Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing

 IBM scientists, in collaboration with the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University, have demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging MRI with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI.  

…

For more than a decade, IBM scientists have been making pioneering advances in
MRFM. Now, the IBM-led team has dramatically boosted the sensitivity of MRFM and combined it with an advanced 3D image reconstruction technique. This allowed them to demonstrate, for the first time, MRI on nanometer-scale biological objects. The technique was applied to a sample of tobacco mosaic virus and achieved resolution down to four nanometers. (One nanometer is one billionth of a meter; a tobacco mosaic virus is 18 nanometers across.)

via IBM Press room – 2009-01-13 IBM Research Creates Microscope With 100 Million Times Finer Resolution Than Current MRI – United States.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely “black” but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox (re: What happens when you throw an elephant into a black hole?). …

Continue reading on Our world may be a giant hologram – space – 15 January 2009 – New Scientist.

——

Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a science fiction story in 1884 called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions that was an allegory to social hierarchy of Victorian culture. The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland. The unnamed narrator, a humble square (the social caste of gentlemen and professionals), guides us through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. The Square has a dream about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland), and attempts to convince the realm’s ignorant monarch of a second dimension, but finds that it is essentially impossible to make him see outside of his eternally straight line. (Source: Wikipedia).

The book is out of copyright and is available in its entirety here: Google Books: Flatland.

A movie version was made in 2007. Here’s its trailer.

Senator Obama’s proposed “tax cuts for the middle class” are actually marginal rate hikes in disguise.

It’s pretty simple. If you have an adjusted gross income of between $85,000 and $100,000 or so, Obama won’t raise your marginal tax rates. If you’re anywhere else in the income scale, you’re not so lucky.

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives. First, whether or not you get those breaks will depend on your income. In Washington, taking away tax breaks as families work harder to make more money is called a “phase-out.” Economists have a different name for it—we call it a tax. Reducing a person’s tax credit as his income goes up also reduces his incentive to earn more income.

Source: http://www.american.com/archive/2008/august-08-08/the-folly-of-obama2019s-tax-plan

Today I watched the live feed from NASA of the exciting successful landing of the Phoenix Mars Lander. Since the people at NASA, JPL, etc made it look easy, it’s even more impressive considering that only half of the attempts at landing robots/equipment on Mars have been successful. Hopefully this lander will provide the science that we need to continue our quest to put Man on Mars. My parent’s generation saw the Moon landing “live.” It will be very exciting when in 20-30 years we have a fully working Moon colony and are making the first steps on Mars. It will be expensive, but, considering all the technological advancement that NASA has given us in the past, I believe that the rewards in the future will be far greater. Plus, innovation will only continue to accelerate now that private enterprise is getting involved in space travel.

Latest photos from the Phoenix Mars Lander. They are only black and white now (5/25/2008) but will be in color once the Robotic Arm Camera is operating.

Traffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.

The mathematical theory behind these so-called “shockwave” jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic – typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.

After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.

The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now.

Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time

So Google Web History has a feature called Interesting Items. Google saves your search history (only when logged into your Gmail/Google account) and then analyzes it to determine the “recent top queries related to your searches.” I must have been doing a lot of searching for medications, diseases, and science-related stuff (explanation: medical school) because coming in at #4 in top queries related to my searches is esthesioneuroblastoma, an “uncommon malignant neoplasm of the nasal vault, believed to arise from the olfactory epithelium.” What an interesting and unusual thing to learn! Interesting video is also offered and a few months ago I was shown a video of cataract surgery.

Remember my post entitled “Diluting medicine: Homeopathy“? In it I linked to a number of videos refuting the practice of homeopathy. A few days ago I found a 2-hour video of a debate held at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. The debate alternates between both viewpoints. It can be watched fairly quickly because the video is cued up with a Powerpoint slide. Advancing the flash Powerpoint slide also advances the video. It’s quite interesting. The Canadian homeopathic doctor at the end makes the very radical point that the healthcare crisis would be completely solved if everyone switched over to homeopathy…ahh, yeah right. The moderator mentioned that more such debates would be happening in 2008. I wished the format is more of an actual debate. The video was just 4-5 different people talking with little discussion occurring. I feel the best part of the video could have been the question and answer session that occurred after the online webcast ended. Here’s hoping that the format will be different for their future debates.

Advertisement for the debate:

A Debate: Homeopathy – Quackery Or A Key To The Future of Medicine?
Donald Marcus M.D. (Baylor)

An international forum to explore the facts around this controversial modality in an attempt to determine whether it has any place in medical care.

Participants to include Donald Marcus M.D. (Baylor), Iris Bell M.D., Ph.D. (University of Arizona), Rustum Roy Ph.D. (Penn State) and others.

You are invited to watch a debate between six internationally renowned experts as they examine the basic science as well as the clinical and epidemiological evidence around this 200 year old system of medicine.

Link to video

Here are some pretty incredible stories that I found in my clinical psychiatry book:

1) Jim L. and Jim S. were first reunited at age 39. They were genetically identical twins, reared apart since infancy by different adoptive families in Ohio and unaware of each other’s existence. As children, each twin had had a dog named Toy. Each bit his fingernails and, since age 18, had suffered from mixed headache syndrome, a combined tension and migraine headache. Each had been married twice, first to a Linda and then to a Betty. One twin had named his son James Alan, and the other, James Allen. Each had put a circular bench around a tree in his garden. Each had worked at a gas station and later part-time in law enforcement as a sheriff. Each chain-smoked Salems and preferred an occasional Miller Lite beer. Each scattered love notes to his wife around the house. Every summer, unbeknownst to the other, each had driven his family in a light blue Chevrolet from Ohio to the Pas-Grille Beach in St. Petersburg, Florida, for their summer vacation. They had similar voices, hand gestures, and mannerisms.

2) Jerry L. and Mark N., identical twins separated in infancy, were first reunited at age 30. Each was nearly bald and had a bushy mustache. Each was a volunteer firefighter and made his living installing safety equipment. Each wore aviator glasses, big belt buckles, and big key rings. Each drank Budweiser with his pinky hooked on the bottom of the can and crushed the can when he finished.

3) Jack Y. and Oskar S., identical twins born in Trinidad in 1933 and separated in infancy by their parents’ divorce, were first reunited at age 46. Oskar was raised by his Catholic mother and grandmother in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Jack was raised by his Orthodox Jewish father in Trinidad and spent time on an Israeli kibbutz. Each wore aviator glasses and a blue sport shirt with shoulder plackets, had a trim mustache, liked sweet liqueurs, stored rubber bands on his wrists, read books and magazines from back to front, dipped buttered toast in his coffee, flushed the toilet before and after using it, enjoyed sneezing loudly in crowded elevators to frighten other passengers, and routinely fell asleep at night while watching television. Each was impatient, squeamish about germs, and gregarious.

4) Bessie and Jessie, identical twins separated at 8 months of age after their mother’s death, were first reunited at age 18. Each had had a bout of tuberculosis, and they had similar voices, energy levels, administrative talents, and decision-making styles. Each had had her hair cut short in early adolescence. Jessie had a college-level education, while Bessie had had only 4 years of formal education; yet Bessie scored 156 on intelligence quotient testing, while Jessie scored 153. Each read avidly, which may have compensated for Bessie’s sparse education; she created an environment compatible with her inherited potential.

Sources:
Kaplan & Sadock’s “Synopsis of Psychiatry.” Ninth Edition.
Segal NL. Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us about Human Behavior. Plume: New York; 1999:116-151.

I’ll be heading home early from studying to snap a few pictures of tonight’s total lunar eclipse. I guess it will be the last one seen in North America until December 2010. Unfortunately, I forgot my tripod at home so I’ll have to do it hand held. Expected temperature (without wind chill) for the eclipse in Southeast WI is supposed to be a balmy 3 degrees F. I’ll update this post with the photos once my camera warms back up from the cold.

EDIT: As promised, here is a photo of tonight’s eclipse. These photos were hand held and taken with a good lens but not great lens (Canon 28-135 f3.5-5.6 EF IS USM). Click the photo to be taken to the gallery.

As a comparison I also took a photo using my point & shoot Minolta G400. Despite being a quarter of the film speed (400 vs. 1600) and more than double the shutter speed, the shots look more like an outdated picture of Neptune than our Moon. Here one of those pictures is: