by netage | General |
Alive and well
The inside of a gray office building located in downtown Vienna Austria is busy with 24/7 hacktivity. The “hacker space” called Metalab is filled with people constantly searching security gaps in servers of major corporations and governments and informing them about their vulnerability. The hackers are also involved making Wi-Fi accessible to communities to connect, develop, communicate and prosper.
Metalab is non-profit org made up of a group of approximately 100 volunteers working day and night to promote open source software and defend freedom on the Internet. They are a new generation of hackers who continue good work originated by Net evangelists.
They are currently working on routing systems to by-pass a proposed French law called Adopi 2. The legislation is trying to set government surveillance of emails, chat rooms and instant messaging suspected of piracy and violation of “intellectual property”. The law is not clear and deceptive and allows authorities to spy on unsuspecting French citizens. Metalab interprets the law as a corporatist subversion of the government and the Internet. They suspect that government is working on behalf of corporatist interests to eventually control the Internet. Furthermore, the French government is seen as the front runner in such legislation and may set an example for other countries to follow.
Hacker Tribes
Until 2000 hackers used to work alone or in groups found on university campuses. Since then, new tribal “hacker spaces” have flourished all over the world. It is estimated that there are 200 “hacker spaces” currently working and another 170 in working progress in more than 50 different countries. The founders of Metalab have also set up a web page Hackerspaces.org that has become a virtual Mecca for hackers
Original story; “Les Nouvelles Tribus de Net”, by Yves Eudes, LeMonde.fr
by netage | General |
Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85
by Jascha Hoffman, New York Times
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed the field of fractal geometry and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.
Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.
“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”
In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”
For most of his career, Dr. Mandelbrot had a reputation as an outsider to the mathematical establishment. From his perch as a researcher for I.B.M. in New York, where he worked for decades before accepting a position at Yale University, he noticed patterns that other researchers may have overlooked in their own data, then often swooped in to collaborate…
When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.
“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”
Also
The Misbehavior of Markets,
A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, Yale.edu, getAbstract
“Fractals and Multifractals
A fractal is a pattern that repeats itself in larger or smaller scale. Consider a fern frond,
for example, or a coastline, or a stock market price chart. A fern leaf looks like a fern
frond. A hundred yards of coastline looks like a hundred miles of coastline. A chart
of stock prices for one day looks like a chart of stock prices for ten years. Fractal
mathematics offers the promise of devising:
• Better tools for investment analysis — Individual stocks may manifest unique fractal
patterns in their price charts — as distinctive as fi ngerprints.
• Superior portfolios — Portfolios can be developed that are better than those derived
through modern portfolio theory. As noted above, conventional thinking about
fi nance assumes that stock prices incorporate all relevant information. It assumes
that prices move randomly. It assumes other things that are clearly at variance with
facts. A new approach would involve, for example, much more extensive stress tests
over a much wider range of possible outcomes.
• Better option valuation models — The “holes” in Black-Scholes, the most widely
accepted option-pricing model, have been the subject of much debate. The holes have
been patched repeatedly, but the patches are wearing thin.
• Risk management models — Assumptions of randomness, normal probability distributions
and so forth underlie many of the risk management models used by international
bankers and regulators. Extensive reliance upon such inadequate models
actually makes the fi nancial world a much more dangerous place.
