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Your response is misleading at best. That table shows only sucrose (table sugar) consumption. Americans get fully 2/3rds of their sugar from high-fructose corn syrup. Reference: http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/winter_ 05/article5.aspx

One needs to be clear whether on is using the term "sugar" to mean "any monosaccharide or disaccharide" or specifically "sucrose" (table sugar).

I hate to be a jerk, but I have to question why the farmers just don't stick to their traditional crops (versus the GM versions) if Monsanto is so horrible. Not one is forcing them to buy GM seeds...

That would be fine... except for the fact that:

(a) Even if you grow non-Monsanto traditional crops, if a Monsanto seed blows in from miles away and you end up growing Monsanto crops, you are liable for growing Monsanto crops without a license, and

(b) Third-world farmers are approached by agribusiness with incredibly delicious loans if they would just consent to grow GM crops. But this leads to an ever more expensive cycle of buy seeds / buy chemicals, leading eventually to many farmers simply committing suicide. So it's not necessarily that people are stupid and rolling over for agribusiness. Agribusinesses are being your typical ultracapitalistic corporate jerks. --Rob

I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.

This fall total tuition and fees for most majors at Iowa State is $3080.66 / semester:
http://www.iastate.edu/~registrar/fees/tuition0708 .html

Minnesota: $4705 / semester
http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/costsaid/tuition.html

Wisconsin: $3365 / semester
http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php

Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).

ISU used to have the hacking part of that... http://www.iac.iastate.edu/summercamp/index.html

It's not an entirely new concept.... I believe a different variation of "data exchange by handshake" - low voltage transmitted via skin (water?) has been around for a while now. One person could exchange a business cards's worth of data at about low-end modem speeds (1200-9600baud)". Remember the PAN? (Personal Area Network). http://ecpe.ece.iastate.edu/arun/Cpre489/stuff/stu ff1.html

Looks like it's been done before and posted online for everyone's perusal:

http://seniord.ece.iastate.edu/may0710/index.shtml

Ruby now runs on Blue Gene/L :)
http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~crb002/cnr.html

Waging the good fight against dumbed-down science and research by press release, your masked hero finds.. this.

Mobile phones can soon survive being dropped

Good because you cannot get a patent after publication? Or bad because.. oh phooey. This might be by the same person.

* In unrelated news is anyone going to be at ETC2007? Neal Stephenson talk and a new hires cave called C6 by Iowa State! Someone video the thing!

Maybe your right. However, based on this state institution's bid policy (which could obviously vary for other states) "Specifications for goods should be based on the functional or technical performance of the products." It seems reasonable that machines giving equal access to all individuals could be pretty important in the selection process for a voting machine in this case -- something that was stated as the reason for Mass's choice in the article.

Now this may change the voter "turnout" for some districts -- but this would be equally true if Diebold forced their less accessable machine on the public.

The gothic cathedral was in many ways a communal project that evolved over decades and even centuries. David Macaulay: Cathedral DVD The medieval craft guilds had a very large say in who sold what and where. Medieval Gulds I can't find an anchorage for Raymond's analogy in any historical reality.

I am in the fast growing field of Information Assurance (aka computer/system security). Every time there's a security/data breach, my field gets more visibility and more companies develop positions in IA. It is definitely not something that will be outsourced overseas either.

Some people in this field have a lot of OJT in a lot of areas (sounds like you) and others have gotten degrees with or without additional experience. I am currently finishing a MS in Information Assurance from Iowa State University via distance. Among my classmates who went to work in private industry, the lowest starting salary was 60K - for 23YOs without experience. Some chose to work for "three-letter government agencies" and after a few years, their experience plus high level security clearance will practically guarantee a quantum leap in salary in private industry.

I have heard that people who go on to get the ISC2 CISSP certification (requires 4 years IA OJT or 3 years w/IA degree from certain universities) have an average salary of 100K.

Some specialize in network security but others have chosen forensics, project management (at MS), applications development, database security, certification and accredidation teams, PKI administration, etc.

I chose the specialization of Information Assurance oversight. I use my broad knowledge of computers/systems but I do no systems/network administration or even have an account on the systems I oversee. Plus, because I had a broader experience/qualifications than my classmates, I started at a lot higher salary also (my net is more than my peers' gross).

I can't find any way to get a copy from there. And the only thing I can find shows course tuition in the range of $2,000 :/

I don't suppose you can subpoena a copy somehow (that's, umm, a subpoena deuces tecum? assuming I remember the fancy legal term). That, or talk with the Iowa State University's library. They might keep an archival copy of such things, and you just might be able to get it via inter-library loan with some local library or something...

Here's their web page, it lists a phone number of (515) 294-3642. I'd ask for the reference desk. If they're anything like the libraries here, they'd be very helpful. No promises, though. If this doesn't work, I don't know what else to try. Good luck! :]

Yeah. If this ever went to trial all the defense would have to do is show video clips of his Info Warfare lecture since they are taped for distance education courses.

I saw something in the transcript that I wanted to point out before anyone else here criticizes Jacobson on it:

Q. By what body are you certified as an engineer?
A. By no professional society.
Q. No professional society? Is there any organization that has certified you as an engineer?
A. No.
Q. Are you part of any peer regulatory body?
A. I don't quite understand what you mean by --
Q. Are you part of any body the members of which are peer-regulated?
A. Can you give me an example of what you are --
Q. A lawyer, an architect, an accountant. I thought an engineer had to be certified by a peer-regulated body.
A. To be called a professional engineer they do.
Q. So are you not a professional engineer?
A. I do not have a PE license.

Based on his Jacobson's research page. It looks like Jacob's, a professor "on the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering", is a computer engineer. Given that, the above statement is totally understandable As a computer engineer myself, I can say that it is *EXTREMELY* rare for a computer engineer to be a licensed PE. (Not a single computer engineering professor in my University is). PE's are common in engineering professions where somebody needs to sign off on the final product - civil engineering especially, and mechanical engineering to a lesser extent.

Maybe we should use switch grass.

Ten times as many gallons / ton, and grows like the weed that it is!

Some places will get colder, some places will get warmer.

Yeah, well, you may want to look at the data before you go any further...

There are other places with better data, but the reality of the situation is that Canada and further north get the bulk of the warming, and most of the warming everywhere is the winter getting warmer. The summers and places that are currently hot remain about the same temperature (with some exceptions). (There is a better temperature increase distribution graph that shows the entire planet - it is much more obvious on that graph, because north of Canada shows up on it.)

If anything, global warming will be solved through technology

I totally agree - technology is the answer. I think most of the people shouting about global warming would disagree though.

Do scientists feel there's some special value to being cold and miserable? (I know, this was the original poster)

I think what it comes down to is a war between people fighting for stasis and people trying to move forward. The global warming argument is a stasis argument - it is gettting warmer, and any change is inherently bad. Florida coastline propperty values will decline sharply, and that must be avoided.

The problem is that there is a flip side to the argument. Florida values decline, but Canadian values increase (like, you know, you can actually live there now...). Many people say that the right of Florida to maintain value trumps the right of Canadians to increased value - but there is no real set law/moral there. Throw in the fact that saving Florida destroys the economy (or at least puts heavy strains on it) and perhaps the answer is to allow change.

I know that many people are now saying "we don't need to do much, just make slight course adjustments in the economy." My only answer is that this is a new development, and my support for the "fix" for global warming is inversely proportional to the effect it has on the economy. Until recently, no one has been paying much attention to that - they just wanted to make all sorts of laws to tell me what I can and can't do. This new perspective is a welcome change.

I can't speak for the mainstream media, but you can try looking at studies of regional warming, e.g. here. The scenario studied leads to an increase of 1-5C in the maximum summer temperatures, in different regions of the U.S. Of course, this is not actual "data", it is a model prediction. It's not immediately clear to me which global warming scenario they were using, however.

At Iowa State University we have wireless over our entire campus - including our 50 acre central campus green. Here is a map that shows all of the APs. The overall service is really good - both for signal strength and bandwidth.

Home builders have architectural plans. Machinist have blueprints. Electronic equipment builders have schematics. Software specifications are uniformly deplorable.

How about a material that has a negative index of refraction?

It only works for energy with a wavelength of a few meters right now, but weird shit none the less.

http://www.las.iastate.edu/newnews/soukoulis0324.s html

But cows don't need to eat protein; they're ruminants, and can live very nearly solely on grass. (Or newspapers, orange peels, or other cellulose sources.) Feeding grain to cows is a way of dealing with grain surplus and allowing animals to be raised at higher density.

Note that on his homepage - http://vulcan.ee.iastate.edu/~dougj/ - he mentions that he's one of the founders of Palisade, which... wait for it... "identifies and blocks private data before it leaves your network, including [...] intellectual property".

So of course he's going to claim that it's possible/easy/etc to trace that kind of thing.

Google the clown. None of his web pages seem to have been updated since 2003. Even back then his scientific production, in his supposed area of research, was completely dead. This guy is completely out of touch with science and would never be able to land another research faculty position based on his publication record. Most likely he was not smart enough to stay in the game.

What I see on the provided 26-page vita in the category of refereed publications are just 5 refereed journal publications between 1980 and 1990, in areas far removed from detection of filesharing activity. There is a smattering of NSF grants related to supporting students with scholarships, training of faculty, a planning grant for a center and later funding for that security center, which does not seem to have research experience on issues relevant to the issues likely to arise in a filesharing trial.

Do you know of anyone better qualified than yourself, possibly with experience developing and using filesharing tools, developing and using rootkits, spyware, and IP spoofing techiniques, who is willing to serve as the RIAA expert?

Static analysis becomes virtually unnecessary when you use a proper, statically-typed language like Haskell, Standard ML or OCaml. Furthermore, the use of garbage collection eliminates many of the buffer overruns that plague C and C++ software. Add in proper unit testing, and you're almost guaranteed to have a rock-solid system, developed very economically and often with extremely clean code.

In the 80s, kids of my generation cut their teeth on Super Mario Bros..

They went through high school with Mario Kart...

... and bonded with college friends playing Super Smash Bros.

By 1999, though, the N64 had long since proven that Nintendo's dominance in American videogaming was over.

Try filling out a force field analysis. This lays out the situation in a logical manner, using a well known management method.
Write a few sentences or a paragraph under each of these headings:

1) The Problem
2a) The Present Situation
2b) The desired situation
3) Resisting forces
4) Actons to Reduce or Eliminate resisting forces
5) Driving forces
6) Actions to Increase driving forces
7a) Steps Towards Solving the Problem
7b) Resources Required
8) Sequence of Steps
Steps When How

Then lay on a 30 minute presentation for the management, with coffee and biscuits provided. Get a team of like minded staff, and have each person present a 5 minute portion of the analysis. Use A1 flip charts, or powerpoint or something similar to create the presentation materials. Rehearse it through before you book the meeting, so you can work smoothly as a team. This shows management that you've thought carefully about the problem, and are working as a team towards what you perceive to be a solution.

More info here: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/communities/tools /forcefield.html

Actually, even this article seems a bit strange to me- I always thought Damascus Steel required the sacrifice of a young male slave with proper supplication to the gods to temper the steel (the blood of the slave provided the carbon for the nano tubes) while this seems to be a different process.

Requiring that all checkins be accompanied by unit test code is ridiculous because two developers working on the same code will need to update not only the code itself but also any test cases that rely on the behavior of the executing code.

We have #141 on the list at Iowa State and we booked time on it so it could be used as a password cracker at one of our Cyber Defense Competitions.

I don't know if it actually got used, or if it was deemed "unfair" for the red team (attackers) to use it. It would have been pretty sweet if they were allowed to.

These competitions are pretty cool, and have some pretty good challenges like the red team pulling the fire alarm at 3:00AM, forcing the blue team (defenders) to evacuate the building. More info can be found at the ISU Information Assurance Student Group website, or the competition website.

We have #141 on the list at Iowa State and we booked time on it so it could be used as a password cracker at one of our Cyber Defense Competitions.

I don't know if it actually got used, or if it was deemed "unfair" for the red team (attackers) to use it. It would have been pretty sweet if they were allowed to.

These competitions are pretty cool, and have some pretty good challenges like the red team pulling the fire alarm at 3:00AM, forcing the blue team (defenders) to evacuate the building. More info can be found at the ISU Information Assurance Student Group website, or the competition website.

The National Summit on Video Games, Youth, and Public Policy is hosted by The National Institute on Media and the Family and Iowa State University.

First session was an overview presented by Douglas Gentile. You can buy his book here. Next, they had a session on "Violent Video Games: Effects and Public Policy" from Craig Anderson. Then they had a panel discussion with Joanne Cantor, Kim Thompson, Douglas Gentile, and one person from the ESRB.

I can go on, but it looked like a mutual masterbation get-together from the names I saw in attendance. So I can see why the games press didn't want to go.

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb =true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_Searc hValue_0=EJ370876&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_ accno&objectId=0900000b80060cbb

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/povertyre search.html#crucial

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/madon/so cialpsychology280/extrareadings/Genes.htm

      http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turk heimer%20psychological%20science.pdf

Besides the many very good points you mention there's also the question of documentation - good DbC systems are integrated into the autogenerated documentation elegantly. All that said, you do have more options then Eiffel if you want to use contracts. If you use Java you can use JML which I believe covers all your points, and my point about documentation. If you use Ada you can use SPARK which again, covers your points quite well. Both SPARK and JML also offer (via ESC/Java2 for JML) extended static checking as well as the usual runtime checking of contracts. Finally for C# there's Spec#, but I don't know too much about that one.

Still, Eiffel is actually an extremely elegant language with powerful DbC built into at the core. If DbC is something that's important to you Eiffel probably is your best choice.

Surprise, that's what I'm working on : http://hsse.ece.iastate.edu/publications_1.html

Pretty scary, they're teaching compiler design using "a compiler generating system". Good luck really understanding lexical analysis if all you're doing is writing a bunch of lex rules. And good luck figuring out how to write an optimizer w/o knowing assembly language...

Seriously though, this is obviously CS tacked onto an engineering curriculum (at UMich? Whoda thunkit?), and I can't imagine that a college that teaches a course in game development doesn't have some expertise at teaching assembler. FWIW, ISTR that the situation was about the same when I went to Drexel. For a list of courses at another large Midwestern university, check this out. Note CS 321, " Introduction to Computer Architecture and Machine-Level Programming".

We defined violence as acts in which the aggressor causes or attempts to cause physical injury or death to another character. We did not include damage to objects, accidental actions that unintentionally harmed another character, the effects of natural disasters, or the presence of dangerous obstacles that could not be attributed to the actions of a particular character. We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game (e.g., tacking in football or checking in hockey), because the intention of the player is technically to stop the other player without causing injury. We did count excessive physical contact in sports games, such as punching or otherwise attacking another player (e.g., after the football play was over).

This is a problem from the start. So unintentional harm is not violence? This instantly brings up the question of what the player's "intention" is. Is your intention to kill someone or to win? Is winning accomplished by killing?

They then continue: "We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game" which immediately sets up a binary division between sports and videogames. I've long argued that if we are worried about violence, we should be a lot more worried about the kids who hit each other so hard they have to wear padding and helmets than we should be about the kids sitting on the couch with controllers in their hands. Such a division also indicates that in the minds of the researchers that, seemingly without examination, sports are ok, but videogames aren't. If they didn't assume that sports were ok, then they would examine them for violence. If they didn't assume that videogames weren't ok, then they would not examine them for violence.

In the joystiq interview, when asked, "Do you feel that the violence portrayed in games like Pac-Man and Mario Bros. is harmful to minors? In what way does it affect their growth to warrant a rating exceeding that of the pre-designated E?"

Her response was,

If you are interested in the body of literature that indicates harmful effects, then you should contact Dr. Joanne Cantor, Dr. Craig Anderson (Iowa State), or Dr. Vic Strasbuger (author of Kids and Media)

Funny that when asked about the impacts of media violence she pretends not to be qualified to make a statement about it, but somehow refernces three people who have consistently been crying that the sky is falling when it comes to media violence for years. Were one to actually be objective, it would seem that one would suggest contacting people who have been less convinced that media violence is bad.

When asked, "To what extent are video games used as a scapegoat for politicians and activists?" she responds, "This is not a question that I have researched so I'm not sure how to answer it. My impression is that every industry thinks that it is the scapegoat for politicians and activists. This is America." So basically she is saying that the videogame industry is a bunch of crybabies and that it is common to whine about things that you have no reason to whine about. Sure, just like when the Comic Book industry was complaining that they were being scapegoated...

Finally, she concludes by stating, "We developed and consistently applied definitions for violence and other content." That is nice and all. However, being

Oh, and I found this, too: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html

And there might be something good here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html but, then, I didn't poke around here too much.

And this one: http://hcvl.hci.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/openEyes.cgi

And....I'm done. That's enough link to keep anyone busy for a while.

Layne

Wrong. First digital electronic computer was built in Ames, Iowa: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml

The article talks only about how health has improved over the last few hundred years. This is almost entirely due to nutrition and sanitation. The article fails to mentions the much more interesting point that we are probably still less healthy than our ancestors of 2000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers are on average taller than Americans today, and there has never been a documented hunter-gatherer cancer death. Read accounts of the original Spanish explorers in the Carribean and Florida. They saw how much taller and healthier the hunter-gatherer tribes were.

http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diam ondmistake.html
http://www.paleodiet.com/lindeberg/

The ideal human diet is high in meat and animal fat. For the last several hundred years "civilized" humans have been highly reliant on grains and short on quality fats and proteins, which has been disasterous for human health. Only in the last hundred years has meat and fat consumption risen to reasonably healthy levels in wealthy countries. The effects of increased meat and fat intake was clearly documented in post-war UK and Japan, where deliberate efforts to raise egg and dairy consumption had dramatic effects on heart disease and general health.

The Information Assurance Graduate Certificate link

Masters of Science in Information Assurance link

Courses are offered over the web, lectures are streamed live and are available for download, and you can get DVDs of the lectures mailed to you. All of the courses are designed with off-campus students in mind, including a policy that off-campus homeworks are due 1-week after on-campus students so any DVDs that are sent have time to arrive. Also, if you talk to the professors when work issues come up, arrangements can be made.

Another nice point about working with a university is access to equipment and software that wouldn't otherwise be available - sometimes for weeks at a time. For example, in my Forensics class we got to use EnCase and FTK for our projects. In the Information Warfare class, we got to perform a break-in lab on a fake company network - sort of like you would do in an Ethical Hacking class - but we got several weeks to look for vulnerabilities. In a 3-day course you may get to use their software and equipment, but there is no time in the schedule for you to play around with it. When the class lasts a few months, there are a lot of opportunities for you to use it, just to use it.

Yes, taking the actual courses, with the actual tests, homeworks and projects can be a real pain - both in time and effort, but can also provide opportunities to learn a lot more overall.

The Information Assurance Graduate Certificate link

Masters of Science in Information Assurance link

Courses are offered over the web, lectures are streamed live and are available for download, and you can get DVDs of the lectures mailed to you. All of the courses are designed with off-campus students in mind, including a policy that off-campus homeworks are due 1-week after on-campus students so any DVDs that are sent have time to arrive. Also, if you talk to the professors when work issues come up, arrangements can be made.

Another nice point about working with a university is access to equipment and software that wouldn't otherwise be available - sometimes for weeks at a time. For example, in my Forensics class we got to use EnCase and FTK for our projects. In the Information Warfare class, we got to perform a break-in lab on a fake company network - sort of like you would do in an Ethical Hacking class - but we got several weeks to look for vulnerabilities. In a 3-day course you may get to use their software and equipment, but there is no time in the schedule for you to play around with it. When the class lasts a few months, there are a lot of opportunities for you to use it, just to use it.

Yes, taking the actual courses, with the actual tests, homeworks and projects can be a real pain - both in time and effort, but can also provide opportunities to learn a lot more overall.

The Information Assurance Graduate Certificate link

Masters of Science in Information Assurance link

Courses are offered over the web, lectures are streamed live and are available for download, and you can get DVDs of the lectures mailed to you. All of the courses are designed with off-campus students in mind, including a policy that off-campus homeworks are due 1-week after on-campus students so any DVDs that are sent have time to arrive. Also, if you talk to the professors when work issues come up, arrangements can be made.

Another nice point about working with a university is access to equipment and software that wouldn't otherwise be available - sometimes for weeks at a time. For example, in my Forensics class we got to use EnCase and FTK for our projects. In the Information Warfare class, we got to perform a break-in lab on a fake company network - sort of like you would do in an Ethical Hacking class - but we got several weeks to look for vulnerabilities. In a 3-day course you may get to use their software and equipment, but there is no time in the schedule for you to play around with it. When the class lasts a few months, there are a lot of opportunities for you to use it, just to use it.

Yes, taking the actual courses, with the actual tests, homeworks and projects can be a real pain - both in time and effort, but can also provide opportunities to learn a lot more overall.

Large-scale systems of greater than l00 kW cost in the range of $1,000 to $2,000 per kilowatt. I've seen cheaper estimates, but perhaps they might have been optimistic, cant find them now anyway. This is "rated power output", which on a large scale commercial site, I would think to be average power output, not peak but I'm not sure on that.

Now you can claim payback time is still 20 years or whatever, but you are forgetting, they are (in my magical la la land world) being payed for with reclaimed millitary invasion money, redirected from securing the oil fields to securing wind power, leaving money normally spent on actual oil/coal/gas purchases to other uses (whatever they might be)(not to mention saving plenty of peoples lives in the process). Even better would be if this was partially in the form of large rebates for homes to solar/wind power where possible, to enable distributed power generation, reducing blackouts etc.

Not sure of the cost of electricity where you are. It costs around 15c per kWh here in aust though. Assuming (and this could be wrong) that that IS average power, it would take $1000/15c= around 7000 hours, or 291 days to pay itself off. (lets be generous and round up by a factor of about 2 and make it 2 years) As for Solar cells, they are a couple of times more expensice than that, so we are looking at maybe a 10 year payoff time, however solar cells last a lot longer than 10 years. (just looking at SES stirling en gine solar collector, aiming for $1 per watt (again their figures, Im assuming average power but not sure) by next year.)

As to my understanding of currency, it is, I'll admit, limited. I would like to hear how you justify calling the USD "universal irregardless of oil" though. Considering the massive US debt, offshoring of many jobs, deskilling etc etc, how else is faith in the US economy being maintained besides OIL and millitary? because without faith in the US, they're just slips of printed T.P.

Has the memory of 9/11 faded that much?

Prior to 9/11 the cockroaches to plotted to attack the US did so in the kind of open environment you seem to want to restore. They used our openness and their freedom to be anonymous as a weapon.

Nah they'll probably code in Eubonicode