I wonder whether they'll finally be able to (dis)prove the hypothesis that everybody knows everybody else within six (or however many) degrees of separation.
Then again, most people will probably have a connection to Nigeria due to the certain organ-lengthening drug that they are so famous for.
Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan rossflan umich edu 734-647-1853 University of Michigan
From football conferences to food webs: U-M researcher uncovers patterns in complicated networks
SEATTLE---The world is full of complicated networks that scientists would like to better understand---human social systems, for example, or food webs in nature. But discerning patterns of organization in such vast, complex systems is no easy task.
"The structure of those networks can tell you quite a lot about how the systems work, but they're far too big to analyze by just putting dots on a piece of paper and drawing lines to connect them," said Mark Newman, an assistant professor of physics and complex systems at the University of Michigan.
One challenge in making sense of a large network is finding clumps---or communities---of members that have something in common, such as Web pages that are all about the same topic, people that socialize together or animals that eat the same kind of food. Newman and collaborator Michelle Girvan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed a new method for finding communities that reveals a lot about the structure of large, complex networks. Newman will discuss the method and its applications Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.
"The way most people have approached the problem is to look for the clumps themselves---to look for things that are joined together strongly," said Newman. "We decided to approach it from the other end," by searching out and then eliminating the links that join clumps together. "When we remove those from the network, what we're left with is the clumps."
The researchers tested their method on several networks for which the structure was already known---college football conferences, for example. In college football, teams in the same conference face off more frequently than teams in different conferences. When inter-conference games do occur, they're more likely to be between teams that are geographically close together than between teams that are far apart. Plugging in information on frequency of games between pairs of teams in the 2000 regular season, Newman and Girvan tested their method to see if it could correctly sort the colleges into conferences. "There were a few cases where it made mistakes, but it got well over 90 percent of them right," said Newman. "It gave us the structure we were expecting, so that was encouraging."
Newman and Girvan---and other researchers who've learned about their work---have gone on to apply the technique to systems where the structure is not as well understood, looking at everything from networks of Spanish language web logs to communities of early jazz musicians to a food web of marine organisms living in Chesapeake Bay.
"Networks and other systems that we study are becoming increasingly large and complicated these days," said Newman. "New methods like this help us to make sense of what we see and to understand better how things work."
Is a Mac cheaper to run and does a Mac make a user more productive?
If the answer is yes, does it really matter?
More importantly, does ANYBODY in corporate America consider this when buying their machines? I'll betcha, TCO means buying a "reliable" PC that's not made of crappy generic parts, and nowhere does a Mac come into the equation, even though it might very well be the better choice.
ROI means handing that machine down the line from programmers to office support, to milk as much out of it until it heads for a landfill, and nobody figures out how productive their people are on the thing during its lifetime.
Why? Because there's really no choice. Not in any practical sense.
So, it's really about how well a machine runs Windows, not how Windows compares to any other OS. That's because the market perception is that "the battle is over and Windows won." We feel enough anxiety about upgrading our machines, adding new software. To open up the decision process to worrying about entire platforms again... just ain't gonna happen now.
So Apple finds itself in a tough spot, appealing to those who want to "switch" in hopes that if it can gain enough market share and mind share, it can pry open the door of possibility eventually.
But it's going to be almost impossible, not because Apple can't offer a better product, but because people have become so shellshocked from the PC/Internet experience that they just want to settle down and go with the flow... the Windows flow.
So when I saw the above article, I thought to myself that even if Apple were to offer irrefutable truth to lower TCO/higher ROI, how much would it really, really matter?
Not much, unfortunately. Not right now. But perhaps, little by little...
I hope you are joking. Your post is the intellectual summation of 2000 years of fear of the truth. Not saying that Darwin is the end-all-be-all truth, however, it is and always has been the fundemantal Christian's way to hide the eyes and lash out at anything that doesn't support the ultimate in tall tales and outlandish theories.
Darwinism has been studied relentlessly by thousands of teams of scientists and skeptics. No one has yet been able to prove it wrong. Quite the contrary, actually; most times evidence is dicovered to support the theory of evolution. I have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted or the burning bush spoke or the bones of the whale that Jonah lived in for 3 days and nights were found.
I go to great lengths to avoid having my email reach spammer lists. But it only takes one person to screw that email address by submitting it to an e-card spammer.
Do I need to attach a note to my emails?
If you are thinking of sending me an e-card:
I will be changing my email address address again, much to the chagrin of everyone else.
Since you have have proved incapable of not providing spammers with my personal email address, you will NOT be receiving the new one.
You are now limited to traditional (non 21st Century) forms of communication with me.
What possesses people to do it?
Are they too busy to write me something personal? Do they feel they cannot express their greeting in words? Do they not understand how to attach images? Maybe they actually hate me...
Start by Installing a stable, easy to use and secure Linux distro.
So.. In order to be diverse, everyone must use Linux. Aparently your dictionary has a different definition of diverse than mine.
Hackers are about to make it even easier for you to be flattened by a virii attack now that Microsoft source has been leaked to the entire world.
Exactly how is "Windows Source available on the internet" more dangerous than "Linux source available on the internet" ?
The problem isn't that Microsoft software has security issues. All the OS's have 'em to some degree. The problem is exactly "monoculture". One bullet kills all. I'm more of a mind that companies need three operating systems.... Call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie to avoid the existing OS arguments.
Alpha runs on the corporate web servers, ftp servers and in general anything hooked to the outside world.
Bravo runs on the intranet servers that provide file storage, user authentication, etc etc.
Charlie runs on the employee desktops.
Thus any virus that targets the public layer (Alpha) won't effect internal operations. Any virus that targets the workstations (Charlie) won't spread to the intranet servers (where important data should be stored, and regularly backed up) and any virus that targets the intranet servers (Bravo) needs to get past the other two (Alpha and Charlie) -- or introduced directly -- to be a threat.
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that the changes ATI is making with R4xx are much less drastic than what Nvidia is doing with NV4x. Nvidia is claiming 3X perfomance increase over NV3x, and up to 8X performance increase in Pixel Shader operations. Yeah, it's all theoretical at this point, but it's something to think about. Of course, if you compare R3xx to NV3x, it appears that ATI just had a better design than Nvidia, for the most part, so they didn't need to change as much.
Regardless of which chip you favor, it's shaping up to be an interesting battle come springtime! (Or more likely summer for those of use that don't get the very first cards direct from the manufacturers.) Can't wait! When these cards get released, I'll finally be able to afford a Radeon 9800XT.:)
But there are MORE SECURE operating systems than Microsoft's various Windows versions.
The integration of the browser's ability to directly run code in Windows is the big hole that Microsoft has failed to fix. Integration of user software, such as Outlook or Office, directly to the operating system makes Windows the virtual equivalent of a petri dish for the internet and giving every 11 year old hacker the ability to cripple corporate networks globally.
Start by Installing a stable, easy to use and secure Linux distro.
So.. In order to be diverse, everyone must use Linux. Aparently your dictionary has a different definition of diverse than mine.
Hackers are about to make it even easier for you to be flattened by a virii attack now that Microsoft source has been leaked to the entire world.
Exactly how is "Windows Source available on the internet" more dangerous than "Linux source available on the internet" ?
The problem isn't that Microsoft software has security issues. All the OS's have 'em to some degree. The problem is exactly "monoculture". One bullet kills all. I'm more of a mind that companies need three operating systems.... Call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie to avoid the existing OS arguments.
Alpha runs on the corporate web servers, ftp servers and in general anything hooked to the outside world.
Bravo runs on the intranet servers that provide file storage, user authentication, etc etc.
Charlie runs on the employee desktops.
Thus any virus that targets the public layer (Alpha) won't effect internal operations. Any virus that targets the workstations (Charlie) won't spread to the intranet servers (where important data should be stored, and regularly backed up) and any virus that targets the intranet servers (Bravo) needs to get past the other two (Alpha and Charlie) -- or introduced directly -- to be a threat.
Without a doubt, online security is a major concern. The idea of monoculturism may be applicable to the computer industry due to the prevalence of MS operating systems. This, of course, assumes everyone has the same version of an MS operating system, with a single, universal exploitable flaw. The fact that not everyone has the exact same operating system nor the exact same component and software configuration tends to undermine the argument of 'monoculture' somewhat more.
However, diversity of computers fosters a much higher learning curve to a machine that is already far more complex than 80% of the people using them understand. I'm a proponent of unity in the field of computers in that the UI of any OS should be the same as EVERY OTHER UI. This promotes a uniform learning curve for everyone so that learning one machine or OS does not restrict a person to that particular product or platform for life.
People want to learn as much as they need to - and not have to constantly relearn it - in order to do the things they want to do with the computer. Imposing 'bio-diversity' on the operating systems of the world will only create sub-monocultures between which comparability issues and cross learning would be difficult for most to handle unless the UI for each system is essentially the same.
I'd REALLY like to see Linux be available to anyone without having to have any knowledge of Unix protocols, have the same driver support and always be able to run ANY program regardless of the original OS requirements without having to constantly tweak everything into compliance. If anyone knows a way of doing this, or if it's already been done and you know how, PLEASE post it here.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder whether they'll finally be able to (dis)prove the hypothesis that everybody knows everybody else within six (or however many) degrees of separation.
Then again, most people will probably have a connection to Nigeria due to the certain organ-lengthening drug that they are so famous for.
Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan rossflan umich edu
734-647-1853
University of Michigan
From football conferences to food webs: U-M researcher uncovers patterns in complicated networks
SEATTLE---The world is full of complicated networks that scientists would like to better understand---human social systems, for example, or food webs in nature. But discerning patterns of organization in such vast, complex systems is no easy task.
"The structure of those networks can tell you quite a lot about how the systems work, but they're far too big to analyze by just putting dots on a piece of paper and drawing lines to connect them," said Mark Newman, an assistant professor of physics and complex systems at the University of Michigan.
One challenge in making sense of a large network is finding clumps---or communities---of members that have something in common, such as Web pages that are all about the same topic, people that socialize together or animals that eat the same kind of food. Newman and collaborator Michelle Girvan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed a new method for finding communities that reveals a lot about the structure of large, complex networks. Newman will discuss the method and its applications Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.
"The way most people have approached the problem is to look for the clumps themselves---to look for things that are joined together strongly," said Newman. "We decided to approach it from the other end," by searching out and then eliminating the links that join clumps together. "When we remove those from the network, what we're left with is the clumps."
The researchers tested their method on several networks for which the structure was already known---college football conferences, for example. In college football, teams in the same conference face off more frequently than teams in different conferences. When inter-conference games do occur, they're more likely to be between teams that are geographically close together than between teams that are far apart. Plugging in information on frequency of games between pairs of teams in the 2000 regular season, Newman and Girvan tested their method to see if it could correctly sort the colleges into conferences. "There were a few cases where it made mistakes, but it got well over 90 percent of them right," said Newman. "It gave us the structure we were expecting, so that was encouraging."
Newman and Girvan---and other researchers who've learned about their work---have gone on to apply the technique to systems where the structure is not as well understood, looking at everything from networks of Spanish language web logs to communities of early jazz musicians to a food web of marine organisms living in Chesapeake Bay.
"Networks and other systems that we study are becoming increasingly large and complicated these days," said Newman. "New methods like this help us to make sense of what we see and to understand better how things work."
For more information:
Mark Newman
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Santa Fe Institute
Is a Mac cheaper to run and does a Mac make a user more productive?
... just ain't gonna happen now.
If the answer is yes, does it really matter?
More importantly, does ANYBODY in corporate America consider this when buying their machines? I'll betcha, TCO means buying a "reliable" PC that's not made of crappy generic parts, and nowhere does a Mac come into the equation, even though it might very well be the better choice.
ROI means handing that machine down the line from programmers to office support, to milk as much out of it until it heads for a landfill, and nobody figures out how productive their people are on the thing during its lifetime.
Why? Because there's really no choice. Not in any practical sense.
So, it's really about how well a machine runs Windows, not how Windows compares to any other OS. That's because the market perception is that "the battle is over and Windows won." We feel enough anxiety about upgrading our machines, adding new software. To open up the decision process to worrying about entire platforms again
So Apple finds itself in a tough spot, appealing to those who want to "switch" in hopes that if it can gain enough market share and mind share, it can pry open the door of possibility eventually.
But it's going to be almost impossible, not because Apple can't offer a better product, but because people have become so shellshocked from the PC/Internet experience that they just want to settle down and go with the flow... the Windows flow.
So when I saw the above article, I thought to myself that even if Apple were to offer irrefutable truth to lower TCO/higher ROI, how much would it really, really matter?
Not much, unfortunately. Not right now. But perhaps, little by little...
I hope you are joking. Your post is the intellectual summation of 2000 years of fear of the truth. Not saying that Darwin is the end-all-be-all truth, however, it is and always has been the fundemantal Christian's way to hide the eyes and lash out at anything that doesn't support the ultimate in tall tales and outlandish theories.
Darwinism has been studied relentlessly by thousands of teams of scientists and skeptics. No one has yet been able to prove it wrong. Quite the contrary, actually; most times evidence is dicovered to support the theory of evolution. I have yet to see a scientist prove that the Red Sea was parted or the burning bush spoke or the bones of the whale that Jonah lived in for 3 days and nights were found.
Religion is necessary bullshit. Nothing more.
into a higher form of ooze.
They are spam harvesters. Nothing more.
I go to great lengths to avoid having my email reach spammer lists. But it only takes one person to screw that email address by submitting it to an e-card spammer.
Do I need to attach a note to my emails?
What possesses people to do it?
Are they too busy to write me something personal? Do they feel they cannot express their greeting in words? Do they not understand how to attach images? Maybe they actually hate me...
Bastards.
Start by Installing a stable, easy to use and secure Linux distro.
... Call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie to avoid the existing OS arguments.
So.. In order to be diverse, everyone must use Linux. Aparently your dictionary has a different definition of diverse than mine.
Hackers are about to make it even easier for you to be flattened by a virii attack now that Microsoft source has been leaked to the entire world.
Exactly how is "Windows Source available on the internet" more dangerous than "Linux source available on the internet" ?
The problem isn't that Microsoft software has security issues. All the OS's have 'em to some degree. The problem is exactly "monoculture". One bullet kills all. I'm more of a mind that companies need three operating systems.
Alpha runs on the corporate web servers, ftp servers and in general anything hooked to the outside world.
Bravo runs on the intranet servers that provide file storage, user authentication, etc etc.
Charlie runs on the employee desktops.
Thus any virus that targets the public layer (Alpha) won't effect internal operations. Any virus that targets the workstations (Charlie) won't spread to the intranet servers (where important data should be stored, and regularly backed up) and any virus that targets the intranet servers (Bravo) needs to get past the other two (Alpha and Charlie) -- or introduced directly -- to be a threat.
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that the changes ATI is making with R4xx are much less drastic than what Nvidia is doing with NV4x. Nvidia is claiming 3X perfomance increase over NV3x, and up to 8X performance increase in Pixel Shader operations. Yeah, it's all theoretical at this point, but it's something to think about. Of course, if you compare R3xx to NV3x, it appears that ATI just had a better design than Nvidia, for the most part, so they didn't need to change as much.
:)
Regardless of which chip you favor, it's shaping up to be an interesting battle come springtime! (Or more likely summer for those of use that don't get the very first cards direct from the manufacturers.) Can't wait! When these cards get released, I'll finally be able to afford a Radeon 9800XT.
The integration of the browser's ability to directly run code in Windows is the big hole that Microsoft has failed to fix. Integration of user software, such as Outlook or Office, directly to the operating system makes Windows the virtual equivalent of a petri dish for the internet and giving every 11 year old hacker the ability to cripple corporate networks globally.
Start by Installing a stable, easy to use and secure Linux distro. So.. In order to be diverse, everyone must use Linux. Aparently your dictionary has a different definition of diverse than mine. Hackers are about to make it even easier for you to be flattened by a virii attack now that Microsoft source has been leaked to the entire world. Exactly how is "Windows Source available on the internet" more dangerous than "Linux source available on the internet" ? The problem isn't that Microsoft software has security issues. All the OS's have 'em to some degree. The problem is exactly "monoculture". One bullet kills all. I'm more of a mind that companies need three operating systems. ... Call them Alpha, Bravo and Charlie to avoid the existing OS arguments.
Alpha runs on the corporate web servers, ftp servers and in general anything hooked to the outside world.
Bravo runs on the intranet servers that provide file storage, user authentication, etc etc.
Charlie runs on the employee desktops.
Thus any virus that targets the public layer (Alpha) won't effect internal operations. Any virus that targets the workstations (Charlie) won't spread to the intranet servers (where important data should be stored, and regularly backed up) and any virus that targets the intranet servers (Bravo) needs to get past the other two (Alpha and Charlie) -- or introduced directly -- to be a threat.
Without a doubt, online security is a major concern. The idea of monoculturism may be applicable to the computer industry due to the prevalence of MS operating systems. This, of course, assumes everyone has the same version of an MS operating system, with a single, universal exploitable flaw. The fact that not everyone has the exact same operating system nor the exact same component and software configuration tends to undermine the argument of 'monoculture' somewhat more.
However, diversity of computers fosters a much higher learning curve to a machine that is already far more complex than 80% of the people using them understand. I'm a proponent of unity in the field of computers in that the UI of any OS should be the same as EVERY OTHER UI. This promotes a uniform learning curve for everyone so that learning one machine or OS does not restrict a person to that particular product or platform for life.
People want to learn as much as they need to - and not have to constantly relearn it - in order to do the things they want to do with the computer. Imposing 'bio-diversity' on the operating systems of the world will only create sub-monocultures between which comparability issues and cross learning would be difficult for most to handle unless the UI for each system is essentially the same.
I'd REALLY like to see Linux be available to anyone without having to have any knowledge of Unix protocols, have the same driver support and always be able to run ANY program regardless of the original OS requirements without having to constantly tweak everything into compliance. If anyone knows a way of doing this, or if it's already been done and you know how, PLEASE post it here.