics often produced from spreadsheets. And successful in the true sense of revealing underlying truths of the universe and of ennobling the spirits of the participants and judges alike.
Some countries reserve the title "Engineer" for those who have been through government Engineering certification Boards.
This is yet another dimension of the problem. I distinguished job title from job function (e.g., design versus research). Certification references requirements outside the particular organization's. Such certification need not involve a government board, however. Many programmers do seek certification of various sorts - for example, Microsoft offers various finely graded levels and classes of certification.
Contrarily, not all engineering disciplines map well onto formal certification processes. Civil engineering (there's those bridges again) is tailor made for a certification process. On the other hand, many niches for system engineers involve the development of unprecedented facilities. In that case it's hard to focus on specific best practices - even best practices for process development - when nobody has ever created a similar system in the past. Other engineering disciplines fall somewhere in the middle between these extremes.
Certification itself is only one way to build confidence in mastery of a subject. Others are membership in professional organizations, or subscription to journals - or, of course, possession of appropriate college degrees. CS/programming/software/IT are much more diverse than the relatively small number of engineering disciplines - to begin with, software is important in every engineering discipline.
Bottom line - the biggest distinction between the engineering of software and the engineering of hardware is that the design is finished before you even start building a hardware prototype - but a software design is not finished until the actual deliverable is finished. Software process and modeling tchotchkes like UML are all about trying to impose external order on what is intrinsically an internal creative effort. These techniques are useful for some projects, deadly poison for others, and perhaps appropriate in moderation for most projects.
Software certification (like my framed ICONIX "diploma") is ok if enough freedom of action is preserved for (senior) personnel to decide how to apply the techniques. Forcing someone to build a robustness diagram is not going to help with non-object oriented projects.
I don't think engineer should be the vaunted title - scientist should be.
"Engineer" and "scientist" are more like different roles, not different titles. A single individual might wear both hats at one time or another. Better job titles might be "computer systems architect" versus "computer systems researcher". That is - what is the motivation for practicing either engineering or science?
Having worked with a lot of both engineers and scientists, it is clear that there is no implicit hierarchy. I don't know about a "vaunted title", but depending on the enterprise either an engineer or a scientist might take pride of place. In academia, for instance, the science side usually rules. But with the bridge example, one certainly hopes that an engineer is in charge and hires scientists for various jobs such as researching materials or unique lighting requirements. Of course job titles associated with roles that more directly concern financial aspects of the project outvote everybody else:-)
I prefer "programmer" as a title over "software engineer", just as "teacher" is preferable to "educator". Fancy titles obscure fundamental purposes. On the other hand, "software systems engineer" is perhaps more accurate than "system programmer" because the word software describes the type of system. Also, "system programmer" tends to have overtones of IBM System 370 era groupspeak.
Engineering is design. Science is discovery. Both are (potentially) equally creative.
Requirements, requirements, requirements...
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Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
All projects can be described by:
define the problem
entertain solutions
iterate
Requirements are the interface between #1 and #2. Thus, one way or another all system failures are about requirements. Either the true project requirements were never discovered - or the customer was allowed to impose unnecessary and counterproductive pseudo-requirements - or the domain requirements weren't correctly elaborated into appropriate functional requirements - or the process for managing the requirements was top down and static when it should have been bottom up and iterative (or vice versa) - or a contractor was permitted to be non-responsive to the requirements (for any of a 1000 reasons) - or...
Which is to say that each project represents a single complex-but-inherently-self-consistent problem. There are an infinity of possible solutions. Each solution attempts to manage the complexity of the problem space, but cannot ever eliminate this complexity. Further, all real world solutions are guaranteed to be inconsistent. We often refer to these inconsistencies as bugs, but more often they are failures of the conceptual model, that is they are requirement failures.
On the other hand, development teams often complain that requirements have changed - for instance that the customer is demanding new features. Rather, requirements never change, only our understanding of the scope of the problem changes. Discover the requirements and the Platonic ideal of a project will be laid out in front of you.
The search for project requirements can be an adventure as rich as any our species embarks upon. Projects fail for the same reason that expeditions fail - a lack of imagination. A customer's description always fails to capture the essence of a project; customers always fail to include a broad enough vision for how the new or modified system will fit into the organization. The first stage of any project is to clarify that vision. As with Indiana Jones, the trail is fraught with dangers, but the trek is the essence of the exercise.
The poll says more about Democrats than about scientists. Whether causally or casually, Democrats want to be perceived as being the "Smart Party". On the other hand, the Republicans have been referred to as the "Stupid Party" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004449). One could argue that there is more evolutionary advantage for a party that appeals broadly to the uneducated than for a party that appeals narrowly to the educated. And hence the lack of enthusiasm among the Republican elites for educating the masses.
Some subset of the religious far right in America have difficulty reconciling the overt word of God with the covert evidence of God's creation. Again, this says more about human nature than it does about Nature's God. An all powerful deity certainly could have planted pre-aged fossils underground - as well as layered the bedrock of the world with metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous strata that tell a coherent worldwide tale of deep time. The innumerable celestial clocks of planets, stars and galaxies could have been set in vast logically interconnected ways stretching back billions of years before James Ussher assures us the Universe first drew breathe. But again, doesn't this say more about the good Bishop than it does about He to whom the tetragrammaton refers?
We share the world with the few who share our individual ideas and ideals and with the many who will dispute us. Every one of the faithful from every one of the world's great and small religions is an atheist - toward all the other religions. Who now believes in Jupiter and Ra, Zeus and Odin? A poll of what scientists believe is as pointless as a poll of spiritual beliefs. The defining difference, rather, is that at the end of the day (or aeon) there is now and ever shall be one science, but many religions.
To deny religion is commonplace - at least the denial of specific religions belonging to others. To deny specific facts uncovered through scientific methods is also commonplace - even more so from other scientists. But the real world is ever ready to overcome all arguments. Humans will most likely be long gone before the supervolcano under Yellowstone reasserts its own scientific world view. But however long that Apocalypse is in coming, one can be confident that it will arrive before the Rapture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture).
You don't mention what field you work in. There is no such thing as a generic techie or manager. Consider (strongly consider) continuing education, whichever way you jump. Instead of generic software engineering courses, take some graduate system engineering courses. The one strength a senior programmer has is understanding the entire system design (including human engineering). Which is to say that by adding a title like "system architect" to a management job you don't have to give up the thrill of working with the technologies (whatever those technologies are).
Stephen Jay Gould told an anecdote about Richard Feynman excitedly announcing that he had discovered new principles of evolution. On inspection they turned out to be either well known findings or well known fallacies. Basically he was largely ignorant of the literature in the field. It says more about physicists than about evolution that he would deem himself qualified to wade into the fray with such minimal preparation.
It is not surprising that Stephen Hawking, another great physicist, similarly feels empowered to speculate about evolution without apparently having read Richard Dawkin's popular works. Others have mentioned memes, but Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype might be even more pertinent. Hawkings appears to be taking the notion of the meme to the extreme of thinking that species evolution is now relying on actual gene analogues outside our physical corpus. Rather, our genes remain internal, but their somatic expression is external to ourselves.
Bringing it slightly back On Topic, this has nothing to do with translation of already readable stone inscriptions.
Rather absurd to claim the original post in this thread was off topic. The article is about improving traffic analysis for ancient texts. An expert in ancient texts can't say, "Yay!", as a result?
Its about determining which hammer and chisel jockey was involved in translating the "written on paper" to the "carved in stone". This is akin to determining if Margret typed your manuscript or if it was Walter.
Exactly. And if Walter lived in 1870 and Margret in 1970, that would tell you a lot about the possible authorship of the document.
Nothing at all about recovering last works or determining if you have risen to the status of a classic author.
Experts in classics use all the same techniques of forensics and just plain logic as anybody else. In particular, they must assemble coherent texts from separate sources. This will help produce a self-consistent corpus. It is a prerequisite to all higher levels of scholarship.
"the only way the public would actually accept "public" photograph data as real deal, is if NASA "open-sourced" spacecraft broadcasting interface - frequencies, protocol, encoding, where to set up a dish, size of dish required"
Open source is the wrong term, of course, but none of this information is hidden away: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=16926 The inverse-square law ensures that you need a very large antenna beyond Low Earth Orbit, but the public has been eavesdropping on satellites since Sputnik. In this case, just point the antenna at the Moon:-)
KITZ... To fake a signal from Vega, what would you need? [...] you would need a satellite, and you would need launch capabilities to put the satellite into orbit. And of course the message itself. To put something like this together, so complex, drawing on so many different disciplines...
ELLIE... would be impossible.
Actually it would most definitely be impossible. The parallax of Vega is a bit over a tenth arcsecond. This is straightforward to measure with 19th century technology. More to the point, any spacecraft of Earth origin will be much, much (much, much (much, much)) closer than Vega. Simple trigonometry would reveal the scale of the distance to the origin of the signal with zero chance of being spoofed. This is the antithesis of any Moon Hoax.
The appellate judge states as if established in fact:
"The community reacted violently to the publication of the Ode. Appellants received death threats and a shot was fired at the family home, forcing the family to move out of [AnyPlaceUSA]. Due to severe losses, David closed the 20-year-old family business."
Did the lawyers for both sides stipulate to these "facts"? Or were they somehow proven in the trial court? There are at least six assertions here:
The community reacted violently.
Appellants received death threats.
A shot was fired at the family home.
The family [was forced] to move.
The [business suffered] severe losses.
David closed the business.
Numbers 2, 3 and 5 are assertions that should be straightforward to establish evidentially. Although the precise scenario of the "severe losses" is not laid out. Did business simply drop precipitously? Or was there an extended period of tedious sniping back-and-forth, for instance in the local chamber of commerce? How exactly did the (former) customers learn that the business was connected to the girl's family? And what kind of business was it, anyway? What was happening with the business's competition at the same time? Did one profit at the expense of the other? Or did the entire local industry fail (a very familiar scenario in small towns)?
But was the business forced to close (#6) as a direct result of the republication? The implication is that the family moved due to both safety and economic concerns (#4). The first of these seems a criminal matter almost impossible to connect back to republication unless the bullet is traced to a gun and the gun to a death threat and the death threat to someone unhinged by a letter to the editor. In rural America, having a shot fired at a house is more likely to be an incautious sportsman. Was it deer season? While moving due to economic reasons is simply a restating of the prior assertion about the business failing. This is perhaps pertinent to damages, but not to the facts of the case.
What does it mean for an appellate judge to assert "the community reacted violently"? Surely there must be prior case law to understand this point? The implication in the Slashdot article is that this happened in fact and that it was causally related to one poor girl's teenage angst about where she happened to grow up.
It appears rather to this reader that the judge overreached unnecessarily. To come to the same decision ("go away little girl, you bother me") there was no reason to rule on the copyright aspects of the case at all. The judgement can be taken to say that any intentional "publication", no matter how temporary, to an online source permits a newspaper to republish your work. This doesn't do the newspaper industry any favors. Fair use is a two-edged sword:
"Having been published on myspace.com, the Ode was not private."
Doesn't this apply to everything a newspaper ever publishes? If there is no copyright protection of the girl's expression of her all-too-typical teenage thoughts, why can't complete articles from this newspaper now be republished at will as letters to the editor on MySpace pages? Either MySpace is a publication coequal with a newspaper - or it isn't.
One remains skeptical about the facts in this case. Surely the bad actions (as described) of the community's high school principal and newspaper publisher would have been even more likely to arouse community ire? While one could almost take a sensitivity to insult as a defining characteristic of small town life versus city life - similar negative screeds to city life are published every day in city newspapers - one is skeptical that this small town is such a caricature of the girl's description. In Aesop's fable, it is the Country Mouse who scurries home.
Rather all usability tends toward suckishness. It's called entropy.
MPT's later essay "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", immediately rejects its own premise and points out that the real issue is coherent management for volunteer projects. This is surprising?
F/OSS projects are not always staffed by volunteers. And volunteer projects - in software or elsewhere - are not always amateurishly managed. The defining characteristic of Free or Open Source software models is paradoxically a restriction on how work products can be used - that is, it is a restriction on the output of the project. It may also be true that such a project may choose itself to use restricted inputs - perhaps including its own output recursively. It is only by comparison with proprietary software that F/OSS can be called open or free, as the case may be.
Usability may be a strong requirement on a project. Usability itself has many dimensions. Many here appear to think usability is synonymous with GUI technology. Far from it. But even if GUIs are given specific attention, the discussion is rather naive. Pointer focus is not always better than click-to-focus. Otherwise desirable features often interact - should the window with focus automatically move to the front while your mouse traverses 8 intervening windows?
But usability is never the only requirement. Requirements must be interpreted in some context. A project without a coherent context is going to produce poor requirements. Whatever software process is followed, failing to capture solid requirements will result in a weak differentiation between proposed solutions. Unless there is a self-consistent solution, the usability of that solution never even becomes a realistic point of discussion.
A project addresses a single problem - whether that problem is well described or not. Any problem has several good solutions - and many, many, many bad solutions. Design is an exercise in rejecting bad solutions and retaining good solutions, that is - survival of the fittest. A project can pursue design faster than natural selection or slower than natural selection. Ultimately it will be the selection pressure arising from a community of users (whether skilled or naive doesn't really matter) that will drive convergence to an acceptable solution. Some users will always find solutions acceptable to the community to be bad solutions from their own point of view.
A lot of respondents seem to have seized on a spurious notion of what this is all about. That isn't surprising since the Slashdot article and the press release and even the abstract are rather obscure. No sign of a preprint, but the same abstract shows up for a number of colloquiums in the last couple of months. The paper is from a proceedings, so it may itself not be especially profound.
The abstract says: "We propose a fully homomorphic encryption scheme -- i.e., a scheme that allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt. Our solution comes in three steps. First, we provide a general result -- that, to construct an encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits, it suffices to construct an encryption scheme that can evaluate (slightly augmented versions of) its own decryption circuit; we call a scheme that can evaluate its (augmented) decryption circuit bootstrappable."
The encryption and compression literature tends to use the word "scheme" where others might say algorithm or transform. "Circuits" here is a term of art (maybe arising originally from actual physical circuits, as in the Enigma machine?)
"An encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits" suggests only that the possessor of the private key can generate these arbitrary queries, not that anybody and their brother can scavenge the encrypted data. It isn't stated whether such a query also requires the plaintext. It would be pretty cool if one feature were to be able to discard the plaintext post-encryption.
The gimmick appears to be that the arbitrary circuit can include the decryption itself (the bootstrap part). Note that this feature is far more cool (assuming it works) than all the nonsense about cloud computing. Somehow the data are *arbitrarily* available to properly encoded queries without ever being exposed - even to the CPU performing the operations. This processor could be on the same machine, on some remote server, in the cloud or across the galaxy. How cool is that?
If you normalize out the usual "tax" of Slashdot bullshit, this article has generated a better discussion than most. That said, it is remarkable how many of the contributers appear to be far more reactionary than Bradbury himself is accused of being. A couple of points:
1) Wouldn't it make more sense to read his anti-internet rant as provocative rhetoric in pursuit of a pro-library agenda? After all, he also denigrates a college education in the same breath. In nine decades of dealing with the media he likely has learned some tricks for gathering attention and staying on message.
2) And what about his stated distaste for universities? Other than one or two home school proponents, nobody has even commented on that.
What does it say about Slashdotters that they jump to the defense of the role the internet plays as a static archive and ignore the dynamic role networked technologies (like Slashdot on a good day) can play in developing and extending online communities analogous to universities? There are also far too many here who seem ready to accept unsubstantiated assertions about Bradbury's politics, while investing no weight to this widely regarded author's body of work. Do yourself a favor and read a few of his books.
The remarkable thing here is not that an author would support libraries - in particular, that the author of Fahrenheit 451 would - but rather that members of this technology-aware community would have such an inert view of the internet.
Ignoring off topic comments about McDonald's, this is really a question raised in books like, say, "The Razor's Edge". What we do for employment does not ultimately define who we are. Stephen Jay Gould also definitively rejects the premise of "smartness" in his "Mismeasure of Man".
And, of course, the proper business model for staffing entry level jobs such as McDonald's is to provide a way for employees to work the counter or the grill for a few years and then move on to better paying careers.
Slashdot Mirror
In the last 100 years, we have seen the most explosive growth rates in history, and in some geographic areas, some of the lowest growth rates in history.
It is the global growth that matters. Humanity continues to grow exponentially worldwide. Some localities may show a decrease in population, but this includes effects such as emigration.
It is inevitable that we will "solve" the population crisis somehow. At the current growth rate the mass of human flesh will equal the mass of all life on Earth in a thousand years or so - this clearly won't happen. The question is whether we will choose the manner of solving the problem or rather whether we will see war, disease and famine of biblical proportions. Whatever the solution will be, it won't include mass transport of humans to other worlds.
bjourne points out: "They assume that alien civilizations would grow exponentially like humanity. To maintain exponential growth the civilization would inevitably have to colonize other planets, other solar systems and even other galaxies."
What they really assume is that the laws of physics apply broadly across the cosmos. Darwin and Malthus do the rest.
The real question is how hard it is to jump the gap from one world to the next. Science fiction authors assume this is not only possible but relatively easy, because otherwise they would have no story to write. Travel (of the few) within the solar system seems plausible. Travel (of the many) to neighboring stars is far beyond daunting.
Consider Malthusian growth: Our population today is 6.602 billion souls. The current growth rate is 1.167% per annum. (Numbers are a couple of years old - it doesn't change the result.) Do the math.
Today there were 210,000 more souls and 6000 tons more human flesh pressing inward on Mother Earth than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be 210,000 more. The day after - another 210,000. In six months that will be 211,000 per day - in a year, 212,000 per day, and so forth and so on. Less than a year from now there will be another 1.8 million tons of human flesh literally shouldering other species into extinction. That's not 1.8 million tons total - that's just the additional growth of skin and hair and sinew and good red meat locked up in your mama's Soylent Green recipe.
For space travel to matter in the solution of this problem, we have to build a fleet of ships capable of offloading 210,000 people - a new space fleet every day, year after year - forever. A space shuttle carries a crew of seven - so we need 30,000 space shuttles a day. (Of course, that only gets you to low Earth orbit.) Each year we would have to move at least that 1.8 million tons of human cold cuts - that's the equivalent of 18 Nimitz class aircraft carriers - to some other distant, unwelcoming world.
And then, of course, you've just shifted the horizon of the always looming catastrophe to a collection of planets rather than a single planet. Since this is a doubling issue, colonizing another planet - say, a terraformed Venus - just buys you an additional 60 years.
"pet concept that happens to be empirically testable but isn't what the word actually means"
This assumes that there is a stable (if perhaps complex) concept denoted by the word - and that all share that concept. The whole point of this discussion is that some dispute the definition. The other traits you mention map pretty well onto Gardner's classifications - and just to select one, "love" has its own rich class distinctions from eros to agape. (See also "Galatea 2.2" by Richard Powers.)
I believe Gardner himself was ambivalent to referring to the traits he was discussing as separate "intelligences". The heart of your assertion appears to be that this is more a political choice of words than anything else, and I agree with that assessment.
Emerson referred to language as fossil poetry. It falls flat when communities co-opt terminology mostly because they tend to be rather tone deaf to the poetry of organic usage. (But see also Steven Pinker.)
IQ and intelligence are concepts rather devoid of meaning, however - but asserting survival itself as a better meaning seems pretty limp reasoning.
There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means
Point taken, but you are confounding two separate issues yourself. The notion of Howard Gardner's so-called "multiple intelligences" is well presented in Stephen Jay Gould's book, "Mismeasure of Man". Gould's thesis is that IQ is a meaningless measure, and that intelligence is a meaningless notion that doesn't correspond to a single measurable entity in the first place.
You suggest a definition "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information", but this begs the question by assuming its own premises. In the first place, you describe a composite entity comprising multiple skills (there's Gardner's multiple intelligences) as well as something ("ability to acquire, retain, and use information") that seems itself like a circular definition.
So yes, there is a bit of academic slight of hand in reusing the word "intelligence" to represent something other than "what people commonly mean", but the fundamental point is that what people commonly are trying to express is a bunch of hooey.
That said, this statement from the referenced article: "survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence" seems evolutionarily extremely suspect. Survival is the dependent variable in Natural Selection. Phenotypical traits like intelligence, whether multiple or singular, are the independent variables driving evolution.
We've just seen governments worldwide deliver a trillion dollar windfall to their corporate masters. No attempt was made to hide the fact that this money was an explicit reward for mismanagement and stupidity. The logic - what there is of it - behind the giveaway depends utterly on the implicit assumption that a healthy economy requires cancerous growth. The decision-making process for this bailout proceeded with lightning speed over the space of a few months.
Meanwhile, scientists have spent the past three or four decades patiently building the case for climate change. Scientists have persisted in continuing this research even though there is no personal reward to speak of, and even given the spittle spraying them in the face from rabid industrialists and climate change deniers. The case for climate change has been made many times over. More evidence is piling up even with a budget of a few hundredths of one-percent of the corporate bailout. Our climate is a shared resource for the entire world with far more economic impact than 100 Goldman Sachs.
Consider two alternatives:
1) The industrialists and/or the fundamentalists are right. That is, either we could burn dioxin laced sulfurous coal in vast piles on every street corner and Mother Earth would thank us and beg for more - or, the rapture is fast approaching and the faithful will be sucked up to heaven leaving the damned to clean up the mess.
2) The tree huggers are right. The Earth is fragile and we're fast approaching (or already past) a tipping point that will usher in climate change of a scale that hasn't been seen for millions of years. In the mean time, we are permanently degrading our stores of natural resources. It will be hard to recover from an ice age when all the fossil fuel has been burned.
What to do? What to do? Given these two choices, what to do?
Well, look at it this way, if #1 is true then what's the harm in advocating, adopting and implementing prudent environmental policies? All that happens is that the children of the rich get better water and air and parkland and healthier and more plentiful food along with the rest of us. (Or perhaps that when the rapture comes, we hand over the keys to a planet that has been better tended.)
Whereas, if there's even a small likelihood of #2, a society would have to be insane to continue to permit unregulated industries to squander resources and to pollute and to cheat on paying the full lifecycle costs of their operations (http://dieoff.org/page95.htm). One doesn't have to believe that an airtight case has been made (yet) for manmade climate change - one just needs to recognize that no coherent case at all has been made against manmade climate change.
Environmentally conscious policies are simply common sense. Don't ask how good the case for manmade climate change has to be to justify taking environmental action, ask rather how good a case would have to be made against climate change to justify doing nothing.
This is a familiar discussion, although the assertion about not being able to cite your own work is bogus. I suspect that everybody in academia expects a new online publication model to emerge, but this is certainly taking a long time to converge.
The issue of so-called "intellectual property" is another recurring discussion, even outside the rabid FOSS ranks. See, for example (to cite myself as well as others): http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/11/29/an-ethical-question-involving-ebooks.
The absolutists here may want to consider a couple of complications. First, what about the very frequent case of multiple authorship? Without a third party such as a journal to whom to reassign copyright, the authors would constantly have to squabble between themselves about who - jointly, severally or individually - would retain copyright and in what proportions. Second, most corporate or educational institutions require their staff to sign over ownership of intellectual work products as a basis for employment in the first place.
There is no simple Platonic ideal of "property", let alone something called "intellectual property". The laws that exist (at least in origin) were primarily intended to defend the rights of the body politic, not of the individual "creator". Further, the notion of a truly individual creator is a fantasy. Newton saw further because he stood upon the shoulders of giants. (Or should I have quoted that 382 years after his death?)
The point is that not only does Jupiter protect the terrestrial planets now, but that Jupiter has protected Earth from the birth of the solar system. This is one reason that Earth isn't yet another gas giant.
The recent controversial redefinition of the word "planet" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet) discusses this "vacuum cleaner" effect as the third of three criteria:
Jupiter is by far the largest planet and has by far the largest such effect. A lot of the reasoning in the comments has caused one to question how well Astro 100 courses are being taught, but perhaps it is ok to venture one simple statement for why Jupiter preferentially protects the inner solar system. The comets that threaten us originate in the distant Oort Cloud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud). They visit the inner solar system, but their orbits all begin far outside. It is thought that external perturbations play a role in causing them to plunge inwards. Jupiter (to oversimplify outrageously) stands between us and the bombardment.
Fundamentally this is the famous "three body problem". The equations describing Newtonian gravity are straightforward to solve for two bodies, and impossible to solve precisely for three or more. Relativistic corrections add a bit of spice. As a result planetary mechanics requires numerical integration.
The solar system is full of neat resonances and points of stability such as the Lagrangian points. Jupiter's Trojan asteroids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy)) cluster at L4 and L5 and are thought to be as numerous as those in the main belt. Our Moon's tidal locking is a) imperfect (since the orbit is rapidly growing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Orbit_and_relationship_to_Earth), and b) simple compared to resonances (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance) between other bodies.
NIST presumably charges on a cost recovery basis. They keep the data updated (latest version appears to be v3.2 as of 2007) and have to pay for the due diligence of keeping up with the scientific literature. Presumably either the DB (STPLIB2) or the documentation or separate publications describes how the data are accumulated and vetted. The software appears to permit the values to be updated by users (undoubtedly also familiar with the appropriate journals and research) in between releases.
You could consult the same papers and accumulate the same data. (And don't forget the subtle physical algorithms and numerical techniques embedded in the code.) This would not be a trivial exercise. More to the point, NIST exists precisely to serve as a reliable source of such information. Few other organizations have the resources to gain such trust. Should your customer trust you as much as NIST?
There is a frequent disconnect in scientific programming between the science and computing requirements. Many of the comments here focus on the niceties of programming, but neglect the underlying scientific reasoning. It isn't enough to get an answer - or even the answer - one must also construct a chain of deduction from the peer reviewed scientific literature to the resulting decision-making (for whatever purpose).
As far as choice of programming language, mature programmers appreciate the characteristics of each language like the bouquet of fine wines. Some languages are indeed "corked", but FORTRAN is not one of them. Think of a fine old brooding cabernet. C is a cheerful chianti, suitable for most situations - ideal (by design) for none.
The technical issues here have nothing to do with programming, per se, but rather system architecture. Clearly what is needed amounts to a small multi-platform relational database - mySQL or what have you - along with a portable library with multi-language bindings to allow the algorithms to be accessed from tailored applications. The NIST could then continue to sell their own general purpose application. The marketing issue is whether it would turn out that everybody would continue to use the NIST's application even given its apparent limitations.
But the real issue is sociology. One presumes that "Thermophysical Properties of Hydrocarbon Mixtures" implies a resource of interest to "Big Chem". Perhaps the reality is just that Exxon and Shell and BP and 3M and Monsanto and BASF create and maintain their own proprietary codes for such purposes?
Buridan's principle describes a type of race condition intrinsic to all decision-making systems. Lamport's paper is on the short list of documents that everybody in the slashdot community should read.
In a nutshell, macroscopic real world systems are continuous. Thus the mean value theorem applies. For every go/no-go decision, there is one threshold before which decision A is clearly valid and another threshold after which decision B is valid. By the MVT, somewhere between those two thresholds is a point where the decision crosses the axis between A and B.
Driving requires a sequence of decisions. It isn't too much to say that driving is a sequence of life-and-death decisions. Anything that distracts us moves the decision-making thresholds - e.g., the 3 second rule for following cars should lengthen for distracted drivers. Buridan, for instance, is a likely culprit in railroad crossing accidents. The driver could stop and be safe. The driver could cross expeditiously and be safe. The driver vacillates. Kaboom!
Cell phones aren't just a distraction - cars and roads are full of distractions. Cell phones are an unnecessary distraction.
Hogwash!
Not everyone gets to sit at an observatory looking for some celestial wonder. Most live in Excel spreadsheets and databases.
Indeed - including most astronomers. Experimental design is not boring just because it has evolved to include digital cameras and computer networks and a remote operations paradigm.
Kids need some reality
Encouraging a bit of hopeful imagination about their futures is dramatically more realistic than your fatalistic world view. As regards science in particular, your premise is absurd. Science is all around us. A forensic accountant may "live in Excel and DBs", but uses the principles of science just the same. A baker is a chemist. An auto mechanic a mechanical engineer. And both may use spreadsheets and databases regularly - and those databases and spreadsheets, if well organized, will save them a lot of time they would otherwise spend sitting at a desk crunching numbers.
A child who is encouraged to visit museums and libraries and Geek travel sites and to participate in "Science Olympiad" or "Destination Imagination" and to build LEGO robots and electronics kits and chemistry sets - is going to have a heck of a head start no matter what career they eventually pursue.
I've judged (with many others) at my local science fair for the last ten years or so. I can personally attest to having seen hundreds of "Real Science" projects successfully conducted by kids over that time. Successful by your restricted definition of success, meaning with neat, complete lab notebooks and pertinent graphics often produced from spreadsheets. And successful in the true sense of revealing underlying truths of the universe and of ennobling the spirits of the participants and judges alike.
Some countries reserve the title "Engineer" for those who have been through government Engineering certification Boards.
This is yet another dimension of the problem. I distinguished job title from job function (e.g., design versus research). Certification references requirements outside the particular organization's. Such certification need not involve a government board, however. Many programmers do seek certification of various sorts - for example, Microsoft offers various finely graded levels and classes of certification.
Contrarily, not all engineering disciplines map well onto formal certification processes. Civil engineering (there's those bridges again) is tailor made for a certification process. On the other hand, many niches for system engineers involve the development of unprecedented facilities. In that case it's hard to focus on specific best practices - even best practices for process development - when nobody has ever created a similar system in the past. Other engineering disciplines fall somewhere in the middle between these extremes.
Certification itself is only one way to build confidence in mastery of a subject. Others are membership in professional organizations, or subscription to journals - or, of course, possession of appropriate college degrees. CS/programming/software/IT are much more diverse than the relatively small number of engineering disciplines - to begin with, software is important in every engineering discipline.
Bottom line - the biggest distinction between the engineering of software and the engineering of hardware is that the design is finished before you even start building a hardware prototype - but a software design is not finished until the actual deliverable is finished. Software process and modeling tchotchkes like UML are all about trying to impose external order on what is intrinsically an internal creative effort. These techniques are useful for some projects, deadly poison for others, and perhaps appropriate in moderation for most projects.
Software certification (like my framed ICONIX "diploma") is ok if enough freedom of action is preserved for (senior) personnel to decide how to apply the techniques. Forcing someone to build a robustness diagram is not going to help with non-object oriented projects.
I don't think engineer should be the vaunted title - scientist should be.
"Engineer" and "scientist" are more like different roles, not different titles. A single individual might wear both hats at one time or another. Better job titles might be "computer systems architect" versus "computer systems researcher". That is - what is the motivation for practicing either engineering or science?
Having worked with a lot of both engineers and scientists, it is clear that there is no implicit hierarchy. I don't know about a "vaunted title", but depending on the enterprise either an engineer or a scientist might take pride of place. In academia, for instance, the science side usually rules. But with the bridge example, one certainly hopes that an engineer is in charge and hires scientists for various jobs such as researching materials or unique lighting requirements. Of course job titles associated with roles that more directly concern financial aspects of the project outvote everybody else :-)
I prefer "programmer" as a title over "software engineer", just as "teacher" is preferable to "educator". Fancy titles obscure fundamental purposes. On the other hand, "software systems engineer" is perhaps more accurate than "system programmer" because the word software describes the type of system. Also, "system programmer" tends to have overtones of IBM System 370 era groupspeak.
Engineering is design. Science is discovery. Both are (potentially) equally creative.
All projects can be described by:
Requirements are the interface between #1 and #2. Thus, one way or another all system failures are about requirements. Either the true project requirements were never discovered - or the customer was allowed to impose unnecessary and counterproductive pseudo-requirements - or the domain requirements weren't correctly elaborated into appropriate functional requirements - or the process for managing the requirements was top down and static when it should have been bottom up and iterative (or vice versa) - or a contractor was permitted to be non-responsive to the requirements (for any of a 1000 reasons) - or...
Which is to say that each project represents a single complex-but-inherently-self-consistent problem. There are an infinity of possible solutions. Each solution attempts to manage the complexity of the problem space, but cannot ever eliminate this complexity. Further, all real world solutions are guaranteed to be inconsistent. We often refer to these inconsistencies as bugs, but more often they are failures of the conceptual model, that is they are requirement failures.
On the other hand, development teams often complain that requirements have changed - for instance that the customer is demanding new features. Rather, requirements never change, only our understanding of the scope of the problem changes. Discover the requirements and the Platonic ideal of a project will be laid out in front of you.
The search for project requirements can be an adventure as rich as any our species embarks upon. Projects fail for the same reason that expeditions fail - a lack of imagination. A customer's description always fails to capture the essence of a project; customers always fail to include a broad enough vision for how the new or modified system will fit into the organization. The first stage of any project is to clarify that vision. As with Indiana Jones, the trail is fraught with dangers, but the trek is the essence of the exercise.
The poll says more about Democrats than about scientists. Whether causally or casually, Democrats want to be perceived as being the "Smart Party". On the other hand, the Republicans have been referred to as the "Stupid Party" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004449). One could argue that there is more evolutionary advantage for a party that appeals broadly to the uneducated than for a party that appeals narrowly to the educated. And hence the lack of enthusiasm among the Republican elites for educating the masses.
Some subset of the religious far right in America have difficulty reconciling the overt word of God with the covert evidence of God's creation. Again, this says more about human nature than it does about Nature's God. An all powerful deity certainly could have planted pre-aged fossils underground - as well as layered the bedrock of the world with metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous strata that tell a coherent worldwide tale of deep time. The innumerable celestial clocks of planets, stars and galaxies could have been set in vast logically interconnected ways stretching back billions of years before James Ussher assures us the Universe first drew breathe. But again, doesn't this say more about the good Bishop than it does about He to whom the tetragrammaton refers?
We share the world with the few who share our individual ideas and ideals and with the many who will dispute us. Every one of the faithful from every one of the world's great and small religions is an atheist - toward all the other religions. Who now believes in Jupiter and Ra, Zeus and Odin? A poll of what scientists believe is as pointless as a poll of spiritual beliefs. The defining difference, rather, is that at the end of the day (or aeon) there is now and ever shall be one science, but many religions.
To deny religion is commonplace - at least the denial of specific religions belonging to others. To deny specific facts uncovered through scientific methods is also commonplace - even more so from other scientists. But the real world is ever ready to overcome all arguments. Humans will most likely be long gone before the supervolcano under Yellowstone reasserts its own scientific world view. But however long that Apocalypse is in coming, one can be confident that it will arrive before the Rapture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture).
You don't mention what field you work in. There is no such thing as a generic techie or manager. Consider (strongly consider) continuing education, whichever way you jump. Instead of generic software engineering courses, take some graduate system engineering courses. The one strength a senior programmer has is understanding the entire system design (including human engineering). Which is to say that by adding a title like "system architect" to a management job you don't have to give up the thrill of working with the technologies (whatever those technologies are).
SysML makes UML make sense.
Stephen Jay Gould told an anecdote about Richard Feynman excitedly announcing that he had discovered new principles of evolution. On inspection they turned out to be either well known findings or well known fallacies. Basically he was largely ignorant of the literature in the field. It says more about physicists than about evolution that he would deem himself qualified to wade into the fray with such minimal preparation.
It is not surprising that Stephen Hawking, another great physicist, similarly feels empowered to speculate about evolution without apparently having read Richard Dawkin's popular works. Others have mentioned memes, but Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype might be even more pertinent. Hawkings appears to be taking the notion of the meme to the extreme of thinking that species evolution is now relying on actual gene analogues outside our physical corpus. Rather, our genes remain internal, but their somatic expression is external to ourselves.
Bringing it slightly back On Topic, this has nothing to do with translation of already readable stone inscriptions.
Rather absurd to claim the original post in this thread was off topic. The article is about improving traffic analysis for ancient texts. An expert in ancient texts can't say, "Yay!", as a result?
Its about determining which hammer and chisel jockey was involved in translating the "written on paper" to the "carved in stone". This is akin to determining if Margret typed your manuscript or if it was Walter.
Exactly. And if Walter lived in 1870 and Margret in 1970, that would tell you a lot about the possible authorship of the document.
Nothing at all about recovering last works or determining if you have risen to the status of a classic author.
Experts in classics use all the same techniques of forensics and just plain logic as anybody else. In particular, they must assemble coherent texts from separate sources. This will help produce a self-consistent corpus. It is a prerequisite to all higher levels of scholarship.
"the only way the public would actually accept "public" photograph data as real deal, is if NASA "open-sourced" spacecraft broadcasting interface - frequencies, protocol, encoding, where to set up a dish, size of dish required"
Open source is the wrong term, of course, but none of this information is hidden away: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=16926 The inverse-square law ensures that you need a very large antenna beyond Low Earth Orbit, but the public has been eavesdropping on satellites since Sputnik. In this case, just point the antenna at the Moon :-)
KITZ ... To fake a signal from Vega, what would you need? [...] you would need a satellite, and you would need launch capabilities to put the satellite into orbit. And of course the message itself. To put something like this together, so complex, drawing on so many different disciplines...
ELLIE ... would be impossible.
Actually it would most definitely be impossible. The parallax of Vega is a bit over a tenth arcsecond. This is straightforward to measure with 19th century technology. More to the point, any spacecraft of Earth origin will be much, much (much, much (much, much)) closer than Vega. Simple trigonometry would reveal the scale of the distance to the origin of the signal with zero chance of being spoofed. This is the antithesis of any Moon Hoax.
Set up a BSD lpd queue under Cygwin, something like:
sendit:lp=/spool/null:sd=/spool:if=/spool/sendit.sh:sf:sh:mx#0:
Have the sendit.sh script do whatever it is you want with the file. To send a file: lpr -Psendit filename
Configuration of the network queue left as an exercise for the student. (Hint - queue pathnames locally.)
"The community reacted violently to the publication of the Ode. Appellants received death threats and a shot was fired at the family home, forcing the family to move out of [AnyPlaceUSA]. Due to severe losses, David closed the 20-year-old family business."
Did the lawyers for both sides stipulate to these "facts"? Or were they somehow proven in the trial court? There are at least six assertions here:
Numbers 2, 3 and 5 are assertions that should be straightforward to establish evidentially. Although the precise scenario of the "severe losses" is not laid out. Did business simply drop precipitously? Or was there an extended period of tedious sniping back-and-forth, for instance in the local chamber of commerce? How exactly did the (former) customers learn that the business was connected to the girl's family? And what kind of business was it, anyway? What was happening with the business's competition at the same time? Did one profit at the expense of the other? Or did the entire local industry fail (a very familiar scenario in small towns)?
But was the business forced to close (#6) as a direct result of the republication? The implication is that the family moved due to both safety and economic concerns (#4). The first of these seems a criminal matter almost impossible to connect back to republication unless the bullet is traced to a gun and the gun to a death threat and the death threat to someone unhinged by a letter to the editor. In rural America, having a shot fired at a house is more likely to be an incautious sportsman. Was it deer season? While moving due to economic reasons is simply a restating of the prior assertion about the business failing. This is perhaps pertinent to damages, but not to the facts of the case.
What does it mean for an appellate judge to assert "the community reacted violently"? Surely there must be prior case law to understand this point? The implication in the Slashdot article is that this happened in fact and that it was causally related to one poor girl's teenage angst about where she happened to grow up.
It appears rather to this reader that the judge overreached unnecessarily. To come to the same decision ("go away little girl, you bother me") there was no reason to rule on the copyright aspects of the case at all. The judgement can be taken to say that any intentional "publication", no matter how temporary, to an online source permits a newspaper to republish your work. This doesn't do the newspaper industry any favors. Fair use is a two-edged sword:
"Having been published on myspace.com, the Ode was not private."
Doesn't this apply to everything a newspaper ever publishes? If there is no copyright protection of the girl's expression of her all-too-typical teenage thoughts, why can't complete articles from this newspaper now be republished at will as letters to the editor on MySpace pages? Either MySpace is a publication coequal with a newspaper - or it isn't.
One remains skeptical about the facts in this case. Surely the bad actions (as described) of the community's high school principal and newspaper publisher would have been even more likely to arouse community ire? While one could almost take a sensitivity to insult as a defining characteristic of small town life versus city life - similar negative screeds to city life are published every day in city newspapers - one is skeptical that this small town is such a caricature of the girl's description. In Aesop's fable, it is the Country Mouse who scurries home.
"Why free software usability tends to suck"?
Rather all usability tends toward suckishness. It's called entropy.
MPT's later essay "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", immediately rejects its own premise and points out that the real issue is coherent management for volunteer projects. This is surprising?
F/OSS projects are not always staffed by volunteers. And volunteer projects - in software or elsewhere - are not always amateurishly managed. The defining characteristic of Free or Open Source software models is paradoxically a restriction on how work products can be used - that is, it is a restriction on the output of the project. It may also be true that such a project may choose itself to use restricted inputs - perhaps including its own output recursively. It is only by comparison with proprietary software that F/OSS can be called open or free, as the case may be.
Usability may be a strong requirement on a project. Usability itself has many dimensions. Many here appear to think usability is synonymous with GUI technology. Far from it. But even if GUIs are given specific attention, the discussion is rather naive. Pointer focus is not always better than click-to-focus. Otherwise desirable features often interact - should the window with focus automatically move to the front while your mouse traverses 8 intervening windows?
But usability is never the only requirement. Requirements must be interpreted in some context. A project without a coherent context is going to produce poor requirements. Whatever software process is followed, failing to capture solid requirements will result in a weak differentiation between proposed solutions. Unless there is a self-consistent solution, the usability of that solution never even becomes a realistic point of discussion.
A project addresses a single problem - whether that problem is well described or not. Any problem has several good solutions - and many, many, many bad solutions. Design is an exercise in rejecting bad solutions and retaining good solutions, that is - survival of the fittest. A project can pursue design faster than natural selection or slower than natural selection. Ultimately it will be the selection pressure arising from a community of users (whether skilled or naive doesn't really matter) that will drive convergence to an acceptable solution. Some users will always find solutions acceptable to the community to be bad solutions from their own point of view.
Quicksand discovered !!!
Quicksand is rather a colloidal suspension requiring an underground water source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksand
A lot of respondents seem to have seized on a spurious notion of what this is all about. That isn't surprising since the Slashdot article and the press release and even the abstract are rather obscure. No sign of a preprint, but the same abstract shows up for a number of colloquiums in the last couple of months. The paper is from a proceedings, so it may itself not be especially profound.
The abstract says: "We propose a fully homomorphic encryption scheme -- i.e., a scheme that allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt. Our solution comes in three steps. First, we provide a general result -- that, to construct an encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits, it suffices to construct an encryption scheme that can evaluate (slightly augmented versions of) its own decryption circuit; we call a scheme that can evaluate its (augmented) decryption circuit bootstrappable."
The encryption and compression literature tends to use the word "scheme" where others might say algorithm or transform. "Circuits" here is a term of art (maybe arising originally from actual physical circuits, as in the Enigma machine?)
"An encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits" suggests only that the possessor of the private key can generate these arbitrary queries, not that anybody and their brother can scavenge the encrypted data. It isn't stated whether such a query also requires the plaintext. It would be pretty cool if one feature were to be able to discard the plaintext post-encryption.
The gimmick appears to be that the arbitrary circuit can include the decryption itself (the bootstrap part). Note that this feature is far more cool (assuming it works) than all the nonsense about cloud computing. Somehow the data are *arbitrarily* available to properly encoded queries without ever being exposed - even to the CPU performing the operations. This processor could be on the same machine, on some remote server, in the cloud or across the galaxy. How cool is that?
If you normalize out the usual "tax" of Slashdot bullshit, this article has generated a better discussion than most. That said, it is remarkable how many of the contributers appear to be far more reactionary than Bradbury himself is accused of being. A couple of points:
1) Wouldn't it make more sense to read his anti-internet rant as provocative rhetoric in pursuit of a pro-library agenda? After all, he also denigrates a college education in the same breath. In nine decades of dealing with the media he likely has learned some tricks for gathering attention and staying on message.
2) And what about his stated distaste for universities? Other than one or two home school proponents, nobody has even commented on that.
What does it say about Slashdotters that they jump to the defense of the role the internet plays as a static archive and ignore the dynamic role networked technologies (like Slashdot on a good day) can play in developing and extending online communities analogous to universities? There are also far too many here who seem ready to accept unsubstantiated assertions about Bradbury's politics, while investing no weight to this widely regarded author's body of work. Do yourself a favor and read a few of his books.
The remarkable thing here is not that an author would support libraries - in particular, that the author of Fahrenheit 451 would - but rather that members of this technology-aware community would have such an inert view of the internet.
This reminds me of a letter to the editor I wrote back in the day about the Arizona standardized AIMS test:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/mailbag/Content?oid=1066326
Ignoring off topic comments about McDonald's, this is really a question raised in books like, say, "The Razor's Edge". What we do for employment does not ultimately define who we are. Stephen Jay Gould also definitively rejects the premise of "smartness" in his "Mismeasure of Man".
And, of course, the proper business model for staffing entry level jobs such as McDonald's is to provide a way for employees to work the counter or the grill for a few years and then move on to better paying careers.