Jeremy wrote:
] According to the election-year bluster of politicians and
] pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries
] has become a problem of epic proportion.
]
] Fortunately, this alarmism is misguided.
]
] Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both
] now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a
] new wave of American protectionism, the consequences will be
] disastrous -- for the U.S. economy and for the American
] workers they claim to defend.
]
]
] This article appears in the May/June 2004 issue of Foreign
] Affairs.

Drezner pinpoints why there is such a strong backlash:

When it comes to trade policy, there are two iron laws of politics. The first is that the benefits of trade diffuse across the economy, but the costs of trade are concentrated.

RE: The Outsourcing Bogeyman

Jeremy wrote:
] lclough wrote:
] ] Jeremy wrote:
] ] ] This conference was held in Greece in May 2003. There are
]
] ] ] several papers of interest, including:
] ] ]
] ] ] Architecture and Algorithms for a Distributed
] Reputation
] ] ] System
] ] ]
] ] ] Hardware Security Appliances for Trust
] ] ]
] ] ] Trust Management Tools for Internet Applications
] ] ]
] ] ] Simulating the Effect of Reputation Systems on E-markets
] ] ]
] ] ] Trust Propagation in Small Worlds
] ]
] ] I'm looking for academic research pertaining to social
] ] networks and reputation algorithms within p2p systems, and
] ] rememebered this meme'd link. This should've been a real
] good
] ] starting point, but the link now stops at the SpringerLink
] ] homepage. Can you remember anything equivalent?
]
] You can access the table of contents for this conference at
] the following URL:
]
] http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0302-
] 9743&volume=2692
]
] You'll still need access to Springer Link (usually through a
] university or corporate library subscription) in order to
] download the full text electronically. Many research
] libraries also subscribe to the hard copy edition of LNCS.
]
] You can access Internet web sites related to this conference
] at
]
] iTrust 2003 - Program
] http://www.itrust.uoc.gr/conf2/program.cfm
]
] iTrust 2004 - Call for Papers
] http://www.itrust.uoc.gr/
] http://www.trustmanagement.cclrc.ac.uk/

That's great -- thanks! What I'm looking for primarily is the list of authors. Trying to identify the "graybeards" in this area. In an academic setting the memes tend to cluster around schools of thought associated with individuals. An active researcher will have a lot of versions of his/her research concepts. Some of those papers will be hanging off their web page, or free repositoreis (like citeseer) or digital repositories for which I have a subscription.

Of course, if you know who the leading lights are in the field are, I could skip a some of those steps.

RE: Trust Management: First International Conference

Jeremy wrote:
] This conference was held in Greece in May 2003. There are
] several papers of interest, including:
]
] Architecture and Algorithms for a Distributed Reputation
] System
]
] Hardware Security Appliances for Trust
]
] Trust Management Tools for Internet Applications
]
] Simulating the Effect of Reputation Systems on E-markets
]
] Trust Propagation in Small Worlds

I'm looking for academic research pertaining to social networks and reputation algorithms within p2p systems, and rememebered this meme'd link. This should've been a real good starting point, but the link now stops at the SpringerLink homepage. Can you remember anything equivalent?

RE: Trust Management: First International Conference

Laughing Boy wrote:
] fractal wrote:
] ] CALGARY (CP) -- Researchers at the University of Calgary
] have
] ] found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and
] ] memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.
]
]
] Unfreaking real! the implications of this go well beyond
] "controlling artificial limbs or restoring sight for the
] visually impaired" and "thinking computers". This is going to
] be huge.

It puts a whole new perspective on "human-computer interface".

RE: Cdn. researcher: Cells can grow on silicon

] The world's knowledge reservoir has long since grown way
] too deep for anyone to do that, but Microsoft co-founder
] Paul Allen is throwing money into pursuing this
] extraordinarily far-out notion: Can a computer be loaded
] with the world's textbook-science knowledge, reason
] through it and then answer questions in plain English
] like a phenomenal teacher, a "Digital Aristotle"?

See http://www.projecthalo.com/ for more detail. The Phase I results in the Chemistry domain are very compelling. Check out the Project Halo Results browser to see for the examination results for three knowledge-based representation and reasoning (KRR) systems.

The browser lays out how 100 questions were encoded for each of the systems, the answer produced, and a translation of the answer back into natural language. The coolest thing are PDF images of the annotations made by the three subject matter experts (SME's) on the answers provided.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Vulcan project aims to build 'Digital Aristotle'

] The education of Stryker, an 18-ton military monster
] truck, begins in the warehouse lab of General Dynamics in
] Westminster, Md.
]
] There, Stryker, one of the U.S. Army's newest infantry
] vehicles, is fitted with a "ladar" scanner, the
] equivalent of a mounted pair of eyes that see by emitting
] 400,000 laser and radar beams and snap 120 camera images
] every second. Its brain -- a 40-pound computer system
] tucked inside its body -- processes that data, and makes
] instant judgments on how to act and where to go.

An all-purpose un-manned land vehicle.

Robots for No Man's Land (TechNews.com)

] IEI is busily transforming all of its advanced neural
] network paradigms into TCP/IP based systems. The overall
] intent is to convert many, if not all, of the TCP/IP
] nodes on the Internet into functioning neurons. The
] resulting freethinking entity will be capable of
] introspecting upon all human-originated content residing
] on the Internet and World Wide Web, and from that
] knowledge store creating new ideas and strategies that
] will inevitably transform our thinking and our planet. As
] this World Brain accumulates new knowledge, it will begin
] to create a "SuperNet" above the Internet, vastly
] overshadowing the present content stored there.
]
] This coming World Brain will not be accessed via search
] engines. We will simply ask it to introspect on the
] information we, as humans, seek.

Imagination Engines, Inc. (Stephen Thaler) is not shy about
proclaiming the potential of this technology.

IEI's World Brain Project

Stephen Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc., has developed a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

] What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in
] a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at
] General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
]
] "His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous
] Generation of Useful Information," the official name of
] the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent
] was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent
] Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about
] that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number
] One!"
]
] Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of
] what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking
] machine.

In a piece like this it's hard to separate the hype from the true advancements. The concept presented makes a certain kind of intuitive sense -- but maybe that's because it resonates with ideas and results presented by others.

The emergent behavior of the cockroach-like H3 robots sounds real similar to Rodney Brooks walking robots. (google on 'rodney brooks subsumption citations')

David Gelernter presented a concept of "affect linking" (The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought by David Hillel Gelernter) which had a notion of dialing the level of creativity by accepting different amounts of fuzziness in matching ideas together.

This resonance is, perhaps, an indicator that Thaler may be on to something. A stronger indicator would be experimental data the show that Thaler's algorithm scales up to machines with greater than a cockroach-level processing power.

STLtoday - News - Science & Medicine

] Second, sometimes smashing someone in the face is
] necessary to signal others that they will be held
] accountable for the intolerance they incubate. Removing
] the Taliban and Saddam sent that message to every
] government in the area.

This is a good series. This article offers a sound bitey version of why we went to War in Iraq.

War of Ideas, Part 5

] LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Scientists
] at Los Alamos National Laboratory are trying to predict
] how supercomputers of the future will perform.
]
] The research arm of the Department of Defense has awarded
] a three-year, $4.2-million (U.S.) grant for the lab's
] computer and computational sciences division to
] performance analysis and modelling, create software tools
] and evaluate networks.

Goal: by 2008 the design for a 1 petaflop supercomputer.

Globetechnology