Nexus - 1204 - New Times Magazine-pages

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NEWS ... ... GLOBAL NEWS ... Seen hose OF consists of four independent components: — mind, they can write and send emails. "It's simulated annealing, active networks, _ really the start of interfacing the chip with consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions". Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e- mails that solicit admissions to the confer- ence. "We were tired of the spam," Stribling told Reuters in a telephone inter- view, adding that his team wanted to chal- lenge the standards of the conference's peer review process. (Source: Reuters April 14, 2005; http-//tinyurl.com/Shajc) mind, they can write and send emails. "It's really the start of interfacing the chip with the nervous system," he said. (Source: The Age; April 14, 2005. www. theage.com.au) prominent West Australian geologist whose work is internationally recog- nised, is convinced that the accepted explanation for the devastating Boxing Day tsunami is wrong. Dr James Maxlow blames the tsunami on what he says is "the continuous expan- sion of the earth's crust creating under-sea fault movements". He dismisses the alter- native and widely held view that it was caused by compression and subduction in plate tectonics as a myth. Maxlow says that conventional wisdom is based on a hypothesis that the Earth has maintained a constant size during its geo- logical evolution. Instead, his research shows that the size of the Earth 1600-million years ago was little more than one-fifth of its dimensions today and the planet is currently continu- ing to grow at the rate of 22 millimetres a year. "Growth like this over millions of years has weakened the Earth's crust causing fractures which lead to natural disasters such as the Asian tsunami and other seis- mic events," said Dr Maxlow. (Source: 26 April 2005; Press Release; Terrella Consultants, Tel: +61 8 9298 8819 www. geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchp ad/6520/) THE RACE TO CONTROL THE IONOSPHERE Cot of the Earth's weather in a spe- cific location by manipulating the ionosphere and the Earth's outer radiation belts is possible, and many nations are developing countermeasures to neutralise such weather manipulation techniques, according to an an editorial in India Daily. "The modern methods of artificial weather modifications involve artificial ionization of Earth's atmosphere between 15,000 and 30,000 feet and above. Manipulating the ionosphere and use of controlled solar-terrestrial interactions can create much larger effects. The Sun's nat- ural electromagnetic radiation reaching the Earth controls the Earth's weather. The Sun's radiation and ultraviolet rays have to cross the ionosphere to reach the Earth. Solar radiations and flares are directly responsible for planetary weather changes. Solar flares and levels of radiations are caused by bombardment of cosmic rays on the Sun from either a distant massive black hole or a star-cluster caused by the col- lapse of thousands and thousands of stars in a small space. The ionosphere acts as a filter to the solar radiations that reach the Earth. Manipulation and controlling the filter is a potential source of massive THE FUTURE WITH CHIPS lor anyone under 30, handsets as we know them will be gone in 20 years. The world's tech-savvy youngsters will be using microchip implants to communicate and transact. If the microchip scenario sounds too much like a Star Trek episode, London nuclear physicist, marine biologist and futurist Wolfgang Grulke has news: it's already happening. Already two scientists at Britain's Warwick University have chips embedded under their skin that let them send emails just by thinking. The process is still cumbersome, Mr Grulke says, but by willing a cursor around a keyboard on a computer screen with their CONFERENCE FALLS FOR GIBBERISH PRANK bunch of computer-generated gibber- ish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific con- ference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jeremy Stribling and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams. The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13, 2005 in Orlando, Florida. To their surprise, one of the papers— "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy"—was accepted for presentation. "Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic “I's the Ultra Deluxe model, it said on the box ff hed special extra features." to gems as: JUNE — JULY 2005 NEXUS +7 www.nexusmagazine.com