From what I gather, the emphasis for the project is not mainly on facilitating re-implementation of incorporating existing features found in modern cameras, but to enable researchers and developers to add onto to new functionality very seldom found in today's camera. Computational Photography ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography ) is currently a hot research area in academia. A huge chunk of computational photographic work is purely software driven, and do not involve any hardware tweaking (Think HDR imaging, panorama) . Thus, what a programmable (open) camera will enable me is to pick up a recently published work (or device my own technique), implement it and add onto the functionality of the camera. ** snip from the quoted article ** Of course users with Frankencameras would not be constrained by what is already known. Theyâ(TM)d be free to discover and experiment with all kinds of other operations that might yield innovative results because theyâ(TM)d have total control. ** snip ends **

While I agree to you to a certain extend that outlier rejection is a useful and accepted technique, and relevant to the context since the original article is more an empirical studies based on statistics ('not science'). The reported literature are observations or evidences which may be used to validate (but not prove) a fact. But what is not clear to me (or very fuzzily explained in article) is the correlation between after-world sensual promises to a person turning into a human bomb.

The after-world rewards has always been a prominent concept judeao-christianity derivative religions. If we peek back to our history (middle ages to be precise) many a 'hypothesis' pivots the root psychology of the conflicts to be belief, re-affirmation and justification of their actions on to the reward structure system. Though these systems did not include sexual rewards, we still could find elements of terrorist activities aplenty.

Also one of other suspicious point is the definition of what counts as terrorist activity and the sample set used. Pre-911, concept of Islamic terrorism was virtually unknown to us. Though the same groups (Al-Qadea et.al) was very active even a decade before 9/11, but some of these organisations never counted as a terrorist one in the past. Argument I am raising is against the fairness of the sample set. There might well be a non-muslim terrorism organisation (again without sex reward scheme) in operation in lesser know part of the world. For example LTTE of Sri-lakha is know for it's suicide bombers.

To cut the long story short, the article does not give 'necessary' data required for a statistical inference to validate the arguments it put forward, though nevertheless is interesting and worth further & thorough investigation, but cannot be qualified as good science at this moment.