text:
1. To convey on wheels, or in a wheeled vehicle; as, to wheel a load of hay or wood.
2. To put into a rotatory motion; to cause to turn or revolve; to cause to gyrate; to make or perform in a circle. The beetle wheels her droning flight. Now heaven, in all her glory, shone, and rolled Her motions, as the great first mover's hand First wheeled their course. (milton)
Origin: Wheeled; Wheeling.
1. A circular frame turning about an axis; a rotating disk, whether solid, or a frame composed of an outer rim, spokes or radii, and a central hub or nave, in which is inserted the axle, used for supporting and conveying vehicles, in machinery, and for various purposes; as, the wheel of a wagon, of a locomotive, of a mill, of a watch, etc. The gasping charioteer beneath the wheel Of his own car. (Dryden)
2. Any instrument having the form of, or chiefly consisting of, a wheel. Specifically:
A spinning wheel. See Spinning.
An instrument of torture formerly used. His examination is like that which is made by the rack and wheel. (Addison)
This mode of torture is said to have been first employed in Germany, in the fourteenth century. The criminal was laid on a cart wheel with his legs and arms extended, and his limbs in that posture were fractured with an iron bar. In France, where its use was restricted to the most atrocious crimes, the criminal was first laid on a frame of wood in the form of a St. Andrew's cross, with grooves cut transversely in it above a
nd below the knees and elbows, and the executioner struck eight blows with an iron bar, so as to break the limbs in those places, sometimes finishing by two or three blows on the chest or stomach, which usually put an end to the life of the criminal, and were hence called coups-de-grace blows of mercy. The criminal was then unbound, and laid on a small wheel, with his face upward, and his arms and legs doubled under him, there to expire, if he had survived the previous treatment.
A circular frame having handles on the periphery, and an axle which is so connected with the tiller as to form a means of controlling the rudder for the purpose of steering.
A potter's wheel. See potter. Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. (Jer. Xviii. 3) "Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar A touch can make, a touch can mar.
(Science: chemistry) " (Longfellow) A firework which, while burning, is caused to revolve on an axis by the reaction of the escaping gases.
The burden or refrain of a song.
This meaning has a low degree of authority, but is supposed from the context in the few cases where the word is found. You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! (Shak)
3. A bicycle or a tricycle; a velocipede.
4. A rolling or revolving body; anything of a circular form; a disk; an orb.
5. A turn revolution; rotation; compass. According to the common vicissitude and wheel of things, the proud and the insolent, after long trampling upon others, come at length to be trampled upon themselves. (south) He throws his steep flight in many an aery wheel. (milton) A wheel within a wheel, or Wheels within wheels, a complication
of circumstances, motives, etc. Balance wheel. Bevel wheel, brake wheel, cam wheel, fifth wheel, Overshot wheel, spinning wheel, etc. See Bevel, Brake, etc. Core wheel.
Any one of numerous species of rotifers having a ciliated disk at the anterior end. Wheel barometer.
(Science: physics) A stitch resembling a spider's web, worked into the material, and not over an open space.
(Science: botany) Wheel tree, a circular window having radiating mullions arranged like the spokes of a wheel. Cf. Rose window, under Rose.
Origin: OE. Wheel, hweol, AS. Hweol, hweogul, hweowol; akin to D. Wiel, Icel. Hvel, Gr, Skr. Cakra; cf. Icel. Hjol, Dan. Hiul, Sw. Hjul. 218 Cf. Cycle, Cyclopedia.


text:
Neighbors: Man held toddler moments before police shooting
Omaha police said at least four officers fired at a man who had just been holding a small child early Tuesday.
Officers were called to the area of 42nd and Pratt streets around 4 a.m. to investigate a report of a man armed with a shotgun.
Responding officers reported that the man was making threatening and suicidal statements and holding a small child.
By 6 a.m., Omaha Fire Department rescue units were placed on standby as the "situation was deteriorating," police said.
Neighbors tell KETV Newswatch 7 that police used horns to reason with the man.
"They were calling him out, saying come to the front door, hands up and all that. Kept repeating that," said Dupree Hayes.
According to police, at least four officers fired their weapons, citing the man as an immediate threat to the child and the officers at the scene.
The man, identified as Tyree Bell, 31, was taken to Alegent Creighton Health Creighton University Medical Center, where he died from his injuries.
A check of Bell's criminal history indicates he's been convicted of terroristic threats and strangulation among other crimes.
Police said the officers involved will be placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, as is standard procedure.
More details are expected at a news conference Wednesday.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Facebook said it was building something big to reveal this week—and those in attendance at Tuesday's event got a first-hand introduction to Graph Search. Today however, Facebook quietly rolled out another interesting new feature—the ability to make calls using the social network's messaging app.
The Verge reports that the company's Messenger for iPhone app added a new free calling button for US users. It's an initiative the company beta tested in Canada earlier this month, saying at the time that a US rollout was coming soon. Facebook confirmed the call feature has been released for its iPhone app today, though it provided no additional information on the feature expanding to other countries or mobile operating systems.
We attempted to use the new calling system but received an error message that said "Free Calling Unavailable." (TheNextWeb notes it's not yet available for all users.) But starting a free call within the app is pretty straightforward: find the user you'd like to chat with, tap the 'i' button on their profile, and then tap the Free Call button. Calls use either Wi-Fi or data connections and the recipient should receive a push notification prompting them to accept the call. (Again, as long as those involved are iOS users within the US.)
Given the vast number of Facebook users, this move has certain implications. If you're using an iOS device like an iPad or iPod Touch, you now have another app for making phone calls without a dedicated phone or data package. Let us know below if you'll try the Facebook calling when it becomes available to you.


text:
When putting a link on the page, you should make the text of the link (that is, the words in the sentence that the user must click on to follow the link) meaningful. The classic bad example is:
To find out more about the BGA, click here.
'Click here' gives absolutely no clue about where this link goes, which makes skim-reading the page to find a particular link much harder. That is bad.
It gets worse: for a blind or partially sighted using a screen-reader to access the site, this sort of thing makes the site almost unusable. Then, to add insult to injury, the sentence uses the word 'click'. That assumes that the reader is using a computer with a mouse, which is not universally true. Where possible, avoid assumptions like that. If you must instruct the user, tell them to 'follow' the link, or 'go to' the page that the link points to (or synonyms). They will know the appropriate procedure for following links with their set-up.
Now for some good examples:
There is another page giving the results of British go tournaments.
Based on the European rating list of 5th May 2004.
The ratings FAQ explains this table, and how to use the information it contains.
[The BGA] also has a selection of promotional material for use by Go clubs and at publicity events.
If you plan to take children to a Go tournament, you should read the BGA policy on working with children and young people.
Writing sentences so that there is a sequence of words that can naturally be used as the text of the required link is something of an art. It is not always easy, although it does get easier with practice. Sometimes you have to be prepared to completely reorder the sentence to make it happen. If you are stuck, it often helps to ask another person. I am always happy to be asked about this sort of thing.
The rule here is that almost all punctuation goes outside the link. If the link is at the end of the sentence, or before a comma, the full stop, exclamation mark, comma, or whatever, goes outside the link. This applies even if the link forms an entire sentence. If a link is in brackets, then the brackets go outside the link. However, it only a part of link text is bracketed, those brackets go inside the link.
For example, Simon Goss asked my about three examples from the policies page.
Not so good: (Simon's comment: Naff repetition.)
3. Working with Children & Young People
Better: (The sentence now at least conveys some other information, the fact that a policy exits as a separate document, as well a repeating the title. That seems unavoidable, since the policy has a good clear name that describes exactly what it is.)
3. Working with Children & Young People
The BGA has a separate Policy on Working with Children and Young People.
Not so good: (Simon's comment: Ungrammatical construction.)
The BGA provides facilities for distributing tournament entry forms with the newsletter and hosting them on the BGA web site. These facilities and many other recommendations are described in Publicising Go Tournaments.
Better: (Nothing wrong with putting the link at the start of the sentence.)
The BGA provides facilities for distributing tournament entry forms with the newsletter and hosting them on the BGA web site. The page Publicising Go Tournaments explains how this works, alongside other recommendations for tournament organisers.
Not so good: (Simon's comment: Stilted workaround to avoid ungrammatical constructions.)
The official version of the rules for the British Go Championship, the British Pair Go Championship and the British Youth Championships is the BGA Championships Rules page.
The BGA Championships Rules page contains the official rules for the British Go Championship, the British Pair Go Championship and the British Youth Championships.


text:
Please Submit Your Info
Thank you for booking an classroom program with Aquarium on Wheels for your school/group. Below are questions that we need answered and submitted 4-6 weeks prior to your event date. Expect a confirmation call or email from an Education staff member 3-4 weeks before your scheduled date to review these details. Along with these details you will need to provide a schedule for the day of our visit. PLEASE COMPLETE ONLY IF YOU HAVE A CONFIRMED BOOKING.
"You are not authorized to perform this action"
- Please try again. That usually pops up in the following situations:1) The browser window was left open for a really long time with the form open or 2) you attempted to submit the form but had another error, hit the back button, fixed the error, and tried to submit again. The form needs to be refreshed after an attempt at submitting, otherwise, the server thinks you are trying to spam it.
After waiting a long time, it just goes to the homepage
- Your files are probably too large. Please make them smaller and try sending in your work again.


text:
The world's most compact capital never fails to impress and this year's Geneva Motor Show managed to cram a few new titillating models onto the show floor. Oh yeah... and the cars were nice too.
The Geneva Motor Show brings a touch of class to the booth professional world; gone are the over-inflated chests and miles and miles of freshly shaven legs, instead replaced with demure yet awe-inspiring young women ever-ready to give you the low down on your car of choice. They do so with a touch of class, an ounce of sweetness and the smell of Altoids, cigarettes and Diet Coke on their breath. Ah, the beloved European Booth Professional — how could we live without thee?
(You can find more 'Booth Professionals' at Autoblog.it.)


text:
This is an archive page. The links in this content are no longer being updated.
Rhonda Santos: (508) 852-8044
Lyndsay Cole: (970) 494-7410
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2012—The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today committed $1 million to plant trees in the areas within Worcester County, Ma., which are fighting an infestation of the invasive Asian longhorned beetle (ALB).
"With our local, state and federal partners, USDA is doing everything it can to eradicate ALB in Massachusetts and restore a healthy population of trees to the affected communities," said Rebecca Blue, Deputy Undersecretary for USDA's Marketing and Regulatory Programs. "We also urge the public to remain vigilant in reporting any sightings of the pest. Together we can eradicate this beetle and ensure the health of our nation's trees and the local economies that depend on them."
The ALB, a tree-killing invasive insect, was first detected in Worcester in August 2008 by a homeowner, and currently 110 square miles in the central part of the state are regulated for the pest. The removal of infested trees reduces beetle populations and contributes towards the eradication of the pest.
Massachusetts has been conducting replanting efforts since 2009, after receiving $500,000 from USDA and an additional $4.487 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The funding announced today will be provided to the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to continue replanting efforts in cooperation with USDA's US Forest Service. The tree species being replanted are a wide variety of non-host plants that are not vulnerable to ALB and typically include conifers and various deciduous trees such as ornamental cherries and tree lilacs.
The invasive pest is known to attack and kill healthy maple trees, as well as ash, birch, elm, European mountain ash, golden rain, hackberry, horse chestnut, katsura, London plane tree, mimosa, poplar and willow. Early detection is paramount to stopping the beetle and saving trees. An alert public can help.
The ALB is a large beetle. Its body is approximately 1- to 1-1/2 inches long and is shiny black with random white spots. Its antennae, which are longer than the insect's body, are banded black and white and it has six legs which may have a bluish tint. Adult beetles typically first appear during the month of July and will continue to be present throughout the summer and into the early fall months until hard frost which usually occurs in early November. Adult ALB can be found anywhere, including on trees, benches, patios and outdoor furniture, sides of houses and sidewalks, etc. For additional information, please go to http://beetlebusters.info/
APHIS ALB eradication partners in Massachusetts include the US Forest Service, Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, the city of Worcester, the towns of Holden, West Boylston, Boylston, Shrewsbury and Auburn, the city of Boston, and the town of Brookline.
With Agriculture Secretary Vilsack's leadership, APHIS works tirelessly to create and sustain opportunities for America's farmers, ranchers and producers. Each day, APHIS promotes U.S. agricultural health, regulates genetically engineered organisms, administers the Animal Welfare Act, and carries out wildlife damage management activities, all to safeguard the nation's agriculture, fishing and forestry industries. In the event that a pest or disease of concern is detected, APHIS implements emergency protocols and partners with affected states and other countries to quickly manage or eradicate the outbreak. To promote the health of U.S. agriculture in the international trade arena, APHIS develops and advances science-based standards with trading partners to ensure America's agricultural exports, valued at more than $137 billion annually, are protected from unjustified restrictions.
USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer and lender. To file a complaint of discrimination, write:
USDA, Director, Office of Civil Rights, 1400 Independence Ave., SW., Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call
(800) 795-3272 (voice) or (202) 72-6382 (TDD).
USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office of Adjudication, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call (866) 632-9992 (Toll-free Customer Service), (800) 877-8339 (Local or Federal relay), (866) 377-8642 (Relay voice users).


text:
What's the most expensive one-way commercial flight with no buses, cars or trains taking you from one airport to the other? Jalopnik readers started booking and this is what they found.
I guess the most important lesson we learnt from this round is that you can actually spend the price of a new Subaru STI or a Mustang Convertible on a single 4,771 mile long flight starting from New York. Now imagine spending that amount on petrol, and see where it could take you!
Note that these are all one-way tickets with no doubling back.
10.) Fairbanks (Alaska) to Auckland (New Zealand)
Suggested by: DannyO
Price: $28066
Distance on the map: 7308.85 miles
Flight time: 36 hours 10 minutes
Going through Dubai with Emirates has a price.
9.) Dallas (US) to London (UK)
Suggested by: TeXWD
Price: $31464
Distance on the map: 4745.14 miles
Flight time: 27 hours 38 minutes
They just found a new oil field under the farm.
8.) Miami (US) to Tokyo (Japan)
Suggested by: Raphael Orlove
Price: $32758
Distance on the map: 7448.98 miles
Flight time: 24 hours 55 minutes
Sounds like a party.
7.) New York (US) to London (UK)
Suggested by: Ray Wert
Price: $37297
Distance on the map: 4013.03 miles
Flight time: 40 hours 55 minutes
All Nippon Airlines is all about taking you around the world, at least twice if possible.
6.) New York (US) to Frankfurt (Germany)
Suggested by: Ray Wert
Price: $37297
Distance on the map: 4013.03 miles
Flight time: 44 hours
The same story here.
5.) New York (US) to Lisbon (Portugal)
Suggested by: Travis Okulski
Price: $37360
Distance on the map: 3367.19 miles
Flight time: 46 hours 45 minutes
If you're on a plane for 46 hours, fingers crossed for lovely flight attendants. It usually works.
4.) New York (US) to Istanbul (Turkey)
Suggested by: Yamuda
Price: $37992
Distance on the map: 5009.82 miles
Flight time: 45 hours 45 minutes
This one is shorter. By an hour.
3.) New York (US) to Oslo (Norway)
Suggested by: rileseven
Price: $39001
Distance on the map: 3672.61 miles
Flight time: 28 hours
A New York to Oslo flight usually takes 7 hours and 52 minutes. This trip takes a bit more...
2.) Santiago (Chile) to Beirut (Lebanon)
Suggested by: lamakachop
Price: $39525
Distance on the map: 8286.39 miles
Flight time: 20 hours 30 minutes
With Air France, you can try both the Boeing and the Airbus. That almost makes it a good deal.
1.) New York (US) to Sao Paulo (Brazil)
Suggested by: cwgtimkv
Price: $40994
Distance on the map: 4771.69 miles
Flight time: 59 hours
All Nippon Airways once again welcomes your cash or credit card! Also, basically, leaving New York in the wrong direction is more expensive than living there.
Welcome back to Answers of the Day - our daily Jalopnik feature where we take the best ten responses from the previous day's Question of the Day and shine it up to show off. It's by you and for you, the Jalopnik readers. Enjoy! Photo credit: University of Texas Library


text:
Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.
Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as "Solti," after his favorite conductor. He couldn't see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that's longer than a football field but feels like a single room. "My desk is all the way at the other end," he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.
Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.
He'd been shut out the first time Zitnick taught the class, too. This time, when the lectures started in the middle of January, he showed up anyway. He also wormed his way into the workshops, joining the rest of the class as they competed to build the best AI models from company data. Over the next few weeks, he climbed to the top of the leaderboard. "I didn't get in, so I wanted to do well," he says. The Facebook powers-that-be are more than happy he did. As anxious as Solti was to take the class—a private set of lectures and workshops open only to company employees—Facebook stands to benefit the most.
Deep learning is the technology that identifies faces in the photos you post to Facebook. It also recognizes commands spoken into Google phones, translates foreign languages on Microsoft's Skype app, and wrangles porn on Twitter, not to mention the way it's changing everything from internet search and advertising to cybersecurity. Over the last five years, this technology has radically shifted the course of all the internet's biggest operations.
With help from Geoff Hinton, one of the founding fathers of the deep learning movement, Google built a central AI lab that feeds the rest of the company. Then it paid more than $650 million for DeepMind, a second lab based in London. Another founding father, Yann LeCun, built a similar operation at Facebook. And so many other deep learning startups and academics have flooded into so many other companies, drawn by enormous paydays.
The problem: These companies have now vacuumed up most of the available talent—and they need more. Until recently, deep learning was a fringe pursuit even in the academic world. Relatively few people are formally trained in these techniques, which require a very different kind of thinking than traditional software engineering. So, Facebook is now organizing formal classes and longterm research internships in an effort to build new deep learning talent and spread it across the company. "We have incredibly smart people here," Zitnick says. "They just need the tools."
Meanwhile, just down the road from Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters, Google is doing much the same, apparently on an even larger scale, as so many other companies struggle to deal with the AI talent vacuum. David Elkington, CEO of Insidesales, a company that applies AI techniques to online sales services, says he's now opening an outpost in Ireland because he can't find the AI and data science talent he needs here in the States. "It's more of an art than a science," he says. And the best practitioners of that art are very expensive.
In the years to come, universities will catch up with the deep learning revolution, producing far more talent than they do today. Online courses from the likes of Udacity and Coursera are also spreading the gospel. But the biggest internet companies need a more immediate fix.
Seeing the Future
Larry Zitnick, 42, is a walking, talking, teaching symbol of how quickly these AI techniques have ascended—and how valuable deep learning talent has become. At Microsoft, he spent a decade working to build systems that could see like humans. Then, in 2012, deep learning techniques eclipsed his ten years of research in a matter of months.
In essence, researchers like Zitnick were building machine vision one tiny piece at time, applying very particular techniques to very particular parts of the problem. But then academics like Geoff Hinton showed that a single piece—a deep neural network—could achieve far more. Rather than code a system by hand, Hinton and company built neural networks that could learn tasks largely on their own by analyzing vast amounts of data. "We saw this huge step change with deep learning," Zitnick says. "Things started to work."
For Zitnick, the personal turning point came one afternoon in the fall of 2013. He was sitting in a lecture hall at the University of California, Berkeley, listening to a PhD student named Ross Girshick describe a deep learning system that could learn to identify objects in photos. Feed it millions of cat photos, for instance, and it could learn to identify a cat—actually pinpoint it in the photo. As Girshick described the math behind his method, Zitnick could see where the grad student was headed. All he wanted to hear was how well the system performed. He kept whispering: "Just tell us the numbers." Finally, Girshick gave the numbers. "It was super-clear that this was going to be the way of the future," Zitnick says.
Within weeks, he hired Girshick at Microsoft Research, as he and the rest of the company's computer vision team reorganized their work around deep learning. This required a sizable shift in thinking. As a top researcher once told me, creating these deep learning systems is more like being a coach than a player. Rather than building a piece of software on your own, one line of code at a time, you're coaxing a result from a sea of information.
But Girshick wasn't long for Microsoft. And neither was Zitnick. Soon, Facebook poached them both—and almost everyone else on the team.
This demand for talent is the reason Zitnick is now teaching a deep learning class at Facebook. And like so many other engineers and data scientists across Silicon Valley, the Facebook rank and file are well aware of the trend. When Zitnick announced the first class in the fall, the 60 spots filled up in ten minutes. He announced a bigger class this winter, and it filled up nearly as quickly. There's demand for these ideas on both sides of the equation.
There's also demand among tech reporters. I took the latest class myself, though Facebook wouldn't let me participate in the workshops on my own. That would require access to the Facebook network. The company believes in education, but only up to a point. Ultimately, all this is about business.
Going Deep
The class begins with the fundamental idea: the neural network, a notion that researchers like Frank Rosenblatt explored with as far back as the late 1950s. The conceit is that a neural net mimics the web of neuron in the brain. And in a way, it does. It operates by sending information between processing units, or nodes, that stand in for neurons. But these nodes are really just linear algebra and calculus that can identify patterns in data.
Even in the `50s, it worked. Rosenblatt, a professor of psychology at Cornell, demonstrated his system for the New Yorker and the New York Times, showing that it could learn to identify changes in punchcards fed into an IBM 704 mainframe. But the idea was fundamentally limited—it could only solve very small problems—and in the late '60s, when MIT's Marvin Minsky published a book that proved these limitations, the AI community all but dropped the idea. It returned to the fore only after academics like Hinton and LeCun expanded these system so they could operate across multiple layers of nodes. That's the "deep" in deep learning.
As Zitnick explains, each layer makes a calculation and passes it to the next. Then, using a technique called "back propagation," the layers send information back down the chain as a means of error correction. As the years went by and technology advanced, neural networks could train on much larger amounts of data using much larger amounts of computing power. And they proved enormously useful. "For the first time ever, we could take raw input data like audio and images and make sense of them," Zitnick told his class, standing at a lectern inside MPK 20, the south end of San Francisco Bay framed in the window beside him.
'We have incredibly smart people here. They just need the tools.' Larry Zitnick
As the class progresses and the pace picks up, Zitnick also explains how these techniques evolved into more complex systems. He explores convolutional neural networks, a method inspired by the brain's visual cortex that groups neurons into "receptive fields" arranged almost like overlapping tiles. His boss, Yann LeCun, used these to recognize handwriting way back in the early '90s. Then the class progresses to LSTMs—neural networks that include their own short-term memory, a way of retaining one piece of information while examining what comes next. This is what helps identify the commands you speak into Android phones.
In the end, all these methods are still just math. But to understand how they work, students must visualize how they operate across time (as data passes through the neural network) and space (as those tile-like receptive fields examine each section of a photo). Applying these methods to real problems, as Zitnick's students do during the workshops, is a process of trial, error, and intuition—kind of like manning the mixing console in a recording studio. You're not at a physical console. You're at a laptop, sending commands to machines in Facebook data centers across the internet, where the neural networks do their training. But you spend your time adjusting all sorts of virtual knobs—the size of the dataset, the speed of the training, the relative influence of each node—until you get the right mix. "A lot of it is built by experience," says Angela Fan, 22, who took Zitnick's class in the fall.
A New Army
Fan studied statistics and computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard, finishing just last spring. She took some AI courses, but many of the latest techniques are still new even to her, particularly when it comes to actually putting them into practice. "I can learn just from interacting with the codebase," she says, referring to the software tools Facebook has built for this kind of work.
For her, the class was part of a much larger education. At the behest of her college professor, she applied for Facebook's "AI immersion program." She won a spot working alongside Zitnick and other researchers as a kind of intern for the next year or two. Earlier this month, her team published new research describing a system that takes the convolutional neural networks that typically analyze photos and uses them to build better AI models for understanding natural language—that is, how humans talk to each other.
This kind of language research is the next frontier for deep learning. After reinventing image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation, researchers are pushing toward machines that can truly understand what humans say and respond in kind. In the near-term, the techniques described in Fan's paper could help improve that service on your smartphone that guesses what you'll type next. She envisions a tiny neural network sitting on your phone, learning how you—and just you in particular—talk to other people.
For Facebook, the goal is to create an army of Angela Fans, researchers steeped not just in neural networks but a range of related technologies, including reinforcement learning—the method that drove DeepMind's AlphaGo system when it cracked the ancient game of Go—and other techniques that Zitnick explores as the course comes to a close. To this end, when Zitnick reprised the course this winter, Fan and other AI lab interns served as class TAs, running the workshops and answering any questions that came up over the six weeks of lectures.
Facebook isn't just trying to beef its central AI lab. It's hoping to spread these skills across the company. Deep learning isn't a niche pursuit. It's a general technology that can potentially change any part of Facebook, from Messenger to the company's central advertising engine. Solti could even apply it to the creation of videos, considering that neural networks also have a talent for art. Any Facebook engineer or data scientist could benefit from understanding this AI. That's why Larry Zitnick is teaching the class. And it's why Solti abandoned his lunch.


text:
Clinical instructor, WoW player, shadow priest, and WoW Insider reader Andrew Byrne is running a study on gaming addiction as part of his Doctoral dissertation. He needs to survey 200 respondents (some kind of Nate Silver nonsense), so if you want to do your good deed for the day, head on over to mmorpgresearchstudy.com and take the questionnaire.
The survey is a set of 20 questions; completing it takes about five minutes.
Research participants needed for a study on healthy and unhealthy use of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games like WoW. Your identity will not be collected. If interested, please click on this link: http://www.mmorpgresearchstudy.com/
Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.


text:
hi. does anyone have pictures or videos of their system showing their squeezebox (preferrably the duet) with their 3rd party hardware? i'm talking about the sheevaplug, the vortexbox, the NAS, a laptop. i've seen photos of user's overall system, but i want to see how a typical system would look with those units... primarily for space requirements, but also for a visual on how to hook it up.
i have an SB3 and a Duet running SBS on my main computer and would like to expand. i have a lot of music and video. i looked on youtube and couldn't find a system showing a sheevaplug, or vortexbox, etc. actually connected.
Results 1 to 9 of 9
2011-03-02, 15:38 #1
- Join Date
- Feb 2011
- Posts
- 14
photos - showing sheevaplug/vortexbox/NAS/laptop/etc
2011-03-02, 16:17 #2
You may not get many photos like you seem to be looking for because for many people the server isn't close at all to the Squeezebox. My server is the same hardware platform as a Vortexbox Appliance, but minus the DVD drive and using a different OS. You can see it next to my SB Radio in one of the pictures in Post #1099 in this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...19817&page=110 . You can also see the other SBs that are fed by the same server.
Post #1094 on that same page shows another user's multi-room system with a QNAP NAS. As you can see, the photo just looks like a NAS with some cables sticking out, because it isn't that close to some of the SBs.
As for how to hook it up, it's really not much different from what you have now with your pc. Plug the pc/nas/sheeva/vortexbox appliance into the AC outlet, and connect it by ethernet to your router. Then connect your SB to the router via ethernet or wireless. Or maybe I'm missing your point.
2011-03-03, 04:43 #3
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- 14
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I see your vortexbox(near the router, right?), and I also see the QNAP NAS (funny, I thought it was a modem ). I know most people dont have their servers close to the squeezebox, I was just hoping to see more pictures showing them, as well as the rest of the system(like yours & post #1094)
Yes, you answered my question, the way I posted it. The thing is, I made a typo. When I said how to hook it up, I meant the sheevaplug. Im thinking you still need some kind of storage device along with the sheevaplug, right? For instance, sheevaplug + NAS connected to the router.
By the way: my cousin has the same corner stand as you. What a coincidence.
2011-03-03, 04:54 #4
I don't know much about the Sheevaplug, but as far as I know the Sheevaplug does need external storage, either a NAS on the network or an external USB attached directly. There must be photos somewhere, but here's a picture of the Sheevaplug itself (http://www.slashgear.com/marvell-she...-wart-2435556/) -- then imagine an ethernet cable running out of it, and possibly an attached USB drive as well (that is, if you don't choose to use a NAS).
EDIT: I neglected to answer that yes, that is my Vortexbox-like server next to the router. Btw, the Vortexbox Appliance is a great solution for people who want something that works straight out of the box. But if you're comfortable with installing RAM, hard drive, operating system, and software you can save yourself some money and/or get better performance with a semi-DIY barebones solution like mine. Newegg.com has some options along these lines: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...n=barebone+msi
EDIT2: Also check out post #1092 on that same page to see a FitPC2. It's sitting between the monitor and the speaker. It costs more than a Sheevaplug (I think around US$300-450, depending on CPU and HDD chosen), but it is one incredibly compact and slick server solution. It is big enough to hold a laptop-size (ie, 2.5 inch) hard drive.
Last edited by aubuti; 2011-03-03 at 08:22.
2011-03-07, 21:42 #5
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that certainly helps a little bit more. maybe there are more systems in that post that show member's servers. hopefully they point it out like you did, and post #1092 did. i'll have to look through it again.
2011-03-08, 04:34 #6
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2011-03-12, 20:52 #7
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The FitPC is used solely as a music server in this instance, although it is a full-fledged PC. I bought the diskless version and installed a 2.5" 500gb drive, on which resides SBS and my music collection. The device is on 24/7, has been for a year and a half, with no problems. Content is updated using Second Copy backup software across the network, from my master music folder on a dedicated external drive attached to my main computer.
2011-03-15, 02:58 #8
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Probably not what you are looking for, but here's mine. Its currently stripped down again while I fiddle with an Ion Mobo to run XBMC as well.
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...elite+case+modCustom mini itx server in a 1940s radio case, currently being revamped to add XBMC, Acer Revo as a stand-in. Favourite 7,500 tracks on the Touch USB server.
Kitchen --- SB3>Aego M
Conservatory --- >SB3 (custom case)>Musical Fidelity Tempest>Canon S50
Lounge---SB Touch>yamaha 863>Kef3005SE\Sennheiser RS 170
Bedroom---SB3>Audioengine A3
Bathroom---Radio, now work in progress
Gaming room/roving commission---Boom
Control---Ipeng on Iphone,Pod and Pad
More Audiofool than Audiophile!
2011-03-15, 09:43 #9
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- 14
wow. very intersting setup you have there. you really put some thought into it. thanks for the pics, everything helps.
funny you mention XBMC. i want to rip my large collection of DVDs and my music to a storage device. from there i can access my music thru the squeezebox & stereo; and my video thru XBMC & tv. i've just started to read about XBMC and it seems like a good way to go with my videos. (wouldn't it be great for competition if logitech added a video out or HDMI out on the squeezebox lines? i hear you can stream your music on the Apple TV and the Roku boxes.)
thanks for the replies guys. keep 'em coming.


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Now, I know that Samantha gets turned on by most things. But all the same, this one's pretty funny.
In a departure for Nintendo's usually family-friendly celebrity spokespeople, a new British ad for Super Mario 3D Land features Sex and the City's friskiest character talking about her predilection for men who play dress-up.
"I go on magical adventures with a certain Mario. And guess what? He's totally into dressing up. That tanooki suit is my particular favorite."


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Jennifer Lawrence will film "X-Men: Days of Future Past" immediately following "Catching Fire".
Creative Commons
The second film in a super-popular trilogy, "Catching Fire", is now in pre-production and casting calls for the film's extras have now gone out. Casting has been underway in Los Angeles for new co-starring and supporting roles. The day players, extras, photo doubles, and stand-ins will be hired in the Atlanta, GA area where shooting take place. Additional casting will take place on the Hawaiian Islands of Oahu and Kauai, and possibly in North Carolina.


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Forward-thinking Metalist eye Sporting scalp
Wednesday 28 March 2012
Article summary
FC Metalist Kharkiv coach Myron Markevich said his free-scoring team will stay true to their attacking style as they travel to meet an impressive Sporting Clube de Portugal side.
Article top media content
Article body
FC Metalist Kharkiv have arrived in Lisbon determined to underline their reputation as the UEFA Europa League's arch-entertainers, but Sporting Clube de Portugal and coach Ricardo Sá Pinto are determined to make the mantle their own over the course of this quarter-final tie.
With 25 goals since the start of the group stage and a swaggering style borne of a strong South American contingent, Metalist are the tournament's top scorers – not that Sporting left-back Emiliano Insúa needs any introduction to their strengths. "We have seen some of their matches," he said. "They have the best attack in the competition, but we face every team the same way: being humble, working hard and showing our opponents respect, recognising their strengths."
Coach Sá Pinto, whose side eliminated Manchester City FC in the last 16, has also been keeping tabs on the Ukrainian team. "They had a very impressive group stage and eliminated Olympiacos FC in the last round. We have to be serious and rigorous, with a will to win. I don't see any weaknesses in Metalist. Any team that comes here having been so dominant against good opponents must have class in all departments, so we have to be alive to that and do our job."
Sá Pinto's praise did not go unnoticed by Metalist boss Myron Markevich, who spoke of his desire to prove his counterpart right, even if he acknowledges that it will not be easy. "Sporting are a strong team playing particularly well in the Europa League – their elimination of Manchester City is evidence of that," said the 61-year-old, whose own charges suffered only their second defeat in 14 games on Saturday, going down 4-2 at FC Arsenal Kyiv.
"I agree with something else that Sá Pinto said, though: that there are no favourites in this tie. It's 50-50. I think the match will be hard for us, but we'll try to be united and play our own game while retaining full respect for them. We always play the same way." On the evidence of their campaign to date, that is cause for concern even for a Sporting side that collected a sixth successive home win on Saturday, beating CD Feirense 1-0.
The Lions have also won all four of their previous games against Ukrainian outfits, but statistics make no difference to Sá Pinto. "Our approach is always the same: play good football, respect the other team and remain balanced and focused," he explained. "We want the fans to be proud of us tomorrow, so we must go for the win. Sporting are not the favourites here. At this stage, there are no favourites – no home advantage, nothing."


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Xmas is almost here!
Discuss anything in general here, talk to other members, make yourself at home!
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5 posts • Page 1 of 1
Xmas is almost here!
Can't wait, last day at work today then long break ahead
Re: Xmas is almost here!
So how was everybodys xmas? I dont think asian celebrate it but you do get a break yeh
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Re: Xmas is almost here!
my Xmas ended up saying HAPPY NEW YEAR ALLL WELCOME TO 2015
Re: Xmas is almost here!
I'm more happier you joined us, now im not the only new person here lolanosh wrote:hello guys am new here am very happy to join all of you
Once you pop you can't stop
Re: Xmas is almost here!
thanks for the post and wonderful post
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5 posts • Page 1 of 1


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WASHINGTON, Oct. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ — Childhood lead poisoning is considered the most preventable environmental disease among young children, yet nearly one million children are affected. To coincide with National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week (October 21 -27), the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Ad Council are encouraging all families to get their children (ages 0-6) and homes (built before 1978) tested for lead poisoning. To extend this critical health message to caregivers, parents and pregnant women, they redistributed their national Lead Poisoning Prevention public service advertising (PSAs) nationwide.
To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: http://www.multivu.com/mnr/58496-epa-hud-y-coalicion-educan-familias-acerca-de-prueba-de-plomo-en-los-ninos
This year's National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week theme, "Lead-Free Kids for a Healthy Future," underscores the importance of testing your home, testing your child, and learning how to prevent lead poisoning's serious health effects. A simple blood test can prevent permanent damage that will last a lifetime. In children, lead paint poisoning can cause lifelong learning disabilities, hearing loss, speech delays, developmental disabilities and aggressive/violent behaviors.
"Lead poisoning is indiscriminate, affecting children of all races and ethnicities, in rural and urban communities, and at every socioeconomic level," said Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. "There are still millions of children and families at risk in homes around the country that contain lead paint hazards. We are grateful to the Ad Council and our federal partners for their commitment to help raise awareness about this tragic and costly disease."
The most common pathway for lead poisoning is dust from deteriorating lead-based paint (on older windows, doors and trim, or walls) or through improper renovation, repair and painting activities in older homes and buildings that cause paint to chip, peel or flake. Families need to make sure the proper measures are taken when renovating, repairing or painting older homes built before 1978 by implementing lead-safe work practices.
Created pro bono by New York-based ad agency Merkley+Partners Creative Credits, the television, radio, print and digital PSAs target parents, caregivers and pregnant women whose children are at the greatest risk for lead poisoning. All of the PSAs direct caregivers, parents and pregnant women to visit http://www.leadfreekids.org and http://www.libredeplomo.org or call the National Lead Information Center's toll-free number, 1-800-424-LEAD, for tools and resources about lead poisoning. Spanish-language PSAs are also available.
"Our partnership with the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, EPA, and HUD continues to provide access to critical tools and resources to educate families about how to prevent their children from exposure to lead poisoning," said Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of the Ad Council. "During National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week we encourage all caregivers and parents to get their children tested."
Launched in April 2010, the campaign has received more than $50 million in donated media to date. The PSAs were distributed to more than 33,000 media outlets nationwide this week. Per the Ad Council model, the PSAs will run and air in advertising time and space that is donated by the media.
The Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning
The Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning designs, develops and promotes programs, policies and direct services to eradicate childhood lead poisoning and create green and healthy homes for all children. For more information about the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, visit http://www.greenandhealthyhomes.org.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA leads the nation's environmental science, research, education and assessment efforts. The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and the environment. Since 1970, EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people. For more information about EPA, visit http://www.epa.gov
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
HUD's mission is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. HUD is working to strengthen the housing market to bolster the economy and protect consumers; meet the need for quality affordable rental homes: utilize housing as a platform for improving quality of life; build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination; and transform the way HUD does business. More information about HUD and its programs is available on the Internet at http://www.hud.gov and http://espanol.hud.gov. You can also follow HUD on twitter @HUDnews, on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/HUD, or sign up for news alerts on HUD's News Listserv.
The Advertising Council
The Ad Council is a non-profit organization with a rich history of marshalling volunteer talent from the advertising and media industries to deliver critical messages to the American public. Having produced literally thousands of PSA campaigns addressing the most pressing social issues of the day, the Ad Council has effected, and continues to effect, tremendous positive change by raising awareness, inspiring action, and saving lives. To learn more about the Ad Council and its campaigns, visit http://www.adcouncil.org.
SOURCE The Ad Council


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'via Blog this'
Safe, Effective, All-Natural Pain Relief
Nyloxin provides all-natural, anti-inflammatory, analgesic pain relief that is non-toxic, non-narcotic, non-addictive, non-steroidal and does not contain aspirin or acetaminophen. http://drrohe.mynyloxin.com/content/default.aspx
Survive Anything - Disasters - Economy Collapse - Mobs, Etc. PROTECT YOUR FAMILY!
37 Food Items that will be SOLD OUT after Crisis:
NWO Vision Report Watch
The Anti-Christ Identity? Can we know it now?
Ping your blog


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PayPal |
410-543-8200 |
Print | Site Map | Employment | Contact Us | Upload Files | Remote Support
111 Davis Street
Salisbury, MD 2874
Phone: 410.543.8200 | 800.346.1225
Fax: 410.543.8261
Web: http://www.inacom-sby.com
In today's business climate, it is expected that the commercial buildings that we occupy will be able to support our voice and data networking needs today and in the future. Why is this important? Improperly designed networks can manifest a variety of symptoms, including hum, noise, crosstalk and poor voice quality over phone lines, or low data transmission speeds, failed print jobs, and bottlenecks over data lines. When situations such as this arise, your phones and computers become a competitive disadvantage, causing unnecessary frustration and higher service costs. In addition, your business will be in poor position to adopt new technologies that could give you an edge over the competition as they become available.
To help businesses ensure a strong, reliable networking infrastructure, the Telecommunications Industry of America (TIA) and other standards organizations have teamed up to develop standardized methodologies relating to the installation of structured cable networks. There are standards established relating to wiring buildings, creating pathways and spaces in the building design for network cable, and managing the network cable throughout the building as needs change. Together, these standards provide a "blue print" to architects, contractors, and network installers so that you will have a network that will work with any product from any vendor. These standards are used as requirements for Federal, State, and Local Government buildings, and you should require them for your projects as well.
The most important standard to know about is TIA 568-B.1-2000, the Commercial Building Telecommunications Wiring Standard. It was developed through a consortium of more than 60 contributing organizations, so the support for this standard is very broad. This latest revision to the 568 standard defines the technical and performance criteria for creating a strong, reliable network capable of supporting voice, data, and video. The goal of this standard is to provide:
• A generic telecommunication wiring system for commercial buildings
• Defined media, topology, termination and connection points, and administration
• Support for multi vendor, multi product environments
• Direction for technology migration and future design of telecommunications products
• A generic telecommunication wiring system for commercial buildings
• Defined media, topology, termination and connection points, and administration
• Support for multi vendor, multi product environments
• Direction for technology migration and future design of telecommunications products
The intent of this standard is to provide best practices for the design and installation of systems that will support a wide variety of services from many vendors, while giving a good likelihood that your network will support future technologies as well. You can expect networks built with 568-B in mind to have a lifespan of 10 years or more. A similar TIA standard for Category 5 cable, widely used for these types of applications throughout the 1990's, had a life span of about 9 years. During that time, network performance increased ten fold. About 5 years ago TIA updated their standard to specify that only Category 5e cable be used because of the advent of Gigabit networks which are only now becoming prevalent in most business environments.
Utilizing 568-B (and other related standards), it is possible to build integrated structured cabling systems for commercial buildings and campus environments involving multiple buildings. Cable types, connectors, distances, architectures, terminations, performance metrics, installation requirements and testing methods are all outlined in 568-B. Subsets of this standard address the specific issues relating to special cable types.
It's best to insure that your structured cabling adheres to these standards from the point of initial building design through completion. A good architect can design the building to include equipment rooms, server closets, and cable pathways that meet the TIA standards. With a building plan in mind, an infrastructure engineer can then design your structured cabling around your business objectives and a structured cabling specialist or electrician should be able to efficiently install the cabling. Because many building codes apply to low voltage cabling, it's important to ensure that all parties involved are aware of these regulations. One example is the requirement to use fire retarding plenum coated cable in environments like open ceilings.
Because it's much easier to wire a new building while the walls are open versus after building completion, it's in your best interest to make sure that the job is done correctly the first time. You'll want to plan for plenty of extra capacity while establishing the design requirements of your structured cabling, because adding a cable drop later will cost you much more. Serious rehabilitation of structured cabling is usually possible, but will cost many more times the price of the initial installation in time, materials, and lost productivity.
Once you have a strong, reliable network in place, your business will be in great position to adopt technologies as they emerge. The physical layer upon which these devices and applications run will be ready to go when you are. This will reduce future project completion costs, add more value to your technology investments, and create a competitive advantage over others in your industry.
Listed below is the complete listing of our press releases. To view an article, please click on a link below.
- Mark L. Granger - Granger & Company, PA
Inacom Information Systems providescomputer network support, business telephone systems, website design, web development and Internet marketing, and copier sales and serviceto the following Delmarva communities:


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The UNESCO/Emir Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah Prize to Promote Quality Education for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities is now open for submissions.
The prize is awarded every two years and it recognizes the work of individuals, organizations, groups and centres, with an impact on promoting equal education opportunities for persons with intellectual disabilities.
Deadline for applications: 13 September 2013
To submit a nomination please follow instructions in the guide for applications and download the submission form.
More information is available at: http://www.unesco.org/new/emir-jaber-al-sabah-prize
The Brussels based United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe - UNRIC provides information on UN activities to the countries of the region. It also provides liaison with institutions of the European Union in the field of information. Its outreach activities extend to all segments of society and joint campaigns, projects and events are organized with partners including the EU, governments, the media, NGOs, schools and local authorities.
United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC Brussels)
Residence Palace, Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat 155, Block C2,7th and 8th floor, Brussels 1040, Belgium
Tel.: +32 2 788 8484 / Fax: 32 2 788 8485


text:
Our study evaluates a provision of Dodd-Frank which provided permanent exemption from Section 404b compliance to non-accelerated filers. Our results show that these small firms did not improve their reporting quality to the same extent as large firms implying that the Dodd-Frank exemption will probably serve to keep the reporting quality of the exempted firms at lower than achievable levels.
We also note that as part of the Dodd-Frank legislation, the SEC was given a mandate to investigate raising the Section 404b exemption requirements from $75 million to $250 million in market capitalization (Dodd Frank 2010). While the SEC eventually decided to leave the exemption criterion at $75 million, this matter is still considered to be an open topic (SEC 2011). Our study informs this ongoing debate.
For more information on this study, please contact
Anthony D. Holder, PhD, CPA
Assistant Professor, Department of Accounting - MS 103
University of Toledo
Toledo, OH 43606-3390
Email: email@example.com
Web: http://homepages.utoledo.edu/aholder4/
Phone: 1.419.530.2560
Fax: 1.419.530.2873
Holder, A., K. Karim, and A. Robin. 2013. Was Dodd-Frank Justified in Exempting Small Firms from Section 404b Compliance? Accounting Horizons 27 (1): 1-22.
The quality of reported in earnings is influenced by a firm's fundamentals. To the extent investors differ in their ability to process this information, poor earnings quality can lead to information asymmetry, which can be costly. For these reasons, standard-setters and regulators are concerned about the quality of accounting information and its consequences for capital markets. This study provides empirical support for the concerns articulated by regulators that an important adverse consequence of poor earnings quality is increased information asymmetry and reduced liquidity.
For more information on this study, please contact Nilabhra Bhattacharya.
Bhattacharya, N., H. Desai, and K. Venkataraman. 2013. Does Earnings Quality Affect Information Asymmetry? Evidence from Trading Costs. Contemporary Accounting Research 30 (2).


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Suzuki has introduced an all-new vehicle called the Aerio. The Aerio is among the new class of crossover vehicles that are a blend between two different kinds of vehicles. Suzuki calls the Aerio SX a "sport crossover" vehicle, a cross between a sport sedan and, well, something more versatile. A minivan? SUV? Wagon? We're not sure, but it's certainly different, much like the new Toyota Matrix and Pontiac Vibe, and similar to the Ford Focus ZX3 and ZX5 and Mazda Protege5. Regardless of what you call these cars, they are more entertaining than a station wagon, but have similar cargo capacity.
The Suzuki Aerio comes as a sedan as well.
To a certain extent, the Aerio is Suzuki's replacement for the Esteem (which remains on sale through August, 2002). The Suzuki Esteem has been an acceptably nice small car, offered in sedan and wagon form, both handsome in a conventional way. But it has not been a runaway sales success, restricted by both a limited dealership network and the difficulty of getting noticed in a crowded marketplace. The Aerio is more likely to get noticed.
If it's hard to place the Suzuki Aerio when looking at it, it's even harder to label after driving it.
The 2.0-liter engine revs past its 5700 rpm power peak with unabashed eagerness. It's not as smooth as a Honda, but it's never harsh, and it pulls strongly with the 5-speed manual transmission. That's in part due to the relatively light 2668 lb curb weight, about the same as the standard Matrix and about 100 lbs more than the Focus XR3.
Aerio uses what the modern compact front-drive layout, its four-cylinder engine mounted transversely. The engine is the J18A from the Esteem (complete with maintenance-free camshaft drive chains that won't have to be replaced at 60,000 miles or so), enlarged to 2 liters, with an elongated intake manifold and larger catalyst and muffler for easier breathing.
The standard 2-liter engine in the Aerio produces 141 bhp, eleven more than the base 1.8-liter Toyota engine or Focus ZX3/5 engine. The automatic transmission sapped some of the energy from the Suzuki engine, as it does from any small engine, making standing-starts feel slower. Suzuki claims comparative tests it commissioned proved that with automatics, the Aerio was faster than its rivals. Remarkably, the automatic surrenders little in the fuel economy department, identical in city driving and only on mpg shy on the highway.
So the Aerio can hold its own at the mini crossover drags. How about the twisties? It feels a bit softly sprung, actually, with not quite enough roll resistance. It leans in corners, a feeling exaggerated by the Aerio's high seating position, and the Yokohama Geolandar tires squeal with little provocation. Suzuki gave us the opportunity to drive a sport-tuned SX with firmer roll resistance and sport tires on a race track and it was ferocious. No doubt the aftermarket will make a similar suspension available, but we think Suzuki, king of the sport bikes, should produce cars with sporty suspensions on their own. Here the Matrix and Focus have an edge.
The Aerio SX is perfectly suited for day-to-day driving chores, however, with a fully independent strut-type suspension soaking up the bumps and grinds of daily driving. The struts have layered valves for progressive shock damping, allowing the suspension to soak up small bumps while stiffening for the big ones. The rear subframe mounted in rubber helps further isolate Aerio passengers from road shock and harshness. A chassis with variable thickness steel helps with rigidity from strength in the right places without unnecessary weight.
The manual shifter is smooth and quick, with a nice, tight pattern. Steering feedback is good. Even if the cornering limits aren't what an enthusiast would ask, there's good communication about what the tires are doing. Brakes are disc/drum but fully up to the task of stopping this lightweight vehicle.
The Aerio SX cruises quietly on the interstate. There's the usual ruffle of wind noise around the A-pillar (which incorporates a little corner window just like the old Ford AeroStars), but conversation or listening to the audio system is easy.
Not all areas of this great nation are served with a convenient Suzuki dealership, so buying one (and getting it serviced) may be an adventure, although Suzuki has plans to increase by half again its number of dealers.
Everyone who buys a Suzuki Aerio SX will do so for his or her own reason. Some will dig the funky styling, some will go for the utility of a wagon (or small SUV) combined with excellent fuel economy, while others will be paging through tuner catalogs, figuring out how to make the SX go faster than it already does. Some will wait until wait until fall 2002, when viscous-coupling all-wheel drive becomes available. It's best that buyers be extroverts, however, and not shy, because until there are a lot of Aerios on the road they will be drawing a lot of stares.


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Cameras stare across a forbidden desert, monitoring disputed territory in a conflict that is so bitter the opponents cannot even agree what to name it.
One side calls the struggle a war, with countless innocent lives in jeopardy.
The other side claims there are no victims.
And so, suspicious cameras peer and pan, alert for encroachment. Vigilant camouflaged monitors scan from atop hills or under innocuous piles of stones. They hang beneath highway culverts, probing constantly for a hated enemy. For some time — months, at least — these guardians have succeeded in staving off incursions across the sandy desolation.
That is, until technology changes yet again, shifting the advantage briefly from defense to offense.
When the enemy struck this time, their first move was to take out those guardian eyes.
Infiltrators arrived at dawn, under the glare of the rising sun. Several hundred little flying machines jetted through the air, skimming very low to the ground on gusts from whispering motors. Each device, no larger than a hummingbird, followed a carefully-scouted path toward its selected target, some stationary camera or sensor. The attackers even looked like native desert birds, in case they were spotted during those crucial last seconds.
Each little drone landed behind the target, in its blind spot, and unfolded wings that transformed into a high resolution graphics displays, depicting perfect false images of the same desert scene. Each robot inserted its illusion in front of the guardian lens — carefully, so as not to create a suspicious flicker. Other small spy-machines sniffed out camouflaged seismic sensors and embraced them gently, providing new cushioning that would mask the tremors to come.
The robotic attack, covering an area of more than a hundred square kilometers, took only eight minutes to complete. The desert now lay unwatched, undefended.
From over the horizon, giant vehicles started moving in. They converged along several roadways toward the same open area — seventeen quiet, hybrid-electric rigs... tractor trailers disguised as commercial cargo transports, complete with company holo-logos blazoned on their sides. But when their paths intersected at the chosen rendezvous, a more cryptic purpose revealed itself. Crews wearing dun-colored jumpsuits leaped from the cabs to start unlashing container sections. Auxiliary generators set to work. The air began to swirl with shimmering waves of exotic stench, as pungent volatiles gushed from storage tanks to fill pressurized vessels. Electronic consoles sprang to life, and hinged panels fell away from the trailers, revealing long, tapered objects that lay on slanted ramps.
With a steady whine, each cigar shape lifted its nose from horizontal to vertical, aiming skyward, while stabilizer fins popped open at the tail end. Shouts between the work crews grew more tense as a series of tightly coordinated countdowns commenced. There wouldn't be much time to spare before the enemy — sophisticated and wary — picked up enough clues and figured out what was going on.
Soon every missile was aimed... launch sequences engaged... and targets acquired. All they lacked were payloads.
Abruptly, a dozen figures emerged from an air conditioned van, wearing snug suits of shimmering material and garishly painted helmets. Each one carried a small satchel that hummed and whirred, pumping air to keep the suit cool. Several had trouble walking normally. Their gait seemed rubbery, as if both excited and anxious at the same time. One of the smaller figures even briefly skipped.
A dour-looking woman wearing a badge and a uniform awaited them, holding a clipboard. She confronted the tallest figure, whose helmet bore a motif of flames surrounding a screaming mouth.
"Name and scan," she demanded in a level tone of voice.
The helmet visor swiveled back, revealing a heavily tanned face, about thirty, with eyes the color of a cold sea.
"Hacker Sander," he said, as her clipboard automatically sought his left iris, reading its unique patterns to confirm his ID. "And yes," he continued. "I affirm that I'm doing this of my own free will. Can we get on with it?"
"Your permits seem to be in order," she replied, unhurriedly. "Your liability bond and waivers have been accepted. The government won't stand in your way."
The tall man shrugged, as if the statement was both expected and irrelevant. He flung the visor back down. There were other forces to worry about, more formidable than mere government. Forces who were desperate to prevent what was about to take place here.
At a signal, all of the suited figures rushed to ladders that launch crew members braced against the side of each rocket. Each hurried up the makeshift gantry and, slipping inside a narrow capsule, squirmed into the cramped couch with unconscious grace, having practiced the motions hundreds of times. Even the novices knew exactly what they were doing. What the dangers might be. The costs and the rewards.
Hatches slammed shut and hissed as they sealed. Muffled shouts could be heard as final preparations were completed.
The countdown for the first missile reached zero.
"Yeeeee-haw!" Hacker Sander shouted, before a violent kick of ignition flattened him against the airbed. He had done this several times before, yet the sheer ecstatic rush of this moment beat anything else on Earth.
Soon, he would no longer even be part of the Earth... for a little while.
Seconds passed amid a brutal shaking as the rocket clawed its way skyward. A mammoth hand seemed to plant itself on his chest and shove, expelling half the contents of his lungs in a moan of sweet agony. Friction heat and ionization licked the transparent nose cone just inches from his face. Shooting toward the heavens at Mach 15, he felt pinned, helplessly immobile... and completely omnipotent.
I'm a freaking god!
Somehow he drew enough breath to let out another cry — this time a shout of elated greeting as black space spread before the missile's bubble nose, flecked by a million glittering stars.
Back on the ground, the last rocket was gone. Frenetic cleanup efforts then began, even more anxious than setup had been. Reports from distant warning posts told of incoming flying machines, racing toward the launch site at high speed. Men and women sprinted back and forth across the scorched desert sand, packing up to depart before the enemy arrived.
Only the government official moved languidly, using computerized scanners, meticulously adding up the damage to vegetation, erodible soils, and tiny animals. It was pretty bad, but localized, without appreciable effect on endangered species. A reconditioning service had already been called for. Of course that would not satisfy everybody....
She handed over an estimated bill as the last team member revved his hybrid engine, impatient to be off.
"Aw, man!" he complained, reading the total. "Our club will barely break even on this launch!"
"Then pick a less expensive hobby," she replied, and stepped back as the driver gunned his truck, roaring away in a cloud of dust, incidentally crushing one more small barrel cactus enroute to the highway. The vigilant monitoring system in her clipboard noted this and made an addendum to the excursion society's final bill.
Sitting on the hood of her jeep, she waited for another "club" to arrive. One whose members were just as passionate as the rocketeers. Just as skilled and dedicated, even though both groups hated each other. Sensors announced they were near, coming fast from the west — radical environmentalists whose no-compromise aim was to preserve nature at all costs.
The official knew what to expect when they arrived, frustrated to find their opponents gone and two acres of precious desert singed. She was going to get another tongue-lashing for being "evenhanded" in a situation where so many insisted you could only choose sides.
Oh well, she thought. It takes a thick skin to work in government nowadays. Nobody thinks you matter much. They don't respect us like in the old days.
Looking up, she watched the last of the rocket contrails start to shear apart, ripped by stratospheric winds. For some reason it always tugged the heart. And while her intellectual sympathies lay closer to the eco-enthusiasts, a part of her deep inside thrilled each time she witnessed one of these launches. So ecstatic — almost orgiastic — and joyfully unrestrained.
"Go!" She whispered with a touch of secret envy toward the distant glitters, already arcing over the pinnacle of their brief climb and starting their long plummet toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Hacker Sander found out something was wrong, just after the stars blurred out.
New flames flickered around the edges of his heat shield, probing every crevice, seeking a way inside. These flickers announced the start of re-entry, one of the best parts of this expensive ride, when his plummeting capsule would shake and resonate, filling every blood vessel with more exhilaration than you could get anywhere this side of New Vegas. Some called this the new "superextreme hobby"... more dangerous than any other sport and much too costly for anybody but an elite to afford. That fact attracted some rich snobs, who bought tickets just to prove they could, and wound up puking in their respirators or screaming in terror during the long plunge back to Earth.
As far as Hacker was concerned, those fools only got what they deserved. The whole point of having money was to do stuff with it! And if you weren't meant to ride a rocket, you could always find a million other hobbies....
An alarm throbbed. He didn't hear it — his eardrums had been drugged and clamped to protect them during the flight. Instead, he felt the tremor through a small implant in his lower jaw. In a simple pulse code the computer told him.
"What?" Hacker shouted, though the rattle and roar of re-entry tore away his words. "To hell with that! I paid for a triple redundancy system —"
He stopped, realizing it was pointless to scream at the computer, which he had installed himself, after all.
"Call the pickup boats and tell them —"
"Override encryption! Send in the clear. Acknowledge!"
No answer came. The pulses in his jaw dissolved into a plaintive, juttering rhythm as sub-processors continued their mysterious crapout. Hacker cursed, pounding the wall of the capsule with his fist. Most amateur rocketeers spent years building their own sub-orbital craft, but Hacker had paid plenty for a "first class" pro model. Someone would answer for this incompetence!
Of course he'd signed waivers. Hacker would have little recourse under the International Extreme Sports Treaty. But there were fifty thousand private investigation and enforcement services on Earth. He knew a few that would bend the uniform ethics guidelines of the Cop Guild, if paid enough in advance.
"You are gonna pay for this!" He vowed, without knowing yet who should get the brunt of his vengeance. The words were only felt as raw vibrations in his throat. Even the sonic pickups in his mandible hit their overload set points and cut out, as turbulence hit a level matching any he had ever known... then went beyond. The angle of re-entry isn't ideal anymore, he realized. And these little sport-capsules don't leave much margin.
I could be a very rich cinder... any moment now.
The realization added a new dimension that had not been there during any of his previous amateur sub-orbital flights. One part of Hacker actually seemed to relish a novel experience, scraping each nerve with a howling veer past death. Another portion could not let go of the galling fact that somebody had goofed. He wasn't getting what he'd paid for.
The world still shook and harsh straps tugged his battered body when Hacker awoke. Only now the swaying, rocking motion seemed almost restful, taking him back to childhood, when his family used to "escape civilization" on their trimaran wingsail yacht, steering its stiff, upright airfoil straight through gusts that would topple most other wind-driven vessels.
"Idiots!" Hacker's father used to grumble, each time he veered the agile craft to avoiding colliding with some day-tripper who didn't grasp the concept of right-of-way. "The only ones out here used to be people like us, who were raised for this sort of thing. Now the robofacs make so much stuff, even fancy boats, and everybody's got so much free time. Nine billion damn tourists crowding everywhere. It's impossible to find any solitude!"
"The price of prosperity, dear," his mother would reply, more soft-heartedly. "At least everybody's getting enough to eat now. And there's no more talk of revolution."
"But look at the result! This mad craze for hobbies! Everybody's got to be an expert at something. The best at something! I tell you it was better when people had to work hard to survive."
"Except for people like us?"
"Exactly," Father had answered, ignoring his wife's arch tone. "Look how far we have to go nowadays, just to have someplace all to ourselves."
The old man's faith in rugged self-reliance extended to the name he insisted on giving their son. And Hacker inherited — along with about a billion New Dollars — the same quest. To do whatever it took to find someplace all his own.
As blurry vision returned, he saw that the space pod lay tilted more than halfway over to its side. It's not supposed to do that, he thought. It should float upright.
A glance to the left explained everything. Ocean surrounded the capsule, but part of the charred heat shield was snagged on a reef of coral branches and spikes that stretched far to the distance, filled with bright fish and undulating subsea vegetation. Nearby, he saw the parasail chute that had softened final impact. Only now, caught by ocean currents, it rhythmically tugged at Hacker's little refuge. With each surge, the bubble canopy plunged closer to a craggy coral outcrop. Soon it struck hard. He did not hear the resulting loud bang, but it made the implant in his jaw throb. Hacker winced, reflexively.
Fumbling, he released the straps and fell over, cringing in pain. That awful re-entry would leave him bruised for weeks. And yet...
And yet, I'll have the best story to tell. No one will be able to match it!
The thought made him feel so good, Hacker decided maybe he wouldn't take everything, when he sued whoever was responsible for the capsule malfunction. Providing the pickup boats came soon, that is.
The bubble nose struck coral again, rattling his bones. A glance told him a hard truth. Materials designed to withstand launch and re-entry stresses might not resist sharp impacts. An ominous crack began to spread.
Standard advice was to stay put and wait for pickup, but this place would be a coffin soon.
I better get out of here.
Hacker flipped his helmet shut and grabbed the emergency exit lever. A reef should mean an island's nearby. Maybe mainland. I'll hoof it ashore, borrow someone's phone, and start dishing out hell.
Only there was no island. Nothing lay in sight but more horrible reef.
Hacker floundered in a choppy undertow. The skin-suit was strong, and his helmet had been made of Gillstuff — semi-permeable to draw oxygen from seawater. The technology prevented drowning as currents kept yanking him down. But repeated hits by coral outcrops would turn him into hamburger meat soon.
Once, a wave carried him high enough to look around. Ocean, and more ocean. The reef must be a drowned atoll. No boats. No land. No phone.
Sucked below again, he glimpsed the space capsule, caught in a hammer-and-vice wedge and getting smashed to bits. I'm next, he thought, trying to swim for open water, but with each surge he was drawn closer to the same deadly site. Panic clogged his senses as he thrashed and kicked the water, fighting it like some overpowering enemy. Nothing worked, though. Hacker could not even hear his own terrified moans, though the jaw implant kept throbbing with clicks, pulses and weird vibrations, as if the sea had noticed his plight and now watched with detached interest.
Here it comes, he thought, turning away, knowing the next wave cycloid would smash him against those obdurate, rocky spikes.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp poke in the backside. Too early! Another jab, then another, struck the small of his back, feeling nothing like coral. His jaw ached with strange noise as someone or something started pushing him away from the coral anvil. In both panic and astonishment, Hacker whirled to glimpse a sleek, bottle-nosed creature interposed between him and the deadly reef, regarding him curiously, them moving to jab him again with a narrow beak.
This time, he heard his own moan of relief. A dolphin! He reached out for salvation... and after a brief hesitation, the creature let Hacker wrap his arms all around. Then it kicked hard with powerful tail flukes, carrying him away from certain oblivion.
Once in open water, he tried to keep up by swimming alongside his rescuer. But the cetacean grew impatient and resumed pushing Hacker along with its nose. Like hauling an invalid. Which he was, of course, in this environment.
Soon, two more dolphins converged from the left, then another pair from the right. They vocalized a lot, combining sonar clicks with loud squeals that resonated through the crystal waters. Of course Hacker had seen dolphins on countless nature shows, and even played tag with some once, on a diving trip. But soon he started noticing some strange traits shared by this group. For instance, these animals took turns making complex sounds, while glancing at each other or pointing with their beaks... almost as if they were holding conversations. He could swear they were gesturing toward him and sharing amused comments at his expense.
Of course it must be an illusion. Everyone knew that scientists had determined Truncatus dolphin intelligence. They were indeed very bright animals — about chimpanzee equivalent — but had no true, human-level speech of their own.
And yet, watching a mother lead her infant toward the lair of a big octopus, he heard the baby's quizzical squeaks alternate with slow repetitions from the parent. Hacker felt sure a particular syncopated popping meant octopus.
Occasionally, one of them would point its bulbous brow toward Hacker, and suddenly the implant in his jaw pulse-clicked like mad. It almost sounded like the code he had learned in order to communicate with the space capsule after his inner ears were clamped to protect them during flight. Hacker concentrated on those vibrations in his jaw, for lack of anything else to listen to.
His suspicions roused further when mealtime came. Out of the east there arrived a big dolphin who apparently had a fishing net snared around him! The sight provoked an unusual sentiment in Hacker — pity, combined with guilt over what human negligence had done to the poor animal. He slid a knife from his thigh sheath and moved toward the victim, aiming to cut it free.
Another dolphin blocked Hacker. "I'm just trying to help!" He complained, then stopped, staring as other members of the group grabbed the net along one edge. They pulled backward as the "victim" rolled round and round, apparently unharmed. The net unwrapped smoothly till twenty meters flapped free. Ten members of the pod then held it open while others circled behind a nearby school of mullet.
Beaters! Hacker recognized the hunting technique. They'll drive fish into the net! But how —
He watched, awed as the dolphins expertly cornered and snared their meal, divvied up the catch, then tidied up by rolling the net back around the original volunteer, who sped off to the east. Well I'm a blue-nosed gopher, he mused. Then one of his rescuers approached Hacker with a fish clutched in its jaws. It made offering motions, but then yanked back when he reached for it.
The jaw implant repeated a rhythm over and over. It's trying to teach me, he realized.
"Is that the pulse code for fish?" He asked, knowing water would carry his voice, but never expecting the creature to grasp spoken English.
To his amazement, the dolphin shook its head. No.
"Uh." He continued. "Does it mean food? Eat? Welcome stranger?"
An approving blat greeted his final guess, and the Tursiops flicked the mullet toward Hacker, who felt suddenly ravenous. He tore the fish apart, stuffing bits through his helmet's chowlock.
Welcome stranger? He pondered. That's mighty abstract for a dumb beast to say. Though I'll admit, it's friendly.
That day passed, and then a tense night that he spent clutching a sleeping dolphin by moonlight, while clouds of phosphorescent plankton drifted by. Fortunately, the same selective-permeability technology that enabled his helmet to draw oxygen from the sea also provided a trickle of fresh water, filling a small reservoir near his cheek. I've got to buy stock in this company, he thought, making a checklist for when he was picked up tomorrow.
Only pickup never came. The next morning and afternoon passed pretty much the same, without catching sight of land or boats. The world always felt so crowded, he thought. Now it seems endless and unexplored.
Hacker started earning his meals by helping hold the fishing net when the group harvested dinner. The second night he felt more relaxed, dozing while the dolphins' clickety gossip seemed to flow up his jaw and into his dreams. On the third morning, and each of those that followed, he felt he understood just a bit more of their simple language.
He lost track of how many days and nights passed. Slowly, Hacker stopped worrying about where the pickup boats could be. Angry thoughts about lawsuits and revenge rubbed away under relentless massaging by current and tide. Immersed in the dolphins' communal sound field, he began concerning himself instead with daily problems of the Tribe, like when two young males got into a fight, smacking each other with their beaks and flukes until adults had to forcibly separate them. Using both sign language and his growing vocabulary of click-code, Hacker learned that a female (whose complex name he shortened to "Chee-Chee") was in heat. The young brawlers held little hope of mating with her. Still, their nervous energy needed an outlet. At least no one had been seriously harmed.
An oldtimer — Kray-Kray — shyly presented a pectoral fin to Hacker, who used his knife to dig out several wormlike parasites. "You should see a real doctor," he urged, as if one gave verbal advice to dolphins every day.
Helpers go away, Kray-Kray tried to explain in click code. Fins need hands. Helper hands.
It supported Hacker's theory that something had been done to these creatures. An alteration that had made them distinctly different than others of their species. But what? The mystery grew each time he witnessed some behavior that just couldn't be natural.
Then, one day the whole Tribe grew excited, spraying nervous clicks everywhere. Soon Hacker saw they were approaching an undersea habitat dome hidden in a narrow canyon, near a coast where waves met shore.
Shore.... The word tasted strange after all these days — weeks? — spent languidly swimming, listening, and learning to enjoy raw fish. Time had different properties down here. It felt odd to contemplate leaving this watery realm, returning where he clearly belonged — the surface world of air, earth, cities, machines, and nine billion humans, forced to inhale each others' humid breath everywhere they went.
That's why we dive into our own worlds. Ten thousand hobbies. A million ways to be special, each person striving to be expert at some arcane art... like rocketing into space. Psychologists approved, saying that frenetic amateurism was a much healthier response than the most likely alternative — war. They called this the "Century of Aficionados," a time when governments and professional societies could not keep up with private expertise, which spread at lightning speed across the WorldNet. A renaissance, lacking only a clear sense of purpose.
The prospect of soon rejoining that culture left Hacker pensive. What's the point of so much obsessive activity, unless it leads toward something worthwhile?
The dolphins voiced a similar thought in their simple but expressive click-language.
# If you're good at diving — dive for fish! #
# If you have a fine voice — sing for others! #
# If you're great at leaping — bite the sun! #
Hacker knew he should clamber up the nearby beach now to call his partners and brokers. Tell them he was alive. Get back to business. But instead he followed his new friends to the hidden habitat dome. Maybe I'll learn what's been done to them, and why.
Swimming under and through a portal pool, he was surprised to find the place deserted. No humans anywhere. Finally, Hacker saw a hand-scrawled sign.
Project Uplift Suspended!
We ran out of cash. Court costs ate everything.
This structure is deeded to our finned friends.
Be nice to them.
May they someday join us as equals.
There followed a WorldNet access number, verifying that the little dolphin clan actually owned this building, which they now used to store their nets, toys and a few tools. But Hacker knew from their plaintive calls the real reason they kept coming back. Each time they hoped to find that their "hand-friends" had returned.
Unsteady on rubbery legs, he crept from the pool to look in various chambers. Laboratories, mostly. In one, he recognized a gene-splicing apparatus made by one of his own companies.
Project Uplift? Oh yes. I remember hearing about this.
It had been featured in the news, a year or two ago. Both professional and amateur media had swarmed over a small group of "kooks" whose aim was to alter several animal species, giving them human-level intelligence. Foes of all kinds had attacked the endeavor. Religions called it sacrilegious. Eco-enthusiasts decried meddling in Nature's wisdom. Tolerance-fetishists demanded that native dolphin "culture" be left alone, while others rifkined the proposal, predicting mutants would escape the labs to endanger humanity. One problem with diversity in an age of amateurs was that your hobby might attract ire from a myriad others, especially those whose particular passion was indignant disapproval, with a bent for litigation.
This "Uplift Project" could not survive the rough-and-tumble battle that ensued. A great many modern endeavors didn't.
Survival of the fittest, he mused. An enterprise this dramatic and controversial has to attract strong support, or it's doomed.
He glanced back at the pool, where members of the Tribe had taken up a game of water polo, calling fouls and shouting at each other as they batted a ball from one goal to the next, keeping score with raucous sonar clicks.
Hacker wondered. Would the "uplift" changes carry through from one generation to the next? Could this new genome spread among wild dolphins? If so, might the project have already succeeded beyond its founders' dreams, or its detractors' worst nightmare?
What if the work resumed, finishing what got started here? Would it enrich our lives to argue philosophy with a dolphin? Or to collaborate with a smart chimp, at work or at play? If other species speak and start creating new things, will they be treated as equals — as co-members of our civilization — or as the next discriminated class?
Some critics were probably right. For humans to attempt such a thing would be like an orphaned and abused teen trying to foster a wild baby. There were bound to be mistakes and tragedies along the way.
Are we good enough? Wise enough? Do we deserve such power?
It wasn't the sort question Hacker used to ask himself. He felt changed by his experience at sea. At the same time, he realized that just asking the question was part of the answer.
Maybe it'll work both ways. They say you only grow while helping others.
His father would have called that "romantic nonsense." And yet...
Exploring one of the laboratories, Hacker found a cheap but working phone that someone had left behind — then had to work at a lab bench for an hour, modifying it to tap the sonic implant in his jaw. He was about to call his manager and broker — before they had a chance to declare him dead and start liquidating his empire. But then Hacker stopped.
He paused, then keyed the code for his lawyer instead.
At first Gloria Bickerton could not believe he survived. She wouldn't stop shouting with joy. I didn't know anyone liked me that much, he mused, carrying the phone back to the dome's atrium. He arrived in time to witness the water polo game conclude in a frothy finale.
"Before you arrange a pickup, there's something I want you to do for me," he told Gloria, after she calmed down. Hacker gave her the WorldNet codes for the Uplift Project, and asked her to find out everything about it, including the current disposition of its assets and technology — and how to contact the experts whose work had been interrupted here.
Gloria asked him why. He started to reply.
"I think I've come up with a new..."
Hacker stopped there, having almost said the word hobby. But suddenly he realized that he had never felt this way about anything before. Not even the exhilaration of rocketry. For the first time he burned with a real ambition. Something worth fighting for.
In the pool, several members of the Tribe were now busy winding their precious net around the torso of the biggest male, preparing to go foraging again. Hacker overheard them gossiping as they worked, and chuckled when he understood one of their crude jokes. A good natured jibe at his expense.
Well, a sense of humor is a good start. Our civilization could use more of that.
"I think —" He resumed telling his lawyer.
"I think I know what I want to do with my life."
David Brin's bold newest novel EXISTENCE explores the ultimate question: Billions of planets may be ripe for life, even intelligence. So where is Everybody? Do civilizations make the same fatal mistakes, over and over? Might we be the first to cross the mine-field, evading every trap to learn the secret of EXISTENCE?
"Aficionado" takes you on a wild rocket ride — the new sport of the super-rich in 2050. Hacker Sander is spoiled, temperamental and a champion rock-jock, expert at the game of Space War... till a crash landing throws him into lethal peril.
Originally published as "Life in the Extreme" by Popular Science Magazine Special Edition, 8/1998. Copyright © 1998 by David Brin. All rights reserved.
Amazon.com US: paperback and Kindle ebook and audiobook (unabridged)
Amazon.ca Canada: paperback and Kindle ebook
Amazon.co.uk UK: paperback and Kindle ebook
Amazon.de Germany: Existenz (German-language paperback) and Existenz (German-language Kindle ebook)
Apple iTunes US: Existence iBook (English-language edition) and Existenz ibook (German-language edition) and Existence audiobook (English-language edition)
Barnes and Noble US: paperback and Nook ebook
indiebound.org US: paperback
Kobo.com US: ebook
Mysterious Galaxy San Diego: paperback and (Kobo) ebook and audiobook (unabridged)
Powell's US: paperback (English-language) and Existenz (German-language paperback)
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins
Warcross, by Marie Lu
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow, by Tad Williams
The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse
Split Infinity, by Piers Anthony
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Otherworld, by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
David Brin's science fiction novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. At least a dozen have been translated into more than twenty languages. They range from bold and prophetic explorations of our near-future to Brin's Uplift series, envisioning galactic issues of sapience and destiny (and star-faring dolphins!).
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Short stories and novellas have different rhythms and artistic flavor, and Brin's short stories and novellas, several of which earned Hugo and other awards, exploit that difference to explore a wider range of real and vividly speculative ideas. Many have been selected for anthologies and reprints, and most have been published in anthology form.
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Since 2004, David Brin has maintained a blog about science, technology, science fiction, books, and the future — themes his science fiction and nonfiction writings continue to explore.
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Who could've predicted that social media — indeed, all of our online society — would play such an important role in the 21st Century — restoring the voices of advisors and influencers! Lively and intelligent comments spill over onto Brin's social media pages.
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David Brin's Ph.D in Physics from the University of California at San Diego (the lab of nobelist Hannes Alfven) followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech. Every science show that depicts a comet now portrays the model developed in Brin's PhD research.
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Brin's non-fiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?, continues to receive acclaim for its accuracy in predicting 21st Century concerns about online security, secrecy, accountability and privacy.
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Brin speaks plausibly and entertainingly about trends in technology and society to audiences willing to confront the challenges that our rambunctious civilization will face in the decades ahead. He also talks about the field of science fiction, especially in relation to his own novels and stories. To date he has presented at more than 200 meetings, conferences, corporate retreats and other gatherings.
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Brin advises corporations and governmental and private defense- and security-related agencies about information-age issues, scientific trends, future social and political trends, and education. Urban Developer Magazine named him one of four World's Best Futurists, and he was appraised as "#1 influencer" in Onalytica's Top 100 report of Artificial Intelligence influencers, brands & publications. Past consultations include Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and many others.
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