Efforts to Track Foreign Students Are Said to Lag By KATE ZERNIKE and CHRISTOPHER DREW Despite promises to tighten controls on student visas after Sept. 11, the government is at least a year from making the system safer from terrorists, who used the visas while plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the September attacks, immigration officials say. A computer network to track foreign students in the country, originally ordered by Congress six years ago, is still being tested and will not be running fully until next year. Even then, immigration service officials said, there will not be enough enforcement agents to check on all of the visa violators flagged by the system. Moreover, colleges that see foreign students as a lucrative market are raising concerns about how the system will be paid for and operated, and their objections could delay it even further. Officials concede they do not know for sure where the 547,000 people holding student visas are attending school, or whether they actually are.

Labels: Economics

Adrian Thompson has publications about Evolutionary Electronics (here). He tries to answer: What can evolutionary design do that conventional methods can't? He is faculty of the School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences: COGS.
He is associated with the Evolutionary & Adaptive Systems group (here), the Cente for Computational Neuroscience & Robotics (here), and the Centre for The Study of Evolution (here).
All this is going on at University of Sussex. And somewhere else I found this paper: Design of single-electron systems through artificial evolution
by Adrian Thompson and Christoph Wasshuber
Abstract We show how evolutionary methods can help in the design of single-electronic circuits with an example of evolving a simple NOR gate. Evolutionary algorithms, capturing the bare essentials of Darwinian evolution, work differently from conventional design methods, and have the potential to explore new territory. Our preliminary evolved circuit is far from an ideal NOR gate, but has interesting properties. It was evolved to work at a temperature of 340mK, and its performance deteriorates if the temperature is lowered, as well as if it is increased. This is contrary to the usual behaviour of single-electronic circuits, which generally improve with decreasing temperature. We hypothesise that the circuit exploits or relies upon the simulated effects of the particular thermal energies of the electrons at around 340mK.

Keywords: Nanoelectronic circuit design, evolutionary algorithms, design automation, single-electron circuit simulation, physics of computation.

Labels: Economics

Yes, now we have wirless LAN in the Cafe Prückel like in the Cafe Diglas. Again provided by metronet.at. Vienna is getting a better place to be, if you have wirless access point everywhere (just my home is still missing).

Labels: eat+drink

Gefunden in der Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04.01.2003, Nr. 3 / Seite 11
Besonders treffend analysiert fand ich folgenden Teil: "Der "gute Gast" zeichnet sich dadurch aus, da§ er niemals und unter keinerlei Umständen gegen die vorgegebene Etikette aufbegehrt oder dem Ober gar "Ezzes" geben will. Er bleibt, ganz im Gegenteil, stets bemüht, sein Wohlwollen mittels guter Manieren und diskret verabreichter Trinkgelder zu erhaschen. Kurzum, der "gute Gast" beweise immer seine lang geübte Anpassungsfähigkeit, die ihrerseits den milden Stolz des Obers ausmache, heist es im Vorwort zum Buch "Kaffeehäuser in Wien" von Thomas Martinek. Der "schlechte Gast" hingegen bleibt nach diesem Urteil ein Phänomen der Kaffeehausgeschichte, an dem schon die grö§ten Geister gescheitert sind. Betreten nach seinem verschollenen Bohnengetränk Ausschau haltend, das nicht und nicht kommen will, während ringsum alles genusvoll an den Tassen nippt, wird das Unglück des "schlechten Gasts" vollkommen, reklamiert er vielleicht nach zwanzig Minuten vergeblichen Wartens völlig deplaziert seine Bestellung - peinliches Schweigen. Nicht nur der Befragte, auch sämtliche seiner "guten Gäste" werden ihre Blicke sogleich angewidert abwenden - der Ober, um seine Dominanz anschaulich unter Beweis zu stellen, jene, um sich ihrer wohlerworbenen Privilegien zu erfreuen, heist es dort weiter."

Labels: eat+drink, Patrick

posted on Friday, January 04, 2002 link to this post (0) comments