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hod lipson and company at cornell have announced the arrival of the replicators.
“Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology, ” Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.
update: with video [wmv].
from the people that brought you the soda constructor, the moovl java-widget.
play.
here comes the “is your essay too small?” spam…
SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors [new york times, 2005.05.04]“It appeared to me that regardless of what a student wrote, the longer the essay, the higher the score,” Dr. Perelman said. A man on the panel from the College Board disagreed. “He told me I was jumping to conclusions,” Dr. Perelman said. “Because M.I.T. is a place where everything is backed by data, I went to my hotel room, counted the words in those essays and put them in an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop.”
In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing “anchor” samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.
He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. “I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one,” he said. “If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.” The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade.
He was also struck by all the factual errors in even the top essays. An essay on the Civil War, given a perfect six, describes the nation being changed forever by the “firing of two shots at Fort Sumter in late 1862.” (Actually, it was in early 1861, and, according to “Battle Cry of Freedom” by James M. McPherson, it was “33 hours of bombardment by 4,000 shot and shells.”)
so, remember, sat test-takers…. as you prepare for your essay portion this saturday: size does matter.
and if you can’t get it up to 400 words without making things up, make things up. it’s a valuable lesson for the rest of your life.
anyone that’s been paying attention knows that purple is the new red. so, it comes as somewhat of a surprise (now that the slashdotting has subsided a bit), that the new red screen of death as disclosed by michael kaplan and apparently popularized by joi is… well. red.
red is upsetting. aggressive. bad. bad, microsoft.
so who’s heading up the campaign to remake the RSOD into a PSOD?
i haven’t heard of a jaywalking citation in a while, but i use jaywalking as an example of the kind of law that’s enforced when someone has an agenda…
Chicken Ticketed for Crossing the Road [ap via abc news, 2005.05.09]The deputy issued a ticket March 26 because one of the couple’s chickens allegedly impeded traffic in Johannesburg, a rural mining community near Ridgecrest, some 220 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
…
“The chicken thing has nothing to do with the motorcycle thing,” Moore said.
in a follow-up to this post about making up any excuse to invade iraq, tonight, i stumbled into congress, or rather, some part of congress, potentially stepping up to their constitutional responsibilities.
the democrats of the house judiciary committee have written a letter [pdf] asking some questions about all this. it opens:
We write because of troubling revelations in the Sunday London Times apparently confirming that the United States and Great Britain had secretly agreed to attack Iraq in the summer of 2002, well before the invasion and before you even sought Congressional authority to engage in military action. While various individuals have asserted this to be the case before, including Paul O’Neill, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council official, they have been previously dismissed by your Administration. However, when this story was divulged last weekend, Prime Minister Blair’s representative claimed the document contained “nothing new.” If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war as well as the integrity of your own Administration.
signed by 88 members of congress, i imagine this will vanish in the news cycle very quickly. it was written may 5, and it certainly took a while for me to find out…
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