So I guess it's time for another stupid/useful tricks post, this time for/usr/share/dict. You could use it to make a list of english-seeming words (that get people really confused when piped through 'festival --tts'), similar to this one:
Slashdot: Game Experience May Change During Online Play
Slashdot is a game where individuals carry out unexpected attacks on boring everyday items. Individuals are occasionally rewarded with the 'moderator' skill, which allows them to negate or enhance other attacks. The attacks have real-world consequences, such as causing both computers and individual people to burst into flames, as well traffic congestion.
Try Foldit. It's a game where you fold proteins to get a ranking / score (no money incentive at the moment). If you want to cooperate, join a team and evolve someone else's folded protein. There's also a duel mode, where you battle against someone else, trying to fold a protein in as few moves as possible.
And just in case you're interested, the folding helps researchers who are looking for ways in which humans can fold better than computers.
Those temperatures and pressures seem relatively low. I wonder if this stuff could be achieved using something like a pressure cooker hooked up to a clay kiln. The idea of a DIY stainless steel diamond coating process is quite pleasing to me.
The RepRap is able to use an Arduino board, but the RepRap Research Foundation have recently developed a modified variant called the Sanguino. That Sanguino link shows some differences between the two board designs.
1) Convince his superiors that a particular open source program is the best available for the job. If this works, try with another one, but make sure you point out the open source nature of the program.
2) Talk to your workmates about open source software that you use, and try to get them to request some of this software to be available to them. For bonus points, try to get them to complain (with email evidence) when software is rejected to the people who evaluate the performance of staff.
It'll take a long time, and you'll have better success (and more likelihood of him being replaced) with the top-down approach, but the bottom-up approach is probably more likely to develop good word-of-mouth links to OSS.
Here's a braindump of a few of my thoughts from the graduate student viewpoint:
The typical way my supervisors determine how good a particular journal is is based on its Impact Factor, basically an indication of how many citations the average article gets within a particular time period (I think its 3 years). This suggests that the value of a published article is the number of citations you get in other papers.
Since about 4 years ago, pretty much the only papers I've been reading have been those available to me for free -- This includes those publications for which my university has a subscription. It's only when a paper is absolutely critical to my research, and no other free paper exists with similar research, that I fork out the couple of dollars required (and ~1 month wait) to get a copy of an article via the library's Interloan service. Researchers are expected to read the papers that they cite, so more generally, I would expect papers published in freely-accessible journals to have more citations (and therefore have more value) than those with a pay-per-view model.
This value gets diluted by people who cite second-hand without reading the article (e.g. "X said Y said Z", so I'll say that "Y said Z"). Researchers can then get articles cited by simply getting a highly trusted researcher to cite their own paper, even if it is in a pay-per-view journal. This is the quicker way to get a paper done, but ends up with a chinese-whispers distortion of the original research.
If people respect your past research (which can be indicated by how many citations of your papers have been made), it is easier to get another paper published, with less checking carried out by the reviewers of the paper. And, with each new paper comes more citations, so a greater perceived respect for your research.
I believe that both open access and peer review are important. Doing this in such a way that the reviewers can't avoid a good critique of the article is difficult.
As an aside, funding is so driven by new/novel results that funding bodies often won't provide money for repeating experiments done by others. Richard Feynman has made some nice points on why this is a bad idea.
Based on what I'm used to ubuntu doing, they're probably treating one of the later release candidates (of which this is the tenth) as something "good enough" for ubuntu 2.6.27.
Not in upcoming Debian
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.
Okay, so after skimming through the article, it looks like he's arguing that there's not enough mutation for evolution to happen. I don't think this is a good enough reason, because recombination plays a much larger role in introducing variation into a population. Our population is large enough that even with a population of young maters, the number of new mutations in the species as a whole will be large enough to make a difference.
There's a little caveat regarding the relationship between time to fixation and population size (or more correctly in this case, change in population size), but I'll choose to ignore that for now....
We're not evolving because we're reproducing earlier. So what happened back in the day, when you'd be lucky to live past 30, and it was a good thing to produce offspring as early as possible?
Anyway, why does evolution need to be based on death? I would certainly prefer an evolving species based on mate selection, resulting in people with the preferred aspects (intelligence, humour, etc.) becoming more common in the population. Death is so last millenium.
In 2009, the Imagine Cup challenges the world's most talented students to "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today."
I find the goal a bit too broad for a challenging competition, there are also a few requirements, some of which I find a bit odd:
Use of a Mobile device
Implementation or consumption of a XML Web Service
.NET Framework 2.0 or later;
Visual Studio family (Express, Standard, Professional, or Team System) for development
That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.
They chucked a fudge word in, that makes it okay. It's literally like that, not literally that. Kinda like the US economy being both strong and at risk, literally like a muscleman who wouldn't wear a condom.
It's a simple line randomisation program. I use it a lot in the work that I do for short shell scripts, which involves doing lots of permutations of lines of text files (or just sequences of numbers). Once that code gets put deeper into a loop (and hence becomes more of a limiting factor in terms of excecution time), I substitute it for faster stuff written in Java, Perl, R, C++, or whatever else takes my fancy at the time. shuf is a similar program which seems to be in the coreutils of Debian, but doesn't allow resampling from the brief reading I've had regarding its use.
Slashdot Mirror
Bit like Gore-Tex, you mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Tex
So I guess it's time for another stupid/useful tricks post, this time for /usr/share/dict. You could use it to make a list of english-seeming words (that get people really confused when piped through 'festival --tts'), similar to this one:
http://user.interface.org.nz/~gringer/montyword.php
[okay, that's derived from IRC logs... I should probably change that to /usr/share/dict]
Slashdot: Game Experience May Change During Online Play
Slashdot is a game where individuals carry out unexpected attacks on boring everyday items. Individuals are occasionally rewarded with the 'moderator' skill, which allows them to negate or enhance other attacks. The attacks have real-world consequences, such as causing both computers and individual people to burst into flames, as well traffic congestion.
Try Foldit. It's a game where you fold proteins to get a ranking / score (no money incentive at the moment). If you want to cooperate, join a team and evolve someone else's folded protein. There's also a duel mode, where you battle against someone else, trying to fold a protein in as few moves as possible.
And just in case you're interested, the folding helps researchers who are looking for ways in which humans can fold better than computers.
Well, the pressure cooker would only need to be at 280C (that's at 4.5 psi -- it's just to vaporise the mixture).
FTA:
In a specially made device, they heated the liquid tequila to 280C to transform it into a gas.
But that's still outside the usual operating range of the device. Things won't work off the shelf for this.
Those temperatures and pressures seem relatively low. I wonder if this stuff could be achieved using something like a pressure cooker hooked up to a clay kiln. The idea of a DIY stainless steel diamond coating process is quite pleasing to me.
There's even a book on that site about all the ways in which you can tie a shoe!
http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/iansbook.htm
And for those who just want to tie the damn things a bit quicker, there's the "ian knot":
http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
If you're referring to the file sharing application, it has had a name change, and is now called Vuze.
http://vuze.sourceforge.net/
[however, the project page is still at azureus.sourceforge.net]
The RepRap is able to use an Arduino board, but the RepRap Research Foundation have recently developed a modified variant called the Sanguino. That Sanguino link shows some differences between the two board designs.
Reminds me of this clip from Harry Enfield:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRTUNh1vPo
[For those hard of flashing, it's a parody of a short gangster conversation in which the bad words have been taped over with better words]
1) Convince his superiors that a particular open source program is the best available for the job. If this works, try with another one, but make sure you point out the open source nature of the program.
2) Talk to your workmates about open source software that you use, and try to get them to request some of this software to be available to them. For bonus points, try to get them to complain (with email evidence) when software is rejected to the people who evaluate the performance of staff.
It'll take a long time, and you'll have better success (and more likelihood of him being replaced) with the top-down approach, but the bottom-up approach is probably more likely to develop good word-of-mouth links to OSS.
To sit at 3-oh as the prince of your chair.
[apologies to Will Smith]
Here's a braindump of a few of my thoughts from the graduate student viewpoint:
The typical way my supervisors determine how good a particular journal is is based on its Impact Factor, basically an indication of how many citations the average article gets within a particular time period (I think its 3 years). This suggests that the value of a published article is the number of citations you get in other papers.
Since about 4 years ago, pretty much the only papers I've been reading have been those available to me for free -- This includes those publications for which my university has a subscription. It's only when a paper is absolutely critical to my research, and no other free paper exists with similar research, that I fork out the couple of dollars required (and ~1 month wait) to get a copy of an article via the library's Interloan service. Researchers are expected to read the papers that they cite, so more generally, I would expect papers published in freely-accessible journals to have more citations (and therefore have more value) than those with a pay-per-view model.
This value gets diluted by people who cite second-hand without reading the article (e.g. "X said Y said Z", so I'll say that "Y said Z"). Researchers can then get articles cited by simply getting a highly trusted researcher to cite their own paper, even if it is in a pay-per-view journal. This is the quicker way to get a paper done, but ends up with a chinese-whispers distortion of the original research.
If people respect your past research (which can be indicated by how many citations of your papers have been made), it is easier to get another paper published, with less checking carried out by the reviewers of the paper. And, with each new paper comes more citations, so a greater perceived respect for your research.
I believe that both open access and peer review are important. Doing this in such a way that the reviewers can't avoid a good critique of the article is difficult.
As an aside, funding is so driven by new/novel results that funding bodies often won't provide money for repeating experiments done by others. Richard Feynman has made some nice points on why this is a bad idea.
The article says that "the cheapest three dimensional printers cost $20,000", so I might as well mention the hacker's alternative:
http://blog.reprap.org/
http://www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Based on what I'm used to ubuntu doing, they're probably treating one of the later release candidates (of which this is the tenth) as something "good enough" for ubuntu 2.6.27.
It's a shame this won't be in the upcoming Lenny release of Debian. The in-kernel support for heaps of webcams via gspca is a very nice user-visible element of this release.
http://release.debian.org/emails/release-update-200808
Although, I guess they made the decision for 2.6.26 before they realised that a September release would be an impossible target.
Okay, so after skimming through the article, it looks like he's arguing that there's not enough mutation for evolution to happen. I don't think this is a good enough reason, because recombination plays a much larger role in introducing variation into a population. Our population is large enough that even with a population of young maters, the number of new mutations in the species as a whole will be large enough to make a difference.
There's a little caveat regarding the relationship between time to fixation and population size (or more correctly in this case, change in population size), but I'll choose to ignore that for now....
This seems... odd.
We're not evolving because we're reproducing earlier. So what happened back in the day, when you'd be lucky to live past 30, and it was a good thing to produce offspring as early as possible?
Anyway, why does evolution need to be based on death? I would certainly prefer an evolving species based on mate selection, resulting in people with the preferred aspects (intelligence, humour, etc.) becoming more common in the population. Death is so last millenium.
For those people who haven't seen this before, I'd like to point you to an article about a guy who's decided that leaving a gap is a good thing:
http://trafficwaves.org/
My distilled thoughts based on what he said:
Alright, who farted a few hundred thousand years ago?
This reminds me of Microsoft's Competition:
http://www.microsoft.com/nz/imaginecup09/about.aspx
In 2009, the Imagine Cup challenges the world's most talented students to "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today."
I find the goal a bit too broad for a challenging competition, there are also a few requirements, some of which I find a bit odd:
That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.
They chucked a fudge word in, that makes it okay. It's literally like that, not literally that. Kinda like the US economy being both strong and at risk, literally like a muscleman who wouldn't wear a condom.
That sounds a bit like what bittorrent tries to enforce with the share ratio and download throttling.
It's a simple line randomisation program. I use it a lot in the work that I do for short shell scripts, which involves doing lots of permutations of lines of text files (or just sequences of numbers). Once that code gets put deeper into a loop (and hence becomes more of a limiting factor in terms of excecution time), I substitute it for faster stuff written in Java, Perl, R, C++, or whatever else takes my fancy at the time. shuf is a similar program which seems to be in the coreutils of Debian, but doesn't allow resampling from the brief reading I've had regarding its use.
Simulate 100 years of climate in a day? Here's my code:
echo -e "sunny\nrainy\ncloudy" | rl -rc 36525