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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 88 declined, 23 accepted (111 total, 20.72% accepted)

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Censorship

Submission + - Free Speech Redefined by Canadian Court (majorityrights.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Saying, essentially, that "If it were free speech then it wouldn't be prohibited!" an Ontario Superior Court has ruled that a dissident must pay damages for calling a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Commission "an enemy of free speech". The London Free Press reports that: "Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions. Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being "an enemy of free speech." Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory... Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman's claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn't accurately be called an attack on free speech." Additional details of the ruling indicate this centers on the use of internet communication."
The Matrix

Submission + - Surfer's Theory of Everything Stuns Physicists (arxiv.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The UK Telegraph reports that: A surfer dude named Garrett Lisi has come up with a new theory of everything which physicists are calling "fabulous", "incredibly beautiful", "profound" and "most compelling". Lisi's peer-reviewed paper titled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is being published with the New Scientist. The Telegraph article continues: "Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.""
Announcements

Submission + - Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold (google.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program) thereby, not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge but, bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12."
Biotech

Submission + - Flowers For Algernon

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Drug Researcher reports that Algernon lives: ''...[R]esearchers ... have conditionally knocked out a specific gene to prevent an enzyme called cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) from being produced, but only in the brain. This led to the mice becoming more adept at learning and also able to more quickly decipher environmental changes...."It's pretty rare that you make mice 'smarter,' so there are a lot of cognitive implications," said Dr Bibb. "Everything is more meaningful to these mice," he said. "The increase in sensitivity to their surroundings seems to have made them smarter." ''

The mice did have a more difficult adolescence than the "normal" mice, who bit them and pushed them off the wheel when the researcher wasn't looking."
Biotech

Submission + - Founding Researcher Says Algae Oil Claims Absurd

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "John Benemann, who ran the open algae pond project for the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, takes aim and fires at "absurd" claims of biodiesel from algae with a new article posted at The Oil Drum, concluding with: "I hope that this posting helps persuade GFT, and all others in this "business", to CEASE AND DESIST from the absurd and totally bizarre claims they are making. PLEASE!""
Space

Submission + - Armadillo Publishes Their Space Access 2007 Video

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Armadillo Aerospace has published their Space Access 2007 video. Highlights include a collage of the various flight systems flown by the team at Armadillo Aerospace. Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack states during the video: "Real experience isn't gained by running simulations and doing paper studies. You get it by actually building and testing things. Our small team at Armadillo Aerospace has built an experience base that may be unique in the entire world. We've made over a hundred rocket powered test flights using 3 different propellant combinations, 50 engines spanning over a hundred different vehicles, using 4 different attitude control systems, 6 generations of electronics boxes, ... and our work on this project is just done 2 days a week with an all-volunteer team.""
Space

Submission + - Reagan's Order to Launch the Challenger

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Of his new book "Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age", author Richard C. Cook, NASA analyst, says: "...the (Presidential) Commission claimed there was no political pressure from outside NASA to launch Challenger, which my book shows conclusively to be false." Others have documented the role of the four Morton Thiokol engineers who opposed the launch of the Challenge, but this is the first book to focus on the choice facing the administration of NASA. Either, 1) Defy their chain of command going all the way to the White House on the eve of a State of the Union Address or 2) Throw a pair of dice claiming it won't come up 7 dead astronauts."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - X-Prize Foundation Goes VC

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Redherring interviews Tom Vander Ark, former head of the Gates Foundation's education philanthropy, who is now heading up the X-Prize Foundation's outreach to venture capital: "Define a new area for innovation in collaboration with venture capitalists, put up a prize for it, and see what companies come out of the woodwork. Promote the heck out of the contest. Award the prize to the company with the best solution, and see if VCs are interested in backing the company with a round of funding.""
Space

Submission + - Griffin Backpedals on NASA As Prize Underwriter

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Spaceref reports NASA administrator Mike Griffin's comments before the Space Transportation Association wherein he states: "While we have learned many lessons from the X-Prize for our own prize program, and are learning how to leverage commercial space interests, Burt will admit that he only had one stakeholder to whom he answered, Microsoft founder Paul Allen. As a public institution, we at NASA have hundreds of stakeholders to whom we must answer." Why not compare NASA with the Ansari family? Competitors for a prize such as Allen are different from underwriters of a prize such as the Ansari family — a distinction that Griffin recognized as recently as October when he said: "So what are the lessons to be gleaned? First, the U.S. government acted through the Post Office Department as a major purchaser of potential air transport services, as opposed to being a technology developer." So this appears to be a genuine backpedal from NASA as prize creator to NASA as competitor, unless, of course, it is merely the first stage of Idiocracy setting in."
The Matrix

Submission + - In The Beginning Was The Code.

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Just in case you were wondering what makes our universe tick, an hypothesized (meta)algorithm running our universe has been proposed in "The New AI: General & Sound & Relevant for Physics" by Jürgen Schmidhuber of Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence: "Systematically create and execute all programs for a universal computer, such as a Turing machine or a CA; the first program is run for one instruction every second step on average, the next for one instruction every second of the remaining steps on average, and so on." This actually computes all parallel universes — not just ours. Among the consequences of this hypothesis is: "Large scale quantum computation will not work well, essentially because it would require too many exponentially growing computational resources in interfering 'parallel universes'". Prof. Schmidhuber's post-doc student, Marcus Hutter, of Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge fame came up with some of the key breakthroughs in "The New AI" upon which Schmidhuber's hypothesis is based."
Power

Submission + - Should Google Go Nuclear?

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled "Should Google Go Nuclear?" in which he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which he claims produced several orders of magnitude high fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Ratushnyak Wins First Hutter Prize Payout

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Alexander Ratushnyak (middle) of the Moscow State University Compression Project is the first winner of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge which was announced here August 13. On 25 Sep 2006, within two months of the announcement of the Hutter Prize, Alexander Ratushnyak submitted his program paq8hp5 which compressed the first 100MB of Wikipedia down to 17,073,018 bytes. As required by the contest, this size includes a program which must be capable of decompressing the 100MB sample of Wikipedia within a reasonable time using widely-available desktop computer hardware resources. This is a whopping 6.8% improvement over the contest baseline and compares very favorably with the historic rate of progress in text compression of approximately 3% per year, even accounting for "low-hanging-fruit" under customization of compressors for new benchmark corpora.

paq8hp5 is the first text compressor to reduce to practice the theoretic possibility of using semantic associations between words — a form of language modeling.

At Alexander Ratushnyak's request, part of the 3416 euro (500 euro for each percent improvement) prize will go to Przemyslaw Skibinski of the University of Wroclaw Institute of Computer Science for his early contributions to the underlying PAQ compression algorithm.

Matt Mahoney has a further write-up on the history of this lineage of text compressors as well as his announcement of the payout in alt.ai.nat-lang."
Space

Submission + - The X-Prize Cup Flights of Pixel

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "John Carmack has put up a page of videos and photos of the flights of Pixel along with a text narrative at the Armadillo Aerospace website. Although Armadillo Aerospace did not win the sought-after Lunar Lander Challenge Prize the flights were quite reminiscent of the famous test flight of the Delta Clipper which set higher expectations for speed and economy of development in aerospace. To put things in perspective the Delta Clipper cost tens of millions and set a record for reusable rocket flights at 26-hour turnaround. The Pixel cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had a turnaround between flights almost 10 times faster."
Space

Submission + - Video of Armadillo Aerospace's X-Prize Cup Flight

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Armadillo Aerospace's 1 minute 35 second X-Prize Cup hovering rocket flight is toward the end of this video. This flight was part of the $2M Lunar Lander Challenge prize competition — aimed at winning the $350,000 Level One prize. As blogged by space journalist Leonard David the first leg of the flight, shown in the video, was successful but the second leg of the flight failed near lift-off."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Netflix Progress Prize May Already Be Won

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Merely a week after the announcement of The Netflix Prize a "The Thought Gang" team has already beaten the threshold for the 2007 Netflix Progress Prize of $50,000. This is pretty impressive given the previously quoted researcher who said: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.' Congratulations are in order for Netflix and "The Thought Gang" team, whoever they are, for demonstrating, yet again, the power of prizes to accelerate progress."

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