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That is not the only exemption, I believe 1201 f should apply as it is providing the information to allow the PS3 OS software to inter-operate with the software generating homebrew images.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html#f

IANAL

So they started with a year based on 260 day years, the so called Tzolkin calendar. If now you went "wait, that can't be right, it would skip through the actual year like crazy", congrats, you'd be smarter than the Mayans.

The most obvious answer is that it was not used for a solar year, but had some other significance. 260 days is simply the time that it takes for two short cycles, the 13 day trecena and the 20 day veintena, to start on the same day again (the least common multiple of 20 and 13 is 260). The significance of the number 13 also forms the basis for the 2012 apocalypse calculation, because it is the end of the 13th baktun. [1]

All that happens in 2012 or 2013 is the end of a baktun. Yes, it's not even millennialism. The piktun (base-20 millenium) won't end for another couple thousand years or so.

Why do apocalypses have to happen at the end of millennia? A baktun is still almost 400 years, a good chunk of time. The length of this apocalyptic worry is also about on the same time scale as others. 13 baktuns is about 5126 years. Many christian apocalyptic predictions say that the Earth will end 6000-7000 years after its creation [2]. (Using Ussher's date of the start of the world at the 22nd of Oct. 4004 BCE, the world would have ended in 1996.) [3]

That scare isn't even like Y2K, it's more like being scared of the rollover from 699 AD to 700 AD. I mean, WTF, it's not even running out of digits or anything.

Y2K was the rollover from 1999 CE to 2000 CE, it only had rollover problems because of using two digits for dates, which would have been a problem for any century.

"now I am shallow in many ways and I accept it, because this shallowness is a part of human nature."

For those who are interested... see demonstrations tests for unconscious bias.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html

"now I am shallow in many ways and I accept it, because this shallowness is a part of human nature."

For those who are interested... see demonstrations tests for unconscious bias.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html

But suddenly, when companies come under a DDoS that terminated business and froze funds of an organization that fights FOR more transparency and freedom of information, a DDoS becomes an attack on the freedom of speech.

No, this is just a case of a Computerworld 'journalist' editorialising and drawing false equivalencies between the DDoS attacks on WikiLeaks and other human rights organisations and those conducted by Anonymous. The Actual Report explicitly does not discuss the banks:

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer. In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack. Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.

TL;DR: The Berkman report is talking only about the stifling effect of DDoS attacks on alternative media and human right organisations. Banks don't come into it at all -except in the fevered imaginations of certain 'tech journalism' hacks.

Um, what human rights groups are being assaulted by DDoS attacks? The article mentions only a few groups, and the closest things to human rights groups in that list are a Vietnamese environmental protest group and a Russian independent newspaper. And honestly, I can think of a dozen things off the top of my head that could get a group DDoS'd when dealing with Russia.

So I went and skimmed the actual report discussed by the article. (No, I didn't read all 66 pages of it.) It doesn't seem to reference any groups other than those mentioned in the article.

I have no doubt that DDoS attacks can be a threat to human rights sites, but so far I don't see any.

And I am having a hard time avoiding the conclusion that the article is deliberately conflating the pro-WikiLeaks attacks with attacks on "human rights."

I think the voters could have been been educated to realize that tax cuts for millionaires would be bad for everyone else.

Either you are naive or you want to steal, and what gives you the right to steal from the wealthy? As a matter of fact the wealthy pay more taxes in the US than others. On 14 May 2010 Roshawn Watson posted the question Do The Rich Pay Their Fair Share Of Taxes? He then answers by linking to and using numbers from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculations in Spreading the Wealth Around: Reflections on Joe the Plumber [pdf]. The bottom 1/5 of the population in income, the poorest in other words, pay 4.5% of their income in taxes. The middle 1/5 pays 13.9%. And the top 1/5 pays 31.1%. If you want "fair taxes" those percentages should be the same, in other words after cost of living is deducted everyone pays the same percent of their income in income tax.

The wealthy get caps on social security taxes, and get a LOT more influence with the government than the average person. I'm one of several hundred thousand constituents that are supposedly represented by my congressman. I'm not going to get to have a lunch meeting with him. He'll make time for a wealthy person that can contribute either more money or some other benefit to him. The wealthy have the kind of access and ability to influence government policies that the rest of us do not. They're obviously benefiting the most from the way things are being done as well, as their wealth keeps growing while the rest of the country's wealth remains flat or declines.

Harvard has need based financial aid. If the family makes less than $60k/yr then tuition is covered. From $60k-$120k its 0-10% of family income, while $120k-$180k its 10% of income. This is all in grants not loans so no money has to be paid back.

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&pageid=icb.page248616

Seems a little invasive, but no more so than other need based loans.

Roughly the same formulae are used across the Ivy League. On top of that, it's quite negotiable. Getting into multiple Ivies does wonders because they're willing to compete very aggressively for you. My costs went from $10k/year to $2k/year thanks to faxing an offer from another school and a ten minute phone conversation.

Harvard has need based financial aid. If the family makes less than $60k/yr then tuition is covered. From $60k-$120k its 0-10% of family income, while $120k-$180k its 10% of income. This is all in grants not loans so no money has to be paid back.

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&pageid=icb.page248616

Seems a little invasive, but no more so than other need based loans.

The Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult Development studied groups of men since the 1940s. The only correlation the study could find with anything was personal relationships.
http://adultdev.bwh.harvard.edu/research-SAD.html

Men with good relationships in childhood and young adulthood did better in almost every facet of their lives than did those with poor relationships: income, social status, marital status, health, etc. etc.

There are also lots of studies that show that, once employees meet the minimum qualifications and are hired, their performance has nothing to do with where they graduated, their marks, their IQ or any additional degrees they have. The big thing is their interpersonal relationships.

Of course, this is Slashdot, populated with geeks and nerds, so I don't expect that most of those reading this will believe it; sigh.

I think the voters could have been been educated to realize that tax cuts for millionaires would be bad for everyone else.

Either you are naive or you want to steal, and what gives you the right to steal from the wealthy? As a matter of fact the wealthy pay more taxes in the US than others. On 14 May 2010 Roshawn Watson posted the question Do The Rich Pay Their Fair Share Of Taxes? He then answers by linking to and using numbers from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculations in Spreading the Wealth Around: Reflections on Joe the Plumber [pdf]. The bottom 1/5 of the population in income, the poorest in other words, pay 4.5% of their income in taxes. The middle 1/5 pays 13.9%. And the top 1/5 pays 31.1%. If you want "fair taxes" those percentages should be the same, in other words after cost of living is deducted everyone pays the same percent of their income in income tax.

They also mention what Warren Buffet said about his secretary paying more in taxes than he pays. His income is from dividends and capital gains which is taxed at 15% whereas making $60,000 his secretary was taxed at 30%. Now if the secretary had income from dividends and capital gains, and if not then why has s/he not invested some pay as well, the secretary would pay the same percent on that income. Also what Buffet did not say is that he pays more in taxes than he let's on. When the CBO included the taxes Berkshire Hathaway, Buffet is the biggest shareholder, pays such as individual income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate income taxes his tax burden is higher.

Falcon

Generally these sorts of "clicker" activities are not designed for testing (though of course they could be used for that purpose). Rather they are an attempt to engage to audience in some participatory activities that from an educational standpoint are hoping to encourage the participant to be in a more "active learning" mode rather than the "passive learning" mode that is common in a lecture situation.

Generally speaking, humans learn more efficiently when they actively participate in activities that incorporate newly desired knowledge into their existing frameworks. Thus the popularity among educators of "project based learning", "workshop" models of instruction and other hands-on types of programs. These types of programs however tend to scale linearly - twice as many students require twice as many instructors and other resources. A lecture format however scales fairly nicely - adding more students is as easy as adding more seats - instructor costs are constant since lecturing to 5 students is "no different" than lecturing to 5 thousand (for some values of "no different").

People who do learn a lot in a lecture do seem to be more actively involved in the lecture compared to those who learn less. They think about what is being discussed, they ask questions of the instructor, or their classmates, or just themselves about the material. They anticipate the future direction of the lecture and consider the implications of the material. All of these activities seem to correlate with increased retention and understanding. Thus the desire among instructors to assist more students in a lecture class to get into and remain in this more active mental mode. Specifically including these types of internal mental processes in the actual lecture material is one way ("With this new idea we just discussed, you might think that things would work like blah, but actually they work like bleck"). What seems to be even more effective is to encourage introspection ("What do you think will happen in this situation? Why?") and encourage collaboration ("What do the people around you think? Why?") It is difficult however to get students in a large group to all participate in these activities, so getting them to have some personal emotional investment in the outcome of the activities can be used as well ("Raise your hand if you think blah. How about bleck?")

Using a clicker type of device is thought to be even more effective to encourage student participation and "buy-in" compared to raising hands or voting ABC cards. Clickers can allow for completely anonymous reporting, or alternatively individual tracking of individual responses. It can allow presentation in graphical or numerical format in real-time of the student responses which might have an impact on students learning (hopefully positive, possibly negative). They certainly can give people doing research on learning and teaching some insight into how the students respond to different things.

Since at least the 1990s, Mazur (among others) has been a strong proponent of this in physics education: http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?ed=1&rowid=8

As an aside, there does seem to be some research indicating that not all multiple-guess exams are crap from the point of view of evaluating student ability in comparison to evaluating them based on "work it out" problems. See for example the "previous projects" links at the UIUC Physics Education Research page: http://research.physics.illinois.edu/per/Research.html

Of course there is also the question of what we want our graduates of various programs to be able to do well. In most cases we do not expect our graduates to be answering exam questions in their final career activities, so there are legitimate questions about the value of almost any type of exam format.

Many amateurs or hobbyists have faced this dilemma in their own personal (and professional) work spaces for centuries nows. Two groups I know a little about are wood workers and machinists, who have written dozens of books and articles about this subject, in both the general and specific case.

0. Safety equipment: dust masks, goggles, safety glasses (with side protection), gloves (nitrile, latax, neoprene), hearing protection (ear muffs, ear plugs), and as needed!
1. Tools
2. Storage / management of those tools
3. Hard copy (dead-tree) documentation, it is being rapidly moved online thanks to cheap and compact computers and laptops, but much older reference material is still in old-school paper form (which can be handy) (example references to collect: ARRL Handbook, Art of Electronics, Machinery's Handbook, Woodworking Basics, Understanding Wood, Wiring Simplified)
4. Commonly used materials (lumber, hoses, holes clamps, fabric, sheet metal, dowels, nuts & bolts, wood and metal screws, etc.)
5. Parts (in anti-static containers for any static sensitive parts like CMOS ICs)
6. Labelling tools
7. Log / Lab notebooks . These should be paper-based, though can be complimented with online documents, a honest to goodness hard copy lab book is essential.
8. Chemicals
9. Large, easy to read clock
10. Test equipment: rulers, tape measures, calipers, digital multi-meter
11. Plenty of AC mains circuits and outlets. Preferably with a separate circuit for lighting versus wall outlets. - Avoid extended use of extension cables, and excessive use of power bars.

And time.

I had a friend in college who got a double major in art and electrical engineering. When I asked her why she was working in such different fields, she responded that to her art and electrical engineering were both forms of art.

For some reason this has stuck with me for decades (yeah, I'm an old guy).

Interesting but patentable?
Google for

haptic shape memory

haptic display

and you will see it is not a sudden invention out of nowhere. The pixels used to be electromagnetically activated metal pillars whereas they are using shape memory alloy. Perhaps the part about how they are using the alloy mechanically is new?

NHK and Tokyo U. in 2008 develop touch panel/braille display

Harvard research

It talks about shape memory alloy in pixel sized units.. So did Microsoft get this idea from the Russian and 4 Japanese below?
Reference 12 is from a well known source in 2004:

[12] I. Poupyrev, T. Nashida, S. Maruyama, J. Rekimoto, and Y. Yamaji. Lumen: interactive visual and shape display for calm computing. In Proc of SIGGRAPH ’04, page 17. ACM.

Shape-changing interfaces encode information by modifying the shape of the device, using any of a number of different approaches. Pin-based displays use a matrix of elements that move up and down. Horev [7] describes how one might design a TactoPhone, in which the back of the phone is a morphing surface for displaying animated tactile icons. His video prototype shows how it might be used to provide location information. Lumen [12] is a 2D low-resolution pin- based display that controls the height and color of individual 'pixels'. Shape Memory Alloy provides noiseless, smooth and continuous actuation. Although notification through the haptic channel, SMA threads are fragile and are not very responsive.

Note that production and capture of antihydrogen is not new. There's been prior work trying to use it to test for possible CPT violations. See for example hussle.harvard.edu/~atrap/Papers/2010/AntihydrogenPhysicsToday.pdf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005APS..DPPFP1058V and http://www.physics.harvard.edu/Thesespdfs/speck.pdf.

Note that production and capture of antihydrogen is not new. There's been prior work trying to use it to test for possible CPT violations. See for example hussle.harvard.edu/~atrap/Papers/2010/AntihydrogenPhysicsToday.pdf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005APS..DPPFP1058V and http://www.physics.harvard.edu/Thesespdfs/speck.pdf.

This doesn't seem much smaller than Tom Fine's Atari-Small font (maybe a pixel shorter?). I expanded this font to a full DOS extended ASCII version for my Doom source port.

24.29.89.151 is an awesome address. It's all over the intarweb. They care about the truth.

You are continuing to engage in a total reckless disregard for the truth

If they can't say the truth, they should say nothing.

She got in a fight with a retired attorney here, where he calls out her sockpuppetting and claims that "fair use doesn't apply," like just saying it would make it so.

Anyway - she's clearing using an autoblogging plugin like wp-robot (won't link, they are scum) to rip articles from other sites via RSS while stripping attribution in her attempt to extort money from people more ill-informed than her - if they exist. Basically, she is guilty of exactly what she's accusing others of doing.

I love cranks. They really keep the world interesting.

Full disclosure: I sysadmin blogs.law.harvard.edu.

Yes. The fluctuations in density seen in the cosmic microwave background are large enough that some can collapse under gravity to galaxy massed globs within a few hundred million years. What has been more of a mystery is how stars can form since gas needs to cool to condense enough to form stars and big bang gas is very clean and has a hard time cooling radiatively. One might think that only very massive stars might form but then this would never dirty up the gas since they would soon collapse to back holes and never release processed material back to their surroundings. However, pair instability supernovae disrupt their cores when they explode and likely seed protogalaxies particularly with oxygen which, when combined with abundant hydrogen, can form ice and allow normal cooling of gas for star formation. One bit of evidence that ice is important comes from the infrared emission of an early quasar: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...686..251D

What, you think there are no pollutants in farm-raised fish? In fact, there tend to be significantly higher PCB levels. I avoid high mercury-level species (swordfish, shark, etc.) with the exception of canned tuna, which I eat fairly frequently, on the order of twice a week.

I mostly don't worry about mercury levels with tuna too much. For starters, I buy canned tuna from companies that catch them off the US coast and publish their average mercury levels. More expensive, but the stuff tastes insanely good. Also, it's not fully understood, but you can find a fair amount of reference out there to the fact that the high selenium content of tuna offsets the toxicity of the high methylmercury content. Not to say I'd sit there and eat tuna all day long every day - might not be a great idea.

I also eat quite a bit of wild-caught salmon, which has rather low mercury levels anyway. Farm-raised salmon tends to have very high PCB levels - the levels are short of the FDA's ridiculously high limits, but are on average something like 8-10 times higher than in wild-caught salmon (see, for example, this blurb from Harvard).

Obviously, this is a statistical game. In my judgment, the risks of not eating any fish outweigh the benefits.

*facepalm*

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/files/2007/12/oilmap.jpg.

A study (see URL below) shows that the US could even get away with a first strike on Russia (good intelligence means only submarine nukes will not be hit in the initial counterforce strike and then submarine missiles will be few enough to be all shot down). Where does that leave poor China, with its handful of nukes? http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/737/end_of_mad_the_nuclear_dimension_of_us_primacy.html?breadcrumb=%2Fexperts%2F1088%2Fdaryl_press

There's yet to be any evidence the universe doesn't run on very specific mathematical rules. For example, there's a very good reason for inflation having to do with the 'pressure' at high energy states. [ShakaUVM]

Huh? Your customarily vague but authoritative comment which doesn't include an "IANAP" disclaimer will just reinforce the disturbingly common impression that physicists are bullshitting about concepts like inflation and dark matter.

The cosmology course I've mentioned was taught by Dr. Nanopoulos using Kolb's The Early Universe. He pointed out that physicists have known for decades that something like inflation is required to explain the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Kolb disusses these topics in chapter 8, though his overview is somewhat dated now. WMAP has since observed temperature fluctuations on the 10^(-5) level, which matches predictions based on modelling quantum fluctuations in the early universe. More precisely, inflation predicts that these fluctuations would deviate slightly from the perfect scale invariance expected in a universe without inflation. After 7 years, WMAP can exclude the possibility of a scale invariant spectrum by more than 3 sigma. The WMAP results also show that the universe is perfectly flat, at least to within the limits of measurement. Inflation isn't necessary for the universe to be perfectly flat, but it's sufficient to explain what may seem like "fine-tuning" at first glance.

That's why physicists think inflation happened, but it's an argument based on how relativistic causality affects the large-scale thermodynamics of the universe, not pressure. Pressure is at least tangentially relevant to almost every physics problem imaginable, though, and inflation is no exception. I've explained that dark energy's negative pressure acts as a kind of anti-gravity. Later, Dr. Stoeger (Jesuit priest, astrophysicist working for the Vatican Observatory) observed that "There is, of course, a much deeper connection between inflation and dark energy. The only way we can really conceive of inflation occurring in the early universe is under the influence of a large amount of vacuum energy, which is a type of dark energy. This dark energy must be quickly transformed into the particles and radiation at the end of inflation. So, it's not at all clear if there is a relationship between the dark energy which drove inflation and the dark energy which we have evidence is driving the gentle acceleration of cosmic expansion now. It may be that the dark energy now may be a remnant of the dark energy left over from the very early universe."

Then there's the problem of heavy exotic particles predicted by most GUT's; the only one I'm familiar with is the magnetic monopole. In my senior year, I took electrodynamics using the standard Griffiths 3rd ed. Page 327 shows how symmetric Maxwell's equations appear in the presence of magnetic monopoles, and Griffiths opines that they "beg for magnetic charge to exist." My fondest memory of that class is problem 8.12 on page 362, along with footnotes 11

std commercial ultracentrifuges, used in the life sciences, spin at 80 to 100 K, and the objects they rotate ("rotors" in the argot)are titanium cylinders or frustrated cones that weigh several kilos. Centrifgues that went up to 50K were available in the 1970s, if not earlier; one limit was the strenght of hte "rotor", which were made of aluminum at the time; now they are made of Ti and carbon fiber. As you can imagine, the manufacturers are carefull to stress safety; one thing that distinguishes a Beckman L50, which has a max speed of 50K, and a 90K instrument is the rating for the armor plate that surrounds the spinning object; basically, if a multi Kilo piece of metal rotating at 90K comes loose, the armor has to be able to prevent any projectile formation PS: you know when it happens, cause you get a loud noise https://www.beckmancoulter.com/eCatalog/CatalogItemDetails.do?productId=12210 (http://www.beckmancoulter.com/literature/Bioresearch/BR-9272A.pdf ) http://golgi.harvard.edu/Gaudet/Resources_Files/Beckman/PrepRT.pdf

"most conversation within a car don't cause anywhere near this level of distraction"

[citation needed]

Link

Link

Link

Google for more

It's amazing what a difference the time makes in slashdot's opinions on this issue. There is no homogenous American "gun culture." I collect and shoot historic firearms because I find them fascinating and I hugely enjoy being able to restore and preserve them. However, no one else in my family owns any firearms and I grew up with parents who were quite opposed to the idea of gun ownership in general. I think you assume that everyone in the US owns guns because of some sort of derailed-train tradition with no reasoning behind it besides "my Dad owned guns..."

The fact is that many people responsibly own firearms for both sporting uses and self defense. Guns are absolutely misused at times, but the irresponsibility of some few is not in any way an acceptable reason to strip me of my right to have firearms and use them for whatever legal purpose I desire.

I think you will also find a considerable body of research and opinions that contest the idea that banning all guns would even result in an any decline in violent crime. Off the top of my head, this paper is a good example:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

Note the fact that the authors enumerate extensive statistics and constantly reiterate that they are surprised to report that, contrary to popular opinion, there exists no favorable correlation between limits on gun ownership and a reduction in violent crime.

I have no intent to convert you or the many posters in this thread who seem to share your perspective into gun lovers, but I would greatly appreciate even a moment of consideration before emotionally founded kneejerk responses that accuse all Americans of being uncivilized morons who need a strong government to take away anything they might hurt themselves with. Thanks.

Instead of regulating prudence, the government basically forced banks to support untenable inner city mortgages which should have never been approved in the first place.

The assertion that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble and ensuing recession is a disproven canard.

Thus:

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages banks to expand mortgage lending in the communities in which they have branch offices, subject to maintaining overall levels of financial safety and soundness. Some have argued that this regulation forced banks to lower their credit standards and engage in riskier mortgage products in order to extend credit to lower-income individuals, who perhaps should not have received such loans. However, data provided by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) reveal that loans covered by the CRA accounted for only a fraction of mortgage lending to lower-income borrowers and neighborhoods. This is especially true of higher-priced, or subprime, mortgages.1 CRA assessment-area lending accounted for only nine percent of higher-priced loans to lower-income borrowers and neighborhoods, while independent mortgage companies accounted for the majority. Further, the subprime share of assessment-area loans made to lower-income borrowers and lower-income neighborhoods was lower than the subprime share for all loans made between 2004 and 2006.

The vast majority of subprime home mortgage lending was made by organizations not bound by the CRA. Not to mention lending for commercial real estate development.

Well, what we *really* know is it was there 56 years ago (actually ~59 years ago, according to the distance given in the wikipedia-entry (53 ly) and the date of the press release (Feb. 2004). :)

The real correlation is not with income per se. The real correlation is with how well you get along with others, in other words, your interpersonal relationships.

The Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult Development started in the 1940s and has followed the same group of people throughout. The only predictor they could find for: happiness, income, social status, marriage status, or almost anything else that mattered, was a person's relationships with their family and their relationships as young adults.

(This, of course, sounds like bad news for geeks, me included.)

http://adultdev.bwh.harvard.edu/research-SAD.html

ok. One guy does not the scientific community make. What papers has this guy published? What journals has he appeared in? What books has he written? What research has he done?

Who is this guy other than a name and cheap youtube link?

I can understand you have never heard of Szostak but have you never heard of google? Dr. Jack Szostak - Biologist, Nobel Laureate and Harvard proffesor. His CV. His lab

Now that your argument from authority has blown up in your face, why don't you toddle off and actually watch that "cheap youtube video", you might learn something new.

ok. One guy does not the scientific community make. What papers has this guy published? What journals has he appeared in? What books has he written? What research has he done?

Who is this guy other than a name and cheap youtube link?

I can understand you have never heard of Szostak but have you never heard of google? Dr. Jack Szostak - Biologist, Nobel Laureate and Harvard proffesor. His CV. His lab

Now that your argument from authority has blown up in your face, why don't you toddle off and actually watch that "cheap youtube video", you might learn something new.

Singh may need to learn a bit more on just how inaccurate most of our historical readings truly are -- but that's not his field.

Well, as someone who's spent most of his career developing data acquisition systems, I tend to agree with you, and even the most well-designed instrumentation can (as you say) suffer from deployment and installation issues. Want another example? Human body temperature. 19th century research was dependent upon 19th measuring technology: making crucial public policy decisions on old data that is likely flawed is very dangerous. Yet, that's exactly what we're doing in the case of global warming.

http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/about/faq.html

"Harvard graduates 97 percent of its students, among the very highest graduation rates in the nation."

I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.

I guess KingAlanI isn't the only one to have outmoded ideas of Boston area institutions.

There may be a problem with that. I suggest reading up on the Chandra X-Ray Telescope. Long story short, because of the high energy, only shallow angles are used so the mirror in the telescope is more like a barrel.

10-12 hours? Dude, as an intern you sometimes are required to do things like a 24-hours shift, 12 hours off, then 24 hours more. It's among the stupidest things I have ever heard. But good news! Now there's a 30-consecutive-hour limit! http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/09.14/99-sleepyinterns.html Hooray for safety...

Could you do me a favor? Could you send your research to Harvard? You clearly must know more about this than they do. Those idiots with their stupid data and analysis came up with "95% of our nation's virgin forests have been cut down and less than 20% of paper manufactured in the U.S. comes from tree farms." I'm sure they'll thank you for your contribution, the error will no doubt embarrass them. Oh, do me a favor and post a link to your research, too, I might like to cite it as well.

>>a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read from Harvard. And I've read a lot of ridiculous things.

For example:
"Excuse: Recycling costs too much.

        * Recycling generates revenue to help pay for itself, while incineration and landfilling do not."

Notice the complete lack of connection between 'excuse' and explanation? If recycling cost 10x as much as landfilling, but only paid back a fraction of a percent, they would make the same excuse, and be just as right. It doesn't address the core issue at all.

Or even better:
"Excuse: There is no landfill crisis.
landfill

        * Recycling's true value comes from preventing pollution and saving natural resources and energy, not landfill space."

So in other words, we know that there's no crisis, but look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!

" * Recycling is largely responsible for averting the landfill crisis."

Not in the slightest.

" * Most states have less than twenty years of landfill capacity: who wants to live next to a new landfill?"

Deceptive; this makes it sound like we'll be out of landfill space in 20 years. Just like we were in 1980.

So on and so forth. I can't believe you're helping spread such bullshit.

Of course, lots of resources on the web about this as well as "garbage recycling deniers" but a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml

I totally agree with you, this is too insubstantial even for science reporting.

The article is at adsabs, but it's on subscription only:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010GeoRL..3714107D

Maybe someone with a subscription to "Geophysical Research Letters" could voice an opinion?

1) Netscape came pre-installed by some (most?) OEMs at that time. I don't have numbers on this but it was hard to find a computer that didn't have it.

By 1996, Microsoft was specifically targetting Netscape by both releasing a free web browser, Internet Explorer, but also engaging in specific OEM requirements that minimally required IE to remain on the desktop and possibly included either excluding Netscape's icon on the desktop or Netscape's install completely (it's unclear to what extent it was).

2) Netscape was out first; a lot of people were settled into using Netscape before there even really was an IE. Netscape started with the dominant market position.

While Netscape started in the lead, PC sales skyrocketed in the 90s. Put simply, if all the computers in '96 were sold with just Netscape and all the computers in '99 were sold with just IE and all the computers were still running in '99, then IE would have about a 66% market share in '99 inherently. The numbers in the previous link aren't quite like that, in part because computers take time to be sold, Netscape users apparently clung on for quite a while, and obviously not all computers had just one web browser installed (some percentage downloaded a browser or installed from a CD).

3) While Netscape for a while was superior, later versions of Netscape were terrible -- as in, not as good as the previous versions of Netscape. Eventually even people who hated IE of that era (including me) started using it just because they were so damn tired of how buggy Netscape had become.

While I don't doubt that had something to do with it, people only started switching to Firefox when it was clearly superior in some ways (extensions) to IE. Ie, to get people to d/l the browser or cause OEMs to fight MS to keep Netscape would have required for Netscape to be significantly better in some property. As much as Netscape 4.x could be called terrible, I don't think it would have been enough even if Netscape 4.x was merely as good as IE4.

I don't deny that Microsoft had a big and unfairly used advantage in having the dominant operating system, but in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to Microsoft trying to slip Netscape roofies while Netscape was busy firing a shotgun at itself as fast as it could.

I think you're overstating your case a bit. IE4 was hardly bug free. But, it was already there and good enough. Why bother fighting with Netscape at all unless it's clearly superior? Certainly, until Mozilla was open source and started caring about standards compliance there really wasn't any ideological reason to be pro-Netscape either. Really, if there were any shotgun blasts that were fired, it was from Microsoft failing to making IE secure enough from attack for such a long period, Firefox was able to gain some traction for those worried about (if nothing else) the homogenous security risk.

Why is it that you assume only FOX News spews propaganda?

Although the AC answered, for the record I am well aware that the research demonstrates that Murdoch's channels (much more than Fox, WSJ, Sky etc) are certainly not the only active and passive participants in blatant propaganda. Not to mention the echo chamber amplification of such rhetoric.

Well, let's see...according to this study in The Lancet, approximately 5 million people die/year from smoking. Since your timespan is over the last 100 years, 100 x 5 million = 500,000,000. Granted, the 5 million number probably wasn't consistent throughout the whole of the 100 year span you're proposing, but corporations still win in a landslide.

And, before you reply how I know you're going to reply: the link between smoking and lung cancer was first identified in 1920. The addictive nature of nicotine's been known to the tobacco companies since at least 1970. That gives you 20 million and 450 million deaths just from the tobacco companies who knowingly marketed lethal products depending on when exactly you want to place the blame on them. We can also include DeBeers (responsible for countless deaths over the last 140 years financing insurgencies and wars in order to secure their diamond monopoly), Monsanto (responsible for over 50 superfund sites in the US that have contaminated and poisoned individuals in the area), Chevron (who dumped 18 billion gallons of toxins into rivers used by communities in the Amazon resulting in cancer, birth defects, etc), Pfizer (who sells AIDS drugs at higher prices in areas where AIDS is most prevalent and least likely to be able to afford to purchase the medication), Nestlé (melanine in Chinese baby milk), WalMart (child labor in hazerdous conditions), Coca-Cola (assassinations of union folks in Columbia), and Dow (leading manufacturer of chemical weapons) if you like.

True. As recent published research demonstrates: The WaPo, NYTimes, and LATimes all do not deserve our eyeballs (Warning: PDF Publications).

However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?

Yes and no.

It was an intro physics class, but at Harvard (with many pre-meds in the course; not sure if majors or not). Certainly the students were motivated and had had physics in high school. The point is that students could do calculations, but they didn't understand, in a fundamental way, Newton's Laws (kinda the point of an intro physics class). If you really don't understand them, then you haven't learned what that course is all about. Here's my favorite quote when one of the students was given the assessment with that question, that asked about everyday phenomena, like colliding cars and trucks: "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" (again, a Harvard student taught by someone who was regarded an excellent lecturer). When the results came back on the assessment, sure enough, these students largely didn't understand the fundamentals.

In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI and http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990 Mazur (sorry, both are quite long) describes the same thing with circuits -- students could do the math, but couldn't describe what would happen if a light bulb was pulled out of a simple one. In short, they didn't fundamentally understand the concepts. There is a large literature in physics education research that on a fundamental level students don't understand the key concepts. One leading paper on this (the leading one?) is http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/fci.pdf (some 1,000 cites from the scholarly literature) . It makes for sobering reading.

Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker.

Rather than "dumb," this literature finds that such techniques leads to students who (i) can do calculations as well as those in a traditional class and (ii) have a better fundamental understanding. This really isn't too surprising as they're actually doing physics with a lot of frequent feedback from their clicker responses and discussions with each other to carefully crafted questions designed to help ferret out their common misconceptions. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (quite short) where students are much more engaged than in the typical lecture. Part of that is students committing anonymously to a question (via clickers). With no questions, there is a strong temptation for students to say, "Yeah, I understand that." Many times, in fact, they don't.

Yes, the clicker is just a means to an end (shouldn't all technology in teaching be that?) -- getting students to commit anonymously to an answer. As Mazur says in http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf , you can get the same basic results with cards that students hold up and where they can't easily see each other's cards. As you say, and I'm sure that Mazur agrees, key is the discussion with other students and with Mazur.

One more direct role for technology here is that students at first do on-line homeworks that are used to guide the selection of ques

As a college professor (economics), I take pretty seriously the work of physicists like Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001, U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities), 2004; and currently associate science adviser to the President) and Eric Mazur (Harvard). They and many other serious physicists have carefully studied how students learn in their field. They've found that things like clickers, correctly used, and simulations can indeed aid learning in deep ways. Here's some links to summaries of their work: http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf (Mazur -- short, in the journal Science) http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (Wieman -- longer) Here's a key part of the primary literature; it has more than 1,000 cites: http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf (the most frequent method of "interactive engagement" is clickers). Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.

Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds. I've heard both Harvard and Michigan mentioned as schools that could offer their incoming freshman classes free education from undergrad through PhD without making so much as a dent in these funds.

Wouldn't it be neat if we could do a bit of research to see if the above were true? Oh wait, we can.

Harvard endowment: $25.7 billion

Harvard 2009-2010 undergrad tuition (excluding various student fees): $33,696

Admitted undergrads per year: 2,175 students

Total cost for 1 year of undergraduates to get their undergraduate degree, assuming everyone graduates and takes 4 years to do so (as a ball-park approximation):

>>> 33696*2175*4/1e6
293.15519999999998

That's $293 million dollars, or 11.4% of the total endowment. And that's just for undergrads, excluding graduate school, so I'd call that a "dent". They could keep it up for about a decade before going from having the nation's largest endowment to being bankrupt.

Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds. I've heard both Harvard and Michigan mentioned as schools that could offer their incoming freshman classes free education from undergrad through PhD without making so much as a dent in these funds.

Wouldn't it be neat if we could do a bit of research to see if the above were true? Oh wait, we can.

Harvard endowment: $25.7 billion

Harvard 2009-2010 undergrad tuition (excluding various student fees): $33,696

Admitted undergrads per year: 2,175 students

Total cost for 1 year of undergraduates to get their undergraduate degree, assuming everyone graduates and takes 4 years to do so (as a ball-park approximation):

>>> 33696*2175*4/1e6
293.15519999999998

That's $293 million dollars, or 11.4% of the total endowment. And that's just for undergrads, excluding graduate school, so I'd call that a "dent". They could keep it up for about a decade before going from having the nation's largest endowment to being bankrupt.