#{TiggrBitz}

Undocumented C# Types and Keywordsr

2005-09-28T14:44:00.000+10:00

{#TIGGR} - Crossposted from http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030114.asp

Undocumented C# Types and Keywords: "Undocumented C# Types and Keywords
By Peter A. Bromberg, Ph.D.
Printer - Friendly Version Peter Bromberg

The C# language has a few interesting and undocumented (or in some cases, poorly so) Types and Keywords. One interesting set that I came across recently is the TypedReference type. This represents data by containing both a reference to its location in memory as well as a runtime representation of the type of the data.

Only local variables and parameters can be of the TypedReference type - fields cannot be. The TypedReference type, as you would guess from the above description, is not CLS complaint and the undocumented keywords that go with it appear nowhere in the ECMA C# Specification.

__makeref : You can create a typed reference from a variable by using the __makeref keyword:

int i = 21;
TypedReference tr = __makeref(i);

The original type of the variable represented by the typed reference can be extracted using the __reftype keyword:

int i = 32;
TypedReference tr1=__makeref(i);
Type t= __reftype(tr1);
Response.Write( t.ToString());

__refvalue: Lastly, the value can be extracted from the TypedReference using the __refvalue kyeword:

int q = __refvalue(tr, int);

Typed references come in handy when you want to represent method arguments in variable argument lists (varargs). These argument lists (in a manner similar to the params keyword) can be passed into methods and accessed with the also undocumented __arglist keyword:

The C# language has a few interesting and undocumented (or in some cases, poorly so) Types and Keywords. One interesting set that I came across recently is the TypedReference type. This represents data by containing both a reference to its location in memory as well as a runtime representation of the type of the data.

Only local variables and parameters can be of the TypedReference type - fields cannot be. The TypedReference type, as you would guess from the above description, is not CLS complaint and the undocumented keywords that go with it appear nowhere in the ECMA C# Specification.

__makeref : You can create a typed reference from a variable by using the __makeref keyword:

int i = 21;
TypedReference tr = __makeref(i);

The original type of the variable represented by the typed reference can be extracted using the __reftype keyword:

int i = 32;
TypedReference tr1=__makeref(i);
Type t= __reftype(tr1);
Response.Write( t.ToString());

__refvalue: Lastly, the value can be extracted from the TypedReference using the __refvalue kyeword:

int q = __refvalue(tr, int);

Typed references come in handy when you want to represent method arguments in variable argument lists (varargs). These argument lists (in a manner similar to the params keyword) can be passed into methods and accessed with the also undocumented __arglist keyword:

Curious users should note that since the above code examples use undocumented keywords, they aren't guaranteed to work in future versions of C#. The params keyword is, of course documented and you can accomplish a similar task using it. I found at least one tech-talk sponsored by Microsoft where a user asked about whether MS planned to document any of these. The answer was "Why should we?". Go figure....

Bitkraft takes another step forward - No Base Class Required!

2005-09-01T10:03:00.000+10:00

Due to overwhelming popular demand for Bitkraft to become compatible with other frameworks such as DotNetNuke, the requirement to inherit from the PageTemplate, UserControlTemplate and ControlTemplate base classes! This means that you can use Bitkraft functionality on normal ASP.NET pages and in other frameworks such as DNN Portals, Modules and User Controls!..

click here! to go straight to the new No Inheritance Demonstration!

Bitkraft - An "AJAX" Library for .NET with a difference

2005-08-24T21:26:00.000+10:00

What is Bitkraft?

Bitkraft is a CLR based (.NET) web framework that allows distributed web content to be created and served in a unique fashion. It is written in C# and compiles for operation under the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1+ or the .Mono Framework, making it portable to almost any platform.

At it's core, the Bitkraft framework extends the ASP .NET Architecture to fully support Javascript-based Server callbacks using the XmlHttpRequest object as a transport layer in a fashion referred commonly today as AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript Over XmlHttpRequest). There are many "AJAX" fameworks available today however, the Bitkraft framework is unique in the way that it seeks to blur the lines between client (browser) and server and the manner that it allows the development of truly Smart Web-Based applications that intelligently distribute their functionality between Client and Server in a seamless manner.

Indeed, Bitkraft deliberately tries not to describe it's technology as "AJAX" based because of the connotation of the use of XML (a'la SOAP/Webservices). Bitkraft does NOT use XML, instead JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is used as the main transport for communications between client and server. Using JSON as opposed to XML for message formatting produces a lighter-weight message and also has the advantage of being a native format that can be accessed as a real object by most modern clients (browsers). the Bitkraft framework translates CLR Types directly to and from the JSON format resulting in objects that behave and appear the same both at the client and at the server.

The Bitkraft framework allows web content to be developed in a single environment and promotes the distribution of functionality between the client and the server. It allows objects to be created that behave predictably regardless of whether the implementation is being run at the client or at the server and allows objects to expose methods that are implemented either on the client or on the server without re-posting or rendering page content. This approach reduces the size and quantity of round-trips to the server, updating the content provided on a single page by requesting it on-demand from the server instead of relying on full -page re-posts and re-rendering of complete pages.

The end result?.....

Web content that is dynamic and fast!
A way of developing web content that hides the complexity of communicating between client and server from both the developer and the user.
A whole new breed of web applications that run inside the ever-popular and familiar Web Browser but break away from the mould of traditional a "Network Of Pages".
Not just Web Pages but real Web Applications.
Simply; a smarter web framework.

CHECK OUT THE BITKRAFT FRAMEWORK HERE!

Herald Sun: Laptops spark sale stampede [18aug05]

2005-08-22T09:49:00.000+10:00

Herald Sun: Laptops spark sale stampede [18aug05]: "Laptops spark sale stampede

18aug05

VIRGINIA -- A rush to buy $US50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede yesterday, with people being thrown to the pavement and beaten with a folding chair.

One woman wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

An estimated 5500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in Henico County in hopes of getting their hands on four-year-old Apple iBooks, which sell for $1300 to $1690 new.

Henico public schools were selling 1000 of the computers to residents.

When the gates opened at 7am, people threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing.

Seventeen people suffered minor injuries, with four requiring hospital treatment, police said"

DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run?

2005-08-11T12:14:00.000+10:00

{#TIGGR} - I Cite the following article as an excellent read on the on-going M$-AntiTrust/AntiCompetative Trade Practices topic... for those of you familiar with my tack on this subject, you will note that despite my personal Anti-Monopo$oft track, this is an article from the Pro-M$ persepctive .....NOTE THe EXCELLENT conversation that follows from the Anti-M$ crowd though, some EXCELLENT POINTS!

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run?: "August 01, 2005
DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run?
In response to the recent kerfuffle over Andrew Orlowski's claim on the Register that IE7 is deliberately disabling Yahoo! and Google's search toolbar, Robert Scoble's response, and the subsequent counter-claims and counter-counter-claims, Ed Bott posted this which included the following: 'The implication of Andrew's story is that Microsoft deliberately or negligently blocked IE7 from working with software from two rivals. It's the modern equivalent of the old 'DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run' canard. Which also wasn't true.'"

Mozilla Goes Corporate to Build Market Share

2005-08-04T10:06:00.000+10:00

{#TIGGR} - This Article Copied Verbatim from
Mozilla Goes Corporate to Build Market Share

"In an unexpected move, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation on Wednesday announced that it was creating a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, in order to more rapidly increase market share for its core product, the Firefox Web browser. Though the Mozilla Corporation will seek to make a profit, that won't be the primary goal of the company, Mozilla representatives say. Instead, the new company will help the Mozilla Foundation promote the use of open Web standards.

'We've done this to respond to the success and growing market-share of Mozilla Firefox and the new opportunities this makes possible,' Mozilla Corporation president Mitchell Baker noted in a blog posting describing the reorganization. 'Mozilla Firefox is approaching 10 percent market share, with figures showing usage several times higher in selected groups and countries. We're reaching the point where Mozilla Firefox is becoming a significant element of the Internet experience and has growing influence within the Internet and software industries.'

Because the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity, Baker says, it is granted greater legal freedom and can more easily interact with other corporate entities. However, the Mozilla Corporation is not designed as an investment vehicle and will not offer an IPO (initial public offering). Instead, it will continue to push the original goals of the Mozilla Foundation, albeit in a far more flexible fashion. And all profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will used to continue product development and further those goals. Put simply, the Mozilla Foundation became too successful, and basically outgrew its nonprofit status.

The new Mozilla Corporation will be based in Mountain View, California, at the same address as the Mozilla Foundation. It will have about 36 employees, compared to a handful that will remain as Mozilla Foundation employees.

According to the new company, future versions of Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla Thunderbird email application, and other products, will remain free and be based on open source code. Firefox, in particular, has rocketed to mainstream success in recent months, and has logged over 76 million downloads since the 1.0 version was shipped late last year. According to NetApplications, Firefox grabbed 8.7 percent of the Web browser market in July and is the number two browser behind Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), which still controls 86 percent of the market. IE is losing .5 to 1 percent of the market to Firefox each month, NetApplications says.

Firefox has been so successful, in fact, that it caused Microsoft to rethink its Web browser strategy. The original plan was for the next major Windows version, now called Windows Vista, to integrate Web browser functionality directly into the system shell and remove the concept of a standalone Web browser all together. During this time, Microsoft halted development of the standalone IE product, stranding Windows users with an out-of-date browser that required numerous security patches. Responding to the unexpected success of Firefox, Microsoft reconstituted the moribund IE team. In February 2005 the company announced that it would ship a new standalone IE version, IE 7, and include a version of IE 7 in Windows Vista. Since then, Microsoft has shipped the first beta version of IE 7, which includes a number of features Firefox and other browsers have had for some time, including tabbed browsing and RSS integration.

There are questions on both sides of the equation. For Microsoft, it's unclear whether IE 7 will be compelling enough to stem the slow trickle of users that vacate IE each month for Firefox. However, its bundling strategy has worked in the past, and some onlookers question whether Firefox will simply plateau at 10 or 15 percent of the market and never rise above niche status. That's the future the Mozilla Corporation is seeking to prevent.

Let's just hope Microsoft doesn't send a Terminator robot back in time to stop them.

African Grey Parrot Is First Bird To Comprehend Numerical Concept Akin To Zero

2005-07-15T09:54:00.000+10:00

African Grey Parrot Is First Bird To Comprehend Numerical Concept Akin To Zero

Waltham, Mass. -- A Brandeis University researcher has shown that an African grey parrot with a walnut-sized brain understands a numerical concept akin to zero -- an abstract notion that humans don't typically understand until age three or four, and that can significantly challenge learning-disabled children.

Strikingly, Alex, the 28-year-old parrot who lives in a Brandeis lab run by comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg, spontaneously and correctly used the label "none" during a testing session of his counting skills to describe an absence of a numerical quantity on a tray. This discovery prompted a series of trials in which Alex consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label "none."

Dr. Pepperberg's research findings, published in the current issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, add to a growing body of scientific evidence that the avian brain, though physically and organizationally somewhat different from the mammalian cortex, is capable of higher cognitive processing than previously thought. Chimpanzees and possibly squirrel monkeys show some understanding of the concept of zero, but Alex is the first bird to demonstrate an understanding of the absence of a numerical set, Dr. Pepperberg noted.

"It is doubtful that Alex's achievement, or those of some other animals such as chimps, can be completely trained; rather, it seems likely that these skills are based on simpler cognitive abilities they need for survival, such as recognition of more versus less," explained Dr. Pepperberg.

Alex had previously used the label "none" to describe an absence of similarity or difference between two objects, but he had never been taught the concept of zero quantity. "Alex has a zero-like concept; it's not identical to ours but he repeatedly showed us that he understands an absence of quantity," said Dr. Pepperberg.

Historically, the use of "zero" to label a null set has not always been obvious even in human cultures, which in many cases lacked a formal term for zero as recently as the late Middle Ages. The value of number research lies mainly in its ability to help determine the extent of animal cognition and animals' potential for more complex capacities. To that end, Dr. Pepperberg's studies on the avian brain are continuing with research into Alex's ability to count, as well as add and subtract small quantities.

Yet significantly, Dr. Pepperberg's research, which uses a training method called the model-rival technique, also holds promise for teaching autistic and other learning-disabled children who have difficulty learning language, numerical concepts and even empathy.

The model rival technique involves two trainers, one to give instructions, and one to model correct and incorrect responses and to act as the student's rival for the trainer's attention; the model and trainer also exchange roles so that the student sees that the process is fully interactive. The student, in this case, a middle-aged parrot, tries to reproduce the correct behavior. So far, results using this learning technique with small groups of autistic children, taught by Diane Sherman, PhD, in Monterey, CA, have been very promising, said Dr. Pepperberg.

"This kind of research is changing the way we think about birds and intelligence, but it also helps us break down barriers to learning in humans -- and the importance of such strides cannot be underestimated," said Dr. Pepperberg.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Brandeis University.

TIGGER DIES: Paul Winchell, R.I.P.

2005-06-27T09:48:00.000+10:00

Paul Winchell, R.I.P.

(this news sadly just in from the "News From ME" Archives - a sad day for all A.A. Milne devotees...TIGGR, you will be missed)

An amazing man died yesterday at the age of 82. Paul Winchell was a pioneer of early television, appearing on hundreds of shows with his wooden-headed friends, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. He was a great ventriloquist -- maybe the best ever -- but he was also a great all-around entertainer and inventor.

Paul was born Paul Wilchin, and an early hero in his life was radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. (Years later, a whole generation of voice-throwers would cite Paul Winchell as their early hero.) Paul got his start on the popular radio program, Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour and he later toured with stage presentations featuring talent discovered for that show. He debuted on television in 1948, at a time when few American homes even had sets, and was a mainstay of network programming for years with several different shows of his own and frequent guest appearances on others. Adults and kids alike loved the irreverent Jerry Mahoney who flirted with ladies and sassed the man who operated his head. They also loved the shy, silly Knucklehead, as well as other characters that Winchell devised. Paul was an extremely clever man and his shows were marked with inventive uses of the new medium.

Beginning in the mid-fifties, Paul turned that inventiveness into non-entertainment directions, especially medicine. His most famous achievement was in the invention of an artificial heart. Others advanced Paul's basic design to the point of making it practical but all acknowledged that the breaktrough, the underlying design, was the work of Paul Winchell. He invented numerous other things as well, including battery-heated gloves and a flameless cigarette lighter, and was as proud of his many patents as he was of all his awards as a performer.

During the sixties, Winch -- as many of his friends called him -- cut back on his ventriloquism and focused on his inventing. Most of his performing was limited to cartoon voice work -- a field in which he quickly became one of the top practitioners. He was Dick Dastardly on Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley, Gargamel on The Smurfs, Fleagle on The Banana Splits, and many more...but his most enduring characterization would surely be Tigger in the Disney cartoons of Winnie the Pooh. Paul played Tigger for various projects until a few years ago when a rasp in his voice finally (and controversially in some circles) caused Disney to replace him. He also did occasional on-camera acting jobs, many of them sans dummies, and was very good in them.

I was privileged to know Paul and to work with him on several occasions. He was a brilliant man who made no secret that he was also a troubled man, uncertain of his own accomplishments and torn between performing and doing something "more serious." At times, he seemed genuinely stunned that he had been a personal hero to so many of us.

He had an amazing thirst for what some would call "dirty jokes." One of my oddest memories is of sitting with a group of friends in the living room of a small condo he had in Encino. Completely impromptu, Paul picked up a Jerry Mahoney dummy and launched into what had to have been the filthiest and funniest routine ever performed by a beloved children's entertainer. I enjoyed the performance but couldn't help but "flash back" to being five years old and watching Paul and Jerry hosting Super Circus on ABC. It was one of those moments when you're acutely aware of how far you've come since childhood.

Last year, Paul published a dark, candid autobiography called Winch, detailing some of the demons that had plagued him over the years. The book troubled many of Paul's friends, and some of his fans regretted reading it. Here's the review I posted at the time. As noted, it's not one of those "here's a list of my successes" memoirs. It was more like, "Here's how I went crazy." The last few times we spoke, I got the feeling that he was more at peace with himself than he'd been in decades, and I hope that was not just wishful thinking on my part.

I do not believe word of Paul's death has hit the wire services yet, but it's been floating around the Internet since last night. Sadly, I was finally able to confirm it via a friend of the family so I decided to go ahead and post this here. I'm sure there will be news stories soon and tributes. In the meantime, you can learn more about this extraordinary man -- and even hear his theme song -- over at his website. Even that exhaustive collection of articles and clippings will only give you some inkling of the brilliance of Winch.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW ELEMENT - GOVERNMENTIUM

2005-05-10T11:44:00.000+10:00

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the
heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named
"Governmentium."

Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy
neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass
of
311. These 311 particles are held together by forces called morons,
which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles
called
peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be
detected, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into
contact.

A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over 4
days
to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay,
but
instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant
neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since
each re-organisation will cause more morons to become neutrons,
forming
isodopes.

This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to
believe
that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity
in
concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical
Morass."

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an
element which radiates just as much energy, since it has 1/2 as many
peons but twice as many morons.

Debug Internet Explorer Javascript

2005-04-20T09:28:00.000+10:00

Debug Internet Explorer Javascript: "Debug Internet Explorer Javascript

Only one tip that I didn't know before: When you want to debug Javascript code you can start your debugger (Visual Studio .NET or Script Debugger), search for the correct iexplore.exe process, attach it and go on debugging.

A very fast way is to write 'javascript:debugger;' in the address line, select your debugger and start debugging. Also, the 'debugger;' command can be used in Javascript code:

if(typeof(res)=='object') debugger;

This line will start the debugger if the type of res is object."

WTF: Introducing the PairOn

2005-04-20T09:23:00.000+10:00

Cenqua: Introducing the PairOn: "So you do XP huh?

Introducing the PairOn

The PairOn by Cenqua: sit tight for eXteme XP

Welcome to Extreme XP

Cenqua have partnered with Herman Miller, makers of the legendary Aeron, to produce the ultimate must-have for Extreme XPers: The PairOn.

Key Features:

* Fully unit-tested in our ego-free ergonomics lab
* Essential office furniture for any eXtreme XP Pair (XXPP)
* Fully adjustable via individual or pair control
* can be levered to standup-meeting height
* 40-hour-week alarm buzzer built in
* Available in a range of attractive colours

Update: Order Now to avoid eXtreme disappointment*

The deluge of orders we've had for the PairOn since it's launch this morning has been staggering. So much corporate money, so easily well spent! Unfortunately we've sold out of our initial batch of 5000 to ThoughtWorks. But fear not! We've doubled our manufacturing capacity and hope to fill all orders placed in quick time.
*Orders taken only on April 1."

CoCo: German Song Lyric Sites Cease & Desisted

2005-04-20T09:12:00.000+10:00

CoCo: German Song Lyric Sites Cease & Desisted: "German Song Lyric Sites Cease & Desisted
I've never really understood musicians that prefer to fill their CD booklets with fancy artwork at the expense of the inclusion of song lyrics. Worse are song lyrics written down in some cryptic handwriting, or cut-and-pasted and printed in a surreal collage, for the listener to decipher (Radiohead-syndrome). Whenever I really want and need to read the lyrics, because of a foreign tongue or unintelligible growling by the singer, I go to a song lyrics site. It may take a few searches and several sites before I get the lyrics I want, but music enthusiasm drives you a long way.

That may come to an end now. At least, there are signs that the amount of online resources for song lyrics are going to be trimmed down. In Germany 42 non-commercial websites that provide song lyrics have received warning notices to take down the lyrics, or face fines higher than usually demanded for the offering of copyright infringing MP3 files.

The (German) law seems pretty straightforward about it that placing (song) lyrics online without permission constitutes a copyright violation. Still, I can imagine it is pretty hard for the website owners in question and music fans to understand this kind of absolute enforcement. Fencing off the exploitation, commercially or not, of copyrights may be a right, but one may question if it is the right thing to do. Not in the last place from a business perspective, coming down on the true fan base."

This Day In History

2005-04-20T09:11:00.000+10:00

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Spotlight: Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the radioactive element radium on this date in 1902. A very rare metal, radium is found in minute amounts in uranium ore. In 1903 the Curies shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Henri Becquerel. Their daughter, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935, for figuring out a way to synthesize new radioactive elements.

Quote: "I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries." -- Marie Curie

GENES: Hair is good source of stem cells

2005-03-30T11:51:00.000+10:00

Hair is good source of stem cells

Most people have about 100,000 hairs on their head
US scientists say they found a good source of stem cells - hair follicles.
The fact that hair grows quickly and is continually replenished makes it an attractive source to harvest the amount of stem cells needed for treatments.

This has been a major stumbling block of stem cell research, as well as controversy surrounding the ethics of harvesting cells from embryos.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science study shows nerve cells can be grown from hair follicle stem cells.

Stem cells are immature cells that have the ability to become any kind of tissue in the body.

Hair facts
Hair grows 1.25cm per month on average
Humans have about 100,000 hairs on their head
Blonds have 140,000, brunettes 120,000 and red-heads 90,000
The lifespan of a single head hair varies from race to race, but on average is about 5 years
A new hair takes 3-6 months to grow
Source: Institute of Trichologists

Hair grows from follicles and new follicle cells are born from stem cells that exist in a small bulge on the side of the hair follicle.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have already suggested that these stem cells might be a way of treating baldness.

Now Dr Yasuyuki Amoh and colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, have shown that the same stem cells could potentially be used to treat neurological conditions.

They found that the follicle stem cells from the whiskers of mice expressed a substance called nestin, a known signal to tell cells to develop into neurons.

They then tested whether the follicle cells could develop into mature nerve cells and found that they could when they were transplanted under the skin of the mice.

The follicle stem cells were also able to grow into skin cells, smooth muscle cells and pigment-producing cells called melanocytes.

"These results suggests that hair follicle stem cells may provide an accessible source of stem cells for therapeutic application," said the researchers.

Dr Robin Lovell-Badge, head of the division of developmental genetics at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research, said: "It's definitely a source of cells that needs to be explored.

"We want to find the best source of cells possible."

He said it would be important to compare the quality of hair follicle stem cells with stem cells derived from other sources.

He said follicle stem cells did carry the bonus of being relatively accessible.

13 things that do not make sense - Features

2005-03-24T13:13:00.000+11:00

1 The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

2 The horizon problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

?A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'?

3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.

As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.

Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.

Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.

Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.

?One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong?

4 Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

5 Dark matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.

And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."

?If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry?

6 Viking's methane
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.

Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.

So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?

The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."

Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.

Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.

?Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane?

7 Tetraneutrons
FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.

Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.

The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.

Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).

And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.

8 The Pioneer anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.

That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?

Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.

Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."

Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).

"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.

9 Dark energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

10 The Kuiper cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.

Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.

The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.

There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.

11 The Wow signal
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.

Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?

The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.

Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.

?It was either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation beaming out a signal?

12 Not-so-constant constants
IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.

If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.

But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?

No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.

Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.

The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).

There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.

"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.

13 Cold fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.

With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.

That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.

The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.

?Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested?That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."

Messing with Microsoft gets hacker 6 months jail time

2005-03-18T10:14:00.000+11:00

The next time 44-year-old David Jeansonne sits at a PC, he will make sure to resist his impulse to send malicious programs and phony e-mails to unsuspecting people. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte ruled that this middle-aged hacker will spend 6 months in prison and get an additional six months of home detention. He will also pay a fine of USD $27,100 to Microsoft after he is released as a result of this court order.

The hacker had pled guilty of sending e-mails with a malicious program as attachment to about 20 Web TV (now known as MSN TV) users in July 2002. His e-mails lured recipients into downloading the attachment saying it would improve the colours of their Web TV display. In reality, the file was a script which programmed the device (used to connect to the Internet) to call 911 emergency services instead of the routine local telephone number to access Microsoft's WebTV servers.

WebTV (MSN TV) is a Microsoft service which allows users to connect to the internet using their TV sets.

As many as ten people were lured by the mail which resulted in local police departments around the country rushing officers to the homes of WebTV users in response to the 911 calls. Jeansonne was caught following an investigation and subsequently charged with offenses of intentionally causing damage to computers and causing a threat to public safety. He was prosecuted by the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIP) unit of the United Sates Attorney's Office.

Earlier this month, the CHIP unit had managed to get an admission of guilt out of another hacker Robert Lyttle who defaced government websites with mate"

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Underground search for 'God particle'

2005-03-18T10:08:00.000+11:00

At the foot of the Jura Mountains, where Switzerland meets France, is a laboratory so vast it boggles the mind.

But take a drive past the open fields, traditional chalets and petite new apartment blocks and you will look for it in vain.

To find this enormous complex, you have to travel beneath the surface.

One hundred metres below Geneva's western suburbs is a dimly lit tunnel that runs in a circle for 27km (17 miles).

Nature is much smarter than us. It might come up with a real surprise and that would be much more interesting - much more satisfying

Professor Jim Virdee, Imperial College London
The tunnel belongs to Cern, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. Though currently empty, over the next two years an enormous experiment will be installed here.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and impossibly complicated machine that will smash particles together at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

'New physics'

By recreating the searing-hot conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang, scientists hope to see new physics, discover the sought-after "God particle", uncover new dimensions and even generate mini-black holes.

When completed, two parallel tubes will carry high-energy particles called protons in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

The Atlas experiment will join the search for the Higgs boson at Cern

Enlarge Image

The tunnel's huge circumference provides only the slightest of bends. Nevertheless, around 5,000 superconducting magnets are needed to steer and focus the particles around the tubes.

"When the coils are energised there is one jumbo jet - 500 tonnes - per metre pushing outwards," says LHC project leader Lyn Evans.

Along the way, the proton beams will pass through enormous experimental instruments called detectors where they will cross.

When some of these protons collide at high energy, heavier particles can appear amongst the debris.

Great quest

When the LHC is turned on in the latter half of 2007, physicists will scour this crash wreckage for signs of the Higgs boson.

The Higgs is nicknamed the God particle because of its importance to the Standard Model, the theory devised to explain how sub-atomic particles interact with each other.

The 16 particles that make up this model (12 matter particles and 4 force carrier particles) would have no mass if considered alone. So another particle - the Higgs boson - is postulated to exist to account for this omission.

The CMS is constructed from different layers in an "onion" structure

Enlarge Image

"The Standard Model is the best thing we've come up with so far," says Jim Virdee, spokesman for the team working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector.

But everyone recognises it is merely a stage on the way to something else. The Standard Model describes ordinary matter and yet astronomical observations show this makes up but a small part of the total Universe.

Needless to say, new theories are gaining ground and discoveries at the LHC could lead physicists towards a unified theory to explain how the Universe works.

"We are at a stage where the theorists do not know which direction to go in. The results from [our] experiment will determine which direction science takes," says Professor Virdee, who is based at Imperial College London, UK.

"We don't always like theorists to tell us what we should find. Nature is much smarter than us.

"It might come up with a real surprise and that would be much more interesting - much more satisfying."

Huge scale

The detectors at the LHC will count, trace and analyse the particles that emerge from the collisions between protons.

To call them experiments simply does not give an idea of their scale. The equipment weighs tens of thousands of tonnes and in some cases is as tall as a multi-storey building.

A giant cavern will house the CMS detector at Cern

Enlarge Image

This week marked the inauguration of the enormous cavern at Cessy in France that will house the CMS. A 78m-long shaft leads up to the surface, through which the CMS will be lowered by crane early next year.

Both the CMS and its rival experiment, Atlas, are based on a cylindrical "onion" structure with several layers to perform different roles.

By 2010, nearly one billion collisions will take place every second in these detectors.

"CMS needs to collect a sample of several hundred collisions out of 40 million. And we have just three microseconds to decide whether a collision produced something interesting," Professor Virdee told the BBC News website.

High energy

After attending the CMS inauguration, we travelled just across the border to Switzerland, where the Atlas cavern is located.

Measuring 53m long, 30m wide and 35m high, it is taller than Canterbury Cathedral and is currently empty but for the support structures that will hold the detector in place.

The Atlas cavern could fit a 12-storey building inside it

Enlarge Image

"You're visiting at a good time; it won't look like this again," says Atlas technical co-ordinator Mark Hatch.

High radiation levels when the LHC is running mean access to these caverns will be forbidden when the machine is in operation, creating problems for the scientists.

The energies achieved by the experiment are 70 times greater than those of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) which previously occupied the tunnels at Cern.

Only by raising the bar will scientists be able to expand our current understanding of the Universe.

Whatever the discoveries ahead for physicists working at the LHC, the experiments will, according to its chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, "keep physicists off street corners for a long time to come".

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

2005-03-18T10:04:00.000+11:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Lab fireball 'may be black hole': "Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

Creating the conditions for the formation of black holes is one of the aims of particle physics
A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.
It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.
Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine.
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as 'Hawking' radiation.
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole. "

Smart squid may unlock the secret of how animals and people learn

2005-03-17T15:22:00.000+11:00

Lowly squid's behavior may yield clues to human brain

BY MARK SHWARTZ

Squid.

The only time most of us think about this strange-looking sea creature is when it is served grilled, fried or basted in its own ink.

But the lowly squid is actually an intelligent invertebrate capable of learning complex behavior at a very young age.

A new study reveals that newborn squid actually learn through the process of trial and error, much like humans do, and that these early-life experiences can physically change a squid's nervous system in ways that may be permanent.

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Photo: Hopkins researchers study the species Loligo opalescens, a common squid found in the Pacific Ocean off California. Adult squid like the one shown here are usually four to seven inches long. Courtesy: William Gilly.

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These results also could provide new insight into how learning transforms the human brain, says William F. Gilly, a professor of cell and developmental biology at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station.

Gilly and former postdoctoral fellow Thomas Preuss describe their latest findings on squid behavior in the January issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology.

"The squid is a mollusk -- an animal closely related to a clam," says Gilly, "but it has an amazingly rich behavioral repertoire. Its brain is probably as complicated as that of some mammals."

He points out that the squid is an ideal species for conducting neurological research, because its elaborate brain is connected to a set of giant axons -- the largest nerve cells in the animal kingdom (see illustration below).

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When a newborn squid is frightened, its brain sends an electrical signal through the giant axons, causing the mantle muscles to automatically contract and discharge a jet of water. To gain voluntary control of its jet propulsion, the adult brain fires the small axon network first, bypassing the giant axons. Courtesy: William Gilly.

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A giant axon can grow to be a millimeter wide, and its large size makes it much easier to measure electrical signals to and from the brain while the squid is carrying out various behaviors.

Startle-escape response

It is a well-known fact, write Gilly and Preuss, that a startled squid will release a powerful jet of water that propels its body forward or backward so it can escape predators.

This "startle-escape response" is similar to a reflex action and is triggered by the network of giant axons that connects the squid's brain to the muscles in its mantle -- the part of the body many of us like to eat.

When a squid is frightened, its brain sends an electrical signal through the giant axons in less than a tenth of a second -- an "all-or-nothing" impulse that causes the mantle muscles to involuntarily contract and discharge a jet of water.

Every squid is born with this startle-escape reflex, but to be successful in the wild, an animal must be able to voluntarily control and operate its jet propulsion system. That means preventing the giant axon network from automatically firing an all-or-nothing impulse.

And that's just what young squid start doing as soon as they are hatched.

According to Gilly and Preuss, the brain of a newborn squid quickly develops the ability to bypass the giant axons in favor of a parallel nerve network made up of small axons --- narrower neurons that control a different set of muscles in the mantle.

By the time it becomes an adult, a squid is able to regulate the force of its escape jet by simply activating the small axons first, then firing the giant axon network a fraction of a second later.

But is this ability to suppress the giant axon network genetically programmed in every squid, or is it a skill that each animal has to learn through experience?

To answer that question, Gilly and Preuss decided to focus on another important squid behavior that does depend on learning: the ability to hunt and capture prey.

Wild squid love to eat tiny crustaceans called copepods. But copepods are difficult to catch because they can detect and outswim a pursuing squid -- plus, copepods are covered with sharp, lobster-like spines (see drawing below).

Courtesy: William Gilly.

Through the process of trial-and-error, a young squid learns that the best way to capture a copepod is not to chase it but to remain still, spread its eight tentacles like a net, then quickly grab the crustacean and bite into it.

But Gilly observed that, when a juvenile squid grasps its first copepod, it often releases the spiny crustacean and jets backward in a classic startle-escape response.

Perhaps the copepod's needlelike exoskeleton irritates and startles the young squid, triggering an all-or-nothing signal through its giant axons and causing it to involuntarily spurt water.

With practice, novice squid eventually learn to hold onto copepods without automatically jetting in reverse -- an observation that led Gilly and Preuss to suspect that a squid's control of its escape reflex goes hand-in-hand with the development of its hunting skills.

Speedy and slow hunters

To find out, the researchers set up an experiment using newly hatched eggs from squid collected in Monterey Bay.

Newborn animals were divided into two groups. One received a diet that included speedy copepods. The other was fed only slow-moving brine shrimp larvae, which are much easier to catch.

When a newly hatched squid sees a potential meal, its first reaction is to lunge at the prey as quickly as possible -- a strategy that worked well for the group that was given brine shrimp.

In fact, two months into the experiment, the majority of shrimp-eaters were still pouncing on their slow-moving prey instead of developing more subtle hunting techniques.

But a different strategy developed among copepod-fed squid. Despite repeated attempts to pounce on their prey, these young squid were never fast enough to capture the swift crustaceans.

After several weeks of trial and error, they finally became adept copepod hunters. They stopped involuntarily jetting around and learned instead to approach copepods stealthily and then grab them -- a technique none of the shrimp-fed squid ever developed.

Clearly, the two experimental groups had learned different styles of hunting. To determine if the animals' escape reflex had also changed, Gilly and Preuss wired each squid's nervous system to miniature electrodes to compare how copepod-eaters and shrimp-eaters would respond to a very brief electrical shock.

Electrode analysis revealed that, after just two weeks, most copepod-fed squid were indeed firing their small axons first, enabling them to control their automatic escape response. Without this important skill, a wild squid would continue to unintentionally dart backward every time it tried to grab a meal, greatly reducing its ability to capture prey.

It was a different story for the shrimp-fed squid.

Electro-analysis showed that, after eight weeks, most shrimp-eaters were still firing their giant axons first, much like newly hatched squid. They had not learned to control the involuntary escape response and were probably using this infantile reflex to lunge at their prey.

"Furthermore," say the authors, "when switched to a copepod diet, these animals show no sign of developing the suppression of jetting that is necessary for captures" -- evidence that voluntary control of jet propulsion is indeed a behavior that must be learned at an early age.

"The inability of shrimp-fed squid to master copepod capture later in life implies that there is a short window of opportunity during the first weeks after birth in which benefit can be derived from trial-and-error experience," adds Gilly.

"If the squid does not learn to control its startle-escape reflex during that critical period, it seems to lose the ability to program its nervous system in a way that allows it to perform the sophisticated hunting skills that are necessary to survive in the wild."

Human research

This suggests that the process of learning by trial and error causes actual physical changes in the squid's neurons, says Gilly.

Similar findings have been made in vertebrates, including birds, cats and humans.

For example, research on newborn cats and monkeys has shown that sensory visual deprivation early in life leads to the loss of specific neurons in the brain that would normally respond to the visual images missing during development.

These experiments revealed that a critical time period exists when the effects of learned experience are beneficial.

But, Gilly notes, if the experience comes too late, it may do no good at all.

"This body of work also strongly supports the idea that a rich sensory environment is important for normal brain development in humans," Gilly points out.

He says that discovering exactly how a particular experience acts to modify specific neurons and guarantee their survival is one of the major challenges in neuroscience today.

And it's the unique anatomy of the squid that could allow a breakthrough in our understanding of how learning causes physical alterations in the brain.

"The simplicity of the squid's giant axon system will be advantageous in identifying the genes and chemicals involved in causing and maintaining these cellular changes -- even in people," Gilly predicts.

"In this way, the delectable calamari may actually help unlock the secret of how our own brain cells are modified by early childhood experiences and help explain why we are who we are." SR

CYOAs as Early Hypertext

2005-03-14T12:26:00.000+11:00

{#TIGGR Says:} - For those of you following the (offline) topic of the origins of the internet - i have located an excellent article by Philipp Lenssen <philipp.lenssen@gmail.com> (thanks Phillip for kindly letting me reproduce his article here and for pointing out the omission of credit - for this i apologize sincerely - PHILLIP LENSSEN WROTE THIS ARTICLE, it is reproduced here for viewer's ease of reading!). This article is cited here as a source of external opinion regarding some of the "Infant" technologies that have lead to the development of "The World Wide Web"

CYOAs as Early Hypertext

The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure* books I read - played, rather - in the 80s were a form of hypertext. They were mostly written by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, and they were mostly in a fantasy setting.

*I'm referring to CYOA as a genre, not a specific series by that name.

While there was a defined start, you couldn't just continue reading by skimming through the pages from 1 to 300. The book was filled with independent, connected stations, in no special order. At the end of each station, you would have to choose where to go to continue, like this:

You are passing by a beggar squirming
in the dimly lit dirt strait. What do you do?

- You give him a gold coin.
-> Continue at 329.
- You ignore him and mind your own business.
-> Continue at 102.
- You ask him for directions.
-> Continue at 40.Following one of those station, naturally, would lead to more choices to more stations. Until the end, when you would either die or kill the dark sorcerer to free the princess.

There was also a back-button, but that was cheating: once you would hit a dead end (like, you fell into a trap and died), you could try remember where you came from and go back to that station. I played by a semi-strict rule in that I allowed myself to go back a single time through-out the adventure. But if I remember correctly I had rules whereby I could "win" a second or even third back-button-like, the station leading me into sudden was plain unfair, or I "misread" something. In any case, my friend had even more lax rules.

Sometimes, you also had to randomize a bit. That was implemented by asking you to throw a dice, or if you didn't have a dice, you could flip through the pages quickly and halt at one random page... for every page had a dice symbol at the bottom. This way, you could get to any number from 1-6, but usually this didn't work nearly as well as throwing a real dice.

These books also asked you to store information, a sort of 80s browser cookies, to continue on the analogy. For example you could lose your health, win some strength points by winning a battle, or luck points by buying a magic ring. (Some items would be bad for you and strain your health, but you were not allowed to put them away - possibly, the explanation was your game character didn't realize they were doing bad things to him.) To write down the information you'd use a simple pen, and write on some of the first blank pages provided to you at the beginning of the book. Again, it would have been very easy to cheat on broad scale here, except you'd ruin the fun for yourself.

My favorite of these games books, and I read many of them, must have been City of Thieves. The fun here was that you could freely move around on a (restricted) map of a medieval town. You could also draw a map which would match the directions being given through this "offline hypertext".

Much later - I started programming to better recreate these books with my own plot - and after many failed attempts, I created the Quest Markup Language, QML. It too does have cookies, and hypertext, of course. While it most naturally works as HTML (I wrote interpreters in VBS, PHP, and Python), it can be printed too. It's an adventure game language, but can be used to create multiple-choice tutorials or similar. (Its language does not "know" anything of mystical dragons and such, and works to describe anything you have in mind.)

So, in a strange way, these books prepared me for hypertext in a world which had none, at least not in any practical way for a kid (kids typically don't get into Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson). By the way, I think Escher's or Dali's images were an early form of programming tutorials - in retrospect I think they introduced to me the concept of the strange binary brothers IF and ELSE, which, while sitting next to each other in perfect harmony, are actually representing two completely opposing states - but that's another post.

New mobile phone virus found in messaging - Mar. 8, 2005

2005-03-10T16:49:00.000+11:00

'Commwarrior.A' is a virus designed to spread through multimedia messages and drain phone batteries.

"HELSINKI, Finland (Reuters) - A new mobile phone software virus started spreading this week via messages containing photos and sounds, the first of its kind and a threat to cellphones globally, data security firms said Tuesday.
The Commwarrior.A virus tries to replicate itself by sending multimedia messages to people on the phone's contacts list, and also tries to do the same via Bluetooth wireless connections with other devices, eventually draining the battery.
Unlike computer viruses that spread quickly around the world via the Internet, mobile phone viruses have previously been limited by technology.
Cabir, the world's first mobile phone virus 'in the wild,' has spread to only 16 countries in 6 months using Bluetooth connections.
But Commwarrior.A tries to send variously named multimedia messages (MMS) to phones running the popular Series 60 phone operating software by Symbian, security software maker Symantec said in a statement.
If the user does not click and download the message the virus will not spread.
'I do not think this particular virus will be a big problem, but it is the beginning of a new era,' said Mikko Hypponen, director of Finnish anti-virus research company F-Secure.
'It's revolutionary as all previous mobile viruses have been spreading either with some other software or only within a limited area, using Bluetooth,' he said.
Hypponen said the first indications suggested the virus originated in Russia.
The mobile virus threat is seen as growing as software writers become more sophisticated and phones use standardized technologies that make it easier for viruses to spread across not just specific devices but the whole industry.
The world's largest mobile phone maker Nokia "

Questionable Future Of The .NET Framework? Part One

2005-02-25T12:41:00.000+11:00

Questionable Future Of The .NET Framework? Part One

A friend and colleague of mine, Ben Stahlhood, recently sent me the link to Richard Grimes' farewell. Over the years, Mr. Grimes has made many great contributions to the community, among them authoring several books on COM related topics and, more recently, on .NET. However, it would appear that he has become somewhat disenchanted with the current state of the .NET Framework, and he brings up several issues in his farewell address, some of which I do not agree with. Now, do not get me wrong, I hold a lot of respect for Mr. Grimes, but there are some things here I cannot ignore. So today, I would like to offer a response to some key points that I have grouped into the following categories: Marketing Influences and VB.NET, Framework Bloat and Deployment, and Interfaces versus Abstract Classes.

Marketing Influences, VB.NET

One such point, that I agree entirely on, is his outlook on how marketing has had its influence on the .NET Framework. He seems to be dead on when concerning such things as how people are often confused as to what the .NET Framework actually is, how a person should pronounce C#, or the reason for the existence of the VB.NET language. It is no question as to why Microsoft has decided to cull the use of the .NET brand from Visual Studio 2005 development suite, the answer is obvious. Marketing has taken its toll on the platform, and I am glad to see that Microsoft is attempting to recover from this blunder.

As for the purpose of having the VB.NET language around only to transition VB developers to the .NET Framework, I agree with Mr. Grimes in part. Yes, it exists to fill that void, allowing VB developers to quickly learn the .NET Framework and without them having to learn entirely new syntax. But he seems to imply that VB developers would be better off staying with VB6, and not moving on to the newer and better technologies at all. I am not sure that this is an entirely wise decision to make. As a case in example, a friend of mine who casually writes software to help automate his business recently made the transition from VB6 to VB.NET. So I asked him what his opinion was on this issue. Take note that he has little background in software engineering or developing applications. Unsurprisingly, he said that when he first approached VB.NET, he was somewhat lost due to the size of the .NET Framework base class libraries, but that after he had overcome this hurdle, he saw the many benefits of the framework. I am not sure if this is universally shared by people who have made a similar transition, but here is someone who would not want to move back to VB6 after having learned VB.NET. VB.NET is not a total loss.

Framework Bloat And Deployment

Now, I am sure we all felt a little daunted when first glancing through the class library reference, for this is not something this is exclusively experienced by VB.NET developers alone. I agree with Mr. Grimes when he says that some classes have been poorly designed, or that the .NET Framework is somewhat bloated. Mr. Grimes uses the EventLog class as an example of bad design, and there are many others. There are also many namespaces and assemblies that contain functionality this is often not used, one example I could use here is System.EnterpriseServices, which wraps COM+ enterprise services. Although, I am sure that there are programmers out there who use this subsystem, it does not seem to be essential to core .NET development. Indeed, if you look through Partition IV of the ECMA CLI Specification, you will see that the core CLI base class libraries are lacking a number of the Microsoft specific libraries. It could be argued that this is good, as it removes libraries that usually only wrap older Microsoft specific technologies.

But some people could also argue that the CLI specification outlines a crippled implementation, which is, in truth, the case with System.Windows.Forms. What VB.NET developer, or .NET application developer in general, does not use System.Windows.Forms at some point or another? And since it is nonexistent in the CLI specification, we run in to some awful portability and logistics issues. Fortunately, some alternative implementations of the .NET Framework, such as Mono, are including support for many .NET features not found in the CLI standard, System.Windows.Forms being no exception.

Mr. Grimes compares the size of Microsoft's .NET Framework redistributable to the Java redistributable, and claims that the .NET redistributable is many times larger than its Java counterpart. Well, with the Java J2SE 5.0 Update 1 sitting at over 15MB, and with .NET Framework 1.1 redistributable weighing in at a little over 23MB, the .NET Framework redistributable is not even twice as big as the Java runtime. And with increasing bandwidth and storage capacity, I do not see what the big issue is here. And with the .NET Framework coming preinstalled on Windows XP machines with Service Pack 2, this issue is further lessened.

But not everyone has WinXP with SP2. Let us consider the situation with someone on dialup who needs to download a particular redistributable. Whether it is downloading the Java redistributable or the .NET Framework redistributable, they're in trouble either way--it is still going to take a long time. And if they are on broadband, it is only a minute more, at most, to download the .NET Framework in comparison to the Java runtime. Comparing redistributable size of the .NET Framework to Java is somewhat foolish when one considers this.

And I cannot forget to mention that the .NET Framework redistributable has a lot more features than the Java redistributable. The .NET Framework includes compilers for C#, VB.NET, J#.NET, and JScript.NET out of the box. It also includes inline XML documentation for all of the assemblies. You can develop for the .NET Framework with nothing more than the redistributable installed. Try doing that with the Java redistributable.

All in all, I would rather have a slightly bloated .NET Framework, than have to go back to earlier technologies like the Win32 API, MFC, COM, and so on. The .NET Framework, for all of its heftiness, is obviously the way forward here, folks.

Interfaces Versus Abstract Classes

Our fair journalist, Mr. Grimes, also mentions how classes are preferred above interfaces, but he fails to cover all aspects of this area. He remarks on how difficult it is to use interfaces with .NET remoting. It may not be a walk in the park, but once you understand the workings of it, it is fairly straightforward. Essentially, what you do is create a common assembly that houses a core set of interfaces which act as communication gateways. This assembly is then located on both the client and the server. Next, the server assembly is written, and its classes implement the common interfaces. The client assembly only needs to communicate with the server through the common interfaces, which removes the need for the server assembly to be duplicated on the client. Alas, the core reference documentation on MSDN does not seem to document this capability, so he is right in this respect. But there is a lot of literature on this topic out there. It looks like this is a case of Mr. Grimes not doing his homework.

Remoting aside, there are several valid reasons for preferring abstract classes and virtual methods over interfaces. One reason is performance: a method call through an interface uses reflection to find and invoke the method, whereas a call through a virtual method is just a quick virtual-table look-up, or pointer indirection. Second, abstract classes are better for when you want to implement a planned inheritance hierarchy, controlling what behaviors or specific methods can be overridden in subclasses, as well as being able to provide default behaviors. Abstract classes are thus excellent candidates for class frameworks, which is exactly what the .NET Framework base class library is!

Let us use remoting again here as an example. MarshalByRefObject provides a default implementation and behaviors for objects that can be marshaled by reference. Without this functionality present, remoting would not work. If we instead had an IMarshalByRefObject interface, the remoting system would rely on the client programmer's implementation to be correct, which opens remoting up for a large number of problems and bugs. Furthermore, more internals of .NET remoting would need to be exposed to the client programmer, so that he could implement the IMarshalByRefObject interface properly. But this could pose as a security risk. And let us not to forget that requiring the client programmer to duplicate code for every single marshal-by-reference class he needed would be overkill.

Usually, as a framework architect, you do not want client programmers to be able to override every single method in a class, so that you can focus on maintaining the robustness and stability of your framework. This is where you use abstract base classes and virtual methods. Interfaces provide a contract between implementers of an interface, and consumers of an interface. If you want client programmers to be able to override behavior at the granularity of the scope of a contract, you should use interfaces. Looking at things like ICloneable, IDisposable, and ISerializable, we see that this is exactly what the designers of the .NET Framework have done.

As far as I can tell, the .NET Framework sticks to these interface and abstract class guidelines most of the time, and I believe that Mr. Grimes' standpoint on always using interfaces is a bit too extreme.

2005-01-28T01:25:00.000+11:00

How to enable Remote Desktop for non-admin?

After hearing from many that Power Users are still admin, I have converted myself to a regular user. Most apps continue to work properly. Remote Desktop stops working. To be specific, from the non-admin box, I can remote desktop to another machine, but not vice versa.

After fiddling with some settings, I discovered that regulars users are not enabled to remote desktop by default. After adding myself as a Remote User in the System Properties, I can start a Remote Desktop session to my box again.

LANDMINES: .NET Undocumented: Floating Point Arithmetic

2005-01-21T09:27:00.001+11:00

.NET Undocumented: Floating Point Arithmetic

Floating Point Arithmetic

Eric Lippert has a serious of recent blog posts on Floating Point Arithmetic, if you were interested in or following any of my prior math quiz posts.

Also, Eric Gunnerson talks about floating point arithmetic in a December 2003 post, and posts to a canonical discussion of floating point arithmetic in ?What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.?

Some more math trivia: True or false?

1. Math.Round(2.5) = 3.
2. Math.Round returns an int.
3. Both x and y are expressions of type Double and have the same exact bit representation of a Double in memory. Neither are special cases?ie, NaN, negative zero, denormalized numbers, or infinities. Therefore, x = y.
4. If x is a Double and x = x, then double.Parse(x.ToString()) = x.
5. Is MSDN documentation correct in stating the following about Double.Epsilon?

?Two apparently equivalent floating point numbers might not compare equal because of differences in their least significant digits. For example, the C# expression, (double)1/3 == (double)0.33333, does not compare equal because the division operation on the left-hand side has maximum precision while the constant on the right-hand side is only precise to the visible digit.

Instead, determine if the two sides of a comparison are close enough to equal for your purposes by comparing whether the absolute value of the difference between the left and right-hand sides is less than Epsilon.?

EVIL-BILL: Gates Interview Part Four: Communists and DRM

2005-01-21T09:27:00.000+11:00

Gizmodo : Gates Interview Part Four: Communists and DRM

Gates Interview Part Four: Communists and DRM
Portable Media
filed under Portable Media

gates3.jpg imageThis is the final segment of our interview with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, where we discuss why Creative Commons advocates aren't (or are?) communists, and why Microsoft feels their DRM offers the best of both worlds.

Gizmodo: When you talked to CNet (I believe that was yesterday), you sort of ticked off some of the blog world with some of the comments... a specific comment that was made, about some of the IP advocates?people that are advocating more... not necessarily open source, but Creative Commons and things like that. A less restrictive IP environment. You made an analogy and called them "communist."

Do you feel that's necessarily a fair judgment to make, to call those people 'communists,' as opposed to someone who adopts DRM as maybe... a 'capitalist?' (I don't know what you're thinking the opposite would be).

Gates: No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.' I did say that they're... The question is: what incentive systems should exist in the world? Call 'communism' a system where [in] the extreme case you believe that the idea of the individual getting lots of wealth in return for the things they do... that that's wrong. If you have no incentive for individual excellence and it's just sort of, you know, banned. All the way up to an extreme that nobody would believe in, that there's no redistribution of wealth and that's there's no expiration of rights and control. So you have this huge spectrum.

All I was saying is that the number of people who are at this extreme who believe there should be no incentive systems for creative work?there's actually less of those people. The question seemed to be saying that the whole support for IP and incentive systems was completely falling apart and didn't I notice that was a big trend, and I said, no, on the contrary. The idea of capitalistic incentive: there's actually a higher percentage of the planet?take all of China?that's involved in capitalistic incentive systems than there have been in the past. That's all.

Now, reasonable people can disagree about it. There are very few people at either extreme at this point and there's lots of good debate. Take one point on the spectrum: that there should be no patent system. Another point in the debate would be that it should be somewhat improved patent system. I was just saying that the balance was, 'Hey, let's draw out the creativity of all the smart people in China,' which the communistic system did not. Let's draw out the creativity of the people in India. Let's have these great university systems and the internet letting you find buyers and sellers in much better ways than ever before. And the world is richer for what's gone on.

Gizmodo: Do you think that it's critical to protect IP?software, music, whatever... Do you think it's critical to protect those things with DRM or do you think that, or do you feel like you have to provide the DRM so that the companies that are distributing that stuff will allow it on your systems?

Gates: Well, ignore DRM for a second. Should an artist that creates a great song be paid for that song? That's where you have to start. You don't start with DRM. DRM is just like a speed bump that reminds you whether you're staying within the scope of rights that you have or you don't. So you don't start with DRM. That's like saying, 'Do you believe in speed bumps?' You have to say, 'Should people drive at 80mph in parking lots?' If you think they should, then of course you don't like speed bumps.

Gizmodo: I think that's sort of disingenuous. Obviously people think that artists, or you know, whoever creates software should be paid...

Gates: No, no, no. That's not true! Many people don't believe that. Absolutely don't believe that.

Gizmodo: You don't think that... Well, okay, I guess that's true. There is definitely a side of...

Gates: Go back to China in 1950 and say, "Hey, I wrote a song! Pay me! Please, pay me!" And then you can read, it says right there: you will not be paid. So yes, views about incentive programs run the entire spectrum.

Gizmodo: Okay, so say that's true. Do you think that DRM as a roadblock, or Microsoft's role in setting up that roadblock, do you think that's helping artists get paid? Do you think you're helping people protect their money?

Gates: That's what they think.

Gizmodo: That's what the artists think, you're saying?

Gates: Yes. There are artists who want the software to remind people of rights boundaries. Are those authors wrong or right? That's up to them. We don't take a position on that. What we want is to have as much content as possible available. And available in the most convenient, easy-to-use form.

Gizmodo: So if that's the case, why in the Windows video players?the [Portable] Media Centers that just came out?why do you have to transcode, let's say a DivX that you might have downloaded or ripped a DVD that you purchase. Why do you have to transcode that to Windows [Media] Video before you copy it?

Gates: That has nothing to do with rights management. Not a thing. We don't have the codec! We just don't happen to have that codec in the Portable Media Centers. This has nothing to do with rights management. There's a discussion whether we should put the DivX codec in. Believe it or not?and you'll find this ironic?we are both a defendant on intellectual property as well as saying there's some value on intellectual property, so whenever we put things in our systems, we have to look at what the IP rights are.

That transcoding has nothing to do with rights management. When we see a format that we don't natively support, the only thing we can do is transcode it. So if you say, hey, why don't we natively support it, that's a question of how many codecs should we put in there? I think the DSPs are actually rich enough to do some additional formats and maybe in future versions we should put those formats in. There's nothing philosophical about that; nothing to do with rights management.

We've always supported, in everything we've done, if something doesn't have a rights envelope on it, we don't sit there and sniff it and say, 'Oh, it looks like you've got Mickey Mouse here, and we don't see in our files that you paid for Mickey Mouse.' We never do anything like that. We support... If there's no envelope, we do everything fantastic with it.

But if there's an envelope that says 'this should only be done with this,' you're right: in order to get authors to be willing to put an ever broader range of content on our platform, we have talked through with them. We have been in a dialogue?with their representatives in most cases and them directly in some cases?saying, 'Okay, what kind of envelopes do you want? And what do you expect?' And sometimes they ask for things that just aren't realistic that would make things inconvenient for the user.

Gizmodo: What seems to me?what hurts my feelings?I feel like I, as a customer, want Microsoft to be totally on my side. In that, as far as the people that are producing things, that might want more DRM and might make it inconvenient, I don't understand what it necessarily benefits you to help them.

Gates: No, I've said it exactly. We have your interests totally in mind, but that includes having... if there's content that can only be there if it's rights protected, we want to be able to have that content available to you. And so all we're doing... in no sense are we hurting you, because if they're willing to make the content available openly, believe me, that's always the most wonderful thing. It's the simplest.

Take, like, putting soundtracks onto movies using our movie editor thing. If you have unprotected music you can take slideshows, put music to it, encapsulate it in the file, mail it around?it works perfectly. If you have rights management, it's actually painful because the people you're mailing it to don't have the certificate and it's kind of painful. But because the artists... some things are only licensed to be in that form, it's hard to put the track on Movie Maker. But hey, we want you, instead of not having that content, to have that content. And in the case that the authors decided it's rights managed, you can decide to stay away from it or to use it. That, again, is your choice.

We're the guys of empowerment. We want these things to be out there everywhere. But it wouldn't serve anyone's interests to go out there and say, 'Hey, by the way, there's no way to remind anyone at any time about any rights boundaries.'

Take medical records: is it your position that rights management for medical records is evil?

Gizmodo: 'Evil' is maybe strong. Do you mean in the sense that medical records shouldn't have any rights management at all?

Gates: Right. We remind people that, like if there's a medical record that has somebody's AIDS status in it, we have software?which is identical software?that says, 'Hey, if you're trying to forward to someone,' that, 'No, this is restricted. You can't forward this to someone. They don't have the right to see this.' It's the notion of 'should there be confidential information?'

Gizmodo: I think that's a different question.

Gates: It's not different. It's identical technology. It's the same bits!

Gizmodo: No, no, no. I think in calling that evil as opposed to whatever, I think that still basically comes down to, 'Do you feel like things should be able to have passwords on them or not?' And of course the answer is 'yes.' I do think that's reasonable. So I don't think anybody is trying to say 'DRM is evil.' I think what people are trying to say is that DRM, as sanctioned by the big players, may be holding back culture as a whole.

Gates: The DRM we put into these systems is used to protect medical records, and it's used to protect things people want to protect. And so it's hard for me to say, 'No, because it might be used for media for a way in some people don't like, I won't put it in there for medical records.' This is a platform that people can use in any way that they choose.

Gizmodo: I think that's a little close to, 'Think of the children.' I understand what you're saying, but just because, 'medical records, it's good to have a password on them' doesn't necessarily mean that when it comes to music or the things that I purchase that that's also a good thing. I think it all comes down to what it is you're actually paying for.

Gates: All we're doing is putting it in the platform. So I'm just saying, can you criticize us for having a platform that allows bits?bits, just bits; not music, not movies, not medical records, not tech things?to have any usage restriction for bits. Are we doing a disfavor to the world at large by saying some of our users, when they choose to?maybe for medical records?they can limit the accessibility of those bits?

Gizmodo: I think setting up the platform? No, it's not inherently bad. But I think it does depend on what it is that you're protecting. But I think we just disagree.

Gates: No, I actually don't think we disagree.

WHITEGOODS: I'm at war with the washing machine

2005-01-21T09:26:00.000+11:00

I'm at war with the washing machine

I'm at war with the washing machine
I'm at war with the washing machine. No matter which countermeasures I take, this "home appliance" manages to stretch my clothes to extreme and unfair proportions. It is particularly brutal to t-shirts.

I'm not the only one. Each apartment in my building has the same model. Every so often I spot a student, a fellow soldier from the front, with a t-shirt draped loosely around their neck like a toga; a t-shirt sent forth into the watery void only to return a changed garment, a v-neck vest or a one-piece skirt.

The machine, a Sharp ES-25E, consists of a main washing tank with an impeller at the bottom. The impeller, which periodically changes direction, creates a watery vortex of death in which my hapless clothes become "clean". They also become stretched in a way similar to when approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The impeller can be set between two levels, strong and weak, both of which elicit evil cackles from the machine. Down at the 100 yen shop, you can buy nylon-mesh bags for protecting clothes. In theory this reduces the stresses experienced when spinning through the vortex but, alas, it merely delays the inevitable.

If I had a dryer, I could purposefully shrink the clothing back into a reasonable shape. Hmm... Perhaps the war is not lost.

TSUNAMI: The life [(or lives) saved by] aquatic [vegetation]

2005-01-21T09:25:00.000+11:00

The life [(or lives) saved by] aquatic [vegetation] - Sepia Mutiny

There's the high tech approach to minimizing tsunami deaths -- a global alert system that tries to predict tsunamis -- and then there's the low tech approach -- mangrove swamps. This should not be a surprise - wetlands are very effective at combatting flooding, for example, far more so than levees and dams. And while it is anthropomorphic to say that "the wetlands are nature's method of protecting people," it is useful to observe that wetlands have preserved many lands and try to cultivate them for that purpose. The Christian Science Monitor reports [snippets only]:

Mr. Selvum says that 172 families were saved from the tsunami in the fishing village of Thirunal Thoppu in India's Tamil Nadu state only because the mangroves are thriving and dense there. He also mentions three other Tamil Nadu villages where damage had been minimized by the aquatic trees. "Every village has more than 100 families, so just think of the number of lives saved," he says.

"Even though the mechanical impact of a tsunami is enormous, and is bound to destroy the first line of mangroves, the water suddenly slows down as it moves farther in," Selvum says.

According to Sridharan, mangroves form only 62 miles of the 620-mile Tamil Nadu coastline. If well looked after, they could save thousands of lives if their density is at least 70 percent in places. "They must be grown very thickly together to have any use as barriers," Sridharan explains.

Bittu Sehgal, a feature editor and ecologist at Sanctuary magazine, told the Indian Express newspaper that he firmly believes the famous mangrove reserve of the Sundarbans in West Bengal saved the coastal part of the state from severe losses.

"The forest officers on duty have reported there that the water level rose by three to five feet when the tsunami hit. But this is nothing abnormal as we can see 10- to 12-foot high tides on the Sundarbans coast. The mangroves saved us," he says.

Environmentalists say that to focus exclusively on mangroves would be a mistake. "We need many more coastal shelter belts that stop the intrusion of salt water, like casuarinas and acacia trees," says Selvum. "But, as usual, it is very late in the day."

MATH: Benford's Law

2005-01-17T11:27:00.000+11:00

Benford's Law

While I was poking through my old numeric analysis textbooks to refresh my memory for this series on floating point arithmetic, I came across one of my favourite weird facts about math.

A nonzero base-ten integer starts with some digit other than zero. You might naively expect that given a bunch of "random" numbers, you'd see every digit from 1 to 9 about equally often. You'd see as many 2's as 9's. You'd see each digit as the leading digit about 11% of the time. For example, consider a random integer between 100000 and 999999. One ninth begin with 1, one ninth begin with 2, etc.

But in real-life datasets, that's not the case at all. If you just start grabbing thousands or millions of "random" numbers from newspapers and magazines and books, you soon see that about 30% of the numbers begin with 1, and it falls off rapidly from there. About 18% begin with 2, all the way down to less than 5% for 9.

This oddity was discovered by Newcomb in 1881, and then rediscovered by Frank Benford, a physicist, in 1937. As often is the case, the fact became associated with the second discoverer and is now known as Benford's Law.

Benford's Law has lots of practical applications. For instance, people who just make up numbers wholesale on their tax returns tend to pick "average seeming" numbers, and to humans, "average seeming" means "starts with a five". People think, I want something between $1000 and $10000, let's say, $5624. The IRS routinely scans tax returns to find unusually high percentages of leading 5's and examines those more carefully.

Benford's result was carefully studied by many statisticians and other mathematicians, and we now have a multi-base form of the law. Given a bunch of numbers in base B, we'd expect to see leading digit n approximately ln (1 + 1/n) / ln B of the time.

But what could possibly explain Benford's Law?

Multiplication. Most numbers we see every day are not random quantities in of themselves. They're usually computed qualities with some aspect of multiplication to them.

Consider, for example, any property which grows on a percentage basis. Like, say, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It typically grows a few percent a year. Suppose, just to pick a rate, that on average the DJIA grows at 7% a year. At that rate, it doubles about every ten years. Suppose that the DJIA is 10000. After ten years of having 1 as the leading digit, it finally gets to 20000. Ten years go by again, but in that ten years, it doubles to 40000, not 30000. Therefore, those ten years were spent about half starting with 2, and about half starting with 3. Ten more years go by, and it doubles again to 80000. Now ten years have 4, 5, 6 and 7 as the leading digits in only ten years. Eventually we get up to 100000, and spend another ten years starting with 1. Pick a random date and you'd expect that the DJIA on that day would be twice as likely to start with 1 as 2, and four times as likely to start with 1 as 5.

We can easily write a program that demonstrates Benford's Law. As we multiply more and more numbers together, they tend to clump based on Benford's Law:

var counters = [
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0] ];

for (var multiplications = 0 ; multiplications <= 3; ++multiplications)
{
for (var trial = 0 ; trial < 10000 ; ++trial)
{
var num = 1;
for (var mult = 0 ; mult <= multiplications; ++mult)
num = num * (Math.floor(Math.random() * 1000) + 1);
var lead = num.toString().substr(0,1);
counters[multiplications][lead] ++;
}
}
print(counters.join("\n"));

A typical run produces data from which we can draw this table:

Leading Digit
Mults 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 1102 1069 1085 1125 1167 1107 1083 1124 1138
1 2416 1752 1443 1162 1019 756 643 453 356
2 3046 1854 1265 979 778 632 551 468 427
3 3090 1814 1197 924 779 661 582 491 462
predicted 3010 1761 1249 969 792 669 580 511 458

As you can see, with no multiplications, the distribution is a flat 11% for each. But by the time we get up to two or three multiplications, we're almost exactly at the distribution predicted by Benford's Law.

What does this have to do with floating point math? Well, we could conceivably design chips that did decimal or hexadecimal floating-point arithmetic. Would such chips yield more accurate results? Well, recall that last time, we used the fact that you can stuff a leading 1 onto a bit field to define a number. Binary is the only system in which every number except 0 begins with a leading 1! You can make a statistical argument which shows that for bases other than binary, in which you cannot always assume a leading digit, have on average a larger representation error. The argument is somewhat subtle, so I'm not going to actually go through the details of it, but suffice to say that we can show that for typical uses, binary is the least error-producing system we can come up with given that we'll almost always be working with data which follow Benford's Law.

P2P-IPO: First peer-to-peer infringer arrested

2005-01-17T10:51:00.000+11:00

First peer-to-peer infringer arrested: January 13, 2005

Intellectual property : First peer-to-peer infringer arrested

A 38-year-old jobless man has been arrested for illegally distributing copyright movies on the Internet through Bit Torrent, which is the first successful enforcement action against P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing.

Secretary for Commerce, Industry & Technology John Tsang said if convicted, it would deal a heavy blow to copyright infringement activities. He appealed to people to respect intellectual property rights and to not commit piracy-related offences. Parents should warn their children of the serious consequence of the offence.

Customs & Excise Assistant Commissioner (Intelligence & Investigation) William Chow said the arrest signifies the department's resolve in tracking down copyright infringing activities over P2P networks by using their expertise and the latest technology to employ round-the-clock monitoring.

On January 10 and 11, Customs officers located the suspect who had uploaded three movies onto a local Bit Torrent discussion forum for sharing with other network users. About 8am yesterday officers searched a Tuen Mun flat and seized two computers, equipment and a batch of VCDs, and arrested the suspect.

Under the Copyright Ordinance, it is an offence to distribute infringing copies of copyright works other than for the purpose of, in the course of, any trade or business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright, without the licence of the copyright owner.

The maximum penalty is a $50,000 fine per infringing copy and four years jail.

RELIGIO-CORNER: The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism

2005-01-17T10:37:00.000+11:00

The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism

GNOSTICISM IS THE TEACHING based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means. Although Gnosticism thus rests on personal religious experience, it is a mistake to assume all such experience results in Gnostic recognitions. It is nearer the truth to say that Gnosticism expresses a specific religious experience, an experience that does not lend itself to the language of theology or philosophy, but which is instead closely affinitized to, and expresses itself through, the medium of myth. Indeed, one finds that most Gnostic scriptures take the forms of myths. The term ?myth? should not here be taken to mean ?stories that are not true?, but rather, that the truths embodied in these myths are of a different order from the dogmas of theology or the statements of philosophy.

In the following summary, we will attempt to encapsulate in prose what the Gnostic myths express in their distinctively poetic and imaginative language.

The Cosmos

All religious traditions acknowledge that the world is imperfect. Where they differ is in the explanations which they offer to account for this imperfection and in what they suggest might be done about it. Gnostics have their own -- perhaps quite startling -- view of these matters: they hold that the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner.

Like Buddhism, Gnosticism begins with the fundamental recognition that earthly life is filled with suffering. In order to nourish themselves, all forms of life consume each other, thereby visiting pain, fear, and death upon one another (even herbivorous animals live by destroying the life of plants). In addition, so-called natural catastrophes -- earthquakes, floods, fires, drought, volcanic eruptions -- bring further suffering and death in their wake. Human beings, with their complex physiology and psychology, are aware not only of these painful features of earthly existence. They also suffer from the frequent recognition that they are strangers living in a world that is flawed and absurd.

Many religions advocate that humans are to be blamed for the imperfections of the world. Supporting this view, they interpret the Genesis myth as declaring that transgressions committed by the first human pair brought about a ?fall? of creation resulting in the present corrupt state of the world. Gnostics respond that this interpretation of the myth is false. The blame for the world?s failings lies not with humans, but with the creator. Since -- especially in the monotheistic religions -- the creator is God, this Gnostic position appears blasphemous, and is often viewed with dismay even by non-believers.

Ways of evading the recognition of the flawed creation and its flawed creator have been devised over and over, but none of these arguments have impressed Gnostics. The ancient Greeks, especially the Platonists, advised people to look to the harmony of the universe, so that by venerating its grandeur they might forget their immediate afflictions. But since this harmony still contains the cruel flaws, forlornness and alienation of existence, this advice is considered of little value by Gnostics. Nor is the Eastern idea of Karma regarded by Gnostics as an adequate explanation of creation?s imperfection and suffering. Karma at best can only explain how the chain of suffering and imperfection works. It does not inform us in the first place why such a sorrowful and malign system should exist.

Once the initial shock of the ?unusual? or ?blasphemous? nature of the Gnostic explanation for suffering and imperfection of the world wears off, one may begin to recognize that it is in fact the most sensible of all explanations. To appreciate it fully, however, a familiarity with the Gnostic conception of the Godhead is required, both in its original essence as the True God and in its debased manifestation as the false or creator God.

Deity
The Gnostic God concept is more subtle than that of most religions. In its way, it unites and reconciles the recognitions of Monotheism and Polytheism, as well as of Theism, Deism and Pantheism.

William BlakeIn the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word ?create? is ordinarily understood. While this True God did not fashion or create anything, He (or, It) ?emanated? or brought forth from within Himself the substance of all there is in all the worlds, visible and invisible. In a certain sense, it may therefore be true to say that all is God, for all consists of the substance of God. By the same token, it must also be recognized that many portions of the original divine essence have been projected so far from their source that they underwent unwholesome changes in the process. To worship the cosmos, or nature, or embodied creatures is thus tantamount to worshipping alienated and corrupt portions of the emanated divine essence.

The basic Gnostic myth has many variations, but all of these refer to Aeons, intermediate deific beings who exist between the ultimate, True God and ourselves. They, together with the True God, comprise the realm of Fullness (Pleroma) wherein the potency of divinity operates fully. The Fullness stands in contrast to our existential state, which in comparison may be called emptiness.

One of the aeonial beings who bears the name Sophia (?Wisdom?) is of great importance to the Gnostic world view. In the course of her journeyings, Sophia came to emanate from her own being a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw. This being, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God. Since he took the already existing divine essence and fashioned it into various forms, he is also called the Demiurgos or ?half-maker? There is an authentic half, a true deific component within creation, but it is not recognized by the half-maker and by his cosmic minions, the Archons or ?rulers?.

The Human Being
Human nature mirrors the duality found in the world: in part it was made by the false creator God and in part it consists of the light of the True God. Humankind contains a perishable physical and psychic component, as well as a spiritual component which is a fragment of the divine essence. This latter part is often symbolically referred to as the ?divine spark?. The recognition of this dual nature of the world and of the human being has earned the Gnostic tradition the epithet of ?dualist?.

Humans are generally ignorant of the divine spark resident within them. This ignorance is fostered in human nature by the influence of the false creator and his Archons, who together are intent upon keeping men and women ignorant of their true nature and destiny. Anything that causes us to remain attached to earthly things serves to keep us in enslavement to these lower cosmic rulers. Death releases the divine spark from its lowly prison, but if there has not been a substantial work of Gnosis undertaken by the soul prior to death, it becomes likely that the divine spark will be hurled back into, and then re-embodied within, the pangs and slavery of the physical world.

Not all humans are spiritual (pneumatics) and thus ready for Gnosis and liberation. Some are earthbound and materialistic beings (hyletics), who recognize only the physical reality. Others live largely in their psyche (psychics). Such people usually mistake the Demiurge for the True God and have little or no awareness of the spiritual world beyond matter and mind.

In the course of history, humans progress from materialistic sensate slavery, by way of ethical religiosity, to spiritual freedom and liberating Gnosis. As the scholar G. Quispel wrote: ?The world-spirit in exile must go through the Inferno of matter and the Purgatory of morals to arrive at the spiritual Paradise.? This kind of evolution of consciousness was envisioned by the Gnostics, long before the concept of evolution was known.

Salvation
Evolutionary forces alone are insufficient, however, to bring about spiritual freedom. Humans are caught in a predicament consisting of physical existence combined with ignorance of their true origins, their essential nature and their ultimate destiny. To be liberated from this predicament, human beings require help, although they must also contribute their own efforts.

From earliest times Messengers of the Light have come forth from the True God in order to assist humans in their quest for Gnosis. Only a few of these salvific figures are mentioned in Gnostic scripture; some of the most important are Seth (the third Son of Adam), Jesus, and the Prophet Mani. The majority of Gnostics always looked to Jesus as the principal savior figure (the Soter).

Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance -- whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities -- is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.

The Gnostic concept of salvation, like other Gnostic concepts, is a subtle one. On the one hand, Gnostic salvation may easily be mistaken for an unmediated individual experience, a sort of spiritual do-it-yourself project. Gnostics hold that the potential for Gnosis, and thus, of salvation is present in every man and woman, and that salvation is not vicarious but individual. At the same time, they also acknowledge that Gnosis and salvation can be, indeed must be, stimulated and facilitated in order to effectively arise within consciousness. This stimulation is supplied by Messengers of Light who, in addition to their teachings, establish salvific mysteries (sacraments) which can be administered by apostles of the Messengers and their successors.

One needs also remember that knowledge of our true nature -- as well as other associated realizations -- are withheld from us by our very condition of earthly existence. The True God of transcendence is unknown in this world, in fact He is often called the Unknown Father. It is thus obvious that revelation from on High is needed to bring about salvation. The indwelling spark must be awakened from its terrestrial slumber by the saving knowledge that comes ?from without?.

Conduct

If the words ?ethics? or ?morality? are taken to mean a system of rules, then Gnosticism is opposed to them both. Such systems usually originate with the Demiurge and are covertly designed to serve his purposes. If, on the other hand, morality is said to consist of an inner integrity arising from the illumination of the indwelling spark, then the Gnostic will embrace this spiritually informed existential ethic as ideal.

To the Gnostic, commandments and rules are not salvific; they are not substantially conducive to salvation. Rules of conduct may serve numerous ends, including the structuring of an ordered and peaceful society, and the maintenance of harmonious relations within social groups. Rules, however, are not relevant to salvation; that is brought about only by Gnosis. Morality therefore needs to be viewed primarily in temporal and secular terms; it is ever subject to changes and modifications in accordance with the spiritual development of the individual.

As noted in the discussion above, ?hyletic materialists? usually have little interest in morality, while ?psychic disciplinarians? often grant to it a great importance. In contrast, ?Pneumatic spiritual? persons are generally more concerned with other, higher matters. Different historical periods also require variant attitudes regarding human conduct. Thus both the Manichaean and Cathar Gnostic movements, which functioned in times where purity of conduct was regarded as an issue of high import, responded in kind. The present period of Western culture perhaps resembles in more ways that of second and third century Alexandria. It seems therefore appropriate that Gnostics in our age adopt the attitudes of classical Alexandrian Gnosticism, wherein matters of conduct were largely left to the insight of the individual.

Gnosticism embraces numerous general attitudes toward life: it encourages non-attachment and non-conformity to the world, a ?being in the world, but not of the world?; a lack of egotism; and a respect for the freedom and dignity of other beings. Nonetheless, it appertains to the intuition and wisdom of every individual ?Gnostic? to distill from these principles individual guidelines for their personal application.

Destiny

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: ?Why do you ask me about death when you do not know how to live?? This answer might easily have been given by a Gnostic. To a similar question posed in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus answered that human beings must come by Gnosis to know the ineffable, divine reality from whence they have originated, and whither they will return. This transcendental knowledge must come to them while they are still embodied on earth.

Death does not automatically bring about liberation from bondage in the realms of the Demiurge. Those who have not attained to a liberating Gnosis while they were in embodiment may become trapped in existence once more. It is quite likely that this might occur by way of the cycle of rebirths. Gnosticism does not emphasize the doctrine of reincarnation prominently, but it is implicitly understood in most Gnostic teachings that those who have not made effective contact with their transcendental origins while they were in embodiment would have to return into the sorrowful condition of earthly life.

In regard to salvation, or the fate of the spirit and soul after death, one needs to be aware that help is available. Valentinus, the greatest of Gnostic teachers, taught that Christ and Sophia await the spiritual man -- the pneumatic Gnostic -- at the entrance of the Pleroma, and help him to enter the bridechamber of final reunion. Ptolemaeus, disciple of Valentinus, taught that even those not of pneumatic status, the psychics, could be redeemed and live in a heavenworld at the entrance of the Pleroma. In the fullness of time, every spiritual being will receive Gnosis and will be united with its higher Self -- the angelic Twin -- thus becoming qualified to enter the Pleroma. None of this is possible, however, without earnest striving for Gnosis.

Gnosis and Psyche: The Depth Psychological Connection

Throughout the twentieth Century the new scientific discipline of depth psychology has gained much prominence. Among the depth psychologists who have shown a pronounced and informed interest in Gnosticism, a place of signal distinction belongs to C. G. Jung. Jung was instrumental in calling attention to the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic writings in the 1950's because he perceived the outstanding psychological relevance of Gnostic insights.

Carl Gustav Jung, 1875 - 1961
The noted scholar of Gnosticism, G. Filoramo, wrote: "Jung's reflections had long been immersed in the thought of the ancient Gnostics to such an extent that he considered them the virtual discoverers of 'depth psychology' . . . ancient Gnosis, albeit in its form of universal religion, in a certain sense prefigured, and at the same time helped to clarify, the nature of Jungian spiritual therapy." In the light of such recognitions one may ask: "Is Gnosticism a religion or a psychology?" The answer is that it may very-well be both. Most mythologems found in Gnostic scriptures possess psychological relevance and applicability. For instance the blind and arrogant creator-demiurge bears a close resemblance to the alienated human ego that has lost contact with the ontological Self. Also, the myth of Sophia resembles closely the story of the human psyche that loses its connection with the collective unconscious and needs to be rescued by the Self. Analogies of this sort exist in great profusion.

Many esoteric teachings have proclaimed, "As it is above, so it is below." Our psychological nature (the microcosm) mirrors metaphysical nature (the macrocosm), thus Gnosticism may possess both a psychological and a religious authenticity. Gnostic psychology and Gnostic religion need not be exclusive of one another but may complement each other within an implicit order of wholeness. Gnostics have always held that divinity is immanent within the human spirit, although it is not limited to it. The convergence of Gnostic religious teaching with psychological insight is thus quite understandable in terms of time-honored Gnostic principles.

Conclusion
Some writers make a distinction between ?Gnosis? and ?Gnosticism?. Such distinctions are both helpful and misleading. Gnosis is undoubtedly an experience based not in concepts and precepts, but in the sensibility of the heart. Gnosticism, on the other hand, is the world-view based on the experience of Gnosis. For this reason, in languages other than English, the word Gnosis is often used to denote both the experience and the world view (die Gnosis in German, la Gnose in French).

In a sense, there is no Gnosis without Gnosticism, for the experience of Gnosis inevitably calls forth a world view wherein it finds its place. The Gnostic world view is experiential, it is based on a certain kind of spiritual experience of Gnosis. Therefore, it will not do to omit, or to dilute, various parts of the Gnostic world view, for were one to do this, the world view would no longer conform to experience.

Theology has been called an intellectual wrapping around the spiritual kernel of a religion. If this is true, then it is also true that most religions are being strangled and stifled by their wrappings. Gnosticism does not run this danger, because its world view is stated in myth rather than in theology. Myths, including the Gnostic myths, may be interpreted in diverse ways. Transcendence, numinosity, as well as psychological archetypes along with other elements, play a role in such interpretation. Still, such mythic statements tell of profound truths that will not be denied.

Gnosticism can bring us such truths with a high authority, for it speaks with the voice of the highest part of the human -- the spirit. Of this spirit, it has been said, ?it bloweth where it listeth?. This then is the reason why the Gnostic world view could not be extirpated in spite of many centuries of persecution.

The Gnostic world view has always been timely, for it always responded best to the ?knowledge of the heart? that is true Gnosis. Yet today, its timeliness is increasing, for the end of the second millennium has seen the radical deterioration of many ideologies which evaded the great questions and answers addressed by Gnosticism. The clarity, frankness, and authenticity of the Gnostic answer to the questions of the human predicament cannot fail to impress and (in time) to convince. If your reactions to this summary have been of a similarly positive order, then perhaps you are a Gnostic yourself!
Stephan A. Hoeller (Tau Stephanus, Gnostic Bishop)

SCIENCE: Does the Brain Work Like the Internet?

2005-01-17T10:35:00.000+11:00

Does the Brain Work Like the Internet?
By M.L. Baker
January 7, 2005

Computer scientists studying the stability of Internet connections may someday find their research used to help patients suffering from schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease or stroke.

Recently published research indicates, for the first time, that networks in the human brain work similarly to those in the World Wide Web and other apparently unrelated networks. Thus, techniques to optimize one kind of network could potentially be applied to another.

Characteristics of individuals, such as height, weight and intelligence, tend to be distributed like a bell curve, with most close to some median value. Surprisingly, this is often not the case for the number of links of any individual component, or node, in a networked system. Networks often have very many nodes with very few links, and very few nodes with very many links.

The differences are often extreme; while the vast majority of nodes might have five or fewer links, the super-linked nodes, or hubs, could have as many as a million. In addition, very few "jumps" may be necessary to get from one node to another. Practitioners in the field describe such networks as scale-free (many hubs) and small-world (tightly connected).

This conception of networks is relatively new. Until the late 1990s, people who thought about networks assumed that links were distributed more or less randomly between nodes, and that all nodes in one network would have about the same number of links.

A study of the World Wide Web in 1998 refuted this notion and shocked researchers, as two authors of that study recounted in a 2003 Scientific American article. Subsequently, all sorts of networks were recognized as belonging to the new category, including social systems and protein interactions within a cell.

eWEEK.com Special Report: Network Performance

Now, the human brain joins this group. Dante Chialvo of Northwestern University and colleagues analyzed brain scans of subjects performing tasks including tapping their fingers in response to verbal or visual cues or simply listening to music.

They divided the brain into more than 30,000 cubes, called "voxels," and examined which ones had correlated activity. The characteristics were clearly those of a scale-free, small-world network.

The new insight will be particularly useful for understanding the effect of brain damage, Chialvo told eWEEK.com. Currently, he said, people assume that brain networks are somewhat like road networks, in which local damage has a relatively local effect, but the airline industry is actually a better model.

"Scale-free networks are very particular in how they respond to damage. If you shut down Chicago, the number of flights you must take to get from city to city could go from two to 10 immediately."

eWEEK.com Special Report: Bioinformatics

Chialvo said a confluence of advances had enabled the research. "Five years ago, there was no activity in network theory," he said. In any case, the brain scans could not have provided fine enough resolution, and computers would have worked too slowly a few years ago.

"We're using 35,000 by 35,000 matrices," he said. "Before, those calculations would have taken a week; now they take half an hour."

In addition, he said, the tools of physics are increasingly being applied to understanding biology.

"Overall, our initial results indicate that the brain networks share these two fundamental properties, implying that the underlying properties can be understood using the theoretical framework already advanced in the study of other, disparate networks," Chialvo said.

The work is published this month in the journal Physical Review Letters. The research group included scientists from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.; and the University of Islas Baleares, in Mallorca, Spain.

A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING AND REFLECTION

2005-01-14T13:23:00.000+11:00

A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING AND REFLECTION

I invite all Australians to observe, in their own chosen ways, Sunday 16 January 2005 as a National Day of Mourning and Reflection for the victims of the devastating earthquakes and resulting tsunamis in South and South East Asia on 26 December 2004.

All Australians are overwhelmed by the appalling tragedy that has claimed so many lives, not only of Australians but the citizens of our close neighbours and of many other nations.

Many Australians will attend religious services on this day and I encourage leaders of all denominations and faiths to include a reference to this tragic event and to those left bereaved and otherwise affected by this terrible natural disaster.

Respecting the fact that Sunday is not a day of religious observance for all faiths in this country, some may prefer to mark this occasion on their normal day of prayer.

For those Australians who choose to observe this day of mourning in other ways, activities already planned for Sunday should go ahead perhaps with the inclusion of a suitable dedication or act of remembrance.

On this day I ask that Australians observe a minute?s silence at 11.59 am Australian Eastern Daylight Time, marking the time at which the devastating earthquake which preceded the tsunamis struck. I am sure that television and radio services will mark this moment of silence in an appropriate way.

As a simple tribute to those who have died or who are injured or missing I encourage the wearing of a piece of wattle or similar native flora during the day as a quiet personal gesture of remembrance and reflection.

On Sunday 16 January the Australian National Flag will be flown all day at half-mast on all Commonwealth buildings throughout Australia and at our missions overseas. I encourage others to follow suit.

We are saddened beyond words by the loss of so many lives, particularly young ones. Our hearts and our condolences go out to Australians and those of other nations left grieving and especially those who wait for confirmation of news about their loved ones.

Let us all in our chosen ways find time on Sunday 16 January to mourn the tragic loss of so many and offer our prayers and hope for those still missing or recovering from this event.

January 2005

07 January 2005

SCI-FI: Happy Birthday HAL 9000

2005-01-12T09:49:00.000+11:00

SCI-FI: Happy Birthday HAL9000!!!
HAL 9000, Fictional Supercomputer

* Born: 12 January 1997
* Birthplace: Urbana, Illinois
* Best Known As: The supercomputer from 2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL 9000 is the spaceship supercomputer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 film written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Kubrick. (The movie, and a full-length book of the same title, were based on Clarke's 1951 short story The Sentinel.) HAL malfunctions, attacking the crew of the Discovery and endangering the mission until he is shut down by the astronaut Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea). Hal's creepy-calm voice and calculating intellect have made him one of science fiction's best-known characters. One much-quoted exchange from the movie occurs as HAL tries to trap Bowman outside the ship: Bowman: "Open the pod bay doors please, Hal." HAL: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." HAL also appears in the sequel film, 2010 (1984).

The voice of HAL 9000 was provided by actor Douglas Rain... HAL's age is the subject of a slight discrepancy: Clarke's story has HAL becoming operational on January 12, 1997, while in the film the date given is January 12, 1992; both agree that HAL was "born" at Urbana, Illinois... HAL is sometimes compared with chess-playing computer Deep Blue.

FOUR GOOD LINKS

* 2001 Internet Resource Archive
Excellent online guide to information on the film, with various HAL details
* Happy Birthday, Hal
1997 Wired News article, compares HAL's abilities to real-life computers
* HAL's Legacy: Dream and Reality
Deep-thinking page of essays about HAL and computers; online version of a 1996 book
* 2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Sounds
Several files of Hal's voice from the movie

HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer) is a fictional character in the Space Odyssey series, the first being the novel and film 2001 A Space Odyssey, written by Arthur C Clarke. HAL is an artificial intelligence, the sentient on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery. HAL is usually represented only as his television camera "eyes" that are an omnipresent feature of the Discovery spaceship. The voice of HAL 9000 was performed by the actor Douglas Rain. HAL became operational on January 12, 1997 (1992 in the movie) at the H.A.L. Laboratory in Urbana, Illinois, and was created by Dr. Chandra. In the 2001 film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition and natural language understanding, but also lip reading.
A view of HAL 9000's Brain Room in Discovery
Enlarge
A view of HAL 9000's Brain Room in Discovery

In other languages than English, HAL might have another name: for instance, in the French version of 2001 A Space Odyssey, his name is stated as being CARL, for Cerveau Analytique de Recherche et de Liaison ("Analytic Research and Communication Brain"). However, the famous camera plates still read "HAL 9000".

Some versions state that the name HAL was derived by rotating one letter (see ROT13) of the name IBM, although this has been denied by both Arthur C. Clarke and Dr. Chandra, who states that "by now, any idiot should know that HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorythm" (2010).
HAL's history
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, after HAL appears to be mistaken about a fault in the spacecraft, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole consider disconnecting his cognitive circuits. They believe that HAL cannot hear them, but are unaware that HAL is capable of lip reading. Faced with the prospect of disconnection, HAL proceeds to kill Frank Poole while he is repairing the ship as well as the other members of the crew who are in suspended animation. Realizing what has occurred, astronaut David Bowman then shuts the machine down. HAL's central core is depicted as a room full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, we witness HAL's consciousness degrading.
HAL 9000's characteristic console
Enlarge
HAL 9000's characteristic console

The book differs from the movie in a number of details. First, the book explains far more explicitly the causes of HAL's behavior. Secondly, in the movie, HAL shuts Bowman out of the craft after Bowman attempts to retrieve Poole's body. In the book, Bowman stays within the ship and is forced to shut down HAL after HAL attempts to kill him, opening the ship's airlocks.
HAL in 2010: Odyssey Two

In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL is restarted by his creator, Dr. Chandra, who arrives on the Soviet spaceship Alexei Leonov. Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders required him to keep the discovery of the monolith TMA-1 a secret. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia.

The alien intelligences controlling the monoliths have grandiose plans for Jupiter, plans which place the Leonov in danger. Its human crew devises an escape plan, which unfortunately requires leaving the Discovery and HAL behind, to be destroyed. Dr. Chandra explains the danger, and HAL sacrifices himself for the Leonov's crew. In the moment of his destruction, the monolith-makers transform HAL into a non-corporeal being, so that David Bowman's avatar may have a companion.

The details in the book and film are nominally the same, with one important exception - in the film, HAL functions normally after being reactivated. In the book, it is revealed that his voice circuits were destroyed during the shutdown, forcing him to communicate through screen text.

The session of keyboard/screen interaction between HAL and Dr. Chandra has a taste of SHRDLU, which both increases the realism of the scene, and gives an interesting insight of the perception of Artificial Intelligence at the time the book was written.
HAL in 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey

In 2061: Odyssey Three, Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.

In 3001: The Final Odyssey, the emulated forms of Bowman and HAL help Frank Poole infect the monolith with a computer virus; as the primitive life in Jupiter's clouds were sacrificed to make the sun to warm Europa, it is feared that humanity would be sacrificed for the new life at Europa.
SAL 9000

HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000. SAL (or possibly another "twin niner-triple-zero") was used as a reference system for HAL; when the twin computer fails to predict any communications failure, Bowman and Poole begin to suspect HAL's reliability. SAL is clearly "female", and features similar camera plates like HAL, but the "eye" is blue. Dr. Chandra has a private terminal to SAL's mainframe in his office, and his influence causes her to develop a slightly Indian accent, making her sound like an Indian princess returning from college in Cambridge (2010: Odyssey Two).

Before the Soviet-USA mission to retrieve Discovery, Chandra uses her for a simulation of the possible effects that a prolonged "sleep" might have induced in HAL, code-named Project Phoenix. When Dr Chandra taunts SAL to guess the reason for the name, her display of culture makes it clear that SAL has access to some form of encyclopedic knowledge database.

In the book 2010, we learn that another ground-based HAL machine undergoes the same psychosis that HAL does.
See also

* computers in fiction

External links

* Text excerpts from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (http://www.imdb.com/Quotes?2001%3A+A+Space+Odyssey+(1968))
* How about an HAL 9000 Desktop Theme for your Mac? (http://www.geocities.com/ninetriplezero)
* Audio soundbites from 2001: A Space Odyssey (http://www.dailywav.com/numbers.html) including such favorites as "Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL," "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen" -- and many more!

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "HAL 9000".

SPACE: Emoticons Invade Mars

2004-10-25T13:42:00.000+10:00

Emoticons Invade Mars

Oblique view of crater ring, sometimes whimsically called the "Happy Face" crater. Credit:NASA/JPL/MSSS

The Mars Global Surveyor released the latest glyph image that appears to evoke the kinds of communication in rock formations that has become famous among Mars' watchers on the internet. But there is a serious side to interpreting remote sensing data, and shadow is not always one's ally.

Astrobiology Magazine -- Light and shadow can play tricks with any geological formation, particularly in cropped imagery that can make any terrain eventually look like some kind of 'smiley face'.

The Cydonia region on Mars -- and its accompanying Face on Mars image -- is legendary in this regard; it has been compared to a martian face eroded over time like an Egyptian Sphinx and has even become a troublesome diversion in the earliest science targeting for the Mars Global Surveyor.

The latest entry in this game of reading geological hieroglyphs is notable however, in actually spelling out a message: "Hi".

Although one might argue that most of the "i" is missing, and part of the "h" has been eroded away, the October 12th image of "Hi" glyphs was photographed from orbit, by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC).

The image shows light-toned sedimentary rock outcrops in northern Sinus Meridiani that almost seem to spell out the word, "hi". This natural graffiti is all that remains of a suite of sedimentary rock that once covered the area shown here.

Is this a case of the internet serving up its first interplanetary versions of emotional icons, or "emoticons"?

No longer must one speculate about the intentions of a secret, subterranean fortress operating beneath an ancient Mars' face. Now the intentions are clear (at least assuming the hieroglyph is communicating to an English-speaking terrestrial audience).

No longer must one wonder if the intention is friendly or hostile. The rocks on Mars are welcoming our cameras.

The "Hi" rock formation joins the "Happy Face" crater and the circular Inca City -- each a view from above that shows a whimsical side to remote sensing.

In some ways, the high-jinx centers on finding a Goldilocks' balance between vivid language and precise scientific terms.

Arizona planetary scientist and painter, Bill Hartmann, put some historical perspective on the discussion, "I think the mania for "neutral" and often "cute" names is beginning to be more destructive than helpful."

Hartmann said: "As my archaeologist wife commented recently, the appealing story about Mars is that it is so Earth-like, but the proliferation of strange sounding geologic names for surface textures, like 'chaotic terrain,' 'fretted terrain,' and so on, leads the public to perceive Mars as ever more alien and non-understandable."

"This was started with a vengeance during the the Mariner 9 imaging team interpretations in the early 1970s, in which I was involved," continued Hartmann. "But it's gotten out of hand! Not to mention the 25 year absurdity of the "'face on Mars,' a whimsical name that got completely out of control, with the 'face on Mars' buffs claiming NASA purposely aborted the Mars Observer mission to hide the truth, and later requiring our Mars Global Surveyor team to drop its science plan, reorient the spacecraft, and waste tax dollars to get images of the 'face' as one of the first activities of the mission."

There is a serious question buried somewhere in the hieroglyphic interpretations. How does one approach a biological signature when visual or instrumental ambiguities cloud the data?

As the principal science investigator on the European Beagle 2 mission, Colin Pillinger, described earlier biological experiments: "It wasn't that Viking didn't find life, it was that they thought the conditions were just so horrid, so harsh, nobody anticipated that life could exist there."

This image, showing what looks to be a human face (above center) and other features of the Cydonia region on the Martian surface, was produced using data from NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in 1976. Credit: NASA

Mars Says "hi"! MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-877, 12 October 2004. Image Credit: Mars Global Surveyor, Malin Space Systems

The Mars' program has structured a series of missions to take on the major questions of water history first, continuing with later follow-ups to make a comprehensive investigation of how water might interact with any remnant biochemistry.

Harvard's Andy Knoll described this staged approach to Astrobiology Magazine as a methodic testing of hypotheses against each other: "A couple of years ago, NASA embarked on a funding campaign to essentially try and anticipate any kind of suggestively biological signature that might be found in any kind of exploration of another planet so that we wouldn't be seen to be scratching our heads. But the plain fact is that you can't anticipate anything you might see...I actually like the whole architecture of NASA's plan to go one step at a time, do each step carefully, and in step two build on what you learned in step one. It makes sense."

The 2009 Mars Science Laboratory is planned as the first set of biological experiments in the current exploration strategy. As the NASA Office of Space Science noted however, there has been considerable debate about when to time a sample return: "We note with concern that there appears to be a growing division within the Mars community between scientists seeking early Mars Sample Return and those who believe it is best to delay it."

As principal investigator Steve Squyres described the team's public profile: "We're letting the science hang out there for everyone to see. We risk letting people think we're confused, but hey, science is really like that. It's exciting and we don't have all the answers. That's why we do it."

Follow every step of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission with RedNova. Click here to learn more...

SCIENCE: It's official - the platypus is weird

2004-10-25T13:06:00.000+10:00

Platypus research turns up some interesting results. (ABC)

It's official - the platypus is weird

Scientists from the Australian National University have proved what many have thought for years - platypuses are really weird.

In the international Nature journal today they report a platypus has five chromosones determining sex, not one - like the rest of the species in the world.

Professor Jennifer Graves says platypus have five X and five Y chromosomes, and when sperm are made it gets even stranger.

"What we've discovered is that these five Xs and five Ys line up in a great big long chain, that go XY XY XY XY XY XY, and then all the X chromosomes move to one pole, and all the Y chromosomes move to the other," she said.

Professor Graves says there is another unexpected finding.

"One end of the chain looks like human sex chromosomes but the other end of the chain looks like bird sex chromosomes, so the chain is actually linking a very ancient system of sex determination in birds and probably reptiles too," she said.

The unique status of the Australian mammal is now unassailable.

TIPS: Usability First: Usability Glossary: Fitts' Law

2004-10-25T13:03:00.000+10:00

Usability First: Usability Glossary: Fitts' Law: "Usability Glossary: Fitts' Law

T = k log2(D/S + 0.5), k ~ 100 msec.
T = time to move the hand to a target
D = distance between hand and target
S = size of target
Fitts' Law is a model to account for the time it takes to point at something, based on the size and distance of the target object. Fitts' Law and variations of it are used to model the time it takes to use a mouse and other input devices to click on objects on a screen.
Broadly, Fitts' Law can be applied by designers to suggest moving target buttons closer and making them larger for extremely commonly used buttons. In detail, applying the formula can be extremely useful for exact design of time-critical applications.
see also
cognitive modeling
GOMS
Hick's Law
input device
Meyer's Law
power law of practice
categories
Glossary Categories > I/O Devices > I/O Design Principles
Glossary Categories > Psychology > Cognitive Modeling
Glossary Categories > Usability Methods > Cognitive Modeling
Glossary Categories > Design Principles > I/O Design Principles "

ESSENTIAL: SAX for .NET, the Simple API for XML in .NET

2004-10-25T12:59:00.000+10:00

SAX for .NET

This is the official website for SAX for .NET, the .NET way to parse XML documents using SAX.

News

Oct. 19, 2004: Release of SAX for .NET 1.0 and SAXExpat.NET 1.0. Download from here.

SAX is the Simple API for XML, originally a Java-only API. SAX was the first widely adopted API for XML in Java, and is a de facto standard. Read more about it on the website of the SAX project. SAX for .NET is the port of SAX to C#. Read more about the differences between the Java version of SAX and the C# version by visiting the differences section.

You can download the default SAX for .NET sources, as well as sample applications and parsers from the Files section. Currently, a C# port of AElfred and a SAX adapter for Expat are provided.

This release is a C#/.NET port of the Java SAX API. It focuses on version 2 of SAX only, as there are no legacy SAX 1 applications to consider in the .NET environment.

This port intends to follow C# coding and naming conventions, but tries to stay close to the original Java source semantics. It has strayed away from them where it was believed there was a better choice for C#, or when it was possible and useful to change the way it was done in the original. For a complete list of differences, see the differences section.

This library is currently maintained by Karl Waclawek.

NANO: Flexible sensors make robot skin

2004-10-20T14:01:00.000+10:00

Flexible sensors make robot skin

Skin is very useful. In addition to neatly separating self from other, it provides all kinds of feedback.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo have devised pressure-sensor arrays that promise to give objects like rugs and robots the equivalent of one aspect of skin -- pressure sensitivity.

The researchers' pressure sensor arrays are built from inexpensive organic, or plastic, transistors on a flexible material. This allows for dense arrays that can be used over large areas.

The arrays could be used in pressure-sensitive coverings in hospitals, homes, gyms and cars to monitor people's health and performance, and eventually as skin that would give robots the means to interact more sensitively with their surroundings, said Takao Someya, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tokyo.

The sensor skin works even when rolled around a cylinder as small as 4 millimeters in diameter, said Someya. The researchers' prototype is an eight-centimeter-square sheet containing a 32-by-32 array of organic sensors -- a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter. In contrast, humans have 1,500 pressure sensors per square centimeter in the fingertips, though far fewer in most other places.

The pressure sensor arrays could be used in pressure carpets that distinguish family members from strangers or sense when a hospital patient collapses.

The active-matrix design allows the arrays to be smart enough to enable specific sensors at certain feedback points to, for instance, monitor the heart and breathing rate of a hospital patient who has fallen to the floor, said Someya. The skin could measure whether an elderly patient is just taking a rest, or needs help, he said.

Because organic transistor-based electronics are potentially very cheap, "it is not unrealistic to spread pressure carpets all over the floor in your house," said Someya.

The skin could also be used in car seats to monitor drivers' mental and physical conditions, Someya said. "Our large-area pressure [sensing abilities] would be helpful" in obtaining information through drivers seats, he said.

The skin could eventually be used to make domestic robots more appropriately sensitive of their surroundings, said Someya. "Robots working at home definitely require touch sensitivity," said Someya. This has proven difficult, he said. "It is not trivial matter to give a robot the ability to pick up an egg."

A pressure-sensitive skin would be helpful in making robots that are capable of gently lifting a person or avoiding injuring people, said Someya.

The prototype's pressure-sensitive rubber layer contains electrically conductive graphite particles that change the layer's electrical resistance when pressure is applied. This half-millimeter-thick layer and a copper electrode are laminated to an array of organic transistors. Because the pressure-sensitive layer and the electrode are unpatterned, only the transistor assembly requires alignment, making the manufacturing process relatively simple, according to Someya.

The sensors are controlled by an active matrix that uses a transistor to record signals from each sensor in the array. The active matrix means that only one transistor is on for each stimulated sensor, which allows for lower power consumption and greater control than simpler pressure sensor arrays that wire sensors together in grids. This makes the pressure-sensitive skin appropriate for large-area sensor arrays, according to Someya.

Organic transistors are considerably larger and slower than the silicon transistors used in most electronics, but they are also very cheap -- they can be manufactured using a printing process. Many groups of researchers are working to make speedier versions of organic transistors. The pressure-sensitive skin, however, is an appropriate application for today's relatively large and slow versions, said Someya.

There is work to be done before the pressure-sensitive skin is ready for practical use, said Someya. The main challenge is making the organic transistors more reliable, he said. The electrical characteristics of organic transistors change in a matter of days, said Someya. To be practical, however, organic transistors should be stable for years, he said.

Electronic skin could be ready for practical use in four to five years, said Someya.

Takao Someya's research colleagues were Tsuyoshi Sekitani, Shingo Iba, Yusaku Kato, Hiroshi Kawaguci, and Takayasu Sakurai. The work appeared in the July 6, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research was funded by the Japanese New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), the Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications, and the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Timeline: 4-5 years
Funding: Government
TRN Categories: Sensors; Robotics; Materials Science and Engineering
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, "A Large-Area, Flexible Pressure Sensor Matrix with Organic Field-Effect Transistors for Artificial Skin Applications," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 6, 2004

NANO: Robot Spider Walks on Water

2004-10-20T13:57:00.000+10:00

Robot Spider Walks on Water

PITTSBURGH -- It could be called a mechanical miracle -- a robot that walks on water.

With inspiration from nature and some help from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team led by Carnegie Mellon engineering professor Metin Sitti built a tiny robot that can walk on water, much like the insects known as water skimmers or Jesus bugs.

It's only a prototype, but some researchers imagine the water-skimming robot could have many uses. With a chemical sensor, it could monitor water supplies for toxins; with a camera it could be a spy or an explorer; with a net or a boom, it could skim contaminants off the top of water.

Producing it was "the final challenge of microrobotics," said Sitti, who runs Carnegie Mellon's NanoRobotics Lab. "It needs to be so light and so compact."

Sitti's robot is little more than a half-inch boxy body made from carbon fibers and eight, 2-inch steel-wire legs coated with a water-repelling plastic (technically making it a water spider).

It doesn't have a brain, any sensors or a battery. Its "muscles" are three flat-plate piezoelectric actuators -- pieces of metal that bend when electricity runs through them. Wires run from the actuators to a power supply.

The robot can stand on water -- it doesn't float -- and can skim backward and forward, propelling itself with two legs that act like oars. Sitti said he could build a more complex water-skimming robot within six months.

Sitti's prototype is especially impressive considering researchers didn't know how water skimmers walked on water until last year. Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician John M.W. Bush and two graduate students solved the riddle by placing dyes and particles in water and using a high-speed video camera.

The MIT team discovered that water striders move by pushing down on the surface of water with enough force to create valleys, but not enough to break the surface. The water then bounces back like a trampoline to push the insect forward.

Sitti's prototype shows how important lighter and stronger materials have been to robotics.

"If you had asked us 10 years ago to build a water bug, I don't think we would have done it," said Mark Cutkosky, an Stanford University engineering professor who has been building roach-like robots.

Sitti's robot weighs about a gram, about the same as half a dime. So far, it's also cheap. Sitti estimates the materials in his Spartan prototype cost about $10.

SCIENCE: People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

2004-10-13T13:24:00.000+10:00

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

By Rowan Hooper

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells.

That's the view of scientists at Imperial College London who published a paper in Nature Biotechnology Oct. 6 describing how these microbes interact with the body. Understanding the workings of the superorganism, they say, is crucial to the development of personalized medicine and health care in the future because individuals can have very different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial fauna.

The scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Luckily for us, the bacteria are on the whole commensal, sharing our food but doing no real harm. (The word derives from the Latin meaning to share a table for dinner.) In fact, they are often beneficial: Our commensal bacteria protect us from potentially dangerous infections. They do this through close interaction with our immune systems.

"We have known for some time that many diseases are influenced by a variety of factors, including both genetics and environment, but the concept of this superorganism could have a huge impact on our understanding of disease processes," said Jeremy Nicholson, a professor of biological chemistry at Imperial College and leader of the study. He believes the approach could apply to research on insulin-resistance, heart disease, some cancers and perhaps even some neurological diseases.

Following the sequencing of the human genome, scientists quickly saw that the next step would be to show how human genes interact with environmental factors to influence the risk of developing disease, the aging process and drug action. But because environmental factors include the gene products of trillions of bacteria in the gut, they get very complex indeed. The information in the human genome itself, 3 billion base pairs long, does not help reduce the complexity.

"The human genome provides only scant information. The discovery of how microbes in the gut can influence the body's responses to disease means that we now need more research into this area," said Nicholson. "Understanding these interactions will extend human biology and medicine well beyond the human genome and help elucidate novel types of gene-environment interactions, with this knowledge ultimately leading to new approaches to the treatment of disease."

Nicholson's colleague, professor Ian Wilson from Astra Zeneca, believes the "human super-organism" concept "could have a huge impact on how we develop drugs, as individuals can have very different responses to drug metabolism and toxicity."

"The microbes can influence things such as the pH levels in the gut and the immune response, all of which can have effects on the effectiveness of drugs," Wilson said.

The Imperial College research demonstrates what many -- from X Files stalwarts to UFO fanatics -- have long claimed: We are not alone. Specifically, the human genome does not carry enough information on its own to determine key elements of our own biology.

BOOK: Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

2004-10-13T12:03:00.000+10:00

Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll


Creator	Carroll, Lewis (1832-1898)
Title	Through the Looking-Glass
Language	English
LoC Class	PR: Language and Literatures: English literature
LoC Class	PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres
EText-No.	12
Release Date	1991-02-01
Copyrighted	No

HOORAH!: EFF's Ten Most Wanted for crimes against the public domain!

2004-10-13T11:57:00.000+10:00

The Patent Busting Project

» Check out the EFF's Ten Most Wanted for crimes against the public domain!

An EFF Initiative To Protect Innovation and Free Expression

(PDF available here. [41k])

I. The Problem

Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called ?prior art?) is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as:

One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.)
Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.) and
Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)

II. The Harm

The harm these patents cause the public is profound.

Unlike most technologies, software and the Internet have attracted a vast number of small business, non-profit, and individual users ? each of whom has adopted and built upon these resources as part of their daily interaction with computers and the online world. From open source programming to online journaling to political campaigning, the average citizen is using new technology online and on her desktop as often as any traditional company.

With this increased visibility, however, comes increased vulnerability. Previously, patent holders had only targeted competing companies. These companies have established legal departments and outside counsel and are thus able to defend against illegitimate patent threats. Now some patent holders have begun to set their sights on the new class of technology users?small organizations and individuals who cannot afford to retain lawyers. Faced with million-dollar legal demands, they have no choice but to capitulate and pay license fees ? fees that often fund more threat letters and lawsuits. And because these patents have become cheaper and easier to obtain, the patentee?s costs can be spread out quickly amongst the many new defendants. Our patent system has historically relied on the resources of major corporate players to defeat bad patents; now it leaves these new defendants with few if any options to defend themselves.

Illegitimate patents can also threaten free expression. More and more people are using software and Internet technology to express themselves online. Website and blogging tools are increasingly popular. Video and audio streaming technology is ubiquitous. E-mail and Instant Messaging have reached users of all ages. Yet because patents can be anywhere and everywhere in these technologies, the average user has no way of knowing whether his or her tools are subject to legal threats. Patent owners who claim control over these means of community discourse can threaten anyone who uses them, even for personal non-commercial purposes. We lose much if we allow overreaching patent claims to reduce the tremendous benefits that software and technology bring to freedom of expression.

III. The Project

So how do we confront these problems? Both the Federal Trade Commission and National Academy of Sciences have issued a series of recommendations for reforming the patent system, each of which provide a useful start. However, there is no guarantee that these reforms will be adopted or that they will be considered on any specific timeline. To help fill this gap, EFF is launching a Patent Busting Project to take on illegitimate patents that suppress non-commercial and small business innovation or limit free expression online. The Project has two components:

A. Documenting the Damage

In the coming months, EFF plans to launch various technical efforts to document the harm that these patents are causing to the public interest. The efforts will include:

(1) Identifying the worst offending patents;
(2) Documenting the prior art that shows their invalidity; and
(3) Chronicling the negative impact they have had on online publishers and innovators.

EFF plans to explore numerous approaches to achieving these goals, including inviting contributions from the public; building on the successful information-gathering and public education of the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse; and collaborating with organizations such as the Internet Archive, the Public Patent Foundation, and various technology law school clinics around the country.

B. Challenging The Patents

Once it has identified some of the worst offenders, EFF will begin filing challenges to each in the form of a ?re-examination request? to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. These requests create a forum to affirmatively invalidate patents rather than forcing technology users to await the threat of suit. Under this procedure, EFF can choose particularly egregious patents, submit the prior art it has collected, and argue that the patent should be revoked. EFF will collaborate with members of the software and Internet communities as well as legal clinics and pro bono cooperating attorneys to help in these efforts.

IV. Additional Resources and Contact Information

For more information on the project or to make a donation, contact:

Jason Schultz
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 436-9333 x 112
jason@eff.org
http://www.eff.org

Additional Resources:

Press Release: EFF Launches Patent Busting Project

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: Patents

FTC Report on Patent Reform

NAS Report on Patent Reform

PATENTS: EFF Publishes Patent Hit List

2004-10-13T11:55:00.000+10:00

EFF Publishes Patent Hit List

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is spoiling for a fight, and on Wednesday it named the top 10 patents it wants killed, or at least redefined.

The EFF said all 10 patents are in some way illegitimate and are being used to limit free expression.

As part of its Patent Busting Project, the EFF in mid-June began soliciting the public for submissions of patents that were both potentially invalid and used to stifle online innovation. The organization received nearly 200 suggestions, 10 of which it will now formally ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine.

"These patent owners have been threatening people that just can't defend themselves," said Jason Schultz, staff attorney at the EFF. "They're trying to claim ownership over some fundamental part of software of the Internet that people use every day, and they're threatening small companies or individuals that can't afford lawyers."

The owners of the 10 patents include some of the biggest names in media and entertainment, as well as some smaller firms and one individual. In each case, Schultz said, the EFF believes the owner has far overstepped its rights under the patents.

The 10 patents, in order of importance to the EFF, are:

1. Acacia Technologies' digital media transmission patent, which the company defines as covering "the transmission and receipt of digital content via the Internet, cable, satellite and other means." The EFF is worried that Acacia, which has already sued several large communications companies, is unfairly targeting small audio- and video-streaming websites.

2. Clear Channel's Instant Live patent, which covers technology used to produce instant recordings of live concerts. The media giant recently bought the patent and is now going after artists who choose to give fans CDs of their shows.

3. Acceris Communication's voice over IP technology patent. Schultz said Acceris is targeting smaller VOIP players. "They're sending (the) patents to investors," said Schultz, "trying to intimidate the investors."

4. Sheldon Goldberg's patents covering online gaming and real-time ladder rankings. Goldberg's attorney has sent a series of cease-and-desist letters to small gaming websites.

5. Ideaflood's personalized subdomains patent. Schultz said the EFF is afraid Ideaflood may try to go after LiveJournal members, as well as others using subdomain addresses.

6. NeoMedia Technologies' patent that claims to control methods for accessing computers based on identification codes, such as bar codes. Already, NeoMedia has sued three developing companies for infringement. "Allowing them to control all look-up functions over a network," said Schultz, "is extremely dangerous."

7. Test Central's Internet test-making technology patent. The EFF is afraid Test Central will use its patent to scare off distance-learning organizations. Indeed, the company has already contacted several institutions, including some universities.

8. Nintendo's video-game emulator patent. The entertainment powerhouse has patented the technology for emulating its old games, something Schultz said used to be allowable under the fair-use doctrine. "A bunch of small game companies are writing these emulators, and they're really no threat to Nintendo," said Schultz. "But Nintendo is being a big bully."

9. Firepond's patent covering automatic message-interpretation and routing systems. This patent, said Schultz, would effectively control the technology that allows consumers to call companies and have their calls routed based on a spoken command.

10. Seer Systems' patent covering the generation, distribution, storing and performing of musical work files. The company claims control over a method of compiling music files as single files for distribution over the Internet, the EFF said, and is targeting small developers of technology for creating music and sound.

Now that the EFF has selected the patents it will challenge, Schultz said, the organization will collect data it can use to demonstrate to the Patent Office that it should re-examine each case.

According to Phil Mann, a Seattle patent attorney with 21 years of experience, the re-examination process is designed to give the public a method to oppose patents.

"It allows members of the public to ask that the patent be examined once again in light of new information," said Mann, "in the hope that the Patent Office will say, 'Oh, we made a mistake. That patent should not have been granted in the first place.'"

Not surprisingly, the owners of the patents contacted for this story disagree with the EFF.

Charles Jensen, CEO of NeoMedia, argued that his company bought its patent in 1995.

"It's been reviewed by many of the biggest companies there are, and all of them say they're valid," Jensen said. "We believe our patents are valid, very powerful patents."

Similarly, Jim Posch, CEO of Test Central, said the EFF and other critics misunderstand its efforts to protect its intellectual property.

"We have invested millions of dollars in our methods, (and) the patent protects this investment," said Posch. "If you invent a better toothbrush handle, you can patent it; (it's) the same thing with our testing methods. As with the toothbrush, one patent on the handle (doesn't) prevent others from going into the toothbrush business."

In a statement, Clear Channel CEO Brian Becker vigorously defended the company's Instant Live patent.

"We want the practice of live recordings being made available immediately after concerts to be in widespread use and welcome all legitimate and serious conversations with those interested in licensing our patent," Becker said in his statement. "But we will not conduct licensing conversations in public or via the media. Nor will we put artists in the middle of those business negotiations -- or try to hide behind them as we negotiate."

The EFF's Schultz hopes this process will help get rid of some bad patents, educate the public about the process of challenging them and protect Internet-based expression technologies.

"The consensus is that a lot of bad patents are leaking through the cracks of the examination process," he said. "We feel ... the ones that we've targeted here are not only invalid, but are being abused."

PATENTS: Clear Channel Buys Concert Recording Patent, Tells Bands To Stop

2004-10-13T11:52:00.000+10:00

Clear Channel Buys Concert Recording Patent, Tells Bands To Stop

Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, May 25th, 2004 @ 01:53AM
from the there they go again dept.

Just as more bands have been realizing the power of offering instant concert recordings to their fans, you knew the industry would somehow figure out a way to kill this new, growing business model. Submitted by someone anonymously, comes this story, that tells us that some company actually had a patent on making instant recordings of concerts for sale - and radio giant Clear Channel has now purchased that patent. Of course, now that they have it, they're cracking down on many bands that want to offer such recordings. They claim they want to be "artist" friendly, but are looking at it from a business perspective - meaning stamping out the competition and selling licenses to any bands that want to offer immediate recordings to their fans. It's amazing how the industry continuously finds ways to use intellectual property protections to harm new business models, rather than to let them help grow the overall industry. Of course, once again, you have to wonder what exactly is patentable here: it's basically a CD burner. Why does selling concerts via a CD burner immediately after the show need a special patent?

PATENTS: Patents Lined Up To Be Shot

2004-10-13T11:49:00.000+10:00

Patents Lined Up To Be Shot

Contributed by Mike on Wednesday, June 30th, 2004 @ 04:24AM
from the knock-'em-down dept.

Considering the number of "bad patent" posts around here, it's good to know that someone is trying to do something about them... The EFF has put together a list of 10 all-around awful patents and will try, one-by-one to take them all down (or at least get them modified). To pick the list, the EFF went after not only bad patents, but bad patents that are being abused by the companies that own them. Number one on the list is everyone's favorite patent from Acacia concerning "the transmission and receipt of digital content via the Internet, cable, satellite and other means." They've been attacking plenty of companies, big and small, to try to suck out license fees. Second on the list is Clear Channel's patent on live recordings. The list is made up of plenty of small patent hoarding firms, but also has a few big companies (like Clear Channel) thrown in for good measure. One of the more ridiculous ones listed is a company that claims to hold patents on VoIP technology. Instead of going after companies actually making VoIP technology, they're sending the patent to investors to scare them off. Hopefully, the EFF can actually do something about this list, but knowing our patent system, it's going to be a long, uphill battle.

NETWAR: Al-Battar, the al Qaeda Manual on Kidnapping

2004-09-30T14:34:00.000+10:00

Al-Battar, the al Qaeda Manual on Kidnapping

#{TIGGR} - A sobering thought - ?The Enemy? is more organised than us - where is the ?Western manual on avoiding kidnap?????...Scariest of all is thati think this is for real......

Issue no. 10 of Al-Battar, al-Qaeda?s training manual has a special coverage of kidnapping. Notice that the terrorists in the Osetian school followed more or less the manual..

Kidnapping
A. Reasons for detaining one or more individuals by an enemy:

i) Force the government or the enemy to succumb to some demands.
ii) Put the government in a difficult situation that will create a political embarrassment between the government and the countries of the detainees.
iii) Obtaining important information from the detainees.
iv) Obtaining ransoms. Such was the case with the brothers in the Philippines, Chechnya, and Algiers. Our brothers from Muhammad?s Army in Kashmir received a two million dollar ransom that provided good financial support to the organization.
v) Bringing a specific case to light. This happened at the beginning of the cases in Chechnya and Algeria, with the hijacking of the French plane, and the kidnapping operations performed by the brothers in Chechnya and the Philippines.

....And so on and so forth it continues.......all the tips you ever wanted to know about kidnapping but were too scared to ask!.......

SPACE: SpaceShipOne Rolls During Flight To Space

2004-09-30T10:26:00.000+10:00

SpaceShipOne Rolls During Flight To Space

UPDATED: 12:43 PM EDT September 29, 2004

SpaceShipOne, on a quest to win $10 million, spun unexpectedly as it rocketed toward space Wednesday, but apparently went into space for the second time.

The craft that in June became the first private vehicle to take a person into space now must complete a third flight in the next two weeks to win the Ansari X-Prize as the first private craft to be capable of routinely reaching space.


	SpaceShipOne Learn How SpaceShipOne Flies, Lands

After landing, pilot Mike Melvill jokingly called the roll at the end of the rocket burn a "victory roll."

"Now that was fun," he said of the flight.

He said that he shut off the motor 11 seconds before it would have automatically cut off.

The White Knight carrier plane took off about 10:10 a.m. EST. About an hour later, the space craft dropped from the plane, fired its rocket and began its flight upward over 300,000 feet.

It soon began rolling, but the nose kept pointed upward, and radar indicated that it reached the official edge of space. It then apppeared to turn up its wings, as expected, and float toward Earth as a glider. It then locked the wings back in place for the last 40,000 feet or so of its descent.

About 20 minutes later, glided to a landing from the airport where it took off.

Designer Burt Rutan said that Melvill was told to abort the flight when the craft started spinning, but Melvill wanted to make sure the threshold was crossed for the first half of the attempt to win the prize.

Rutan said that he didn't know if the problem would delay an expected Monday flight to capture the cash.

Melvill, who became the first private astronaut in June, and weight equivalent to two people were on board. X-Prize rules call for the craft to carry three people, or enough weight to simulate that load.

AP Image

SpaceShipOne, the first private craft to take a person into space.

The weight was made up in part by personal effects of members of the team that brought the project to life.

The flight was the first of two that would earn the team -- led Burt Rutan and financed largely by Microsoft's Paul Allen -- the reward.

The X-Prize orgnizers announced after the flight that they plan to hold an annual event at a spaceport in New Mexico, because the program was not designed to create a one-time effort, but to begin an industry.

The 10-day festival is expected to encourage X-Prize competitors to go for as many flights as they can during that time.

An official called it a "Grand Prix of space."

Earlier this week, airline mogul Richard Branson announced that he has licensed some of the technology from SpaceShipOne to develop a commercial spaceflight venture that could be in operation sometime in 2007.

Rutan is famous for innovative, record-setting designs, including the Voyager craft that circled the globe on a single tank of fuel.

SPACE: Large Asteroid Safely Zooms By Earth

2004-09-30T09:48:00.000+10:00

Large Asteroid Safely Zooms By Earth



Artist's concept of asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which will come no closer than four times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Credit: NASA - click to enlarge.

et Propulsion Lab -- A mountain-sized asteroid made its closest approach to Earth at 6:35 a.m. Pacific Time (9:35 a.m. Eastern Time) Wednesday morning.

Although asteroid 4179 Toutatis came no closer than four times the distance between Earth and the Moon (approximately 1.5 million kilometers or 961,000 miles), this was the closest approach of any known asteroid of comparable size this century.

"This is the closest Toutatis will come for another 500 years, and its orbit is very well known," said Dr. Don Yeomans of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manager of NASA's Near Earth Objects Program Office. "What this fly-by provides is an opportunity to study one of our closest solar system neighbors."

"While we have done radar observations on this particular asteroid before, this is the closest it has come since at least the twelfth century," said Dr. Steve Ostro, a scientist at JPL. "We will use the huge dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to refine our knowledge of its physical characteristics and its trajectory."

Named after an obscure Celtic and Gallic god, Toutatis is a yam-shaped space rock that measures 1.92 kilometers (1.2 miles) by 2.29 kilometers (1.4 miles) by 4.6 kilometers (2.9 miles).

VIRUS: Windows JPEG exploit found in the wild

2004-09-29T13:55:00.001+10:00

Windows JPEG exploit found in the wild
Tuesday, September 28 2004
by Ciaran Buckley

Less than two weeks after it was announced, hackers have exploited a Windows XP JPEG vulnerability and are spreading a virus through adult content newsgroups.

On 14 September, Microsoft released Security Bulletin MS04-028, which warned that because of a problem with the way that Windows handles JPEG image files, malicious code could be executed on a user's machine if they simply viewed an ordinary image file. Because Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is vulnerable, users could be attacked just by visiting a website that has affected images.

Within a week, malicious hackers had developed a proof of concept and software development kit (SDK) for others who wished to write a virus to exploit the vulnerability. A virus is now loose on the internet, having been posted to an adult content newsgroup with a JPEG extension.

"What's important for people to understand is how quickly after the bulletin is published that viruses are out in the wild," said Conor Flynn, technical director of Dublin-based Rits, speaking to ElectricNews.Net. "This is a difficult virus to stop, because not many people have web-based scanning at the perimeter and it can go straight from your browser to your PC."

The virus is a Trojan, which makes the computer available to the hacker as a drone or "zombie," which means that it could be used to forward spam onto other users, or to bombard websites in a distributed denial of service (DDoS). The virus is also able to access information on the user's computer, including software license keys, credit card details or other confidential information. If the computer is on a network, then the virus will have access to all of the shared drives and could spread throughout the LAN.

Flynn advises users to install the patch for the flaw, which can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.

"People are patching the vulnerability, but they're doing it very slowly," said Conor Flynn. "People should download patches before they open Internet Explorer, people need to get into a new routine."

As a general rule, internet users should install anti-virus software and keep it updated and should configure a firewall to stop intrusions from the web, Flynn added. "The top three or four anti-virus programmes do a very good job if you keep them up to date," he said. "The Windows firewall is average, but there are firewalls like Symantec, Tiny and ZoneAlarm which are very good and some of them are free for home users."

VIRUS: Windows JPEG exploit found in the wild

2004-09-29T13:55:00.000+10:00

Windows JPEG exploit found in the wild
Tuesday, September 28 2004
by Ciaran Buckley

Less than two weeks after it was announced, hackers have exploited a Windows XP JPEG vulnerability and are spreading a virus through adult content newsgroups.

Flynn advises users to install the patch for the flaw, which can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.

SPACE: Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks Among Thousands of New Images

2004-09-29T10:50:00.000+10:00

Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks Among Thousands of New Images



Wheel tracks left by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, and even the rover itself, are visible in this image from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL - click to enlarge.

Jet Propulsion Lab -- NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, starting its third mission extension this week after seven years of orbiting Mars, is using an innovative technique to capture pictures even sharper than most of the more than 170,000 it has already produced.

One dramatic example from the spacecraft's Mars Orbiter Camera shows wheel tracks of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and the rover itself.

Another tells scientists that no boulders bigger than about 1 to 2 meters (3 to 7 feet) are exposed in giant ripples created by a catastrophic flood.

Those examples are available online at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs.

In addition, about 24,000 newly catalogued images that Mars Global Surveyor took between October 2003 and March 2004 have been added to the Mars Orbiter Camera Image Gallery at http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/.

These include additional pictures of the Mars Exploration Rover sites seen from orbit.

SPACE: SpaceShipOne Going for X Prize Wednesday

2004-09-29T10:34:00.000+10:00

SPACE: SpaceShipOne Going for X Prize Wednesday



Image credit: Scaled Composites - click to enlarge.

MOJAVE, Calif. (AP) -- A test pilot in a stubby rocket plane will try to climb more than 60 miles over the Mojave Desert and punch through the atmosphere Wednesday in the first stage of a quest to win a $10 million prize meant to encourage space tourism.

SpaceShipOne, which in June became the first private, manned craft to reach space, was to make two attempts to rocket through the atmosphere in six days, less than half the 14-day span allowed under Ansari X Prize rules. The second flight is set for Oct. 4.

Created by maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen, SpaceShipOne is poised to take the prize sought by more than two dozen teams around the world.

Its closest competitor, a Canadian team with a balloon-launched rocket, scheduled its first flight for Oct. 2 but then postponed.

The X Prize, funded by the Ansari family of Dallas, was dreamed up nearly a decade ago as an incentive for development of commercial manned rockets that would make space flight a possibility for civilians.

TIPS: Little Known HTML Facts

2004-09-29T10:30:00.000+10:00

Little Known HTML Facts

Here are some little or less known (X)HTML and CSS facts:

You can't put an input element right into a form element. You need to nest an element like "p" (paragraph) or "div" (divisor) first. Otherwise it'll be invalid according to the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium validator).
Internet Explorer 6 does cope with multiple class names fine in most cases. So you can write HTML like <div class="day highlight">...</div>
Netscape 4 used a rendering engine which was such a big hack, that if you turned off JavaScript, you also turned off CSS. These days, Netscape 4 is of course irrelevant.
There are actually some reasonably well CSS features to handle dynamic pages ? including the min-width and max-width properties ? but they are completely ignored by Internet Explorer.
CSS can render aural media, and includes properties such as voice-family: female.
Internet Explorer 4 was far ahead of Netscape 4, but got never seriously updated in its CSS capabilities. It did get a major update in its DOM (Document Object Model)/ DHTML (Dynamic HTML) capabilities in Internet Explorer 5, though. Next to nothing new happened in version 6. Internet Explorer 5 however uses one interesting and proprietary CSS extension called "behaviors". They make it possible to add functionality to an HTML page without changing any HTML (events get attached via CSS, and are handled by JS files).
Most presentation-based HTML tags are deprecated in recent versions of HTML (like XHTML1 Strict). However, <hr /> (which means "horizontal rule", even though this can be losely interpreted), is not deprecated. Some still prefer <div class="separator"> </div>.
There is an even stricter HTML flavor called ISO-HTML ? it doesn't allow "false" nesting of headlines, so that you need an h1-tag before you can include an h2-tag.
HTML is platform independent and mostly works just fine on the printer, on Text-To-Speech (TTS) devices, and on mobile phones. In theory. In practice, you often need to find the right tool to make it work. (For hand phones, NetFront Access does a great job. Opera's mobile version comes in a close second, but can't compete here.)
Knowing this, you will always snicker seeing web pages which link to a "print version"... CSS can handle this behind the scenes.
So called "table layout", which is mostly used on major web sites, is frowned upon by expert developers. They like to separate functionality, layout and content/ structure into three independent layers. An HTML purist will even expect his or her page to work fine if you remove the stylesheet completely.
You can make Internet Explorer 6 to recognize title attributes only in acronym elements. "Abbr" (abbreviation) elements are not understood. This is why mostly, people use <acronym> to tag an abbreviation. On the other hand some purists believe "acronym" to be presentational, and ignore it altogether. After all, making suggestions on how letters are pronounced are a matter of "audio formatting".
The Semantic Web might not take off after all, even though it's by the same guy who invented HTML and HTTP (Tim Berners-Lee). A counter-movement, known as the "lowercase semantic web", tries to adopt more pragmatic methodology which shows results today (like in the results lists and ranking of search engines, which don't rely on meta-data).
The W3C is doing a good job but has problems delivering prototypes, readable documentation, and pragmatic, lean solutions. XML is becoming a monster of interconnected areas to understand, whereas one of it original purposes was to make things simpler.
Small font sizes for the main body context are a major accessibility hurdle today, even though they look great on some displays.
XML is not intended to replace HTML ? it is the basis for XHTML, which is correctly called an "XML application". XML might however be intended to replace SGML, at least in the HTML world. Most browsers on the other hand have such a fuzzy, forgiving rendering mode (they have to have this, to be competitive) that most pages do not validate according to either HTML "religion".
XHTML is by no means better suited for search engines than HTML. (Using CSS is somewhat superior to layout-based "tag soup" of deprecated HTML versions, because it creates leaner files ? but this was also possible in HTML4 Strict.)
Alt-text is not a description of an image, but a replacement for the image in case it is not displayed. This is a subtle difference. For many cases, alt="" does a good job ? as the image might be purely illustrative, or just visualize something which the main text itself explains well. Also, "alt-tag" is wrong ? it's "alt-attribute", or "alt-text". (Opening and closing tags are what forms an element.)
An ampersand character "&" must always be escaped like this: "&" ? even in URLs. At least if you want your page to be valid HTML.

SPACE: Toutatis; Almost Too Close for Comfort

2004-09-29T10:26:00.000+10:00

Toutatis: Almost Too Close for Comfort

The asteroid Toutatis last flew close by Earth in 1992 and 1996, but it has not come as close to us as it will this year since 1353. On Wednesday morning, scientists and skywatchers alike will be able to witness its passage within only four Earth-moon distances.

Astrobiology Magazine -- Early Wednesday morning, a 5,500 million pound asteroid measuring 5 kilometers in length will pass very close to Earth.

An asteroid two to three times that diameter is credited with causing the extinction of 85 percent of the world's species, including the dinosaurs, when it hit our planet 65 million years ago.

Luckily for us, asteroid Toutatis is only a tourist, and doesn't plan to stop here. It will come within 1.5 million kilometers (960,000 miles) of Earth, or four times the Earth-moon distance. Toutatis is the largest asteroid to come that close in more than a century.

Many smaller asteroids often pass well inside the moon's orbit. The Earth is also hit continually with tiny meteors that often become "shooting stars" as they harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere.

But if a rock the size of Toutatis hit, the atmosphere would do little more than slow it down a bit before it slammed to Earth. The impact would create a vast crater, and toss so much dust and vaporized minerals into the air the skies would darken. Seismic waves created by the explosion would generate tsunamis and earthquakes, and red-hot rocks falling back to Earth would ignite forest fires.

Toutatis, also known as asteroid 4179, is 4.6 kilometers (2.9 miles) long and 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide. Although Toutatis looks like a large peanut, radar images revealed it is actually composed of two rocks that are in close contact. One of the rocks is approximately twice as large as the other.

Toutatis has a strange rotation -- instead of the spinning on a single axis, like the planets and most other asteroids do, Toutatis tumbles so erratically that its orientation with respect to the solar system never repeats.

"The vast majority of asteroids, and all the planets, spin about a single axis, like a football thrown in a perfect spiral," says Scott Hudson of Washington State University, "but Toutatis tumbles like a flubbed pass."

Toutatis's four-year orbit around the sun is also eccentric, extending from just inside the Earth's orbit to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Doppler image of the asteroid, Toutatis. Credit: NASA - click to enlarge

These four views of the Toutatis computer model show shallow craters, linear ridges and a deep topographic "neck" whose geologic origin is not known. Credit: NASA - click to enlarge

Astronomer Christian Pollas discovered Toutatis on January 4, 1989. Pollas spotted the asteroid on photographic plates taken by Alain Maury and Derral Mulholland, who had taken the photos while observing Jupiter's satellites.

Toutatis flew close by Earth in 1992 and 1996, but it hasn't come this near to us since 1353. The next time it will pass this close again will be in the year 2562. The asteroid's orbit around the sun is so eccentric that it can't be predicted with much certainty for more than a few hundred years in the future. Since researchers can't say Toutatis will never hit Earth, it is currently listed as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid.

There is a rumor circulating on the Internet that the asteroid will strike Earth during this 2004 flyby. However, astronomers have been tracking the path of Toutatis ever since it was discovered, and they are certain it will pass safely by Earth.

Throughout history, several asteroids have hit Earth. The solar system was cluttered with asteroids while the Earth was young, and the face of the moon and other dead planetary bodies shows how frequent such impacts were. Impacts by large rocks are much less frequent today, but they can still occur.

There are thought to be more than 300,000 nearby small asteroids (asteroids about 100 meters across). Such asteroids should statistically hit Earth once every few thousand years. The most recent such asteroid strike occurred in 1908, when an asteroid measuring about 60 meters in diameter hit Russia. The "Tunguska" bolide exploded in the atmosphere and flattened about 700 square miles of Siberian forest.

Large (1 kilometer or greater) asteroids are far more rare and infrequent. There are only about 1,100 nearby large asteroids, and they are predicted to strike the Earth every half million years or so. But when these asteroids strike, they can cause catastrophic changes in the global climate. Asteroids that cause mass extinctions are thought to be 10 kilometers or greater in diameter.

The Spaceguard Survey was established to track large asteroids and comets that might pose a direct threat to Earth. So far, the Spaceguard Survey has found about half of these NEOs, and they expect to find the majority of them by 2008.

Although Toutatis will be in the far southern sky when it is closest to Earth, the asteroid is expected to brighten a few days prior to a 10th magnitude point of light visible from the Northern Hemisphere. Sky-watchers should look for it near the bright star Delta Capricorni.

Toutatis won't be visible to the naked eye, but binoculars should suffice for spotting it in the night sky. A telescope would provide the best viewing, because it would allow the viewer to detect the slow motion of Toutatis against the background stars.

SPACE: High Carb Heaven in Outer Space

2004-09-22T15:22:00.000+10:00



Image credit: ESA/NASA - click to enlarge.

From 26,000 light-years-- near the center of our galaxy-- comes a radio signal that can be interpreted as a cloud of sugar molecules, one key component of what might have assisted the development of life if transported on primordial comets.

Astrobiology Magazine -- Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a frigid reservoir of simple sugar molecules in a cloud of gas and dust some 26,000 light-years away, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discovery suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space.

The astronomers detected the 8-atom sugar molecule glycolaldehyde in a gas-and-dust cloud called Sagittarius B2. Such clouds, often many light-years across, are the raw material from which new stars and planets are formed.

The astronomers detected the same molecule in a warmer part of that cloud in 2000, but the new detection shows that the sugar exists at an extremely low temperature -- only 8 degrees above absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion stops.

The cold glycolaldehyde detections were surprisingly strong when compared to the original detections and indicate that a considerable quantity of this simple interstellar sugar exists at extremely low temperatures.

Glycoaldehyde is composed of 2 carbon atoms, 2 oxygen atoms and 4 hydrogen atoms and is called a 2-carbon sugar. Glycolaldehyde can react with a 3-carbon sugar to produce a 5-carbon sugar called ribose. Ribose molecules form the backbone structure of the molecules DNA and RNA, which carry the genetic code of living organisms.

On Earth, most chemical reactions occur in liquid water. Conditions are quite different in interstellar space, and most of the complex molecules appear to form on or under the surfaces of tiny dust grains.

In this scenario, smaller molecules such as water, formaldehyde, methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, or methanol, coat the surfaces and interiors of dust grains in the clouds.

When a shock wave, caused by the infall or outflow of material in the star-formation process, hits the dust grains, it provides the energy to assemble more-complex molecules from the simpler ones, and also to free the newly-formed molecules from the dust grains. Once the shock has passed, the molecules cool into a cold, thin gas.

Although the chemistry on Earth and in interstellar clouds is much different, the results can be very similar. This and other recent studies show that prebiotic chemistry -- the formation of the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life -- occurs in interstellar clouds long before that cloud collapses to form a new solar system with planets.

"Many of the interstellar molecules discovered to date are the same kinds detected in laboratory experiments specifically designed to synthesize prebiotic molecules. This fact suggests a universal prebiotic chemistry," said Jan M. Hollis of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

This suggests that the molecular building blocks for the creation of life on a new planet might get a head start in the dust of interstellar clouds.

The actual formation of a planetary system is such a hot process that any prebiotic molecules would likely be destroyed. However, this study has shown that such molecules may form in very cold regions following the passage of a shock wave.

Such conditions might be typical of the outer regions of a young solar system following the star-formation process. A repository of prebiotic molecules might exist in these outer regions, which is also where comets are formed, the scientists said. It has long been suggested that a collision with a comet or an encounter with the passing tail of a comet might "seed" a young planet with prebiotic material.

Hollis worked with Philip Jewell of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, WV, Frank Lovas of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD, and Anthony Remijan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The scientists reported their findings in the September 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The discovery of the cold glycolaldehyde was made by detecting faint radio emission from the molecules. Molecules rotate end-for-end. When they change from a higher rotational energy level to a lower energy level, they emit radio waves at precise frequencies. Conversely, they can absorb radio waves at specific frequencies and change from a lower rotational energy level to a higher one.

A set of frequencies emitted or absorbed by a particular molecule forms a unique "fingerprint" identifying that molecule. The cold glycolaldehyde was identified both by emission from the molecules and by absorption of radio waves emitted by a background source, all between 13 GHz and 22 GHz in frequency.

"The large diameter and great precision of the GBT made this discovery possible, and also holds the promise of discovering additional new complex interstellar molecules," Jewell said. The GBT, dedicated in 2000, is the world's largest fully- steerable radio-telescope antenna. Its dish reflector has more than 2 acres of signal-collecting area.

TECH: U.S. Researchers Invent Antenna for Light

2004-09-20T12:42:00.000+10:00

U.S. Researchers Invent Antenna for Light

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers said on Friday they have invented an antenna that captures visible light in much the same way that radio antennas capture radio waves.

They say the device, using tiny carbon nanotubes, might serve as the basis for an optical television or for converting solar energy into electricity once properly developed.

Radio and television signals are captured using antennas close to the size of the wavelength of broadcast radiation. These are often huge -- thus the need for tall antennas.

In a receiver, the wave excites electrons into meaningful currents, which are amplified and tuned to carry sound and pictures.

But light is carried by photons -- tiny packages that have the properties of waves and particles. They are visible because cells in the eye capture them, but no one had been able to make a device small enough to act as an antenna.

Yang Wang and colleagues at Boston College used carbon nanotubes, which are microscopic structures built out of carbon atoms.

The tubes, pictured on the Internet at http://www.aip.org/png/2004/221.htm, are aligned randomly.

The light excites miniature electrical currents, they write in the latest issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters.

A visible-light antenna might work by receiving a television signal superimposed onto a laser beam sent down an optical fiber, the researchers said.

This technology may improve the efficiency and quality of television signals.

Or it could be used as the basis of an efficient solar energy device that turns incoming light into an electrical charge to be stored in a capacitor, they said.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

MS-OPENSOURCE?: Microsoft to Share Office Software Code

2004-09-20T12:37:00.000+10:00

Microsoft to Share Office Software Code

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday that it would share the underlying software code for its Office program as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in the security and compatibility of the world's largest software maker's products.

The new initiative is an extension of Microsoft's Government Security Program, which allows the governments of more than 30 countries to examine most of Microsoft's underlying source code, or software blueprint for its flagship Windows operating system.

The source code for Office 2003 will be made available so that governments can conduct in-depth testing and examination to make sure that the document, spreadsheet, presentation and scheduling program works with other information technology systems, Microsoft said.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft keeps its source code closely guarded, and requires any governments or companies to sign agreements not to divulge the data that is used to create its software programs.

The Linux software system, which is now a major competitor to Windows and other Microsoft products, and its source code are freely available to anyone under an open source license that guarantees that the data will always be shared.

Microsoft launched an initiative a few years ago to share more of its software code with other technology companies, and later expanded that to include governments.

Britain has already agreed to participate in the source-sharing program for Office, Microsoft said. More than 30 countries have signed up to view Windows and Windows-related source code

SPACE: Virtual Humans Proposed As Space Travelers

2004-09-17T14:57:00.000+10:00

Virtual Humans Proposed As Space Travelers

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer
posted: 01 September 2004
06:52 am ET

TELLURIDE, COLORADO -- Better make room for an extra crewmember aboard any spaceship heading outward. This person won?t require food, oxygen or water, nor even need to buckle up for safety. The tag-along traveler could, however, be a lifesaver in terms of getting the expedition to and from a celestial destination.

Roll out the welcome mat for the virtual astronaut and enter the 3D space of Peter Plantec, a consultant in virtual human design and animation, as well as a leading expert on visual entertainment. He also initiated the "Sylvie" project -- the first commercially available virtual human interface.

And if dispatching virtual humans from Earth doesn?t turn on your thrusters, think about this. It?s likely that extraterrestrial civilizations might send surrogate entities our way instead of propelling their delicate, soft-shell selves across interstellar mileage.

DRM: Digital Rights Management - A Product Customer?s don?t Want

2004-09-17T14:46:00.000+10:00

Digital Rights Management - A Product Customer?s don?t Want

#{TIGGR} - Well, again, not my work but an excel;lent read...this i found at
strawberryJAMM's Security User Experience WebLog

{This post is an expansion of a small section out of a longer, non-technical, post at my ?personal? blog at strawberryjamm.blogspot.com . This should be it for the reposts.}

The quoted text and link below is from a transcript of an excellent talk about digital rights management (DRM) given by Cory Doctorow on the Microsoft Redmond Campus. I, unfortunately, missed seeing the talk live, but did get to see a recording of the session a week later. It had a bit more zip and zing to it but the transcript is still good reading.

I thought he made some really good points (though I must admit I have doubts about how seriously anyone working on DRM solutions here probably took his views). One such point was around why DRM systems ultimately don?t work: the ?attacker? trying to crack the secret is also the ?recipient? of the coded message (after all, what use is having an encrypted DVD if you don?t also have a device that allows it to be decrypted and played?) So Alice sells Bob her encrypted DVD, and a DVD player that can play it, Bob ends up with the key, the cypher, and the cyphertext in his hot little hands, and, as Cory says, ?Hilarity ensues?).

Another point that resonated with the ?user experience professional? side of me, was how it is essentially a fallacy to believe that DRM is particularly useful as a ?speed bump keeping honest people honest? (he gives this wonderful example of how existing DRM on a DVD ruined the experience of an honest friend of his who was only trying to do something perfectly legal.)

<quote who=?Cory Doctorow? what=?DRM and MSFT: a product no customer wants?>

Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is to you.

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don't work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.

Let's dive into it.

</quote>

Quantum Cryptography: The Next Generation of Security.

2004-09-17T14:41:00.000+10:00

Quantum Cryptography: The Next Generation of Security.

The Associated Press is taking a look into efforts to create quantum encryption systems that use photons to lock and unlock information instead of random-number keys. Researchers at Harvard University, Boston University and BBN Technologies have been given $4 million from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) to explore the idea. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is also doing its own research into high-speed quantum cryptography.

NANO: Nanotechnology could speed up the Internet by 100x.

2004-09-17T14:37:00.000+10:00

Nanotechnology could speed up the Internet by 100x.

Using a new hybrid material made of nanometer-sized "buckyballs" and a polymer, Canadian researchers have shown that nanotechnology could lead to an Internet based entirely on light and 100 times faster than today's. This material allowed them to use one laser beam to direct another with unprecedented control, a featured needed inside future fiber-optic networks. These future fiber-optic communication systems could relay signals around the global network with picosecond (one trillionth of a second) switching times, resulting in an Internet 100 times faster. This discovery appeared in a lab, so we'll have to live with our current networks for a while. [Full Story]

TOOL: SourceMonitor v2.0

2004-09-16T14:25:00.000+10:00

SourceMonitor

The freeware program SourceMonitor lets you see inside your software source code to find out how much code you have and to identify the relative complexity of your modules. For example, you can use SourceMonitor to identify the code that is most likely to contain defects and thus warrants formal review. SourceMonitor, written in C++, runs through your code at high speed. SourceMonitor provides the following:

Collects metrics in a fast, single pass through source files.
Measures metrics for source code written in C++, C, C#, Java, Delphi, Visual Basic or HTML.
Saves metrics in checkpoints for comparison during software development projects.
Displays and prints metrics in tables and charts.
Operates within a standard Windows GUI or inside your scripts using XML command files.
Exports metrics to XML or CSV files for further processing with other tools.
Download the latest version and try it on your source code.

All known bugs are posted on this web site soon after they are reported. Please report problems via e-mail.

ELECTION 2004: Election love-fest on open source

2004-09-16T13:53:00.000+10:00

Election love-fest on open source
James Riley
SEPTEMBER 02, 2004

FOUR days into the election campaign and we now know exactly where the Coalition, Labor and Democrats stand on the the use of open source software in government.

And it looks like they're standing just about where they were last week, although opposition IT spokeswoman Kate Lundy had a stab at estimating potential cost savings that an open source strategy could produce for federal departments.
In a speech to the Australian Unix User Group (AUUG), Senator Lundy said Labor believes an average annual saving of $35 million per year over four years would be a modest goal - if it were attached to a a policy of "assertive promotion."

Labor says there is a "genuine opportunity" to achieve cost reductions through open source, although Senator Lundy concedes trying to predict cost savings was not an exact science.

"Experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to assess the overall expenditure of the Commonwealth in relation to ICT in general, let alone break expenditure down to operating costs," she said.

"An ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) survey published in July 2004 puts Commonwealth spending on ICT operating expenses at about $1.4 billion," she said. Labor believed a target of 2.5 per cent savings per year - or $35 million - was a modest goal.

"Assertive promotion" did not mean legislating to compel departments to use open source solutions, which Senator Lundy said was a completely unworkable solution.

She points to work carried out by the advocacy group Open Source Victoria as having articulated one of the benefits of open source as being "long term expense reduction".

IT minister Helen Coonan, meanwhile, lifted existing white papers from the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) which seek outline open source opportunities, and launched them as new policy.

Senator Coonan says it was up to the departments whether or not they adopt on open source strategy. The coalition would continue through AGIMO to produce research to ensure those departments were able to make informed decisions, she said.

Although the Coalition remains hands-off in its approach to open source - preferring to leave it to the CIOs to decide what best suits their situation - the mere fact that Senator Coonan is talking about open source represents a change.

If the Labor wants to "asertively promote" and the Coaltion wants to educate, the Australian Democrats want to take a somewhat more coercive path.

Democrats spokesman Brian Greig says that legislation should be passed that require all government departments to consider open source software during the procurement process.

The Democrats introduced just such legislation last year that failed to attract support from the major parties.

Mr Greig said using open source was the "financially prudent" course of action. He also said all data needed to be saved in openly documented formats to ensure that data was available now and in future generations.

Both Labor and the government have rubbished the notion that legislative powers could be used to enforce the consideration and than adoption of open source in government as both unrealistic and unworkable.

MS-CRAP: Self Referenceing Constellations in .NET Framework WTF?

2004-09-16T13:38:00.000+10:00

System.Orgy

My experiment the other day to include svg content in my weblog failed dismaly. I've used a PNG file for those of you who couldn't see the image last time. It's a shame bacause I've grown to like svg.

Here is a graph showing the .NET 2.0 'System' assembly and references. I knew about the circular dependency between 'System' and 'System.Xml' in .NET 1.x. I was a little supprised to see so many assemblies involved in .NET 2.0. Does anyone know what will have caused this sudden explosion?

Another Bizarre Constellation

You had the .NET 2.0 System assembly and friends last time. This time it's the turn of System.EnterpriseServices. The boxes represent 'expanded' assemblies with all references shown (except to System and mscorlib). The odd thing here is that 'System.Transations' has a reference to itself! It seems to be the only assembly in the entire framework like this. I don't know if this is an artifact of how they're setting up circular references or by design. Can anyone shed some light on this?

World Year of Physics 2005 - Einstein@Home

2004-09-15T15:28:00.000+10:00

World Year of Physics 2005 - Einstein@Home: " Einstein@Home

Albert Einstein discovered long ago that we are adrift in a universe filled with waves from space. Colliding black holes, collapsing stars, and spinning pulsars create ripples in the fabric of space and time that subtly distort the world around us. These gravitational waves have eluded scientists for nearly a century. Exciting new experiments will let them catch the waves in action and open a whole new window on the universe - but they need your help to do it! "

DRM-WIN!: BitTorrent site in Sweden ?interesting? response to Dreamworks lawyers

2004-09-15T12:41:00.000+10:00

BitTorrent site in Sweden ?interesting? response to Dreamworks lawyers

Posted Aug 28, 2004, 9:42 AM ET by Alberto Escarlate

This would be funny it wasn?t a serious example of how the big media thinks they can rule the world. A BitTorrent site in Sweden got a cease-and-desist letter from Dreamworks, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?a US law?obviously only valid in American soil.

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated. Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in a) a suit being filed for harassment b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats. It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Read the full text of the letter and the response after the jump.

Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 18:21:43 -0100 (GMT)

From: anakata

To: KMWLAW@flash.net

Subject: Re: Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG Properties



On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 KMWLAW@flash.net wrote:



> Dennis L. Wilson, Esq.

> KEATS McFARLAND & WILSON, LLP

> 9720 Wilshire Blvd., Penthouse Suite

> Beverly Hills, CA 90212

> Tel: (310) 248-3830

> Fax: (310) 860-0363

>

>

> August 23, 2004

>

>

> VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL

> AND U.S. MAIL

>

> ThePirateBay.org

> Box 1206

> Stockholm 11479

> SWEDEN

>

> tracker-40-aa-5f-03-412675c8@prq.to

>

> Re:  Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG Properties

>    http://www.thepiratebay.org

>

> To Whom It May Concern:

>

> This letter is being written to you on behalf of our

> client, DreamWorks SKG (hereinafter ^ÓDreamWorks^Ô).

> DreamWorks is the exclusive owner of all copyright,

> trademark and other intellectual property rights in

> and to the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô motion picture.  No one is

> authorized to copy, reproduce, distribute, or

> otherwise use the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô motion picture without

> the express written permission of DreamWorks.

[...]

> As you may be aware, Internet Service Providers can

> be held liable if they do not respond to claims of

> infringement pursuant to the requirements of the

> Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).  In

> accordance with the DMCA, we request your assistance

> in the removal of infringements of the ^ÓShrek 2^Ô

> motion picture from this web site and any other sites

> for which you act as an Internet Service Provider.

> We further declare under penalty of perjury that we

> are authorized to act on behalf of DreamWorks and

> that the information in this letter is accurate.

> Please contact me immediately to discuss this matter

> further.



As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States

of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.

Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.

For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.



Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,

will result in

a) a suit being filed for harassment

b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for

sending frivolous legal threats.



It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and

that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.



Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on

http://www.thepiratebay.org.



Go fuck yourself.



Polite as usual,

anakata

Here?s a link to the complete email text.

OOPS: Things you don't want to see when you boot your laptop

2004-09-14T13:21:00.000+10:00

Things you don't want to see when you boot your laptop

On the positive side:

The laptop immediately cranked down its CPU speed to avoid overheating
A sharp whack on the desk seems to have brought the fan back to life - at least for now...

neurodudes: Punishment or reward? Importance of temporal order...

2004-09-07T13:19:00.000+10:00

neurodudes: Punishment or reward? Importance of temporal order...: "Punishment or reward? Importance of temporal order...
Recent work in Nature from a group in Germany shows the importance of temporal order in determing whether a stimulus is considered aversive or appetitive. Briefly, fruit flies were given paired odors and electric shocks with a varying interval between the two events; when the odor preceeded the shock, it became an aversive stimulus. When shock preceeded odor, the odor became appetitive.
It amazes me that with the recent interest in reinforcement learning, so many of the 'cutting-edge experiments' look awfully similar to the behaviorist literature of almost 100 years ago! Although I don't know the literature well myself, I am positive that someone must have taken Pavlov's famous experiment and reversed the temporal order (maybe not for fruit flies but for dogs or pigeons perhaps). If anyone out there knows of something, please post it below in the comments.
Also, there is some striking similarity with MM Poo's work with growth cone guidance in which a chemotactic factor is combing with electrical stimulation. In that work, certain patters of electrical stimulation were able to reverse the actions of particular chemotrophins from attraction to repulsion or vice versa.
Full article from the German group can be found after the jump.
Nature 430, 983 (26 August 2004); doi:10.1038/430983a
HIROMU TANIMOTO, MARTIN HEISENBERG & BERTRAM GERBER
Lehrstuhl f?r Genetik und Neurobiologie, Biozentrum, Universit?t W?rzburg, Am Hubland, 97074 W?rzburg, Germany
hiromut@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de
Experimental psychology: Event timing turns punishment to reward
Linking a smell with an electric shock does not always have an aversive effect in flies.
Can relief from pain be a pleasure? "

United States Patent: 6,785,902 - Document data structure and method for integrating broadcast television with web pages

2004-09-07T12:21:00.000+10:00

United States Patent: 6,785,902: "Document data structure and method for integrating broadcast television with web pages

Abstract
Described are a method and apparatus for incorporating broadcast television into Web pages. Broadcast television can be embedded into Web pages using, for example, a 'tv:' attribute in conjunction with common HTML tags. Within the 'tv:' attribute, a Web-page author can reference a TV station by channel number, network, or broadcast call letters. HTML documents are parsed to recover both the conventional tags and tags that include TV attributes. The resulting Web pages display the identified broadcast TV in a frame specified by the TV attribute. One embodiment supports the presentation of television in the background of an HTML document. In that embodiment, HTML tags corresponding to overlying HTML content are provided with an attribute that defines a level of transparency from zero to one-hundred percent. The transparency attribute allows content providers to overlay any type of HTML information over a broadcast television show without completely obscuring the underlying show. This aspect of the invention employs a z attribute that can be used to specify the relative position of broadcast television and overlying HTML content. "

United States Patent: 6,785,865 - Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs

2004-09-07T12:19:00.000+10:00

United States Patent: 6,785,865: "United States Patent 6,785,865
Cote , et al. August 31, 2004

Discoverability and navigation of hyperlinks via tabs

Abstract
A user may discover and navigate among hyperlinks through the use of a keyboard. For example, a user may press a tab key to discover and navigate to a first hyperlink that is part of a hypertext document. The first hyperlink is, in response, given focus and a focus shape is drawn around the text or graphics for the hot region of the hyperlink. If the user again presses the tab key, the next hyperlink is given focus and a focus shape (i.e., an outline that surrounds the next hyperlink) is drawn around the next hyperlink. A user may also tab to a placeholder for an image in order to make a decision whether the image should be downloaded or not. "

CONSCIOUSNESS: Scientists Show Babies Have Innate Sense of Beauty

2004-09-07T12:18:00.000+10:00

Science News Article | Reuters.com: "EXETER, England (Reuters) - Beauty may not be just in the eye of the beholder after all because a sense of visual attraction is hardwired in the brain at birth, a British scientist said on Monday.
Psychologist Alan Slater of the University of Exeter in south-western England told a British science conference that babies can recognize their mother from as little as 15 hours after birth and also show a preference for looking at photographs of physically attractive people.
'Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the brain of the newborn infant,' he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
In a series of experiments, he and his colleagues have shown that although babies enter the world visually naive, all their sensory system are functioning.
Infants show several spontaneous visual preferences. They like watching moving rather than stationary objects, prefer to look at three-dimensional stimuli and find faces fascinating.
When given a choice of two facial photographs to look at, babies usually prefer and spend more time gazing at the person who is better-looking.
'Infants prefer to look at the more attractive of two faces,' said Slater.
Although a perception of attractiveness may be evident at birth, Slater said experience also plays a role in a person's conception of beauty. "

SCIENCE: Did the First Americans Come From, Er, Australia?

2004-09-07T12:16:00.000+10:00

Science News Article | Reuters.com: "Did the First Americans Come From, Er, Australia?
Mon Sep 6, 2004 09:24 AM ET
Printer Friendly | Email Article | Reprints | RSS
Top News
Frances Fizzles After Second Jab at Florida
Former President Clinton's Heart Surgery a Success
Bush, Kerry Clash on Iraq in Labor Day Rallies

MORE

EXETER, England (Reuters) - Anthropologists stepped into a hornets' nest on Monday, revealing research that suggests the original inhabitants of America may in fact have come from what is now known as Australia.
The claim will be extremely unwelcome to today's native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first.
But Silvia Gonzalez from John Moores University in Liverpool said skeletal evidence pointed strongly to this unpalatable truth and hinted that recovered DNA would corroborate it.
'This is very contentious,' Gonzalez, a Mexican, said with a smile at the annual meeting of the British association for the Advancement of Science. 'They (native Americans) cannot claim to have been the first people there.'
She said there was very strong evidence that the first migration came from Australia via Japan and Polynesia and down the Pacific Coast of America.
Skulls of a people with distinctively long and narrow heads discovered in Mexico and California predated by several thousand years the more rounded features of the skulls of native Americans.
One particularly well preserved skull of a long-face woman had been carbon dated to 12,700 years ago, whereas the oldest accurately dated native American skull was only about 9,000 years old.
'We have extracted her DNA. It is going to be a bomb,' she said, declining to give details but adding"

ALONE?: Has SETI at Home Found a Signal?

2004-09-07T12:07:00.000+10:00

Has SETI at Home Found a Signal?: "In the News

September 2, 2004
A recent (September 1) article in New Scientist magazine, entitled ? Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away,? implies that the UC Berkeley SETI@home project has uncovered a very convincing candidate signal that might be the first strong evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Alas, this story is misleading. According to Dan Werthimer, who heads up the UC Berkeley SERENDIP SETI project, this is a case of a reporter failing to understand the workings of their search. He says that misquotes and statements taken out of context give the impression that his team is exceptionally impressed with one of the many candidate signals, SHGb02+14a, uncovered using the popular SETI@home software. They are not.
This signal has been found twice by folks using the downloadable screen saver. That fact resulted in the UC Berkeley team putting it on their list of ?best candidates?. Keep in mind that SETI@home produces 15 million signal reports each day. How can one possibly sort through this enormous flood of data to sift out signals that might be truly extraterrestrial, rather than merely noise artifacts or man-made interference?
The scheme used is simple in principle (although the technical details are complex): SETI@home data come from a receiver on the Arecibo radio telescope that is incessantly panning the sky, riding ?piggyback? on other astronomical observations. Every few seconds, it sweeps another patch of celestial real estate, and records data covering many millions of frequency channels. Some of these data are then distributed for processing by the screen saver. By chance, the telescope will sweep the same sky patch every six months or so. If a signal is persistent ? that is to say, it shows up more than once when the t"

ALONE?: SETI has found an interesting signal.

2004-09-07T12:02:00.000+10:00

geeknik.net - SETI has found an interesting signal.: "SETI has found an interesting signal.
Submitted by @brian on 2004-09-02 09:37:38 CST [ Edit | Delete ]
The SETI project has found an interesting signal, and while it doesn't offer proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, it has experts baffled.

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.

The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself. [Full Story] "

BLOGGING: Leading Australian Publisher adds support for RSS

2004-09-07T11:44:00.000+10:00

Leading Australian Publisher adds support for RSS: "Leading Australian Publisher adds support for RSS
You know RSS is hitting mainstream when the old established publishers add support for it
Fairfax has added RSS feeds for their two leading publications - The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age.
Hats off to you, Mr Fairfax

The Sydney Morning Herald RSS Channels
Top Stories
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/top.rss
National
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/national.rss
World
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/world.rss
Business
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/business.rss
Entertainment
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/entertainment.rss
Technology
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/technology.rss
Video
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/multimedia.rss
Sport
http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/sport.rss

The Age RSS Channels
Top Stories
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/top.rss
National
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/national.rss
World
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/world.rss
Business
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/business.rss
Entertainment
http://feeds.theage.au/rssheadlines/entertainment.rss
Technology
http://feeds.theage.au/rssheadlines/technology.rss
Video
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/multimedia.rss
Sport
http://feeds.theage.com.au/rssheadlines/sport.rss "

BAD CODE!: x+=x++;

2004-09-07T11:42:00.000+10:00

x+=x++;: "x+=x++;Today I was looking through an internal C# user group list. One of the messages was about 'x+=x++;' and what should be the right behavior. I thought this is more generally interesting, so I decided to blog it. But first, DO NOT WRITE THAT CODE!!!
Ok, with that out of the way, we can start?
Let?s take this code as an example:
int x = 3;
x += x++;
The first thing the compiler does whenever it sees something like z += y is to convert it to z = z + y. This is obviously true for +=, -=, *=, and /=. Ok, this was easy. Now we have just to consider:
x= x + x++;
This, by the way, gives the same result as:
x = x + x;
This, by the way, gives a different result from:
x = x++ + x;
This, by the way gives the same result as:
x = x + ++x;
As maddening as this may seem, it actually makes sense (once you understand how it works). But first, what is the difference between x++ and ++x? x++ returns the value of x to the current expression and then increments x. ++x increments x and then return its value to the current expression. Given this factoid (and knowing that c# evaluates expressions left to right), we can then consider what happens in the following case:
int x = 3;
x = x + x++;
Here is how the compiler conceptually evaluates it:
x = (x) + x++ -> the first x gets evaluated and returns 3, x = 3
x = 3 + (x)++ -> x gets evaluated and returns 3, x = 3
x = 3 + (x++) -> x++ gets evaluated and x is incremented (to 4), x = 4
x = (3 + 3) -> 3 + 3 gets evaluated and returns 6, x = 4
(x = 6) -> x is assigned "

OPEN-SOURCE: Telstra deal cited in open source playbook

2004-08-30T10:51:00.000+10:00

Telstra deal cited in open source playbook

Australian Linux and open source vendor Cybersource has cited the deal -- whereby Telstra secured a four-year Windows desktop upgrade deal at a deeply discounted price of around AU$20 million after aggressively piloting Linux and products such as StarOffice -- in marketing for a new service as an example of how Linux can be used as leverage to secure discounts from Microsoft.

Cybersource said its new Open Source Strategic Planning Service -- to be launched on 1 September -- was a way for businesses to secure both a migration plan to open source and "leverage in your pricing negotiations with proprietary software vendors".

The company said its service includes methodologies for auditing and analysing corporate computing requirements, while it would map out a strategy for "optimising the cost of software licences".

"?if the negotiations don't end in your favour, you can simply take that final step of adopting the plan's roadmap and migrating to Linux and the open source platform," the vendor said.

The company's services manager, Ron Fabre, said Telstra, Munich and Newham Council in the United Kingdom had all "used Linux to dramatically lower their Microsoft bills" and claimed Cybersource could achieve similar.

The company's marketing push also came after Samba co-developer Jeremy Allison told delegates to LinuxWorld 2004 in San Francisco "if you're not piloting a Linux desktop program, you're paying too much for your Microsoft client software".

The moves highlight the rise of Linux and open source solutions as genuine rivals to Microsoft's software in the enterprise arena.

The proprietary software heavyweight this week fell foul of the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority over its Get the Facts campaign, which alleged Linux was up to 10 times more expensive that Windows for certain functions on comparable machines.

In June, Microsoft's director of marketing, Nick Barley, admitted that more businesses were telling Microsoft they were planning to migrate to Linux rather than to the software heavyweight's products in the hope of securing deep discounts.

However, Microsoft still does not rate open source software as a serious threat on the desktop.

CRYPTO: MD5 and SHA-0 digital signatures possibly broken.

2004-08-30T10:32:00.000+10:00

MD5 and SHA-0 digital signatures possibly broken.

Encryption circles are buzzing with news that mathematical functions embedded in common security applications might have previously unknown weaknesses. The excitement began last Thursday with an announcement that French computer scientist Antoine Joux had uncovered a flaw in a popular algorithm called MD5, often used with digital signatures. Then four Chinese researchers released a paper that reported a way to circumvent a second algorithm, SHA-0. While their results are preliminary, these discoveries could eventually make it easier for intruders to insert undetectable back doors into computer code or to forge an electronic signature--unless a different, more secure algorithm is used.

"If you could find two contracts that hash out to the same signature, you could replace one with the other and in a court of law there would be at least an ambiguity about which one is valid," Hughes, a senior fellow at StorageTek, said in a telephone interview. "That's a very significant possibility."

The MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms are known to computer scientists as hash functions. They take all kinds of input, from an e-mail message to an operating-system kernel, and generate what's supposed to be a unique fingerprint. Changing even one letter in the input file results in a completely different fingerprint.

Security applications rely on these fingerprints being unique. But if a malicious attacker could generate the same fingerprint with a different input stream, the cloned fingerprint--known as a hash collision--would certify that software with a back door is safe to download and execute. It would help a crook who wanted to falsely sign an e-mail instructing that someone's bank account be emptied.

TOOL: Encyclopedia Mythica: mythology, folklore, and religion.

2004-08-30T10:12:00.000+10:00

Encyclopedia Mythica: mythology, folklore, and religion.

The Encyclopedia Mythica is an online encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, and legends. It currently contains over 6,100 entries on gods and goddesses, heroes, legendary creatures and beings from all over the world.

Some of the topics you can find here, are about:

legendary animals such as unicorns and dragons;
mythical objects like Excalibur and Mjöllnir;
gods and goddesses from many religions, including Greek, Japanese, Hindu, and Native American;
imaginative places such as Atlantis, Avalon, and Thule;
supernatural creatures such as ghosts, gnomes, leprechauns, and fairies;
...and much, much more.
Furthermore, this encyclopedia is completely free, although donations will be most appreciated.

This website has been designed with accessibility in mind and conforms to U.S. Section 508 Guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints satisfied). Read more »
The HTML has been validated in accordance with the W3C 4.01 standard. Read more »

eBOOK: - The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

2004-08-30T10:10:00.000+10:00

#{TIGGR} - This sounds like an interesting read...heres the OPENING paras:-

The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

"....Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysic.................."

NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover

2004-08-27T12:21:00.000+10:00

NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover
By Mark Hachman

STANFORD, CALIF. -- A software glitch that paralyzed the Mars "Spirit" rover earlier this year was caused by an unanticipated characteristic of a DOS file system, a NASA scientist said Monday.

The flaw, since fixed, was only discovered after days of agonizingly slow tests complicated by the limited "windows" of communication allowed by the rotation of Mars, said Robert Denise, a member of the Flight Software Development Team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

On Jan. 21, the Spirit rover stopped communicating with the teams on Earth, beginning a cycle where the rover would reboot itself, over and over. After days of tests, the team finally discovered on Jan. 26 that the issue was tied to what was originally reported as corruption inside the rover's onboard flash memory.

In a presentation at the Hot Chips conference here, Denise said that the real issue was an embedded DOS file system whose directory structure kept growing and growing. When the rover's embedded operating system then told the flash memory to mirror the data structure in RAM, the unexpectedly large file caused a fatal error and an almost continuous reboot cycle, he said.

Aside from the flash memory error, the recent voyages of Spirit and Opportunity have gone far better than expected. The mission was originally funded to last 90 sols, the equivalent of 90 Mars days, and come to an end last April. (One sol equals 24.65 hours.) Since both rovers have managed to stay "alive" far longer than anticipated, Denise said, the current funding will run out on Sept. 13, the beginning of the "solar conjunction," when Mars disappears behind the Sun and out of radio range. The lifespan of both rovers is really not known, he said.

On Sol 18, the mood among the JPL ground team was nothing short of "euphoric," Denise said. "Life was good," he said. "And then we missed a comms pass," a window in which the JPL team and the rover were supposed to exchange information.

The team didn't worry, at least initially. The team rechecked that its instruments were calibrated, and awaited the next pass a few hours later. Over the next few days, however, nothing went right, Denise said. The team determined the rover was functional; it could emit a status "beep", proving it was online. Other passes, however, generated just pseudorandom noise, indicative that the rover was online, functioning, but that no data was passing through the antenna. The rover, meanwhile, was rebooting hundreds of times a day.

The problem, Denise said, was in the file system the rover used. In DOS, a directory structure is actually stored as a file. As that directory tree grows, the directory file grows, as well. The Achilles' heel, Denise said, was that deleting files from the directory tree does not reduce the size of the directory file. Instead, deleted files are represented within the directory by special characters, which tell the OS that the files can be replaced with new data.

By itself, the cancerous file might not have been an issue. Combined with a "feature" of a third-party piece of software used by the onboard Wind River embedded OS, however, the glitch proved nearly fatal.

According to Denise, the Spirit rover contains 256 Mbytes of flash memory, a nonvolatile memory that can be written and rewritten thousands of times. The rover also contains 128 Mbytes of DRAM, 96 Mbytes of which are used for data, such as buffering image files in preparation for transmitting them to Earth. The other 32 Mbytes are used for code storage. An additional 11 Mbytes of EEPROM memory are used for additional program code storage.

The undisclosed software vendor required that data stored in flash memory be mirrored in RAM. Since the rover's flash memory was twice the size of the system RAM, a crash was almost inevitable, Denise said.

Moving an actuator, for example, generates a large number of tiny data files. After the rover rebooted, the OSes heap memory would be a hair's breadth away from a crash, as the system RAM would be nearly full, Denise said. Adding another data file would generate a memory allocation command to a nonexistent memory address, prompting a fatal error.

Dynamic allocation of memory is considered a no-no in embedded systems, precisely because of the possibility of a system crash, attendees said. Denise acknowledged that JPL's tests only allowed for the addition of a small number of data files, and that the exception slipped by. "We made an exception and got bit by it," he admitted.

The team finally got the rover up and running by essentially using the system RAM as simulated flash, discovered the error, and disabled the dynamic allocation feature, Denise said. The flash memory was erased, and the JPL engineers installed a utility that monitors the file system, and treats the memory heap as a consumable resources.

Denise's keynote address to the Hot Chips audience lasted about an hour, twenty minutes or so dedicated to the flash-memory issue. At the end, he summed up the issue for the small percentage of the audience who weren't engineers: "The Spirit was the willing, but the flash was weak."

DRM: CD Buyers In France Sue Over Copy Protection

2004-08-27T12:13:00.000+10:00

CD Buyers In France Sue Over Copy Protection

Contributed by Mike on Thursday, August 26th, 2004 @ 06:07AM
from the deception-over-quality dept.
A group of individual CD buyers in France, combined with a French consumer association, have filed a lawsuit against EMI and a record store for selling copy protected CDs, suggesting there has been "deception over the material qualities of a product," since many copy protected CDs don't work well in car stereos or on computers. The record store in question claims they clearly warn consumers of the possibility and offer to refund money if the CDs don't work. As backwards as the policy of copy protection on CDs is (punishing your legitimate buyers, while doing little to stop actual copying) this case seems fairly weak. While the recording industry is obviously a huge fan of lawsuits, suing them back isn't the answer. Making them realize that copy protection is bad for their business is the only way the industry is going to change.

GENETIX: Fetal stem cells rescue cortex after stroke

2004-08-27T12:10:00.000+10:00

Fetal stem cells rescue cortex after stroke

Amazing results. I hope this serves as a wake-up call to those who still haven't realized the incredible advances that are being made possible through the use of embryonic stem cells. From the July 27, 2004 issue of PNAS:

Transplanted human fetal neural stem cells survive, migrate, and differentiate in ischemic rat cerebral cortex
S. Kelly, T. M. Bliss, A. K. Shah, G. H. Sun, M. Ma, W. C. Foo, J. Masel, M. A. Yenari, I. L. Weissman, N. Uchida, T. Palmer and G. K. Steinberg

Full article

We characterize the survival, migration, and differentiation of human neurospheres derived from CNS stem cells transplanted into the ischemic cortex of rats 7 days after distal middle cerebral artery occlusion. Transplanted neurospheres survived robustly in naive and ischemic brains 4 wk posttransplant. Survival was influenced by proximity of the graft to the stroke lesion and was negatively correlated with the number of IB4-positive inflammatory cells. Targeted migration of the human cells was seen in ischemic animals, with many human cells migrating long distances ({approx}1.2 mm) predominantly toward the lesion; in naive rats, cells migrated radially from the injection site in smaller number and over shorter distances (0.2 mm). The majority of migrating cells in ischemic rats had a neuronal phenotype. Migrating cells between the graft and the lesion expressed the neuroblast marker doublecortin, whereas human cells at the lesion border expressed the immature neuronal marker {beta}-tubulin, although a small percentage of cells at the lesion border also expressed glial fibrillary acid protein (GFAP). Thus, transplanted human CNS (hCNS)-derived neurospheres survived robustly in naive and ischemic brains, and the microenvironment influenced their migration and fate.