السبت، 31 يوليو 2010
Olympic sports
Totally bogus products receive "Energy Star" certification
To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it "used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership." All four qualified.More at the link, including the "gasoline-powered alarm clock"
The Feather-Duster Fly-Strip Air Freshener
Ostensibly an indoor air purifier, this item is actually a standard space heater spangled in strips of flypaper, with a feather duster perched up top.
The product was submitted without a standard safety file number from the Underwriters' Laboratories. Plus, the product's website did not include a disclaimer required for Energy Star certification. Last but not least, the garish photo submitted with the product's application portrays what is clearly a feather duster rigged to space heater. Nevertheless, these obstacles proved surmountable—the product was approved in 11 days and became listed on the Energy Star website.
The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch
John Cleese and Graham Chapman (before their Monty Python fame), with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, lampooning the stereotypical "rich people claiming they were happier when they were poor."
One of my favorite comedy bits of all time - and one that is especially relevant in times of economic uncertainty. I had posted this a long time ago, but the video was pulled from YouTube - so watch it now, because it may not stay up long.
What is this musical instrument?
Found at Antique Memes, via Couleurs.
Addendum: Keeping up the tradition at TYWKIWDBI of no question of mine going unanswered, Anonymous replied in less than ten minutes with the answer and a link to a discussion at BoingBoing (where there is also a series of rather rancorous comments regarding the correct terminology for the instrument) - harp-piano, claviharp, harpsichord, clavichord, clavicytherum...
Addendum 2: I've subsequently found a photo of a "19th century clavichord" which appears roughly similar in shape.
"Major Slut Spill in California"
From the Onion News Network: "Clean-up crews are hard at work after a VH1 bus carrying reality show contestants overturned, spilling 2,000 pounds of highly concentrated slut."
Safe for work except for one word at the end. Juvenile humor - you'll know whether you want to watch it or not.
Via Videosift.
$20 billion "to air-condition the desert" in Afghanistan and Iraq
The data comes from Public Radio International's The World. The concern is that about a thousand American servicement have been killed (by IEDs etc) while transporting fuel to aircondition the tents at the forward operating bases. The cooling is necessary not just for human comfort, but for the operation of computer equipment.
The annual budget for NASA is only $18 billion.
Steve Anderson is a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq. He says the Pentagon should find ways to make structures at FOBs and other military compounds more energy efficient, not only to save money and be greener, but also, to save lives.$20 billion. Annually. To air-condition tents and temporary structures.
The annual budget for NASA is only $18 billion.
The word "refudiate" has been (mis)used before
Some have observed that Palin isn't the first to invent the word refudiate. Patrick Galvin of Politico notes a couple of recent uses, such as Sen. Mike DeWine's statement on "Fox & Friends" in 2006: "I think anyone that is associated with him campaigning needs to refudiate these comments."Found at Language Log. I agree with this observation by "Otter" in the comments:
Even earlier is this glaring example [above] that I found in the Atlanta Constitution of June 21, 1925... the hurried headline writer must have mashed up refute with repudiate, just as Palin would 85 years later.
It's not Palin's grasp of English that interests me, it's her reaction to a mistake. That headline writer must have been embarrassed by the error, while Palin is proud of hers.
Like Bush, when she's wrong, she doubles down. That would be a worrying trait no matter how admirable her grammar.
Sarah Palin trailing badly in New Hampshire poll
Public Policy Polling has surveyed New Hampshire voters, and offers these numbers:
I suppose it must be difficult to factor in various intangibles such as voter enthusiasm and turnout. I've also read somewhere this week that Democrats may try to secretly encourage her nomination run because they consider her easier to beat in November than a mainstream candidate.
Mitt Romney 31 percentAccording to the Salon source, "...no one in the modern era has gone on to claim a major party nomination after finishing worse than second in the New Hampshire primary."
Newt Gingrich 14 percent
Ron Paul 13 percent
Mike Huckabee 12 percent
Sarah Palin 9 percent
Tim Pawlenty 3 percent
Mitch Daniels 1 percent
Someone else/undecided 16 percent
I suppose it must be difficult to factor in various intangibles such as voter enthusiasm and turnout. I've also read somewhere this week that Democrats may try to secretly encourage her nomination run because they consider her easier to beat in November than a mainstream candidate.
Carnivorous caterpillar
The species is not identified in this brief video, but its body habitus is that of an "inchworm," so it's a moth caterpillar - probably Eupithecia:
At least 6 of Hawaii’s described Eupithecia species are raptorially carnivorous, only 2 are known to feed predominantly on plant material, especially Metrosideros flowers. A diet including protein-rich flower pollen and a defensive behavior of snapping may have preadapted Hawaii’s ancestral Eupithecia for a shift to predation. Severe barriers to dispersal of mantids and other continental insect predators into Hawaii resulted in an environment favoring behavioral and consequent morphological adaptations that produced these singular insects, which can be commonly called the grappling inchworms.I was puzzled by the phrase "raptorially carnivorous," until the term was repeated later:
They have raptorial claws adapted for grabbing struggling prey, and long thin appendages on the tip of their abdomens which probably work somewhat like the trigger hairs in Venus fly-traps.And this is interesting -
Interestingly, some are host plant specific, even though they do not eat the plant, because they look so much like that particular plant and it gives them a great advantage in disguise. Some are even specific to the part of the plant on which they rest. One Eupithecia is specific to the green, living fronds of the native Hawaiian fern known as uluhe, and it is the perfect green to match their color. Another dark brown species is always found on the mats of dead fronds underlying the green, living part of the plant.They seem to handle parasitic wasps with ease:
Almost no parasitoids have been reared from Eupithecia caterpillars. It certainly seems likely that Eupithecia may be rarely parasitized because it is difficult for a parasitic wasp to sneak up on it and lay an egg without being caught. Here is a brief video showing lightning-fast E. orichloris capturing a parasitic wasp (and releasing it – apparently they are not very tasty).
Very impressive!!
To my knowledge, there is only one butterfly (the Harvester) that has a carnivorous larva - it feeds on wooly aphids.
Via Neatorama and Videosift.
Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia
Viktoria Luise Adelheid Mathilde Charlotte "was the only daughter and the seventh child of William II, German Emperor and Empress Augusta Victoria. She was their last surviving child. Princess Victoria Louise is the maternal grandmother of Queen Sophie of Spain and the former King Constantine II of the Hellenes."Found at for the love of history!, via My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.
Are money market mutual funds in danger?
I know nothing re the reliability or possible biases of the source - just ran across this article while browsing the financial links:
Both the SEC and the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (the Plunge Protection Team) are considering whether Money Market Funds should be forced away from their stable $1.00 value method of maintaining money market share prices. A move by regulators forcing money market funds away from the maintenance of the $1.00 price would cause huge hiccups in the industry and perhaps result in the end of the industry. At a minimum, it would cause huge withdrawals...
At Crane’s Money Fund Symposium, Paul Schott Stevens, President and CEO of the Investment Company Institute spoke about the problems that a move away from $1.00 pricing would mean:..money market funds remain firmly opposed to proposals that would force them to abandon their stable per-share value. And we are not alone in that stance. America’s businesses, along with state and local governments, are rallying in opposition to any suggestion that regulators would force money market funds off their stable $1.00 net asset value.
The idea of floating these funds’ value is likely to be discussed in the President’s Working Group report, whenever it may be issued. And it’s still in the air at the SEC, which is contemplating a “round two” rulemaking to address any lingering issues in money market funds and Rule 2a-7...
In the last several weeks, groups representing state and local governments have come out squarely in opposition to forcing money market funds to float. The National Association of State Treasurers; the Government Finance Officers Association; and the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers, and Treasurers – all have voiced their support for the ability of funds to operate with a stable NAV...
More than 40 companies – many of them household names – have signed on to this letter or others urging the President’s Working Group to drop the idea of floating NAVs.
These organizations and others have emphasized that it is vital to preserve the essential, defining characteristic of money market funds – because they all recognize the highly important role that these funds play in our markets and our economy...
A retail investor expects that $1 put into a money market fund will count for $1 when writing a check or making a withdrawal. If money market funds cannot provide that, retail investors will have no alternative but to use bank accounts – by no means an ideal substitute.
الجمعة، 30 يوليو 2010
Introducing a new sidebar widget - NeatoHub
During this past year Neatorama has also evolved; in addition to some cosmetic layout changes, the most striking innovation has been the addition of a subset of internal blogs, called Neatoblogs. The Upcoming Queue was the first, arising in January of 2009 and discussed in the time in a post here. They have subsequently added four more subblogs:
NeatoBambino - baby, toddler, and child-related posts
NeatoGeek - self-explanatory
Art Blog - presents the work of independent artists, and
Spotlight - uses large-format photos to highlight selected topics.
The next step in the evolution of Neatorama has just been put into effect; it involves the linking of a group of compatible external blogs. I'm pleased to report that TYWKIWDBI has been chosen to be part of that family. Note the quality of the other blogs that have been invited to take part:
VideoSift - selected videos, with (unlike YouTube) intelligent commentary.
Geeks Are Sexy - multiauthor blog providing tech news and related whimsy.
Miss Cellania - multi-award-winning humor site.
Nerd Approved - gadgets and toys for nerds.
Random Good Stuff - hi-tech and low-tech items for geeks and nongeeks.
Presurfer - Gerald Vlemmings' blog will be ten years old next month; a classic, and one of the role-models upon which TYWKIWDBI was based.
The interface for linking is clean and simple. About midway down the right sidebar of TYWKIWDBI (below the categories, above the blogroll - which I note needs updating...) is a set of thumbnail images with brief titles. A click on any of those will take you to the NeatoHub, with the item you selected at the top of a list of posts; you can then click through to the full post at the hosting blog, or select another item from the menu.
Over the years I've been blogging I've been asked to join a number of link-sharing projects. I've always declined, in part because as a noncommercial blog the "traffic" here is largely irrelevant to me (except that more readers provides a broader and deeper base of expertise in the comments). My other reason was that most link-sharing schemes involved marginal-quality material, whereas for this one the blogs are top-notch, and the authors will be selecting their better material to link at the Hub. I also find the interface to be nonintrusive.
Please feel free to browse the Hub, and if you have any comments for its improvement, just append them here, and I'll pass the suggestions along to the admins.
Addendum Aug 16: Many more sites have been added to the Hub, including the following -
Arkinspace
Cubiclebot
Cultcase
Darkroastedblend
Dudecraft
Fashionalbygeek
Forcesofgeek
Geekosystem
Greatwhitesnark
Inventorspot
Japanprobe
Kuriositas
Modernmechanix
NeatoGeek
Neatorama
Poppedculture
Roadtickle
Technabob
Thatsnerdalicious
Uniquedaily
Walyou
Weirdworm
I don't have time right now to post those sites as clickable links. If you want to explore, either use the samples in my right sidebar, or go to the Hub itself.
Google Publications
We often get asked if Google scientists and engineers publish technical papers, and the answer is, “Most certainly, yes.” Indeed, we have a formidable research capability, and we encourage publications as well as other forms of technical dissemination--including our contributions to open source and standards and the introduction of new APIs and tools, which have proven to sometimes be foundational.
Needless to say, with our great commitment to technical excellence in computer science and related disciplines, we find it natural and rewarding to contribute to the scientific community and to ongoing technical debates. And we know that it is important for Google to help create the fundamental building blocks upon which continuing advances can occur.
To be specific, Googlers publish hundreds of technical papers that appear in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings every year. These deal with specific applications and engineering questions, algorithmic and data structure problems, and important theoretical problems in computer science, mathematics, and other areas, that can guide our algorithmic choices. While the publications are interesting in their own right, they also offer a glance at some of the key problems we face when dealing with very large data sets and demonstrate other questions that arise in our engineering design at Google.
We’d like to highlight a few of the more noteworthy papers from the first trimester of this year. The papers reflect the breadth and depth of the problems on which we work. We find that virtually all aspects of computer science, from systems and programming languages, to algorithms and theory, to security, data mining, and machine learning are relevant to our research landscape. A more complete list of our publications can be found here.
In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publications, but here are some summaries:
Speech Recognition
"Google Search by Voice: A Case Study," by Johan Schalkwyk, Doug Beeferman, Francoise Beaufays, Bill Byrne, Ciprian Chelba, Mike Cohen, Maryam Garrett, Brian Strope, to appear in Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Centers, and Clinics, Amy Neustein (Ed.), Springer-Verlag 2010.
Google Search by Voice is a result of many years of investment in speech at Google. In our book chapter, “Google Search by Voice: A Case Study,” we describe the basic technology, the supporting technologies, and the user interface design behind Google Search by Voice. We describe how we built it and what lessons we have learned. Google search by voice is growing rapidly and being built in many languages. Along the way we constantly encounter new research problems providing the perfect atmosphere for doing research on real world problems.
Computer Architecture & Networks & Distributed Systems
"Energy-proportional Datacenter Networks," by Dennis Abts, Mike Marty, Philip Wells, Peter Klausler, Hong Liu, International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA, June 2010.
Google researchers have called on industry and academia to develop energy-proportional computing systems, where the energy consumed is directly proportional to the utilization of the system. In this work, we focus on the energy usage of high-bandwidth, highly scalable cluster networks. Through a combination of an energy-efficient topology and dynamic fine-grained control of link speeds, our proposed techniques show the potential to significantly reduce both electricity and environmental costs.
Economics & Market Algorithms
"Quasi-Proportional Mechanisms: Prior-free Revenue Maximization," by Vahab S. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Uri Nadav, Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium, LATIN, April 2010.
Say a seller wishes to sell an item, but the buyers value it vastly differently. What is a suitable auction to sell the item, in terms of efficiency as well as revenue? First and second price auctions will be efficient but will only extract the lower value in equilibrium; if one knows the distributions from which values are drawn, then setting a reserve price will get optimal revenue but will not be efficient. This paper views this problem as prior-free auction and proposes a quasi-proportional allocation in which the probability that an item is allocated to a bidder depends (quasi-proportionally) on their bids. The paper also proves existence of an equilibrium for quasi-proportional auctions and shows how to compute them efficiently. Finally, the paper shows that these auctions have high efficiency and revenue.
"Auctions with Intermediaries," Jon Feldman, Vahab Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Mallesh Pai, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC, June 2010.
We study an auction where the bidders are middlemen, looking in turn to auction off the item if they win it. This setting arises naturally in online advertisement exchange systems, where the participants in the exchange are ad networks looking to sell ad impressions to their own advertisers. We present optimal strategies for both the bidders and the auctioneer in this setting. In particular, we show that the optimal strategy for bidders is to choose a randomized reserve price, and the optimal reserve price of the centeral auctioneer may depend on the number of bidders (unlike the case when there are no middlemen).
Computer Vision
"Discontinuous Seam-Carving for Video Retargeting," Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Mei Han, Irfan Essa, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR, June 2010.
Playing a video on devices with different form factors requires resizing (or retargeting) the video to fit the resolution of the given device. We have developed a content-aware technique for video retargeting based on discontinuous seam-carving, which unlike standard methods like uniform scaling and cropping, strives to retain salient content (such as actors, faces and structured objects) while discarding relatively unimportant pixels (such as the sky or a blurry background). The key innovations of our research include: (a) a solution that maintains temporal continuity of the video in addition to preserving its spatial structure, (b) space-time smoothing for automatic as well as interactive (user-guided) salient content selection, and (c) sequential frame-by-frame processing conducive for arbitrary length and streaming video.
Machine Learning
"Random classification noise defeats all convex potential boosters," Philip M. Long, Rocco A. Servedio, Machine Learning, vol. 78 (2010), pp. 287-304.
A popular approach that has been used to tackle many machine learning problems recently is to formulate them as optimization problems in which the goal is to minimize some “convex loss function.” This is an appealing formulation because these optimization problems can be solved in much the same way that a marble rolls to the bottom of a bowl. However, it turns out that there are drawbacks to this formulation. In "Random Classification Noise Defeats All Convex Potential Boosters," we show that any learning algorithm that works in this way can fail badly if there are noisy examples in the training data. This research motivates further study of other approaches to machine learning, for which there are algorithms that are provably more robust in the presence of noise.
IR
"Clustering Query Refinements by User Intent," Eldar Sadikov, Jayant Madhavan, Lu Wang, Alon Halevy, Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, WWW, April 2010.
When users pose a search query, they usually have an underlying intent or information need, and the sequence of queries he or she poses in single search sessions is usually determined by the user's underlying intent. Our research demonstrates that there typically are only a small number of prominent underlying intents for a given user query. Further, these intents can be identified very accurately by an analysis of anonymized search query logs. Our results show that underlying intents almost always correspond to well-understood high-level concepts.
HCI
"How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?", Anne Aula, Rehan Khan, Zhiwei Guan, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI , April 2010.
Seeing that someone is getting frustrated with a difficult search task is easy for another person--just look for the frowns, and listen for the sighs. But could a computer tell that you're getting frustrated from just the limited behavior a search engine can observe? Our study suggests that it can: when getting frustrated, our data shows that users start to formulate question queries, they start to use advanced operators, and they spend a larger proportion of the time on the search results page. Used together, these signals can be used to build a model that can potentially detect user frustration.
Google North American Faculty Summit - Day 1
Thursday, July 29 was the first day of the Google North American Faculty Summit, our sixth annual event bringing together Google engineers and subject matter experts with leading computer science faculty, mostly from North America but some from as far away as Japan and China. This year’s summit is focused on three topics: cloud computing, security and privacy, and social networking. It was these first two areas that we discussed yesterday, in a series of talks by Googlers, informal meetings and small round-table discussions.
After an introduction from Alfred Spector, Google’s VP of Research and Special Initiatives, we dove right into the technical talks, covering the “arms race” of malware detection, privacy and public policy, passwords and authentication, and operations and infrastructure security at large scale. I gave a talk on the changes that cloud computing brings to security, both challenges such as privacy and authentication, as well as opportunities for security improvements, which I wanted to summarize briefly below.
Cloud services have defined a new model for end-user cloud applications that are accessed via single-user devices or browsers. Unlike software on personal computers, or on time-shared servers, cloud applications execute logically on stateless clients accessing a substrate of redundant back-end servers. While a single client may execute multiple applications, those applications are typically isolated and communicate only via the cloud, thus eliminating local dependencies and simplifying device management. As well as being isolated and stateless, clients are also provisioned with software upon use, which makes any client pretty much the same as any other and facilitates transparent access from different locations and devices.
There are many clear security benefits that accrue from this cloud application software model. To start with, it eliminates much of the complex, error-prone management traditionally required for each client. Also, because clients and servers are replicated or stateless, security policies can be enforced using simple, conservative fail-stop mechanisms. Cloud applications are also highly dynamic, with new software versions easily deployed through client restart or rolling server upgrades. Not only does this greatly simplify deploying fixes to software vulnerabilities, it also allows for the possibility of deploying specialized software versions, with custom security aspects, to different clients and servers. Such software instrumentation could be used for many diverse security purposes, especially when combined with randomization: these include artificially-induced heterogeneity as well as the large-scale construction and enforcement of models for appropriate software behavior. In short, cloud applications help with basic, but hard-to-answer security questions such as: Am I running the right software? Or, is it known to be bad? Is it behaving maliciously, and can I recover if it is?
Following my talk, faculty attendees had a variety of insightful questions—as they did for all the presenters today. Roy Campbell, from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, raised the issue of zero-day attacks, and how they might be handled and prevented. My response was that while it might be impossible to eliminate all security bugs, it is possible to get strong guarantees and higher assurance about fundamental software aspects. As an example, I mentioned the Native Client open source Google project that establishes strong, verifiable guarantees about the safety of low-level software. Another question raised was whether Multics-like protection rings were relevant to today's cloud computing applications. Although the mechanisms may not be the same as in Multics, my reply was that layered security and defense in depth are more important than ever, since cloud computing by necessity makes use of deep software stacks that extend from the client through multiple, nested back-end services.
On Friday’s agenda: the technical possibilities of the social web. We’ll be back with more highlights from the summit soon—stay tuned.
الثلاثاء، 27 يوليو 2010
The marriage of Queen Victoria
Got any £1 coins? They may be counterfeit.
...new figures indicated there were £41 million fake £1 coins in Britain – one in every 36 in circulation. This is a record level and suggests that the proportion of counterfeit coins had tripled in the last decade...Of course, if coins had any intrinsic metallic value, this wouldn't be such a problem...
Scrapping the £1 coin would be very expensive for the Government as well as major upheaval for consumers. However, other countries have been forced to take similar action when counterfeits became too prevalent. The 5 rand coin in 2004 was reissued after taxi-drivers and shopkeepers in South Africa started to refuse to accept them. Fakes were just 2 per cent of all coins, compared with 2.81 per cent with the British £1.
Experts said it was becoming increasingly difficult for shoppers in Britain to spot a fake. The only time they usually notice is when they are rejected by a parking meter or vending machine, which contain devices to monitor whether the metal composition of the coins is correct. However, at least half the fakes are now so good they pass these tests...
More at The Telegraph.
Competing against a superorganism
From a long essay at Esquire, via Metafilter."The numbers are just incredible," says Mike Rust, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Riverside. "We'll do population surveys at night. We'll go to a house and put out ten sugar-water stations around the house and another ten around the property. In the morning, the sugar water will be gone, and we'll have counted six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand ants. And that's in a night."
Wilson's book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself...
"One time I left a warm computer battery on the floor," Suiter says. "When I came back, I thought it was covered in cotton. But it was covered in Argentine ants. The white stuff was the larvae. There were five thousand larvae on the battery and another five thousand ants. They'd moved the whole brood to the battery, literally overnight. But this is not unusual. When my printer is warm, ants crawl in and out of it. Basically, whole colonies come through the walls."
"One day my wife called me," Rust says. "She said, 'They're in the freezer.' I went home, and there they were. There were two hundred thousand Argentine ants at the bottom of the freezer, frozen to death. I have no idea what they were doing there, but we took pictures."
...when we came back from summer vacation two Augusts ago and decided to grill outside on the Weber. I lit the fire and went inside to prepare the meat. My daughter stayed outside, and so when I heard the words "Emergency! Emergency!" I went running and was grateful to find that she hadn't caught fire. She was, however, pointing at the Weber and saying, "Ants, Daddy — ants!" I looked and said that I didn't see any. The Weber was enameled black, as always. Then the enamel began to seethe, and began to break up, like some experiment in the disassociation of matter. There had been tens of thousands of ants in the bed of soggy ash at the bottom of the grill, and when I lit the coals, they covered the cover, until that got too hot, and the whole scene was like a myrmicine version of the Hindenburg disaster, with cooking ants spilling off the top of the Weber and their horrible glittering larvae streaming through the slots at the bottom, while my daughter ran around screaming the one word that described what she saw...
See also Leiningen Versus the Ants, by Carl Stephenson.
And the award goes to...
Google's very own Tushar Chandra along with his coauthors, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Sam Toueg, received the prestigious Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing conference in Zürich. This award is given for outstanding papers that have had great impact on the theory and practice of distributed computing for over a decade.
Their papers introduced and precisely characterized the notion of unreliable failure detection in a distributed system:
- Tushar D. Chandra and Sam Toueg. "Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems," Journal of the ACM, 43(2):225-267, 1996.
(The first version appearing in the Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1991.) - Tushar D. Chandra, Vassos Hadzilacos and Sam Toueg. "The Weakest Failure Detector for Solving Consensus," Journal of the ACM, 43(4):685-722, 1996.
(The first version appearing in the Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1992.)
Tushar currently works on large-scale machine learning and distributed systems at Google.
You can find more information about the award and the papers here.
Congratulations to Tushar, Vassos, and Sam!
The devastation caused by bottom trawling
Detail from Landsat satellite image, Gulf of Mexico, taken on 10/24/99. Individual vessels can be seen as bright spots at end of sediment trails. Other bright spots are fixed oil and gas production platforms. One sediment trail can be traced for 27 km. Credit: SkyTruthFor over two years I've been meaning to write a post decrying the use of "bottom trawling" as a fishing technique. In 2008 I bookmarked an article at LiveScience (via), which included the photo above showing the effects visible from satellite imaging:
As nets are dragged across the seafloor, they can crush coral reefs, drag boulders across the bottom, and trap fish and animals not intended to be caught, called bycatch. All this activity stirs up sediments from the seafloor, which create the persistent plumes in the wake of the fishing ships.
Watling and his colleagues say that the plumes visible in satellite images are likely just the "tip of the iceberg" as most trawling is in waters that are deep enough that the plume remains hidden by the water above.
“The commons petition the King, complaining that where in creeks and havens of the sea there used to be plenteous fishing, to the profit of the Kingdom, certain fishermen, for several years past have subtily contrived an instrument called the “wondyrechaun” made in the manner of an oyster dredge, but which is considerably longer, upon which instrument is attached a net so close meshed that no fish, be it ever so small which enters therein can escape, but must stay and be taken.More at Southern Fried Science, via Neatorama's Upcoming Queue.
And that the great and long iron of the wondyrechaun runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below water there, and also the spat of oysters, mussels and other fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished. By which instrument in many places, the fishermen take such quantity of small fish that they do not know what to do with them; and that they feed and fat their pigs with them, to the great damage of the commons of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries, and they pray for a remedy.”
The Battle of Baltimore
Excerpts from The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814, by Anthony S. Pitch, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1998.[During the bombing of Fort McHenry] The barrage was so intense that, on average, a bomb a minute thundered out of the British barrels for hour after hour. Hoping for a combination of luck and calculation, the crews measured lengths of fuses expected to ignite the power while the shells were still airborne. A perfectly timed explosion would rip the shell casing apart a few yards above ground, spraying deadly shrapnel in every direction…
The stream of explosives created an awesome sight. Observers clearly saw the trail of sparks from burning fuses stuffed inside the streaking shells. Men, women, and children crammed the roofs of houses to see what one spectator described as “the most awful spectacle of shot and shells and rockets shooting and bursting through the air.”
The night sky lit up with such a brilliance of bursting shells and fleeting rockets that observers gasped at its peculiar beauty. (208-9)
Image source.
Looting in wartime America
Excerpts from The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814, by Anthony S. Pitch, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1998.With relief, Tingey found his own home still standing, but only, he learned, because [Brit. Rear Adm.] Cockburn had declared private property sacred. Local mobs, however, had already broken in and run off with some of the contents… Tingey’s departure set off a new flurry of looting by people living close to the navy yard. He was the last figure of authority blocking their way. They set to with crazed abandon, swarming into homes, scurrying from cellars to attic, and snatching anything that could be carried away, even ripping fixtures off the walls and tearing locks out of the doors… (p. 135)
(British officer) “We have not come here for the purpose of plunder, but to destroy all public property. If anything of the kind [theft] should take place again, such as you have just witnessed, I have to request that your citizens will assemble, seize the villains without delay, and conduct them to headquarters. Depend upon it, Sir, they will be punished.” The [British] soldier was set on his stolen horse and escorted up to Capitol Hill… On the way he tried to escape several times, but his luck had run out. After being paraded at headquarters, he was summarily shot. (p. 137)
The morning after the British left the capital, hordes of citizens swarmed over the remains of the President’s House, the Capitol, and the navy yard… Without any means of law enforcement, the city was open to looters and thieves. Like vultures, they descended on the open ruins to pick and pluck at random… Unchecked, they violated the sanctity of private homes, snatching and hoarding items of value and even of worthless sentiment. (p. 150)
Googlers receive multiple awards at the 2010 International Conference on Machine Learning
Googlers were recognized in three of the four paper awards at ICML 2010:
- Sajid Siddiqi was co-recipient of the best paper award for Hilbert Space Embeddings of Hidden Markov Models with Le Song, Byron Boots, Geoff Gordon, and Alex Smola
- John Duchi, who is also a graduate student at UC Berkeley, was co-recipient of the best student paper award for On the Consistency of Ranking Algorithms with Lester Mackey and Michael Jordan
- And last but not the least, Yoram Singer was co-recipient of the best 10-year paper award for the most influential paper of ICML 2000, Reducing Multiclass to Binary: A Unifying Approach for Margin Classifiers (pdf) with Erin Allwein and Robert Schapire, which has currently 852 citations in Google Scholar.
الاثنين، 26 يوليو 2010
Double Helix Tension Mast in the Forest
A tree-inspired tension mast has risen in "the Tuscany of Austria".
This observation tower by Munich office terrain:loenhart&mayr rises over the river Mur in Southern Styria, on the Austrian border with Slovenia, near Bad Radkersburg. It was engineered by the Office for Structural Design in Frankfurt.
It is a double helix tension structure composed of steel and clad with aluminum, by Klaus Loenhart, Director of the Institut für Architektur und Landschaft at Graz University of Technology and his colleague Christoph Mayr.
The supporting structure of the observation tower is designed like a tree. The lower part corresponds with a tree's trunk, while the steel structure of thinned-out tubes represents the more delicate branches up above. Its double spiral staircase boasts 168 steps that raise a visitor to a height of 27 meters. It has another flight going down. The tower sways as one climbs its stairs.
The tower was supported by local donors, whose names are inscribed on a plaque.
Client: Gemeinde Gosdorf Orts- und Infrastrukturentwicklungs KG
Design & planning of observation tower and exteriors: terrain:loenhart&mayr architects and landscape architects, Munich/Graz
Structural planning: osd – office for structural design, Frankfurt
Construction period: March – September 2009
Opening: 20 March 2010
Links
De Zeen Design Magazine article by Lilli Hollein
http://www.dezeen.com/2010/07/24/observation-tower-on-the-river-mur-by-terrainloenhartmayr
The supporting structure of the observation tower is designed like a tree. The lower part corresponds with a tree's trunk, while the steel structure of thinned-out tubes represents the more delicate branches up above. Its double spiral staircase boasts 168 steps that raise a visitor to a height of 27 meters. It has another flight going down. The tower sways as one climbs its stairs.The tower was supported by local donors, whose names are inscribed on a plaque.Client: Gemeinde Gosdorf Orts- und Infrastrukturentwicklungs KG
Design & planning of observation tower and exteriors: terrain:loenhart&mayr architects and landscape architects, Munich/Graz
Structural planning: osd – office for structural design, Frankfurt
Construction period: March – September 2009
Opening: 20 March 2010
LinksDe Zeen Design Magazine article by Lilli Hollein
http://www.dezeen.com/2010/07/24/observation-tower-on-the-river-mur-by-terrainloenhartmayr
A Funereal Duskywing (Erynnis funeralis) in Wisconsin
The butterfly was nectaring on a large stand of catnip (Nepeta cataria) right next to our front door. Photography was difficult because it rested on individual blossoms only for a few seconds before moving to another, so it was difficult to capture good images. It wasn't afraid of me; a few times I was able to get the lens within about 3" with a macro setting, but I had to snap blindly. During the 5-10 minutes it spent nectaring I fired off about 25 photos, fully half of which were out of focus.
When the little fellow left, I went in and checked my standard book reference (Butterflies of the North Woods, by Larry Weber). It wasn't in there. Double-checked. Not there - and not even in the appendix listing "rare strays to the North Woods."
I finally found the answer at Mike Reese's Wisconsin Butterflies website, where there was a page devoted to the Funereal Duskywing. It is described as a "very rare stray" to Wisconsin, only seen in this state five times - one of which was ten days ago in Milwaukee.
After discovering how rare this sighting was, I went back to the front steps and sat there with my camera and a thick novel and a glass of sangria and waited until dark for it to return, without any success. You can bet that tomorrow afternoon/evening I'll be out there again hoping to get some better pictures. Stay tuned.
The Maldives are NOT sinking
The Maldives have become a symbol of the dangers of global warming, amid fears the low-lying nation could disappear as a result of rising sea levels. But one team of scientists believes the truth is more complicated. The Maldives coral islands, they postulate, may be growing with the rising waters...More discussion and explanation at Der Spiegel.
The geomorphologists compared old aerial photographs taken in World War II with current satellite images. To their surprise, they found that most of the atolls they were studying had either grown or remained unchanged in the last few decades, even though the sea level has already risen by 12 centimeters (about 5 inches).
As soon as it was published, the study became ammunition in the political battle over global warming. Climate activists questioned its conclusions, which would normally be welcomed as good news. Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, on the other hand, seized upon the study as evidence that all the excitement over global warming is completely unnecessary.
Video xray of a caterpillar on a treadmill
Biologists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences studying crawling caterpillars have reported a unique "two-body" system of locomotion that has not previously been reported in any animal.I ran across some discussion of this research elsewhere today (lost the link); apparently it has some non-entomological implications re the design of robots. Other than that, it's interesting or not depending on whether you are interested in caterpillars.
In an article published online July 22 in the journal Current Biology, the Tufts-led team reported that the gut of the crawling tobacco hawkmoth caterpillar (Manduca sexta) moves forward independently of and in advance of the surrounding body wall and legs, rather than moving along with them. Collaborating with Tufts were researchers from Virginia Tech and Argonne National Laboratory.
This informational video demonstrates the discovery, using synchrotron-sourced, phase-contrast, X-ray imaging to show how the gut is propelled forward in advance of the rest of the body during crawling.
Conference room assassination technique
(2) Opens fire on first subject to react. Swings across group toward center of mass. Times burst to empty magazine at end of swing.From "A Study of Assassination," a declassified CIA manual.
(1) Covers group to prevent individual dangerous reactions, if necessary, fires individual bursts of 3 rounds.
الأحد، 25 يوليو 2010
What should be done with the last roll of Kodachrome film?
[Photojournalist Steve] McCurry snapped a picture that ended up on the cover of National Geographic's June 1985 issue. "The Afghan Girl" became one of the magazine's most widely recognized photographs — and one of the century's most iconic. To get that shot, McCurry used a type of film that has become iconic in its own right: Kodachrome.More at the link. (And if you have any more Kodachrome film, get it processed by December 30).
The film, known for its rich saturation and archival durability of its slides, was discontinued last year to the dismay of photographers worldwide. But Kodak gave the last roll ever produced to McCurry. He has just processed that coveted roll at Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons, Kan. — the last remaining location that processes the once-popular slide film.
What's on that landmark roll of film is still under wraps. It will be the subject of an upcoming documentary by National Geographic.
Child's bicycle embedded in a house
A child's bicycle is shown, impaled into the side of a home after a tornado hit part of Millbury, Ohio on Sunday, June 6, 2010. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
World record Flugtag distance
90,000 people gathered in St. Paul this week for a Flugtag during which a new world record was set for longest distance achieved.
Dozens of the 37 teams crashed into the Mississippi just a few feet from the launching platform, and none came close to the flight made by Williams' team.The StarTribune story has a two-minute video showing multiple crashes. The video embedded above shows only the record flight.
Then again, not everyone was trying to set a world record. One after another, crafts built like hamburgers, Zambonis and baseball bats all crashed into the river. The crowd roared with approval for their efforts.
"We had good control of the aircraft," pilot Rachel Norman said. "We had an elevator that moved, and so when I pulled the stick back, we could actually control where the nose was at instead of just pitching the nose down and trying to shift our weight."
The craft, designed by a team of aeronautical engineers, began its flight perched on top of a large metal tower that the team pushed off the platform to give it extra altitude. Norman herself gave the team an advantage over the competition: She's a licensed pilot.
Wooden peg = "treenail" = "trunnel"
Seaweed drapes much of the eroded woodwork — timbers nine inches square extending from keel to gunwale and still covered in part by strakes, wooden planks that run from stem to stern. Here and there a green stain betrays the occasional metal pin, perhaps of copper, but the hull is held together mostly by wooden pegs...Via Professor Hex.
They’re called treenails, pronounced “trunnels,” said D.K. “Kathy” Abbass, founder and director of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project.
Abbass said that method of ship construction dates back centuries, but maritime traditions die hard.
“Wooden pegs don’t really help” in determining the age of the ship, she said. They only began falling out of fashion in the last century. She said the yacht Coronet, which is being restored by the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, is built treenail-fashion.
"Swan-upping" and the "Swan With Two Nicks"
The census — it takes five days — is operated by the Swan Marker and the Swan Uppers of two of the ancient trade guilds of London, the Vintners’ and Dyers’ livery companies. The census is said to date from the twelfth century, at a time when the sovereign claimed ownership of all swans (they were valuable birds that were served up at banquets and feasts).Photo credit.
These days, royal ownership is claimed only on the Thames and some tributaries and — you may be pleased to learn — the Queen doesn’t actually eat any of her swans. The birds used to be tagged by nicks on their beaks — which is why the Swan Marker has that name — but these days are ringed on their legs.
Two nicks put on a swan’s bill at the time of swan-upping signified that it was owned by the Vintners, hence the connection with pubs. The link has often puzzled people. Down the centuries several such pubs changed their names to Swan With Two Necks, in the toponymic equivalent of popular etymology.
"... an interest in the enemy's staying alive"
‘Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.’
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Origin of the word "taxi"
The German name of Taxameter, at first adopted in Britain, was taken from Taxe, a charge or levy. After the device became common in Paris..., the French created the term taximètre for it, from taxe, a tariff...Found at World Wide Words, where there are additional details.
Partly in consequence of patriotic feelings, coupled with anti-German sentiment..., the French term proved popular. In the Anglicised spelling taximeter it was used in a London newspaper in 1898 even before the metropolitan meters, of the German type, had gone into operation. Taximeter soon permanently replaced the German name.
These early devices were, of course, fitted to horse-drawn hansom cabs or growlers (so called because of the noise their iron-hooped wheels made on London cobbles). There was some argument over what to call these new metered vehicles. While the official designation for any vehicle plying for hire was hackney carriage, everybody called them cabs (a short form of cabriolet, the French name for a light horse-drawn two-wheeled vehicle that had been indirectly borrowed from the Latin word for goat because of its bounding motion). A metered hire vehicle was clearly enough a taximeter cab, but this was too unwieldy for daily use.
Motorised vehicles began to appear in substantial numbers during the first decade of the new century, all being fitted with meters from the outset. In March 1907, the Daily Chronicle remarked that “Every journalist ... has his idea of what the vehicle should be called” and went on to list motor-cab, taxi-cab, and taximo among the options touted... By November 1907 the Daily Mail had begun to refer to a “taxi”, in inverted commas as befitted a colloquial term not yet admitted to the standard lexicon. In February 1908, the Daily Chronicle noted that the issue had been resolved: “Within the past few months the ‘taxi’ has been the name given to the motor-cab.” Since then, of course, it has spread greatly, though never ousting cab from the language.
That isn’t the whole story. Of the words on the list that the Daily Chronicle produced in March 1907, one other did well, though not so much in the UK. Taxicab is on record from as early as December 1907 in New York and it has survived in the US.
Tonsillectomy without anesthesia in Belarus
I've been debating whether to post this, because it will distress many viewers, so as I did with the last potentially offensive video, I'll embed it at the bottom of the post after these cautionary statements.
The video shows the tonsils being removed from a child, apparently in Belarus. No anesthesia is used. The child is restrained and under considerable emotional stress. The medical staff are not speaking harshly or being intentionally cruel. The procedure itself takes about one minute. It is bloody.
This will be disturbing to some viewers. On the other hand, this is real life. This is how things are done in some parts of the world. This is how this (and similar or worse) procedures were done in antiquity.
Remember the old adage: "what has been seen cannot be unseen" - then make your decision.
Addendum: Ninabi notes "...from airing this sad, scary video in Ireland, funds were raised for an anesthetic machine for this hospital."
The video shows the tonsils being removed from a child, apparently in Belarus. No anesthesia is used. The child is restrained and under considerable emotional stress. The medical staff are not speaking harshly or being intentionally cruel. The procedure itself takes about one minute. It is bloody.
This will be disturbing to some viewers. On the other hand, this is real life. This is how things are done in some parts of the world. This is how this (and similar or worse) procedures were done in antiquity.
Remember the old adage: "what has been seen cannot be unseen" - then make your decision.
Addendum: Ninabi notes "...from airing this sad, scary video in Ireland, funds were raised for an anesthetic machine for this hospital."
"I wouldn't worry about that"
The full phrase is, of course, "I wouldn't worry about that IF I WERE YOU." But it is often - perhaps typically - shortened to "I wouldn't worry about that." Which, taken literally, means something quite different, and which can properly be used in the sense that Dilbert's boss uses it. I'll have to try this...
Stephen Fry discusses atheism
Excerpted from the full interview at Big Think....and I love how when people watch I don’t know, David Attenborough or Discovery Planet type thing you know where you see the absolute phenomenal majesty and complexity and bewildering beauty of nature and you stare at it and then… and somebody next to you goes, “And how can you say there is no God?” “Look at that.” And then five minutes later you’re looking at the lifecycle of a parasitic worm whose job is to bury itself in the eyeball of a little lamb and eat the eyeball from inside while the lamb dies in horrible agony and then you turn to them and say, “Yeah, where is your God now?” You know I mean you got… You can’t just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is...
...perhaps the greatest insult to humanism is this idea that mankind needs a god in order to have a moral framework. There is a very clear way of demonstrating logically how absurd that is because the warrant for that logical framework, for that moral framework that comes from God is always tested against man’s own morals and it’s a complicated argument, but I mean that’s, you know it’s the standard one which is pretty unanswerable, but the idea that we don’t know right from wrong, but we have to take it from words put down in a book two, three, four, five, six thousand years ago and dictated to rather hotheaded neurotic desert tribes is just insulting. It’s just no, I mean you know if there were a God he would want us to be better spirited than to take his word for everything. Wouldn’t he? If he gave us free will would he really want us to say, “No, I have to abide by everything that’s written in this book, all the laws of circumcision and of eating and of… and what to do with menstruating women?” I mean, “I’m going to obey those written down there.” “I won’t think for myself because that’s not required of me.” Come on. It’s just not good enough and you know I have no quarrel with individuals who wish… who are devout and who have faith. I don’t want to mock them. I really don’t, but damned if I’m going to be told by them what to do with my body or damned if I’m going to have the extraordinary battles won by enlightenment over the past 400 years, to have those battles abdicated by a new dark ages...
"Dirce" (1897) and "Nero's Torches" (1897)
Via Fantasy Ink.
Famous books are being re-edited for today's youth
By substituting modern terms for outdated ones, children will no longer be challenged to learn new words...
Farewell to the awful swotters, dirty tinkers and jolly japes: Enid Blyton's language is being dragged out of the 1940s by her publisher in an attempt to give her books greater appeal for today's children.I disagree.
Starting next month with 10 Famous Five novels, Hodder is "sensitively and carefully" revising Blyton's text after research with children and parents showed that the author's old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as "mercy me!" have been changed to "oh no!", "fellow" to "old man" and "it's all very peculiar" to "it's all very strange".
Other changes include "housemistress" becoming "teacher", "awful swotter" becoming "bookworm", "mother and father" becoming "mum and dad", "school tunic" becoming "uniform" and Dick's comment that "she must be jolly lonely all by herself" being changed to "she must get lonely all by herself"...
Tony Summerfield, who runs the Enid Blyton Society, said he was "thoroughly against unnecessary changes just for the sake of it, from adults who underestimate the intelligence of children"...
Bestselling children's author Andy Briggs, who is writing a children's series bringing Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan into the 21st century, approved of the changes. "It's an unfortunate necessity," he said. "The classic books we were brought up on – the Famous Five, Tarzan, Sherlock Homes – need to be updated. Language just changes, it evolves, and the problem is if we don't evolve with it, then the new generation of kids is not going to have anything to relate to. When these books were published, 'jeepers' and 'golly gosh' was modern slang. It makes perfect sense to update the language."
Sunday smörgåsbord
(I wonder whether anyone else reading this blog will remember the names of Charlie Boone and Roger Erickson at WCCO radio)
James Joyce's Ulysses is summarized in cartoon on one page at "Ulysses for Dummies'
Add Caravaggio's name to the list of painters whose death may in part have been caused by (or accelerated by) lead poisoning.
Getty Images is now purchasing photographs from Flickr users.
Harbour seals reportedly use their whiskers as vibration sensors to detect the presence and direction of movement of fish.
Newsweek has published its list of America's top 1,600 high schools.
Mental Floss asks a logical question: Why does bottled water have an expiration date?
In June, earthquake activity was increasing in Iceland volcano Eyjafjallajökull's bigger neighbor, Mýrdalsjökull.
A French prisoner killed his cellmate and ate his cellmate's lung (he fried it with onions, if you really want to know).
The US Supreme Court has ruled that Monsanto can sell genetically modified seeds before safety tests on them are completed.
A laser pointer is attached to the collar of a dachshund. Video at the link.
Australian men have been shooting one another with air rifles "to see if it hurts." Alcohol is presumed to have affected the decision-making.
In Oklahoma "Police tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn't breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance."
The highest score ever recorded in soccer was 149-0, consisting of 149 own goals.
Discovery News has photos of a 112-year-old wreck of a wooden steamship found on the floor of Lake Superior; the cold water has preserved everything.
King Tut may have been a sickler.
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