From beberg at mithral.com Mon Nov 30 09:32:27 2009 From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:32:27 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] The circle of life - database edition... In-Reply-To: <20091129233349.GC11941@aaron-x31> References: <4B109FC9.30505@mithral.com> <20091129233349.GC11941@aaron-x31> Message-ID: <4B1401AB.5040008@mithral.com> Aaron Burt wrote on 11/29/2009 3:33 PM: > Eugen might have liked it there - much of the interesting bits were about > eventual consistentcy and other distributed data-processing issues. I often wonder when the rest of the world will catch on that CS is just solving the same problems over and over again, and write the entire field off as just a bunch of Geek Squad idiots with degrees. Then I remember they already did, and everything makes sense again. -- Adam L. Beberg http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/ From aaron at bavariati.org Mon Nov 30 13:57:05 2009 From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:57:05 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] The circle of life - database edition... In-Reply-To: <4B1401AB.5040008@mithral.com> References: <4B109FC9.30505@mithral.com> <20091129233349.GC11941@aaron-x31> <4B1401AB.5040008@mithral.com> Message-ID: <20091130215705.GA1234@aaron-xps> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 09:32:27AM -0800, Adam L Beberg wrote: > Aaron Burt wrote on 11/29/2009 3:33 PM: >> Eugen might have liked it there - much of the interesting bits were about >> eventual consistentcy and other distributed data-processing issues. > > I often wonder when the rest of the world will catch on that CS is just > solving the same problems over and over again, and write the entire > field off as just a bunch of Geek Squad idiots with degrees. Ayep. It's what happens when you pretend that in-depth study of a largely theoretical academic discipline is appropriate preparation for entering a craft. I think it's mostly for weeding out the undesireables. No idea where Biz Skul computer degrees fit into all of this. Some day, we may treat it as an engineering discipline, but I've only seen the barest hints of that so far, mostly expressed as ideals in the context of providing high-volume services. Mathematicians probably make poor accountants too, Aaron From ejw at cs.ucsc.edu Wed Dec 2 01:22:20 2009 From: ejw at cs.ucsc.edu (Jim Whitehead) Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:22:20 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] CFP Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (co-located with FDG 2010) Message-ID: <4B1631CC.4040308@cs.ucsc.edu> Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PC Games) Co-located with FDG 2010 ? Monterey, California ? June 18, 2010 http://pcgames.fdg2010.org/ Overview As computer games increasingly take place inside large, complex worlds, the cost of manually creating these worlds is spiraling upwards. Procedural content generation, where a computer algorithm produces computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, background history, stories, characters, and weapons, offers hope for substantially reducing the authoring burden in games. Procedural content generation has multiple benefits beyond reducing authoring cost. With rich procedural generation, a single person becomes capable of creating games that now require teams to create, thus making individual artistic expression easier to achieve. Automated content generation can take player history as one of its inputs, and thereby create games that adapt to individual players. Sufficiently rich content generation algorithms can create novel game elements, thereby discovering new game potentials. Finally, the procedural generation algorithm itself acts as an executable model of one aspect of the game, thereby improving our theoretical understanding of game design. Important Dates * Paper submission: Feb. 24, 2010 * Notification to authors: April 5, 2010 * Workshop held: June 18, 2010 (day before the main conference) Workshop Organization PC Games is a full-day workshop, with a peer-reviewed workshop program. Following a traditional working conference model, each talk session will have 2-3 paper presentations, followed by extensive time for questions and answers, as well as general discussion. Research Areas The PC Games workshop solicits paper submissions as either full papers (8 pages) or short papers (4 pages). PC Games welcomes research results that are either fully or semi-automated, in the following (and related) list of research areas. Papers will be published as part of the workshop proceedings. * Procedural game level generation, for all game genres * Procedural scenario generation for both entertainment and serious games * Procedural quest generation, for single and multiplayer (online) games * Procedural (non-player) character generation * Procedurally generated game objects (e.g. weapons, vehicles, ?) * Procedural art asset generation, for a wide range of art assets * Procedural creation of buildings, villages, towns, and cities * Automatic layout techniques and procedural generation of interiors * Procedural creation of natural environments, including terrain, water, clouds, plants, trees, etc. * Procedural generation of crowds in real time * Procedural animation of both procedurally and manually created content * User control in procedural generation and intuitive input mechanism for procedural systems * Construction and use of mixed-mode systems with both manual editing and automatic generation of content * Integrating frameworks for procedural methods * Procedural creation of background history and background stories for game worlds * Adaptive game balancing and content generation based on prior player history * Techniques for games that evolve and/or discover new game variants * Procedural generation of computer and/or tabletop games * Automatic generation of game rules * Procedural generation of content for web-based and social networking games * Player and/or designer experience with procedural content generation * Models of player experience with procedurally generated content * Theoretical implications of procedural content generation * Meaningful incorporation of procedural generation into game design * Procedural generation during development (e.g. for prototyping, design, testing, tuning, etc.) * Lessons from historical examples of procedural generation * Case studies of industrial application of procedural generation Submission Instructions Submissions to the PC Games workshop must follow ACM SIG conference formatting guidelines (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers must be submitted using the Easychair submission system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pcgames2010). Program Committee Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University Rafael Bidarra, TU Delft Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech. Cameron Browne, Imperial College London Simon Colton, Imperial College London Eric Galin, LIRIS - CNRS - Universit? Lumi?re Lyon 2 Magy Seif El-Nasr, Simon Fraser University Erin Hastings, Alion Science and Technology Pascal Mueller, Procedural, Inc. Ian Parberry, Univ. of North Texas Jimmy Secretan, DiSTI Corporation Ken Stanley, Univ. of Central Florida Julian Togelius, ITU Copenhagen Jim Whitehead, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz Georgios Yannakakis, ITU Copenhagen R. Michael Young, North Carolina State Univ. The PC Games workshop is co-located with the 2010 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2010, www.fdg2010.org), which is an official conference of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games (SASDG). FDG 2010 is supported by a generous sponsorship from Microsoft Research. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Dec 2 03:08:48 2009 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 12:08:48 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] [wta-talk] [h+] Webcasts of Humanity+ Summit and IEET Seminar this weekend Message-ID: <20091202110848.GU17686@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." ----- From: "Hughes, James J." Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 21:57:02 -0500 To: "wta-announce at transhumanism.org" Subject: [wta-talk] [h+] Webcasts of Humanity+ Summit and IEET Seminar this weekend Reply-To: Humanity+ Discussion List This coming Saturday and Sunday Humanity+ will be hosting two full days of talks in Irvine California on topics of central interest to transhumanists. For those of you who can't attend there will be a live webcast available from this page: http://www.techzulu.com/live.html The IEET "Biopolitics of Popular Culture" seminar this coming Friday will also be available through the TechZulu website. The Humanity+ Summit agenda is available here: http://hplus.eventbrite.com/ Proceedings will be broadcast from 9am-5:30pm PST Saturday, December 5, and 9am-6pm Sunday, December 6, 2009. The IEET Seminar agenda is here: http://ieet.org/bpcs09 Proceedings will be broadcast 8:30am to 5:30pm PST Friday December 4, 2009. ------------------------ James Hughes Ph.D. Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies http://ieet.org International Secretary, Humanity+ http://humanityplus.org Williams 229B, Trinity College 300 Summit St., Hartford CT 06106 (office) 860-297-2376 director at ieet.org _______________________________________________ wta-announce mailing list wta-announce at transhumanism.org http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-announce _______________________________________________ wta-talk mailing list wta-talk at transhumanism.org http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Wed Dec 2 15:18:52 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 15:18:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Cloud is more than just data hostage Message-ID: <979097.23009.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Someone thinks the cloud is potentially much worse than just a place that holds your data hostage. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=27935&tag=nl.e539 ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com From beberg at mithral.com Wed Dec 2 16:38:24 2009 From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg) Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:38:24 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] The circle of life - database edition... In-Reply-To: <20091130215705.GA1234@aaron-xps> References: <4B109FC9.30505@mithral.com> <20091129233349.GC11941@aaron-x31> <4B1401AB.5040008@mithral.com> <20091130215705.GA1234@aaron-xps> Message-ID: <4B170880.1070800@mithral.com> Aaron Burt wrote on 11/30/2009 1:57 PM: > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 09:32:27AM -0800, Adam L Beberg wrote: >> Aaron Burt wrote on 11/29/2009 3:33 PM: >>> Eugen might have liked it there - much of the interesting bits were about >>> eventual consistentcy and other distributed data-processing issues. >> I often wonder when the rest of the world will catch on that CS is just >> solving the same problems over and over again, and write the entire >> field off as just a bunch of Geek Squad idiots with degrees. > > Ayep. It's what happens when you pretend that in-depth study of a largely > theoretical academic discipline is appropriate preparation for entering a > craft. I think it's mostly for weeding out the undesireables. But civil engineers taught by nothing but theoretical physicists make the best bridges, it's all physics isn't it? It's mostly for weeding the software engineers out of the future academic and getting rid of them. > Some day, we may treat it as an engineering discipline, but I've only seen > the barest hints of that so far, mostly expressed as ideals in the context > of providing high-volume services. It's coming, Asia is way ahead on thinking of school as something you do to get SKILLS for a JOB. Eventually the products of the US system will be unemployable (and by that I mean already are), and the universities will change by being irrelevant. > Mathematicians probably make poor accountants too, Don't get me started... -- Adam L. Beberg http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/ From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 3 01:17:19 2009 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 10:17:19 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] Cloud is more than just data hostage In-Reply-To: <979097.23009.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <979097.23009.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20091203091719.GL17686@leitl.org> On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 03:18:52PM -0800, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote: > Someone thinks the cloud is potentially much worse than just a place that holds your data hostage. > > http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=27935&tag=nl.e539 > "And sometimes these vendors will cave to demands from governments and other groups." *Sometimes*? That's a rather polite way to put it. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From holger.krekel at gmail.com Thu Dec 3 06:03:32 2009 From: holger.krekel at gmail.com (Holger Krekel) Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 15:03:32 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] Cloud is more than just data hostage In-Reply-To: <979097.23009.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <979097.23009.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Hi all, i also just recently subscribed here, through the fun programming languages rant. This and cloud computing ring a certain bell with me. I consider it crucial to make distributed execution environments available that can be instantiated and collaboratively owned by users. I am currently working on one building block, http://codespeak.net/execnet and am interested in generally related thoughts. best, holger On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:18 AM, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote: > Someone thinks the cloud is potentially much worse than just a place that holds your data hostage. > > http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=27935&tag=nl.e539 > > ? ? ? ...ken... > > > ? ? ?__________________________________________________________________ > Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From dmorton at bitfurnace.com Fri Dec 4 17:04:58 2009 From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton) Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 12:04:58 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] slingers Message-ID: <8092dc770912041704h155be6f1y811f66886937928a@mail.gmail.com> http://vimeo.com/7963572 From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Sun Dec 6 19:24:52 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2009 19:24:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] What's all the fuss ("Climategate")? Message-ID: <783181.16390.qm@web33008.mail.mud.yahoo.com> His agenda becomes clear at the very end. But everyone has an agenda. At least this is an understandable explanation of what all the fuss is about, regardless of which side you come down on. http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com.