Computer Scientists Take The ‘Why’ Out Of WiFi

“People expect WiFi to work, but there is also a general understanding that it’s just kind of flakey,” said Stefan Savage, one of the UCSD computer science professors who led development of an automated, enterprise-scale WiFi troubleshooting system for UCSD’s computer science building. The system is described in a paper presented in August in Kyoto, Japan at ACM SIGCOMM, one of the world’s premier networking conferences.

“If you have a wireless problem in our building, our system automatically analyzes the behavior of your connection – each wireless protocol, each wired network service and the many interactions between them.  In the end, we can say ‘it’s because of this that your wireless is slow or has stopped working’ – and we can tell you immediately,” said Savage.

For humans, diagnosing problems in the now ubiquitous 802.11-based wireless access networks requires a huge amount of data, expertise and time.  In addition to the myriad complexities of the wired network, wireless networks face the additional challenges of shared spectrum, user mobility and authentication management.  Finally, the interaction between wired and wireless networks is itself a source of many problems.

“Wireless networks are hooked on to the wired part of the Internet with a bunch of ‘Scotch tape and bailing wire’ – protocols that really weren’t designed for WiFi,” explained Savage. “If one of these components has a glitch, you may not be able to use the Internet even though the network itself is working fine.”

There are so many moving pieces, so many things you can not see.  Within this soup, everything has to work just right. When it doesn’t, trying to identify which piece wasn’t working is tough and requires sifting through a lot of data.  For example, someone using the microwave oven two rooms away may cause enough interference to disrupt your connection.

“Today, if you ask your network administrator why it takes minutes to connect to the network or why your WiFi connection is slow, they’re unlikely to know the answer,” explained Yu-Chung Cheng, a computer science Ph.D. student at UCSD and lead author on the paper. “Many problems are transient – they’re gone before you can even get an admin to look at them – and the number of possible reasons is huge,” explained Cheng, who recently defended his dissertation and will join Google this fall.

“Few organizations have the expertise, data or tools to decompose the underlying problems and interactions responsible for transient outages or performance degradations,” the authors write in their SIGCOMM paper.

The computer scientists from UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering presented a set of modeling techniques for automatically characterizing the source of such problems. In particular, they focus on data transfer delays unique to 802.11 networks – media access dynamics and mobility management latency.

The UCSD system runs 24 hours a day, constantly churning through the flood of data relevant to the wireless network and catching transient problems.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070904175347.htm

Millionths Of A Second Can Cost Millions Of Dollars: A New Way To Track Network Delays

A new way to track network delays. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – San Diego)

Computer scientists have developed an inexpensive solution for diagnosing delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds—delays that can lead to multi-million dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems. Similar delays can delay parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications run by Fortune 500 companies and universities.

University of California, San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference.

The new approach offers the possibility of diagnosing fine-grained delays—down to tens to microseconds—and packet loss as infrequent as one in a million at every router within a data center network. (One microsecond is one millionth of a second.) The solution could be implemented in today’s router designs with almost zero cost in terms of router hardware and with no performance penalty. The UC San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists call their invention the Lossy Difference Aggregator.

“This is stuff the big traders will be interested in,” said George Varghese, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper, “but more importantly, the router vendors for whom such trading markets are an important vertical.”

If an investment bank’s algorithmic stock trading program reacts to information on cheap stocks from an incoming market data feed just 100 microseconds earlier than the competition, it can buy millions of shares and bid up the price of the stock before its competitors’ programs can react, the computer scientists say.

While the network links between Wall Street and investment banks’ data centers are short, optimized and well monitored, the performance of the routers within the data centers that run automated stock trading systems are difficult and expensive to monitor. Delays in these routers, also known as latencies, can add 100s of microseconds, potentially leading to millions of dollars in lost opportunities.

“Every investment banking firm knows the importance of microsecond network delays. Because routers today aren’t capable of tracking delays through them at microsecond time scales, exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange use specially crafted external boxes to track delays at various key points in the data center network,” said Alex Snoeren, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper.

But these external systems are generally too large and expensive to be added to every router in a data center network running an automated stock trading system. This makes it difficult for the network managers to identify and locate problematic routers before they cost the company large amounts of money, the computer scientists say.

“Our hope is that this approach will allow router vendors to add fine scale delay and loss tracking, at almost zero cost to router performance, perhaps obviating the desire for expensive external network monitoring boxes at every router,” said Ramana Kompella, the first author on the SIGCOMM paper and a computer science professor at Purdue University. Kompella earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego in 2007.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820161329.htm

Sandfish Tucks Legs And ‘Swims’ Like A Snake Under Desert Sand

A new study conducted at Georgia Tech found that sandfish (shown here) place their limbs against their sides and create a wave motion with their bodies like snakes to swim through sand. (Credit: Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek)

A study published in the July 17 issue of the journal Science details how sandfish — small lizards with smooth scales — move rapidly underground through desert sand. In this first thorough examination of subsurface sandfish locomotion, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the animals place their limbs against their sides and create a wave motion with their bodies to propel themselves through granular media.

“When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within a half second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion — instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake,” said study leader Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the research team used high-speed x-ray imaging to visualize sandfish — formally called Scincus scincus — burrowing into and through sand. The team used that information to develop a physics model of the lizard’s locomotion.

The sandfish used in this study inhabits the Sahara desert in Africa and is approximately four inches long. It uses its long, wedge-shaped snout and countersunk lower jaw to rapidly bury into and swim within sand. The sandfish’s body has flattened sides and is covered with smooth shiny scales, its legs are short and sturdy with long and flattened fringed toes and its tail tapers to a fine point.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141140.htm

Star-birth Myth ‘Busted’

False-colour images of two galaxies, NGC 1566 (left) and NGC 6902 (right), showing their different proportions of very massive stars. Regions with massive O stars show up as white or pink, while less massive B stars appear in blue. NGC 1566 is much richer in O stars than is NGC 6902. The images combine observations of UV emission by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft and H-alpha observations made with the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) telescope in Chile. NGC 1566 is 68 million light years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. NGC 6902 is about 33 million light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHU)

An international team of researchers has debunked one of astronomy’s long held beliefs about how stars are formed, using a set of galaxies found with CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope.

When a cloud of interstellar gas collapses to form stars, the stars range from massive to minute.

Since the 1950s astronomers have thought that in a family of new-born stars the ratio of massive stars to lighter ones was always pretty much the same — for instance, that for every star 20 times more massive than the Sun or larger, you’d get 500 stars the mass of the Sun or less.

“This was a really useful idea. Unfortunately it seems not to be true,” said team research leader Dr Gerhardt Meurer of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The different numbers of stars of different masses at birth is called the ‘initial mass function’ (IMF).

Most of the light we see from galaxies comes from the highest mass stars, while the total mass in stars is dominated by the lower mass stars.

By measuring the amount of light from a population of stars, and making some corrections for the stars’ ages, astronomers can use the IMF to estimate the total mass of that population of stars.

Results for different galaxies can be compared only if the IMF is the same everywhere, but Dr Meurer’s team has shown that this ratio of high-mass to low-mass newborn stars differs between galaxies.

For instance, small ‘dwarf’ galaxies form many more low-mass stars than expected.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827101237.htm

NASA’s NextGen Astronauts – Bacteria With the Ability to Survive Radiation & Rapidly Repair Its Own DNA

NASA is experimenting was an extremeophile bacteria that could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to toxic chemicals. 

Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually with 48 hours. D. rad is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy of ionizing radiation with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.  The symbol Gy for a “gray,” is the unit of absorbed radiation dose due to ionizing radiation such as X-rays).

A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred complete breaks into the organism’s DNA. By comparison, 10 Gy can kill a human, over 4000 to kill the radiation-resistant tardigrade, and 60 Gy will kill E. coli. It accomplishes its resistance to radiation by having multiple copies of its genome and rapid DNA repair mechanisms. It usually repairs breaks in its chromosomes within 12-24 hours through a 2-step process.

Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. rad are of interest to NASA partly because they might be adaptable to help human astronauts survive on other worlds. A recent map of D. rad’s DNA might allow biologists to augment their survival skills with the ability to produce medicine, clean water, and oxygen. Already they have been genetically engineered to help clean up spills of toxic mercury. Likely one of the oldest surviving life forms, D. rad was discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists investigating food preservation techniques could not easily kill it.

A team of Russian and American scientists proposed that evolution of the microorganism could have taken place on the Martian surface until it was delivered to Earth on a meteorite. However, apart from its resistance to radiation, D. rad is genetically and biochemically similar to other terrestrial life forms, arguing against an extraterrestrial origin.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/nasas-nextgen-nano-astronauts-bacteria-with-the-ability-to-repair-their-own-dnaa-plot-for-the-next-ridley-scott-space-thrill.html

Is Detection by an Exo Civilization a Threat to Earth? World’s Experts Debate

Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives.  The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to  cities.  The fear of change that tells us “hang on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don’t want to risk losing them.”  There isn’t any greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn’t try.  

There has been some outrage recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away.  Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs.  They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it.  While such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn’t human, at least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than “Shoot us”.

Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn’t think much of these worries either way.  A proponent of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical investigation.  Though whether writing a paper saying “This METI thing we’re doing has only a tiny chance of working” is overall a good idea remains to be seen.  An important point is that METI represents an intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien interception of some random radiation from Earth – the difference between saying “Hello!” and just being a suspicious strange noise late at night.

Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close examination.  We can’t suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason – in fact, we’d better hope that an advanced civilization doesn’t catch an episode of “American Idol” and just vaporize us outright.  Suddenly keeping quiet would be like a drunk boyfriend carefully taking off his shoes after knocking over a bookshelf on his way to the bedroom.

Then there’s the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of technology we do – despite the extremely obvious fact that our technology can’t actually get to other planets.  Any attempt to mask radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to hide from satellite imaging.

The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it.  “Experts” decried boiled water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river, cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared that computers were nothing but expensive toys.  As an intelligent species we must make every effort to contact anyone or thing we can – and if you don’t like it, there are some lovely caves you can move back to.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/is-detection-by-an-exo-civilization-a-threat-to-earth-worlds-experts-debate-a-galaxy-classic-.html

Statistics on Paying Taxes from the NTU

Who Pays Income Taxes? See Who Pays What 

For Tax Year 2007

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$410,096	40.42
Top 5%	$160,041	60.63
Top 10%	$113,018	71.22
Top 25%	$66,532	86.59
Top 50%	$32,879	97.11
Bottom 50%	<$32,879	2.89
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income Source: Internal Revenue Service

http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6

Since it was founded over 35 years ago, the National Taxpayers Union’s Number One job has been helping to protect every single American’s right to keep what they’ve earned. Our guiding principle has always been: “This is your money and the government should return it to you.” We are a nonprofit, non-partisan citizen group whose members work every day for lower taxes and smaller government at all levels.

That’s why it is so vitally important for us to continue our pursuit of institutional change in government. Paramount among these reforms is scrapping the U.S. Tax Code for a better alternative. And it’s time once again to consider adding a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to keep Congress from spending beyond our means. Also, a Tax Limitation Amendment would prevent our elected representatives from raising our taxes so that they can raise their spending.

Let’s face it–our U.S. Tax Code is a complicated mess, far too complex for average taxpayers to understand. We need sweeping tax reform designed to make this system both fair and comprehensible for the folks who actually pay those taxes. And real reform would also mean an end to the dreaded Internal Revenue Service.

By reforming taxes, we can transform American politics as well. There are hundreds of lobbyists and special interests running around Washington seeking tax breaks and exemptions. Tax reform would end the game of picking winners and losers under the tax laws and break the cycle of dependence between lobbyists and politicians.

We here at NTU promise to fight for these and other important pro-taxpayer causes, so as to ensure that all Americans are able to pursue their dreams without the hand of Big Government holding them back.

http://www.ntu.org/main/misc.php?MiscID=1

Disney Acquires Marvel

In the voice of Stan Lee – “could this be the end of our fearless heros?  Stay, tuned..”

UPDATE 8:30 AM PDT – There have been a number of developments since the initial press release about Disney’s acquisition of Marvel went out. Disney held a conference call with investors that just finished to discuss the deal and while much of it was focused on the financial aspect of the deal – with regards to both current and future opportunities – there were a number of comments concerning publishing and Marvel’s film slate that are of interest. The bullet points are: 

• Existing licensing and distribution deals should remain where they are.
• Disney believes there’s real opportunity with the Marvel catalog of characters and will work on where those opportunities are greatest and how best to leverage them across the existing Marvel and Disney infrastructure.
• Disney executives went to great lengths during the call to make the point that they don’t pretend to be more expert than Marvel is in handling their characters, citing the hands-off relationship Disney has had with Pixar since the acquisition of that studio. Disney said Marvel manages the properties from a business perspective very intelligently and trusts them to make the right decisions for these products for a long time to come.
• Disney said the deal was attractive not just because they’re buying great characters, stories and brand, but about working with people who know these characters best and how best to work with them in other media.
• Again, referencing the Pixar deal, Disney finds working as one company with Marvel removes friction and creates value that’s very compelling. Licensing offers very attractive opportunities, but nothing is better than being one. International expansion of Marvel properties through Disney was cited as a potential growth area.
• Cable channel Disney XD is currently running about 20 hours a week of Marvel content and Disney has been looking to license more Marvel content and this deal gives them that opportunity as well as the opportunity to expose these characters internationally.<.li>
• With regards to video game publishing, Disney praised Marvel’s licensing agreements with some of the best video game producers and publishers in the business and said moving forward they will consider what’s best for each individual property as each licensing deal comes up for renewal and that there would likely be a blend of licensed and self-produced/self-distributed titles.
• With respect to Paramount’s distribution deal with Marvel and the Iron Man franchise, Disney has every intention to respect the deal that’s in place, but noted that it’s in their best interest, overtime, to become the sole distributor of Marvel films.
• Will Disney3D be used for Marvel movies? That will be determined by those who are in charge of producing Marvel’s theatrical films.
• When asked if there was potential for cross-polination between Marvel and Pixar, Disney said that Pixar’s John Lasseter has met with key Marvel creative executives recently and the group got “pretty excited, very fast.” Disney will look at all opportunities and thinks there are some exciting product that could come from this sort of partnership.
• Disney said this deal is expected to benefit Marvel’s retail efforts, being able to leverage Disney’s shelf space and relationships with major chains and distributors.
• The deal began when Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger reached out to Marvel Chief Executive Ike Perlmutter earlier this year. Again, Disney noted that they believe in the creative team at Marvel and see no reason to upset that applecart.
• Disney has not made any real estate decisions and sees no reason to move Marvel Studios from their headquarters in Manhattan Beach, California. No mention of Marvel Publishing’s offices in New York City was made.

 

In addition, Marvel Editor-In-Chief twittering this morning and has made some comments on the deal:

“G’ morning, Marvel U! Welcome to this moment in history. Everyone relax, this is incredible news and all is well in the Marvel U.”

“Everybody take a deep breath, all your favorite comics remain unchanged and Tom Brevoort remains grouchy.”

“If you’re familiar with the Disney/Pixar relationship, then you’ll understand why this is a new dawn for Marvel and the comics industry.”

Developing…

Hydroponic Ferris Wheel Optimizes Growth: The OmegaGarden (Video)

When I wrote about marijuana as a possible gateway to farming, I noted that much of the hydroponic supply market seems to be marketed toward, shall we say, recreational growers of certain herbs – and often not very subtly. But as we’ve seen, hydroponics also has applications in everything from rooftop agriculture to integrated backyard aquaponics. But how energy and water efficient is it to grow under lights and without soil? One Vancouver-based company is aiming to optimize the efficiency of hydroponics with these rotary hydroponic ferris wheels. And they are marketing themselves firmly to the urban farming crowd, before you ask.

John has already written about the Valcent high density vertical growth garden, a system that is being put to use at Paignton Zoo’s vertical farm in the UK. But here’s a different take on a similar concept.

OmegaGarden Hydroponics Design has put together three rotary ferris wheel-type grow products that rotate plants around a central light – aiming to maximise plant growth for each unit of electricity. From the Volksgarden rotary hydroponic set-up – which has a capacity of 80 plants, through to the fully automated Carousel which claims to provide 1500 sq. ft. of greenhouse yet only using 150 sq. ft. of floor space!

In terms of efficiency, the company claims that the system can yield 3-5 times the typical harvest of a flat or tiered garden. It is also compatible with fluorescent and LED grow lights, which would significantly cut power consumption. The company also claims that the system uses just 1% of the water required for traditional agriculture. (As one commenter to my marijuana post pointed out – hydroponics can be very water efficient because there is none of the evaporation and soil seepage associated with soil-based growing.)

Follow the link for a video – http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/hydroponics-omega-garden.php

One Atom Away From Clean Water

A breakthrough discovery from Sandia National Laboratories could help keep a lid on the rising cost of chemical water treatment and make clean drinking water more affordable in “water challenged” areas of the world. Working with researchers at the University of California, the Sandia team substituted one atom in aluminum oxide, a common chemical used to coagulate impurities in water. The new compound promises a more sustainable way to decontaminate wastewater as well as purify drinking water. Next step: Sandia has partnered with the award-winning water technology company Kemira to bring the new compound into commercial production.

The Sandia development could help provide some much-needed breathing room for water suppliers, which have been struggling for resources to purchase water treatment chemicals during a period of price and supply instability. Alongside improvements in the efficiency of chemical processes, the water treatment industry is also rapidly developing non-chemical water treatments including UV disinfection, new high-tech membranes, and ultrasound.

http://www.enn.com/sci-tech/article/40419

(Full article) – http://www.matternetwork.com/2009/8/one-atom-away-from-clean.cfm