I really wish submitters would include a link to the research paper, so we could actually judge the research for ourselves instead of relying on some journalist's interpretation. Here's the abstract for this paper, from Neuroscience:
The transient (T-type) calcium channel participates in the generation of normal brain rhythms as well as abnormal rhythms associated with a range of neurological disorders. There are three different isoforms of T-type channels and all are particularly enriched in the thalamus, which is involved in generating many of these rhythms. We report a novel means of T-type channel regulation in the thalamus that involves diurnal regulation of gene expression. Using real time polymerase chain reaction we detected a diurnal pattern of gene expression for all T-type channel transcripts. The peak of gene expression for the CaV3.1 transcript occurred close to the transition from active to inactive (sleep) states, while expression for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3 peaked near the transition of inactive to active phase. We assessed the effect of chronic consumption of ethanol on these gene expression patterns by examining thalamic tissues of ethanol-consuming cohorts that were housed with the controls, but which received ethanol in the form of a liquid diet. Ethanol consumption resulted in a significant shift of peak gene expression of approximately 5 h for CaV3.2 toward the normally active phase of the mice, as well as increasing the overall gene expression levels by approximately 1.7-fold. Peak gene expression was significantly increased for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3. Measurements of CaV3.3 protein expression reflected increases in gene expression due to ethanol. Our results illustrate a novel regulatory mechanism for T-type calcium channels that is consistent with their important role in generating thalamocortical sleep rhythms, and suggests that alterations in the pattern of gene expression of these channels could contribute to the disruption of normal sleep by ethanol.
Curiously, I get the impression that the emphasis of the research is somewhat different from what was emphasized in the popular-press article.
I work for a contracting company, and I definitely know that if I ever were to mention the word "Wiki" to any of the government customers, they would have a word with their boss, who would have a word with their boss, who would have a word with my boss, who would have a word with me. And not in a good way...
It's kind of funny... most people I talk to assume that all wikis have to allow anonymous editing. Of course, this isn't the case, and having a wiki-like system with authenticated usernames would be pretty much ideal for what the FBI wants.
What I don't understand is how you can be such a huge, rich country, claim to be the greatest country on Earth, and yet you can't do what the Dutch have done with a quarter of their country to one city on your coast? Heck, even the Italians managed to do it for over a millenia - Venice was founded some time between 400 and 800 AD.
I wasn't aware that Italy and the Netherlands were subject to hurricanes.
Curiously, neither the submission nor the CNN article gave a link to the actual project page for the Peer to Patent Project. That page has more information and a blog giving updates on progress. There's also a Community Patent Proposal Wiki, but it seems to be down.
Interestingly, the lead sponsors for the project are HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat. Strange bedfellows, eh?
How are you against "the idea" of abortion but you think it should be legal? I mean, what does that mean? What about it are you against...? If you are against it, presumably you are against it because you believe its wrong, and the only way you can believe its wrong is if ou think its killing a human being, aka, murder. So, if you think its murder, how can you think it should be legal? Are you supposed to be some sort of ultra logical example of how Republicans aren't all neanderthals? Cause, if so, I am not seeing it, at least with you as the poster boy for logic or reason.
Many slashdotters are against Windows and Microsoft, but only a few slashdotters think Windows/Microsoft should be illegal.
For general stuff, News@Nature is fairly good, although much of their content requires a subscription.
There's also a few blogs I regularly read which are quite good at offering in-depth analysis of recent scientific news in specific fields:
* Space science: Planetary Society's blog (note that the main author, Emily Lakdawalla, is on maternity leave, so at the moment there's some guest-authors of varying quality)
Would you have told Abe Lincoln to make sure he fully understood all the societal and economic consequences before he delivered the Emancipation Proclamation?
Yes. And Lincoln certainly did try to limit the consequences -- there's a reason the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the seceding states, leaving those in Union states under bondage.
There have been other metods proposed to remediate radiation belts that don't require wrecking RF comminucations.
one proposal suggests using a long conductive tether orbiting in the radiation belt. The charged particles in the belt would interact with the electric charge on the tether, altering their orbit in a way that would remove them from the belt.
The details are kind of hazy, but I think the tether-based approach is actually what the submitter's article is about. The claim is that using tethers to remediate the radiation belts might temporarily disrupt GPS and high-frequency radio over the Pacific.
I fished around a little and found a link for the actual research paper the article is based on. The paper itself requires a subscription, but here's the abstract:
C. J. Rodger, M. A. Clilverd, Th. Ulich, P. T. Verronen, E. Turunen, N. R. Thomson
Abstract: High altitude nuclear explosions (HANEs) and geomagnetic storms can produce large scale injections of relativistic particles into the inner radiation belts. It is recognised that these large increases in >1 MeV trapped electron fluxes can shorten the operational lifetime of low Earth orbiting satellites, threatening a large, valuable population. Therefore, studies are being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts, termed "Radiation Belt Remediation" (RBR). Here we consider the upper atmospheric consequences of an RBR system operating over either 1 or 10 days. The RBR-forced neutral chemistry changes, leading to NOx enhancements and Ox depletions, are significant during the timescale of the precipitation but are generally not long-lasting. The magnitudes, time-scales, and altitudes of these changes are no more significant than those observed during large solar proton events. In contrast, RBR-operation will lead to unusually intense HF blackouts for about the first half of the operation time, producing large scale disruptions to radio communication and navigation systems. While the neutral atmosphere changes are not particularly important, HF disruptions could be an important area for policy makers to consider, particularly for the remediation of natural injections.
I'd never heard of the "radiation belt remediation" procedure that was mentioned in the article, so I dug around some more and located the following paper:
Abstract: Scattering of energetic charged particles by high-voltage electrostatic tether structures may present a technically and economically viable method of rapidly remediating radiation belts caused by both natural processes and manmade events. In this paper, we describe a concept for a system of electrostatic tether structures designed to rapidly remediate an artificial radiation belt caused by a high altitude nuclear detonation. We then investigate the scaling of the system size and power requirements with the tether voltage and other design parameters. These scaling analyses indicate that a conventional single-line tether design cannot provide sufficient performance to achieve a system design that is viable. We then propose innovative multiwire tether geometry and show that this tether design can significantly improve the overall performance of the electrostatic system, enabling the requirements for total power and number of satellite systems to be reduced to levels that are both technically and economically viable.
The slashdot submission and popular press-article (but not the research paper) engages in some fear-mongering about how the US is supposedly planning on deploying RBR, but I haven't found any sources which confirm this to actually be the case. It should probably be mentioned that DARPA funds almost everything under the sun, usually without much expectation of it actually being of practical use. I mean, this is the same DARPA that funded psychic telepathy research and mechanical elephants for the jungles of Vietnam.
Regardless of whether or not it's practical, radiation belt remediation still seems like interesting research. It'd be a shame if fear-mongering about this being a "US plot to disrupt worldwide communications" or something resulted in funding for this research being cut off.
The current "foiled attack" is quite obviously fictional: A senior congressional source told CNN that the plot was believed to hinge on mixing an energy drink with a gel-like substance inflight to create a potent explosive capable of being ignited by an MP3 player or mobile phone. Unhook your brain from the government propaganda and think about that for a second. Energy drink + gel + MP3 player/mobile phone = terrorist attack? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
The journalist, or the congressional source, or likely both, are being dumb. Here's the description of the liquid explosives from Wikipedia, which is rather more plausible:
According to various news sources, liquid explosives were intended to be used,[4] formed by combining a number of separate components carried in soft-drink containers, in order to avoid detection by baggage screening devices designed to detect solid explosives.
One report suggests the explosives were liquid/slurry explosives, similar to solid explosives used in previous London attacks (See: organic peroxide), to be based on hydrogen peroxide and detonated via an improvised device incorporating a disposable camera flash. The same report also states that at least one martyrdom video was recovered. [16]
ABC News is reporting the plot involved concealing the explosive or explosives inside a modified sports beverage drink container. The plotters planned to leave the top of the bottle sealed and filled with the original beverage but add a false bottom, filled with a liquid or gel explosive. The terrorists planned to dye the explosive mixture red to match the sports drink sealed in the top half of the container.[17]
There are several different types of liquid or gel based explosives. Various news reports mention a peroxide-based explosive.[18] Methyl ethyl ketone peroxide, is one such peroxide-based high explosive in the form of a colorless, oily liquid at room temperature and pressure. It is related to acetone peroxide which is an old standby for various terrorist organizations because of the fact that it can be made from fairly common household items. The FBI-DHS stated that two peroxide-based liquid explosive could be used --triacetone triperoxide (TATP) or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD). Terrorists could assemble bombs with these chemicals. Peroxide-based liquid explosives "are sensitive to heat, shock, and friction, can be initiated simply with fire or electrical charge, and can also be used to produce improvised detonators," "For example, TATP or HMTD may be placed in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament, such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb, to produce an explosion."[2]
According to a report in CNN, ingredients found in a unnamed British sports drink could have also formed part of the explosive mixture.[19]
I kind of feel bad for Cyc/OpenCyc... they've put so many years into this project, but using web-based games to collect and verify this common-sense data is much faster than using a few paid experts and can give much more data. For the curious, Luis von Ahn, a grad student (and now assistant professor) at Carnegie Mellon University gave a (rather entertaining) tech talk at Google about his work in this area.
He's recently been working on a project called Verbosity, which uses such games to collect the same sort of common-sense data that Cyc has been trying to collect all these years. Cyc's ontology apparently contains "hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other." If Verbosity is as popular as von Ahn's ESP Game, the game could probably construct a better database in a matter of weeks.
Verbosity: a game for collecting common-sense facts
We address the problem of collecting a database of ""common-sense facts"" using a computer game. Informally, a common-sense fact is a true statement about the world that is known to most humans: ""milk is white,"" ""touching hot metal hurts,"" etc. Several efforts have been devoted to collecting common-sense knowledge for the purpose of making computer programs more intelligent. Such efforts, however, have not succeeded in amassing enough data because the manual process of entering these facts is tedious. We therefore introduce Verbosity, a novel interactive system in the form of an enjoyable game. People play Verbosity because it is fun, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect accurate common-sense knowledge. Verbosity is an example of a game that not only brings people together for leisure, but also collects useful data for computer science.
From what I understand, the infrared is going to give the "pointer/mouse" capability (communicating with the locator bar that you set up under the TV), with bluetooth handling everything else (buttons, gyroscope, accelerometer, etc).
Where did you get that info from? According to the wiki article: "The controller communicates wirelessly with the console via short-range Bluetooth radio, with which it is possible to operate up to 4 controllers as far as 10 meters (approx. 33 ft.) from the console."
Of course, it's quite possible that maybe the locator bar emits infrared, which the Wii Remote then uses for localization, and then transmits that information back to the console via Bluetooth.
While that's certainly LDA code, it's actually from a lab different from the one discussed in the story, and I think they use some slightly different techniques. For topic-modeling code from Mark Steyvers' lab, who produced the paper in question, here's the link:
I'm looking forward to the Wii and playing around with the games. If the Wiimote turns out to be a decent pointing device, I'm also interested in how it may effect human-computer interaction on other machines.
Apparently the Wii Remote is going to operate using Bluetooth. Hopefully Nintendo won't try to obfuscate the protocol (if they're making a profit on the hardware itself, they won't have any reason to), and it'll be fairly easy to interface with.
Much (most?) pollution is not a consequence of inefficiency, and industry has no inherent incentive to reduce it. This is the standard example given to illustrate negative externalities. Government is the only instrument I'm aware of by which people can push these externalized costs back onto the polluters.
I'm guessing dada21 would probably respond with a link to something like the following from the Mises Institute:
I'm rather curious to see how well their approach scales. For example, what if you just dumped all the 1,853 photos of Times Square from Flickr into their interface? Scaling even more, in the future could one use this to aggregate all the photos in a particular city, or even have a Google Earth-like interface aggregating photos from all over the globe and integrating it with satellite data? There's some interesting computational problems with arise in trying to find correspondence between that many visual features.
I'm also like to see if they can deal with pictures taken at different times of day. I'm guessing it's still too difficult to actually adapt a day image to a night image, so it'd probably just end up treating photos taken at different times of day as different scenes.
REAL VIZ has been doing this stuff for years. They even have a few movies under their belt where their software has been used.
I've never tried REAL VIZ, but from scoping out their web site it actually seems rather different. From the looks of it, REAL VIZ can either create a 2D panorama from several photos, or a 3D model based on a single photo. This new thing from Microsoft will allow you to create a 3D model aggregating the information from multiple photographs.
Here's an idea: We should organize a "Police Photography Day." On this day, the participants would go around legally taking photographs of police officers. This would be done in the most polite manner possible, and would be photos of officers doing their everyday activities. There could be a set of documents participants would carry, explaining the idea of "Police Photography Day" to concerned officers, and explaining that such photographs aren't illegal.
Seriously, a big problem seems to be that officers (and many citizens) simply don't realize that citizens taking photos of them in public places (or from their own property) is completely legal. Organizing a day like this could help raise awareness about that.
$419.3 billion (2006 official), it's no surprise that they have to cut certain other projects. Poor NASA, sadly there's not as much profit in exploring / colonizing space as there is in invading countries with rich oil sources.
Of course, you do realize that NASA's overall budget has actually been increasing over the past few years, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I really wish submitters would include a link to the research paper, so we could actually judge the research for ourselves instead of relying on some journalist's interpretation. Here's the abstract for this paper, from Neuroscience:
Diurnal gene expression patterns of T-type calcium channels and their modulation by ethanol
The transient (T-type) calcium channel participates in the generation of normal brain rhythms as well as abnormal rhythms associated with a range of neurological disorders. There are three different isoforms of T-type channels and all are particularly enriched in the thalamus, which is involved in generating many of these rhythms. We report a novel means of T-type channel regulation in the thalamus that involves diurnal regulation of gene expression. Using real time polymerase chain reaction we detected a diurnal pattern of gene expression for all T-type channel transcripts. The peak of gene expression for the CaV3.1 transcript occurred close to the transition from active to inactive (sleep) states, while expression for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3 peaked near the transition of inactive to active phase. We assessed the effect of chronic consumption of ethanol on these gene expression patterns by examining thalamic tissues of ethanol-consuming cohorts that were housed with the controls, but which received ethanol in the form of a liquid diet. Ethanol consumption resulted in a significant shift of peak gene expression of approximately 5 h for CaV3.2 toward the normally active phase of the mice, as well as increasing the overall gene expression levels by approximately 1.7-fold. Peak gene expression was significantly increased for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3. Measurements of CaV3.3 protein expression reflected increases in gene expression due to ethanol. Our results illustrate a novel regulatory mechanism for T-type calcium channels that is consistent with their important role in generating thalamocortical sleep rhythms, and suggests that alterations in the pattern of gene expression of these channels could contribute to the disruption of normal sleep by ethanol.
Curiously, I get the impression that the emphasis of the research is somewhat different from what was emphasized in the popular-press article.
I work for a contracting company, and I definitely know that if I ever were to mention the word "Wiki" to any of the government customers, they would have a word with their boss, who would have a word with their boss, who would have a word with my boss, who would have a word with me. And not in a good way...
It's kind of funny... most people I talk to assume that all wikis have to allow anonymous editing. Of course, this isn't the case, and having a wiki-like system with authenticated usernames would be pretty much ideal for what the FBI wants.
What I don't understand is how you can be such a huge, rich country, claim to be the greatest country on Earth, and yet you can't do what the Dutch have done with a quarter of their country to one city on your coast? Heck, even the Italians managed to do it for over a millenia - Venice was founded some time between 400 and 800 AD.
I wasn't aware that Italy and the Netherlands were subject to hurricanes.
Curiously, neither the submission nor the CNN article gave a link to the actual project page for the Peer to Patent Project. That page has more information and a blog giving updates on progress. There's also a Community Patent Proposal Wiki, but it seems to be down.
Interestingly, the lead sponsors for the project are HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat. Strange bedfellows, eh?
Here's some biographies of the less conventional scientists:
Ada Byron Lovelace: The Lady and the Computer
Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius
Turing and the Computer: The Big Idea
How are you against "the idea" of abortion but you think it should be legal? I mean, what does that mean? What about it are you against...? If you are against it, presumably you are against it because you believe its wrong, and the only way you can believe its wrong is if ou think its killing a human being, aka, murder. So, if you think its murder, how can you think it should be legal? Are you supposed to be some sort of ultra logical example of how Republicans aren't all neanderthals? Cause, if so, I am not seeing it, at least with you as the poster boy for logic or reason.
Many slashdotters are against Windows and Microsoft, but only a few slashdotters think Windows/Microsoft should be illegal.
Here's some of the sources I use...
For general stuff, News@Nature is fairly good, although much of their content requires a subscription.
There's also a few blogs I regularly read which are quite good at offering in-depth analysis of recent scientific news in specific fields:
* Space science: Planetary Society's blog (note that the main author, Emily Lakdawalla, is on maternity leave, so at the moment there's some guest-authors of varying quality)
* Biology/evolution: Carl Zimmer's The Loom
* Pharmaceuticals: In The Pipline
* Future tech trends: http://futurepundit.com/
Would you have told Abe Lincoln to make sure he fully understood all the societal and economic consequences before he delivered the Emancipation Proclamation?
Yes. And Lincoln certainly did try to limit the consequences -- there's a reason the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the seceding states, leaving those in Union states under bondage.
There have been other metods proposed to remediate radiation belts that don't require wrecking RF comminucations.
one proposal suggests using a long conductive tether orbiting in the radiation belt. The charged particles in the belt would interact with the electric charge on the tether, altering their orbit in a way that would remove them from the belt.
The details are kind of hazy, but I think the tether-based approach is actually what the submitter's article is about. The claim is that using tethers to remediate the radiation belts might temporarily disrupt GPS and high-frequency radio over the Pacific.
This is perhaps slightly ironic, given that the Iranian Government actively censors blogs on the Internet."
Indeed. In fact, they don't just censor blogs... they detained at least 50 bloggers last year.
I fished around a little and found a link for the actual research paper the article is based on. The paper itself requires a subscription, but here's the abstract:
The atmospheric implications of radiation belt remediation
C. J. Rodger, M. A. Clilverd, Th. Ulich, P. T. Verronen, E. Turunen, N. R. Thomson
Abstract: High altitude nuclear explosions (HANEs) and geomagnetic storms can produce large scale injections of relativistic particles into the inner radiation belts. It is recognised that these large increases in >1 MeV trapped electron fluxes can shorten the operational lifetime of low Earth orbiting satellites, threatening a large, valuable population. Therefore, studies are being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts, termed "Radiation Belt Remediation" (RBR). Here we consider the upper atmospheric consequences of an RBR system operating over either 1 or 10 days. The RBR-forced neutral chemistry changes, leading to NOx enhancements and Ox depletions, are significant during the timescale of the precipitation but are generally not long-lasting. The magnitudes, time-scales, and altitudes of these changes are no more significant than those observed during large solar proton events. In contrast, RBR-operation will lead to unusually intense HF blackouts for about the first half of the operation time, producing large scale disruptions to radio communication and navigation systems. While the neutral atmosphere changes are not particularly important, HF disruptions could be an important area for policy makers to consider, particularly for the remediation of natural injections.
I'd never heard of the "radiation belt remediation" procedure that was mentioned in the article, so I dug around some more and located the following paper:
Remediation of radiation belts using electrostatic tether structures
Abstract: Scattering of energetic charged particles by high-voltage electrostatic tether structures may present a technically and economically viable method of rapidly remediating radiation belts caused by both natural processes and manmade events. In this paper, we describe a concept for a system of electrostatic tether structures designed to rapidly remediate an artificial radiation belt caused by a high altitude nuclear detonation. We then investigate the scaling of the system size and power requirements with the tether voltage and other design parameters. These scaling analyses indicate that a conventional single-line tether design cannot provide sufficient performance to achieve a system design that is viable. We then propose innovative multiwire tether geometry and show that this tether design can significantly improve the overall performance of the electrostatic system, enabling the requirements for total power and number of satellite systems to be reduced to levels that are both technically and economically viable.
The slashdot submission and popular press-article (but not the research paper) engages in some fear-mongering about how the US is supposedly planning on deploying RBR, but I haven't found any sources which confirm this to actually be the case. It should probably be mentioned that DARPA funds almost everything under the sun, usually without much expectation of it actually being of practical use. I mean, this is the same DARPA that funded psychic telepathy research and mechanical elephants for the jungles of Vietnam.
Regardless of whether or not it's practical, radiation belt remediation still seems like interesting research. It'd be a shame if fear-mongering about this being a "US plot to disrupt worldwide communications" or something resulted in funding for this research being cut off.
The current "foiled attack" is quite obviously fictional:
i rcraft_plot#Liquid_explosives
A senior congressional source told CNN that the plot was believed to hinge on mixing an energy drink with a gel-like substance inflight to create a potent explosive capable of being ignited by an MP3 player or mobile phone.
Unhook your brain from the government propaganda and think about that for a second. Energy drink + gel + MP3 player/mobile phone = terrorist attack? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
The journalist, or the congressional source, or likely both, are being dumb. Here's the description of the liquid explosives from Wikipedia, which is rather more plausible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_a
According to various news sources, liquid explosives were intended to be used,[4] formed by combining a number of separate components carried in soft-drink containers, in order to avoid detection by baggage screening devices designed to detect solid explosives.
One report suggests the explosives were liquid/slurry explosives, similar to solid explosives used in previous London attacks (See: organic peroxide), to be based on hydrogen peroxide and detonated via an improvised device incorporating a disposable camera flash. The same report also states that at least one martyrdom video was recovered. [16]
ABC News is reporting the plot involved concealing the explosive or explosives inside a modified sports beverage drink container. The plotters planned to leave the top of the bottle sealed and filled with the original beverage but add a false bottom, filled with a liquid or gel explosive. The terrorists planned to dye the explosive mixture red to match the sports drink sealed in the top half of the container.[17]
There are several different types of liquid or gel based explosives. Various news reports mention a peroxide-based explosive.[18] Methyl ethyl ketone peroxide, is one such peroxide-based high explosive in the form of a colorless, oily liquid at room temperature and pressure. It is related to acetone peroxide which is an old standby for various terrorist organizations because of the fact that it can be made from fairly common household items. The FBI-DHS stated that two peroxide-based liquid explosive could be used --triacetone triperoxide (TATP) or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD). Terrorists could assemble bombs with these chemicals. Peroxide-based liquid explosives "are sensitive to heat, shock, and friction, can be initiated simply with fire or electrical charge, and can also be used to produce improvised detonators," "For example, TATP or HMTD may be placed in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament, such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb, to produce an explosion."[2]
According to a report in CNN, ingredients found in a unnamed British sports drink could have also formed part of the explosive mixture.[19]
I kind of feel bad for Cyc/OpenCyc... they've put so many years into this project, but using web-based games to collect and verify this common-sense data is much faster than using a few paid experts and can give much more data. For the curious, Luis von Ahn, a grad student (and now assistant professor) at Carnegie Mellon University gave a (rather entertaining) tech talk at Google about his work in this area.
He's recently been working on a project called Verbosity, which uses such games to collect the same sort of common-sense data that Cyc has been trying to collect all these years. Cyc's ontology apparently contains "hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other." If Verbosity is as popular as von Ahn's ESP Game, the game could probably construct a better database in a matter of weeks.
Here's the abstract from a research paper on the topic:
Verbosity: a game for collecting common-sense facts
We address the problem of collecting a database of ""common-sense facts"" using a computer game. Informally, a common-sense fact is a true statement about the world that is known to most humans: ""milk is white,"" ""touching hot metal hurts,"" etc. Several efforts have been devoted to collecting common-sense knowledge for the purpose of making computer programs more intelligent. Such efforts, however, have not succeeded in amassing enough data because the manual process of entering these facts is tedious. We therefore introduce Verbosity, a novel interactive system in the form of an enjoyable game. People play Verbosity because it is fun, and as a side effect of them playing, we collect accurate common-sense knowledge. Verbosity is an example of a game that not only brings people together for leisure, but also collects useful data for computer science.
Sent.
From what I understand, the infrared is going to give the "pointer/mouse" capability (communicating with the locator bar that you set up under the TV), with bluetooth handling everything else (buttons, gyroscope, accelerometer, etc).
Where did you get that info from? According to the wiki article: "The controller communicates wirelessly with the console via short-range Bluetooth radio, with which it is possible to operate up to 4 controllers as far as 10 meters (approx. 33 ft.) from the console."
Of course, it's quite possible that maybe the locator bar emits infrared, which the Wii Remote then uses for localization, and then transmits that information back to the console via Bluetooth.
While that's certainly LDA code, it's actually from a lab different from the one discussed in the story, and I think they use some slightly different techniques. For topic-modeling code from Mark Steyvers' lab, who produced the paper in question, here's the link:
Matlab Topic Modeling Toolbox
I'm looking forward to the Wii and playing around with the games. If the Wiimote turns out to be a decent pointing device, I'm also interested in how it may effect human-computer interaction on other machines.
Apparently the Wii Remote is going to operate using Bluetooth. Hopefully Nintendo won't try to obfuscate the protocol (if they're making a profit on the hardware itself, they won't have any reason to), and it'll be fairly easy to interface with.
I dug around a little for your email, and sent something to your hotmail account. If there's another account I should email, please let me know.
Much (most?) pollution is not a consequence of inefficiency, and industry has no inherent incentive to reduce it. This is the standard example given to illustrate negative externalities. Government is the only instrument I'm aware of by which people can push these externalized costs back onto the polluters.
I'm guessing dada21 would probably respond with a link to something like the following from the Mises Institute:
Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution
My mistake, thanks for the info.
I'm rather curious to see how well their approach scales. For example, what if you just dumped all the 1,853 photos of Times Square from Flickr into their interface? Scaling even more, in the future could one use this to aggregate all the photos in a particular city, or even have a Google Earth-like interface aggregating photos from all over the globe and integrating it with satellite data? There's some interesting computational problems with arise in trying to find correspondence between that many visual features.
I'm also like to see if they can deal with pictures taken at different times of day. I'm guessing it's still too difficult to actually adapt a day image to a night image, so it'd probably just end up treating photos taken at different times of day as different scenes.
REAL VIZ has been doing this stuff for years. They even have a few movies under their belt where their software has been used.
I've never tried REAL VIZ, but from scoping out their web site it actually seems rather different. From the looks of it, REAL VIZ can either create a 2D panorama from several photos, or a 3D model based on a single photo. This new thing from Microsoft will allow you to create a 3D model aggregating the information from multiple photographs.
Here's an idea: We should organize a "Police Photography Day." On this day, the participants would go around legally taking photographs of police officers. This would be done in the most polite manner possible, and would be photos of officers doing their everyday activities. There could be a set of documents participants would carry, explaining the idea of "Police Photography Day" to concerned officers, and explaining that such photographs aren't illegal.
Seriously, a big problem seems to be that officers (and many citizens) simply don't realize that citizens taking photos of them in public places (or from their own property) is completely legal. Organizing a day like this could help raise awareness about that.
$419.3 billion (2006 official), it's no surprise that they have to cut certain other projects. Poor NASA, sadly there's not as much profit in exploring / colonizing space as there is in invading countries with rich oil sources.
Of course, you do realize that NASA's overall budget has actually been increasing over the past few years, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_te chnology
It could always use improvement of course, but it seems fairly comprehensive already.