June 30, 2004
Teachers seek new angle on geometry: Hopkinton educators want to make it funBy Cathy Flynn HOPKINTON -- Why are students so obtuse about acute angles and parallelograms? Teachers say part of the problem is a daunting vocabulary. "(It) is a challenge for the students," said Pat DiCostanza, a third grade teacher at Elmwood School. "They don't understand that a shape can be called different things." Linda Coffey, a geometry specialist, shared her insights yesterday with teachers from Hopkinton Middle School, hoping to help more students see the connection between geometry and everyday life. Geometry has long been considered a non-relevant stepchild in the math family. "There was once a philosophy that geometry was just shapes, and you really wouldn't ever need to use it," Coffey said. The specialists say that today's students must see how geometry relates to their world before they can grasp abstract concepts like equilateral triangles. "Our research tells us that you should start at the concrete level and move toward the abstract," said O'Connor, who has taught elementary school children. "The problem is that most of the testing is done at the abstract level." Teachers seek new angle on geometry: Hopkinton educators want to make it fun |
June 29, 2004
Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackersChappell Brown HANCOCK, N.H. -- Design automation systems tailored to the task of genetic engineering could prove to be double-edged tools. While they represent a central thrust of the emerging synthetic biology movement, they also can lead to the accidental or deliberate creation of pathogenic biological components. One expert in the field, Harvard University genetics professor George Church, compared the potential misuse of synthetic biological designs with the danger posed by nuclear weapons. But there is one important difference, in his view — it is much harder to build a fusion device than to genetically engineer a pathogen. And the complexity of biological processes also increases the danger of accidents. By reducing the molecular biology of the cell to a list of standard modules with predictable behavior, professional biodesigners could engineer molecular machines in much the same way that system-on-chip designers create silicon systems. Just as a circuit designer does not need to be an expert in silicon physics and manufacturing processes, the future biodesigner will not need a detailed knowledge of biochemistry to effectively create complex biochemical machines. "Even if we don't have bioterrorists and teen-age biohackers, we will still create things that do not have the properties that we thought they would," Church said. The problem is that the body has not evolved a general ability to fend off artificial biological agents. "Even if you are genetically resistant and even if you are recently immunized you will have problems with this type of bug." Church chaired a panel on the problems and opportunities of DNA synthesis at the recent Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this month. A critical question for researchers and entrepreneurs entering the new field is what form technology regulation should take. Church suggested that anyone designing systems with synthetic biological components be required to have a license, which would entail passing basic competency tests. Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackers |
June 28, 2004
Joseph Doob, 94, Expert on Probability Theory, Is DeadBy JEREMY PEARCE r. Joseph L. Doob, a mathematician who studied and wrote extensively about probability theory, which has applications in insurance, polling and other fields, died June 7 at Clark-Lindsey Village in Urbana, Ill. He was 94. The cause was liver cancer, said Dr. Joseph Rosenblatt, a colleague at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Dr. Doob was interested in an aspect of probability theory called martingale theory, which is a sequence of functions that is used in statistics and mathematical physics. In 1940, he began to develop his ideas about probability, resulting in the book "Stochastic Processes" in 1953. He "was one of a very few mathematicians who were at the forefront of developing probability theory as a core area with connections to many other disciplines," said Dr. Rosenblatt, who is chairman of Illinois's department of mathematics. In later studies, Dr. Doob did work on axiomatic potential theory and Choquet boundary theory. Joseph Leo Doob was born in Cincinnati on Feb. 27, 1910. He graduated from the Ethical Culture School in New York City before attending Harvard, where he received his doctorate in 1932. After research at Columbia and Princeton, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1935. He became a professor emeritus in 1978, but remained active on campus until last month. Dr. Doob was a former president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1950, he served as president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1979, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He received the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize in 1984. Joseph Doob, 94, Expert on Probability Theory, Is Dead |
June 28, 2004
Prof has made a career out of solving puzzle |
June 28, 2004
Clarke unveils maths shake-upUnder the move, top class maths teachers could earn up to £60,000. The government is also set to increase the "golden hello" to new maths teachers from £4,000 to £5,000. Ministers will also appoint a new chief adviser for mathematics to oversee the implementation of the new strategy. A National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching to provide strategic direction and leadership will also be established. The report follows Professor Adrian Smith's report Making Mathematics Count released earlier this year. "We all need mathematics every day of our lives, from working out shopping bills to budgeting to buy a house. We need to get away from the myth that mathematics is a stand alone subject which is too difficult for many," said Clarke. "Mathematical skills are crucial throughout the curriculum, from geography to ICT, and they are vital for today's fast moving high-tech economy. "It is critical that we work and engage with the wider mathematics community to take forward these proposals, from encouraging more mathematics undergraduates to work in schools through the Student Associates Scheme to promoting better local links between teachers." Clarke unveils maths shake-up |
June 28, 2004
N.C. State study to focus on racial gapBy TIM SIMMONS In thousands of elementary schools throughout the nation, the racial achievement gap is never smaller than on the first day of kindergarten. It's a frustrating reality that researchers trace to various factors, including the critical roles of parents and others outside of school. But the most practical place for educators to close the gap is inside the classroom -- the place where two N.C. State University professors will soon focus a five-year, $3.6 million study. Ron Tzur and Patricia Marshall, both associate professors in the university's College of Education, will eventually work with 120 Wake County teachers from kindergarten through second grade as part of the project paid for by the National Science Foundation. Focusing on math instruction, the two will use dozens of research assistants to help monitor the way teachers explain math concepts to children of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Extra attention will be given to the way in which teachers work with minority students. "We know that math is more than calculating," Tzur said. "It is also about how people communicate ideas to each other and apply reasoning." "Sometimes we assume that a child can't succeed mathematically because they are poor or maybe a minority," said Lee Ann Segalla, Wake's senior director of elementary school programs. "My dad would probably say these are the kids who aren't book smart, but they are street smart." But children who are street smart are also children who understand concepts, which in turn means they can understand math, Segalla said. N.C. State study to focus on racial gap |
June 27, 2004
Mind Reading |
June 25, 2004
Record number hits math magic markA 'Ramanujan effect' seems to have swept Madhyamik 2004, with 221 students from the city and its neighbourhood scoring a perfect 100 in mathematics. The results of the no-merit-list Madhyamik were declared on Thursday. A total of 299 candidates from Bengal have secured full marks in mathematics this year, creating a record of sorts. Another 62 students from the city (of 77 in the state) have scored a century in additional mathematics, while 142 of the 156 candidates from Bengal have earned the distinction in additional mechanics, as well. On Calcutta emerging as the number-crunching capital, Debabrata Basu, in charge of the mathematics department at South Point School, pointed out: "Students in Calcutta have more opportunities and facilities. "The pressure from parents on students in and around the city is much greater than the pressure that students in the districts face," added the teacher of South Point, where over 30 of the 850 candidates this year scored a 100 on 100. Basu clarified that no complaints against the mathematics paper had been lodged by any of his students. "Our students have always been strong in mensuration and algebra," Basu said. One of his students, Soumadip De Sarkar, said he was "happy" he had scored full marks. "In addition to the school's prescribed textbooks, I used to solve quite a lot of problems from reference books," he smiled. Record number hits math magic mark |
June 24, 2004
New computational tools to aid in protein researchThe field of structural genomics - the study of the three dimensional geometric structures of proteins - is complicated by vast amounts of data, expensive experiments and cumbersome methods of analysis. Computer Science Professor Bruce Randall Donald and his students are working to ease this burden by developing techniques that simultaneously minimize the number of experiments and accelerate the data analysis involved in determining the structure of proteins. Learning about protein structure is especially relevant for treating illnesses that alter protein function, such as cancer. Published in consecutive months of the Journal of Biomolecular NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), Donald, a graduate student and a post-doctoral fellow present new algorithms that interpret NMR data to reveal a protein's shape and molecular architecture. NMR surveys a protein's molecular structure and uses tiny, spectroscopic protractors and rulers to generate a network of geometric measurements. A second paper by Donald and Lincong Wang, a Dartmouth post-doctoral fellow, will be published in July 2004. This paper describes a new protein structure determination algorithm, which solves complex algebraic equations that relate the experimental data to the protein's geometry. "Our algorithm requires less data and yet the resulting protein structures are incredibly accurate," says Donald. Unlike previous techniques, Wang's equations can be solved exactly in a manner similar to solving the quadratic equation of high school algebra fame. Wang and Donald hope that their work proves helpful to both structural genomic researchers as well as to those in the broader structural biology field. New computational tools to aid in protein research |
June 24, 2004
Mathematicians Salute Borweinby Jim Anderson Canada's mathematicians gave a special tribute to Western professor emeritus David Borwein at a recent conference held at Dalhousie University in Halifax. A special session of the joint summer meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society and the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society was dedicated in honour of Borwein's 80th birthday. Three former doctoral students, now mathematics professors themselves, spoke about the influence Borwein had on their careers and on so many people in the field of mathematics as well as his contribution to mathematical research. Other leading academics from Canada and the United States presented papers at the session on classical mathematical analysis. Mathematicians Salute Borwein |
June24, 2004
Research may explain why methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections are so difficult to control in hospitalsNew research by scientists by the University of Warwick may explain why methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections are so difficult to control in hospitals. MRSA is a major cause of invasive and sometimes deadly disease in hospitalised patients. Currently, attempts to prevent spread of these infections include isolating infected patients and increasing staff hygiene measures such as handwashing. However, these attempts have met with limited success. A new mathematical model helps explain why infections represent a serious threat and why attempts to control MRSA, the so-called 'superbug', have failed or met limited success. Scientists explored the conditions under which isolation policies can control MRSA transmission, both by preventing an endemic state and eradicating MRSA where it is already endemic. The mathematical model shows how the rising drug resistant strains of MRSA may fail depending on the timing of intervention and the levels of resource provision. If resources, such as the isolation of patients and in dedication isolation units (IUs), do not scale with MRSA, prevalence isolation policies can fail catastrophically. Research may explain why methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections are so difficult to control in hospitals |
June 23, 2004
Kiev Mathematician Dresses 'Sex and the City'By Maria Levitov For fashion designer Yelena Yarmak, a former mathematician from Kiev, giving up algorithms for hemlines was more an act of economic necessity than self-indulgence. Known today on the international catwalks as Helen Yarmak, she wears oversize jewelry of her own design and looks perfectly at ease in all the photos of her on the party circuit with Prince Charles, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, to name-drop but a few of the faces that decorate her Moscow office. Named International Designer of the Year at last year's New York Fashion Week, 15 years ago Yarmak worked on quantitative modeling at Ukraine's Institute of People's Property and dabbled in clothing design as a hobby. In 1992, Yarmak's husband, also a mathematician, got a job in Moscow, so the family traded Ukraine's capital for Russia's, where Yarmak broke into the fashion world. "Funding for sciences was at a minimum then," recalls Yarmak, who holds a doctorate in mathematics from Kiev's Cybernetics Institute. "I had no idea what I was going to do in Moscow." Yarmak had never considered a profession outside of mathematics. "Math is first and foremost logic," Yarmak says. "It is also creative and beautiful." But she found a similar creativity in designing clothes. The characters of "Sex and the City," a popular TV series about fashionable New York 30-something singles, wore Yarmak's designs in several episodes. Winner of several design, leadership and business honors, Yarmak has no plans to slow down. She loves Moscow, but spends much of her time traveling. "I adore New York for its infectious energy," Yarmak says. "It makes me want to work more and to do it better." Yarmak has another reason for traveling to the Big Apple. Her daughter Anna works there for Merrill Lynch. "She doesn't care about fashion," Yarmak says. "She is a mathematician." Kiev Mathematician Dresses 'Sex and the City' |
June 22, 2004
Has local mathematician proven the '5th Postulate?'By May Habib BEIRUT: Rachid Matta, a Lebanese mathematician and engineer, claims to have proven Euclid's parallel theorem - a theorem that has remained unproved since Euclid wrote it in 300 BC and one that many of the world's greatest minds have deemed improvable. If verified, Matta's work could have an enormous impact on mathematics because both elliptical and hyperbolic geometry - branches of geometry that violate the parallel theorem - would be discredited. Matta says that the proof of the parallel theorem - also known as the "Fifth Postulate" - supports philosophers like Emmanuel Kant, who once stated that Euclidean geometry was the "inevitable necessity of thought." "Epistemology and philosophy now have truth upon which to form a solid base. This is a rehabilitation of Kant," Matta says. Matta adds that he has submitted his recently published book of proofs to science academies in France and Germany for verification and is confident that the academies will find the 10 independent proofs "sound and rigorous," despite the fact that the famous French mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss wrote that he thought the postulate was an impossibility. "When you try to solve a problem, there will always be people who say. 'It's impossible.'" says Matta. "That's a lazy mistake. But it's true that many mathematicians are afraid of this problem because of Gauss's statements." Matta, who calls geometry the "perfect science," says he has spent 10 years working full-time on the problem of the parallel theorem. "I have read more than 1,000 mathematics books in the last 10 years, and this year alone I have consulted over 400 references," he says. "For future research I will need no less than 1,500 references. These references should be under my hand, because a researcher does not know when he will need them. The government needs to consider this lack of resources as an issue, but I don't think the future will be any better." Matta has sent his book to fellow mathematician Lebanese Culture Minister Ghazi Aridi. "I want (the Lebanese government) to understand the importance of what I have done," he says. Matta has yet to finish his second book - about problems of infinity and continuum, expected early next year - but he is already thinking about his third book. "If all goes as planned, I want to write a book about what the Phoenicians gave to science," he says. Has local mathematician proven the '5th Postulate?' |
June 22, 2004
Cones, Curves, Shells, Towers: He Made Paper Jump to LifeBy MARGARET WERTHEIM SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - On the mantel of a quiet suburban home here stands a curious object resembling a small set of organ pipes nestled into a neat, white case. At first glance it does not seem possible that such a complex, curving form could have been folded from a single sheet of paper, and yet it was. The construction is one of an astonishing collection of paper objects folded by Dr. David Huffman, a former professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a pioneer in computational origami, an emerging field with an improbable name but surprisingly practical applications. Derived from the Japanese ori, to fold, and gami, paper, origami has come a long way from cute little birds and decorative boxes. Mathematicians and scientists like Dr. Huffman have begun mapping the laws that underlie folding, converting words and concepts into algebraic rules. Computational origami, also known as technical folding, or origami sekkei, draws on fields that include computational geometry, number theory, coding theory and linear algebra. This weekend, paper folders from around the nation will gather at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York for the annual convention of Origami USA. At an adjacent conference on origami and education, Dr. Robert Lang, a leading computational origamist, will give a talk on mathematics and its application to origami design, including such real-world problems as folding airbags and space-based telescopes. Dr. Huffman's folding was a private activity. Professionally he worked in the field of coding and information theory. As a student at M.I.T. in the 1950's, he discovered a minimal way of encoding information known as Huffman Codes, which are now used to help compress MP3 music files and JPEG images. Dr. Peter Newman of the Computer Science Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute said that in everything Dr. Huffman did, he was obsessed with elegance and simplicity. "He had an ability to visualize problems and to see things that nobody had seen before," Dr. Newman said. The mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote that "there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." Dr. Huffman, who gave concrete form to beautiful mathematical relations, would no doubt have agreed. In a talk he gave at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1979 to an audience of artists and scientists, he noted that it was rare for the two groups to communicate with one another. "I don't claim to be an artist. I'm not even sure how to define art," he said. "But I find it natural that the elegant mathematical theorems associated with paper surfaces should lead to visual elegance as well." Cones, Curves, Shells, Towers: He Made Paper Jump to Life |
June 22, 2004
Mathematician involved in invention of computers diesIn 1958, he was hired by IBM, and stayed with the company for 26 years in posts including director of research. He retired in 1984, and IBM established a Herman Goldstine Fellowship in mathematical sciences. In 1985, Goldstine was awarded the National Medal of Science for his part in the invention of the computer. He was the author of five books, including The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann. Born in Chicago, Goldstine earned bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees at the University of Chicago, and taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan before enlisting in the Army. Mathematician involved in invention of computers dies |
June 21, 2004
ROOT ROOT ROOT FOR YOUR OWN TEAMby Edward Comstock "What sickness could make a person want to get out of bed in the morning to check the box score for last night's Pirates vs. Brewers game?" This is a variation of a tired rhetorical question for players of what is commonly known as "fantasy baseball," an old joke about the compelling nature of the game and the strange practices and habits it inculcates. For the uninitiated, fantasy baseball is a game wherein players "sign" actual major league ball players to "manage" over the course of a season, using their accumulated stats to compete against other managers in a "league". The most (over)used metaphor to describe the game is that of selecting and trading stocks. What is remarkable, however, is that there really are tens of thousands of people doing this, getting off on an RBI double by an unheralded player like Keith Ginter at the end of a 10-2 blowout, or a crucial hold by relief pitcher extraordinaire Brooks Kieschnick. Some may even find themselves rooting against their home team in the hopes that an opposing pitcher will net "their [fantasy] team" one more strikeout. For these people, increasingly, the fantasy of fantasy baseball is becoming more real than the reality. And not only because they are hopeless statistics geeks, lost in a game of numbers or immured in a game about a game like some character in a trendy metafiction novel. These characterizations simply do not do justice to the enormous amount of people that play fantasy baseball (an unknown amount estimated in the hundreds of thousands), in the same way citing nerd money cannot account for the huge success of The Lord of the Rings movies. These people are, or were, Major League Baseball fans that love the game. But more often than not, they have something else in common. In various ways and to different extents, they feel marginalized by MLB's audience membership discourse; they no longer feel that the game is produced for them. Far from passive consumers of an MLB product, these "fans" have become producers of a different type of baseball that operates largely outside of the league and its official and legitimized brand of baseball. In doing so, they have reinterpreted and reclaimed the grounds of fandom from the ideological constructions and projections of MLB. Indeed, fantasy players have undermined the entire concept of the pennant race and "rooting for the home team" in favor of following the constructs of their fantasy leagues. They have developed a baseball that deconstructs the MLB offering by shifting the focus from the battles of individual teams (with their "greedy" owners) to the dynamics of on-the-field player interaction. Along with this, fantasy players have developed an entire language and system of analysis, called sabermetrics, that utilizes incredibly sophisticated mathematical formulas that make Batting Average and Earned Run Ratios seem like tools unearthed in an arctic ice encasement. Those archaic statistical measures are left instead to ignorant managers, haplessly ignoring would-be good hitters that know how to take a walk. ROOT ROOT ROOT FOR YOUR OWN TEAM |
June 20, 2004
Math, science teachers assess new technologyBy Clare Kittredge When Phillips Exeter Academy holds its 20th annual math, science, and technology conference for high school teachers later this month, Portsmouth High School math teacher Tobey Schoff will be on hand. ''First and foremost, this is known as the best conference in the nation," Schoff said. ''Not only does it attract my peer group, but other teachers who give us best instruction, so hopefully it will make me a better teacher." With a national election coming up, Schoff also hopes to turn some information he gleans from this year's session on ''the mathematics of elections" into a hot topic to teach next fall. ''I'm interested in polling and elections, and that will definitely be part of my instruction and curriculum, primarily in my statistics classes," he said. ''Certainly, we'll touch on it in every class I teach." ''A lot of older people see mathematics learning and teaching as quite different from what it is now," Seidenberg said. ''Because of computers and calculators, it's a much more dynamic, interactive discipline than it was. The idea of a mathematics teacher lecturing to a classful of kids who would rather be somewhere else has changed into a very dynamic almost laboratory-based environment where kids can learn mathematics by doing mathematics." Math, science teachers assess new technology |
June 20, 2004
Schools in city to use new math methodsBy Heather Hare Math classes in Rochester elementary schools may be a little noisier next year. A new kindergarten-through-sixth-grade program the district will implement in the fall breaks from traditional teaching methods and allows students to work in groups — without teachers' lectures. Students using the Investigations in Number, Data and Space curriculum are encouraged to figure out their own ways of solving problems instead of being taught procedures and then practice using them. "It's about developing mathematical thinkers, said Judith Fonzi, director of the Warner Center for Professional Development and Education Reform at the University of Rochester. The Warner Center has helped the City School District develop a pilot program, which was originally developed with National Science Foundation money, in several elementary schools. Karen Soanes, a math specialist at School 50 on Seneca Avenue, said she has been using the program for four years and believes it helps students because it's more hands-on than other curricula. "We've noticed a difference in their ability to problem-solve," Soanes said. "Their understanding of concepts is sometimes deeper than students' in other classrooms. The program is not accepted in all circles. Some math experts say it may end up hurting students as they progress through school, especially if they want to study science or math. Schools in city to use new math methods |
June 19, 2004
Decyphering the Grammar of Mind, Music and MathBy EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Imagine a locked room in which a person sits alone staring into space. There is nothing to look at. Nothing to touch or taste or smell. Most of the world is stripped away. Except for sounds. But these sounds resemble nothing heard before. They lack all similarity to experience and any reference to surroundings. Now imagine that those sounds — heard for the first time — are the sounds of a Beethoven Symphony. Or an Indian raga. What would that disembodied ear and mind make of them? How much would be understood? In recent decades such a situation would have been considered artificial, abstract and irrelevant. What kind of musical understanding can grow out of this kind of isolation, lacking the resonance of a cultural framework, lacking the expectations provided by the knowledge of a style and lacking some sense of historical and political context? To understand music, we have been taught, that room has to be unlocked, the windows opened and the world fully engaged. This change in emphasis may also be contributing to a renewed interest in the relationship between music and mathematics. More than 20 years ago when I wrote an article about the subject for The New York Times and later when I explored it in a book, I argued that there was more to musical meaning than was evident in influential political and programmatic interpretations. For all of music's deep connections to human experience and social life, music was also similar to mathematics in important respects, as ancient philosophical and musical texts insist. But more recently seminars in music and mathematics have been proliferating at universities. Last fall Oxford University Press published an anthology, "Music and Mathematics: From Pythagoras to Fractals." On Thursday night in Weill Recital Hall, the Siemens Foundation also presented four recent winners of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition, a high school science research competition, playing various instruments. The event featured a discussion by scientists interested in music, including Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, the director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard University, who has studied the neural basis of musical perception for over a decade. But music has a power unique among forms of human communication: it can teach itself. Gradually over repeated hearings, without the use of a dictionary or any reference to the world outside, music shows how it is to be understood. The listener begins to hear patterns, repeated motifs and changes in meter and realizes that something is happening, that sounds have punctuation, that phrases are being manipulated, transformed and recombined. Nothing else is quite like this self-contained, self-teaching world. Music may be the ultimate self-revealing code; it can be comprehended in a locked room. This is one reason that connections with mathematics are so profound. Though math requires reference to the world, it too proceeds by noting similarities and variations in patterns, in contemplating the structure of abstract systems, in finding the ways its elements are manipulated, connected and transformed. Mathematics is done the way music is understood. Of course, this does not exhaust music's possibilities. Open the locked door and meanings proliferate. A composition is related to others in the same musical style; it has a place in history; it has an impact on the body and emotions; it speaks of things outside itself. Its abstract patterns take on other meanings, just as abstract mathematical reasoning can find unexpected applications. Music is a metaphor; the world provides its analogies. This means that music can be fully understood only by maintaining access between the room and world; neither can be closed off. And in its ability to combine opposing realms that are both timeless and timely, absolute and relative, mental and physical, abstract and concrete, music might become a teacher of more than just sound. Decyphering the Grammar of Mind, Music and Math |
June 18, 2004
Fractals Show Machine IntentionsA sense of internal states is integral to human communications: it's useful to have a sense of when a human is annoyed. In contrast, it's often impossible to determine whether a robot is processing data, awaiting instruction or in need of repair. Researchers from Switzerland and South Africa have designed a visual interface that would give autonomous machines the equivalent of body language. The interface represents a machine's internal state in a way that makes it possible for observers to interpret the machine's behavior. The researchers' autonomous machine interface consists of a clustering algorithm that groups snapshots of the machine's many internal states into a manageable number of representations, and a fractal generator. The algorithm organizes data about the machines internal state, including sensory input, computational processing, and output, into groups with similar traits. A set of snapshots corresponding to a high degree of sensory stimulation could be clustered into a representation of the machine observing a change in its environment, for example. These state clusters are displayed as fractal images. The fractal generator produces a fractal pattern in the center of the display and patterns move outward in concentric rings, giving observers a sense of change over time. Fractal generators produce a large variety of patterns, and observers quickly learn to correlate machine behavior with the fractal patterns, according to the researchers. Initial practical applications of the researchers' work are about five years away, according to the researchers. The work appeared in the March 31, 2004 issue of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Fractals Show Machine Intentions |
June 18, 2004
Author explores brain and mindBy Paul Bachmeier for tb source Godel Escher Bach is an exploration of artificial intelligence, but that's not to say it's only about A.I. That would be like referring to The Old Man and the Sea as a book about marlins. It's philosophy, religion, science and speculation all existing inside a strange and humbling idea of what it means to be alive. In his exploration, author and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter ponders what the brain and that elusive thing called the mind – is. The idea is that our brains are made up of very simple 'yes-no' steps akin to the binary decision-making procedures of a computer. Although meek in origin, once these interactions achieve a certain level of complexity it gives rise to the powerful organ of discernment known as the brain. Add a few billion neurons to the existing mess and we have that remarkable and mysterious thing known as 'the mind'. This conception is not Hofstadter's; Francis Crick and computer scientist Marvin Minsky -not to mention early computer pioneer Charles Babbage- all had similar thoughts. What is Hofstadter's, however, is the marriage of this theory with such disparate things as contrapuntal technique in the music of J.S. Bach and the alluring pictures of graphic artist M.C. Escher (and the 'incompleteness therom' of mathematician Kurt Godel, if you're wondering about the first name in the title of the book). In addition, Hofstadter fuses his musing on the brain and mind with discussions about contradictions. I'll risk the impatience of those who have heard it and relate the maddening Zeno's Paradox (or my version of it, anyway). Let's say that it's the last game of the World Series. You're on third base and you start running home. There will obviously come a point when you are exactly halfway between third base and the home plate. As you running you again cut the remaining distance in half. You're three quarters of the way there now, and it looks good. Then Zeno comes in. He tells us that the remaining distance can also be cut in half indefinitely. You will get quite close, he says, but you will never actually reach the plate. If that sounds like your bag, (and I hope it is) you'll probably get a kick out of the dialogues between a tortoise and a hare, narratives within narratives, riddles, art, music and plenty of other fun that has no other place to live than in a book as eclectic and rarefied as GEB. Any volume that takes on the mysteries of the mind is bound to be complex as well as disputable. GEB is unapologetically both. As Hofstadter weaves philosophy, computer science, paradoxes, recursion and mathematics into his 'eternal golden braid' he also offers us a glimpse into a world in which computers are seen as inchoate brains, waiting for our technology to tap their awesome potential. (I'll bet anyone who has seen The Matrix just shuddered.) If I haven't scared you off, maybe you are willing to go that last 'bit' and pick up a copy of Godel Escher Bach. It's not a book for everyone, but there are bound to be lots of incorrigibly curious people in Thunder Bay who have been waiting to hear about something like this. Oh yeah, and before I forget, I might as well add that it won a little something called the Pulitzer Prize. Author explores brain and mind |
June 17, 2004
How Many Squares, Mr. Franklin?When he wasn't experimenting with lightning or overthrowing the British Empire, Benjamin Franklin found time to fool around with mathematics, inventing a variant of the magic square called Franklin's squares. Now Maya Ahmed, a mathematics graduate student at UC Davis, has come up with a way to construct both Franklin's own squares and others of the same type. The methods could have applications in computer programming for business. A regular magic square is a table of numbers in which any row, column or diagonal adds up to the same number. Mathematicians around the world have studied them for thousands of years. "They are classical, beautiful objects," said Jesus De Loera, associate professor of mathematics at UC Davis and Ahmed's thesis supervisor. Franklin's squares are similar, but instead of diagonals adding to the magic number, the bent diagonals add to the magic number. The four corners and four center squares also add to the magic number. Franklin himself created three such squares, two that are eight rows by eight columns and one of 16 by 16. "No one knows how he did it," Ahmed said. "They're very hard to construct." Ahmed's method turns what looks like an arithmetic problem into a geometry problem. The numbers in a Franklin square can be described by a series of equations -- 127 equations for an eight-by-eight square. Those equations also describe a cone-shaped object in multiple (more than three) dimensions. That yields the basic elements of a Franklin square. Using this method, Ahmed could both reconstruct Franklin's three original squares and create new ones that obey the same rules. She was also able to work out the maximum possible number of eight-by-eight Franklin squares: just over 228 trillion. Franklin regarded his squares as "incapable of useful application." But Ahmed's methods can also be used to find whole-number solutions to problems of linear equations. An example would be scheduling aircraft and crew members for an airline, De Loera said. The paper is published in the May issue of the American Mathematical Monthly. How Many Squares, Mr. Franklin? |
June 16, 2004
Men all ears as health technology gets hearingA REVOLUTIONARY hearing aid was just one of a number of new technological exhibits on show at the Men's Health Expo in Tamworth yesterday to coincide with Men's Health Week. The hearing aid allows the person wearing it to focus on a specific conversation more clearly while drowning out any other noises in the room. It has been designed to select the best speech over noise using parallel processing through a new concept called syncro. Spokesman James Battersby for Oticon , which manufactures the hearing aid, said already the revolutionary device was a big hit in Australia after only being launched three weeks ago. "We're getting a great response from the clarity of this hearing aid," Mr Battersby said. "This new hearing aid enables someone to hold a conversation in a noisy room and still allow them to hear what another person is saying across the room. "It's design has been created by using artificial intelligence and allows the wearer to cancel out up to four different noises simultaneously." He said the device, because of its adaptive directional microphone allowed the wearer to hear things more clearly. It wasn't only the hearing aid which impressed those attending the week-long expo with various exhibits featuring brochures and professionals discussing mental, physical and sexual health issues. The Men's Health Expo is being held at the Tamworth Community Centre in Darling St until Sunday. Men all ears as health technology gets hearing |
June 15, 2004
New Technique Developed At UCSD For DecipheringA team led by University of California San Diego neurobiologists has developed a new approach to interpreting brain electroencephalograms, or EEGs, that provides an unprecedented view of thought in action and has the potential to advance our understanding of disorders like epilepsy and autism. The new information processing and visualization methods that make it possible to follow activation in different areas of the brain dynamically are detailed in a paper featured on the cover of the June 15 issue of the journal Public Library of Science Biology (plos.org) The significance of the advance is that thought processes occur on the order of milliseconds—thousandths of a second—but current brain imaging techniques, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and traditional EEGs, are averaged over seconds. This provides a "blurry" picture of how the neural circuits in the brain are activated, just as a picture of waves breaking on the shore would be a blur if it were created from the average of multiple snapshots. The challenge of interpreting an EEG is that you have a composite of signals from all over the brain and you need to find out what sources actually contributed to the pattern," explains Makeig. "It is a bit like listening in on a cocktail party and trying to isolate the sound of each voice. We found that it is possible, using a mathematical technique called Independent Component Analysis, to separate each signal or "voice" in the brain by just treating the voices as separate sources of information, but without other prior knowledge about each voice. Independent component analysis, or ICA, looks at the distinctiveness of activity in each patch of the brain's cortex. It uses this information to determine the location of the patch and separate out the signals from non-brain sources. Because ICA can distinguish signals that are active at the same time, it makes it possible to identify the electrical signals in the brain that correspond to the brain telling the muscles to take an action —which in the paper was deciding whether or not to press a button in response to an image flashed on a computer screen—and to separate this signal from the signals the brain uses to evaluate the consequences of that action. New Technique Developed At UCSD For Deciphering |
June 15, 2004
Web Services Are Biggest Security ChallengeBy Mitch Wagner SAN FRANCISCO -- Web services are the major challenge for network security in the 21st Century, because they require users to routinely run code and data on machines that the users don't control, said Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer for Sun Microsystems. "Now, I do most of my computing on a chip a couple of feet in front of me, or if I do it elsewhere, I know it," said Diffie, delivering a keynote at the NetSec 2004 computer security conference here. Most applications run on the user's desktop system or - if they run elsewhere - the user manually went to another site like Google or Amazon.com, Diffie said. "I believe that within a decade, it will become true that a typical program, without human effort, will go out on the network and look for resources wherever they are avalable," Diffie said. What kind of resources will programs look for? They could be secret algorithms, like Google's highly guarded search algorithms, or a great deal of computing power, or a great deal of proprietary information, such as the databases at Mead Data, which publishes the NexisLexis compilation of newspaper and magazine articles, Diffie said. "The least noticed security discovery of the late 20th Century, and certainly the most important outside ot cryptography, is client-server computing," Diffie said. A user looking to isolate sensitive information can encapsulate the information on a single computer and guard access to the computer. In 1970, a user looking to start a secret project needed to get access to "the big computer that's down in the basement," and create a secure section on that computer, Diffie said. "Everyone is so worried about network security that they fail to notice that networking has made some great contributions to security," Diffie said. "Now, if you have a secret project, you get a computer, you get a room, you put it in the room, you lock door. You get to decide how the computer communicates with the outside world. Do you carry disks in and out? Do you get a network encryption system?" Web Services Are Biggest Security Challenge |
June 15, 2004
Researchers Recreate Patterns Formed by Mammalian CellsNewswise - In early development, how do cells know to put the right spacing between ribs, fingers and toes? How do they communicate with each other to form symmetrical and repeated patterns such as zebra stripes or leopard spots? For the first time, UCLA researchers have recreated the ability of mammalian cells to self-organize, forming evenly spaced patterns in a test tube. Published in the June 22, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings may help improve methods for regenerating tissue, controlling birth defects and developing new treatments for specific diseases. "Just as a marching band needs direction from a conductor to line up in formation on a football field, cells also need guidance to form patterns -- but until now we didn't know how they were communicating or receiving direction," said Alan Garfinkel, Ph.D., first author and professor of physiology and cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Previously it was a bit magical how cells knew exactly how far apart to space ribs or tiger stripes," said Dr. Linda L. Demer, senior investigator, Guthman Professor of Medicine and Physiology, and vice chair for cardiovascular and vascular medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We now know that it's orchestrated by specific proteins produced by cells that disperse at different rates and interfere with one another. These interactions can be described in mathematical formulas dictating how cells organize into specific, evenly spaced patterns. Researchers grew stem cells from adult bovine arteries and found that they produce intricate, lace-like patterns in culture dishes. Such patterns are known to be created in nature by a process called reaction-diffusion discovered by Alan Turing, the mathematician famous for his role in breaking the Nazi code during World War II. He showed that patterns required interaction between an activating protein that draws cells together (activator) and another protein that stops them from coming together (inhibitor). The inhibitor protein must diffuse or disperse more rapidly than the activator. The result creates areas where cells pile up separated by empty spaces. The exact patterns depend on the strength and speed of the two proteins. "Using the mathematical formula based on Turing's concepts, we were able to recreate the classic stripe or spot patterns seen throughout nature – such as in a zebra's stripes or leopard's spots," said Garfinkel. Garfinkel adds that many parts of the body are based on patterns: Stripe patterns are used to generate fingers, ribs and toes, while branching patterns generate vessels, lungs and nerves, and spot patterns produce the organization of hair follicles, vertebrae and teeth. The type of structure formed depends upon the types and amounts of the proteins and cells involved. Researchers Recreate Patterns Formed by Mammalian Cells |
June 14, 2004
How to make elections fair in enlarged European UnionBy Belle Dumé Two scientists from Poland claim to have found a solution to the problem of voting in the newly enlarged European Union. The current voting system, which is based on guidelines set by the Treaty of Nice, and the new system proposed in the draft EU Constitution both lead to inequalities between the different member states. The new system, proposed by Karol Z.yczkowski and Wojciech Slomczyn'ski of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, is based on a square-root formula and would ensure that all European citizens had equal voting powers (arXiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0405396). The treaty of Nice, which came into force in February 2003, is unfair and irrational in the opinion of Z.yczkowski and Slomezyn'ski. For instance, it gives Germany, which has a population in excess of 82 million, the same number of votes (29) in the European Parliament as Italy, which only has around 57 million inhabitants. Moreover, Poland receives 27 votes despite having a population of only 38 million. Moreover, the draft Constitution—which calls for the Nice system to be replaced in 2009—seems to favor the largest and smallest countries in the EU at the expense of medium-sized countries such as Poland and Spain. Z.yczkowski, a physicist, and Slomczyn'ski, a mathemapopulation in votes at the European Council. Such a system would also give more power to smaller countries while safeguarding the rights of larger states. Under the proposed system the number of votes that each country has in the European Council would be proportional to the square root of its population. How to make elections fair in enlarged European Union |
June 14, 2004
He's Faster Than a ComputerArthur Baguma Kampala YOU don't need a calculator to divide 11,633,011 by 47 or to multiply 5747869312 by the same figure. You can do it in seconds without a pen or a piece of paper. All you need is your head and the figures. Well, any person will say that it takes more than an ordinary brain to do it- a genius. But that is what 20-year-old Paul Serunjogi, a P.7 dropout is. He calculates off head without any difficulty. Before he dropped out of school due to lack of fees, he used to get 99 or 98% in mathematics tests and exams. When he appeared on WBS television on Omubala talkshow last Sunday, his ability to work out mathematical problems stunned viewers. The nature in which he articulated hard calculations was breath-taking. He has since generated a debate as to whether he is a genius or just an intelligent boy. "23456 x 30, what do you get?" In 13 seconds he shoots back " the answer is 703680," I fidget with my phone calculator, which confirms his answer. Okay! I thought to myself and pulled another one: 2945 divide by seven. In eight seconds he gives me the answer - 420.7143 after rounding off. "How do you get the answer?" "Katonda yampa buwi kitone (God gave me a gift)," he replies He's Faster Than a Computer |
June 13, 2004
A Computer That Has an Eye for Van GoghBy DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER WHO can say for sure that a great artwork is the real deal? It depends on whom you ask, and when: attributions of authorship often flip-flop from generation to generation, and a painting's journey from real to not real and back again can mean windfall profits for the lucky and despair for those who sell — or buy — too soon. Considering the sums at stake, you might think the business of art authentication would have long ago given way to modern technology. But so far, sophisticated techniques like spectrometry, DNA testing and pigment analysis have failed to supplant expert opinion. Now a team of researchers at the University of Maastricht, here in the Netherlands, are taking a stab at rationalizing connoisseurship, a word that in its art-historical context refers to the formal process of determining who created a work of art. They have developed a computer system that quickly examines hundreds of paintings for telltale patterns. The results, they say, can lend credence to existing attributions or help dismiss them. Of the practice of defining authenticity through a body of paintings that may itself contain illegitimate works, Igor Berezhnoy — a Ph.D. candidate on the team, who is also exploring how to commercialize the technology — says: "Even if there'll be some fakes, statistically they will be pushed out from our set, because they would show completely different characteristics." Dr. Postma compares this pattern-seeking technique to chess. "If you're a skilled player in chess," he said, "you can recognize the configuration on the board immediately. And the same is true for an expert in paintings." But the computer can process more data, churn through more potential patterns, and do it faster than a human being can. "That's why a computer can beat the grand master." And by discovering patterns that experts never thought to look for, Authentic can also serve as a tool for more general art-historical research. A Computer That Has an Eye for Van Gogh |
June 13, 2004
She's a natural at leadership, mathBy VIVIAN AUSTIN PASCAGOULA - Erin Smith holds much admiration for her parents and teachers and said she did well in school thanks to their support and influence. Steven and Phyllis Smith are proud and excited about their daughter's achievements. "Anything that I need for them to do for me, they do it pretty much. They say this is a good kind of problem," Erin said. Phyllis Smith said both their children, including son Kyle, have done well in school, and their daughter has worked hard. "We've always stressed school. Always. You have to apply yourself and use the gifts God gave you." Calculus teacher Robin Thompson said Smith easily grasped difficult mathematical concepts and theories, and was a class leader. "Not often have I taught a student who was able to help her peers by using acceptable teaching methods," she said. "When I have found it necessary to be absent from class, Erin assumes leadership in the class and is willing and able to answer questions from other students, review concepts, and work with those who are struggling," Thompson said. Erin Smith, 17, said she learned perseverance from her parents because they refused to let her quit when she wanted to give up math in third grade. She said they shaped and refined the math gene both had passed on to their daughter. "If someone shows a math problem or technique to me once, one of two things happen: it either clicks immediately, the more common case, or I work at grasping the concept until it does click," Smith said. "No matter what, though, I refuse to allow the mathematics to overwhelm me. Instead, I just persevere like my parents did so many years ago. As a result, I excel at mathematics." Smith has a 4.0 GPA and is the valedictorian of the Class of 2004 at Pascagoula High. She was named a National Merit Finalist, and scored 35 on the ACT to become a STAR Student. She selected former retired Betty Freeman as STAR Teacher. "She really had an influence on me in a lot of stuff. And I love her to death." Smith likes English but teachers also kept her focused on math. "I've always been really good at it and had really good teachers along the years. And just seeing the enthusiasm they've shown toward it made me interested." Smith completed advanced placement English, calculus and physics this year to help prepare for studies at Mississippi State University, where she will major in chemical engineering. She may go into the medical field, possibly forensic science. While Smith belongs to the National Honor Society, Scholar's Bowl Team, Beta Club and Fellowship of Christian Athletes at PHS, she also participates in youth choir, Bible drill, youth council, mission trips and camps at Arlington Baptist Church. Smith said her senior year was stressful because of classes and preparation for college. "I'm glad the year is over with," she said. "I'm thinking about getting a summer job, but I haven't gotten one yet." She's a natural at leadership, math |
June 12, 2004
Theorems for SaleErica Klarreich In April, an eBay auction offered math and science aficionados a rare opportunity: to link their names, albeit through 5 degrees of separation, with one of the most famous mathematicians of the 20th century. Trumpeting the title "Decrease your Erdös number!" the auction presented bidders with the chance to collaborate on a research project with the seller, who had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with someone who had collaborated with Paul Erdös, the Hungarian mathematical prodigy who died in 1996. Erdös was an eccentric, legendary figure with no fixed address. He worked with mathematicians all over the globe, coauthoring papers with more than 500 other researchers during his lifetime. Just as some film buffs calculate movie actors' fame by measuring their degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, mathematicians calculate their "Erdös numbers." A mathematician who has published a paper with Erdös has an Erdös number of 1. A mathematician who has published a paper with someone who has published a paper with Erdös has an Erdös number of 2, and so on. The eBay seller was William Tozier, a scientific consultant in Ann Arbor, Mich., whose Erdös number is 4. He launched the auction as a joke, in his words, "one morning before I'd had enough coffee." Quickly, however, the auction took on a life of its own, sparking a vigorous debate both about the limited research opportunities available to amateur mathematicians and about the ethics of selling an Erdös number. Theorems for Sale |
June 12, 2004
Groups, Graphs, and Erdös NumbersMath Trek Ivars Peterson Mathematical research is generally thought to be a solitary pursuit. And some mathematicians do indeed spend their professional lives in lone contemplation of a single problem. The dramatic announcement in 1993 by Andrew Wiles of Princeton University that he had proved Fermat's last theorem appeared to belong to this category of discovery. Wiles had isolated himself from the rest of the mathematical community for nearly 8 years to work on the problem. Only a select few were aware of what he was trying to accomplish. Nonetheless, Wiles relied heavily on the work of mathematicians who had previously tackled the same problem. He occasionally tested his ideas on a handful of trusted experts in areas of mathematics relevant to his approach. When reviewers later discovered a flaw in his original chain of logic, Wiles obtained help from one of his former graduate students, Richard Taylor, to fill in the gap and complete the proof. In general, mathematical research is a remarkably social process. Colleagues meet constantly to compare notes, discuss problems, look for hints, and work on proofs together. The abundance of conferences, symposia, workshops, colloquia, seminars, and other gatherings devoted to mathematical topics attests to a strong desire for interaction. Electronic communication speeds and facilitates such interaction worldwide. Perhaps more than any other mathematician in modern times, Paul Erdös (1913–1996) epitomized the strength and breadth of mathematical collaboration. Because he had no permanent home and no particular job, Erdös simply traveled from one mathematical center to another, sometimes seeking new collaborators and sometimes continuing a work in progress. His well-being was the collective responsibility of mathematicians throughout the world. Mathematicians assign Erdös the number 0. Anyone who has coauthored a paper with him has the cherished Erdös number 1. By the end of 2003, there were 509 such coauthors. Another 6,984 mathematicians had the Erdös number 2, because they wrote a paper not with Erdös himself but with someone who wrote a paper with Erdös. The Erdös number 3 goes to anyone who has collaborated with someone who has collaborated with someone who coauthored a paper with Erdös. Thus, any person not yet assigned an Erdös number who has written a joint mathematical paper with a person having an Erdös number n earns the Erdös number n + 1. Anyone left out of this assignment process has the Erdös number infinity. People belonging to the first three categories (n = 1 to 3) already encompass a significant portion of all mathematicians in academia today. Groups, Graphs, and Erdös Numbers |
June 11, 2004
Human and brains think alikeA new research has shown that humans and robots are more alike than we care to admit since both use similar strategies to make value-based judgements. Ben Seymour from University College London and colleagues used a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner to study the brain activity of a group of people as they learned to distinguish a bad hunch from a good omen. Subjects were shown arbitrary images and certain combinations were followed by a painful electrical shock delivered to the back of the hand, whereas others prompted a less painful jolt. After a few trials, subjects were subconsciously able to predict the arrangements that spelled trouble. As they learned, key regions of their brain lit up. The research is published in this week's Nature. One illuminated area, the insula cortex, helps to process emotions. Another, known as the ventral striatum, is well known as the brain's motivation centre. But this is the first time they have been implicated in the ability to learn good from bad. The trials mimic our ability to use conflicting experiences to form value judgements. This is the first time such realistic learning scenarios have been tackled," says computer neuroscientist Read Montague, of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. The team also plotted brain activity on a graph to give a mathematical description of processes that underlie the formation of value judgements. The patterns they saw resembled those made by robots as they learn from experience. "The results were astounding," says study co-author Peter Dayan. "There was an almost perfect match between the brain signals and the numerical functions used in machine learning," he says. This suggests that our brains are following the laws of artificial intelligence. "This is simply a terrific study", says Montague. It is of paramount importance for a whole range of fields, from neuroscience to engineering, and from psychology to economics, he adds. (ANI) Human and brains think alike |
June 11, 2004
The mathematical formula for the perfect face!It is difficult to define perfect beauty as the parameters for a perfect face may vary according to individual preferences. However, scientists have narrowed down to a simple mathematical ratio of 1:1.618, otherwise known as phi, or divine proportion, to set standards of beauty. "Only one formula has been consistently and repeatedly present in all things beautiful, be it art, architecture or nature, but most importantly in facial beauty," The Sydney Morning Herald quoted US dentist Yosh Jefferson, who operates a website dedicated to divine proportion at www.facialbeauty.org., as saying. "Ideal facial proportions are universal regardless of race, sex and age, and are based on divine proportions," he adds. He defines the formula and says, if the width of the face from cheek to cheek is 10 inches (25 centimetres), then the length of the face from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin should be 16.18 inches to be in ideal proportion. If you're keen to see how you measure up, keep in mind that the ratio of phi also applies to: + The width of the mouth to the width of the cheek. + The width of the nose to the width of the cheek. + The width of the nose to the width of the mouth. Dr Stephen Marquardt has gone one step further to prove the correlation between the divine proportion and facial beauty by developing a phi mask that acts as an archetype of the ideal human face. (ANI) The mathematical formula for the perfect face! |
June 11, 2004
Fuzzy logic and neural nets: still viable after all these years?Both neural networks and fuzzy logic aspire to allow electronic systems, built with familiar circuit techniques or employing conventional computing technologies, to attack certain problems in a way that mimics human responses and abilities. One of the intimidating aspects of fuzzy logic is the name itself, which has connotations of imprecision. On the contrary, however, fuzzy logic is capable of precise responses. It allows systems built around Boolean logic, handling binary values, to work with imprecisely defined values that you might express verbally as "more," "less," "high," "low," and so on. Although vague, those values are amenable to intuitive human understanding. ("Vague" is one of those words that has a special meaning in the special vocabulary.) You cannot define their meaning by using one parameter but with reference to others; for example, if the problem that you are exercising control over is the separation between your car and the car in front of it, the meaning you express by "near" or "far" differs depending on the speed at which you are traveling, whether you are accelerating or braking, and a number of other parameters. Neural networks, unlike fuzzy logic, seek to reproduce the versatility of the human brain in recognizing the end-to-end, input-to-output behavior of a system without understanding all the processes taking place within it. Taking as a fundamental model the interconnections of nervous systems within the brain—neurons and synapses—neural networks have the attributes of memory and learning. In applying a neural technique to a system, you show the network many examples of known-correct input/output-value pairs. In its learning mode, the network creates network connections with weighted values to match the data you provide and stores the values for the weighted connections that achieve the correct result. By exploring the whole input/output-value space, the network "learns" to provide a correct response to any given input stimulus, without formally modeling the processes comprising the original system. An essential trick in designing a neural-network architecture is to achieve convergence; that is, as you show it successive input/output examples, it builds the ability to model the complete value space and does not "forget" the examples it previously learned. So, companies are designing and building innovative systems with both fuzzy and neural techniques. Should you be using them? If you have complex control problems with intractable nonlinearities, they would appear to be worth revisiting—especially if you are also contending with limited resources. It is worth adding that you can make both techniques, particularly neural nets, adaptive, to continually optimize control of a changing process. Fuzzy logic and neural nets: still viable after all these years? |
June 10, 2004
Vanderbilt to study disabilitiesVanderbilt University is looking for children to participate in a study about brain activity related to math and reading disabilities. The goal of the study, called "Remediating Students' Mathematics Disabilities," is to overcome math disabilities and examine how the brain functioning changes from the remediation. The first phase of the study will map brain activity in third- and fourth-grade students who are working on math tasks. The study will compare various groups of children with normal math and reading capabilities and those with math disabilities, reading disabilities or both. The project director is Lynn Fuchs, the Nicholas Hobbs Chair in Special Education and Human Development and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator. Students will be evaluated for free to see if they meet the requirements to join the study. Families of those accepted to the study will be compensated for time spent on it. The study is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. For information on participating in the study, call Erin Caffrey at 322-8291 by July 1. Vanderbilt to study disabilities |
June 10, 2004
How to raise test scoresBy Marion Brady When Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974, over a period of several years I read it four or five times. I did the same with his 1991 Lila. Both touch on many matters, but what interests me most are his thoughts on human values in general and on "quality" in particular. I dog-ear my books. Turning down the corners of pages makes it easy to go back and re-read, which is what led me yesterday to Pirsig's contention in Lila that societies build their beliefs on what they think are facts, but once those beliefs are in place, there's little interest in new facts unless they reinforce old ones. "A contradictory fact," he writes, "has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it, too." What's the idea I'm hammering? The same idea Alfred North Whitehead was hammering in 1916 when he told the Mathematical Association of England that school subjects disconnected from each other would be "fatal" to education. It's the same idea Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was hammering in 1948 when he wrote that the main thing wrong with American universities was "the curse of departmentalization." It's the same idea John Goodlad was hammering in 1984 when, following a massive study of America's schools, he said, "The division into subjects and periods [makes schooling] increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect." How to raise test scores |
June 9, 2004
Proof For Riemann Hypothesis?A mathematician from Purdue University claims to have proven the Riemann hypothesis, often dubbed the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics. Louis De Branges de Bourcia has posted a 23-page paper detailing his attempt at a proof on his university web page. The spirited competition to prove the hypothesis - which carries a $1 million prize for whomever accomplishes it first - has encouraged de Branges to announce his work as soon as it was completed rather than go through the more traditional peer reviewed publishing process. "I invite other mathematicians to examine my efforts," said de Branges. "While I will eventually submit my proof for formal publication, due to the circumstances, I felt it necessary to post the work on the Internet immediately." The Riemann hypothesis is a highly complex theory about the nature of prime numbers - those numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves - that has stymied mathematicians since 1859. In that year, Bernhard Riemann published a conjecture about how prime numbers were distributed among other numbers. He labored over his own theory until his death in 1866, but was ultimately unable to prove it. The problem attracted a cult following among mathematicians, but after nearly 150 years no one has ever definitively proven Riemann's theory to be either true or false. In 2001 the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., offered a $1 million prize to whomever proves it first. At least two books for popular audiences have appeared recently that describe the efforts of mathematicians to solve the puzzle. One of the books, Karl Sabbagh's "Dr. Riemann's Zeros," provides an extensive profile of de Branges and offers one of the mathematician's earlier, incomplete attempts at a proof as an appendix. De Branges is perhaps best known for solving another trenchant problem in mathematics, the Bieberbach conjecture, about 20 years ago. Since then, he has occupied himself to a large extent with the Riemann hypothesis and has attempted its proof several times. His latest efforts have neither been peer reviewed nor accepted for publication, but Leonard Lipshitz, head of Purdue's mathematics department, said that de Branges' claim should be taken seriously. "De Branges' work deserves attention from the mathematics community," he said. "It will obviously take time to verify his work, but I hope that anyone with the necessary background will read his paper so that a useful discussion of its merits can follow." Proof For Riemann Hypothesis? |
June 9, 2004
Lifelong debunker takes on arbiter of neutral choicesBY ESTHER LANDHUIS Persi Diaconis has spent much of his life turning scams inside out. In 1962, the then 17-year-old sought to stymie a Caribbean casino that was allegedly using shaved dice to boost house odds in games of chance. In the mid-1970s, the upstart statistician exposed some key problems in ESP research and debunked a handful of famed psychics. Now a Stanford professor of mathematics and statistics, Diaconis has turned his attention toward simpler phenomena: determining whether coin flipping is random. Could a simple coin toss -- used routinely to decide which team gets the ball, for instance -- actually be rigged? Diaconis set out to test what he thought was obvious -- that coin tosses, the currency of fair choices, couldn't be biased. "Mathematicians are always doing that," he says. "You know, everybody knows it's true, and then we prove it. So what, right?" Wrong. Diaconis had good reason to suspect that surprising truths lurk beneath common assumptions. He had uncovered them time after time. For example, people had long supposed that a few shuffles were sufficient to randomize a deck of cards -- until 1992, when Diaconis and Columbia University's David Bayer proved that thorough mixing requires seven shuffles. "If you hit a coin with the same force in the same place, it always does the same thing," he says. To make his point, Diaconis commissioned a team of Harvard technicians to build a mechanical coin tosser -- a 3-pound, 15-inch-wide contraption that, when bolted to a table, launches a coin into the air such that it lands the same way every single time. Diaconis himself has trained his thumb to flip a coin and make it come up heads 10 out of 10 times. But what he really wanted to know was whether unrehearsed tosses -- by ordinary folk who flip coins with unpredictable speeds and heights and catch them at different angles -- would show that the outcome of the act was, in fact, random. Lifelong debunker takes on arbiter of neutral choices |
June 9, 2004
Top PhD juggles mathematical theory - and fatherhoodDr. Manuele Santoprete sees the world in numbers. UVic's top doctoral student for 2004 divided his graduate studies in half when he was encouraged to switch to a PhD one year after beginning his master's in mathematics in 1999. To top it off, he also added a daughter to his family. "It was a lot of work, juggling my thesis and welcoming a newborn," he says, "I didn't get much sleep sometimes, but it was worth it on all counts." The Pisa, Italy, native combined his love of physics with an interest in mathematics, and wrote his thesis on the different approaches to solving problems. Since defending his thesis in August 2003, he hasn't shown any signs of slowing down. Upon graduation he was immediately offered a three-year instructorship at the University of California in Irvine, where he's currently teaching and researching. Since arriving in California, he's become a father again, this time to a son. Santoprete's thesis focused on the mathematical study of chaotic systems, developing techniques to understand, for example, the interaction between the sun and the Earth in mathematical terms. He examined how the chaotic orbits of non-spherical objects like these can be interpreted mathematically. In a field where experienced researchers are content to publish two articles per year, each of Santoprete's nine papers has appeared in a high-profile journal. A recent paper appeared in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, one of the world's top mathematical journals. This paper was the first important contribution in 30 years to "Saari's conjecture," a puzzle that's been explored by the best researchers in the field. Santoprete has already been hailed as a star in a field that counts Newton and Euler among its pupils. He looks forward to a future of research and teaching. "I'm working to develop techniques to help people understand problems in a different way," he says. "There's so much to learn." Top PhD juggles mathematical theory - and fatherhood |
June 9, 2004
Good stories, pity they're not trueKeith Devlin The enormous success of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code has introduced the famous Golden Ratio (henceforth GR) to a whole new audience. Regular readers of this column will surely be familiar with the story. The ancient Greeks believed that there is a rectangle that the human eye finds the most pleasing, and that its aspect ratio is the positive root of the quadratic equation x2 - x - 1 = 0You are faced with this equation when you try to determine how to divide a line segment into two pieces such that the ratio of the whole line to the longer part is equal to the ratio of the longer part to the shorter. The answer is an irrational number whose decimal expansion begins 1.618. Having found this number, the story continues, the Greeks then made extensive use of the magic number in their architecture, includiort any of these claims, and good reason to believe they are completely false, as University of Maine mathematician George Markowsky pointed out in his article "Misconceptions About the Golden Ratio", published in the College Mathematics Journal in January 1992. But with such a wonderful story, which marries some decidedly accessible pure mathematics with aethestics, architecture, and painting - a high school math teacher's dream if ever there were one - the facts have had little impact.
I could go on, as there are many more examples, ranging from the sacred (eg.
the dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant) to the profane (such as,
predicting the behavior of the stock market), all of which, on close
examination, turn out to be without any supporting evidence whatsoever.
Despite the lack of evidence, however, and in some cases in the face of
evidence to the contrary, each claim seems to attract its own band of
devotees, who will not for a moment entertain the possibility that their
cherished beliefs are not true. Consequently, not only is GR a very special
number mathematically - all of its genuine appearances in mathematics and
Nature show that - it also has enormous cultural significance as the number
that most people have the greatest number of false beliefs about. Now
there's a GR fact that has plenty of supporting evidence. |
June 8, 2004
High hopes for unscrambling the voteby Declan McCullagh PISCATAWAY, N.J.--Computer scientists gathered here recently and bobbed their heads into an odd-looking contraption for a glimpse of emerging technology that might just help make the digital world safer for democracy. Beneath the viridian green glow of a viewfinder flowed an inch-wide strip of paper that inventor David Chaum says will prove with mathematical rigor whether a vote cast on a computer in a ballot box has been tampered with after the fact. The system was demonstrated publicly for the first time at a Rutgers University voting conference late last month. The technology builds on the increasingly popular notion that computerized voting machines need to leave behind a paper trail to safeguard against fraud--something that's lacking in most current models and the subject of furious debate. Chaum has raised the concept to an entirely new level, according to electronic-voting experts, by including breakthrough cryptographic techniques that will provide instant feedback on irregularities while ensuring voter anonymity. While still a clunky prototype, the system could represent the next evolutionary step in improving the security and reliability of the voting process, some believe. "The math is fine," said Ron Rivest, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-creator of the popular RSA encryption algorithm. "I view this as the early days of the practical applications...The paradigm is a new and interesting one. I'm optimistic." Chaum is not alone among researchers vying to better voting's state of the art. Fed up with what they view as antediluvian punched cards and mechanical lever systems--and with an eye to the problems of the 2000 Florida recount--scientists are borrowing from decades of academic work to invent systems that are probably secure against malfeasance. Their inventions are also designed to one-up current electronic voting machines that have limited audit capabilities and may include bugs that surreptitiously alter vote totals. "I'd like to think that we have some" influence, said Josh Benaloh, a cryptographer at Microsoft Research. "All acting en masse, maybe we'll have an impact." High hopes for unscrambling the vote |
June 8, 2004
UCSC man's work earns top award |
June 7, 2004
FINANCIAL MARKETS FORECAST AND ANALYSISBy Robert McHugh A quick thumbnail explanation of Fibonacci numbers: Leonardo Fibonacci was a 12th century mathematician who noticed that certain numbers and ratios were evident throughout nature on a repetitive basis. Those numbers create a sequence where the prior two add up to equal the next. They are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc. The ratio of the two prior numbers is always .382 and .618 of the next number in sequence. For example, 13 is .382 of 34 and 21 is .618 of 34 and 13 plus 21 equal 34. Architects and artists have found that structures built in these phi ratios are the most pleasing to the eye. The human body is loaded with Fibonacci numbers and ratios. Five fingers, five projectiles (two hands, two legs, and 1 head), two ears and eyes, etc. The height of most people is in a .382 to .618 ratio divided by the navel. For a fascinating discourse on all this, I recommend Robert Prechter's book, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socioeconomics, available at www.elliottwave.com. The point is, this unique phi ratio is also apparent in time and price movements of the market. Why? Because markets are governed by people's emotions, whose moods swing predictably according to the natural order of phi ratios as designed by God. As I mentioned in last week's newsletter, it does not have to be exactly a June 15th top or bottom. It could be within a few days or even weeks of June 15th for the time ratios to approximate .382 and .618 due to the extraordinary length of time June 15th occurs from 1/14/00 and 10/9/02. For example, let's say the top comes in on June 8th instead of June 15th. The ratios would be .378 and .621 - still statistically close to the golden ratio. Interestingly, June 18th happens to be a Fibonacci 89 trading days from the February 11, 2004 top in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. FINANCIAL MARKETS FORECAST AND ANALYSIS |
June 7, 2004
Tiny tango: Device sorts microscopic particles with speed and precisionIn a remarkable collaboration between engineers, physicists and biologists, Princeton scientists have invented a device that rapidly sorts microscopic particles into extremely fine gradations of sizes, opening a range of potential uses. The researchers have used the device to sort particles ranging in size from bacterial cells to large segments of DNA and reported their results in the May 14 issue of Science. The technology could greatly accelerate the work of sequencing genomes and could find uses in many other areas, from improving the performance of pharmaceuticals to detecting bioterrorism agents. Until now there was no way to sort large quantities of molecules or cells by size with such speed and precision, according to the researchers. Current methods separate particles only according to major differences in size and, for particles such as DNA, can take hours to perform. The Princeton invention can distinguish large quantities of particles that are 1.00 micrometer (a millionth of a meter) from others that are 1.005 microns in a matter of seconds. The device is dubbed a "tango array" for the precise choreography it imposes upon particles. The discovery was led by Lotien R. Huang, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical engineering, and grew out of a long-term collaboration between James Sturm, professor of electrical engineering, Robert Austin, a professor of physics, and Edward Cox, a professor of molecular biology, all of whom are co-authors of the Science paper. The group, which is part of the newly formed Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, has produced a variety of devices for sorting DNA and other particles, but none as fast and precise as the tango array. The trade-off between speed and precision had seemed insurmountable, said Huang, who has been building and testing sorting devices for nearly six years. The breakthrough came when a collaborator in the physics department, former postdoctoral researcher Jonas Tegenfeldt, challenged Huang to come up with a mathematical description of how his earlier attempts at sorting devices worked: If he altered a device, could he predict exactly how its performance would change? "At first I thought such an analytical model would be impossible because the structures were so complicated, but Jonas got me thinking," said Huang, who has been working on the problem for six years. Within a few days, Huang not only derived a mathematical theory, but had an insight into making an entirely new device that has virtually no trade-off between speed and accuracy. Huang quickly made a prototype device and tested it with tiny plastic beads. "It gives such amazing separation resolution in just a minute," he said. "And the operation is very simple: You just need a syringe to push your sample through. We are very excited about it." Tiny tango: Device sorts microscopic particles with speed and precision |
June 6, 2004
What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'sBy RANDALL STROSS EY, it's not rocket science. And it's not brain surgery. But if your background is in either, you're welcome to take a shot and apply at Google. The company's employees include a former rocket scientist and a former brain surgeon. Mostly, Google has concentrated on recruiting those with a background in what you would expect: computer science. Founded by two near-Ph.D.'s who have purposely placed Ph.D.'s throughout the company, Google encourages all employees to act as researchers, by spending 20 percent of their time on new projects of their own choosing. Ed Lazowska, professor and former chairman of computer science at the University of Washington, says Google's policy of reserving one day a week to do your own thing is "hugely attractive to potential employees." Google has about as many Ph.D.'s from his university as Microsoft, but Microsoft is almost 30 times larger. WORKING in Google's favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.'s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained - in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause. What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s |
June 5, 2004
American claims to have solved prime problemBy John Gibb American mathematician Prof Richard Arenstorf may have solved a knotty problem over "twin" prime numbers, which has left mathematicians scratching their heads for centuries. University of Otago BSc mathematics graduate Geoff Walmsley (22) contacted the Otago Daily Times yesterday, drawing attention to a recently-published paper by Prof Arenstorf, of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, involving mathematical number theory. Mr Walmsley said he had studied the prime twins issue at university last year and it was "just amazing" the long-standing problem could be nearing solution. The 38-page paper offers a proof of the so-called "twin-prime" conjecture, which asserts that there are "infinitely many prime twins". Prime numbers are whole numbers greater than one which cannot be produced by multiplying any two smaller whole numbers. Mathematicians have long been vainly trying to prove a "conjecture" that prime twins - pairs of prime numbers which are two numbers apart, such as three and five,ssional mathematicians who were not specialists in analytical number theory would find it easy to read the paper at any depth, Dr McCaughan said. The prime twins issue was the kind of mathematical problem that non-mathematicians could readily understand but had proved "extremely difficult" to resolve. "It annoys people that the problem is still there and hasn't been knocked over hundreds of years ago." The academic jury was still out on the validity of Prof Arenstorf's claimed proof, which was published only late last month, he said. American claims to have solved prime problem |
data, 2004
Priming UpwardIvars Peterson In 1644, French cleric and mathematician Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) proposed that the numbers 2n – 1 are prime for the values n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127, and 257, and they are composite for all other positive integers greater than 257. A prime is a whole number evenly divisible only by itself and 1. Mersenne was certarm 2n – 1. And the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) continues to unearth new Mersenne primes. The latest entry—the 41st known Mersenne prime—was discovered last month: 224,036,583 – 1. Written out in the full, the number consists of 7,235,733 decimal digits or, in binary notation, an unbroken string of 24,036,583 1s. It's now the largest known prime number. Its discoverer is GIMPS participant Josh Findley, who used his home computer and software provided by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski to find the enormous prime. Findley's computer is one of more than 240,000 computers worldwide engaged in testing Mersenne numbers for primality. GIMPS volunteers are responsible for checking Mersenne numbers within specified ranges of exponents, whenever their computers would otherwise be idle. The new champion prime greatly surpasses the previous record holder, 220,996,011 – 1, which has 6,320,430 decimal digits. The latest find suggests that the first 10-million-digit prime may be within reach. Its discovery would net a prize of $100,000 from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. GIMPS volunteers haven't yet tested every Mersenne number smaller than the current champion, so another Mersenne prime may yet lurk among the untested numbers. Only exponents less than 12,441,900 have all been tested at least once. There's still a lot more testing to do! Priming Upward |
June 4, 2004
Scientists launch web site to view Transit of VenusScientists at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth have launched a new website which will feature live images of the transit of Venus on the morning of Tuesday 8 June, as well as providing safety advice on how to view the event. Members of the public are also invited to see the transit using specialist equipment at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. For the first time since 1882 the planet Venus will pass between the Earth and the Sun, appearing as a black circle drifting across the face of the Sun. Only six of these transits have ever been observed - the first in 1639. According to Dr Andy Breen, a solar-terrestrial physicist at the Institute of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UWA, transits of Venus have been of enormous importance in increasing our understanding of the solar system in which we live. "Until high-powered radars were available the only way of measuring the distance between the planets was by observing transits of Venus from many different places on Earth, when the difference in the times when Venus crossed the disc of the Sun could be used to calculate how far Venus was from the Earth and - with further calculation - how far the Earth was from the Sun. "The expeditions to observe the Venus transits during the 18th and 19th centuries were the first great international scientific programmes, sending scientists from many countires out across the whole of the world to make measurements – one expedition even travelled to Tahiti with Captain Cook to observe a transit. "Today the size of the solar system is well-known, but this year's transit is still important for science as astronomers and space scientists use the change in the spectrum of light from the Sun as Venus passes in front to test instruments which will be used in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes", he added. The Institute of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, at UWA will be observing the transit of Venus on the morning of 8th June, using two computer-controlled telescopes mounted outside Aberystwyth Arts Centre. The views from the telescopes will be streamed live to the Institute's Venus Transit website and will be shown on screens in the Arts Centre. The transit of Venus begins shortly after 6:20am, and from 9am - weather permitting! - the Institute will be streaming images of Venus passing across the face of the Sun to the website http://www.breakfastwithvenus.org.uk/ and to screens in the cafe and foyer of Aberystwyth Arts Centre. The transit lasts until shortly before 12:30pm, and from 11am the streamed images of the transit will also be screened in the theatre bar in Aberystwyth Arts Centre. If the sky is cloudy staff from the Institute will show the view of the transit from the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer Spacecraft - one of several spacecraft members of the Aberystwyth team use to study activity on the Sun. Scientists launch web site to view Transit of Venus |
June 4, 2004
In Families With Psychosis, The Numbers Tell a StoryJoan Arehart-Treichel Is there any link between math talent and mental illness? A researcher in Iceland finds that the incidence of psychosis is greater than expected among mathematical scholars. Several years ago, the book and movie "A Beautiful Mind" made quite a splash. They had to do with the life of mathematical genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. One could get the impression from both the book and movie that it was purely coincidental that Nash, a math genius, developed schizophrenia. But maybe it was more than chance, a new study suggests. The study, conducted by Jon Karlsson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Institute of Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, has found an intriguing relationship between math talent and psychosis susceptibility in the Icelandic population. Results were published in the April British Journal of Psychiatry. "I know of no other quantitative study demonstrating a link of psychosis to mathematical ability," Karlsson told Psychiatric News. Lynn DeLisi, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at New York University, agreed, saying, "I don't know of any other study that has suggested that mathematical abilities are higher in families with psychosis— so this is very interesting." There is ample evidence of an increased risk of mental illness among highly creative persons and their relatives. Few such studies, however, have been conducted to determine whether extremely successful scholars might also be at such an increased risk. Karlsson thus viewed the stability of the Icelandic population and the excellent demographic records in Iceland as a unique opportunity to see whether there might be an increased risk of mental illness—specifically of hospital-treated psychosis—in scholars and their first-degree relatives. These results, Karlsson wrote, "leave little doubt that the altered levels of brain activity seemingly associated with risk of psychosis can lead to superior performance in academic settings.... Most of the individuals surveyed here lived in the period before the educational emphasis shifted to mathematics and science, but even in college subjects covered a century ago, an increase in psychosis was apparent among the gifted students." In Families With Psychosis, The Numbers Tell a Story |
June 3, 2004
If virtual characters had brainsBy JERRY LANGTON Put yourself in a movie producer's chair for a moment. You're making an epic -- you know, the kind they used to say had "a cast of thousands" -- and you're having constant headaches about hiring, paying, feeding, clothing and maintaining the safety of all those actors. BioGraphic Technologies Inc., a Montreal-based software company, has developed a system called AI-Implant that can provide those thousands. Using the same artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D modelling common in video games, BioGraphic has created software-driven animated characters that can replace real actors -- in droves, if necessary. "We use artificial intelligence to make a brain for digital humans, to allow animated characters to make independent choices," said Paul Kruszewski, president of BioGraphic Technologies. "It's great not only because human actors are expensive, but [also] because you can't blow them up." "What we learned is that artificial intelligence is easy, but artificial stupidity is hard," Mr. Kruszewski said. "To make a character realistic, he needs some stupidity -- it's nothing to make a character who won't fall over a chair in his path, but what if he's afraid or injured or drunk? You need him to hit the chair every once in a while." If virtual characters had brains |
June 3, 2004
How to Break a Code, Ever Since the Days of the SphinxBy JOHN SCHWARTZ ode makers and code breakers have danced a dance of secrecy and revelation throughout recorded history. Allegations that Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former Bush administration ally, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had cracked the code used by its intelligence service is only the most recent example. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks used the simple scytale, a rod with a strip of paper wrapped around it. Codemakers wrote their messages lengthwise along the rod and would then unwrap the paper; the recipient wrapped the paper around another rod of the same diameter to read the message. But anyone with the right rod could read the message, too. Things have gotten more complicated. With the 20th century came mechanical encryption machines like the Enigma used by the Germans in World War II. It took the genius of the mathematician Alan Turing and the thousands of people working at Bletchley Park in England to crack the code. The advent of computer power made it possible to use a "brute force" attack to defeat encryption schemes, with the machines rapidly running through myriad combinations. But computing soon made encryption more powerful as well, and now there are systems commonly available that are virtually impossible to break without enormous expenditures of computing power and time. Encryption has become a transparent part of everyday life, thanks to the need for security in the global financial network and on the Internet, part of online purchasing and the most mundane errands. "When you go to the ATM and take out 20 bucks, or a hundred bucks, that message to the central computer is encrypted," said said David Kahn, an expert on encryption and espionage and the author of "The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet." The increasing difficulty of breaking codes is changing the nature of espionage, said James Bamford, the author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency." Code breakers at the National Security Agency have had to change their tactics. "The old saying used to be that the N.S.A. is focused on `information in motion,' " he said. "Now it's focused on information at rest," before it has been sent or after it has been received and unscrambled. A former Clinton administration official involved with encryption matters said that it would be surprising if the Iranian government used an outmoded or easy-to-crack system for scrambling messages that allowed users to read the traffic with, say, a single numeric key. "It would be unlikely that we would have the equivalent of a skeleton key," he said. Instead, he said, if the kind of equipment that another nation uses is known, American intelligence agencies will build special-purpose computer equipment to crack those messages, and even then use the routing information to pick and choose among messages to find the ones that are likeliest to contain valuable information. So instead of expending the resources and time to crack encrypted messages, Mr. Bamford said, "the much easier way of doing it is bribing a code clerk or an employee of the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad," he said. "The idea would be to get a bug into the system," attached to the keyboard, screen or even the power cord of a target computer. Although Mr. Chalabi supposedly provided the information about the American eavesdropping to Iran some six weeks ago, Iran's intelligence service continued to use the code until recently, American officials have said. That might seem surprising, but experts in intelligence and codebreaking say that it is actually predictable. Once a system has been cracked, it is hard to recover and change course, said Mr. Kahn. Matthew Aid, a researcher who is working on a book about the National Security Agency, said that Iran got word in the 1980's that the United States was listening in on its communications as part of the investigation of Iran's role in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. "Rather than admitting that their systems were compromised, they continued to send messages with the compromised cypher system," he said. "I guarantee you nothing has changed there." At the same time, knowing that a system has been compromised can be useful as well, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert in Washington. "Maybe they don't want us to know that they know it's been compromised, so that they can insert disinformation," he suggested. How to Break a Code, Ever Since the Days of the Sphinx |
June 3, 2004
Plaque will honour genius TuringTHE home of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician credited as the father of computer science, is to be marked with a blue heritage plaque. Turing died 52 years ago at Copper Folly - formerly Holly Mead - at Adlington Road, Wilmslow. At the time his work was little unknown outside a small circle of scientists and academics. But in recent years, recognition of his genius has led him to be named among the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Turing's work was also crucial in the cracking of the German Enigma code, which helped the Allies defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. The current owners of Copper Folly, Peter and Diana Stephenson, say they are delighted. Macclesfield borough council has commissioned the plaque, the first in Wilmslow, at the request of Andrew Crompton, a Manchester University lecturer. He has invited Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, who was a friend of Turing, to unveil the plaque. Turing's homosexuality meant he was a controversial figure during his lifetime. After his suicide in 1954, his place in history was played down, as well as his links with Wilmslow. But last year, Turing was placed 21st in a poll of the greatest Britons and his life story was dramatised on ITV1. Part of the ring road in Manchester is named after him and there is a bronze statue in Sackville Park. Diana said: "Wilmslow should be proud that this great mathematician, voted one of the greatest Britons of all time, was a resident." Plaque will honour genius Turing |
June 2, 2004
Why the tax system drives me -- and you -- crazyJeff Schnepper Who said, "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax"? Answer: Albert Einstein. He is also purported to have remarked, when confronted with a Form 1040 Personal Income Tax Return, "I'm a mathematician, not a philosopher. I'm with Uncle Albert. The tax code is driving me nuts! I've got two law degrees and an MBA in finance. I'm licensed by the New Jersey Board of CPAs. I've taught taxation for over two decades, both on an undergraduate and a graduate level. And I still have no idea what they're talking about half the time. Why the tax system drives me -- and you -- crazy |
June 2, 2004
Decoding the Science of SynchronizationSync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order Steven Strogatz Hyperion, New York, 2003. $24.95, (338 pp.). ISBN 0-7868-6844-9 Reviewed by Nigel Goldenfeld After a prolonged and difficult adolescence, the science of complex systems has finally come of age. No longer dismissable as being long on hype and short on results, the field boasts some remarkable and genuinely wide-ranging discoveries that are starting to make an impact across the spectrum of scientific endeavor—from mathematical physics to cell biology, genomics, and even social science. The recent developments are especially notable because they are detailed quantitative analyses or predictions, clearly moving beyond the grandiose collection of aphorisms and paradigms that, to some, characterized the field's early days and drew the ire of skeptics. Advances in the characterization of networks are arguably the most fundamental insights that have arisen in recent years. How can one describe the structural complexity of networks? How do networks evolve? What new features emerge when dynamical systems are strongly coupled into complex networks? These questions would be a fruitless line of inquiry if the answers exhibited sensitive dependence on the specifics of the networks. But remarkably, it turns out that some generic applicable principles permit useful idealization, classification, quantification, and even insight. Answers to these questions are relevant to a whole host of real-life systems, such as food webs, microbial communities, metabolic and gene networks, the power grid, the Internet, and social or affiliation networks. Sync is a collection of vignettes about spatially-extended dynamical systems that fall (or fail to fall) into synchronization—often in spectacular ways. The captivating opening chapter describes the massive displays of synchronized firefly flashing that are observed in Southeast Asia. The chapter then moves rapidly into the synchronization of cells in a beating heart and the general problem of the effect of pulse coupling on a set of identical nonlinear oscillators. In a beautifully simple explanation that faithfully captures the elements of his rigorous proof, Strogatz shows that, regardless of the initial conditions, the oscillators will inevitably become synchronized. Decoding the Science of Synchronization |
June 2, 2004
Technology Futurist Ray Kurzweil to Deliver Keynote Address at Business 4SiteZiff Davis Media's Event Marketing Group announced today that futurist, inventor and author, Ray Kurzweil will present a keynote address at Business 4Site, which will be held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, June 15-17, 2004. Technology professionals can register at http://www.business4site.com to hear Mr. Kurzweil speak at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday June 15th. Considered to be one of the world's most influential thinkers, Ray Kurzweil is a technology futurist whose vision extends far beyond even tomorrow's extraordinary capabilities. In his keynote speech, "The Ultimate Infusion of Information Technology: What Will Happen When IT Becomes 100% of the Value of Products & Services?" Mr. Kurzweil will paint an image of a future fueled by information technology that was once considered the realm of science fiction. His forward thinking keynote will cover the accelerating change that is taking place within computation, business, communication, brain scanning, and biological technologies such as DNA sequencing. He will talk about the explosive growth of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on business and mankind. "Ray Kurzweil is a visionary who is well ahead of his time," said Jim Hasl, Vice President Ziff Davis Event Marketing Group. "Everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton considers him to be a legend and we're excited that he will present attendees with his ideas on how technology will shape our economic, business and cultural landscape in the future." During Mr. Kurzweil's illustrious and award-winning career he has successfully developed nine market leading businesses in optical character recognition, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art. He has also invented several ground-breaking machines including: an omni-font optical character recognition system, a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, a CCD flat-bed scanner, a text-to-speech synthesizer and, the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. In 2002, Mr. Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office and also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology. Business 4Site (http://www.business4site.com ) is a new mid-market conference that provides customers with customized programs to analyze key business issues and the technology to solve them. The three day conference provides a unique and intimate setting where the technology industry's leading companies can interact with their customers and prospects. Following its launch in Los Angeles, Business 4Site East will be held November 16-18, at the New York Hilton in New York City. Components of Business 4Site include Global Dialogue, town-hall style presentations with executives from Cisco, Microsoft and digital expert Don Tapscott; Solutions Circle an invitation-only executive briefing center; 4Ward a preview area of never before seen technologies with wide-ranging commercial applications; Marketplace an interactive demonstration area of products and services from top companies including Microsoft and; CommunityNet a secure community site that fosters continued customer relationship building after the event. The 4Site Conference program offers four tracks which provide important information and tools to help companies make smarter technology decisions. Topics covered include security, outsourcing, Web services, VoIP, wireless technologies, as well as an update on industry-specific sessions for government, healthcare and manufacturing. Technology Futurist Ray Kurzweil to Deliver Keynote Address at Business 4Site |
June 2, 2004
Maths a vital subjectBy Laila Rahman Mathematics encourages human beings to think and reason systematically and rationally. It is the most important tool to push forward the development of civilisation in the field of science and technology, as well as to improve the general level of human intelligence. That is why many developed economies place great emphasis on mathematics and science education. These were stated by Cikgu Hajah Norjum bte Hj Md Yusop, Director of the Curriculum Development Department at the Ministry of Education, the guest of honour at the launching of the Mathematics Week of Sultan Saiful Rijal Technical College (MTSSR). The event, organised by the Mathematics Department MTSSR, began yesterday and will run until June 5, 2004. Among the activities that would be held during the week are talks, exhibitions, workshops, competitions and quizzes. The guest of honour in her speech said that students with little exposure to mathematics and science would be left out in the job market, so core knowledge of mathematics and science is vital to students to keep up with the rapid advances in science and technology. Acquiring such skills would be important particularly for students in developing economies like Brunei Darussalam, she added. Silva Das, Head of Mathematics Department, in his welcoming remarks said that the Mathematics Week is aimed to develop students' mathematical inquiry and critical thinking skills; to provide a relevant, hands on, and out of class dimension to mathematics instruction; to promote creativity, initiative, collaboration and independent thinking among students and to encourage greater school, parent, student involvement in learning process. In the future the department will also be embarking on two new projects such as the mathematics laboratory and the mathematics club. Research studies show that student's attitudes towards mathematics and understanding of difficult mathematical concepts generally improve when more interactive forms of activities are conducted in the classroom. Maths a vital subject |
June 1, 2004
Boys ahead in arts, girls in mathsLUCKNOW : Traditionally girls are supposed to have natural proficiency in music and boys are deemed to be smart in mathematics. But the UP Board high school results have belied the age old belief as girls have outscored boys in mathematics, whereas boys excelled in the fine art of playing music. Sixty one per cent girls were successful in mathematics subject, in comparison to 53 per cent boys. In sharp contrast, boys seemed more in tune with their artistic side scoring 82 per cent in vocal and 85 per cent in music (instrumental) in comparison to 70 and 59 per cent girls respectively. Interestingly, boys have also dominated in subjects like painting, drawing and home science subjects, which are traditionally known to be the domain of girls. Around 87 per cent boys who had painting as a subject were successful, in comparison to 58 per cent girls. Similarly, 78 per cent boys were successful in tailoring and 91 per cent in home science, whereas the success rate of girls was 74 and 82 per cent respectively. Girls scored better in English with 59 per cent success rate with boys having 56 per cent success. Another interesting factor was that there were total 25 boys and one girl student who had opted for Nepali language as a subject. All 25 boys failed, but the lone girl cleared the examination. Things reversed in French language. Six boys who appeared in the examination passed, but the lone girl failed. Girls also outsmarted boys in the male dominated domain of agriculture. Around 82 per cent girls with agriculture as subject passed the examination, in comparison to 66 per cent boys. In commerce also girls scored better with 51 per cent success rate, as against 47 per cent of boys. In science, boys were slightly better with 66 per cent success rate and girls with 63 per cent. Similarly in Sanskrit language, 83 per cent boys were succcess rate of girls was 66 per cent and boys 67 per cent. Girls were better in drawing, as 76 per cent passed, with boys having success rate of 71 per cent. Despite being from the Hindi heartland, only 63 per cent boys and 65 per cent girls could pass the subject. Boys ahead in arts, girls in maths |
June 1, 2004
New Yorker Fiction, by the NumbersBy DAVID CARR When most students in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton construct a senior thesis, they hew to studies of arcane derivatives, options and other financial instruments, some with an eye toward the potentially lucrative job market awaiting them on Wall Street. Katherine L. Milkman, 22, decided to turn rigorous mathematical analytics on an even more mystical topic: the selection of short fiction for The New Yorker. In applying scientific metrics to an ineffable process, Ms. Milkman will no doubt set off a small, discreet tempest among a cadre of authors who would gladly saw off their (nonwriting) hand to be the next Jhumpa Lahiri, a young writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her book of short stories after her work was plucked from the pile by the editors at that weekly magazine. Ms. Milkman, who has a minor in American studies, read 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001, and built a substantial database. She then constructed a series of rococo mathematical tests to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters. The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters. "She gives you a new way of looking at these stories which would not have occurred to me," Ms. Treisman said. "Do I walk away thinking, `Now I have to think about gender and race and location in selecting stories?' No." After harvesting the gossip about the tendentiousness of one editor or another — there is much to choose from — the thesis segues to the "Kolmogorov-Smirnov Two-Sample Goodness of Fit Test" and the "Pearson Correlation Coefficient Test." In applying numerically based analysis to literary matters, Ms. Milkman's work was something of a micro-execution of the controversial text-free literary investigations of Prof. Franco Moretti of Stanford, in which he examined the broad scope of literary history by the numbers, tracking the birth and denouement of various genres based on statistics. Longtime adherents to canonical literary thought were appalled by Professor Moretti's by-the-numbers approach to the study of literature, something Ms. Milkman came to be familiar with. "Many people thought it was completely idiotic," she said. "But when they found out I would actually be reading the stories, they were more understanding." New Yorker Fiction, by the Numbers |