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Not exactly by MickLinux · 2003-06-18 20:39 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma

To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star.

I don't have a lot other than my (very faulty) memory to back this up, but I seem to remember a Scientific American article that most of our heavy elements were formed in the shock waves of supernovas of the first round of stars. Not only that, but the progress of the supernova shock wave creates large clumps of specific types of elements.

But most of us was not inside a star at one type, hydrogen possibly excepted. Most of us was most likely formed in a shock wave.

But your point still stands: you feel immensely richer for thinking you know what you do. [Sorry for that small withdrawal from your bank account, but the interest that will accrue from your *knew* imagined knowledge will accrue at a much faster rate.]

All joking aside, we don't *know* anything, but we have our theories, and those theories do help us feel at home within our universe [much like my fish in his tank feels very uneasy when I drop a ping pong ball in the water, but later feels at home with it], and that makes us more comfortable.

It's the Instructors Re:University of Phoenix by flatfilsoc · 2003-06-05 17:52 · Score: 1 · on Do Online Schools Provide A Quality Education?

"Traditional classroom: Instructor works through some problems during class, talks about theory, etc. . . . Quite the opposite at my college . . . we are encouraged to work together - otherwise it would be near impossible to complete . . ."

Your posts and along with others point out what I think the original thread author alludes to is the problem is not with University of Phoenix but with the instructor as with many college instructors whether online or brick and mortar.

There is an "inside joke" among the reformers of higher education that basically goes --

college teaching is the only profession where one can still be rewarded for ignoring the best practices and standards in complete disregard of the research.

Since the late 1980's after Chickering and Gameson published the now classic Seven Best Teaching Principles for Undergraduate Education * after extensive research, there has been a quiet revolution to reform college teaching practices and promote effective teaching practices including eliminating the famous "dancing with the blackboardâ so common in the math and science departments and replace it with pedagogically, effective active learning.

I am finishing an online post-Masters degree (Specialist) in preparation of a doctoral studies both from the University of Missouri and it has been an excellent experience. Of course, it helps that it is offered by the College of Education, a radical departure for me since my previous three degrees are from the Business School. It has taught me a great deal about human learning theory and effective teaching practices on my way to earning a PhD in the sociology of knowledge. I have been teaching college and adult education part-time for almost 20 years and for the most part, I have been doing things right. I just know why now and how to be more effective. As a statistics instructor, I vowed to face my students and talk to them and not the chalkboard the first time I taught in 1984 because I always hated that when I was a student.

My suggestion to anyone including the original thread author is to make sure you complete the student evaluations with specific comments. The best time to improve the course is early in the course. Write the instructor and tell them what you arenâ(TM)t receiving and what you would change. If that doesnâ(TM)t work go to the next level. Instructors do take evaluations seriously but without feedback and specific remarks from students about what to change; they cannot âoetweak the course.â The online classroom really lends itself to provide a rich learning environment but if the students do not tell the instructor he/she is doing a lousy job, how does the instructor know? Since the UofP is in the business to make money, believe me they are going to give your student feedback even more weight then the average institution.

-Regards, Robin

Murphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~

* NOTES:
Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987; Reprint 1991). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education . http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacD evCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm

Re:Civilized Countries by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-01 18:42 · Score: 0 · on Three Gorges Dam Begins Storing Water

Nice spin.

Too bad no one with any sense is buying it any more..

Of course, we all know that the oh-so-civilized governments of, say, Europe, would never, EVER kill their own citizens, right?

Have a look at this page

Look up how many people the United States executes every year. Look up how many people were killed by the "civilized" Germans in WWII. Do the arithmetic. Figure out how long it'll take the United States to catch up.

We won't even go into the fact that most of those executed in the United States have been convicted of heinous crimes such as murder, while most of the Europeans killed by their own governments were innocent of any crime whatsoever.

Re:Murderers in the millions... by bnenning · 2003-05-30 16:53 · Score: 1 · on Copy Protection a Crime Against Humanity

I believe "genocide" usually specifically refers to ethnic cleansing-type activities, so shooting political dissidents doesn't count. Here's a site with information on "democide", defined as all murder committed by governments.

missing link by CanSpice · 2003-05-28 09:01 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Sci/Tech Web Awards 2003

They left off my favourite astronomy website, the Joint Astronomy Centre's Birthday Stars website. It's really informative and fun!*

* Disclaimer: I work for them.

Re:Not a moon, IMHO by barakn · 2003-05-16 15:58 · Score: 3, Interesting · on 43 More Moons Discovered Orbiting Jupiter

The "400 captured asteroids" aren't called moons, not because they are asteroids, but because they are not moons, i.e. they are not captured. They are Trojans that orbit the sun (not Jupiter) with the same period as Jupiter. And there's over 1600 of them.

Re:Hematite? by young-earth · 2003-04-11 19:34 · Score: 3, Informative · on NASA Selects Mars Landing Sites

Check out the article which explains that researchers now

think that there is now abundant evidence that most and probably all of the magnetites in ALH 84001 formed because of shock heating of carbonate. Faceted magnetites resembling the supposedly biogenic magnetites are crystallographically oriented in the carbonate lattice and could not have formed inside bacteria. We infer that ALH 84001 magnetites differ from abiogenic terrestrial magnetites because terrestrial carbonates never experienced the unique impact history of ALH 84001.

So if NASA is looking for hematite in order to prove something, they'll just be proving that the rocks they found got banged around.

Somehow that seems like a colossal waste of time and money, so hopefully they have some more noble, or more useful, reason to pick that location.

Unofficial patched sendmail SRPM by Laven · 2003-03-29 11:23 · Score: 1 · on Security-Fix Sendmail 8.12.9 Released

http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/~warren/fedora/sendmai l-8.12.8-2.fdr.1.80.src.rpm

I converted the security patch to a unidiff and applied it to Red Hat's latest sendmail errata SRPM for Red Hat Linux 8.0. Use at your owk risk.

Former 3rd Shift by mlmb · 2003-03-26 20:28 · Score: 1 · on Mainframe Operators Needed

It has been more than 15 years since I was a mainframe operator (IBM 360/50 running EDOS/VS) at the university. We did all the business processing for the school (accounting, payroll, alumni stuff, student and course tracking, etc.) and some local payroll and mailing lists as well.

I was trained apprentice style and it took more than a year because you don't SEE some jobs more than once in a year and some jobs had their own quirks. Plus some programmers (or rather JCL coders) would mistype their JCL and you had know if you should call them if the job (not the OS) bombed so you could change it and rerun it or just stuff it in their bin. The bigest fear was a power outage (we couldn't afford a backup generator) from electrical storms or kamikaze squirrels who take out transformers (it really happened). When that happens you are suddenly sitting in the very quiet darkness.

It could be mind numbing but as a student it was a blessing. I ran my class project programs (Assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL), anytime I wanted (everyone knew me in the center) while most students had only two runs a day. In addition, when we got a DEC PDP11/45 there was a terminal in the machine room as well (I had to do backups) so I had unlimited access there as well.

The mind altering part is the work consisted mainly in loading decks of punch cards, changing disks (20mb in huge 15 or 20 inch multi-platter packs), tape (9 track 1200 bpi), and paper; and it was mostly paper. Some jobs cranked for hours and spit out two pages (header and EOJ). Others ran quickly and printed all weekend (end of year general ledger). But printing 5 boxes of paper (with no, or 1-5 parts i.e. up to 4 carbons) a weekend was about normal. But that still leaves lots of hours sitting in the room LISTENING to all those blowers in a room illuminated by floresent lights watching the LEDs flicker on the panel. It got to the point that I could tell when a job was finishing up by the pattern flashing. In fact there were many times I dozed off only to awake JUST before a job finished up. No ESP, just the sound of 9 track tape drives rewinding....

Perhaps these people should not be searching in the IS field because you don't need to know the theory and you can teach this to anyone who wants to keep a job.

Others... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-03-03 12:34 · Score: 2, Informative · on Plotting/Graphing Programs for Mac OS X

The best have been mentioned. A couple not mentioned include:

GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) Which is a command line driven set of plotting tools that excell in plotting data on a map. There are some GUI's based upon this. The best I have seen for mapping.
M Map (for Matlab) Also does mapping plots, but from Matlab.
Guppi (gnome based)
SciGraphica
Peakster Simple real time plotting.
RTP Also very simple real time plotter.
Biggles Python based plotter.
GRI Python based plotter.
GRE Perl based plotter.

I don't know if some of these are MacOS compatible or not. They are Unix compatible though.

Re:Spectrometer? by JetJaguar · 2003-02-14 12:21 · Score: 4, Informative · on More on the Mars Ice Cap

It's a little trickier than that. Ices don't really have any spectroscopic features until you get into the far infrared. So you need an infrared spectrometer on board the probe. This isn't so easy to do, as any good infrared spectrometer needs a replenishable supply of liquid helium (which boils off fairly readily in the inner solar system).

It's far easier to take temperature measurement using other means, and those measurements are sufficient to show that it's too warm for CO2.

I'm not positive of this, but I would guess that ground based infrared spectrometers (like what's on NASA's IRTF) may not have the resolution nor the signal to noise capabilities to do the detection. No that I think of it, there are several plausible reasons why you can't do the detection from ground based telescopes, but I would need to check them out before sticking my neck out and posting them.

Astronomy that can be done with this? by dpp · 2003-02-11 10:26 · Score: 4, Informative · on Terahertz Imagery Progresses

that's cool. What sort of astrnomy can be done with this?

I work for an observatory that uses these wavelengths to do astronomy. At these wavelengths you're mostly looking at the cold material in the universe --- stuff like interstellar gas, dust, and so on.

Re:Hail Bush! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-02-08 07:10 · Score: 0 · on PATRIOT II Legislation Leaked

This post is yet another example of the unfortunate tendancy to lump everything into either "good" or "bad". Hitler murdered almost 21 million people and took a world war to get rid of in the end.GW Bush is a moron, not a monster.

Thanks to GW Bush civil liberties are on the wane, the enviornment is neglected, and a woman's right to choose is dying a slow death but it will only take a trip to the ballot box or term limits to put a stop to him.

Re:Astrophysics 101 by CanSpice · 2003-01-15 07:35 · Score: 1 · on Brown Dwarf Companion to Epsilon Indi

The bulk of what little light brown dwarves emit is emitted in the infrared, making them practically invisible without a very expensive (and new) telescope.

Really? Then how is it that a 23-year old, 3.8 metre telescope (which is cheap and old and small by today's standards) is able to not only detect brown dwarfs, but determine what kind of weather patterns their atmospheres have?

Re:Astrophysics 101 by CanSpice · 2003-01-15 07:35 · Score: 1 · on Brown Dwarf Companion to Epsilon Indi

The bulk of what little light brown dwarves emit is emitted in the infrared, making them practically invisible without a very expensive (and new) telescope.

Really? Then how is it that a 23-year old, 3.8 metre telescope (which is cheap and old and small by today's standards) is able to not only detect brown dwarfs, but determine what kind of weather patterns their atmospheres have?

Re:I'm sure someone else will mention the Gimp... by Creepy · 2003-01-13 03:34 · Score: 2 · on Mac vs. PC Digital Photography Comparison

Paint Shop Pro is a great program, but it is Windows only, so unless you're comparing it to emulated Windows on the mac, you won't have much success.

GIMP lacks some of the OOTB appeal of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro - the basic package lacks such basic things as red-eye reduction filters which are pretty much standard in other packages. To do Red Eye, I had to grab a filter off this page

I bought Photoshop 3 when I was in college (much cheaper for students), and still find it better for some things than Paint Shop Pro (even being 3 generations out of date). As a whole, PSP gives me what I need these days, which is mainly web graphics and some digital photo editing (I don't have their photo touchup package yet, though), and is much cheaper. On the other hand, Photoshop is a much more "complete" solution, where Jasc sells a bunch of individual packages targeting certain types of people, so if you do lots of different types of graphics design, you might be better off with Photoshop.

Re:Indeed, there *will* be lawsuits. . . by SEWilco · 2003-01-02 16:30 · Score: 1 · on Should We Change the Weather Even If We Can?

Well, you sort of steal someone else's rain. But if you make the ground wetter there will be somewhat more evaporation than before in that spot.

There may be places such as Washington State with more than enough rain, where some more moisture could be allowed to go eastward. The reason there is so much rain is the mountains, and there are a lot of them -- do we have enough thermonuclear bombs for some nuclear engineering?

Let's see...
Washington is about 550 km long and 380 km wide.
Mean elevation 518m, highest 4392m.
Meteor Crater was 10-megaton blast which made a crater 1.2km by 180m deep.
A 20-megaton blast makes a crater about 2.2km by 240m deep.
Let's estimate a 20 MT crater on average is 1km wide and 150m deep.
To go the width of the state requires about 550 craters, to make one stripe 1km wide and about 1/4th the mean height of the state.
If a horizon-to-horizon distance is meteorologically significant, standing in the middle and making it flat on both sides is about 10km.
550 craters for a 1km stripe... 10km needs 5,500 craters (looks like a flat valley flat up to the mountains which are visible from 100km away).
10 km may look like a lot when standing in the middle, but that is 1/38th the width of the state. See any weather map with a weather front to see the scale of weather events.
1/38th is near 1/40th, or 2.5 percent. Yeah, that should be measurable.
Making 5,500 20MT bombs is quite a task. And don't put the environmental impact statement there or it will fill in the whole valley.

Answer: Not enough bombs. Have to hit Washington State with space rocks.

Re:I thought it only had 16 moons by lvdrproject · 2002-12-28 04:52 · Score: 3, Interesting · on New Moon of Jupiter Discovered

It depends on what you call "moons". Personally i think the term "moon" is less specific than the term "satellite". Pretty much anything that has a permanent orbit around a planet is a satellite. I wouldn't really consider a bunch of large rocks (i.e. under a few kilometres) "moons", though. Essentially it's semantics, but you can't deny the fact that they are satellites.

As for where the other satellites came from....

The discovery of the last eleven of them is discussed here (39);

the eleven before those are discussed here (28);

the one before those is discussed here (17);

... and the first sixteen you obviously already knew about.

Updated Mirror List by Laven · 2002-12-23 08:18 · Score: 4, Interesting · on New Red Hat Beta

This is a more complete mirror list. Mirrors will hide and unhide as they become full. Please e-mail me if you find additions or corrections for this list.

http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/phoebe_mirrors.html

Light/Dark == Something/Something Else by Tsar · 2002-12-19 06:25 · Score: 1, Flamebait · on Methane Clouds on Titan

From the press release:

"These are the most spectacular images of Titan's surface which we've seen to date," said Dr. Michael Brown, lead author of the Caltech paper. "They are so detailed that we can almost begin to speculate about Titan's geology, if only we knew for certain what the bright and dark regions represented."

Yeah, if we only had that one missing datum... Seems to me that what they have right now is the planetological equivalent of a rorschach test. But why should that stop the speculation, rampant or otherwise? Just assume a working interpretation and work from there. I'll even start. The "bright and dark regions" could represent:

Highlands and lowlands.
Continents and seas.
Younger surface and older surface.
Desert and methane-breathing vegetation.
Open plains and urban sprawl.
Vanilla and chocolate.
Men and Orcs.
Skin and fur.

Just pick one and run with it, guys!

Re:They can by gorilla · 2002-12-18 06:41 · Score: 2 · on Whisper Heard From Pioneer 10

There are lots of short lived isotopes which are found in nature. Obviously they are part of decay sequences. An example would be Radium 226, which has a half life of 1590 years, and is part of the decay chain of Uranium 238. It was discovered by the Curries, by simply purifying large amounts of pitchblende.

There is a useful term here to identify isotopes which are not found in nature on Earth, and those which are.Artifical/Natural is the usual terminology.

Combine fictional physics with real physics by yerricde · 2002-12-12 17:19 · Score: 1 · on Lessig Spins Copyright Law

But who do you quote to support various renditions of FTL travel??

If both our universe and the fictional universe have the law in common, they may have the physicist in common. Otherwise, quote fictional physicists and engineers. For example, in the Star Trek universe, "Zefram Cochrane invented warp drive in 2063".

You can't have it both ways. Either fictional universes subscribe to real world physics that we know about OR They subscribe to physics that we don't know about

There's no reason that a fictional universe can't take some physical laws from our universe but invent others, as long as the combination remains consistent. For instance, even if they have lots of bullsh*t physics, SF worlds still have the attraction of one mass to another, which we call "gravity" in our physics. I brought up Heisenberg because it was the first explanation that came to mind for the limitations of teleporters. Perhaps you meant: "either a fictional universe has zero BS physics, or it has at least one BS law of physics."

forget individuals, Govt. has killed 160million! by olddoc · 2002-12-09 13:12 · Score: 3, Insightful · on An Unbiased Analysis of Gun Crime vs. Gun Control?

Thousands of Americans are killed by criminals using guns. According to well documented research over 160,000,000 people have been killed by totalitarian governments in this past century. Look here for some eye opening figures. The average person on the planet in the past century had a much greater chance of being killed by a dictator as a fellow citizen in an armed free society. In other words, guns are much more dangerous when concentrated in the hands of a government then in the hands of a free people.
I had a very interesing visit to the Sydney Australia Jewish museum
There was an old New York Times from the 1930s with an article about how Adolf Hitler passed a gun control law banning Jews from possesing guns. I imagine there were a lot fewer jews killing each other after that law was passed!
I strongly suggest looking at the first link above. It is really shocking what totalitarian governments have done in the 20th century.

"I fear the government that fears my gun"

Science Island: the big island of Hawaii by mbenzi · 2002-12-04 04:39 · Score: 1 · on Seeking Interesting Sites When Travelling the World?

The best vacation I ever had was on Hawaii. The Highlights were the Keck Observatory and Kilauea volcano and lava fields.

When we visited the Keck we drove from sealevel to 4,200 m (14000ft). We got a free guided tour of the Keck observatory and the NASA telescope. I don't know if they still do that. It was an awe inspiring experience.

Another day we spent hiking around the world's most active volcano. Near the end of the day we hiked to where the lava was flowing into the ocean. This was the most terrifying and exciting thing I have ever done. Better than any rollercoaster

Debian elitism, not for long by Laven · 2002-11-22 19:27 · Score: 3, Interesting · on University of Twente Back Online

People are heartily sick of the ceaseless but apt-get is sooo cool repetition that goes on

Not for long. The Fedora project aims to bring a Debian-like community of packages and apt-get to Red Hat Linux. We are early in specification stages at the moment, but developers (NOT USERS YET!) are welcome on our mailing lists.

I personally feel that Fedora will be very influential for the Linux community in the future.
Why? Please read my 1st Fedora draft proposal .

Mailing Lists
http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-announce http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-devel

Debian elitism, not for long by Laven · 2002-11-22 19:27 · Score: 3, Interesting · on University of Twente Back Online

People are heartily sick of the ceaseless but apt-get is sooo cool repetition that goes on

Not for long. The Fedora project aims to bring a Debian-like community of packages and apt-get to Red Hat Linux. We are early in specification stages at the moment, but developers (NOT USERS YET!) are welcome on our mailing lists.

I personally feel that Fedora will be very influential for the Linux community in the future.
Why? Please read my 1st Fedora draft proposal .

Mailing Lists
http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-announce http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-devel

Debian elitism, not for long by Laven · 2002-11-22 19:27 · Score: 3, Interesting · on University of Twente Back Online

People are heartily sick of the ceaseless but apt-get is sooo cool repetition that goes on

Not for long. The Fedora project aims to bring a Debian-like community of packages and apt-get to Red Hat Linux. We are early in specification stages at the moment, but developers (NOT USERS YET!) are welcome on our mailing lists.

I personally feel that Fedora will be very influential for the Linux community in the future.
Why? Please read my 1st Fedora draft proposal .

Mailing Lists
http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-announce http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/fedor a-devel

Adaptive Optics by Hawaiian+Lion · 2002-11-14 01:38 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Incredible Images of the Sun

The technology used by this telescope to counter the effects of the atmosphere in measurements is called adaptive optics. This is the first application I know of for adaptive optics on a solar telescope.

This technology has been around for awhile, and was first seriously developed by the military at the Starfire Optical Range .

Recently it has been used in such telescope projects as the WM Keck Observatory and Gemini Project . I know AO is also used for measurement of eye aberrations, with projects being conducted at several Universities. For more information about Adaptive Optics, I suggest the Center for Adaptive Optics

My personal experience with AO was as an intern for Gemini this past summer. I helped write parallel code for a program that simulates current and future adaptive optics systems planned for the next generation of extremely large telescopes.

Re:Wrong question :) by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-10 03:44 · Score: 0 · on Altavista Renewed

Me neither, but I do remember only having things like WAIS and a bunch of comic strip characters!

Alta Vista by The+Trolling+Troller · 2002-11-10 02:52 · Score: -1 · on Altavista Renewed

Anyone remember when Alta Vista was the best search engine?

Re:Monopoly Abuse? by Dun+Malg · 2002-11-05 03:11 · Score: 3, Informative · on Microsoft takes on PDF

To be fair, by most reports Stalin killed 10 million of his own people

And to be accurate, Stalin killed about 43 million between 1939 and 1953. Take a look at R.J. Rummel's web site for accurate analyses of historical acts of democide.