Very insightful comment -- tissue donation is one of the most altruistic (and underrated) things one can do for society. However, I had a chance to see an organ procurement procedure while shadowing, and it really turns your stomach to see physicians rummage through the body looking for spare parts (i.e.:
"On my 3rd year surgery rotation at about 2am one night we had a harvest of an 8yo boy killed in a car accident (he was riding his bike). It was awful, everyone came in and just took what they wanted like it was some sort of morbid shopping trip. The transplant resident was 5 months pregnant at the time and when we were almost at the end she started crying, which set me and the anesthesia resident crying. It was just us and the nurses in there, all crying for the little boy as we closed. It was so awful, and I'm just glad that I'll be dead when they harvest my organs. And this might be weird, but I secretly hope that someone cries for me as they're closing." Quote
I'm all for organ donation, but honestly, it can be quite sad.
Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman School of Physics and Astronomy and School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel; and Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
We address the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics, and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, chromosome or protein sequence data, sheet music, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This unsupervised algorithm is capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics.
Many types of sequential symbolic data possess structure that is (i) hierarchical and (ii) context-sensitive. Natural-language text and transcribed speech are prime examples of such data: a corpus of language consists of sentences defined over a finite lexicon of symbols such as words. Linguists traditionally analyze the sentences into recursively structured phrasal constituents (1); at the same time, a distributional analysis of partially aligned sentential contexts (2) reveals in the lexicon clusters that are said to correspond to various syntactic categories (such as nouns or verbs). Such structure, however, is not limited to the natural languages; recurring motifs are found, on a level of description that is common to all life on earth, in the base sequences of DNA that constitute the genome. We introduce an unsupervised algorithm that discovers hierarchical structure in any sequence data, on the basis of the minimal assumption that the corpus at hand contains partially overlapping strings at multiple levels of organization. In the linguistic domain, our algorithm has been successfully tested both on artificial-grammar output and on natural-language corpora such as ATIS (3), CHILDES (4), and the Bible (5). In bioinformatics, the algorithm has been shown to extract from protein sequences syntactic structures that are highly correlated with the functional properties of these proteins.
The ADIOS Algorithm for Grammar-Like Rule Induction
In a machine learning paradigm for grammar induction, a teacher produces a sequence of strings generated by a grammar G0, and a learner uses the resulting corpus to construct a grammar G, aiming to approximate G0 in some sense (6). Recent evidence suggests that natural language acquisition involves both statistical computation (e.g., in speech segmentation) and rule-like algebraic processes (e.g., in structured generalization) (7-11). Modern computational approaches to grammar induction integrate statistical and rule-based methods (12, 13). Statistical information that can be learned along with the rules may be Markov (14) or variable-order Markov (15) structure for finite state (16) grammars, in which case the EM algorithm can be used to maximize the likelihood of the observed data. Likewise, stochastic annotation for context-free grammars (CFGs) can be learned by using methods such as the Inside-Outside algorithm (14, 17).
We have developed a method that, like some of those just mentioned, combines statistics and rules: our algorithm, ADIOS (for automatic distillation of structure) uses statistical information present in raw sequential data to identify significant segments and to distill rule-like regularities that support structured generalization. Unlike
If you're searching for a hosting provider, Netcraft has a rather nice table that displays server uptimes, % failed requests & other ancillary information for a large sample of hosting companies. An example of one row in the aforementioned table would be as follows:
Hosting provider = www.valueweb.net OS = Linux Outage hh:mm:ss = 0:00:00 Failed Req% = 0.00 DNS (Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname) = 0.181 Connect (first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server) = 0.105 First byte (time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received) = 0.211 Total (This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received) = 0.211 Kb/s = - Size (K) = 0
The table displays the top 50 hosting providers with respect to failed requests, so, personally, I restricted my search to all the hosting providers that had a Linux OS (for script compatibility), and a failed request percentage below 3.0%. Given these performance constraints, I subsequently chose the cheapest suitable plan offered by a hosting company in this sample set, based on my bandwidth/disk space criteria.
Although I'd agree with you with regards to Asimov, as a counterpoint, Michael Crichton (from Harvard Med) does a phenomenal job at writing science fiction -- 'Jurassic Park' and 'The Andromeda Strain' are two works that really got me interested in pursuing science.
If the Patriot Act and ancillary legislation from the Dept. of Homeland Security can stop an American citizen from receiving due process in American courts, I don't think that they'll have any problem circumventing DMCA restrictions.
Regarding books by O'Reilly, I'd also recommend Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, and, to a lesser extend, Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics -- quite personally, our lab has been using several custom-built sequencing tools, but I've found that Perl always gets the job done faster.
Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell: A Guide to Common Tools and Databases pulls together all of the vital information about the most commonly used databases, analytical tools, and tables used in sequence analysis. The book contains details and examples of the common database formats (GenBank, EMBL, SWISS-PROT) and the GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ Feature Table Definitions. It also provides the command line syntax for popular analysis applications such as Readseq and MEME/MAST, BLAST, ClustalW, and the EMBOSS suite, as well as tables of nucleotide, genetic, and amino acid codes. Written in O'Reilly's enormously popular, straightforward "Nutshell" format, this book draws together essential information for bioinformaticians in industry and academia, as well as for students. If sequence analysis is part of your daily life, you'll want this easy-to-use book on your desk.
If you don't want to wait until this comes in print, I'd recommend Cisco's "Home Networking Simplified", which was reviewed on Slashdot a few days ago. From the review:
This is an almost perfect book on home networking for the person who has a Windows computer or two (and nothing else) and knows nothing. It pains me to admit that I have a number of friends who fall into this category and I would have no hesitation in lending them a copy of this book. Given the cost, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to everyone, but I do feel that it is the perfect volume for the local library; borrowing it for two weeks while setting up the home net would be the ideal solution for people like my mate Tim, who (while a pediatric specialist) has trouble hooking up a router, or the neighbours downstairs who can't properly secure a wireless network.
Part II Simple Home Networks Chapter 5 Creating a Basic Home Network Planning a Network Designing Your Network Building Your Network
How to Build It: Connecting Two Computers Decide on the Type of NICs Physically Install the NIC Internal NIC in a Desktop Computer Internal PCMCIA NIC in a Laptop Computer External NIC for a Desktop or Laptop Computer Configure Windows to "Talk To" the NIC Build a Network Between the Two Computers Back-to-Back Using a Hub, Switch, or Router Set Up the Network in Windows Troubleshooting Tips: Building a Network
Chapter 6 Sharing Network Resources File Sharing Printer Sharing Practicing Safe Share Sharing Guidelines Network Design Guidelines How to Build It: File and Printer Sharing Enable File and Printer Sharing Share a File Over the Network Map a Shared File Folder as a Disk Drive Share a Printer Over the Network Map a Shared Printer Add Security Precautions to File and Printer Sharing...
With regards to a text-to-speech program, I'd recommend TextAloud, which converts text files to MP3s.
Way back, I converted Schwartz's 'Learning Perl' (the llama book by O'Reilly press) to an mp3 and used it while working out -- it's quite convenient, but I ended up scrapping it later on, just because I learn quicker when I'm actually at a computer to test commands.
Also, after trying audiobooks, it's easier to just use normal books when studying, since it's easy to flip to the glossary/index to get syntax for commands.
It'd be rather neat if you could use two cameras to create a 3D-model of a person, instead of a 2D image -- some folks at MIT already did some research on this, but it'd be pretty cool to see this implemented in a game.
Maybe the Xbox 360 or PS3 could create a realtime 3D model on the fly?
Just as a fyi, if you're interested in swapping muscles with a different species, you'd probably be better off using the rat IIb fast-twitch myosin muscle filament, instead of the cheetah.
There was a great article about gene therapy & interspecies muscle filament switching a few years ago in Scientific American, and they noted that switching muscles with another species could be problematic under duress, because the resultant strain on the quadriceps could physically rip out the hamstring, patella tendon, and tibia bone, eventually causing the quadriceps to shoot up the femur.
Just as the parent post noted, Eurogamer suggests that most of the 'fun' from Black comes from its physics engine and the ability to destroy crap in the environment.
Although having a good physics engine is good, I seriously doubt that Black (coming out on the PS2 and Xbox 1 in 2006) will be able to able to replicate the physics modeling of the upcoming Unreal 2007 engine, or for that matter, even Half-Life 2 (viz. gravity gun).
Bottom line: Full environment interactivity is hard enough on a high-end 3.2Ghz gaming workstation, much less on a 250 mhz PS2
It *is* interesting -- the I Love Bees campaign was able to generate an unprecedented amount of support and comraderie among fans, and it's interesting to see how this effort was orchestrated. Just to pull a quote from an related Wired article:
In any case, the phones keep ringing all across the United States, and they are even beginning to ring in Holland and England. Some people have driven hours to take part, and one player even braved Florida's Hurricane Ivan to answer a call at a pay phone that was destroyed shortly afterward.
"Dude," said Puppetmaster 2, "it's a hurricane. Put the phone down."
Speaking from limited experience, I haven't heard of a game marketing campaign that was so imaginative or effective. If this is how games are released in the future, I'm all for it.
Actually, parent's post is pretty insightful -- if you encounter a person with a prefrontal cortex lesion , the *last* thing you'll notice about their condition is their inability to understand sarcasm.
From Fix's High-Yield Neuroanatomy: "Destruction of the anterior two-thirds of the frontal lobe convexity results in deficits in concentration, orientation, abstracting ability, judgment, and problem-solving ability. Other frontal lobe deficits include loss of initiative, inappropriate behavior, release of sucking and grasping reflexes, gait apraxia, sphincteric incontinence . . . and inappropriate social behavior (e.g., use of obscene language, urinating in public)"
I volunteered in a psych ward during undergrad, and people with prefrontal cortex lesions are among the most difficult patients to interact with on a daily basis.
IMO, the new addition of AI-controlled bots in the upcoming Castlevania title seems like an rather poor decision:
Armed with the unique new abilities of Devil Forgery, gamers will be able to call upon trusty allies - "Innocent Devils" - who will help defeat a variety of powerful enemies. More than 30 evolving allies will develop unique abilities ranging from those that can open heavy doors, to those that can help Hector fly.
The mere idea of having one AI-controlled henchman/ally/bot annoys me to no end (i.e. Farah in Prince of Persia), but it seems horrendous to have *30* different bots that one *must* learn to use in order to complete game-critical tasks (i.e. opening heavy doors) -- I can't count how many times that 'helpful' bots have gotten stuck around corners, forcing a console reboot.
Hmm, I could be wrong about this, but flocking behavior is *vastly* more complex than the three points that listed in the parent's post.
From what I understand, flocking doesn't result from just 'following the birds adjacent to you', but instead a result of optimizing a complex multiplanar lifting system in order to reduce total flight power demand.
Honestly, I'd be suprised if the researchers were able to emulate the real purpose of a flock, instead of just emulating superficial swarming behavior -- there was a very readable article in Science written by two guys at Caltech on flight efficiency & flocking, and they conclude with the premise that: "theoretically 25 birds could have a range increase of about 70 percent as compared with a lone bird"
IMO, programmed swarming behavior is nothing new, but if these researchers run with the ball and generate *real* efficiency-optimizing flocking behavior with man-made aircraft, the ramifactions could be huge.
it's not enough to call Resident Evil 4 one of the high points of the series, because this is probably the single greatest horror-themed action game ever created. Resident Evil 4 is an amazing achievement in a variety of ways, especially in how its inspired, state-of-the-art cinematic presentation works so well with its relentlessly exciting, white-knuckle action, all of which is wrapped up in a decidedly lengthy adventure chock-full of hidden secrets and bonus extras. It obviously isn't for the squeamish or for those otherwise not qualified to play this gory, mature-rated GameCube game, which is too bad for them, because it's hard to imagine anyone else not being consistently thrilled and impressed by what Resident Evil 4 has to offer. (Greg Kasavin, Gamespot, Editor-in-chief)
And yes, let's totally forget about Metroid Prime 1 & 2 -- the Gamecube is an Easy Bake Oven, after all...
the whole point of online gaming is that you can play with anyone no matter where you are
This is an excellent point.
After reading the article, it seems that Square Enix is backtracking on it's prior stance on openness -- for instance Square Enix's MMORPG (Final Fantasy XII) showed an *unprecedented* amount of player-player communication:
1. People using both consoles (Playstation 2) and computers could fight together [something which is unseen in any major MMORPG]
2. People from Japan and America could both go on missions, instead of being relegated to language/country-specific servers
I'm not sure why exactly Square would close up their systems so much (cue KDR_11k's pedophilia argument), but perhaps they had a bad experience from kids playing FF12.
more interesting to me, it could be used as a very high-bandwidth connection between a computer and me.
This has already been done several times, both at a low-bandwidth level (electrodes on the skull, done several years ago), and a high-bandwidth level (implanting an electrode directly in the neocortex, done in 2000)
If you're interested in this stuff, you should check out this journal article - PDF Reprint
Kennedy PR, Bakay RAE, Moore MM, Adams K, Goldwaithe J. 2000. Direct control of a
computer from the human central nervous system. IEEE Trans. Rehabil. Eng. 8:198-202
Here's the abstract, if you don't want to wade through the PDF:
We describe an invasive alternative to externally applied brain-computer interface (BCI) devices. This system requires implantation of a special electrode into the outer layers of the human neocortex. The recorded signals are transmitted to a nearby receiver and processed to drive a cursor on a computer monitor in front of the patient. Our present patient has learned to control the cursor for the production of synthetic speech and typing.
For those interested, a much more informative description of Schwartz et. al.'s research can be found at his lab paper reprint section (click on on the second title from the top - "Schwartz, A.B.: Cortical neural prostheses, Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 27:487-507, 2004.")
Just to give my two cents, this is cool stuff, but it's not that big of a deal when compared with prior research:
"Investigators have demonstrated the potential of this technology in humans patients with the cone electrode (Kennedy et al. 2000). This electrode is a capillary tube filled with growth factor or peripheral nerve extract. Also in the tube are the exposed ends of two microwires, which act as differential electrodes. Neurites that sprout in re-sponse to the electrode penetration are attracted to the interior of the tube, through which they grow and form synaptic connections to other neurons. The axon is per-manently trapped next to the recording electrode. Although only a few channels of multiunit data were recorded, this activity was used by locked-in ALS patients for communicating with a spelling/letter-board program. One patient used this method for more than a year." -- (Schwartz 503)
Also, it's interesting that the paper notes that "laboratories using CNP suggests that, on average, a chronic electrode implanted in monkey cortex has only a 40% to 60% chance of recording unit activity." (Schwartz 503) -- maybe this is just me, but this percent really needs to go up to at least 95% before it's commercially viable -- it'd really suck to have an ALS patient get a cortical implant stuck in his brain at the tune of $100,000+, and have it break immediately after.
The demo video is a bit on the heavy site (161 MB zipped Quicktime.mov) and is around 7 minutes long, but it goes into a lot of the details that will differentiate Unreal 2007 from Unreal 2k4 -- n-chain bump mapping, immissive channels for textures, exponentially increased polycounts for high-resolution character meshes, etc. etc.
Just as a fyi, the press release for Hu et. al.'s research can be found at the American Association for Cancer Research proceedings page -- it's more technical than the Economist article linked above, but is quite informative.
Slashdot Mirror
Very insightful comment -- tissue donation is one of the most altruistic (and underrated) things one can do for society. However, I had a chance to see an organ procurement procedure while shadowing, and it really turns your stomach to see physicians rummage through the body looking for spare parts (i.e.:
"On my 3rd year surgery rotation at about 2am one night we had a harvest of an 8yo boy killed in a car accident (he was riding his bike). It was awful, everyone came in and just took what they wanted like it was some sort of morbid shopping trip. The transplant resident was 5 months pregnant at the time and when we were almost at the end she started crying, which set me and the anesthesia resident crying. It was just us and the nurses in there, all crying for the little boy as we closed. It was so awful, and I'm just glad that I'll be dead when they harvest my organs. And this might be weird, but I secretly hope that someone cries for me as they're closing." Quote
I'm all for organ donation, but honestly, it can be quite sad.
Unsupervised learning of natural languages
Zach Solan, David Horn, Eytan Ruppin and Shimon Edelman
School of Physics and Astronomy and School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel; and Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
We address the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics, and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, chromosome or protein sequence data, sheet music, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This unsupervised algorithm is capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics.
Many types of sequential symbolic data possess structure that is (i) hierarchical and (ii) context-sensitive. Natural-language text and transcribed speech are prime examples of such data: a corpus of language consists of sentences defined over a finite lexicon of symbols such as words. Linguists traditionally analyze the sentences into recursively structured phrasal constituents (1); at the same time, a distributional analysis of partially aligned sentential contexts (2) reveals in the lexicon clusters that are said to correspond to various syntactic categories (such as nouns or verbs). Such structure, however, is not limited to the natural languages; recurring motifs are found, on a level of description that is common to all life on earth, in the base sequences of DNA that constitute the genome. We introduce an unsupervised algorithm that discovers hierarchical structure in any sequence data, on the basis of the minimal assumption that the corpus at hand contains partially overlapping strings at multiple levels of organization. In the linguistic domain, our algorithm has been successfully tested both on artificial-grammar output and on natural-language corpora such as ATIS (3), CHILDES (4), and the Bible (5). In bioinformatics, the algorithm has been shown to extract from protein sequences syntactic structures that are highly correlated with the functional properties of these proteins.
The ADIOS Algorithm for Grammar-Like Rule Induction
In a machine learning paradigm for grammar induction, a teacher produces a sequence of strings generated by a grammar G0, and a learner uses the resulting corpus to construct a grammar G, aiming to approximate G0 in some sense (6). Recent evidence suggests that natural language acquisition involves both statistical computation (e.g., in speech segmentation) and rule-like algebraic processes (e.g., in structured generalization) (7-11). Modern computational approaches to grammar induction integrate statistical and rule-based methods (12, 13). Statistical information that can be learned along with the rules may be Markov (14) or variable-order Markov (15) structure for finite state (16) grammars, in which case the EM algorithm can be used to maximize the likelihood of the observed data. Likewise, stochastic annotation for context-free grammars (CFGs) can be learned by using methods such as the Inside-Outside algorithm (14, 17).
We have developed a method that, like some of those just mentioned, combines statistics and rules: our algorithm, ADIOS (for automatic distillation of structure) uses statistical information present in raw sequential data to identify significant segments and to distill rule-like regularities that support structured generalization. Unlike
If you're searching for a hosting provider, Netcraft has a rather nice table that displays server uptimes, % failed requests & other ancillary information for a large sample of hosting companies. An example of one row in the aforementioned table would be as follows:
Hosting provider = www.valueweb.net
OS = Linux
Outage hh:mm:ss = 0:00:00
Failed Req% = 0.00
DNS (Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname) = 0.181
Connect (first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server) = 0.105
First byte (time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received) = 0.211
Total (This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received) = 0.211
Kb/s = -
Size (K) = 0
The table displays the top 50 hosting providers with respect to failed requests, so, personally, I restricted my search to all the hosting providers that had a Linux OS (for script compatibility), and a failed request percentage below 3.0%. Given these performance constraints, I subsequently chose the cheapest suitable plan offered by a hosting company in this sample set, based on my bandwidth/disk space criteria.
Although I'd agree with you with regards to Asimov, as a counterpoint, Michael Crichton (from Harvard Med) does a phenomenal job at writing science fiction -- 'Jurassic Park' and 'The Andromeda Strain' are two works that really got me interested in pursuing science.
If the Patriot Act and ancillary legislation from the Dept. of Homeland Security can stop an American citizen from receiving due process in American courts, I don't think that they'll have any problem circumventing DMCA restrictions.
:)
Just as a friendly fyi, I'd suggest checking out this article on American citizens in Guantanamo.
PS: Very interesting question!
Regarding books by O'Reilly, I'd also recommend Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, and, to a lesser extend, Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics -- quite personally, our lab has been using several custom-built sequencing tools, but I've found that Perl always gets the job done faster.
PS: Personally haven't checked this out, but you might want to take a gander at O'Reilly's Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell: A Guide to Tools
Sequence Analysis in a Nutshell: A Guide to Common Tools and Databases pulls together all of the vital information about the most commonly used databases, analytical tools, and tables used in sequence analysis. The book contains details and examples of the common database formats (GenBank, EMBL, SWISS-PROT) and the GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ Feature Table Definitions. It also provides the command line syntax for popular analysis applications such as Readseq and MEME/MAST, BLAST, ClustalW, and the EMBOSS suite, as well as tables of nucleotide, genetic, and amino acid codes. Written in O'Reilly's enormously popular, straightforward "Nutshell" format, this book draws together essential information for bioinformaticians in industry and academia, as well as for students. If sequence analysis is part of your daily life, you'll want this easy-to-use book on your desk.
Personally, I've found that the 'x for dummies' / 'x for complete idiots' are about as useful as a rudimentary Google search.
...
I like O'Reilly's "Missing Manual" series, so I'd suggest O'Reilly's Home Networking: The Missing Manual (coming in july 2005).
If you don't want to wait until this comes in print, I'd recommend Cisco's "Home Networking Simplified", which was reviewed on Slashdot a few days ago. From the review:
This is an almost perfect book on home networking for the person who has a Windows computer or two (and nothing else) and knows nothing. It pains me to admit that I have a number of friends who fall into this category and I would have no hesitation in lending them a copy of this book. Given the cost, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to everyone, but I do feel that it is the perfect volume for the local library; borrowing it for two weeks while setting up the home net would be the ideal solution for people like my mate Tim, who (while a pediatric specialist) has trouble hooking up a router, or the neighbours downstairs who can't properly secure a wireless network.
Table of Contents:
Part II Simple Home Networks
Chapter 5 Creating a Basic Home Network
Planning a Network
Designing Your Network
Building Your Network
How to Build It: Connecting Two Computers
Decide on the Type of NICs
Physically Install the NIC
Internal NIC in a Desktop Computer
Internal PCMCIA NIC in a Laptop Computer
External NIC for a Desktop or Laptop Computer
Configure Windows to "Talk To" the NIC
Build a Network Between the Two Computers
Back-to-Back
Using a Hub, Switch, or Router
Set Up the Network in Windows
Troubleshooting Tips: Building a Network
Chapter 6 Sharing Network Resources
File Sharing
Printer Sharing
Practicing Safe Share
Sharing Guidelines
Network Design Guidelines
How to Build It: File and Printer Sharing
Enable File and Printer Sharing
Share a File Over the Network
Map a Shared File Folder as a Disk Drive
Share a Printer Over the Network
Map a Shared Printer
Add Security Precautions to File and Printer Sharing
Just out of curiousity, do you know any sites that provide a primer on how to link a train set to the internet / remote interface?
Your review sounds quite interesting, but it would be rather nice to know where to start...
With regards to a text-to-speech program, I'd recommend TextAloud, which converts text files to MP3s.
Way back, I converted Schwartz's 'Learning Perl' (the llama book by O'Reilly press) to an mp3 and used it while working out -- it's quite convenient, but I ended up scrapping it later on, just because I learn quicker when I'm actually at a computer to test commands.
Also, after trying audiobooks, it's easier to just use normal books when studying, since it's easy to flip to the glossary/index to get syntax for commands.
It'd be rather neat if you could use two cameras to create a 3D-model of a person, instead of a 2D image -- some folks at MIT already did some research on this, but it'd be pretty cool to see this implemented in a game.
Maybe the Xbox 360 or PS3 could create a realtime 3D model on the fly?
Just as a fyi, if you're interested in swapping muscles with a different species, you'd probably be better off using the rat IIb fast-twitch myosin muscle filament, instead of the cheetah.
There was a great article about gene therapy & interspecies muscle filament switching a few years ago in Scientific American, and they noted that switching muscles with another species could be problematic under duress, because the resultant strain on the quadriceps could physically rip out the hamstring, patella tendon, and tibia bone, eventually causing the quadriceps to shoot up the femur.
Muscle, Genes and Athletic Performance. Andersen, Jesper L.; Schjerling, Peter; Saltin, Bengt. Scientific American, Sep2000, Vol. 283 Issue 3, p48I've been using Endnote for years, so I'm biased to it, but some of my peers use ProCite (http://www.procite.com/)
:)
Your mileage may vary, of course
Just as the parent post noted, Eurogamer suggests that most of the 'fun' from Black comes from its physics engine and the ability to destroy crap in the environment. Although having a good physics engine is good, I seriously doubt that Black (coming out on the PS2 and Xbox 1 in 2006) will be able to able to replicate the physics modeling of the upcoming Unreal 2007 engine, or for that matter, even Half-Life 2 (viz. gravity gun). Bottom line: Full environment interactivity is hard enough on a high-end 3.2Ghz gaming workstation, much less on a 250 mhz PS2
This is /so/ /interesting/!
It *is* interesting -- the I Love Bees campaign was able to generate an unprecedented amount of support and comraderie among fans, and it's interesting to see how this effort was orchestrated. Just to pull a quote from an related Wired article:
In any case, the phones keep ringing all across the United States, and they are even beginning to ring in Holland and England. Some people have driven hours to take part, and one player even braved Florida's Hurricane Ivan to answer a call at a pay phone that was destroyed shortly afterward.
"Dude," said Puppetmaster 2, "it's a hurricane. Put the phone down."
Speaking from limited experience, I haven't heard of a game marketing campaign that was so imaginative or effective. If this is how games are released in the future, I'm all for it.
Actually, parent's post is pretty insightful -- if you encounter a person with a prefrontal cortex lesion , the *last* thing you'll notice about their condition is their inability to understand sarcasm.
From Fix's High-Yield Neuroanatomy: "Destruction of the anterior two-thirds of the frontal lobe convexity results in deficits in concentration, orientation, abstracting ability, judgment, and problem-solving ability. Other frontal lobe deficits include loss of initiative, inappropriate behavior, release of sucking and grasping reflexes, gait apraxia, sphincteric incontinence . . . and inappropriate social behavior (e.g., use of obscene language, urinating in public)"
I volunteered in a psych ward during undergrad, and people with prefrontal cortex lesions are among the most difficult patients to interact with on a daily basis.
There was a fairly thorough XBOX360/PS3 spec comparison at IGN:
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.html
It's IGN, though, so take this with a measure of salt -- the individual articles at AnandTech are much better.
Have to agree completely with parent's post that del.icio.us is excellent.
Just as a friendly fyi, I'd also suggest Hotlinks, which is slanted to more technical / software articles.
Also, in terms of bookmarks managed solely by one individual, I *highly* recommend Andy Baio's WaxyLinks.
IMO, the new addition of AI-controlled bots in the upcoming Castlevania title seems like an rather poor decision:
Armed with the unique new abilities of Devil Forgery, gamers will be able to call upon trusty allies - "Innocent Devils" - who will help defeat a variety of powerful enemies. More than 30 evolving allies will develop unique abilities ranging from those that can open heavy doors, to those that can help Hector fly.
The mere idea of having one AI-controlled henchman/ally/bot annoys me to no end (i.e. Farah in Prince of Persia), but it seems horrendous to have *30* different bots that one *must* learn to use in order to complete game-critical tasks (i.e. opening heavy doors) -- I can't count how many times that 'helpful' bots have gotten stuck around corners, forcing a console reboot.
Hmm, I could be wrong about this, but flocking behavior is *vastly* more complex than the three points that listed in the parent's post.
From what I understand, flocking doesn't result from just 'following the birds adjacent to you', but instead a result of optimizing a complex multiplanar lifting system in order to reduce total flight power demand.
Honestly, I'd be suprised if the researchers were able to emulate the real purpose of a flock, instead of just emulating superficial swarming behavior -- there was a very readable article in Science written by two guys at Caltech on flight efficiency & flocking, and they conclude with the premise that: "theoretically 25 birds could have a range increase of about 70 percent as compared with a lone bird"
IMO, programmed swarming behavior is nothing new, but if these researchers run with the ball and generate *real* efficiency-optimizing flocking behavior with man-made aircraft, the ramifactions could be huge.
No really cool games, unless you count dumbed-down disney-quality children's games
/sarcasm
Yes, Resident Evil 4 is a crappy kids game:
it's not enough to call Resident Evil 4 one of the high points of the series, because this is probably the single greatest horror-themed action game ever created. Resident Evil 4 is an amazing achievement in a variety of ways, especially in how its inspired, state-of-the-art cinematic presentation works so well with its relentlessly exciting, white-knuckle action, all of which is wrapped up in a decidedly lengthy adventure chock-full of hidden secrets and bonus extras. It obviously isn't for the squeamish or for those otherwise not qualified to play this gory, mature-rated GameCube game, which is too bad for them, because it's hard to imagine anyone else not being consistently thrilled and impressed by what Resident Evil 4 has to offer. (Greg Kasavin, Gamespot, Editor-in-chief)
And yes, let's totally forget about Metroid Prime 1 & 2 -- the Gamecube is an Easy Bake Oven, after all...
/sarcasm
the whole point of online gaming is that you can play with anyone no matter where you are
This is an excellent point.
After reading the article, it seems that Square Enix is backtracking on it's prior stance on openness -- for instance Square Enix's MMORPG (Final Fantasy XII) showed an *unprecedented* amount of player-player communication:
1. People using both consoles (Playstation 2) and computers could fight together [something which is unseen in any major MMORPG]
2. People from Japan and America could both go on missions, instead of being relegated to language/country-specific servers
I'm not sure why exactly Square would close up their systems so much (cue KDR_11k's pedophilia argument), but perhaps they had a bad experience from kids playing FF12.
more interesting to me, it could be used as a very high-bandwidth connection between a computer and me.
This has already been done several times, both at a low-bandwidth level (electrodes on the skull, done several years ago), and a high-bandwidth level (implanting an electrode directly in the neocortex, done in 2000)
If you're interested in this stuff, you should check out this journal article - PDF Reprint
Kennedy PR, Bakay RAE, Moore MM, Adams K, Goldwaithe J. 2000. Direct control of a computer from the human central nervous system. IEEE Trans. Rehabil. Eng. 8:198-202
Here's the abstract, if you don't want to wade through the PDF:
We describe an invasive alternative to externally applied brain-computer interface (BCI) devices. This system requires implantation of a special electrode into the outer layers of the human neocortex. The recorded signals are transmitted to a nearby receiver and processed to drive a cursor on a computer monitor in front of the patient. Our present patient has learned to control the cursor for the production of synthetic speech and typing.
For those interested, a much more informative description of Schwartz et. al.'s research can be found at his lab paper reprint section (click on on the second title from the top - "Schwartz, A.B.: Cortical neural prostheses, Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 27:487-507, 2004.")
Just to give my two cents, this is cool stuff, but it's not that big of a deal when compared with prior research:
"Investigators have demonstrated the potential of this technology in humans patients with the cone electrode (Kennedy et al. 2000). This electrode is a capillary tube filled with growth factor or peripheral nerve extract. Also in the tube are the exposed ends of two microwires, which act as differential electrodes. Neurites that sprout in re-sponse to the electrode penetration are attracted to the interior of the tube, through which they grow and form synaptic connections to other neurons. The axon is per-manently trapped next to the recording electrode. Although only a few channels of multiunit data were recorded, this activity was used by locked-in ALS patients for communicating with a spelling/letter-board program. One patient used this method for more than a year." -- (Schwartz 503)
Also, it's interesting that the paper notes that "laboratories using CNP suggests that, on average, a chronic electrode implanted in monkey cortex has only a 40% to 60% chance of recording unit activity." (Schwartz 503) -- maybe this is just me, but this percent really needs to go up to at least 95% before it's commercially viable -- it'd really suck to have an ALS patient get a cortical implant stuck in his brain at the tune of $100,000+, and have it break immediately after.
Just fyi, the beyondunreal site linked in the parent 's post also has an *extremely* interesting tech demo of the Unreal 3.0 engine.
The demo video is a bit on the heavy site (161 MB zipped Quicktime .mov) and is around 7 minutes long, but it goes into a lot of the details that will differentiate Unreal 2007 from Unreal 2k4 -- n-chain bump mapping, immissive channels for textures, exponentially increased polycounts for high-resolution character meshes, etc. etc.
Well worth a look for the technically inclined.
Just as a fyi, the press release for Hu et. al.'s research can be found at the American Association for Cancer Research proceedings page -- it's more technical than the Economist article linked above, but is quite informative.