Well, I learned about the DARPA red balloons thing on Slashdot. My lab is involved in social network research, and we ended up using the DARPA thing to do some analysis. So that was good.
As for Facebook, I occasionally hear about funding sources. Most recently was this RFP for a digital media in education competition. I also stay vaguely up to date when people post things about papers they've published.
I've found the difference between a horrible and good experience on sites like Slashdot and Facebook is to keep the squelch turned wayyyy up.
I would ban students for merely having a Facebook account
You would probably not be able to attract students or faculty in sufficient numbers to stay open. Sure, Facebook wastes a hell of a lot of time. But so does Slashdot. And I could point you to specific instances where I learned something that was of professional, academic relevance to my work on both Facebook and Slashdot.
We're still trying to figure out how newfangled media works. The first thing anybody does with any new technology is find the most gratuitous possible activities that you couldn't really do before. Social media is in the gratuitous-pointlessness phase right now, but I guarantee you it will mature into something of value.
Regardless of if he did it on purpose, those pictures tell me that he is basically a regular dude, or at least plays one on the Intertron. I don't find any of those pictures even remotely embarrassing or controversial. Not that I'm supporting the recent privacy policy changes.
Choices, choices.... Do I hand over the care for my personal privacy to Beelzebub or Ba'al?
My tip would be to take some personal responsibility for what you tell others about yourself.
This is good advice. But many people don't know who is figuratively in the room when things are 'said' that ought to remain private. It's sometimes not obvious that the devious but perfectly legal thing you're doing is being logged. What's worse, your friends might be the ones who spill the private beans.
If you would ask your average Facebook user about who can and can't see/find the horribly embarrassing picture of them wearing a pixie outfit, submerged in a bathtub, drinking from a gallon-pitcher of Oat Soda, you might be met with either a blank stare or the erroneous "only my friends". Or you might get "er, what picture? I didn't upload that. Let me see... Oh, I am so going to kick John's ass for uploading that..."
Anyway, the bit about personal responsibility is supremely important, but poorly designed, confusing technology and dim-witted friends are also problems with dealing with online privacy.
Where is your lab? I saw a talk by some academic German guys who were building multitouch tables (the frustrated total refraction index things, or whatever the term is). The cost of the hardware was really quite cheap, so if you're willing to do a bunch of soldering and carpentry these are actually fairly easy to build.
I don't think she's talking about garden variety fraud. She defines tribalism thusly:
Tribalism is defined here as a strong identity that separates one’s group from members of another group, characterized by strong in-group loyalty and regarding other groups differing from the tribe’s defining characteristics as inferior. In the context of scientific research, tribes differ from groups of colleagues that collaborate and otherwise associate with each other professionally.
Her sense of tribalism is more in tune with the scientific Old Boys' Network that Kuhn warned us about. Scientists are human, and they are subject to social prejudices and bias just like the rest of the species. It's understandable, but that doesn't mean it is something we should tolerate on an ongoing basis. Science is supposed to be ego-free. She's just pointing out there these ego-driven turf wars are not only harmful to the field, but given the topic, also harmful to the world.
2. So his sites will appear on bing and not google? Sounds like the quality of google searches just went up.
Hear, hear! I've been trying for years to get Google to let you selectively filter things out from the results lists in both the news and web search. If it is from FOXNews or experts-exchange, I won't even click on it. That screen space is wasted to me, and I would rather use it on something potentially useful.
As a CMU student (sort of), this doesn't surprise me, and I invite Luke Ravenstahl to kiss my poor ass. Considering this guy prioritizes money in the most bogo-riffic ways (e.g. spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fancy trash cans sporting his name) it seems clear he is not and has not been fit to run the city.
Pittsburgh's new economy is fueled by the universities*. Everybody knows this. Taxing the students---those people least able to pay---is akin to cannibalism.
Of course, what will happen is students will just borrow a bit more and stack on a little more debt. So maybe Luke's idea is to get students to hedge their futures on his present financial problems.
I last used enlightenment in like 1998 or so, and always felt like it excelled in gratuitous eye candy and infinite customization, but lacked in usability. But I always respected how Raster was willing to try new and sometimes completely wonky things, because that is how interesting interaction is developed.
But I just tried it again, and was underwhelmed (with E16). It is entirely possible that I am just grumpy in my old age, or I'm no longer in the target audience.
Nerds of many stripes can benefit from the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It is required reading in many undergrad and masters programs (like HCI, Film, English, Interaction Design, etc). If you ever have the chance to see Scott give a talk, do yourself a favor and go.
If you aren't sure if comics are a legitimate art or communication medium, read the book. It uses comics as a platform for explaining how narrative works---and that's something that is useful to basically everybody.
posting to undo my mistaken mod (I hit overrated, sorry about that).
But while I'm at it: I agree with your conclusion about differentiating the legal status per drug, but I think your persuasion skills need some work. You're ostensibly trying to change people's opinions while simultaneously calling them idiots. That is not the way to win an argument.
Do-it-yourself rapid prototyping machinery is roughly in the same state that home desktop publishing was back in 1980. Fabrication devices like 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers, and soon robotic garment makers will eventually become cheap enough that you will likely have access to one (if not in your home, then perhaps at your school or local crazy artist co-op). The thing is, most people have such a consumption mentality that given the opportunity to design and make things for themselves, they really have no idea where to begin. Fortunately, this is starting to change as people realize they can take an active part in designing and making the world they live in. Communities like Make Faire and various local flavors of DorkBot (go find yours!) are around to help educate and support your inner nerd. Personally, I've made a sort of 3D Logo language for programming physical shape that can be produced on a laser cutter.
Another nice thing about GPS (well, potentially big-brotherish) is that it might be able to learn patterns in where people go and factor that in to route-based search.
I live in North Bergen county, across the Hudson from NYC. When I search for something near where I live, "local" search engines give me tons of hits in Manhattan (radius, as you say), which might be near as the crow flies, but the problem is that I'm not a crow. It would be better if it gave me results that are closer from a travel-time perspective. They should be able to glean that by observing paths people actually take.
I'm really sorry to hear about your H1-B issue. I'm a citizen, but my girlfriend is not. She was recently hired as a university professor, but almost didn't make it because the H1-B process got screwed up. Her PhD is in operations research with a concentration in project management; the RFI included questions such as "why is her PhD appropriate for teaching project management and operations research". It is obvious to even a casual observer that the question was not asked in earnest, but instead was a delaying tactic for some reason. So we had to get lawyers involved (since her university was basically worthless in helping the situation get sorted). Our lawyer told us the government was issuing significantly more RFIs, most of which were ludicrous such as yours.
The way my government treats "foreigners" is enough to make me seditious. You say the US is the greatest place on Earth. Obviously that's a judgment call and I'm not going to argue. But certainly the volume of bogons the USA is emitting these days is unforgivably pathetic.
I hope you can find a way to make it back to the US, because you sound like the kind of person that we want living and working here.
The appealing thing about this is the problem stems from the way we program. It is really difficult to escape the single-core mindset with the languages we have today. I don't necessarily want to invoke the Wharf hypothesis here, but to some degree our expressive power is limited by the language we are using. Imperative languages that I know lend themselves to single-processor execution. I wonder if new languages specifically designed for multi-core programming would be able to avoid some of the problems you mention (like transaction costs of distributing trivial computation). I really have no idea what they would look like; I suspect part of the problem is the textual (1-D) representation of a C program (or whatever) makes it hard to 'see' where data is where it is processed. (I think this is as much a cognitive science problem as it is a computer science one). A diagrammatic (2-D) language might be better.
I'm no radio engineer, but it is my understanding that there's been a bit of work on dynamic frequency negotiation that allow devices to find frequencies that are and aren't being used (or what levels of noise there are). I've just started looking into Software defined radio and the more esoteric (and horribly-named IMO) Cognitive radio that theoretically provides the (artificial) intelligence to perform such negotiation. The theory is that this approach makes more efficient use of the same spectrum while improving communication for those devices because their I/O is very flexible. And, the devices are hackable in software, which is fun for the whole family.
If there are any radio people in the room, speak up.
I'm curious to know how you go about writing code for GPUs. I've been thrown into a project recently that involves programming multicore architectures, so I've been reading about StreamIt (from MIT). It looks really interesting. But they don't mention GPUs in particular (just multicores), probably because the current batch of GPUs don't have a lot of candy that CPUs have (like floats).
One of my favorite UI speedups is on recent versions of OSX (but I don't know when they added this): The 'Help' menu has a text box that lets you type in text for that semi-obscure but useful feature, and if there's a match it opens that menu with a gigantic vibrating arrow pointing to that option. So if I know what a command is called, I can invoke it without having to hunt through nested menu la-la-land. But really, that is just a variation of the command-line interface. Of course if you don't know what they called some particular function, you're still boned. Personally, M-x apropos is adequate, but I am a curmudgeon.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I learned about the DARPA red balloons thing on Slashdot. My lab is involved in social network research, and we ended up using the DARPA thing to do some analysis. So that was good.
As for Facebook, I occasionally hear about funding sources. Most recently was this RFP for a digital media in education competition. I also stay vaguely up to date when people post things about papers they've published.
I've found the difference between a horrible and good experience on sites like Slashdot and Facebook is to keep the squelch turned wayyyy up.
You would probably not be able to attract students or faculty in sufficient numbers to stay open. Sure, Facebook wastes a hell of a lot of time. But so does Slashdot. And I could point you to specific instances where I learned something that was of professional, academic relevance to my work on both Facebook and Slashdot.
We're still trying to figure out how newfangled media works. The first thing anybody does with any new technology is find the most gratuitous possible activities that you couldn't really do before. Social media is in the gratuitous-pointlessness phase right now, but I guarantee you it will mature into something of value.
I imagine he would be seen as an evil supervillain like Lex Luthor or something, and emerge from jail with a small army to do his geological bidding.
Regardless of if he did it on purpose, those pictures tell me that he is basically a regular dude, or at least plays one on the Intertron. I don't find any of those pictures even remotely embarrassing or controversial. Not that I'm supporting the recent privacy policy changes.
Choices, choices.... Do I hand over the care for my personal privacy to Beelzebub or Ba'al?
My tip would be to take some personal responsibility for what you tell others about yourself.
This is good advice. But many people don't know who is figuratively in the room when things are 'said' that ought to remain private. It's sometimes not obvious that the devious but perfectly legal thing you're doing is being logged. What's worse, your friends might be the ones who spill the private beans.
If you would ask your average Facebook user about who can and can't see/find the horribly embarrassing picture of them wearing a pixie outfit, submerged in a bathtub, drinking from a gallon-pitcher of Oat Soda, you might be met with either a blank stare or the erroneous "only my friends". Or you might get "er, what picture? I didn't upload that. Let me see... Oh, I am so going to kick John's ass for uploading that..."
Anyway, the bit about personal responsibility is supremely important, but poorly designed, confusing technology and dim-witted friends are also problems with dealing with online privacy.
Where is your lab? I saw a talk by some academic German guys who were building multitouch tables (the frustrated total refraction index things, or whatever the term is). The cost of the hardware was really quite cheap, so if you're willing to do a bunch of soldering and carpentry these are actually fairly easy to build.
Next - a series of combat robot competitions where the components must come from discarded printers. Who's game?
Sounds like a damn fine basis for a DIY robohacking class.
I don't think she's talking about garden variety fraud. She defines tribalism thusly:
Tribalism is defined here as a strong identity that separates one’s group from members of another group, characterized by strong in-group loyalty and regarding other groups differing from the tribe’s defining characteristics as inferior. In the context of scientific research, tribes differ from groups of colleagues that collaborate and otherwise associate with each other professionally.
Her sense of tribalism is more in tune with the scientific Old Boys' Network that Kuhn warned us about. Scientists are human, and they are subject to social prejudices and bias just like the rest of the species. It's understandable, but that doesn't mean it is something we should tolerate on an ongoing basis. Science is supposed to be ego-free. She's just pointing out there these ego-driven turf wars are not only harmful to the field, but given the topic, also harmful to the world.
On that note, might I interest you in an alternate scientific perspective on the nature of the Earth?
What information consumes is attention. I prefer to focus my attention on news sources that have not proven themselves to be deceptive.
Hear, hear! I've been trying for years to get Google to let you selectively filter things out from the results lists in both the news and web search. If it is from FOXNews or experts-exchange, I won't even click on it. That screen space is wasted to me, and I would rather use it on something potentially useful.
As a CMU student (sort of), this doesn't surprise me, and I invite Luke Ravenstahl to kiss my poor ass. Considering this guy prioritizes money in the most bogo-riffic ways (e.g. spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fancy trash cans sporting his name) it seems clear he is not and has not been fit to run the city.
Pittsburgh's new economy is fueled by the universities*. Everybody knows this. Taxing the students---those people least able to pay---is akin to cannibalism.
Of course, what will happen is students will just borrow a bit more and stack on a little more debt. So maybe Luke's idea is to get students to hedge their futures on his present financial problems.
* And the Steelers
I last used enlightenment in like 1998 or so, and always felt like it excelled in gratuitous eye candy and infinite customization, but lacked in usability. But I always respected how Raster was willing to try new and sometimes completely wonky things, because that is how interesting interaction is developed.
But I just tried it again, and was underwhelmed (with E16). It is entirely possible that I am just grumpy in my old age, or I'm no longer in the target audience.
Thanks for this. It takes me back to 1991 or so when I discovered fractals and suddenly didn't detest math any more.
Nerds of many stripes can benefit from the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It is required reading in many undergrad and masters programs (like HCI, Film, English, Interaction Design, etc). If you ever have the chance to see Scott give a talk, do yourself a favor and go.
If you aren't sure if comics are a legitimate art or communication medium, read the book. It uses comics as a platform for explaining how narrative works---and that's something that is useful to basically everybody.
posting to undo my mistaken mod (I hit overrated, sorry about that).
But while I'm at it: I agree with your conclusion about differentiating the legal status per drug, but I think your persuasion skills need some work. You're ostensibly trying to change people's opinions while simultaneously calling them idiots. That is not the way to win an argument.
Oh, they have. A friend of mine did her PhD on computationally-enhanced textiles.
Do-it-yourself rapid prototyping machinery is roughly in the same state that home desktop publishing was back in 1980. Fabrication devices like 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers, and soon robotic garment makers will eventually become cheap enough that you will likely have access to one (if not in your home, then perhaps at your school or local crazy artist co-op). The thing is, most people have such a consumption mentality that given the opportunity to design and make things for themselves, they really have no idea where to begin. Fortunately, this is starting to change as people realize they can take an active part in designing and making the world they live in. Communities like Make Faire and various local flavors of DorkBot (go find yours!) are around to help educate and support your inner nerd. Personally, I've made a sort of 3D Logo language for programming physical shape that can be produced on a laser cutter.
Another nice thing about GPS (well, potentially big-brotherish) is that it might be able to learn patterns in where people go and factor that in to route-based search.
I live in North Bergen county, across the Hudson from NYC. When I search for something near where I live, "local" search engines give me tons of hits in Manhattan (radius, as you say), which might be near as the crow flies, but the problem is that I'm not a crow. It would be better if it gave me results that are closer from a travel-time perspective. They should be able to glean that by observing paths people actually take.
Thank you. Third best Slashdot post ever.
I'm really sorry to hear about your H1-B issue. I'm a citizen, but my girlfriend is not. She was recently hired as a university professor, but almost didn't make it because the H1-B process got screwed up. Her PhD is in operations research with a concentration in project management; the RFI included questions such as "why is her PhD appropriate for teaching project management and operations research". It is obvious to even a casual observer that the question was not asked in earnest, but instead was a delaying tactic for some reason. So we had to get lawyers involved (since her university was basically worthless in helping the situation get sorted). Our lawyer told us the government was issuing significantly more RFIs, most of which were ludicrous such as yours.
The way my government treats "foreigners" is enough to make me seditious. You say the US is the greatest place on Earth. Obviously that's a judgment call and I'm not going to argue. But certainly the volume of bogons the USA is emitting these days is unforgivably pathetic.
I hope you can find a way to make it back to the US, because you sound like the kind of person that we want living and working here.
The appealing thing about this is the problem stems from the way we program. It is really difficult to escape the single-core mindset with the languages we have today. I don't necessarily want to invoke the Wharf hypothesis here, but to some degree our expressive power is limited by the language we are using. Imperative languages that I know lend themselves to single-processor execution. I wonder if new languages specifically designed for multi-core programming would be able to avoid some of the problems you mention (like transaction costs of distributing trivial computation). I really have no idea what they would look like; I suspect part of the problem is the textual (1-D) representation of a C program (or whatever) makes it hard to 'see' where data is where it is processed. (I think this is as much a cognitive science problem as it is a computer science one). A diagrammatic (2-D) language might be better.
I'm no radio engineer, but it is my understanding that there's been a bit of work on dynamic frequency negotiation that allow devices to find frequencies that are and aren't being used (or what levels of noise there are). I've just started looking into Software defined radio and the more esoteric (and horribly-named IMO) Cognitive radio that theoretically provides the (artificial) intelligence to perform such negotiation. The theory is that this approach makes more efficient use of the same spectrum while improving communication for those devices because their I/O is very flexible. And, the devices are hackable in software, which is fun for the whole family.
If there are any radio people in the room, speak up.
I'm curious to know how you go about writing code for GPUs. I've been thrown into a project recently that involves programming multicore architectures, so I've been reading about StreamIt (from MIT). It looks really interesting. But they don't mention GPUs in particular (just multicores), probably because the current batch of GPUs don't have a lot of candy that CPUs have (like floats).
One of my favorite UI speedups is on recent versions of OSX (but I don't know when they added this): The 'Help' menu has a text box that lets you type in text for that semi-obscure but useful feature, and if there's a match it opens that menu with a gigantic vibrating arrow pointing to that option. So if I know what a command is called, I can invoke it without having to hunt through nested menu la-la-land. But really, that is just a variation of the command-line interface. Of course if you don't know what they called some particular function, you're still boned. Personally, M-x apropos is adequate, but I am a curmudgeon.
Nah... prior art. Sort of. Obligatory Penny Arcade Twitter Comic.
Your gran rules.