The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly.
No doubt the team did its share of research for this project, but it looks like there's a crucial gap in their understanding of the problem domain. I can just see their faces when they finally realize that their AI, with all its understanding of questions, is completely baffled when presented only with answers!
You would never have even HEARD of MySQL if it had not been an open source product. You think the closed source world had room for yet another database? I'd like to point out that even with just Oracle and IBM in there, that space was pretty crowded, and there were plenty of small players too, going for the crumbs.
MySQL, when it started gaining mind share and usership, was a buggy, feature poor product with nothing going for it EXCEPT its open source status and developer community. If it were closed source, you would never have heard of Michael Widenius nor MySQL. He would either have abandoned his project long ago or still be toiling in obscurity on this little hobby DB in his spare time while he paid the bills with a real job.
Open sourcing a product does mean losing some degree of control, but for all that, it's an excellent way to launch a company into the lime light. As we've seen over and over, there are plenty of ways to leverage that into wealth, with control or without.
I agree with the parent. In your case, while you are taking on a bigger project, you are not being called upon to manage multiple resources, multiple dependencies etc. That's a large part of what project management is. It sounds like you're more after something that can act as a guide to software development. A nice, short, practical book is "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler. While it is geared towards teaching the application of UML, it does so by describing it's various diagrams in context and showing how to use them yourself.
The book starts out with a description of the software development process advocated by Fowler, which is an iterative approach. My favorite nugget is in a section headed "When to Use Iterative Development" which begins, "You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed.":)
There's a breakdown of the project phases and the book deals with requirements, risk management, planning and lots of other issues, and at the end there's a nice simple example.
If you already feel like your project is in a bit of trouble, time may be of the essence. At just 166 pages, "UML Distilled" is a quick read and takes a very pragmatic approach that should get you going in the right direction quickly.
First, size is only very loosely correlated to position on the food chain. Consider the elephant, only one step up on the ladder, or the sequoia at the very bottom. In fact the biggest organisms on Earth are fungi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae). This doesn't really address whether size has anything to do with ecological vulnerability though. As it happens vulnerability is more closely correlated to a species' degree of specialization and to the resiliency of its ecosystem.
Second, if nothing you've read suggests abundant water in Mars' past, you must have missed this: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/18/146252. Also you should not assume a thick atmosphere is a requirement for higher life forms. It's accepted that the higher life forms on Earth arose first in the oceans.
By noon, anger from HP was reaching Microsoft, which had planned to communicate its changes the next day. Poole wrote to Ybarra and Allchin at 12:16 p.m.: "Intel leaked this despite my explicit agreement with [an Intel senior vice president] that we would communicate together."
I'm sure those poor betrayed Microsoft execs were wondering "what did we do to deserve this?"
Modern advertising is a very different creature from what you seem to think it is. It operates quite well, perhaps even at its best, when (you think) you are not aware of it. When you are not paying attention, you have no chance to rationally evaluate the message it is delivering. It just slips past all your conscious filters right into your subconscious.
Show a pretty girl beside a Lexus logo often enough and you'll start getting a hard-on for one even if you can't say just why.
No, the exception is not politically motivated. It's an important factor in determining the nature of a belief.
A belief can be based on no evidence at all, can even contradict the available evidence, without it being a sign of mental problems. Even the most skeptical people have such beliefs when you look closely enough. They arise because of the nature of our brains (check out http://www.csicop.org/si/9505/belief.html.
It's when someone clings to a manifestly false belief in the absence of any social support -- indeed often in the face of seriously adverse social consequences -- that the medical community starts to consider it a medical problem. Such beliefs are often accompanied by hallucinations and can be a symptom of chemical imbalance in the brain.
There's a lot more to being delusional than just being wrong. Anybody who thinks otherwise is obviously deluded.
I haven't read TFA or even the summary -- the headline itself was so alarming I had to post right away.
"Plasma plants vaporize trash" sounds like a great idea on the surface, but anybody who thinks the growth and spreading of these plants can be controlled once they are introduced into the wild is way too optimistic and trusting -- perhaps fatally so. This is exactly the sort of dangerous research Jeremy Rifkin has been warning about all these years. Yet nobody will pay attention to the dangers Monsanto et al expose us to until one day their monsterous genetic creations will start VAPORIZING PEOPLE!!!!
I was dubious about this science when I read the article, but I learned something in the end. From the article:
The team created artificial shark skin with a 16 x 24 array of synthetic scales, each 2 centimetres in length and angled at 90 to the surface of the "skin". They then placed the arrangement in a stream of water travelling at a steady 20 centimetres per second.
Shark scales are tiny - the crown is barely visible to the naked eye. So these scientists have scaled them up (so to speak) at least 2 orders of magnitude. With fluid dynamics the scale of a model can change everything, especially in the range of sizes they are working with here. I thought they should have substituted a more viscous fluid for the water in order to get a useful model. I thought maybe this was just preliminary work and they'd do a better study if their results suggested that it could be valuable."
But before flaming the Slashdot editors for trumpeting this study as a "discovery", I did a little Googling and quickly wound up at Wikepedia learning about Reynolds numbers. Turns out you can model turbulence pretty accurately as long as the Reynolds number stays the same. In this case the Reynolds number is proportional to both the size of the shark scales and the velocity of the water flow, so it can be preserved while the scales are made larger if the velocity is reduced proportionally.
Which is exactly what they did. They're studying sharks swimming at 80 km/hr.
80km/hr = 8,000,000 / 3600 cm/sec = 2200 cm/sec
Or, about 100 times faster than the flow rate they used in their model. Neat.
The long and the short of the matter is this. It's good for business - it gets people out of the house and into the stores after work. So business lobbies government for the required legislation and pushes the energy saving myth to snow the public into going along with it (despite it being an inconvenience in the minds of many).
To calculate the acceleration the driver/pilot experiences, you should also take into account the force of gravity. The two vectors are perpendicular in this case, so it's a simple calculation:
a = (1g^2 + 1.196g^2)^.5
= 2.196^.5 g
= 1.482g
Still quite tolerable, but 48% more than what you get by ignoring gravity.
No mod points today or I'd mod you up. Best I can do is add my support.
Given that this is Slashdot, a bastion of evolution defenders, I don't see many comments here that reveal a real understanding of how it happens.
People and their ancestors have been through innumerable good times and bad times. During the good times, genetic variation increases. This is as important to the evolution process as the bad times (selection events) that wipe out many of those variants. This is called punctuated evolution.
It's hard to understand how so many people here can be complaining that not enough (so called "stupid") people are getting killed for their liking. Isn't their enough death in the world to satisfy everyone? I wish they were joking, but in most cases it doesn't seem that they are.
The tower acts as a scrubber, with sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, reacting with air blown into its base. A metal honeycomb system inside the tower slows down the flow of caustic soda, allowing it to efficiently scrub CO2.
So this answers the question that first occurred to me: in what form is the CO2 stored? For the non-chemists:
CO2 + NaOH ==> NaHCO3 (Sodium BiCarbonate, or baking soda)
The tower acts as a scrubber, with sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, reacting with air blown into its base. A metal honeycomb system inside the tower slows down the flow of caustic soda, allowing it to efficiently scrub CO2.
While Keith said the technology isn't new -- it's been used since the 1950s in industrial processes that call for carbon dioxide-free air -- he believes his team has surmounted one of the two biggest obstacles to CO2 capture.
For the system to be effective, it must remove more carbon dioxide from the air than it emits as a byproduct of the energy used to run the scrubber. This summer's experiment showed that can be done, said Keith.
He estimates that if the electricity used to run the ambient air scrubber were to come from a coal-fired power plant -- a heavy emitter of CO2 -- he could capture 10 times more CO2 than the coal plant emitted.
I don't know how many of those leaving their pessimistic comments here have actually read this book, but I have. It's actually been on my to-do list to write a book review for Slashdot myself. Long overdue, I thought, given that the book was published in 2005. Now I'm sorry I didn't get around to it, because I think this reviewer, though positive about the book, considerably undersells it.
To those of us stuck doing active development on old, ugly code, every day can feel like we are slogging deeper and deeper into a swamp. Each time we hack in a new change, it makes us feel unclean. We are ashamed of the ugliness of the patch work we are adding to. We know programming used to be fun, but only rarely do we feel the echoes of that now. Mostly we feel dejected. And we've lost our motivation because we are not putting out code we are proud of.
If any of that rings a bell with you then grab Michael Feathers' book the next chance you get. A previous poster said something like "get Martin Fowler's Refactoring book instead", but he's entirely wrong. Not that it isn't a great book, but it won't save you. I've known about refactoring for years without being able to put any of it into practice. The prerequisite to aggressive refactoring is a good set of automated tests, and my projects have not only had no tests, but have seemed down-right untestable.
WELC is your map out of the swamp. And it's a map drawn by someone who has clearly spent a lot of time guiding others out. Feathers knows how tangled your code base is. He knows it doesn't have useful documentation or comments. He knows you are under time pressure but afraid to break funtionality you don't even know about. He has seen it all and he knows how discouraging and hopeless it looks. But he knows the way out, and he'll patiently and calmly guide you as you break your first dependency, get your first class into a test harness or write your first test case. And before you know it, you are standing on a little patch of solid ground.
Take my advice. Get this book, read it, and put it into practice. It can change your (work) life!
Quite true. Yet if India is anything like America, a thin layer of anti-terrorist wrapping paper is all that's needed to disguise even the most egregiously pro-corporate legislation. The telecoms want this change to reduce sharing of network connections, pure and simple.
In an April survey conducted for AARP, 27 percent of workers age 45 and over, and 32 percent of those 55-64 said they had pushed back their planned retirement date because of the economic downturn. The telephone poll by Woelfel Research interviewed 1,002 respondents and carried a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
One data point? Meh, I'm not conviced. A few anecdotes make good reading but one isolated survey does not establish a trend. If they want to claim more people are deferring retirement due to financial need, they need to provide historical data to compare this too.
For all we know, the change can all be chalked up to the mid- to late-60's demographic enjoying better health and growing as a percentage of the total population.
If you have a little Java experience (1 month or more) but want to get into the much larger and rather daunting enterprise world, this course - http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/ - is truely one of the great Java resources on the web.
It is the equivalent of a university graduate course on enterprise Java and is offered for FREE by the instructor, Sang Shin, a Sun technology evangelist. It covers a wide range of topics, such as EJB, Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and the Spring framework.
The course is every bit as demanding of your time as a graduate course would be too, so don't undertake it lightly. It is taught over a 5 month period with weekly reading and assignments which are marked for you. There is a Yahoo! group for the course where you can get any questions answered that you may have.
Unfortunately, the current session started on July 1 and will run until the end of November, so you probably won't get a chance to register until January -- assuming Sang is kind enough to offer the course yet again (he does this on his own time).
A better line item on one's cv would be that one's text book is being taught at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT etc. Should the big schools start moving to open text books, you can bet the academics who are giving any thought to tenure, peer recognition etc. will start contributing in a big way. In the academic world, once you have gained recognitions, the (grant) money can usually be counted on to follow.
in the long term, the faster we get viable colonies off this rock, the less impact we'll have as a species on our home planet.
The idea that cheap or even free transportation into space will lead to an easing of population pressures here is based on an over-simplified view of human behaviour or maybe just wishful thinking.
It ain't gonna happen -- and I mean never.
The earth is just to well suited for us - much better than anywhere else we're likely to find or build out there. The only things I see getting the human population on Earth down are:
some sort of major carnage (war, disease, comet impact etc.)
the urbanization of mankind and the associated reduction in fertility rates continue to the point where world population starts to drop as it has in certain countries
environmental disaster brought on by our planetary abuses - and then it's already too late
Slashdot Mirror
The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly.
No doubt the team did its share of research for this project, but it looks like there's a crucial gap in their understanding of the problem domain. I can just see their faces when they finally realize that their AI, with all its understanding of questions, is completely baffled when presented only with answers!
/*
* Flame on
*/
You've got to be kidding me!
You would never have even HEARD of MySQL if it had not been an open source product. You think the closed source world had room for yet another database? I'd like to point out that even with just Oracle and IBM in there, that space was pretty crowded, and there were plenty of small players too, going for the crumbs.
MySQL, when it started gaining mind share and usership, was a buggy, feature poor product with nothing going for it EXCEPT its open source status and developer community. If it were closed source, you would never have heard of Michael Widenius nor MySQL. He would either have abandoned his project long ago or still be toiling in obscurity on this little hobby DB in his spare time while he paid the bills with a real job.
Open sourcing a product does mean losing some degree of control, but for all that, it's an excellent way to launch a company into the lime light. As we've seen over and over, there are plenty of ways to leverage that into wealth, with control or without.
I agree with the parent. In your case, while you are taking on a bigger project, you are not being called upon to manage multiple resources, multiple dependencies etc. That's a large part of what project management is. It sounds like you're more after something that can act as a guide to software development. A nice, short, practical book is "UML Distilled" by Martin Fowler. While it is geared towards teaching the application of UML, it does so by describing it's various diagrams in context and showing how to use them yourself.
The book starts out with a description of the software development process advocated by Fowler, which is an iterative approach. My favorite nugget is in a section headed "When to Use Iterative Development" which begins, "You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed." :)
There's a breakdown of the project phases and the book deals with requirements, risk management, planning and lots of other issues, and at the end there's a nice simple example.
If you already feel like your project is in a bit of trouble, time may be of the essence. At just 166 pages, "UML Distilled" is a quick read and takes a very pragmatic approach that should get you going in the right direction quickly.
A few of quibbles...
First, size is only very loosely correlated to position on the food chain. Consider the elephant, only one step up on the ladder, or the sequoia at the very bottom. In fact the biggest organisms on Earth are fungi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae). This doesn't really address whether size has anything to do with ecological vulnerability though. As it happens vulnerability is more closely correlated to a species' degree of specialization and to the resiliency of its ecosystem.
Second, if nothing you've read suggests abundant water in Mars' past, you must have missed this: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/18/146252. Also you should not assume a thick atmosphere is a requirement for higher life forms. It's accepted that the higher life forms on Earth arose first in the oceans.
Third, although we know the surface of Mars to be cold, we also know that it has a molten core (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3D8133FF934A35750C0A9659C8B63). Somewhere between these extremes may well be a habitable zone within the rock. Mind you, I'd have to agree that any life found there would have to be of a very basic nature. Even on Earth, we only find bacteria in such niches (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10336-gold-mine-holds-life-untouched-by-the-sun.html).
FTFA:
I'm sure those poor betrayed Microsoft execs were wondering "what did we do to deserve this?"
Modern advertising is a very different creature from what you seem to think it is. It operates quite well, perhaps even at its best, when (you think) you are not aware of it. When you are not paying attention, you have no chance to rationally evaluate the message it is delivering. It just slips past all your conscious filters right into your subconscious.
Show a pretty girl beside a Lexus logo often enough and you'll start getting a hard-on for one even if you can't say just why.
Co--stan-za!
I've got mod points, but where's the "-1 - Insensitive Clod" option?
No, the exception is not politically motivated. It's an important factor in determining the nature of a belief.
A belief can be based on no evidence at all, can even contradict the available evidence, without it being a sign of mental problems. Even the most skeptical people have such beliefs when you look closely enough. They arise because of the nature of our brains (check out http://www.csicop.org/si/9505/belief.html.
It's when someone clings to a manifestly false belief in the absence of any social support -- indeed often in the face of seriously adverse social consequences -- that the medical community starts to consider it a medical problem. Such beliefs are often accompanied by hallucinations and can be a symptom of chemical imbalance in the brain.
There's a lot more to being delusional than just being wrong. Anybody who thinks otherwise is obviously deluded.
I haven't read TFA or even the summary -- the headline itself was so alarming I had to post right away.
"Plasma plants vaporize trash" sounds like a great idea on the surface, but anybody who thinks the growth and spreading of these plants can be controlled once they are introduced into the wild is way too optimistic and trusting -- perhaps fatally so. This is exactly the sort of dangerous research Jeremy Rifkin has been warning about all these years. Yet nobody will pay attention to the dangers Monsanto et al expose us to until one day their monsterous genetic creations will start VAPORIZING PEOPLE!!!!
The proof is not, nor has it ever been, in the pudding. However perhaps you meant to say the proof (i.e. test) of the pudding is in the eating.
Idiom police at your service. No, you needn't thank me ... just doing my job.
I was dubious about this science when I read the article, but I learned something in the end.
From the article:
Shark scales are tiny - the crown is barely visible to the naked eye. So these scientists have scaled them up (so to speak) at least 2 orders of magnitude. With fluid dynamics the scale of a model can change everything, especially in the range of sizes they are working with here. I thought they should have substituted a more viscous fluid for the water in order to get a useful model. I thought maybe this was just preliminary work and they'd do a better study if their results suggested that it could be valuable."
But before flaming the Slashdot editors for trumpeting this study as a "discovery", I did a little Googling and quickly wound up at Wikepedia learning about Reynolds numbers. Turns out you can model turbulence pretty accurately as long as the Reynolds number stays the same. In this case the Reynolds number is proportional to both the size of the shark scales and the velocity of the water flow, so it can be preserved while the scales are made larger if the velocity is reduced proportionally.
Which is exactly what they did. They're studying sharks swimming at 80 km/hr.
80km/hr = 8,000,000 / 3600 cm/sec = 2200 cm/sec
Or, about 100 times faster than the flow rate they used in their model. Neat.
Anybody else out there think it's a little odd to be using the term "Standard Time" for a period that covers only 4 months of the year now?
DST has been studied many times over the years and the informed consensus is that it just doesn't work. Here's a good link about it: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/03/11/think-daylight-saving-time-saves-energy-think-again-or-not/
The long and the short of the matter is this. It's good for business - it gets people out of the house and into the stores after work. So business lobbies government for the required legislation and pushes the energy saving myth to snow the public into going along with it (despite it being an inconvenience in the minds of many).
To calculate the acceleration the driver/pilot experiences, you should also take into account the force of gravity. The two vectors are perpendicular in this case, so it's a simple calculation:
a = (1g^2 + 1.196g^2)^.5
= 2.196^.5 g
= 1.482g
Still quite tolerable, but 48% more than what you get by ignoring gravity.
No mod points today or I'd mod you up. Best I can do is add my support.
Given that this is Slashdot, a bastion of evolution defenders, I don't see many comments here that reveal a real understanding of how it happens.
People and their ancestors have been through innumerable good times and bad times. During the good times, genetic variation increases. This is as important to the evolution process as the bad times (selection events) that wipe out many of those variants. This is called punctuated evolution.
It's hard to understand how so many people here can be complaining that not enough (so called "stupid") people are getting killed for their liking. Isn't their enough death in the world to satisfy everyone? I wish they were joking, but in most cases it doesn't seem that they are.
So this answers the question that first occurred to me: in what form is the CO2 stored? For the non-chemists:
CO2 + NaOH ==> NaHCO3 (Sodium BiCarbonate, or baking soda)NaHCO3 + NaOH ==> H2O + Na2CO3 (Sodium Carbonate, or washing soda)
Look out Arm & Hammer, there's stiff competition on the horizon.
I don't know how many of those leaving their pessimistic comments here have actually read this book, but I have. It's actually been on my to-do list to write a book review for Slashdot myself. Long overdue, I thought, given that the book was published in 2005. Now I'm sorry I didn't get around to it, because I think this reviewer, though positive about the book, considerably undersells it.
To those of us stuck doing active development on old, ugly code, every day can feel like we are slogging deeper and deeper into a swamp. Each time we hack in a new change, it makes us feel unclean. We are ashamed of the ugliness of the patch work we are adding to. We know programming used to be fun, but only rarely do we feel the echoes of that now. Mostly we feel dejected. And we've lost our motivation because we are not putting out code we are proud of.
If any of that rings a bell with you then grab Michael Feathers' book the next chance you get. A previous poster said something like "get Martin Fowler's Refactoring book instead", but he's entirely wrong. Not that it isn't a great book, but it won't save you. I've known about refactoring for years without being able to put any of it into practice. The prerequisite to aggressive refactoring is a good set of automated tests, and my projects have not only had no tests, but have seemed down-right untestable.
WELC is your map out of the swamp. And it's a map drawn by someone who has clearly spent a lot of time guiding others out. Feathers knows how tangled your code base is. He knows it doesn't have useful documentation or comments. He knows you are under time pressure but afraid to break funtionality you don't even know about. He has seen it all and he knows how discouraging and hopeless it looks. But he knows the way out, and he'll patiently and calmly
guide you as you break your first dependency, get your first class into a test harness or write your first test case. And before you know it, you are standing on a little patch of solid ground.
Take my advice. Get this book, read it, and put it into practice. It can change your (work) life!
Quite true. Yet if India is anything like America, a thin layer of anti-terrorist wrapping paper is all that's needed to disguise even the most egregiously pro-corporate legislation. The telecoms want this change to reduce sharing of network connections, pure and simple.
In an April survey conducted for AARP, 27 percent of workers age 45 and over, and 32 percent of those 55-64 said they had pushed back their planned retirement date because of the economic downturn. The telephone poll by Woelfel Research interviewed 1,002 respondents and carried a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
One data point? Meh, I'm not conviced. A few anecdotes make good reading but one isolated survey does not establish a trend. If they want to claim more people are deferring retirement due to financial need, they need to provide historical data to compare this too.
For all we know, the change can all be chalked up to the mid- to late-60's demographic enjoying better health and growing as a percentage of the total population.
If you have a little Java experience (1 month or more) but want to get into the much larger and rather daunting enterprise world, this course - http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/ - is truely one of the great Java resources on the web.
It is the equivalent of a university graduate course on enterprise Java and is offered for FREE by the instructor, Sang Shin, a Sun technology evangelist. It covers a wide range of topics, such as EJB, Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and the Spring framework.
The course is every bit as demanding of your time as a graduate course would be too, so don't undertake it lightly. It is taught over a 5 month period with weekly reading and assignments which are marked for you. There is a Yahoo! group for the course where you can get any questions answered that you may have.
Unfortunately, the current session started on July 1 and will run until the end of November, so you probably won't get a chance to register until January -- assuming Sang is kind enough to offer the course yet again (he does this on his own time).
A better line item on one's cv would be that one's text book is being taught at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT etc. Should the big schools start moving to open text books, you can bet the academics who are giving any thought to tenure, peer recognition etc. will start contributing in a big way. In the academic world, once you have gained recognitions, the (grant) money can usually be counted on to follow.
Screw science. Their weapon is Intelligent Design!
LaTeX is hard
Hold everything! I gotta call Mattel. They'll love this one: Dominatrix Barbie!!
The idea that cheap or even free transportation into space will lead to an easing of population pressures here is based on an over-simplified view of human behaviour or maybe just wishful thinking.
It ain't gonna happen -- and I mean never.
The earth is just to well suited for us - much better than anywhere else we're likely to find or build out there. The only things I see getting the human population on Earth down are: