Crimson Crux

“Its creations earn patents, outperform humans, and will soon fly to space. All it needs now is a few worthy challenges.” — Jonathon Keats, Popular Science.

No other two lines can more effectively sum up Stanford University professor John Koza’s “invention machine”, a network of 1,000 computers that creates innovative (sometimes startling) designs from the most basic code — all without human guidance. (more…)

Finally, the news that the IT world has been waiting for! Sun Microsystems has finally seen the light, or more specifically, saw that open source holds the key to Java’s future.

“At this point, it is not a question of whether, but it is a question of how,” said Rich Green, Sun EVP of Software at the annual JavaOne Conference at San Francisco.

(more…)

UML users no longer need to be software-centric with the arrival of SysML. The system-level design language SysML represents all elements of an electronic system, from hardware to software. Created primarily for systems engineers, SysML is both a subset to and an extension of UML.

According to the EETimes.com article, SysML took a major step towards standardization in late April, when key committees of the Object Management Group approved the SysML Team’s language 1.0 specification.

Several salient additions to UML provided by SysML:

• Requirements modeling
• Parametric models
• Extensions that support the flow of data/matter/energy (UML supports discrete events)

More information can be found on the language’s official website.

…the Tactical Language Training Program, which is used by the US Military to train its soldiers in understanding international nonverbal language, i.e. body english.

According to the article at Wired News:

The player is asked to interact with other characters using speech and gestures, while a speech-recognition system records and evaluates the responses. Accurate responses allow the soldier to build a rapport with other characters and advance to the next level.

A civilian version might be possibly released, which might make the game the answer to Grand Theft Auto’s debauchery (snicker snicker).

Technology Review has completed its ten-part special on the 10 Emerging Technologies for this year. IT buffs will certainly find the Universal Authentication and Cognitive Radio technologies to be greatly interesting. The former deals with a unified, privacy-protecting online ID system, while the latter can be used to avoid future wireless traffic jams.

You can find all the articles at the special section of Technology Review.

Who would’ve thought — !

Google’s official blog ‘went down’ for a short time last Monday afternoon. The reason? They accidentally deleted it!

Luckily for them, someone with a good heart was the first to register the URL. All he did was to post the message “Google, fix your blog pleeasssee!” A link to the screenshot can be found at bMarc.net.

‘Exotic’ Programming Tools Go Mainstream

I didn’t quite expect this, but I guess it’s about time these languages are used by more people. Let’s see if they upgrade from “mainstream” to “popular” in the years to come.

(Does this mean my brief exposure to these languages might not have been in vain? Gasp!)

Actually, it’s not artificial at all. At least, it uses a single cell from an animal to culture the meat!This Gizmag article is old news, and I just wanted to post my thoughts on it, albeit belatedly. Large scale production of laboratory-grown “meat” — beef, poultry, pork, and so on — is a distinct possibility in the near future, a scientific paper has claimed. Certainly, this isn’t lunacy; after all, small amounts of edible “meat” were laboratory-grown in NASA space experiments. They’re now chasing after the technology which allows large-scale production. Read the article for the details. Better yet, read the Tissue Engineering paper itself.

If you’d ask me, I’m all for this venture. People will be apprehensive about eating something which popped out of the test tube (well, not exactly like that), and there will be both scientific and ethical concerns. But then, I believe trading in the slaughterhouses for meat culture factories is all for the good of the world.

Just ask the turkey above if he’d prefer to celebrate Thanksgiving alive or served on a plate. I’d really like to eat my sumptuous steak without my conscience nagging me, thank you. Cultured edible meat might just prove to be the savior for guilt-stricken people who love meat but don’t have the willpower (or the stomach) to be vegans — people like me.

“With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply,” the article quotes a scientist. “Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn’t need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat.”

One amusing ‘problem’ with cultured meat is how to give the meat a natural, appetizing texture:

“The challenge is getting the texture right,” says Matheny. “We have to figure out how to ‘exercise’ the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would.”

I wonder how they’re going to do that. Anyway, you can support the technology by visiting the website of New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization for the advancement of meat substitutes.

I tell you, once this technology hits full stride, abattoir and livestock farm owners will rise up in arms, but animal rights activists will spread their love among them and nullify their anxiety, all in the name of Gaia.

Or not.

What’s hot and what’s not in the programming world are all summed up in Infoworld’s 2005 Developers Research Report. Infoworld based their results on a sample of approximately 300 developers.

A preview:

What’s Hot:

• Web services
• Service-oriented architecture
• Open source tools for the business community
• Dynamic scripting tools
• Linux (to be the standard mainframe OS)
• Java
• Python
• Ruby
• Microsoft’s .Net environment
• Mac OS X

What’s Not:

• Pure compiled and traditional development languages (e.g. Ada, C, C++, Fortran)
• Assembly languages
• Win32
• Unix (being supplanted by Linux)
• Solaris (only being “able to tread water”)

Now, I know some of you might be a little bit surprised that C and C++ are included in the What’s Not list. Even the article (“C and C++ Give Way To Managed Code”) states, “C remains the implementation language of choice for Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and other key open source projects”. But then it adds, “It’s a terrific language for systems programming and infrastructure-level software, but it’s less suited to the needs of straightforward applications.” You be the judge if this is true or not; read the article for more details.

There is an abundance of resumé-writing how-tos on the Net, and another one won’t hurt. In this article I found through ACM Technews, three recruitment consultants share their insights on how to write resumés (CVs) for jobs related to science and technology.The crux of CV-writing, as most experts often stress, is to put your best foot forward, in terms of relevant achievements and skills, while avoiding information overload (especially the irrelevant ones). The stuff you prune from your paper CV (the hard copy) can go into your online resumé, after all.

After reading the article, I felt that I needed to revise my own CV. Several worthy points discussed there:

• Keep the CV short. Employers scan the document for less than 30 seconds. If they get lost in a jungle of jargon and irrelevant info, you CV ends up in the trash bin.
• Changing your CV for each job is dangerous.
• Information such as references, publications, and articles may go into appendices; main CV looks clean.
• Keep the CV up to date!