European Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) Conference ECAP'07

University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, June 21-23, 2007

Program Chair: Philip Brey
Local organisation: Katinka Waelbers, k.waelbers@utwente.nl

More information: http://www.utwente.nl/ecap07/

Submission of extended abstracts January 29, 2007

PROGRAM
The conference will deal with all aspects of the "computational turn" that is occurring through the interaction of the disciplines of philosophy and computing.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: TBA

RELEVANT RESEARCH AREAS
We welcome presentations that cover one or more of the following topics pertaining to computing and philosophy:

• Philosophy of Computer Science
• Computer-based Learning and Teaching Strategies and Resources & The Impact of Distance Learning on the Teaching of Philosophy and Computing
• Biological Information, Artificial Life, Biocomputation
• Philosophy of Information and Information Technology
• Ontology
• Computational and Post-Computational Approaches to the Mind.
• Information and Computing Ethics
• IT and Globalization
• IT, Gender and Cultural Diversity
• Robotics
• Open Source and Usability
• Simulation and Virtual Reality
• Computer-Mediated Communication
• The Relation between Psychology and Psychometrics
• Intersections

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
Authors should submit an electronic version of an extended abstract (total word count approximately 1000 words). The extended abstract submission deadline is Monday 29th January 2007. More information about submitting abstracts will be issued in the next, official call for papers, or contact the local organizer, Katinka Waelbers, k.waelbers@utwente.nl.

VENUE

The University of Twente is located in Enschede, a beautiful town just a short train ride from the main airport in Amsterdam. The University of Twente is an entrepreneurial research university. It was founded in 1961 and offers education and research in areas ranging from public policy studies and applied physics to biomedical technology. The UT is the Netherlands' only campus university.


E-CAP conferences are organized under the supervision of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP)

Freebies

I'm still in the upgrade/renovating mood...

so here is another good list of "101 Fabulous Freebies" (just click on the title of this blog).

ATLAS

Members of the NYU Experimental High Energy Physics group who will be working on this project include Professors Peter Nemethy and Allen Mincer, and researchers Rashid Djilkibaev, Rostislav Konoplich, Christopher Musso, and Long Zhao.

The Atlas collaboration, which includes 1800 physicists from 150 institutions in 35 countries, will measure collisions between bunches of protons occurring 40 million times a second. The LHC, which is being built in a 27 kilometer circumference tunnel and which upon completion will be the world's highest energy accelerator, will speed up and steer counter-rotating proton bunches so that they collide in the center of the ATLAS detector. The debris of the collisions reveals the nature of fundamental particle processes and may also contain as-yet undiscovered particles. The energy density in these high energy collisions is similar to that of the early universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Among other studies, ATLAS will search for the Higgs particle, which is the only predicted particle of the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has yet to be detected. The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes the universe in terms of its fundamental particles and the forces between them. The project will also seek to detect a host of new particles not described in the Standard Model of Particle Physics but predicted by many Beyond the Standard Model theories such as Supersymmetry.

The NYU physicists will contribute to the endeavor by developing a method for culling collisions relevant to their investigation from the large number occurring. At about 2 Mega Bytes of information per event, storing 40 million bunch-crossings per second would require one thousand 80 gigabyte disks (the size of a hard disk on a typical personal computer) per second. As it is not possible to deal with so much data, ATLAS uses three stages of storing and discarding collisions that ultimately lets the researchers store about one out of 200,000 events. The NYU team is currently focusing on one property of these interactions that allows separation of meaningful from insignificant collisions.

Source: New York University

New website: www.philosophyofinformation.net

Maybe is the season... after the laptop, now the website. It's done, but it has taken some effort to decide which hosting service was offering the best and most reliable deal. Not to speak reorganizing directories, archives, 301 (thank you Matteo!), and this blog.

It seems that there is no service equivalent to http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/ where customers can compare comprehensive and updated evaluations. In the end, most of the charts and lists are biased, cheating, incomplete, whimsical or a bit of each.

Here are some (only some) of the parameters one may wish to keep in mind:

• price (of course)
• space (GB are given away for a few dollars, Yahoo Business, for example, is overpriced)
• traffic limit (again, one should be looking at hundreds of GB monthly)
  
• how long the web hosting service has been in business (did it manage to survive through the dot com earthquake?)
  
• free (first year) domain registration
  
• variety of plans (in case one wishes to upgrade)
• tools like MySQL or PHP (in case one wishes to do fancier things).
  

In the end, I opted for IX Web Hosting . After several comparison it really came out as the best option. And so far their service has been impeccable. I hope it stays that way.