]
] Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor
] Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with
] far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an
] illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly
] different ones actually exist.

This is something that Negativland has been saying for a long
time, actually...

Books: The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less

Efforts to convince Muslims not to hate Americans need to be combined with efforts to convince Americans not to hate Muslims.

The Muslim Ghetto

As the global war on terrorism continues to expand and the post-Cold War security environment remains in flux, both the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. intelligence have been thrust into the public spotlight. The author advances the argument that a “Revolution in Intelligence Affairs” is needed to prepare the Intelligence Community to meet its future challenges. In this report, she presents a framework for how the United States should consider specific changes to its intelligence enterprise to improve its effectiveness.

Toward a Revolution in Intelligence Affairs

Copy Constructors you are the thorn in my side. I spent nearly half an hour tracking done something that should have been apparent right way:

If you have an object, which contains pointers to dynamic memory, adding to a vector (or any STL container) does a shallow copy! I needed a deep copy. I had some temp objects I was creating only to add them to an array, and then destory them. When they were destroyed, they would free the memory the object in the vector still referenced.

Segmentation Fault

... sigh... at least its all billable hours.

oh baby, copy it deep!

] Jeremy Stribling said that he and two fellow MIT graduate
] students questioned the standards of some academic
] conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate
] research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts
] and diagrams.

Scientific conference falls for gibberish prank. 15/04/2005. ABC News Online

The major goal of the workshop was to identify the most important human-related research and design issues from both the engineering and human factors perspectives and to develop a list of lessons learned and fruitful research directions.

You can download this book in PDF for free.

It's a huge download.

Workshop on Ground and Air Military Robots

] The time for robot translators has arrived, according to
] a panel of language specialists at a meeting of the
] American Association for the Advancement of Science in
] Washington last month.

An interesting status point in the state of Machine Translation.

Robot translators decipher mountains of enemy messages

] ALBANY, N.Y. Apr 3, 2005 %u2014 Researchers and
] volunteers around the world are taking early steps toward
] a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use
] electrical signals from the brain as instructions to
] computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people
] to communicate, move around and control their environment
] literally without moving a muscle.

The reporter describes participating in a demonstration of this technology.

ABC News: Computers Obeying Brain Signals

Cutting just a few calories overall, but feeding intermittently, may be a more feasible eating pattern for some people to maintain than making small reductions each and every day.

All you can't eat | Economist

] NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the
] activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy,
] both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a
] "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is
] available (the usual information such as date of birth, a
] biography, and other essential facts.)
]
] But it mostly exists to document the connections between
] people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's
] otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by
] examining the crowd that person has been hanging out
] with.
]
] Eventually, we will have synopses and analyses of
] creative works by the people in the database, including
] their books, films, and recordings.

Soylent productions, the folks behind Rotten, have a kind of IMDB for everyone site going on. I am surprised by the quality and breadth of the database. Good times

NNDB: Tracking the entire world