Very creative submission….

Wait for itany minute now, someone is going to come in and mention property rights and possibly involve Camden.

Good idea. File a permit to set up a DDT factory in the same spot as the Islamic school. I guarantee you’ll suddenly see 100% support for the Islamic school from everyone who opposed it.

http://boloji.com/society/172.htm

What Greenpeace’s position is on where and how DDT should be manufacturerd I have no idea.

If you have some serious evidence to the contrary then present it.

Sure:
First, Harvards Attaran worries that the procedural barriers and controls put on DDT by the POPs Treaty may raise its cost so much that many poor countries will not be able to afford to continue using it. Second, the WWF Core Issues Statement on the Johannesburg conference still asserts that “negotiators need to remain firm and committed to making elimination the central objective of the POPs Treaty.” That includes DDT. Similarly Greenpeaces briefing paper on the Johannesburg meeting insists that the POPs Treaty must adopt “measures to put an end to the production of and use of all existing POPs.” Again, that includes DDT.

AND

S Attaran points out that Greenpeace is currently trying to shut down one of the worlds two remaining manufacturers of DDT in India. “Thus they may accomplish through the back door what they couldnt accomplish through the front door,” says Attaran.

Perhaps you could email the professor ask for some evidence and post it here.

It would be particularly interesting to ask him about Greenpeace’s attempts to stage a backdoor ban in india which the Indian government obviously ignored.

There has never been a ban (de facto or otherwise) on the use of DDT to fight malaria carrying mosquitoes, only on its use in agriculture, and for very good reasons.

If you have some serious evidence to the contrary then present it.

The Wikipedia entry is OK as far as it goes.

AT&T lawyers slightly hassled John, who however did several sabbaticals at Bell Labs with Ken&Dennis&co, who in no way discouraged him. As an amusing note, at the same time as the lawyers were wringing their hands about this, we were using the Lions books widely for internal BTL courses…

John was a scholar and a gentlemen, and never got in real trouble, just hassled. The last time I saw him, he kindly replaced my personal copies that had been loaned out and never gotten back. But I did return the favor later, as the money I paid for a certain famous license plate went to a Lions Award Fund.

Yeah, the lag is heartbreaking at times. From time to time I’ll muse to one of my professors about a program or feature I’d like to see and they’ll mention that it was worked on in the 70s or 80s. I was born too late, in a way.

I liked the Sun list, particularly the self-optimising and “live star” projects, both of which mesh with my own thinking about where web servers will go next. I reckon the future of web systems for sites like this belongs to turnkey virtual machines.

In the parlance I used in #57, and noting that Google should be included, and of course, I don’t work at any of these places:

Sunlabs has a handy list of projects, which I’d generally call AR (as they do) or ED (exploratory development), although a few verge on R, and they certainly have world-class R computer scientists. A couple years ago, there were about 200 staff members, split among 2 main sites with scattered individuals elsewhere.

Microsoft Research is bigger, with around 800 people much more spread around. They do more R, although a lot is still AR and ED. They have sometimes been knocked for not producing that much for the level of resources and talent (very high), but I’m not sure that’s quite fair: if people do R, most of it fails, and in any case, it takes years for it to move from R to AR to ED/AD to D and get deployed, even in software, which is easier than in physics, for example. Also, it’s like the VC business: the occasional monster winner pays for it all.

These are probably appropriate levels of effort. Very few companies can think of 20-year timeframes, and software and computer company R&D tends to be more in the AR/ED range, since one is looking for things to become products in a few years. That’s different from basic research in physics, chemistry.

Most real R in computing is at universities, and sometimes government labs, although at one point, a big chunk of leading-edge computing research was concentrated in IBM Research, Bell labs, and Xerox PARC, of which only one still much resembles its 1970s self, sad to say. There are still fine people at Bell Labs, but it’s much smaller.

As for taking a while:
Bell Labs history includes a list of top 10 innovations. If you read that, and think how long it took for things like transistor (1947), solar cells (1954), lasers (1958), and UNIX (1969) to catch on, you’ll see what I mean about lag time. Solar cells were nichey for a long time, and nobody guessed that lasers would show up in inexpensive consumer products.

Anyway, Bell Labs was 25,000 people at its height, supported by monopoly money and long time horizons. There were probably 1000 people doing mostly R, and another 1000 or so doing mostly AR, depending on you counted. One of the Consent Decrees required that patents be licensed reasonably, which is why so much currently-used technology backtracks though some Bell Labs patent somewhere. Of course, software patents were more chancy, but we had other ways to get the software out, i.e., like licensing UNIX to universities almost free. The lawyers were terrified at that, as they worried that we;d get sued for being in the computer business. BTW, a famous Australian computer scientist, John Lions, sadly deceased, contributed strongly to the spreading of UNIX.

Do you see the current boom in research at places like Sun and Microsoft to be anything like the Bell Labs era? Or is it too much D and not enough R?

If you want good history, Dennis still has a good website, including some amusing history of Thompson, games, and fake memoes.

you know this guy.

He’s truly a remarkable individual who made the transition from the teaching math at a uni to being possibly the best hedge fund manager in the world. From my experience his firm was a very generous brokerage payer so it kept the snow outside, the kids well fed and the dog with the next meal.

Jim Simons from math teacher to the best hedge fund manager in the world (i think)

Short blurb:
The advantage scientists bring into the game is less their mathematical or computational skills than their ability to think scientifically. They are less likely to accept an apparent winning strategy that might be a mere statistical fluke

http://www.turtletrader.com/trader-simons.html

How about you. and say the thought of growing a penis. Whats your trade off(s).

++ could learn to drive properly.
– easily distracted by own boobs.

(runs away).

So, for you, developing secondary female sexual characteristics would be equivalent to cancer?

Depends which cancer we’re comparing to, Helen. If it is say lung or pancreatic where there’s little chance of survival I’d go for the breasts and period.

If it’s in one organ and hasn’t spread, I’ll take may chances with the cancer.

How about you…. and say the thought of growing a penis. What’s your trade off(s).

For instance, a colleague Ken Thompson spent a few years building Belle, which was the world computer chess champion for a few years.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for the main part of the text in the Thompson/Ritchie/Kernighan classic books about C and Unix (“The C Programming language” and “The Unix Programmer’s Manual”), but they still sit on my shelf at work. They manage to be both entertaining and informative – I wish all programming books were written that well.

So, for you, developing secondary female sexual characteristics would be equivalent to cancer?

Wow.

Interesting data point, that one.

Kelly & colleague Claude Shannon were well before my time, but this is what I mean when I say a great deal of fundamental work was done at BTL over the years.

Folks like Joe Kruskal, Ron Graham, and the great John Tukey were still around. (Read Wikipedia on Tukey, especially the Quotes section.

In particular, truly key basic mathematics, physics, and computer science origianted at BTL, because in those days, the Bell System was (I think) the largest corporation in the world, and routinely had to deal with the most complex systems engineering problems and cases where even a 1% optimization might be worth $10Ms/year. The US government sometimes asked BTL to do things, just because they thought nobody else could, like anti-ballistic missile systems and black projects like “Operation Ivy Bells”.

Of course, it was pleasant to have monopoly money, which let BTL think about 10/20/40-year timeframes. Pure R people were often working on things that might or might not lead to actual products, but if they did, easily could be 10-20 years away, and quite often might be doing things that might seem of little direct usefulness. For instance, a colleague Ken Thompson spent a few years building Belle, which was the world computer chess champion for a few years. Nobody cared [and actually, there were some interesting spinoffs], because besides creating UNIX, Ken saved $Ms a year just in looking at projects and advising.

Sometimes people discovered things they weren’t looking for. A friend of mine jokes “Some people get Nobel prizes for things they were looking for – we got one for something we were trying to get rid of!” That’s research.

Anyway, I’m not surprised that there’s some Bell Labs math underneath modern derivatives trading. However, the Wall Street folks much prefer trade secret to patents.

re: 67 David:

“re: financial derivatives and science: the products are engineering, the theory underneath is the science.”

Yes, well put and accurate. Here’s another friend, John Mulvey, who is very good, and is “professor of operations research and financial engineering”. He’s an example of one of those who straddle the science/engineering boundary, as he usually does research, but when consulting for companies he’s usually doing engineering.

Is that recipe meant to kill on sight?

Isn’t that what they feed the Gitmos during interrogation? Nothing personal.

Okey-dokey. Here’s a taster or two.

Watch:
http://aftergrogblog.blogs.com/agb/film_reviews/index.html
(Tony pops in a few but it’s basically me over the last few years)

and eat:
http://www.progressivedinnerparty.net/2008/05/18/sexy-pink-mashed-potatoes/#more-78

You’ll notice I don’t mention Tim Lambert at all. No doubt you can provide a dozen or so life-appreciating posts which don’t do so either.

“howd it work out with your blogging gig?

Which one? Recipes, film reviews, air show photo essays, Synchrotron reports, sports commentary or Wodehouse parodies?