Good news too from the Duke Robotics Club. Thanks to funding from the Lord Foundation, the club's newest robot,
a commercially-available wall-climber, took first place in the 2004 CLAWAR (CLimbing And WAlking Robot) International Wall-Climbing Robot Competition last week in Madrid. Pratt seniors Andrew Meyerson and Kevin Parker and Pratt junior Julien Finlay helped prepare the robot for the competition. The team was led by Pratt graduate researcher/student Brian Burney. Five other robots competed against Duke's climber, two from Italy and three from Germany, but none was as capable as Duke's. It autonomously approached the wall, transitioned from the floor to the wall, avoided obstacles, and crossed a 1-centimeter-tall barrier. The Duke Climber used an on-board programmable processor, three ultrasonic sensors, an accelerometer, and an infrared sensor to perceive its environment.
?Comercially available?
The "Duke Robotics Club", presently does not seem to have any info on this robot.
I think this is a really cool idea. You bond you chips to some sort of substrate that that provides power and some rudimentary i/o. Then most of the chip-to-chip data flows through capacitive coupling of their edges.
If you use square chips then each chip can talk to only 4 neighbors. However if the chips are hexagons then there are 6 neighbors which ups the grid bandwidth.
Submitted by: clav on Wed, 7 Jul 2004 15:23:34 -0400
I'm working on v0.8 of the Link Toolbar, which will support Firefox 0.9. It will probably be available within a week.
As long as you're going to identify and parse out next/previous tags
I didn't say anything about parsing out next/previous tags. In particular it may be that say the next button looks like
[a href="page2.htm"][img src="nxt.gif"][/a]
In this case the only way that an agent (e.g. Firefox) can understand it as being a "next" tag is by monitoring usage and similarity to comparable pages. Now if the link also had some alterative text, then that also might be useful (but not necessarily so).
Preloading page 3 is an additional issue that does depend on knowing that the first 2 pages have been loaded. I'm not saying that preloading is a bad issue, just that it pales before deciding that 3 is next in the sequence.
As far as combining multi-page articles: that may be hard to address with the current state of (X)(Ht)ml texts. For now it would be better if Firefox could recognize that a 5 part article was also available as a 1 part printer ready article. My eyesight is such that I often look for the printer version then up it to 150%.
The problem with automatically combining articles is that it strongly breaks the chain of provenance. If I work with an auto-combined article and quote from it then there is no way for me to send an URL of the combined article to somebody else. Yes in the ideal (X)(Ht)ml universe there should be some way that I can refer to the 30th sentence of a thing put together from the article parts of 5 pages that contain some article plus advertisements. But until there is such utility, when I quote something I will always give a real URL link.
1) If there was a standard for structured navigation, and 2) everybody followed it, then it would be trivial to integrate to browser buttons.
But people have not agreed on any standard, and even if they did there is little chance most sites would change to follow it.
This learning proposal can be seen as inducing XSLTs. First define 1 or a couple of variants of XML describing sequential navigation with some degree of super/sub-ordination. Then the problem for accepting a particular site may just be in devising some XSLT from the site to the Firefox specific XML definitions.
The nice thing about this scheme is that it doesn't have to work for everything. If Firefox can't understand a site than nothing is lost. If the (X)(Ht)ml for a site is written in an understandable fashion then that site gets the UI bonus of being more easily navigatable. Then designers may start making sure Firefox can understand their structure.
This would in effect make the FireFox standards a universal standard even though this standard is only a homomorphic image of the source pages native formats.
Often masses of information are broken into multi page presentations.
Somewhere on the page you have buttons named things like Next, Previous, or Page:1 2 345 6.
There may be good design rules for positioning these elements but often they are not followed.
I've found many instances where I have to scroll up or down just to find the Next button so that I can click it.
It should be possible to learn for a given site (or sub-tree of a site) what the Next and Previous buttons are just from user behavior and the nearly identical layout of say page 2 to page 3. I think this could be done without parsing any of the html or gifs associated with the buttons.
If Firefox could learn and extract multi-page navigation then these functions could be bound to buttons up on the menu bar, or assigned to keys, and the whole problem of scrolling to find a Next would go away.
In the spring, if you come a cross a stink bug, just after it has emerged from overwintering, it can't make the stink. I guess it has to eat certain stuff to make the stink compounds and those don't last over winter.
Now I can see why some people may find an advantage in stinkless stinkbugs. But to me, Fugu without the mouth tingle seems to be a pointless invention like decafinated coffee and non-alcoholic beer.
The hardware is to divide virtual memory into seperate I (instruction) and D (data) spaces. I has nothing to do with preventing buffer overflows from happening. It does nothing with regard to bounds checks.
It does prevent buffer overflow viruses that rely upon positioning machine instruction in a place they will be executed. This is because the instructions will be in D space and can't be executed.
it's well known that the grammar for all human languages follows the same basic rules (Chomsky's hypothesis) thus nothing would be lost when old languages die out.
You have got it backwards. A linguist will describe different languages with the same rule mechanisms. How else can you compare languages? Many different linguists have come up with many different rule systems.
Chomsky's position is that people have language organs in their brain that define a Universal Grammar (UG) of syntax. It is this UG that explains why no natural language exhibits the full power of a context sensitive grammar. [Chomsky takes this position because he denies that meaning has any effect on syntax.]
Now the funny thing is that given all the noise made over UG very little if anything is known about it. There is not some large collection of rules. In fact every time someone says something like "this english construction behaves the way it does because of a constraint from UG" somebody goes and finds a language like Malagasy where the constraint does not hold and thus it cannot be a part of UB.
The only segment I know that has embraced minidisks is live theater where having the music for your show on a minidisk is a defacto standard. Check out this google search. Maybe they will slowly upgrade to the new format.
Are there any other segments where minidisks are standard?
I only finished the book because there has been a lot of discussion of it.
I found it badly written, pretentious, technically unknowledgeable,..., and pandering to the sexuality of 14 year old boys (lots of discussion of penises and the only female character is a child prostitute).
Jeremy Jaynes and Richard Rutowski each face four felony counts of using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail.
Nasty Rete Blackboard vs. Ranking
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Retealgorithim (Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem by Forgy in Artificial Intelligence 19, September 1982) is an efficient solution to a problems given in a specification that should never be used because of conceptual nastiness.
The attractive promise of declarative rule-based systems is that each "fact" (base or implicational) in the problem domain can be stated as a rule. But this is hardly the case in Rete based systems.
The Rete algorithm was designed to efficiently implement the non-monotonic forward chaining "blackboard" paradigm. A Rete inference system has a "blackboard" of facts that a large number of rules monitor, and when the some facts on the blackboard match the condition of a rule, the rule can fire and add information to the blackboard (monotonic) or change or delete information from the blackboard (non-monotonic). The main conceptual issue in this sort of system is what to do when the blackboard satisfies more than one rule. The problem is that firing one rule may change the blackboard so that another rule that could have fired can no longer do so. So Rete ranks the applicability or rules.
Thus a blackboard system winds up with rules whose meaning is not just contained in a rule but has to be inferred from all of the other rules that might be fired by similar input conditions. Most Rete based applications I've looked at wind up using the blackboard to essentially implement program counters to control program flow. And in general, adding a new rule may generate new solutions but it also may break prior solutions.
Pure monotonic systems (with forward and/or backward chaining) are conceptually very easy to analyze because all of the "facts" are truly independent.
One can add a form of non-monotonic behavior to monotonic systems by ranking their solutions. E.g. a monotonic system generates N solutions but ranking via some ordering prunes these down to say 1 or 2 best solutions. This external ranking is non-monotonic because adding new facts to the monotonic part may result in different "best" solutions.
So, basically I am advocating an inference system which is conceptually defined as results = rank(infer(facts, data)). If these functions have good mathematical definitions then it may be possible to implement their combination so that ranking controls or happens during the inference process but the results look as if it was external, and thus one avoids the computational horror of over-generation by the "infer" function.
Rete however explicitly and globally performs the ranking process during inference and an arbitrary Rete rule set is probably NP complete to analyze. But maybe a good implementation of a conceptual separation of "rank" and "infer" could be realized by a Rete-like network.
The "hook" of this story (social loss = physical pain) depends on characterizing activity in the anterior cingulate region of the brain as perception of pain. But who knows what affects are localized there? The region may correlate with higher affects - maybe social anger, helplessness, etc. If a researcher has you inside a MRI and is sticking pins in your fingers to cause pain, I am sure you would be feeing many things toward that reasearcher other than just pure pain.
For example, a crying child can activate a woman's anterior cingulate.
Twenty-eight healthy, young (20-44 yr) volunteer subjects (13 male, 15 female) were studied with a paradigm-driven functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique during barostat-controlled rectal distension at perception threshold and 10 mmHg below and above perception threshold. Male subjects showed localized clusters of fMRI activity primarily in the sensory and parietooccipital regions, whereas female subjects also showed activity in the anterior cingulate and insular regions.
("barostat-controlled rectal distension" basically means
Inflating a balloon in your ass.)
Is there a direct line from women's rectums to the anterior cingulate or does the activity represent some higher affect? And why women and not men?
Then again, the story wouldn't be too compelling if its title was:
Geeze, the linked article was just as catty and relying on insider vocabulary that 1) it was hard to understand what they were hinting at, and 2) I was sure they would segue into juicy gossip about Ben and J-Lo.
don't know why this wasn't given in the writeup but here is the MIT SSL SPHERES site. And if you look at the pictures you will see that they are not spheres.
Parent: Jr, I've told you 1000 times that I want you to call us and tell where you are going.
Jr: Gee whiz, when we got to the park the payphone was busted. ...
Parent: Here is a mobile phone for you. Now you have no excuses. ...
Jr: The battery ran down. ...
Parent: I've just bought you an always on, methanol powered, auto-locating phone. ...
Jr: The dog ate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here it says:?Comercially available?
The "Duke Robotics Club", presently does not seem to have any info on this robot.
here with bonus spittle in corner of mouth.
I think this is a really cool idea. You bond you chips to some sort of substrate that that provides power and some rudimentary i/o. Then most of the chip-to-chip data flows through capacitive coupling of their edges.
If you use square chips then each chip can talk to only 4 neighbors. However if the chips are hexagons then there are 6 neighbors which ups the grid bandwidth.
LinkToolBar: LinkIt:
Preloading page 3 is an additional issue that does depend on knowing that the first 2 pages have been loaded. I'm not saying that preloading is a bad issue, just that it pales before deciding that 3 is next in the sequence.
As far as combining multi-page articles: that may be hard to address with the current state of (X)(Ht)ml texts. For now it would be better if Firefox could recognize that a 5 part article was also available as a 1 part printer ready article. My eyesight is such that I often look for the printer version then up it to 150%.
The problem with automatically combining articles is that it strongly breaks the chain of provenance. If I work with an auto-combined article and quote from it then there is no way for me to send an URL of the combined article to somebody else. Yes in the ideal (X)(Ht)ml universe there should be some way that I can refer to the 30th sentence of a thing put together from the article parts of 5 pages that contain some article plus advertisements. But until there is such utility, when I quote something I will always give a real URL link.
1) If there was a standard for structured navigation, and 2) everybody followed it, then it would be trivial to integrate to browser buttons.
But people have not agreed on any standard, and even if they did there is little chance most sites would change to follow it.
This learning proposal can be seen as inducing XSLTs. First define 1 or a couple of variants of XML describing sequential navigation with some degree of super/sub-ordination. Then the problem for accepting a particular site may just be in devising some XSLT from the site to the Firefox specific XML definitions.
The nice thing about this scheme is that it doesn't have to work for everything. If Firefox can't understand a site than nothing is lost. If the (X)(Ht)ml for a site is written in an understandable fashion then that site gets the UI bonus of being more easily navigatable. Then designers may start making sure Firefox can understand their structure.
This would in effect make the FireFox standards a universal standard even though this standard is only a homomorphic image of the source pages native formats.
Often masses of information are broken into multi page presentations.
Somewhere on the page you have buttons named things like Next, Previous, or Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
There may be good design rules for positioning these elements but often they are not followed.
I've found many instances where I have to scroll up or down just to find the Next button so that I can click it.
It should be possible to learn for a given site (or sub-tree of a site) what the Next and Previous buttons are just from user behavior and the nearly identical layout of say page 2 to page 3. I think this could be done without parsing any of the html or gifs associated with the buttons.
If Firefox could learn and extract multi-page navigation then these functions could be bound to buttons up on the menu bar, or assigned to keys, and the whole problem of scrolling to find a Next would go away.
In the spring, if you come a cross a stink bug, just after it has emerged from overwintering, it can't make the stink. I guess it has to eat certain stuff to make the stink compounds and those don't last over winter.
Now I can see why some people may find an advantage in stinkless stinkbugs. But to me, Fugu without the mouth tingle seems to be a pointless invention like decafinated coffee and non-alcoholic beer.
The hardware is to divide virtual memory into seperate I (instruction) and D (data) spaces. I has nothing to do with preventing buffer overflows from happening. It does nothing with regard to bounds checks.
It does prevent buffer overflow viruses that rely upon positioning machine instruction in a place they will be executed. This is because the instructions will be in D space and can't be executed.
Chomsky's position is that people have language organs in their brain that define a Universal Grammar (UG) of syntax. It is this UG that explains why no natural language exhibits the full power of a context sensitive grammar. [Chomsky takes this position because he denies that meaning has any effect on syntax.]
Now the funny thing is that given all the noise made over UG very little if anything is known about it. There is not some large collection of rules. In fact every time someone says something like "this english construction behaves the way it does because of a constraint from UG" somebody goes and finds a language like Malagasy where the constraint does not hold and thus it cannot be a part of UB.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??
A: An offer you can't understand.
In 2003 this story was reported in nature.
And here the link to the pre print.
The only segment I know that has embraced minidisks is live theater where having the music for your show on a minidisk is a defacto standard. Check out this google search. Maybe they will slowly upgrade to the new format.
Are there any other segments where minidisks are standard?
I only finished the book because there has been a lot of discussion of it. I found it badly written, pretentious, technically unknowledgeable, ..., and pandering to the sexuality of 14 year old boys (lots of discussion of penises and the only female character is a child prostitute).
The Rete algorithim (Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/Many Object Pattern Match Problem by Forgy in Artificial Intelligence 19, September 1982) is an efficient solution to a problems given in a specification that should never be used because of conceptual nastiness.
The attractive promise of declarative rule-based systems is that each "fact" (base or implicational) in the problem domain can be stated as a rule. But this is hardly the case in Rete based systems.
The Rete algorithm was designed to efficiently implement the non-monotonic forward chaining "blackboard" paradigm. A Rete inference system has a "blackboard" of facts that a large number of rules monitor, and when the some facts on the blackboard match the condition of a rule, the rule can fire and add information to the blackboard (monotonic) or change or delete information from the blackboard (non-monotonic). The main conceptual issue in this sort of system is what to do when the blackboard satisfies more than one rule. The problem is that firing one rule may change the blackboard so that another rule that could have fired can no longer do so. So Rete ranks the applicability or rules.
Thus a blackboard system winds up with rules whose meaning is not just contained in a rule but has to be inferred from all of the other rules that might be fired by similar input conditions. Most Rete based applications I've looked at wind up using the blackboard to essentially implement program counters to control program flow. And in general, adding a new rule may generate new solutions but it also may break prior solutions.
Pure monotonic systems (with forward and/or backward chaining) are conceptually very easy to analyze because all of the "facts" are truly independent.
One can add a form of non-monotonic behavior to monotonic systems by ranking their solutions. E.g. a monotonic system generates N solutions but ranking via some ordering prunes these down to say 1 or 2 best solutions. This external ranking is non-monotonic because adding new facts to the monotonic part may result in different "best" solutions.
So, basically I am advocating an inference system which is conceptually defined as results = rank(infer(facts, data)). If these functions have good mathematical definitions then it may be possible to implement their combination so that ranking controls or happens during the inference process but the results look as if it was external, and thus one avoids the computational horror of over-generation by the "infer" function.
Rete however explicitly and globally performs the ranking process during inference and an arbitrary Rete rule set is probably NP complete to analyze. But maybe a good implementation of a conceptual separation of "rank" and "infer" could be realized by a Rete-like network.
For example, a crying child can activate a woman's anterior cingulate.
For another example, forced rectal distension causes activity in the anterior cingulate for women but not for men. ("barostat-controlled rectal distension" basically means Inflating a balloon in your ass.)
Is there a direct line from women's rectums to the anterior cingulate or does the activity represent some higher affect? And why women and not men? Then again, the story wouldn't be too compelling if its title was:
Geeze, the linked article was just as catty and relying on insider vocabulary that 1) it was hard to understand what they were hinting at, and 2) I was sure they would segue into juicy gossip about Ben and J-Lo.
At this moment there is heavy loading on parts of the US network. Is this related or just a coincidence?
don't know why this wasn't given in the writeup but here is the MIT SSL SPHERES site. And if you look at the pictures you will see that they are not spheres.
I ran across this Behind Enemy Lines site recently.
It seems to be describing a situation very similar to yours and a large number of actions taken to resolve it.
I had always heard that a person that has eyes of different colors is really a chimeral twin.
Parent: Jr, I've told you 1000 times that I want you to call us and tell where you are going.
Jr: Gee whiz, when we got to the park the payphone was busted.
...
Parent: Here is a mobile phone for you. Now you have no excuses.
...
Jr: The battery ran down.
...
Parent: I've just bought you an always on, methanol powered, auto-locating phone.
...
Jr: The dog ate it.
I don't know how "new" this theory is. Here is some info on S. Fred Singer.