Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Predators 'drove human evolution'
The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is wrong, researchers have told a major US science conference. 
Instead, they argue, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts.
This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory.
Despite humankind's considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.
James Rilling, at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation.
He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.
From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding; people reacted negatively when partners did not co-operate.
Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment.
Man 'the hunted'
By contrast, our closest relatives - chimpanzees - have been shown not to come to the aid of others, even when it would pose no cost to themselves.
"Our intelligence, co-operation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator," said Robert Sussman of Washington University in St Louis.
According to the theory espoused by Professor Sussman, early humans evolved not as hunters but as prey for animals such as wild dogs, cats, hyenas, eagles and crocodiles.
He points to the example of one ape-like species thought to be ancestral to humans, Australopithecus afarensis.
A. afarensis was what is known as an "edge species"; it could live in trees and on the ground, and could take advantage of both.
"Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," Professor Sussman explained.
Hard target
Dr Agustin Fuentes at the University of Notre Dame agrees with the predation hypothesis.
He believes early humans were subject to several evolutionary pressures, including predation.
But he also thinks they were expending more energy at this time and that child-rearing became more demanding.
All these factors contributed to an emergence of sociable behaviour in hominids that made them harder targets for predators.
Dr Fuentes points to fossil evidence of predation in two different groups of humanlike species: Australopithecus and Paranthropus.
The latter group, it appears, could not adapt to pressures such as predation, and became extinct between one and 1.2 million years ago.
The scientists outlined their work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St Louis, US.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4729050.stm
What Do You Want in a Job Website?
source:http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/06/02/21/0152242.shtml
Preview: Tom's Hardware takes a first look at AMD's AM2 platform
Westlake Village (CA) - 2006 is on track to become the most interesting year for the processor industry since the end of the Gigahertz race. With Intel prepping a new architecture and AMD set to defend its lead with its AM2 platform, customers should see a wave of innovation that goes well beyond clock speed. Tom's Hardware got a first impression of the capability of the AM2 platform.
In a seemingly effortless way, AMD has been able to counter virtually every single one of Intel's attempts to regain desktop performance leadership with its current product generation. The Athlon's architecture provided AMD everything it needed to achieve not only more performance and less heat dissipation, but also more credibility in new customer segments which increasingly soak up AMD's products, according to recent analyst reports.
While Intel will be answering later this year with its Merom/Conroe processors, AMD officially says that the introduction of its AM2 platform and DDR2 memory support in the second quarter of this year will be able to maintain its current lead. Unofficially, we know that AMD will launch six dual-core and two single-core AM2 processors on June 6 - later than initially expected but well in time for Intel's Conroe, which will be introduced in September. Tom's Hardware got its hands on a stable engineering sample of an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ for Socket AM2 and will publish benchmark results as first as a first impression of the new Socket and processors tomorrow.
However, it is clear that Socket AM2 is not just about performance, at least not until the arrival of DDR2-800 in the mainstream market. With current DDR2-667 memory, very little improvement should be expected as the integrated memory controller suffers from relaxed memory timings. It is rather performance-per-watt, which will determine the overall performance capability of most future processors.
According to our sources, AMD will be able to match Intel's 65 watt promise for mainstream desktop processors. While regular Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors are expected to stay in an 89 watt power envelope, there will be five low-power X2 models with a thermal design power of 65 watt as well. Even more impressive, AMD will drop the power consumption of the Athlon 64 3500+ and 3800+ single-core CPUs to 35 watts.
Read the complete first look at the AM2 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ engineering sample here.
source:http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/20/toms_hardware_amd2_preview/
Court Upholds Dual Patent/Copyright Protection for Software
Aharonian v. Gonzales (N.D.Cal. 2006).
Although he operates primarily through an e-mail list rather than through a website, Greg Aharonian is the honorary trailblazer for today’s intellectual property law blogs (including Patently-O). He is also an activist.
In a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Government, Aharonian requested a declaratory judgment that copyright law cannot be applied to sourcecode.
Specifically, Aharonian hopes to build a powerful database of sourcecode to be used as a prior art repository — but does not want to be held liable for copyright infringement. In a challenge to the statute, Aharonian argued that computer code is entirely made up of “algorithms” and “data structures,” both of which are uncopyrightable “ideas” or “processes” and additionally that the vague language of the Copyright Act is insufficient to support sourcecode copyrights. (And raised other arguments).
Standing: With any DJ action, there is often a question of standing. Here Aharonian was able to show that he was suffering a specific economic harm under the law (inability to build his database) and that economic harm, according to the court, was sufficient to establish standing.
This is not to say that all allegations of economic harm related to copyright law will be sufficient to meet the constitutional requirements for standing. For example, the mere assertion of a desire to copy, with no showing of an actual past or future business practice or actual economic benefit from copying, would not suffice. Here, however, plaintiff has an existing business which involves searching for potentially copyrighted prior art, and he has made a credible argument that incorporating (i.e. copying) such material into an automated search tool would result in additional profits.
Software as Math: The Aharonian machine will apparently transform computer code into a standardized logic framework and store that framework. The court used that pont to avoid addressing the question head-on:
It would be unwise indeed for this court to make sweeping general pronouncements about the nature of software or the relationship between patent and copyright law, particularly where making such a pronouncement would have no clear effect on plaintiff’s ability to create his proposed database.
The court did take pains to distinguish patent and copyright cases — thus predicting their conclusion that both forms of protection are available for software:
A declaration that software consists entirely of “ideas”—data structures and algorithms—has no bearing on the applicability of copyright law to software source code, which, like all copyrightable material, is a particular written expression of ideas. . . . In sum, if plaintiff copies source code that is protected by copyright law, he infringes the copyright regardless of whether the ideas underlying the source code are patentable. Conversely, if plaintiff independently creates software that is functionally identical to other software, he does not infringe any copyright on the other software’s source code, even if his independently created source code is nearly identical to the copyrighted source code.
Vague Statute: On the issues of vagueness, the court essentially found that prior controlling precedent had interpreted the scope of the statute — leaving no room for the district court to hold otherwise.
Dismissed. The case is now on appeal.
Links:
source:http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2006/02/court_upholds_d.html
