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So you're saying Americans weren't celebrating the death of 350000 Japanese civilians that resulting from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima? There's plenty of citations in this paper that suggest otherwise.

The change in policy stems from good mathematics, namely good statistics. Where the number of people who are subjected to a test may suffer from one of two failures,

a) false negative - that is the test fails to detect the presence of a disease and thus incorrectly reports a negative results, and
b) false positive, the test incorrectly reports a positive result, but the disease is not actually present.

The problem is that with a large pool of test population and a small affected sub-population, the misleading results are counter-intuitive, and can end up causing more harm (otherwise healthy individuals undergoing unnecessary biopsies, radiation, and chemotherapy increase mortality rate) to the overall population.

See The dangers of false positives by Dr. Dave Richeson, don't take my word on it.

So mind-numbingly wrong. Why do you think satellite dishes must be painstakingly aimed in the proper direction? Try listening through a parabolic amplifier (those dishes spies use) and see how quickly the volume drops off if you point it off the mark. You'd think more parabolas would show up in nature if they had the magical focus-making properties you think they do. I somewhat suspect you also meant your two ALWAYS assertions in a way that's mutually contradictory.

So, please meditate on this applet:
http://users.dickinson.edu/~richesod/focalpoint/

Since the only case where a parabola fixes the focus is when the incoming rays are parallel to its axis (meaning the sun could only move toward and away from the face of the building), this makes the original poster's distance from being right more in the range of "hardly at all".

In fact, rays that are not parallel to the axis don't even converge into a focal point:

http://users.dickinson.edu/~richesod/focalpoint/

Sheesh, around here it seems like people think "parabolic dish" means "magic focus-maker".

Those aren't regular sheep, they're electric sheep!

This would be funnier if it was Android phones doing this rather than iPhones.

This might be a good resource. Speak with others via Skype. The internet limitations themselves might be hurdles, but its worth a shot.

Back when I was at CalTech in the early 80's (studying physics myself), a friend named Scott Lewicki, and his friend Doug Priest got David Politzer to record a rap song called The Simple Harmonic Oscillator Rap.

Google doesn't find me an MP3 of it, but the lyrics are in this PDF document. Search in the text of the document for "Politzer" and you'll find the lyrics.

You can purchase it on a CD called Physics Pholk Songs for $15.00.

Here's the first verse:

I want to talk today about things that shake,
And I hope my words aren't too opaque.
One degree of freedom moving to and fro,
Just how it moves, we'd like to know.
We can represent all kinds of things
By a single mass between ideal springs.
Each spring's connected to a wall.
So the outer ends don't move at all.

Keep in mind that UTD is not the only educational institution that has banned WAP. Dickinson College http://lis.dickinson.edu/AboutLIS/Policies/wireles s.htm here in Pennsylvania is, I imagine, one of many others. It may be a small little place, but we should be just as worried. It would be a shame if the enforcement of it's WAP policy were to be used as precedent. Yes, it violates federal law, but I'm not sure how much it would take to convince the FCC (either current or Kerry's) that the college was right and law had to be changed... Does anyone know of other institutions that have violated this law?

Yup my small liberal arts college (Dickinson College) did not have a wireless network to use unless you loaned a school owned ibook. In this case it would only work in the library plus you had to return it after 3 hours. The library wireless was mac address locked down so you could not use it with your own computer. They also banned us bringing our own wireless access points. Oh and they used this http://lis.dickinson.edu/AboutLIS/Policies/wireles s.htm/ really ridiculous wireless policy saying that it was impossible to secure wireless internet access for use on a campus network.

The point is this woman is anything but some money-grubbing whatever. She is a clever early-adopter who figured out a way to let her hobby pay for itself and then some.