I have a Griffin one (different than the ones shown), and it's *ok*. It had a frail little arm that plugged into the cigarette lighter, but that broke so I made my own wiring harness and now it's actually a little more handy. One really nice thing about it is that it came with a USB/headphone harness, so you can use it at home with your PC or anything else.
Anyways, I live in Philly and the bandwidth is also sparse here. It's frustrating having perpetually cruddy sound quality, but sans the money to buy/install a new stereo with an input jack it's an OK work-around. I also commute about 40 miles, so I have to find bandwidth that is open over a large geographical range. Luckily I've found a station that works about 90% of the time.
Amusingly, local gym has now installed FM transmitters on their TVs (so treadmillers can listen while they run), which is clever, but every time I drive by the gym my music gets interrupted by CNN or ESPN.
A standard lesson in any text on adaptive control/filtering is the employment of a "forgetting factor". Roughly speaking, if X is your estimate of how something works and you're constantly updating your estimate, heuristically speaking you do something like
X(new) = e^{-\lambda t}X(old) + (estimate based on new information)
That way, as the system slowly changes over time, your estimate is not "stubborn" in thinking that it must always act the same way. Not only is this a good idea, in many cases it is absolutely essential in making something work.
.. how they are able to visualize such high frequencies. How do they know they succeeded?
As mentioned in one of the other replies, there are lots of measurement devices for very high frequency stuff. I'm sure they used something far more precise than this, but here's a couple relatively simple ways to measure a signal that you can't capture on a scope:
- use a frequency counter to count the number of zero crossings against a known, calibrated, time-base
- use a signal multiplier to multiply by a lower-frequency signal of known, calibrated frequency and filter out the summed component.. repeat as necessary.. eventually you can work your way down to a low enough frequency to view on a scope. You know what frequencies you multiplied, so you can work back the frequency of the original signal. This is how AM radio works, as well as MRI machines and lots of other stuff.
Lots of smaller arks
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Instead of building one large ark and setting up for one large catastrophic failure, build lots of smaller arks that can fly in formation. If one runs into an asteroid or breaks down, the rest will be OK. It may even be possible to allow for transportation between the different arks.
This is the singular piece of research that he has produced. And I agree with him, I don't believe them!
Just to throw this out there: Jahn is the founder of one of the nation's foremost Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics laboratories (http://alfven.princeton.edu/person.htm). Lots of faculty members have pet projects - his just happens to be the PEAR lab. I actually work in the same building - was aware of the (highly respected) EPPDyL lab, not the PEAR lab.
This logic actually backfired for me on my last new phone cycle. Since it was on sale, I could have gotten the camera/whatever/phone for the same price that I got my plain old phone with absolutely no bells or whistles. I thought "hey, it's simpler, maybe they put more effort into making it a solid phone." My wife got the fancier phone that looked cool but was also on sale. Turns out my phone sucks (really slow boot time, occaisionally shuts off, mediocre battery performance) and hers is way better. I still generally agree that the phone/mp3/toaster phone is unnecessary, but at least in this case it didn't work out quite as I expected.
I guess it depends what you want to call "swarm intelligence". I would call the auctioning scheme a member of a class of group decision making strategies, which is pretty cool and seems to be motivated by a natural (human in this case) phenomena. I'm interested in the effects of spatial dynamics on group decision making and information flow (time and space-varying graph topologies). It's *directly* motivated by a biological observation of a behavior exhibited in certain species of schooling fish. I certainly wouldn't purport to say that it's the be-all end-all solution to all of life's problems, but it sure makes fun science and gives us a vehicle for approaching some open analytical questions.
I'm pretty sure I'm not wasting my time and energy (funding and a wide community of collaborators from a whole bunch of fields tells me that at least a few other people agree). I'm pretty sure you're not wasting your time, either. A buzz word is a buzz word.
This is my area of research. You make some good points, but just like anything else the bottom line is the constraints of manufacturing and the application. In some cases, you're absolutely right - "swarm intelligence" isn't the right approach. But there definitely do exist cases when it's best, or even just plain necessary. In the end, a lot of the impetus is in terms of robustness, and natural swarms are very robust. The optimal solution is more than likely some combination of individual specialization and ideas from swarm intelligence. This *also* happens in nature. A great simple example is the emergence of sexes.
All these Japanese companies are dead set on the whole humanoid robot concept. While the AI systems are clearly a joke, why focus so much energy on bipedal movement? It is clearly not the easiest mode of transportation. Human walking is essentially controlled falling. Oh great a bunch of things that kind of resemble humans can lift something heavy all together. Why not just build a smart forklift to do the same job autonomously. It just doesn't make any sense.
Besides the fact that the comment has absolutely nothing to do with the actual article, there is at least one important reason that bipedal motion is studied and modeled: Science. The idea is that it would be wildly worthwhile to attempt to understand how a system arranged from simple components can accomplish something amazingly complicated. It's a step in understanding nature. Of course there is still a kind of odd obsession with building humanoid robots. I think the reasons for that are not so much practical, in the way that movies are not totally practical but the motion picture industry has a massive yearly budget.
So, grad students, professors, and statisticians, at CORNELL UNIVERSITY, don't know what they're talking about? And you do? Uh huh.
As a grad student at another ivy league institution in a multidisciplinary scientific field, I can say without a doubt that some academics have a tendency to step beyond their bounds, regardless of their pedigree. At first, I had the same feeling: I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to criticism of scientific research when it is popularized, since most of that criticism is uninformed (more often it is worse - misinformed). The GPP has to be given some credit - it's probably the most well-informed, qualified, "I actually RTFA", rational comment I've ever read on slashdot. It's good to know there are people out there who can actually think about their opinions.
The headline made me think of a totally different and wholly more positive thing. I think we're approaching an age of technological transparency in another sense as well; being that technology is becoming more and more transparent to the user. You no longer need to understand unix to profficiently utilize a computer for day-to-day tasks. You don't need to know anything about the technology behind antilock brakes or active stability control to benefit from a safer automobile. Information transfer is ubiquitous, and the general public knows only a minimal of communication technology. Most of the best technologies are the ones you don't even know you're using.
We run Jboss, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, Asterisk, etc. Do we pay for support? Hell no. We have a knowledgable and competent staff.
Knowledgable and competent staff are expensive, too. If you have 10 guys who spend 10% of their time doing the support you're not paying for, you've effectively hired a full-time guy to do that support anyways. Not that I don't advocate this approach (pay to have good guys in-house who will use their powers for your other projects, too), but you have to acknowledge the costs.
What exactly does "decode" mean here?
on
The Next X Prize
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe TFA is more precise, or maybe it's more obvious to someone who does genetics, or maybe I'm tragically out of the loop, but what exactly does it mean to "decode" the genes of 100 humans? It seems like the real "decoding" would be to look at the ensemble of human genomes and match sequences and combinations of sequences in certain locations with specific phenotypes. That is, after all, the Holy Grail of genetic research isn't it? Given that information, looking at any given person's DNA and classifying their phenotype should be a more-or-less trivial task. Maybe it is the pure procedural/logistical problem of processing that much information in that amount of time that they are after?
Re:Framerates? On a TV?
on
Yakuza Review
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. The TV just sets the maximum framerate, at something comfortably above what you can (arguably?) percieve. That doesn't mean that too much game cranking through too little console won't hork a little. To this day I find myself endearingly anticipating the slight pause in The Legend of Zelda when you enter a new room.
It was successful in that it fused deuterium and tritium. Of course, the break even point doesn't matter. To be economical, the reactor realistically has to hit ignition, which only the ITER could hope to do.
Exactly. It's an experimental reactor, not an experimental power plant. It was successful in reacting, not necessarily in generating net power.
How about due to the lack of code that takes advantage of the multiple processors? If you mainly use one heavy application that doesn't take advatage of more than one or two cores, then those other 78 are going to be bored (and not submitting their dupes to./)!
I'm curious - supposing that the software existed to take advantage of it, would it be possible to design an operating system that used a vast number of cores in a radically different (and advantageous) way than we use one or two (or a few more) today? i.e. the kernel spawns several sub-kernels on different processors or clusters of processors, with each one set up to handle a very specific task. Is there really any advantage? In nature, large scale systems of simple agents tend to be able to accomplish complex tasks more efficiently than single agents or small groups.
I think the original post misses the mark a bit - the best predictions are made on paper, not on film. The best predictions are also general ideas and not specific things. I mean, Steven Spielberg can predict that we'll have animated newspapers and cereal boxes and he's probably right, but that wasn't all that difficult to call. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, took the effort to ask the question "what happens when we substantiate present action with the information of future events."
IMHO, the greatest "predictions" of SF to date is the rise of the logos (the living information, not the nike swoosh) and the death of affect. See: Philip K Dick's Valis, William S. Burroughs' Nova Express, J.G. Ballard's Crash. More readable: Snow Crash. Evidence: The internet, the media, reality television.
Or you could simply refuse to "grow up" and have fun your entire life.
Isn't that the point of graduate school?:) I know that's why I did it. Sure, the work gets a little harder and you pick up some new responsibilities, but dammit if being paid to play with new ideas isn't about the best thing ever.
The story of the Thomas Crown affair is: Thomas and Catherine tear loose from their safe, mundane lives. Sure, you can write a story about the 'adventures' they had afterwards, but how is anything they do going to matter by comparison?
Upon making this precise realization, both Crown and his wife become hopelessly depressed and spiral downward, committing more and more violent and sadistic crimes. This ultimately brings them closer together and makes them stronger, but not before a nation-wide manhunt is launched. As the FBI bears down on them, they fortify themselves in their desert hideout littered with human remains arranged into some sort of perverted art. They are not going down alive.
Sorry, but the number one reason that games are not considered art is that they are thought to be for young people only--in particularly, only boys. It has nothing to do with "commercialism". I'm not saying it is good or bad. Go to your local game store--see how many little boys you see. Chances are, it's a lot more than 50%. Yes, you have some (still male) people in their 20's and 30's who grew up with them.
Change the word "game" to "comic book" and that statement applies directly to a totally different situation, in which the product is widely regarded as art. Yummy, consumable, angst-ridden art.
There is also the undeniable statement that video games contain art. Any graphics widget contains some art. Level design and the sequencing of events could be considered art. Game concepting is an art. Even certain elements of the software design could be considered art by certain people. The concept of the game can be considered art. A question to then ask is, 'Under what circumstances does that which contains art become itself art?' A box of paintings in a museum storage room is a stretch to be considered a work of art, but the skillful arrangement of a gallery is certainly art.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/07/02/iphone.a
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19539747/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287638,00.htm
All linked off their main pages.
I have a Griffin one (different than the ones shown), and it's *ok*. It had a frail little arm that plugged into the cigarette lighter, but that broke so I made my own wiring harness and now it's actually a little more handy. One really nice thing about it is that it came with a USB/headphone harness, so you can use it at home with your PC or anything else. Anyways, I live in Philly and the bandwidth is also sparse here. It's frustrating having perpetually cruddy sound quality, but sans the money to buy/install a new stereo with an input jack it's an OK work-around. I also commute about 40 miles, so I have to find bandwidth that is open over a large geographical range. Luckily I've found a station that works about 90% of the time. Amusingly, local gym has now installed FM transmitters on their TVs (so treadmillers can listen while they run), which is clever, but every time I drive by the gym my music gets interrupted by CNN or ESPN.
A standard lesson in any text on adaptive control/filtering is the employment of a "forgetting factor". Roughly speaking, if X is your estimate of how something works and you're constantly updating your estimate, heuristically speaking you do something like
X(new) = e^{-\lambda t}X(old) + (estimate based on new information)
That way, as the system slowly changes over time, your estimate is not "stubborn" in thinking that it must always act the same way. Not only is this a good idea, in many cases it is absolutely essential in making something work.
Instead of building one large ark and setting up for one large catastrophic failure, build lots of smaller arks that can fly in formation. If one runs into an asteroid or breaks down, the rest will be OK. It may even be possible to allow for transportation between the different arks.
This logic actually backfired for me on my last new phone cycle. Since it was on sale, I could have gotten the camera/whatever/phone for the same price that I got my plain old phone with absolutely no bells or whistles. I thought "hey, it's simpler, maybe they put more effort into making it a solid phone." My wife got the fancier phone that looked cool but was also on sale. Turns out my phone sucks (really slow boot time, occaisionally shuts off, mediocre battery performance) and hers is way better. I still generally agree that the phone/mp3/toaster phone is unnecessary, but at least in this case it didn't work out quite as I expected.
...does not preclude you from also getting what you did not pay for.
Just a thought.
It would be nice to be able to use this kind of customizability for desktop search.
I guess it depends what you want to call "swarm intelligence". I would call the auctioning scheme a member of a class of group decision making strategies, which is pretty cool and seems to be motivated by a natural (human in this case) phenomena. I'm interested in the effects of spatial dynamics on group decision making and information flow (time and space-varying graph topologies). It's *directly* motivated by a biological observation of a behavior exhibited in certain species of schooling fish. I certainly wouldn't purport to say that it's the be-all end-all solution to all of life's problems, but it sure makes fun science and gives us a vehicle for approaching some open analytical questions.
I'm pretty sure I'm not wasting my time and energy (funding and a wide community of collaborators from a whole bunch of fields tells me that at least a few other people agree). I'm pretty sure you're not wasting your time, either. A buzz word is a buzz word.
This is my area of research. You make some good points, but just like anything else the bottom line is the constraints of manufacturing and the application. In some cases, you're absolutely right - "swarm intelligence" isn't the right approach. But there definitely do exist cases when it's best, or even just plain necessary. In the end, a lot of the impetus is in terms of robustness, and natural swarms are very robust. The optimal solution is more than likely some combination of individual specialization and ideas from swarm intelligence. This *also* happens in nature. A great simple example is the emergence of sexes.
The headline made me think of a totally different and wholly more positive thing. I think we're approaching an age of technological transparency in another sense as well; being that technology is becoming more and more transparent to the user. You no longer need to understand unix to profficiently utilize a computer for day-to-day tasks. You don't need to know anything about the technology behind antilock brakes or active stability control to benefit from a safer automobile. Information transfer is ubiquitous, and the general public knows only a minimal of communication technology. Most of the best technologies are the ones you don't even know you're using.
Maybe TFA is more precise, or maybe it's more obvious to someone who does genetics, or maybe I'm tragically out of the loop, but what exactly does it mean to "decode" the genes of 100 humans? It seems like the real "decoding" would be to look at the ensemble of human genomes and match sequences and combinations of sequences in certain locations with specific phenotypes. That is, after all, the Holy Grail of genetic research isn't it? Given that information, looking at any given person's DNA and classifying their phenotype should be a more-or-less trivial task. Maybe it is the pure procedural/logistical problem of processing that much information in that amount of time that they are after?
Exactly. The TV just sets the maximum framerate, at something comfortably above what you can (arguably?) percieve. That doesn't mean that too much game cranking through too little console won't hork a little. To this day I find myself endearingly anticipating the slight pause in The Legend of Zelda when you enter a new room.
I think the original post misses the mark a bit - the best predictions are made on paper, not on film. The best predictions are also general ideas and not specific things. I mean, Steven Spielberg can predict that we'll have animated newspapers and cereal boxes and he's probably right, but that wasn't all that difficult to call. Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, took the effort to ask the question "what happens when we substantiate present action with the information of future events."
IMHO, the greatest "predictions" of SF to date is the rise of the logos (the living information, not the nike swoosh) and the death of affect. See: Philip K Dick's Valis, William S. Burroughs' Nova Express, J.G. Ballard's Crash. More readable: Snow Crash. Evidence: The internet, the media, reality television.
Title: "Mr. and Mrs. Crown: Family of Cannibals"
Sorry, but the number one reason that games are not considered art is that they are thought to be for young people only--in particularly, only boys. It has nothing to do with "commercialism". I'm not saying it is good or bad. Go to your local game store--see how many little boys you see. Chances are, it's a lot more than 50%. Yes, you have some (still male) people in their 20's and 30's who grew up with them. Change the word "game" to "comic book" and that statement applies directly to a totally different situation, in which the product is widely regarded as art. Yummy, consumable, angst-ridden art.
There is also the undeniable statement that video games contain art. Any graphics widget contains some art. Level design and the sequencing of events could be considered art. Game concepting is an art. Even certain elements of the software design could be considered art by certain people. The concept of the game can be considered art. A question to then ask is, 'Under what circumstances does that which contains art become itself art?' A box of paintings in a museum storage room is a stretch to be considered a work of art, but the skillful arrangement of a gallery is certainly art.