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Many colleges have a Philosophy degree in the Computer Science department
https://www.cis.ksu.edu/phd

I learned logic from NAND gates and RPN in my first year of an EE program, ymmv

Nonsense. Roundup Ready technology REDUCES pesticide use. Furthermore the active ingredient in RoundUp is perhaps the least toxic to mammals of any pesticide ever developed.

http://foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=16&sc=129&id=484

I won't explain it, as I don't feel like reading through all of it right now, but someone else is welcome to! And now it's easy to find.

Emission of pulse:

It's actually called Double optical Gating, not Grating, as the article called it. http://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/chang/Chang-attoweb.pdf

Detection: Phase Retrieval by Omega Oscillation Filtering

http://www.creol.ucf.edu/research/publications/2859.pdf

Bacteria love milk. Pasteurisation and refrigeration reduce the risk of contracting food-born illnesses. Recent documented outbreaks

more support

see here as well

and this

Actually shit would be organic fertilizer... :P

Yes, I wonder if they tested results with "organic fertilizer".

Also did they test crop rotation? Organic Sorghum may have lower production if grown without fertilizer unless it's grown the year after Soybeans or Alfalfa (nitrogen fixing) were grown in the same field -- in which case the production is as much as 50% higher.

>Also reminds me of Robby, the only academic one-name I've ever heard of.

Well there is always Arvind [ http://csg.csail.mit.edu/Users/arvind/ ]

  now you have heard of two

He's also a Perl guru, and has the chutzpah to stop using capitals, even for official publications.

Reminds me of the intro to a talk once. "My name is Chromatic. You can call me Chromatic."

Also reminds me of Robby, the only academic one-name I've ever heard of.

-- coppit (whose nick is easily traceable to his real name)

... "Ask the Magic 8-Ball" http://av.vet.ksu.edu/flash/8ball/

Probably the March '85 edition, cited here:

http://eece.ksu.edu/~gjohnson/Search1997.pdf

Too bad I can't find the article itself.

I actually live in the town (to call it a city is a bit laughable) where the NBAF is going, and there is a sizable portion of the local population who is against it's construction as well. I hesitate to call it a majority, as I certainly havent taken a scientific poll or anything, but several people I know are rather opposed to the idea. Their main concern (besides the usual Not In My Back Yard mentality associated with stuff like this) is about the effect an outbreak would have on the local livestock populations. The Manhattan area, despite being a college town, still has a pretty agriculture oriented economy. Cows and sheep and wheat all over the place. A good deal of people are concerned about the repercussions of an outbreak, not only on the macro level (millions of dollars spent containing infections, yet another beef embargo, the slaughter of who knows how many heads of livestock, etc.), but on the micro level (farmers being forced to exterminate what could easily be their only source of income, the possibility of local residents becoming infected with virus variants that can make humans sick, etc.). Programs like Locate In 48, while a great idea, are not very widely implemented, and thus make it much more difficult to track down infections without slaughtering a quarter of the state's cows. And yes, we do have a bit of a tornado problem. Last summer a tornado came straight through Manhattan and tore up several buildings in town and on campus. K-State and the city government like to talk up how great of an economic boost to the community the lab will be, with all the jobs created from the technical staff and construction labor, and how it belongs in Kansas because there is an ample sized pool of scientists and collaborators in this region to work for/with the NBAF, and the number of animal health researchers at K-State and the Biosecurity Research Institute that we already have here.

You could use the argument that researchers wouldn't want to live there, but you could say the same thing about Kansas!

No kidding. I fucking hate it here...

http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/news/sty/2002/flax_health080502.htm

You're right, I should have RTFA instead of just skimming it.

The gene may make more muscle, but unless the genetic change is combined with a change in diet and enviroment(letting the cows roam), all you get is even bigger cows with the same amount of fat. Don't think that feedlot breeders won't take advantage of that.

These days, he plays in a jazz trio called "Bellyflop "with Joey Francesco and Doug "Doctor Music" Riley. He also enjoys tending to his cat.

It's just a tiny difference in the wing to body ratio... http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/webbuilder/DjVu/samples/combines/red%20combine%20300dpi%20gimp.jpg

The Physics Education Group at Kansas State University has made a set of tools for teaching quantum mechanics. Some of them involve computer simulation of wave packets, etc. This helps for visualizing the (rather complex) ideas behind quantum mechanics. I interacted with these tools while taking an undergraduate physics course (intended for non-majors). They really worked well.

Without aqueous chemistry, carbon dioxide couldn't turn into carbonates and stayed in the atmosphere.

Ahhh, so that's why all that limestone looks like fossilized plankton... aqueous chemistry... Got it! Good thing that aqueous chemistry locked up all that C in 66,000,000 gigatons of limestone and dolomite and that life on earth only locked up a paltry amount in 4000 gigatons of fossil fuels. (Source) Man, if only there were some way to get life on earth to get with the program and reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we could counteract any effect CO2 might have by removing it from the atmosphere completely... If only there were some government study or something to show us how!

Oh well, on to plan B. We should we should cease use of the internal combustion engine and shut down all power plants that utilize fossil fuels in the production of electricity. At least that stops adding CO2 to the atmosphere, even though it does nothing to remove the CO2 there and completely handicaps modern society in a multitude of ways. Brilliant plan! Let's begin immediately.

By the same token, code checkers can't know what your intentions are for every variable and class relationship. They can tell you if you generate invalid or null variables, or if a function is orphaned, stuff that is strictly boolean. Beyond mistakes like that, you'll have to tell the checker in explicit manners what to look for, negating the benefit of the tool.

If you state your intentions in a language that the code checker understands (preferrably a language designed to be expressive when it comes to making assertions) then the checker can actually determine a great deal about your code. For instance, look at ESC/Java2. By providing annotations to your Java code it allows the checker to find far more errors than the small amount you suggest. Developing using ESC/Java2 instead of a compiler to "check" your code can be very productive (it checks Java syntax and does type checking as well, so if it passes ESC/Java2 it will definitely compile) - Things get flagged as potential errors early on, often forcing you to add extra annotations to clarify your intentions (which is a good thing! it often helps you actually flesh out your ideas of exactly what you intend), and by the time you're done the odds of code working as you intend is far far higher than you would ever expect otherwise.

The fact that the annotation language that ESC/Java2 uses can also be automatically included into your JavaDoc documentation (making method requirements explicit, and making clear what a method guarantees), and can also be used to automatically build a JUnit testing framework for the code - well that's just icing. Take a look - download the Eclipse plugins here and here and try it out. I think you'll be remarkably suprised how powerful the error checking is, and how productive the development cycle can be when using it.

Jedidiah.

By the same token, code checkers can't know what your intentions are for every variable and class relationship. They can tell you if you generate invalid or null variables, or if a function is orphaned, stuff that is strictly boolean. Beyond mistakes like that, you'll have to tell the checker in explicit manners what to look for, negating the benefit of the tool.

If you state your intentions in a language that the code checker understands (preferrably a language designed to be expressive when it comes to making assertions) then the checker can actually determine a great deal about your code. For instance, look at ESC/Java2. By providing annotations to your Java code it allows the checker to find far more errors than the small amount you suggest. Developing using ESC/Java2 instead of a compiler to "check" your code can be very productive (it checks Java syntax and does type checking as well, so if it passes ESC/Java2 it will definitely compile) - Things get flagged as potential errors early on, often forcing you to add extra annotations to clarify your intentions (which is a good thing! it often helps you actually flesh out your ideas of exactly what you intend), and by the time you're done the odds of code working as you intend is far far higher than you would ever expect otherwise.

The fact that the annotation language that ESC/Java2 uses can also be automatically included into your JavaDoc documentation (making method requirements explicit, and making clear what a method guarantees), and can also be used to automatically build a JUnit testing framework for the code - well that's just icing. Take a look - download the Eclipse plugins here and here and try it out. I think you'll be remarkably suprised how powerful the error checking is, and how productive the development cycle can be when using it.

Jedidiah.

Design by Contract is particularly nice if you are willing to spend a little extra effort to write very reliable code, but it would be even better if there were good theorum provers out there to verify that contracts will always hold and warn if they don't. The would be much more developer friendly than the predicate calculus normally associated with formal methods.

If that's what you're looking for then I would suggest that you take some time to check out JML and ESC/Java2 which provides almost exactly that functionality for Java. It's not as clean as Eiffel as the contracts have be be kludged into Java as add-on annotation in comments, but all the functionality you'd want in a good expressive DbC system is there in JML, and ESC/Java2 provides a static checker/theorem prover that can attempt to verify contracts and provide warn you when they might fail. It also provides a number of other strong static checks based on JML annotations, allowing you to have high degree of confidence in well annotated code that passes ESC/Java2. Honestly, download JML, JMLEclipse and ESC/Java2 and try them out - you'll be amazed the number of subtle errors that can be quickly and efficiently caught!

His belief that a method should never return a value and have a side effect is particularly bad. Writing a stack with get_top() and remove_top() instead of pop() is a little weird.

It seems odd, but it does have nice aspects, particularly if you're used to a more functional perspective: it goes a long way toward isolating side effects and allowing better reasoning about the scope of effects that a given block of code may have. It certainly makes sense to me.

Jedidiah.

Just a nit, but Prolog (in Abstract State Machines) and Scheme (in denotational semantics) also have formal specifications. However, I agree that it's disappointing that so few languages (3 is still a tiny number) use such an approach.

The technique is used in tandem accelerators. You have a grid that is negatively charged (so it attracts the ions) immediately prior to the grid that is positively charged (that repels the ions, once they are through the negatively-charged grid).

Wouldn't the ions be decelerated by the positive grid? After all, the grids can't be too close (this page mentions 1cm separation between the contacts in a 15kV vacuum circuit breaker).

The references I found mentions a different approach. Negative ions are attracted to a positively charged center. Once they arrive, they're stripped of some electrons, making them positively charged. This causes them to be repelled away from the center. This makes more sense to me as there would be no deceleration phase, from what I can figure.

Then again, I'm no expert ;)

Dude, you a clearly mistaken. I don't know what you've been smoking today, but the Bluetooth SIG that everybody else knows about has its headquarters in Kansas. And that's why alot of Bluetooth research is done at the University of Kansas and KSU (like their EECE 690 and 890) classes.

Greets!

OK, up front, I work with Ted, I know him personally, I admire him a lot, so feel free to ignore this post if you want to continue your bigoted, uninformed opinions instead of learning something.

First up, Ted is NOT an uninformed old man - he is the reason, along with Bush and Englebart, that you are all sitting in front of interconnected computers.

Author of two of the most influential books of the computer age, Literary Machines and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (not available in print - I have a copy or two if people are interested), creator of Xanadu WHICH IS AVAILABLE as the Udanax project [site down - Google cache] in both Gold and Green versions.

Victim of a Wired hatchet job - see his reply here

You'll have to take his word for it, but he's pretty sure when asked how his ideas could be simplified, he answered "you could make links one way and use a back button". Familiar?

Everyone that talks about transclusion or linking is refering back to Ted's work.

So show some respect, inform yoursleves and then perhaps, just for once, an informed debate can occur on slashdot!

AM: So there's acetylene rain from the sky that's produced by the breakdown of methane</i>

Notice the green dots? I guess Google's censoring some of their map data.

Someone apparently hasn't flown cross-country.

The green is plants. They're circular because there's a irrigation machine like this spinning around on a central pivot.

No, apparently the salmonella gets inside the eggs as well.

A lot of DNA damage is automatically repaired. You get a lot of broken DNA by being in sunlight, and much of that is repaired. Breaks in DNA are spliced back together, copy errors (mismatches in C/T G/A) are detected and a best guess is used to fix them. Entire sections of broken DNA can be copied and patched in from the other chromosome.

Of course, that doesn't always work, but it's generally a whole lot better than nuthin'.

Although some cancers result from mistakes in DNA repair. A "common" form of leukemia results from a particular section of a gene breaking off and being spliced with the wrong section from another chromosome. The protein that gets assembled following the misrepair is missing the section that keeps it disabled under normal circumstances. Thus, unrestrained replication, which is cancer.

(In searching for the name of this cancer, i came across this bit of info: "[Regarding mammilian DNA..] It has been estimated that approximately 50 DNA double-strand breaks occur during S phase of a normal cell division cycle, and additional breaks may occur during other phases of the cell cycle." http://www.bloodjournal.org/cgi/content/full/105/5 /1843-a

http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~bethmont/mutdes.html is a basic intro to mutagens and DNA repair mechanisms.

1) Kansas State University has a satellite campus in Salina which specializes in aerospace technology. The Global Flyer team decided to use the campus for mission control, and made it a student project. Read more about the selection process here. 2) Salina Municipal Airport is one of the longest runways in the country. It is usually up as an alternate emergency landing site for Space Shuttle missions. You really can't meet anyone from Salina without having them mention this to you, usually several times. :)

Just a quick fact check shows your argument to be rather spurious.

25 000 acres ~ 100 km2 (http://www.google.se/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=2500 0+acres+to+square+kilometers&spell=1)

size of 4 biggest deserts in usa toghether 535 000 miles2(http://www.desertusa.com/glossary.html) ~1 400 000 km2

Toghether this means that you cam fit 14 000 of these plants in the US deserts. With 200 mw per plant, that gives 2800 gigawatt of electricity.
For comparison, the total energy production capacity in USA is 735 gigawatt (http://www.eece.ksu.edu/~pahwa/School/Element.htm l)

It's IS a very big project though, I give you that.

An administrator overseeing the grants for said clowns' site wants them to rename it because it's misleading. (-:

Have a look at the reviewer's comment in the password-protected docs. That is, if you don't fear being done under the DMCA for typing in "7seven7". Still, I suppose it's better than "password". Or follow the direct link, which - not containing any JavScript - doesn't ask you for a password.

Creationism (or 'intelligent design', if you prefer) is unfalsifiable in part because it relies on an omnipotent creator who is used to explain every scientific question.

Why can't creationists be honest and say, "Evolution is the best scientific theory of how life evolved, but I believe in creation because I believe in God, something science takes no stand on"?

The Center for the Understanding of Origins is an interdisciplinary Center at Kansas State University. The center aims to foster bold and scholarly interdisciplinary research addressing issues of origins, especially the origin of the physical Universe, of the Earth, of Life, of intelligence, and of language.

The Center comprises permanent faculty from the departments of Biology, English, Entomology, History, Geology, Philosophy, and Physics. The Center's faculty are involved in developing general education courses and honors seminars for undergraduates, and a graduate certificate program in the study of origins. The Center sponsors both academic and public speakers, with the aim of transforming the discussion of important origins subjects such as evolution from one of hostile arguments between "experts" and "special interests" to informed debate among citizens.

Actually, I think:

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

is FAR worse.
Theres more here, and most are amusing.

This URL, shows how long the Taliban has been PLANNING the World Trade Center 9/11 attacks! It's horrible! Oh, the graph^H^H^H^H^Humanity!

Anyone else remember Stunt Island? It was an entire "movie studio" game that allowed you to build and "play" your own sets, making movies out of them in an editing room. Ran like gangbusters on my 486SX/33. It had an entire underground of people who would make their own movies and post them to BBSes. I was one of them. Sigh. Those were good days.

You can also check irs.gov.

http://www.cjmag.co.jp/magazine/issues/1997/oct97/ 1097indeye.html
Candescent did make some small models, but they never got into big production. I think the largest I saw was a 7 inch, and it was about as thick as a picture frame.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is _n2128_v42/ai_18595794
http://www.phys.ksu.edu/~jingli/nano%20emitter.ppt

Kick ass! My alma mater is ranked 15th. And ya'll think we're a bunch of hillbillies and rednecks around these parts. ;-) I'm happy to see that KU (Univeristy of Kansas) didn't even make the list. Serves them right for beating us this year in football. I guess even a one-armed, deaf, blind, dyslexic, quadriplegic squirrel finds a nut once a decade or so. :-)

Well, you got me going here, and I did some lookups. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony.

So if it's not irony, it's no sarcasm either :-)

Does anybody remember the old (early 90s) DOS game, Stunt Island? Essentially, the game provided an island full of a number of different sets, such as a city, an oil rig, a canyon, and so forth. The player could position cameras and props around these sets, and create event triggers for things like camera pans and object movement. The game also had an editing mode where you could splice together taped footage and insert sound effects. The game had a bias towards airplane stunts, but could be used to film virtually any sort of movie. Back in middle school my friend and I actually used it to create a short documentary about battles from World War II. Stunt Island was greatly loved by those who used it, and it still has somewhat of a cult following.

My question is, why hasn't anybody created something like this more recently? Although FPS game engines work for this, they certainly aren't designed for it, and there's quite a bit of roughness involved when one actually tries to create a movie. 3D animation modelers can also be used, but generally someone creating a movie has to focus on too many low-level details.

I'm actually considering starting up an open-source project this summer to try to create such a movie-creating tool, making heavy use of pre-existing graphics libraries like OGRE. Would anyone else be interested in helping out with such an endeavour?

ancient artifact
modern smut

Coincidence?

When people say that Prohibition doesn't work, they are talking about alcohol, not entertainment. Anyone can make alcohol. I could buy some apple cider, and after some experimentation make it turn into alcohol. There are monkeys who get drunk off of berries that ferment by themselves in the wild.

Comic book censorship in the 50's, on the other hand worked perfectly. The industry was more than decimated.

Since this is happening on the state level, it might not have as much of an effect, but you can bet that there will be a lot fewer M-Rated games produced and sold, which is really the point of the exercise. It's designed to impose censorship on the industry, and it will be at least partially successful if it passes.

Meanwhile, while this sideshow is going on, next year the government will probably be conscripting 18 year old kids, putting guns in their hands, and sending them off to Iraqi cities with exotic names (like my favorite, Samarra) to kill even younger teenagers who've got whatever guns they could get their hands on.

But then, the same irony was present during the anti-comic book crusade, when many comic book readers were off in Korea fighting the war there.

I agree with Cliff. With the possible exception of teaching programming, computers in schools are an unnecessary distraction. Here's a background piece about his book on the subject.

I have a professor that is in the process of writing his own book for introduction to programming class. I didn't think that it was terribly enlightening, and focused on some GUI toys early on, but he appears to have remodelled the book some, perhaps in response to these sorts of complaints. We used it in our class for a couple of years, but it appears that they've moved on. Some of the other students really enjoyed it though, and it makes a handy reference.

What I do like about the book is that the book doesn't focus on the java libraries. No fussing about the difference between a HashMap and HashSet, or what Runnable means.

Since we're not using it right now, you'd probably be an easy sell as a royalty free test market. Shoot off an email to him if you think the book is workable.

The only thing seperating the CS department in my univerity from MIT's is a centralized location and promotion. My AI teacher hosts a central sever for several courses he's taught now and in the past, including online lecture recordings (Tegrity requires MS Java, however =( ). While the name William Hsu (and his degree from China) might throw you off, he speaks English very well, and is very knowledgable about a wide variety of information. In fact, the course pages are designed for "distance" learning. Students attending KSU in Salina (as opposed to Manhattan) can enroll and recieve nearly the same experience as a student attending the live lecture like myself. Well, you might miss his adventures trying to get the recording cart working ;)

... The only way I'll find a pattern to any of this is if I spend the rest of the night playing rounds of 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Frankly I'm disappointed (but not surprised) that the RIAA is more immediately interested in these newer performers than in first "protecting" those artists that made RIAA rich in the first place. I'm in the Lou Reed camp!

And to anyone who downloaded The Clash... just cough up the $20 to buy Sandinista , and support the only rock band that mattered!

It's actually really good for breaking in baseball caps too - if you get that plastic hat holder thingy. It's much less messy than taking showers in your cap and wearing it around the house.

Ah! But apparently while trying to find a link to some such hat rack product, I ran into a couple of pages describing why this is a bad idea. Here's one

Take a diagram like this and add another line of FF on the outputs to mask the output while shifting... (say, DTR will shut them keep/thru, RTS to strobe... use CTS on a dead FF or buffer to sync for propagation delays) Heh, can you buy FF sticks anymore? it would be fun to play with...

I don't know if I should be commenting on games, or cheering for the wildcats

• Copyright: we want to reward and encourage creators, but we don't want to stifle public dissemination of creations.
• Digital Rights Management: Part of DRM is trusted code signatures. We want to protect computers from untrusted code, but it may have side effects like making Open Source implementations illegal
• Commercial Email: Many people don't like it, but commercial speech is still speech. What isn't protected is the right to force people to listen to you.

Of course, computing is a smal portion of "technology." A broad course like this should also cover other sciences.

Biology: Should gene's be patentable? Should parents be able to discern their child's genetic traits, like disease? What about gender? What about eye color? How do you enforce such a rule?

Physical sciences: Should we place Wind Farms near one of the last habitats of the prarie chicken, or should we move it further away from population centers to accomodate? Some interesting evidence may come from the Alaskan pipeline.

There's far more sciences out there, these are simply the ones I am most familiar with. I believe that any field has such dilemmas.

• Copyright: we want to reward and encourage creators, but we don't want to stifle public dissemination of creations.
• Digital Rights Management: Part of DRM is trusted code signatures. We want to protect computers from untrusted code, but it may have side effects like making Open Source implementations illegal
• Commercial Email: Many people don't like it, but commercial speech is still speech. What isn't protected is the right to force people to listen to you.

Of course, computing is a smal portion of "technology." A broad course like this should also cover other sciences.

Biology: Should gene's be patentable? Should parents be able to discern their child's genetic traits, like disease? What about gender? What about eye color? How do you enforce such a rule?

Physical sciences: Should we place Wind Farms near one of the last habitats of the prarie chicken, or should we move it further away from population centers to accomodate? Some interesting evidence may come from the Alaskan pipeline.

There's far more sciences out there, these are simply the ones I am most familiar with. I believe that any field has such dilemmas.

I'd rather have a program that defaults to an uncaught exception and program crash to one that is instead vulnerable. One is somewhat more dangerous than the other, though an uncaught ArrayOutOfBounds or whatnot exception isn't perfect and still results in program crashes.

Indeed the sooner it breaks the sooner it will be fixed in normal applications distributed to society at large. And if you know what you're doing and are ever vigilant you can perhaps avoid these sorts of errors. But its becoming increasingly clear that few and fewer know what they're doing behind that veneer, while still choosing C/C++ because its the standard. To fix this, we can either educate these people in the way of the code warrior or they can select another language. There's an entire body of information on the way of the warrior, so perhaps another language is indeed a viable option. Java actually implements an array class that throws your suggestion of an intelligent object/class built into the library.

Microsft has chosen C#, or Managed C(++). Universities have chosen Java. I'd love to see enterprise level support for OCaml personally, but I think that's doubtful. Stateful inspection of possible overflows is a long way from being complete. It seems a lot of research at my university is focused on such stuff.