Slashdot Mirror

I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.

People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.

Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.

Recently Kudzu has been looked at by farmers, yes farmers as an alternative to standard hay feed for cows and goats. Turns out that cows and goats will eat kudzu with good affect. Farmers did not have farming tools up to the task of dealing with the tough root/vine system that makes Kudzu so resilient, that is changing.

Commercialzing this way or this way may be the way to go. Once mankind figures out a way to make a buck on something, rest assured that something will be used up. At this point farming needs a way to feed livestock with a plant that is heat and drought resistant, kudzu being a viable option. Mayhap one day it wont be amber waves of grain, but rolling hills of green.

Yes. Apparently the parent isn't aware of the various Lucas Prince of Darkness jokes, or the world of British car humor. Although I am not sure who has the reputation for being worse at making a car, the British or Fiat?

Dr. Xuxian Jiang has been busy identifying all sorts of Android malware.

It doesn't need to make it infertile. It just needs to make it 10-15% harder to grow agricultural crops, which don't do well in alkaline soil, or with high calcium content. Corn, for example, prefers a slightly acidic pH of between 5 and 6, depending on soil type:
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/plymouth/cropsci/docs/how_soil_pH_affects_yields.html

The amount of concrete involved here for a single tower, over a few years, could raise the pH of the soil up over 8. Yes, it's somewhat localized, but it's certainly still relevant, especially when you can have 4 or 5 of these things in a single field, all contributing to the problem.

If you wanted to know what it is, you might want to read this paper.

I found it quite interesting, despite not understanding that much.
Maybe it's the 'fuzzy whitepaper' OP mentioned, but we'll never know.

That's not really how trademark works. Two different companies can use the same trademarks if they work in sufficiently different fields as to not lead to confusion.
Evidence:
http://www.delta.com/
http://www.deltafaucet.com/
http://www.deltamachinery.com/
http://www.deltadental.com/
http://www.delta.edu/
http://www.deltasociety.org/
http://www.deltacycle.com/
http://www.deltacreative.com/
http://www.deltacollege.edu/
http://www.deltastorage.com/
http://www.deltatargets.net/
http://www.madebydelta.com/
http://www.deltachildren.com/
http://www.deltawaterfowl.org/
http://www.deltamarine.com/
http://delta.ncsu.edu/
http://www.deltasrestaurant.com/
http://deltamotion.com/
http://www.deltaeducation.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910860/
http://www.deltapress.com/
http://www.deltatire.com/
http://www.deltarf.com/

We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.

Which probably means that some small fraction of the population was already resistant when the "experiment" began. No need to wait for a lucky mutation. Just apply strong selection pressure and the trait quickly spreads.

BT crops were first introduced in 1995 and there has been a steady stream of resistance reports since the early 2000's so it's just been a matter of time before the worms got it. There's even a paper here from 2003 where it was empirically determined that approx 1 in 1000 insects already carried a resistance gene in the wild before any selection pressure.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fgould/pdfs/Burd2003.pdf

Maybe universities have dedicated the most effort into making the ideal computer lab system.
http://vcl.ncsu.edu/

the fact that major industries cutting forests are paper, furniture, construction (mainly in america tho - other countries dont use wood in 21st century large scale construction), and real estate

You're lumping all this together in a way that makes it very clear you don't understand the dynamics in play. You can't just say: here's what they make out of wood, and here's how much wood gets cut down. Your dangerously wrong assumptions are a significant part of the problem. It's naively intuitive to think the way you're thinking, and that's a large reason why so little has been accomplished in solving the problem.

Deforestation is mostly a problem of land use, not of wood products at all. "Tree poaching" for valuable wood can create a slippery slope for deforestation (by making territory more accessible), but these people are not cutting trees to have pulp. A tree that's clear cut from, say, a Brazillian rainforest is much more likely to be used as firewood than pulped. When you make pulp, you want consistency - you want farmed trees, and that's how you make a profit in the industry. To the extent that Brazil is becoming a larger player in paper, it's on the back of farmed, reasonably managed trees. In any pulp production, the bulk of your product is coming either from recycled paper (which has been happening for a longer time than you might think) or as byproduct of another wood product (like lumber). You don't just clear an acre of jungle and put all that stuff in the chipper.

Anyways, for the Brazilians (for example) doing the deforesting, what they want isn't - to a large extent at least - the trees at all, it's the land. They use it for subsistence agriculture, and for growing grass for ranching. And they need more and more of it, because the deforested land is not sustainable. It's a land use problem first, and a valuable-wood problem second. Pulp wood pretty much doesn't enter into it. To the extent that they are doing forestry for producing paper, it's actually stopping deforestation because that land use is now sustainable, and they're producing something without having to clear an ever-increasing swath of land.

If you make a profit by selling the trees off land for pulp, there's good motivation to plant more trees. If you just want pulp, trees grow very, very fast. It's a crop mostly like any other. The problem, again (and you can read about this yourself, anywhere, on any serious environmentalist or industry site alike) is that they aren't making the money off the clear cut trees. They're burning them because they aren't worth money - and then using the land in a way that isn't working (and the result is land that used to be forest and is now garbage).

your proposition that there is no relevance in between recycling and keeping forests safe is not rational. decreasing factors contributing to deforestation will decrease deforestation.

I'll go back to my original analogy: if farmers quit killing pigs, would there be more pigs? I guess that sounds rational, if you don't understand the relationship between pigs and farmers.

If the world uses more paper, then that will mean it has more space - not less - devoted to growing trees. Again, I'm not saying that switching off paper is not a good idea or that farming trees doesn't have environmental impact (as does all the other steps of making paper). I'm just saying the relationship between "amount of paper used" and "amount of forests there are" doesn't go the way you think it does.

This graph looks about right to me. And the 3% for "logging" is going to be almost entirely about harvesting valuable woods. Because, again, you don't make money pulping jungle.

Ok, so I have tried to soak in Bells Theorem. http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html

I made it up to the conclusion. I need to go through the probability math again slowly, but I trust they are right.

And my, that is odd. I guess I have to accept the results of those experiments and they don;t fit with locality. I am *starting* to get a grasp of this now, not that it makes (common) sense yet lol.

I'd really love to get my head around this one day lol.

then you should read http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html

along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time

Actually, cloud seeding is likely to supress lightning rather than create it mainly by supressing hail that can cause intracloud lightning.

There are currently three known ways to trigger lightning which might be plausible.
1) Launch a rocket - Some rockets unspool wire as they launch which acts as a lovely lightning rod back to the ground - however somewhat obvious if this is supposed to be a clean as a whistle murder though.
2) Have a volcano erupt - Volcanos often form lightning storms near their volcanic plume. This stunning picture was captured in 1994 at the Rinjani eruption.
3) Have a super powered laser creating the ionized beam into the clouds - however even the military who have been trying this since the 1970's have only managed to notice a slight increase small local discharges within the cloud itself, rather than a cloud to ground strike.

Whatever way you look at it, it's a really really long shot.

Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.

TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf

Why do you not link to the original article?!

Good question. I'd say it's primarily an anecdotal book, with some links to research on some areas (like automated testing). I do agree that more research is good, and it's work looking into the research Laurie Williams (among others) is doing around the agile software field.

True, although you could always design a nice "virtual bookshelf" type of interface for browsing titles in software. In fact, most library catalog search engines will show "other titles on the same shelf" by default. For example see this entry for Dune and click on "Browse shelf" to the right of the page.

Indeed the long run the robotic library will be cheaper. My alma mater started construction on one just before I graduated and I heard a librarian talking about the new design. Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.

The interesting thing to me is how completely inaccurate all of the media has been in this entire "nuclear crisis". I work for a very large energy company with some of the guys that go visit those nuclear plants every year, most of them with PHDs in Nuclear Physics. Their concerns right now focus mainly on the nuclear fuel rod storage and how they are going to handle the excess amount of heating and unspent fuel rods sitting in empty cooling pools. There are absolutely no major concerns around the radiation levels past the power plants property lines. There has so far been ONE casualty to this accident, and people think that nuclear is unsafe? People in California are taking Potassium Iodide and several of them have gone to the hospital for their stupidity. If you are interested in the information about the nuclear event, and information about the actual power plants and exposure levels? Here's some reading, enjoy :)
Things it would be nice for the news media to have read before they started talking...
GE BWR Manual
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
GE ESBWR - Latest Design: Unbuilt.
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/nuclear_energy/en/downloads/gea14429g_esbwr.pdf
Wiki Concerning Accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
Wiki BWR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWR
Spent Nuclear Fuel Calculations
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/2309/1/etd.pdf
Graphic: Plant Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-reactor-status/
Earthquake/ Radiation Levels/ No.2 / Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/03/16/graphics-explaining-japans-nuclear-reactor-disaster/
Tsunami
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-where-the-wave-hit/#more-52826
Inside Reactor 2
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-inside-fukushima-daiichis-most-worrisome-reactor/
Meltdown Dynamics
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/graphic-meltdown-fears/
Exposure Levels
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-how-fast-will-radation-kill-you/#more-52930
Earthquake Data/ H2 Blast/ Radiation Spread
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-plant-blasts/
Nuclear Fission product Decay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product
NRC: Zirconium Cladding Fire
http://www.irss-usa.org/pages/documents/SGS_213-223_response.pdf
Reactor Status: Excel Spreadsheet
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_13002

Not only that, but if you look at the actual study, even non-FOX News viewers believe a lot of crazy stuff, and it's more indicative the personal biases and beliefs of people who choose to watch FOX News, not that FOX News "makes you stupid".

You might find this study an interesting read.

Notable:

"All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist."

...

Ah yes, the (in)famous Groseclose and Milyo study. This study is notable for its highly idiosyncratic classification of what was liberal and conservative - the most liberal media outlet was the Wall Street Journal, the NRA was considered a liberal organization, the ACLU was a conservative one. In general defensible research supporting a claim that a systematic liberal bias exists seems absent.

The largest study attempting to address this (a meta-analysis of dozens of studies spanning decades) found no systematic bias: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/cobb/p_courses/ps411/assigned%20readings/dalessio_meta%20analyses%20media%20bias.pdf .

You are confusing the word "in" with the phrase "surrounded by". Outer Space is all of the space which the Earth and it's atmosphere are not in, by definition. This isn't open for debate. It has to do with understanding the English language, and the definition of "Outer Space".

You're right, there is no debate which is why you'll find many places discussing earth in space.

It's why WP says on the Outer Space page that "Outer space (often simply called space) is the void that exists beyond any celestial body", and on the Celestial Body page says "Astronomical objects are naturally occurring physical entities, associations or structures that current science has demonstrated to exist in outer space."

So the problem is in fact with understanding the English language, as in you not understanding the difference between "is" and "in".

Look at your post -- your only argument that earth is not in space is that earth isn't space. Which is as ridiculous as saying that the USS George Washington isn't in the ocean because it isn't the ocean.

But it is in the ocean, and the earth is in space. Despite not being space. Really, read the definitions yourself and then get over it.

I find your story plausible, too, but the post in which you are responding is completely off base.... However, I do think the MSM has shown a decidedly one sided view of them... Same facts of life from two different perspectives. News reporting is no different, you get the same facts from a particular point of view, and what they choose to report and not report makes all the difference in the world.

On the other hand, Tea Party claims are typically aired without any examination of whether they are factual or not.

The MSM does not do a good job of reporting the news. It makes little effort to separate fact from non-fact and is happy to "balance" any quote with a counter-quote without examination as if they were equal. But this is quite different for having any sort of systematic bias.

If a systematic liberal bias actually existed it should be possible for research that withstands critical review to demonstrate it. The largest study attempting to address this (a meta-analysis of dozens of studies spanning decades) found no systematic bias: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/cobb/p_courses/ps411/assigned%20readings/dalessio_meta%20analyses%20media%20bias.pdf . The often cited recent study to support the claim of liberal media bias is the one of Groseclose and Milyo published in December 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. This study is notable for its highly idiosyncratic classification of what was liberal and conservative - the most liberal media outlet was the Wall Street Journal, the NRA was considered a liberal organization, the ACLU was a conservative one. In general defensible research supporting a claim that a systematic liberal bias exists seems absent.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that teachers are underpaid for their education level (which might also explain why the higher testing students tend to go into other majors, I might add.) My brother is an elementary special ed teacher, and you're right, he works insane hours, is paid today, with 6 years more experience in his field than I have now, and a masters degree, as much as I was paid while I was still working my way through the low end of the engineering pay scale, AND he has to pay for shit out of his pocket. And all that is wrong. (And, again, a reason why people who score higher often do not choose to go into teaching, thus reducing overall scores)

But it doesn't change the fact that that's the demographic we have teaching. There are exceptions, but on average, teachers are not our best and brightest by any means.

(Caveat here: The statistics I've looked at don't necessarily separate elementary from secondary education. And honestly, I'm not convinced that there's any reason you NEED to have an equivalent education and intelligence to an engineer to teach first grade. Another site from a specific university suggests that secondary education majors are, in fact, in the upper half of GRE scores, but primary are near the bottom, which may be how it should be)

Lithium is the 18th most abundant element in the earth's crust. For example, there is more lithium laying around than:

Beryllium
Nitrogen (excluding atmospheric nitrogen)
Chromium
Nickel
Copper
Zinc
Gallium
Germanium
Tin
Tungsten
Lead

Now, I've read (PDF) there is ~30 million tons of lithium on reserve (meaning readily extractable with current infrastructure).

If you need 140 grams of lithium per kWh of battery then today's typical electric car will need 3.4 kg of the stuff, meaning you can make 588 million such cars per million tons. Right now there are about 800 million cars in the entire world. Advances in technology notwithstanding, roughly 4.5% of our currently available lithium supply will satisfy the entire global automotive market.

Peak lithium my ass. and does it need to be mentioned that, unlike petroleum, the lithium can be recycled?
=Smidge=

Dunno about you, but that Primordial Soup is pretty tasty.

TFS gets it wrong; this research was done at North Carolina State University (NCSU), not University of North Carolina (UNC).

Here's the NSCU press release:

http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/degraffnarayan09/

Actually despite the fact that the summary and article talk about this as though it is an SSD technology, I think it is more likely to be implemented in a conventional spinning-disk hard drive first.

As I recently commented, the hard-drive industry is having a hard time shrinking the magnetic domains on conventional hard drive platters, which use a magnetic thin film. (You can make domains smaller, but they start interacting with one another and not maintaining their magnetization properly.) One proposed solution is to actually pattern disks with individual magnetic dots. The separated dots would interact less and should maintain magnetic orientation better.

There are challenges involved in tracking such small dots in a conventional hard drive, but those challenges are being addressed. In the short term it would be quite a bit easier to integrate a new magnetic-nano-dot technology with existing spinning-disc technology, rather than trying to invent a whole new read/write system. This would also help the nanodot technology be refined/matured. According to this press release, this new technique is a pulsed-laser-deposition technique that is compatible with conventional silicon wafers. In other words, it is compatible with existing chip-making processes, and so we can imagine a later stage where the magnetic dots are memory elements integrated directly into microchips (thus, SSD).

BEGIN RANT Seriously, North Carolina State University (NCSU in Raleigh) is not the University of North Carolina (typically in reference to Chapel Hill). One is a school (that I happened to have attended twice) that focuses primarily on Engineering and Agriculture and the other is a liberal arts school down the road. Seriously, fact-check much? http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/CAMSS/bio1.html END RANT

UNC now also has a cleanroom and the physics department does a lot of nanotechnology, but this guy is definitely at NCSU.

Dr. Narayan teaches in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at N.C. State, which *is* part of the UNC system of colleges and universities, but is a university in its own right, and is actually a fierce rival of UNC-CH. Here is his personal homepage at NCSU.

BEGIN RANT Seriously, North Carolina State University (NCSU in Raleigh) is not the University of North Carolina (typically in reference to Chapel Hill). One is a school (that I happened to have attended twice) that focuses primarily on Engineering and Agriculture and the other is a liberal arts school down the road. Seriously, fact-check much? http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/CAMSS/bio1.html END RANT

Students have to learn a lot in a short time, you need to optimize their time.they can't be mucking around with hypervisors, getting the os to boot, and every possible problem they can meet to get an OS to run, every time they boot it, they don't know about dozens of these concepts and there's no time to learn absolutely everything, the course material is enough already. They need persistent changes, every place they boot their pendrive can't have a different problem, and not have the system exactly as they left it. So therefore I vote for OpenVZ on a shared server, perhaps with CentOS. There are other virtual computing labs around.

And now I've read their paper. Quick summary: (1) they do indeed speculatively pre-allocate heap blocks, and cache pre-allocated blocks per client thread. (2) They run free() asynchronously, and batch up blocks of ~200 frees for bulk processing. (3) They busy-loop the malloc()-thread because pthread_semaphore wakeups are too slow for them to see a performance gain (section 2.E.2-3).

In other words, it's a cute trick for making one thread go faster, at the expense of burning 100% of another core by busy-looping. If you are on a laptop, congrats, your battery life just went from 4 hours to 1 hour. On a server, your CPU utilization just went up by 1 core per process using this library. This trick absolutely cannot be used in real life - it's useful only when the operating system runs exactly one process, a scenario that occurs only in research papers. Idea (2) is interesting (though not innovative); idea (3) makes this whole proposal a non-starter for anything except an academic paper.

Now digesting the real paper at http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/arpers/Papers/MMT_IPDPS10.pdf, they do do a trick of making free() asynchronous to avoid blocking there, but they also do a kind of client-server thing, with a nontrivial but fast and dumb malloc client in the main thread.

Not bad. They really tried a lot of different stuff, thought some stuff out carefully. This reviewer approves!

the clock that is displayed on-screen is just some application level date. it's for 'display purposes only. changing this has no effect on DRM licenses restrictions (such as when you download a movie with an authorization to watch it once over the next 7 days).
the 'real' ps3 clock is a hardware device (I guess they changed model between the 'phat' and 'slim' hardware releases, which is why slim is not affected). this clock has read-only access via the hypervisor only.i don't think it's even possible to reset it - at least that's what was claimed in a Sony document describing the PS3 Linux kernel
if the hardware RTC has a fault, they've got a real big problem

Has anyone else noticed that Dr. Afsaneh Rabiei, who discovered this amazing foam, is a hottie? Man, she's got it all, brains, beauty and a sexy accent! And her breasts are just the right size and I bet they have just the right kind of elasticity and bounce to them, that's probably where she got the idea for the foam. *sigh* But I digress...

MikeChino, next time you report a story make sure to include the name of the researcher, it's poor journalism and downright offensive to say just "a North Carolina State University researcher" without even mentioning the actual name of the person who made the discovery.

it eats wastewater to grow really fast, produces significantly more starch per acre than corn Engineering News at NC State, Fall 2009 Online Magazine

Yup,

Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension.

You shouldn't be reading code word for word anyway. Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names. As you read the names, it automatically fits them into the overall block of code. The only way your brain can do this preattentive trick is if you provide it visual queues through syntax coloring and indentation. Take out one or both and you are stuck reading word-for-word... Since proportional fonts change the indentation, the meaning of the code is altered and spend more time reading the words instead of the meaning--comprehension slows down, not speeds up.

If you think that proportional fonts helps you read code faster, I'd argue you aren't reading code correctly in the first place. You don't read a book letter by letter, you read it word by word or even sentence by sentence. Likewise, you don't read code word for word, you "read" it visually block by block pulling meaning out of the variable and method names. If you are reading code in your mind literally like "if variable1 equals variable2 then set variable3 to 5", you are doin' it wrong.

J.E.M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc. A case decided before the United States Supreme Court in 2001. In this case the court decided that utility patents could be issued for plants, even though some protections on plants are already available through the Plant Patent Act and the Plant Variety Protection Act.

That is why we Monsanto poisoning us and suing any farmer who ends up with GMO pollen in his corn or saving seeds.

http://discovery.csc.ncsu.edu/pubs/ccs09-HookSafe.pdf

[Via Schneier]

The paper: http://discovery.csc.ncsu.edu/pubs/ccs09-HookSafe.pdf

And the required Schneier blog post: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/protecting_oss.html

The rootkits are mentioned in the PDF linked from the Register article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/11/hooksafe_rootkit_protection/ Or the PDF here: http://discovery.csc.ncsu.edu/pubs/ccs09-HookSafe.pdf

At my university, we have a the VCL, a pool of blade servers accessible by RDP or SSH that get imaged on the fly when a user requests a machine with certain apps. These blades get wiped on log-out. (Home directories are of course stored elsewhere, and accessed over AFS.) This is very secure, but it lets students get admin access to their machine, and it also helps keep software licensing costs down, because it is trivial to limit the number of concurrent users of a package that isn't volume licensed. Performance when accessing the VCL on-campus is great, and in a corporate environment it could work great with thin clients.

As a recent grad I can speak to the fact that NCSU supports Linux in a big way by deploying it in computer labs, supporting it for students, having a very active LUG (the mailing list is very friendly, they meet several times a month and host regular install-fests), making Linux desktops available remotely through a Virtual Computing Lab and giving students remote access to a couple of on-campus beowulf clusters. To the best of my knowledge support is strongest in the College of Engineering and in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. I believe most of the other Colleges (Life Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Textiles, Natural Resources etc) tend to use a mix of Windows and Mac workstations (and I'd heard somewhere that Design uses exclusively Macs).

sadly not the case.. for NC .. instate tuition goes to people whom have lived here (while not in college ) for 6 months in a permanent residence (showing of bills or your legal guardian showing them as proof of residence is enough).

Basically i know several people from Brazil who came up here for 1-2 years of High school - on the student visa got an apartment - and enrolled in college with instate tuition.

By now they have gotten green cards - but the didn't have that originally when they where getting instate tuition.

This is BS. If you answer the questions on the application for residency status truthfully, establishing residency for tuition purposes in North Carolina is actually pretty difficult. The situation described in the parent post, students coming to the US on a student visa for the last 1-2 years of highschool and renting an appartment wouldn't cut it. The only way these people from Brazil might have been able to qualify for in-state residency was if they moved in with relatives who were permanent North Carolina residents and the relatives became their legal guardians. From the NC State web page: For any person under 18 years old, the traditional common law generally presumes that minors share the same legal residency as their parents. Thus, if both parents have established legal residency, the minor will also have legal residency in N. C. If the minorâ(TM)s parents are divorced/separated with one living in N. C. and one living out-of-state, the minor may be presumed to share legal residency with the in-state parent if the in-state parent claims the minor as a dependent for tax purposes. Some exceptions exist (see GS 116-143.1(j) and k). If anything, it is more difficult to establish residency if you are over 18. North Carolina requires that you live in the state for 1 year (not six months) before you can be eligible to enroll as an in-state student. In addition, you can't just live here on daddy's dime, you have to show that you have the resources (generally a job) to stay here without assistance from parents, or other guardians that live out of state. If you leave the state for traditional school holidays (spring break, Christmas break, summer break etc.) you pretty much lose in-state residency for tuition purposes. If you have an out of state drivers license, you don't get in-state tuition. If your car is registered or insured in another state - no in-state tuition for you. The list goes on. For non-US citizens, you must provide proof that you are eligible to remain in the United States permanently. Anyone that is at the university on a Student visa (like the hypothetical Brazilian students in the parent post) are automatically disqualified from receiving in-state tuition. And they do read the application for in-state tuition. I've been a North Carolina resident for my entire life, but prior to when I started graduate school in the late 1990s my job had me out of state for six consecutive weeks. One of the questions on my in-state residency application was "Have you been out of NC for more than 30 consecutive days in the last year" The yes answer was an automatic denial of in-state residency. I had to appeal the decisioin, provide proof that I had maintained a legal residence in NC, that I never changed car registration, etc. before I was able to get in state residency for tuition purposes. Here's a link to the NC State page describing the process for establishing NC residency for tuition purposes. http://www.ncsu.edu/legal/legal_topics/residency.php#II No argument that there are lots of problems with immigration, student visas and so on. This just isn't one of them

Actually the research shows that it's a very good way to teach programming. The studies done have show that students who are involved in intro classes which give two-person projects generally have better final test scores, create better programs, are more likely to complete the class, and are more likely to take additional computer science courses.

Dr. Laurie Williams provides a good round-up of the research here. Her papers are provided there, but unfortunately, many of the other paper links are to papers at ACM Portal or IEEE Xplore, which cost money. If you're in a university setting, you can probably access them through your school library. If not, Google can sometimes help find the paper on an author's web site.

...one of the most celebrated sci-fi books ever written.

Of course, whether it deserves that celebration can be questioned.

My background is actually in social sciences (undergrad degree in anthropology, grad degree in law), and I definitely do not have a pro-science/tech bias.

And from what I understand about the Ed.D. degree, is that it has less rigorous requirements than a PhD; for example, many don't even have a foreign language requirement.

And undergraduate education majors seem to perform very poorly in standardized tests (you would think majoring in education would make you especially effective at testing.) For example, here are GRE results by intended major. There is no excuse for someone who spent their undergraduate career presumably reading and writing to be outperformed significantly by chemists and engineers in verbal reasoning. I'm not saying a 437 verbal on the GRE means you're a bad person, but it certainly does mean that you are not ready for graduate education in a social science.

Additionally, the research done in education is notorious for its lack of rigor, especially it's reluctance to use control groups.

NC State university has an awesome way to deal with this, your department can request or build special VMs that have all the software you need, and then you can access it from anywhere on the internet over RDP(For windows VMs), or SSH/X11(For *nix VMs). http://vcl.ncsu.edu/

Lots of software, including MATLAB, can be licensed so that students can install it on their own machine while they're a student. For other expensive software, my university has the Virtual Computing Lab, a remote-access pool of blade machines that are re-imaged on the fly to have the packages needed. This helps keep licensing costs down, because the software doesn't need to be installed on more machines than it will get used on. It works very well for everything I've tried it with except CAD. (Fortunately, the education edition of SolidWorks is one of the packages that can be installed on student laptops.)

The VCL is also great for CS classes that involve lots of coding, because the instructor can create a custom image and standardize the class on that environment. It removes all the problems arising from complaints along the lines of "but it worked on my machine!"

Agree. Most people don't do well without at least some kind of direction and a way to get there. In fact, there was a study done a few years back linked on Slashdot which demonstrated that people were more creative when they were faced with some kind of box or challenge to think around. So enter Problem-Based Learning which seeks to provide students with a challenge and test their ability to reason about it and provide a solution. There is no correct solution, so the exercise is divergent rather than convergent.