I would not mind if Goooogle came out with an AJAX or even ActiveX (ouch that hurt) front end renderer for X so you could have a linux system on a Google partition and run everything nice and secure between there and wherever here is, on whatever size and shape device you are using at the moment. Then they should also buy into those e-ink guys too.
4000 bucks per terabyte sounds a little pricey. Whatever happened to economy of scale? On the other hand I get $3900 bucks for the price after 10 generations of splitting the price by 2. So figure in 10-15 years you'll have that petabyte, but by then you'll be drooling over the sextabyte or whatever it's called. (insert puns here)
A commercial solution is Exact from Giunti Labs, which lets you build content from a library of reusable components as you suggest. Though they recommend you take a course to learn how to use it, imagine a complicated point and click interface. I have not used Moodle though it seems popular, as another poster mentioned the key seems to be SCORM compliance. You will also need an LMS (learning management system) to manage scoring history of students over time, exams, etc. in particular ways for teachers to look at the data and identify progress. I believe there is also the matter of scripting how an exam is taken, i.e. one that adapts to the user's choices, ones that ensure the same questions are not given on later versions of the exam to the same person, etc.
Living in Japan, when I try to reach google.com 9 times out of 10 it redirects me to google.co.jp or some such. So I tried to see the photos of Tianenmen Square as seen behind the firewall but it was not possible to view any page in google.cn.
This event is probably not so big since it evaporates according to a popular theory. On the other hand as energies get bigger presumably the black holes will get bigger. Or something else. The point is that the momentum behind a project pushes the experiment through event though there are a few people who think it is quite dangerous. If you are being objective and have unlimited resources i.e. to make an accelerator in outer space, you would be insane to say you are taking a "calculated risk" when the risk is there that you will destroy the world. Similar to the "igniting the atmosphere" risk taken with the atomic bomb.
I think there are two really important points to keep in mind:
1. There will likely be only a few people really worried about any given risk calculated to be of very low probability, even though the potential worst case is indeed an apocalypse.
2. It seems quite likely that some boogeyman in nature which will bite us with one experiment or another is the answer to the Fermi Paradox, in that the apparent nonexistence of aliens is due to relatively simple scientific experiments backfiring. On the other hand you would think that aliens who figured that much out would be trying to tell everyone about it.. Anyway there are other possibilities, that quantum reality wierdness makes it more likely we are the only civilization in our light cone, or that it really is hard to make intelligent life. The point being that the Fermi Paradox is a good reason to think carefully about terrestrial experiments (into high energy physics, nanotechnology, etc.) and what the potential worst case might be of them. It is highly unlikely that this will stop momentum of physics experimentation but at least should make the few doubters more vocal. We only have one planet for the species at this time after all.
In several Mexican localities, thieves steal telephone and electrical copper
wires, cutting it off from existing lines in order to be melted down and
recycled (Jaramillo, 1995; Medina, 1995; Rejon, 1995; Santacruz, 1995).
Stealing of copper wire has also been reported in New York City's subways
(Faison, 1993) and in transmission lines for Russian trains (Anon., 1994c)
And here in Japan, heaviest snow in 83 years at least also due to global warming apparently (a warm spot on the north pole causes this). They broke out the self defense forces to clear snow before houses collapse (some have).
I posted above with gnu address for gpl violations. Also found an interesting looking site, HackersLab.org at least the link to the Korean page looks like there are people who might listen to what you want to say. They are doing security and hacking of some time and maybe if there are bugs on this device it could be a security problem and that would also be up their alley? Good luck.
Here's the abstract for the presentation by Leo Blitz on the warp. Anyone who was at the AAS, knows someone who does or understands dark matter professionally, how about telling us if this tablecloth fluttering mentioned by Blitz in TFA might be useful as a test of dark matter? Abstract follows.
AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006 Session 40 Galactic Structure with WIMPS, STARS and Gas Oral, Monday, 10:00-11:30am, January 9, 2006, Salon 1
[40.05] The Shape of the HI Warp in the Outer Milky Way Disk E.S. Levine, L. Blitz, C. Heiles (UC Berkeley), M. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Although the warping of the disk of the Milky Way has been known since 1957, our work represents the first time the Milky Way warp has been quantitatively described and we find it to be both elegant and surprising. We examine the outer Galactic HI disk for deviations from the b=0 plane by constructing maps of disk surface density, mean height, and thickness. We find that the Galactic warp is well described by a vertical offset plus two Fourier modes of frequency 1 and 2, all of which grow with Galactocentric radius. The global warp demonstrates approximately an order of magnitude more power in each mode with azimuthal wavenumber m=0,1, and 2 than in any higher frequency mode; thus three and only three modes are necessary to describe the large-scale behavior of the warp. The power in the m=0 and m=2 modes grows starting from around 15 kpc; the m=1 mode is the most powerful everywhere in the outer disk. We outline six observational conclusions regarding the warp that any potential theoretical mechanism must satisfy. We will also show a movie that demonstrates the evolution of the three modes with time.
ESL and LB are supported by NSF grant AST 02-28963. CH is supported by NSF grant AST 04-06987.
Over Christmas I learned and then taught my nephews about the flypen I got them. It was both fascinating and discouraging, and I think on topic too.
First, let me say that I was already familiar with the principle since I worked with Anoto a little (I ran a show in Toyko where we showed the Anoto pen), they make the underlying technology. This may have contributed to unfulfilled expectations.
In case you don't know what it is, the Flypen (very heavy flash site!)is a pen-shaped device based on Anoto's technology. It is a ballpoint pen with a scanner in the tip that can detect where it is writing on specially patterned paper, and includes some gesture recognition, a sound synthesizer and speaker, and application memory.
Anyway take a look at the heavy flash site (even the light side is heavy) in particular Fly Tunes. You start that app by drawing an FT in a circle. You must follow its directions absolutely but it leads you to draw a 10 or 12 key piano which you can then play, a timbre changer for the keyboard (draw a K in a square), circles for drums, etc.
Okay here's the thing. The idea is nice, and startling even for someone who already knows the technology! Kids want to try it. You can see differences in different learning approaches even between brothers, it is quite interesting.
BUT! Kids are constantly penalized for things that should earn rewards. They can have an ah-hah! moment and rush ahead to use it, but it will silently refuse to work unless they exercise dull patience and listen to the announcer's instructions and follow them exactly. You can't draw a longer keyboard to get more notes. Young kids draw big letters, sometimes redraw them in different stroke order or draw letters on top of each other, anyway a big problem for recognition. And so on. The show-off nephew liked recording his songs and the quiet younger one (well both) were hysterical with the ability to make the piano keys produce disgusting burps, chilling screams, laughter, etc. But it just seemed like a demo for some tech and not really something educational. It might have some interest for older kids, if it had some software, but it strikes me that nobody must ever have tested this with real live children, they weren't interested in teaching them anything, they didn't really care about what happens after Christmas day, and if anything it seemed to hurt creativity. The best moment (initiated by my own idea not the kids' unfortunately) was rolling the pen up and down the keyboard and drums geometrically to make some neat tunes.
In contrast I'd much rather recommend Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS (caveat, a friend made it). Which is not only very enjoyable but also you learn to be creative with music and it has (like many of Toshio Iwai's works) hidden music composition in it. I was at an event where the head of Nintendo said they made it at a spec based on music synthesis and interactive requirements of Cyberplankton. This dual screened system (if it could be connected to the net) would seem like a better platform for education.
Anyway it just seems to me that kids who spend hours and hours on a PC with Harry Potter and Spongebob have expectations about interaction, but also they have no immune system to tell them when to stop. They learn about a mythical world and build up their British accents but these games are made by entertainers not educators. You need to have a useability check and see if it educates. To me the flypen was a waste of money and next time I'd try to spend the same money on either books or some educational software. One interesting thing is that a book on dragons (fictional of course) was hugely popular, and it seemed like it might be a neat jumpoff point to software about any kinds of animals. Maybe software that gives children a picturebook style experience, with more info they have to read in a book is more what they need? Maybe the next Harry Potter game should make them jump to the book and read a passage for a clue? etc.
On the other hand the thin nitrogen atmosphere on low gravity Pluto might cause each pin of the cpu to sprout multiple immense tornadoes in all directions, whirling across the entire hemisphere in an attempt to extract the heat which will in fact warm up the entire planet and possibly volatilize what you are standing on. On the other hand if you can bury the heat sink in solid ground you may be okay..
Yup, could very well be seems like a 95% chance to me. We base our opinions on net-based news stories. On the other hand there is the story of Pons and Fleischmann, who it seems have in fact been vindicated if recent net-based news stories about goverment testing is correct.
A capsule hotel in Tokyo runs say 4000-5000 yen while a business hotel is say 6500-8500 and ordinary hotels then above 10,000 yen per night. The best capsule I've seen in Tokyo is VIVI in Roppongi's ROI building, for around 4000 yen, because it includes a common area with reclining chairs and large TVs, ion water, and relatively luxurious accomodations. For a little less you can sleep on shelves separated by curtains but that sucks. I've often used capsules when working past midnight when the trains stop since it costs 8000 yen to get home by cab. Another in Ebisu is 4400 yen I believe and is a standard clean capsule. (Think a quiet room with plastic molded bunk beds but when you go in your honeycomb cell and close the bamboo blinds over the end you scoot in horizontally, turn on the fan and light, and can watch a little tv. Minimal and expensive for what it is. The poster mentions a nice tiny hotel room that sounds more like a smallish Japanese "business hotel" size room without the window you normally get. This is probably like what women can rent in coed capsules (women are not allowed in the capsule side but get private rooms of their own), any women who has tried one please post.
All I can say is I just tried to renew my U.S. driver's liscense, which is harder than entering the country with a U.S. passport. You need for example a passport, proof of billing address, social security card (which nobody I know even has), old college photo ID, etc. totalling 6 points or more (that is 7 points I think above) where different kinds of documents are assigned different point values. I believe this is because the driver's liscense is likely a major the key to surveillance across databases, you know what used to be illegal. This struck home when I realized the EZ Pass system used for automatic toll payment in your car is quite useful in tracking where you move and when linked to gas station payments, credit cards, and photo ID it comes full circle and is perfectly enabling for facial identification over the innumerable security cameras you come across even in suburban life.
Personally I just wanted to update my liscense so I can rent a car when I come back home (I live overseas most of the year) and get a local driver's liscense to rent a car here. It is not impossible but obviously the country takes it much more seriously to be able to track people's movements than actually entering the country per se. As far as I can see every U.S. driver now has to supply these various documents each time he or she wishes to renew a driver's liscense.
It was not so clear to me how well this in fact would catch a terrorist especially one who was planning a suicide attack, and only hope it is just one of the more visible ways they are trying to make the country safe and not in fact the key to the whole strategy.
This sounds like a really great feat. Hmm that FFT looks a bit like what SETI says you don't want to get right? Well it's fabulous stuff and I wish I had a ham radio. Two dumb questions from an astronomy fan.
1. Sol sends out microwaves too. If you were carrying a dish like in the photo and tilted it accidentally up at the sun, and happened to have a hand near the return at its focus, would you get burned or at least start feeling a rise in temperature? And would the other guy start hearing some kind of shrieking?
2. Always wondered if you could approximate the power of something like this but using a fresnel analogue, maybe concentric circular wires or better yet tin foil in varying strips, to do very low cost backyard radio astronomy. Possible? Dangerous?
Thanks for someone knowledgeable answering these perhaps silly questions, the second about which I've wondered for some time.
Looks nice, though I'd also like the rest of the article text to look the same. Actually in Firefox adblock tabs show up on each headline which is a problem. Why not just make a gif and show that?
Anyway I was thinking that google probably doesn't parse these headlines (yet, anyway). Htdig and probably google and other search engines use reverse linking but also other metrics and one important one is text in headlines like the H1 and H2 that are being replaced. Though it says "replaced with flash immediately after page load" and mentions javascript so maybe it treats google's agent as a non-flash equipped browser and hands it the parsable text version of the headlines?
This is extremely cool. I was wondering if there would be any way to do this in software (at least that technical explanation page shows there is a simulator) but thoguht that if it is based on slowing down light of a certain color, you would have to have all the phase info stored. Or at least extremely high resolution/range to have any data left after subtracting the green. I could be way off here but does anyone know of a way this technique could be used on an amateur telescope computationally based on light captured by a ccd without actually physically building a vortex lens? Is it true that this is based on a single color? Also, if you worked on the spectra of the star would this not also include spectra of the planet, i.e. is this really based on a pure black body incandescense i.e. pure green for this star and not really the full spectra of the star? Thanks.
Probably the guy is just using AIML and an alicebot, those flash-animated speaking heads on websites based on what is most likely not A.I. Though I seem to remember at least one marketdroid inflicted site call it "true A.I." or something similar. If it's real great but they're going to have to beat Cyc (Read about it.)
At Keio Techno-Mall 2005, a show by Keio University showing off new technologies. Japanese and foreign (American?) researcher. Haven't read the paper he gave me but apparently they have 1 qubit so far but using an element that retains quantum state for 15 seconds!! In fact it is extremely hard to influence the state which is the drawback. But they think it might be useful as a kind of a "hard disk" for a quantum computer. Next step is to get more qubits in one place, apparently.
Tin foil aside I've often thought the simplest explanation for a lot of the phenomena we've seen (and that legendary "nsa" signature purported to have been buried in code) is that Microsoft has been hired by the government/military complex/fbicia etc. to ensure that its systems will always include enough holes, options, and mutually antagonistic mixtures of conflicting configurations, that computers can be spied on. Adding to this possibly unhealthy paranoia experience with spyware and spam, and some empirical knowledge from the newspapers of espionage by other governments (apparently France and China so they say), I have to admit this latest development sounds a bit scary. You can pretty much expect that within a year of it going on sale there will be at least one major security violation caused by invisible updating of core system components through a viral vector exploiting some known Windows vulnerability. I'd rather they worked on the security side before they started making it easier to quietly change windows. Of course if you do want to be paranoid this is such a new shiny toy for the microsoft team in the secret government branch of your choice. Oh look, shiny! Now we can stay a step ahead of all those antivirus, firewall, and security weenies! Well take your pick.. I'd rather not be forced into some invisible updating service that decides to add some more drm or whatever to my machine while I'm in bed.
A recent article about a Korean experiment which used mice to successfully rebuild CNS (spinal cord) injury covered this. I think I posted it to/. myself. Anyway the scar tissue etc. has to be cleared away first with surgery etc. anyway this seems (to a non doctor) trivial. Why do you feel qualified to doubt a guy who has been working on this problem for decades and successfully proven it in animals?
Sounds like a three sheets to the wind, through and through damned Yankee or desert resident, or maybe he's just a sophmore at a community college in Chicago? Some people say it's just some jerk called Ashlee Vance at the Register, never heard of him..
Anyway, yup, searched for "Otto Z. Stern" on google and the blog entry was just so funny. The gift that keeps giving for sure! Like Otto's herpes? The blog attack on Otto did indeed show up on top. Can you say "obsessive-compulsive"?
I think that bit with Otto and his mom running on extolling the virtues (or lack) of his prostate was hysterical. (If he exists, it's too good to be true how outthrust he is about everything.) Though I think I have a right to demand that he disclose the nature of his middle initial (is it a Heinlein's Number of the Beast reference?) and post a pho-to! (Of your face, silly!) And stop sitting on the copying machine you can get badly hurt.
Also had a lot of fun with those responses Otto posted in this thread under pseudonyms, I laughed my ass off! The people next to me even laughed and they had no clue! Can you spot them?
Honestly his rant about useability was useful if not quite digestible, he is certainly smart enough to get a retainer from Microsoft. My hat's off to you Otto (or whoever you are)! The prostate bit's getting old fast though! And no I don't want to hear about butt plugs or whatever it is you're selling! Ack!
Funny how that article didn't mention the possibility that someone who once was so high up might know something we didn't.. though he is likely insane and it is probably bad for SETI and astronomy, heck it is not such a bad idea to think about the issue.
You have to think about why an alien race might want to wipe out the Earth instead of say ignoring or enslaving it. Sparing talk about impossibilities, etc., it seems a likely reason might be that the human race was determined dangerous i.e. too warlike or curious for its own good, coupled with scientifically not being too far away (decades or centuries perhaps) from discovering a key cosmic technology for colonization like warp drive, spore launching and reconstitution, or some quite magical thing like messing with reality in this part of the galaxy. Whatever. Maybe it is just too much of a pain to deal with a planet that still has so much infighting after a couple centuries of industrialization.
Anyway, aside from maybe becoming a physicist who could unlock those neat physical secrets, or a nanobiochemist who could eradicate disease or even one day make outer space a safe workplace for earthlings, it might be a good think to be an Internet geek. Writing free software and helping deploy communications and education nets around the world will help the world unify more quickly and at a more grass roots level, one could imagine. By reducing the human resources, funds, raw materials and time wasted by ignorance, disease and military spending, we can become more efficient as a planet which will likely make us less threatening while improving our chances of getting that cosmic tech, if it is possible, sooner. Also I think there is also maybe a problem with education in the first world. When we make money, we buy a nice car and a nice house, and so on, that's capitalism and it mostly works. But if you realize the time and money spent on leisure activities by all the members of a town might in fact be enough, if effectively applied, to have a massive impact on somewhere like say Cambodia or Bangladesh, you have to wonder. For example when I grew up I never saw video of what it looks like to walk around in cities around the world, it was all very vague, the non-America grey area. Now we have not only world globes, but a world net. Maybe cheap broadband in the U.S. sometime (I have 100Mbps in my small Tokyo apartment for $50/mo.). So I am thinking that a minimum amount of organization and activity, applied with on the ground intelligence and a unified, integrated outlook, could say take the wasted brain cycles of online geeks and maybe do something positive for the world. Something to think about next time you are searching for torrents anyway. BOINC is also maybe one of those things. Anyway, I once had a little fight with my dad when I tried to explain SETI some years ago and he said he didn't believe in aliens, flat out. My position is something like in Contact where the protagonist's father says something like, if there was nothing else out there but us, seems like it would be a lot of wasted space. The end of the fight was, I don't *want* to meet any bug eyed monsters! I suppose based on Starship Troopers imagery, and that is maybe what a lot of people deep down think. It is maybe silly to worry too soon about it, but on the other hand people will not think so if it happens. Like the spaceguard watch for incoming asteroids. Anyway the nice thing about the above outlined global, or "cosmic" thinking, which incidentally is put forth in science fiction maybe as early as the very entertaining Perry Rhodan space operas, is that it will help us now regardless of whether the aliens are coming or not. If they are already here (eek!) then we got problems folks, but still better to increase information sources and dialogues with people around the world.
Amazing how far M$ will go. It incenses me. I was at WSIS in Tokyo as well as some other similar congresses (for example the Science and Technology in Society Forum - stsforum.org - a year ago). I can tell you that free software is a major topic and at the WSIS Japan leg it was not just one person who picked it up either. One thing of interest is that while it is obvious that free software is useful, it is not a be all and end all if you talk to people from Africa, at least a man from Nigeria mentioned problems like firewood and brain drain to cities was a major problem and IT is not the sole solution.
Also a big topic is things like the open courseware initiative from MIT for free education. At any rate while I was not myself involved in the intensive editing by committees to create the documents which ended up being reeditted and mulched by more talks in Geneva and I guess Vienna, I'm not clear on how important the document itself is. That is, to me producing a document is I'm sorry not that exciting. The process I saw did indeed include some pretty sharp people and seemed quite professional. But I think the people who are implementing solutions will use free software if they can and if it makes sense. It is unfortunate that the very strong pro- free software slant that came out of our conference was massacred by Microsoft, but there are lots of other things the free software community can do, including I would imagine contacting the people who make the real decisions - not the people talking about what to do for years - and finding out more about their real needs so you can tell the rest of the free software community about it and get software created. So there is a point where your motivation, dedication and strategy can make negate this move of Microsoft's or even take advantage of it, for example by making an end run and talking to governments of less well off countries and showing how Microsoft is working against them. On the other hand if they really want M$ lock-in so they can be equally locked in as the first world, then this might be a way to reduce that price. So I am hoping this M$ act of supreme self-interest and cynicism will end up biting their own backside, hard.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not mind if Goooogle came out with an AJAX or even ActiveX (ouch that hurt) front end renderer for X so you could have a linux system on a Google partition and run everything nice and secure between there and wherever here is, on whatever size and shape device you are using at the moment. Then they should also buy into those e-ink guys too.
4000 bucks per terabyte sounds a little pricey. Whatever happened to economy of scale? On the other hand I get $3900 bucks for the price after 10 generations of splitting the price by 2. So figure in 10-15 years you'll have that petabyte, but by then you'll be drooling over the sextabyte or whatever it's called. (insert puns here)
A commercial solution is Exact from Giunti Labs, which lets you build content from a library of reusable components as you suggest. Though they recommend you take a course to learn how to use it, imagine a complicated point and click interface. I have not used Moodle though it seems popular, as another poster mentioned the key seems to be SCORM compliance. You will also need an LMS (learning management system) to manage scoring history of students over time, exams, etc. in particular ways for teachers to look at the data and identify progress. I believe there is also the matter of scripting how an exam is taken, i.e. one that adapts to the user's choices, ones that ensure the same questions are not given on later versions of the exam to the same person, etc.
Living in Japan, when I try to reach google.com 9 times out of 10 it redirects me to google.co.jp or some such. So I tried to see the photos of Tianenmen Square as seen behind the firewall but it was not possible to view any page in google.cn.
This is a bitch. Can anyone post a screenshot?
Thanks,
Matt
I think there are two really important points to keep in mind:
1. There will likely be only a few people really worried about any given risk calculated to be of very low probability, even though the potential worst case is indeed an apocalypse.
2. It seems quite likely that some boogeyman in nature which will bite us with one experiment or another is the answer to the Fermi Paradox, in that the apparent nonexistence of aliens is due to relatively simple scientific experiments backfiring. On the other hand you would think that aliens who figured that much out would be trying to tell everyone about it.. Anyway there are other possibilities, that quantum reality wierdness makes it more likely we are the only civilization in our light cone, or that it really is hard to make intelligent life. The point being that the Fermi Paradox is a good reason to think carefully about terrestrial experiments (into high energy physics, nanotechnology, etc.) and what the potential worst case might be of them. It is highly unlikely that this will stop momentum of physics experimentation but at least should make the few doubters more vocal. We only have one planet for the species at this time after all.
And here in Japan, heaviest snow in 83 years at least also due to global warming apparently (a warm spot on the north pole causes this). They broke out the self defense forces to clear snow before houses collapse (some have).
I posted above with gnu address for gpl violations. Also found an interesting looking site, HackersLab.org at least the link to the Korean page looks like there are people who might listen to what you want to say. They are doing security and hacking of some time and maybe if there are bugs on this device it could be a security problem and that would also be up their alley? Good luck.
Matt
license-violation@gnu.org
Anyway it looks like a translation of this page which mentions the same email address, so why not just email them there in English?
Here's the abstract for the presentation by Leo Blitz on the warp. Anyone who was at the AAS, knows someone who does or understands dark matter professionally, how about telling us if this tablecloth fluttering mentioned by Blitz in TFA might be useful as a test of dark matter? Abstract follows.
AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 40 Galactic Structure with WIMPS, STARS and Gas
Oral, Monday, 10:00-11:30am, January 9, 2006, Salon 1
[40.05] The Shape of the HI Warp in the Outer Milky Way Disk
E.S. Levine, L. Blitz, C. Heiles (UC Berkeley), M. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Although the warping of the disk of the Milky Way has been known since 1957, our work represents the first time the Milky Way warp has been quantitatively described and we find it to be both elegant and surprising. We examine the outer Galactic HI disk for deviations from the b=0 plane by constructing maps of disk surface density, mean height, and thickness. We find that the Galactic warp is well described by a vertical offset plus two Fourier modes of frequency 1 and 2, all of which grow with Galactocentric radius. The global warp demonstrates approximately an order of magnitude more power in each mode with azimuthal wavenumber m=0,1, and 2 than in any higher frequency mode; thus three and only three modes are necessary to describe the large-scale behavior of the warp. The power in the m=0 and m=2 modes grows starting from around 15 kpc; the m=1 mode is the most powerful everywhere in the outer disk. We outline six observational conclusions regarding the warp that any potential theoretical mechanism must satisfy. We will also show a movie that demonstrates the evolution of the three modes with time.
ESL and LB are supported by NSF grant AST 02-28963. CH is supported by NSF grant AST 04-06987.
Over Christmas I learned and then taught my nephews about the flypen I got them. It was both fascinating and discouraging, and I think on topic too.
First, let me say that I was already familiar with the principle since I worked with Anoto a little (I ran a show in Toyko where we showed the Anoto pen), they make the underlying technology. This may have contributed to unfulfilled expectations.
In case you don't know what it is, the Flypen (very heavy flash site!)is a pen-shaped device based on Anoto's technology. It is a ballpoint pen with a scanner in the tip that can detect where it is writing on specially patterned paper, and includes some gesture recognition, a sound synthesizer and speaker, and application memory.
Anyway take a look at the heavy flash site (even the light side is heavy) in particular Fly Tunes. You start that app by drawing an FT in a circle. You must follow its directions absolutely but it leads you to draw a 10 or 12 key piano which you can then play, a timbre changer for the keyboard (draw a K in a square), circles for drums, etc.
Okay here's the thing. The idea is nice, and startling even for someone who already knows the technology! Kids want to try it. You can see differences in different learning approaches even between brothers, it is quite interesting.
BUT! Kids are constantly penalized for things that should earn rewards. They can have an ah-hah! moment and rush ahead to use it, but it will silently refuse to work unless they exercise dull patience and listen to the announcer's instructions and follow them exactly. You can't draw a longer keyboard to get more notes. Young kids draw big letters, sometimes redraw them in different stroke order or draw letters on top of each other, anyway a big problem for recognition. And so on. The show-off nephew liked recording his songs and the quiet younger one (well both) were hysterical with the ability to make the piano keys produce disgusting burps, chilling screams, laughter, etc. But it just seemed like a demo for some tech and not really something educational. It might have some interest for older kids, if it had some software, but it strikes me that nobody must ever have tested this with real live children, they weren't interested in teaching them anything, they didn't really care about what happens after Christmas day, and if anything it seemed to hurt creativity. The best moment (initiated by my own idea not the kids' unfortunately) was rolling the pen up and down the keyboard and drums geometrically to make some neat tunes.
In contrast I'd much rather recommend Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS (caveat, a friend made it). Which is not only very enjoyable but also you learn to be creative with music and it has (like many of Toshio Iwai's works) hidden music composition in it. I was at an event where the head of Nintendo said they made it at a spec based on music synthesis and interactive requirements of Cyberplankton. This dual screened system (if it could be connected to the net) would seem like a better platform for education.
Anyway it just seems to me that kids who spend hours and hours on a PC with Harry Potter and Spongebob have expectations about interaction, but also they have no immune system to tell them when to stop. They learn about a mythical world and build up their British accents but these games are made by entertainers not educators. You need to have a useability check and see if it educates. To me the flypen was a waste of money and next time I'd try to spend the same money on either books or some educational software. One interesting thing is that a book on dragons (fictional of course) was hugely popular, and it seemed like it might be a neat jumpoff point to software about any kinds of animals. Maybe software that gives children a picturebook style experience, with more info they have to read in a book is more what they need? Maybe the next Harry Potter game should make them jump to the book and read a passage for a clue? etc.
On the other hand the thin nitrogen atmosphere on low gravity Pluto might cause each pin of the cpu to sprout multiple immense tornadoes in all directions, whirling across the entire hemisphere in an attempt to extract the heat which will in fact warm up the entire planet and possibly volatilize what you are standing on. On the other hand if you can bury the heat sink in solid ground you may be okay..
Yup, could very well be seems like a 95% chance to me. We base our opinions on net-based news stories. On the other hand there is the story of Pons and Fleischmann, who it seems have in fact been vindicated if recent net-based news stories about goverment testing is correct.
A capsule hotel in Tokyo runs say 4000-5000 yen while a business hotel is say 6500-8500 and ordinary hotels then above 10,000 yen per night. The best capsule I've seen in Tokyo is VIVI in Roppongi's ROI building, for around 4000 yen, because it includes a common area with reclining chairs and large TVs, ion water, and relatively luxurious accomodations. For a little less you can sleep on shelves separated by curtains but that sucks. I've often used capsules when working past midnight when the trains stop since it costs 8000 yen to get home by cab. Another in Ebisu is 4400 yen I believe and is a standard clean capsule. (Think a quiet room with plastic molded bunk beds but when you go in your honeycomb cell and close the bamboo blinds over the end you scoot in horizontally, turn on the fan and light, and can watch a little tv. Minimal and expensive for what it is. The poster mentions a nice tiny hotel room that sounds more like a smallish Japanese "business hotel" size room without the window you normally get. This is probably like what women can rent in coed capsules (women are not allowed in the capsule side but get private rooms of their own), any women who has tried one please post.
All I can say is I just tried to renew my U.S. driver's liscense, which is harder than entering the country with a U.S. passport. You need for example a passport, proof of billing address, social security card (which nobody I know even has), old college photo ID, etc. totalling 6 points or more (that is 7 points I think above) where different kinds of documents are assigned different point values. I believe this is because the driver's liscense is likely a major the key to surveillance across databases, you know what used to be illegal. This struck home when I realized the EZ Pass system used for automatic toll payment in your car is quite useful in tracking where you move and when linked to gas station payments, credit cards, and photo ID it comes full circle and is perfectly enabling for facial identification over the innumerable security cameras you come across even in suburban life.
Personally I just wanted to update my liscense so I can rent a car when I come back home (I live overseas most of the year) and get a local driver's liscense to rent a car here. It is not impossible but obviously the country takes it much more seriously to be able to track people's movements than actually entering the country per se. As far as I can see every U.S. driver now has to supply these various documents each time he or she wishes to renew a driver's liscense.
It was not so clear to me how well this in fact would catch a terrorist especially one who was planning a suicide attack, and only hope it is just one of the more visible ways they are trying to make the country safe and not in fact the key to the whole strategy.
This sounds like a really great feat. Hmm that FFT looks a bit like what SETI says you don't want to get right? Well it's fabulous stuff and I wish I had a ham radio. Two dumb questions from an astronomy fan.
1. Sol sends out microwaves too. If you were carrying a dish like in the photo and tilted it accidentally up at the sun, and happened to have a hand near the return at its focus, would you get burned or at least start feeling a rise in temperature? And would the other guy start hearing some kind of shrieking?
2. Always wondered if you could approximate the power of something like this but using a fresnel analogue, maybe concentric circular wires or better yet tin foil in varying strips, to do very low cost backyard radio astronomy. Possible? Dangerous?
Thanks for someone knowledgeable answering these perhaps silly questions, the second about which I've wondered for some time.
Looks nice, though I'd also like the rest of the article text to look the same. Actually in Firefox adblock tabs show up on each headline which is a problem. Why not just make a gif and show that?
Anyway I was thinking that google probably doesn't parse these headlines (yet, anyway). Htdig and probably google and other search engines use reverse linking but also other metrics and one important one is text in headlines like the H1 and H2 that are being replaced. Though it says "replaced with flash immediately after page load" and mentions javascript so maybe it treats google's agent as a non-flash equipped browser and hands it the parsable text version of the headlines?
This is extremely cool. I was wondering if there would be any way to do this in software (at least that technical explanation page shows there is a simulator) but thoguht that if it is based on slowing down light of a certain color, you would have to have all the phase info stored. Or at least extremely high resolution/range to have any data left after subtracting the green. I could be way off here but does anyone know of a way this technique could be used on an amateur telescope computationally based on light captured by a ccd without actually physically building a vortex lens? Is it true that this is based on a single color? Also, if you worked on the spectra of the star would this not also include spectra of the planet, i.e. is this really based on a pure black body incandescense i.e. pure green for this star and not really the full spectra of the star? Thanks.
Probably the guy is just using AIML and an alicebot, those flash-animated speaking heads on websites based on what is most likely not A.I. Though I seem to remember at least one marketdroid inflicted site call it "true A.I." or something similar. If it's real great but they're going to have to beat Cyc (Read about it.)
At Keio Techno-Mall 2005, a show by Keio University showing off new technologies. Japanese and foreign (American?) researcher. Haven't read the paper he gave me but apparently they have 1 qubit so far but using an element that retains quantum state for 15 seconds!! In fact it is extremely hard to influence the state which is the drawback. But they think it might be useful as a kind of a "hard disk" for a quantum computer. Next step is to get more qubits in one place, apparently.
Tin foil aside I've often thought the simplest explanation for a lot of the phenomena we've seen (and that legendary "nsa" signature purported to have been buried in code) is that Microsoft has been hired by the government/military complex/fbicia etc. to ensure that its systems will always include enough holes, options, and mutually antagonistic mixtures of conflicting configurations, that computers can be spied on. Adding to this possibly unhealthy paranoia experience with spyware and spam, and some empirical knowledge from the newspapers of espionage by other governments (apparently France and China so they say), I have to admit this latest development sounds a bit scary. You can pretty much expect that within a year of it going on sale there will be at least one major security violation caused by invisible updating of core system components through a viral vector exploiting some known Windows vulnerability. I'd rather they worked on the security side before they started making it easier to quietly change windows. Of course if you do want to be paranoid this is such a new shiny toy for the microsoft team in the secret government branch of your choice. Oh look, shiny! Now we can stay a step ahead of all those antivirus, firewall, and security weenies! Well take your pick.. I'd rather not be forced into some invisible updating service that decides to add some more drm or whatever to my machine while I'm in bed.
A recent article about a Korean experiment which used mice to successfully rebuild CNS (spinal cord) injury covered this. I think I posted it to /. myself. Anyway the scar tissue etc. has to be cleared away first with surgery etc. anyway this seems (to a non doctor) trivial. Why do you feel qualified to doubt a guy who has been working on this problem for decades and successfully proven it in animals?
Sounds like a three sheets to the wind, through and through damned Yankee or desert resident, or maybe he's just a sophmore at a community college in Chicago? Some people say it's just some jerk called Ashlee Vance at the Register, never heard of him..
Anyway, yup, searched for "Otto Z. Stern" on google and the blog entry was just so funny. The gift that keeps giving for sure! Like Otto's herpes? The blog attack on Otto did indeed show up on top. Can you say "obsessive-compulsive"?
I think that bit with Otto and his mom running on extolling the virtues (or lack) of his prostate was hysterical. (If he exists, it's too good to be true how outthrust he is about everything.) Though I think I have a right to demand that he disclose the nature of his middle initial (is it a Heinlein's Number of the Beast reference?) and post a pho-to! (Of your face, silly!) And stop sitting on the copying machine you can get badly hurt.
Also had a lot of fun with those responses Otto posted in this thread under pseudonyms, I laughed my ass off! The people next to me even laughed and they had no clue! Can you spot them?
Honestly his rant about useability was useful if not quite digestible, he is certainly smart enough to get a retainer from Microsoft. My hat's off to you Otto (or whoever you are)! The prostate bit's getting old fast though! And no I don't want to hear about butt plugs or whatever it is you're selling! Ack!
Funny how that article didn't mention the possibility that someone who once was so high up might know something we didn't.. though he is likely insane and it is probably bad for SETI and astronomy, heck it is not such a bad idea to think about the issue.
You have to think about why an alien race might want to wipe out the Earth instead of say ignoring or enslaving it. Sparing talk about impossibilities, etc., it seems a likely reason might be that the human race was determined dangerous i.e. too warlike or curious for its own good, coupled with scientifically not being too far away (decades or centuries perhaps) from discovering a key cosmic technology for colonization like warp drive, spore launching and reconstitution, or some quite magical thing like messing with reality in this part of the galaxy. Whatever. Maybe it is just too much of a pain to deal with a planet that still has so much infighting after a couple centuries of industrialization.
Anyway, aside from maybe becoming a physicist who could unlock those neat physical secrets, or a nanobiochemist who could eradicate disease or even one day make outer space a safe workplace for earthlings, it might be a good think to be an Internet geek. Writing free software and helping deploy communications and education nets around the world will help the world unify more quickly and at a more grass roots level, one could imagine. By reducing the human resources, funds, raw materials and time wasted by ignorance, disease and military spending, we can become more efficient as a planet which will likely make us less threatening while improving our chances of getting that cosmic tech, if it is possible, sooner. Also I think there is also maybe a problem with education in the first world. When we make money, we buy a nice car and a nice house, and so on, that's capitalism and it mostly works. But if you realize the time and money spent on leisure activities by all the members of a town might in fact be enough, if effectively applied, to have a massive impact on somewhere like say Cambodia or Bangladesh, you have to wonder. For example when I grew up I never saw video of what it looks like to walk around in cities around the world, it was all very vague, the non-America grey area. Now we have not only world globes, but a world net. Maybe cheap broadband in the U.S. sometime (I have 100Mbps in my small Tokyo apartment for $50/mo.). So I am thinking that a minimum amount of organization and activity, applied with on the ground intelligence and a unified, integrated outlook, could say take the wasted brain cycles of online geeks and maybe do something positive for the world. Something to think about next time you are searching for torrents anyway. BOINC is also maybe one of those things. Anyway, I once had a little fight with my dad when I tried to explain SETI some years ago and he said he didn't believe in aliens, flat out. My position is something like in Contact where the protagonist's father says something like, if there was nothing else out there but us, seems like it would be a lot of wasted space. The end of the fight was, I don't *want* to meet any bug eyed monsters! I suppose based on Starship Troopers imagery, and that is maybe what a lot of people deep down think. It is maybe silly to worry too soon about it, but on the other hand people will not think so if it happens. Like the spaceguard watch for incoming asteroids. Anyway the nice thing about the above outlined global, or "cosmic" thinking, which incidentally is put forth in science fiction maybe as early as the very entertaining Perry Rhodan space operas, is that it will help us now regardless of whether the aliens are coming or not. If they are already here (eek!) then we got problems folks, but still better to increase information sources and dialogues with people around the world.
Amazing how far M$ will go. It incenses me. I was at WSIS in Tokyo as well as some other similar congresses (for example the Science and Technology in Society Forum - stsforum.org - a year ago). I can tell you that free software is a major topic and at the WSIS Japan leg it was not just one person who picked it up either. One thing of interest is that while it is obvious that free software is useful, it is not a be all and end all if you talk to people from Africa, at least a man from Nigeria mentioned problems like firewood and brain drain to cities was a major problem and IT is not the sole solution.
Also a big topic is things like the open courseware initiative from MIT for free education. At any rate while I was not myself involved in the intensive editing by committees to create the documents which ended up being reeditted and mulched by more talks in Geneva and I guess Vienna, I'm not clear on how important the document itself is. That is, to me producing a document is I'm sorry not that exciting. The process I saw did indeed include some pretty sharp people and seemed quite professional. But I think the people who are implementing solutions will use free software if they can and if it makes sense. It is unfortunate that the very strong pro- free software slant that came out of our conference was massacred by Microsoft, but there are lots of other things the free software community can do, including I would imagine contacting the people who make the real decisions - not the people talking about what to do for years - and finding out more about their real needs so you can tell the rest of the free software community about it and get software created. So there is a point where your motivation, dedication and strategy can make negate this move of Microsoft's or even take advantage of it, for example by making an end run and talking to governments of less well off countries and showing how Microsoft is working against them. On the other hand if they really want M$ lock-in so they can be equally locked in as the first world, then this might be a way to reduce that price. So I am hoping this M$ act of supreme self-interest and cynicism will end up biting their own backside, hard.