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Some may argue (and probably will) but I have always found Scheme to be an interesting language to lets kids play with because of the "instant gratification" of an interpreted language's "read-eval-print" paradigm. Plus, with "The Little Schemer", which presents things in a very logical, pedogogical way, which is well suited to clever children.


The Little Schemer
Just a thought...

Gee, you think this may also have something to do with the very different populations and demographics between these states?

Hey, if you want to make the race-based argument, go right ahead. I'll pass on stirring up that bee's nest for the moment.

I would point out, though, that no one race holds a strong majority in Boston... According to NorthEastern's CURP, whites come in at 49.5%, blacks second at 23.8%, hispanics third at 14.4%, and asians 4th at 7.5%. So although Boston certainly has far greater racial diversity than, say, Portland ME at a whopping 98% white, I still don't think you can blame "them" (whichever "them" you prefer to blame).



And why did I mention Portland ME, you might ask? Because, at the same time MA has decided to blame ME for easy availability of guns, nearly all the high-profile crimes in Portland in the past few years involve (mostly white) criminals from Boston coming North to find new markets for selling drugs. Perhaps Romney and Menino should clean up their own overflowing toilets before they start pointing fingers at their neighbors' blinking VCR clocks (wow - that analogy came out so bad, I'll leave it just for the humor value!).

Whooo.. MIT may have a talking robotic head but we have a walking lobster. http://www.neurotechnology.neu.edu/

Many of these techniques aren't new; some of this stuff has been happening since '96.

Background: I'm 42 and live in a pretty damn small rural city (75,000 people). That eliminates some of a big city's risk but not sicko abductions of kids and teens, which have always been around here in numbers enough to merit attention (a classmate of mine disappeared in '79 (one of several to disappear, whose remains were found years later by hunters and hikers). So, while I grew up in a similar relaxed era, I'm biased a bit but I think you're right and I've seen numbers to confirm your suspicion:

Stats I can google up and have read say the USA has a hundred thousand abductions per year. Just 600 of them are taken by strangers, according to ChildFind. 200 kids per year are abducted and killed by strangers. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ABDUCTIONS ARE NOT BY STRANGERS. They're custody-related.

At a conservative googling of 100k per year, abductions would be worrisome (that's 1 per couple thousand people, or 1 per 500 kids, assuming kids are 25% of the population). But at 1 in a million odds? For this, you're gonna deprive a kid from the outdoors and friends and such!? Heck, that's miniscule compared to the risk a kid faces from drowning, falling off a bike, being the one-in-several-hundred that dies tragically in high school (car wreck, suicide, drinking-related, etc).

We got a handbill several weeks ago (I forget from what official agency) that said 'Don't Talk to Strangers' isn't working. The focus needs to be on avoiding adults that act unusually, warning kids what an inappropriately-acting adult (friend of the family or otherwise) will say or do, who is more trustworthy, and how to run/holler/resist/tattle when an adult acts inappropriately.

So, I (absurdist that I am) take my guidance from Crush, the Sea Turtle in 'Finding Nemo'-- I try to reign in my irrational urge to overprotect, I look for reasonable opportunities to let my kids have more freedom, and my wife and I try to keep the kids outside as much as possible. If I had the time, I'd be subtly lobbying other parents in the neighborhood to do the same.

(links, including a nice geek-friendly Bruce Schneier... though I'd say you should look for something by Oprah if convincing your wife is the goal)

http://www.childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm
http://www.jfox.neu.edu/The_boogeyman_in_the_green _car.htm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/talk ing_to_stra.html
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2002-09/04p eters.cfm
http://www.childfindofamerica.org/prevention.htm

Oh, and my kids are too young for chemistry sets, but I bought one for my young-teen nephews on ebay. $40 for the same one we played with in '75, complete with a bunsen burner, meltable sulphur powder, iron and magnesium shavings, test tubes, and a dozen compounds that'd poison anyone dumb enough to ingest 'em. 40-some bottles of reagents... awesome.

Deja vu.

There already is a smaller scale version of Silicon Valley roughly centered on Boston, Massachusetts. The partial circle defined by Route 128 (and to a lesser extent the larger one surrounding it defined by Route 495) has most of the required properties already. Heck, it even has the same elevated levels of Asperger's Syndrome that Silicon Valley has.

I think a bigger point is the number of colleges and universities in the Massachusetts area (like MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and Boston University, to name just a few). Plus, besides Boston, there are numerous other technologically advanced places in that ring (including Cambridge, Saugus, Waltham, and Billerica, to name just a few). If you do a look-up on the saga of ODF and the history of OASIS and/or GNU you'll find a lot of these places mentioned -- OASIS originated in Massachusetts, the Free Software Foundation is headquartered in Massachusetts, and AFAIK Massachusetts was the first government to sanction a special "Open Source Software Trough" to encourage the usage of open source software within both its own branches as well as its local community governments. It's not clear to me where the weird view that Massachusetts is somehow against free software, open source and information sharing that some are espousing is coming from...

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/romulus/papers/mywr/re port.htm

Hey that that kind of looks like the rocks here or here or here or here.

and check out these regularily "cut" bad boys here.

But how do you explain natural pyramids?
Oh I don't know maybe this quote:

"If the glacier erodes three or more cirques on different sides of the mountain, a peak will begin to form. The peak may be a steep pyramid shaped rock, which is known as a horn. The Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps is a well known horn."

Yah!

Speaking as one who currently teaches computer science in high school classrooms, I can offer my own anecdotal evidence to the contrary: students do still program computers. That said, I agree with much of what others have said here. These days there are usually several different courses that tend to be lumped together as 'computing', although some of them have nothing to do with one another save that they involve a computer:
- keyboarding, aka typing
- computer literacy, aka word processing, productivity applications, etc.
- introductory programming,
- intermediate programming,
- AP computer science

The first two in the list have little if any programming component. I say little, though the second course may cover a number of use of spreadsheets and through that the use of formulae, conditional expressions, etc. [ I should note that there is a online journal dedicated to documenting the various ways in which spreadsheets can be used to teach various concepts - see http://www.sie.bond.edu.au/ for more details. ]

The introductory and intermediate courses may have widely differing names depending upon when they were introduced into the school system; a local public system calls the second course "Data Structures", most likely because it was introduced during the Pascal heyday. Even though these two course sound like a close-knit progression of coursework, they actually may be quite different. Two of the local systems teach a different language (Java) in the second course than is used in the first course (VB.Net). The reasons for this choice are not entirely clear. Pascal was introduced into high school classrooms largely via the Apple II series; even the emergence of the IBM PC and its clone still gave access to Turbo Pascal. Not to imply that VB.Net is a step backwards, but the return in the high school classroom to QBasic, VB 6, and then VB.Net seems driven more by the availability of textbooks than other factors. I welcome a more informed explanation.

Originally Pascal was chosen as the AP Computer Science language of choice. { Here A.P. means Advanced Placement, high school courses with an associated standardized exam; many colleges and universities recognize exam scores and award credit towards degree programs. } For whatever reason, though, that choice was relatively short lived - perhaps driven by a 'pragmatic' crowd that wanted a 'real programming language' to be taught in the high school? At any rate, Java is now the language used in the the AP Computer Science exam. There is talk of changing the exams again to use a more language agnostic format.

A great many other tools and languages are taught in addition to or besides these, obviously. A smattering of ones that I know of or have used:

- The TeachScheme project http://www.teach-scheme.org/ exists to provide resources for those who wish to use Scheme in introductory high school and college courses. { And DrScheme rocks.... } I personally know one high school instructor who went through their workshop and adopted their approach and who had good things to say about it. { In fairness, though, he is currently teaching Java due to his participation in an NSF-funded grant. } For those looking for a natural follow-on to Java or more 'traditional' OOP programming, might I suggest having a look at Proulx and Gray's work in
How To Design Classes and ProfessorJ
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/vkp/HtDCH/ http://www.drscheme.org/.

- Alice http://www.alice.org/ is getting a lot of well deserved buzz, especially in light of the recent announcement that EA will be funding the development of their next major version (3.0), which will include features from the popular Sims game series. Caitlin Kelleher's work in extending Alice into a storytelling environment has also produced good results, esp

what CS problem that I might encounter in an upper-division CS course requires the use of Diff. Eq., Linear Algebra or Physics?

To pick just one example, the Kalman Filter, which is used for everything from radar tracking to helicopter stabilization, relies on linear algebra. And physics gives an excellent background in learning to apply mathematical modeling techniques to real-world phenomena. One of the best (or at least most interesting) distributed version control systems out there, Darcs, was written by a physicist, in the Haskell programming language (the latter of course being based on the lambda calculus, another seemingly esoteric subject which is so fundamental that it really ought to be taught in high school). Darcs is based on a physically-inspired theory of patches.

There's a problem here which was described by Paul Graham as "The Blub Paradox" (in Beating the Averages). Graham writes "But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up." It's not easy to correctly assess that which you do not (yet) understand.

The other side of the story is that you're totally right about coding being different from CS. The problem is that most HR/Business types don't know the difference.

I agree, this is a big part of the problem. This comes from the fact that everything about computers, and particularly software, is so relatively new. As alluded to elsewhere in the thread, you don't get HR people trying to hire mathematicians or even economists for accounting positions - they know better than that. They just don't know better than that, yet, when it comes to programming, particularly in "IT". And this confusion affects academic curricula, too - universities want to satisfy the commercial demand with subjects they already teach, and academic computer scientists don't want to turn themselves into a Java instructors any more than they absolutely have to.

It seems the best course of action is to expand software engineering programs to fill the void and make sure those are focused on turning out pratical, level-headed engineers who can solve a variety of problems but do not care to learn any more about math or physics than it takes to get an equation from a mathematician or physicist and implement it.

I think that'd be a start. However, I also think we'll eventually find that the tentacles of software are so diverse that "software engineering" is too broad a subject, and we'll end up with a "software school" analog to "medical school" or "law school", where a wide variety of subjects are taught, including theory, engineering, and other topics. I notice CMU has a "School of Computer Science already, and Northeastern has a College of Computer and Information Science, but most other institutions still treat CS and related disciplines as a "department".

I can leave a book on a table at work and not worry about it being stolen [...] However an ebook reader worth hundreds of pounds? Gone before you've turned your back.

So you put the ebook reader in your pocket and walk off with it. You probably never considered doing that with a physical book because, well, you can't. You're reaching a bit here.

I don't need to carry an entire library with me,

No, you don't. You just need to carry the book that you're reading at the moment. Or maybe that other one you started a few days ago. Or perhaps you'd prefer to space out on some lightweight Harry Potter or some amusing Pratchett. Or maybe read a bit more of one of those interesting programming language books. So... how many books are we carrying now? :)

It's a matter of perspective. Your argument that you "don't need to carry an entire library around with you" could equally well be used against using an ipod to carry around most (if not all) of your music library. After all, you could just take along with you the specific CDs you'd like to listen to... except you might change your mind... and it does take a bit of space to carry even one CD... :) In the end, it's just hella convenient to be able to take one compact device with you and have access to all your content.

Backlit displays? Reading in the dark is bad for your eyes,

The whole point of backlit displays is that you have light. And it's convenient light - just enough to read comfortably, while not enough to, for example, wake up a sleeping partner.

Search? No need for it.

Actually, I sort of agree with you here. I hardly ever use the searchability of ebooks. But "hardly ever" is not "never", and I certainly concede that different people may find it much more useful. And I should also point out that once you actually can search your texts (and you get used to that ability) you may change your tune.

Or you may not :). Anyway, this is a fairly minor ebook advantage IMO.

Tiny display? No thanks.

*shrug* Depends a lot on your eyes here. The display/resolution on most modern Palms or PocketPCs are pretty damn good these days, and you can use quite nice larger fonts if you wish. I'd have been a bit more hesistant about recommending the older Palm V generation, but the modern ones are fine. And on a related note, the advantage of having a small display is that you can have a small device - that you can fit in your pocket or easily hold/control in one hand.

Having to wrestle with an interface? No thanks.

*laugh* Actually, this (IMO) is one of the points for which ebooks (on handhelds) not only win, but piss all over physical books. Turning ebook "pages" is one screen-tap or button-press - or if you prefer (I don't) you can even have the text autoscroll so you can just lie back and read :). Physical books, by comparison - page turning. Sigh. I hate turning pages, especially when I'm reading in bed. And anything larger than a small paperback just takes up too much space and is awkward to read in a comfortable position.

And finally, it's kind of nice to be able to go book-shopping from your computer at midnight - and fifteen minutes later be in bed reading a shiny new book. The biggest downside is still that the available range is limited, but while it could be better, it's Good Enough(tm) for now.

SICP considered harmful

Another option (a little more modern) would be RT. Our security group is using it with success. They get at least a hundred new tickets every day and RT made it possible for them to deal with all of them in a timely manner.

Even if you had the technology to stop ocean currents, doing so would obviously also stop your ability to get energy (because there would be no current). The most energy you can get from a turbine is known as the Betz Limit., which is approximately 59.6% for a wind turbine. I don't know if it's the same for a water turbine, but there is a limit.

So what would I recommend? Well, if you're using Linux, I can think of at least ten things better

That page is old: "Last Updated 8 Apr 2000" and some of the links are broken.

Wikipedia has a nice media player comparison with an "Operating system support" table showing which ones run on Linux.

Once upon a time, I used Winamp.

And it was good.

It was fairly lightweight, I could load in huge playlists of college-napster-garbage without slowdown and I knew all the hot keys for searching and what not.

Then that llama came into the picture. I think it must have been version three or four (I can't remember) when there was a damned llama or alpaca or whatever in a green field. Now, I love llamas and alpacas, don't get me wrong. The problem was that now Winamp was about "graphix" and "features" that were once plugins that I didn't want.

I don't know why they thought Winamp needed to be able to play videos but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to show stupid tripping-on-acid-harmonograph visualizations but it did now. I don't know why they thought Winamp had to melt songs together but it did now ... etc.

On top of that, the memory footprint in Windows was crazy. And my roommate tried to put skins on Winamp that just made my computer shit its gourd. I was disgusted ... the hot keys may have still been there but what I was looking for in a media player was not. For some reason, they seemed to think that competing with Windows Media Player meant mimicking it to every detail. Fine. I never want to touch Windows Media Player, it's about as useful as my appendix. And now I feel the same way about Winamp.

Now there's a spyware flaw in Winamp. Am I surprised? Not really. They have gotten so complicated that there's probably a thousand holes in that application. They definitely lost site of what I was looking for--a plain jane slim audio player. Winamp's executing a remote method invocation through a playlist that can trigger itself to be automatically loaded and ran? Now that sounds like a "feature" I want my audio player to have.

Is this the first time this has happened? Nope, remember the zero day exploit that targeted skins in 2004? There's been a myriad of security issues with Winamp since it became more and more complicated.

"Gee, the way our audio player loads playlists isn't very secure. But it works and the people who use our application aren't interested in security--they're interested in playing AVI files on their audio player!"

So what would I recommend? Well, if you're using Linux, I can think of at least ten things better but XMMS would probably be my favorite. If you're running Windows, I like to use Quintessential Player which can be modified to be as complicated as new Winamp or can be

I'm in my freshman year of college and I've already learned OOP... some places must really be backwards.

Depends. If you learned OOP according to the gospel of C++, Java, or C#, then you're school is backwards. My personal opinion is: OOP should not be taught in a freshman class. According to Matthias Felleisen:

...a functional semester ideally prepares students for the true essence of object-oriented programming according to Alan Kay: the systematic construction of small modules of code and the construction of programs without assignment statements. Experience shows that these courses prepare students better for upper-level courses than a year of plain object-oriented programming. Initial reports from our students' co-op employers appear to confirm the experiences of our upper-level instructors.

In my experience, students who learn OOP, believe that private member variables (private mutable state) is okay, when in fact, private member variables should be used only when necessary. If it is possible assignments should be avoided, data should be passed to a method via the parameters, and results returned from the method because:

1. It makes the method easier to reason about. The methods behavior can be determined by looking the method call. This is not so when there is private data, or global variables influencing the behavior of a method.
2. It makes the method easier to test. Unit testing a method is hard (and sometimes impossible) when the behavior of a method depend on more than just the parameters.

If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.---Alan J. Perlis

I had written a nice piece of code here, but since Slashdot considers code lame (the lameness filter), and thus discourages intelligent conversation involving code examples and the like, I'll have to point you to these threads discussing some of the problems with OOP as it's taught in many schools (and why I believe a pure OOP or OOP biased computer science curriculum is bad).

I'm in my freshman year of college and I've already learned OOP... some places must really be backwards.

Depends. If you learned OOP according to the gospel of C++, Java, or C#, then you're school is backwards. My personal opinion is: OOP should not be taught in a freshman class. According to Matthias Felleisen:

...a functional semester ideally prepares students for the true essence of object-oriented programming according to Alan Kay: the systematic construction of small modules of code and the construction of programs without assignment statements. Experience shows that these courses prepare students better for upper-level courses than a year of plain object-oriented programming. Initial reports from our students' co-op employers appear to confirm the experiences of our upper-level instructors.

In my experience, students who learn OOP, believe that private member variables (private mutable state) is okay, when in fact, private member variables should be used only when necessary. If it is possible assignments should be avoided, data should be passed to a method via the parameters, and results returned from the method because:

1. It makes the method easier to reason about. The methods behavior can be determined by looking the method call. This is not so when there is private data, or global variables influencing the behavior of a method.
2. It makes the method easier to test. Unit testing a method is hard (and sometimes impossible) when the behavior of a method depend on more than just the parameters.

If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.---Alan J. Perlis

I had written a nice piece of code here, but since Slashdot considers code lame (the lameness filter), and thus discourages intelligent conversation involving code examples and the like, I'll have to point you to these threads discussing some of the problems with OOP as it's taught in many schools (and why I believe a pure OOP or OOP biased computer science curriculum is bad).

Every comparative study done on healthcare puts the mostly-public healthcare of Canada and Western Europe as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5% of American vs. Canadian GDP goes to healthcare, vs. 6.8% ot 10.7% of GDP for major Western European nations).

(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)

The reason for this is, according to studies, wasteful bureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. As plenty of posters in this thread have amply explained, that can, does, and should be expected to happen sometimes. Many governments run programs more efficiently than a collection of private companies could do; if a certain government never does so, that's a problem with that government, not with government programs in general.

Perhaps true. However, every comparative study done on healthcare puts Canada's healthcare as equal to or better than that found in the US, despite the US spending a much larger fraction of its total GDP (13.6% vs. 9.5%).

(Before you complain about the link sites, the first study was done by the World Health Organization, the second by Johns Hopkins, the third by an author formerly from the conservative Fraser Institute. And before anyone complains that this is a Canada-vs-US thing, read especially the first study - most countries in Western Europe get better healthcare results for less money than the US, and many are better that way than Canada.)

The reason for this is, according to studies, wasteful bureaucracy in the US system. According to those who have analyzed the systems, this may be one place where a government program is actually more efficient than a collection of private programs. (The mind boggles, I know...)

In other words - ignore most of the data, and you can get any answer you're looking for. Study all of the data, and you'll find you're demonstrably wrong.

Please see my three other posts as repsonses to the other people who don't think I know what I am talking about. Here is a quote...

Quote: ...pay out $440 million in fees to the private attorneys who represented the plaintiffs.

And here is where you can read all about it:

Web Page: THE MULTISTATE MASTER SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT AND THE FUTURE OF STATE AND LOCAL TOBACCO CONTROL:

Granted that $440 Million dollars is not even 1% of $368.5 Billion dollars, but you do have to realize that that is $368.5B over a 25 year period and so really it is $440M from ($368.5B/25)= $14.74B which makes it $440M/$14.74B = 2.9% of the first year's settlement. I'm sure that there was some cap that was put on to the amount since everyone knew up front that the settlement would probably be in the billions of dollars. So yes - it isn't 33% but then, in smaller cases the percentage would be larger.

(Which I think >I could live on $440M quite easily thank you!)

I'm guessing he probably doesn't know either. More likely this is what he meant:

"I'm going to mention a lot of obscure project names so you'll think that (a) my kung fu is stronger than yours and (b) my penis must be huge!"

As to your question I found this:

MOO stands for "MUD, Object Oriented." MUD, in turn, has been said to stand for many different things, but I tend to think of it as "Multi-User Dungeon" in the spirit of those ancient precursors to MUDs, Adventure and Zork.

MOO, the programming language, is a relatively small and simple object-oriented language designed to be easy to learn for most non-programmers; most complex systems still require some significant programming ability to accomplish, however.

For more info, http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/MOO/html/ProgrammersMan ual_9.html#SEC9

There's a mandatory course at my university in regards to technical writing. All engineers have to take it. It's much better than the standard 'college writing' class (think boring lit times 10). in fact, students can only take this course in their third year or later (NU is a 5 year school).

At that point, the student should have gone on a co-op, so the student should have some knowledge and insight into having something techinical to write about.

The courses are taught by professors who have experience in the workplace environment (not professors who came straight from academia).

all in all, the setup is wonderful for making a writing class useful and moderately enjoyable.

--mike

As for "teaching only as much as a major needs", that's the exact problem right there. How does a junior physics professor who studies general relativity have any idea at all what type of physics a neurobiologist is going to find useful? He doesn't, so they learn how balls bounce instead of how an MRI works.

I work as an undergrad on a co-op for a major office in my university. I do a ton of research work and programming and work in a very competetive, research driven environment.

The pay isn't the best (I had received offers for more money), but the people I work with and the opportunities I've received are outstanding.

Expect to work closely with a professor, a post-doctorate, grad students, undergrads, and all sorts of folks... and forge good relationships with all of them. that reference from the professor, or the good word from the post-doc when he starts working for IBM (or another random large company) can go a long way.

Look into cheaper (or even free) tuition. I know that the guy next to me gets free tuition in exchange for his work week, so he stocks up on night classes, and has gotten his masters and is working on a PhD.

The work environment is going to be very casual -- as long as you get the job done. I am assigned 40 hours per week (on my word -- no timecard), and I can work whatever hours i want. I've worked nights, weekends, whatever, to fit my schedule best. Eventually I settled into a 7-3 shift (I like mornings) and it was embraced by all my coworkers, who took it to mean that I was very hard working :]

Make good friends with the office accountant (or secretary, if there is none). Get her/him gifts and engage in conversations. Basically make them a buddy, because you need to make sure your paychecks come through, as well as your reimbursements and travel costs.

My 6 month co-op term is up, but I'm going to be staying on and working for another project. The office got a new project, and was interviewing undergrads for it. They didn't like any of the candidates, so they grabbed me and interviewed me, and asked how I'd like to work for them some more. I accepted and now have another term of work with them, doing some really amazing research work. In fact, we're competing for a very large government check, and if they choose our design and buy our IP, I reap a dividend check, as an undergrad (and my chunk will be large enough to pay my tuition and buy me a house afterwards). So I've got some pretty good inspiration.

To sum it up:

1) make friends with everyone
2) follow up on paperwork, especially with the accountant
3) don't bs anyone -> there are people in the office who know much more than you and, most likely, can call out your BS by pointing to a white paper that says the exact opposite of what youre saying
4) deadlines are going to come. ask for help from your coworkers if you need it. finish early.
5) find a way to get cheap/free tuition. school is expensive. take nightclasses and cheat the system.

hope that helps
-mike

You were saying?

It's like designing web pages from a command line.

I design web pages from a command line, you insensitive clod!

In fact, I'm working on a web page for my robotics team (that's not the new site yet; you can see that here if my computer is on--take a look!), and I use vim to write it. A Perl script plugs the content into Template Toolkit, and it's formatted with CSS.

Designing pages with a GUI is horrible; designing them by hand with an editor that simply provides extra efficiency typing tags and inserting common sets of tags and attributes is good.

and any interest at all in biochem, you could cover your bets pretty well by going after one of the Bioinformatics programs [those are two programs I know of...quite expensive as they are presumed by the schools to be in demand and it is expected your employer is helping pay the tuition] It does not outfit you for commercial web app development or for some mainstream IT jobs but within a few narrow areas such as search and rapid access to terabyte databases, these guys are at the limits of computing. You will get a job if you survive.

• Typical Commercial Software: 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code (Kloc)
• Linux kernel : 0.17 bugs per Kloc
• Windows XP: 40-50 bugs per Kloc Source

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Octave - Matlab minus the GUI and extra toolboxes
Macaulay 2 - advanced algebra
GAP - general algebra

C'mon hax0r people - no-one needs another web server / window manager. I'm missing an OS replacement for Mathemetica. One would think this would be of high priority to the OS community...

http://toxsci.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/77/ 1/126
http://nanopedia.cwru.edu/NanoPage.php?page=lung.t oxicity
http://www.ece.neu.edu/edsnu/mcgruer/nano/nanotoxi cityscience0304.pdf

Which would be safer? A Carbon Nanotube vest, or an asbestos sweater? ;-)

Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called " Biomimetic Robots ." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read more for a photo gallery...

The Sprawl family of robots is developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. These six-legged robots "draw their inspiration from the physical construction and mechanical design principles that are responsible for the robustness of the cockroach," according to Mark Cutkosky, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Here are two links to the family of sprawl robots and to the IndependentSprawl one known as iSprawl .

The iSprawl is the first fully autonomous member of the Sprawl family. It is about 11 centimeters in length and can run at 15 body-lengths/second (over 2.3m/s). (Credit: Center for Design Research at Stanford University)

One team investigating about robotic lobsters is working to give to the robots a "nervous system." This project is based on research done "on lobster and crayfish nervous systems conducted in the 1970s by Joseph Ayers, a biology professor at Northeastern University."

The actions of real lobsters have been reverse-engineered and programmed into a library of actions which give the robotic lobster a similar behavior as the real ones. You'll find other details at the Biomimetic Underwater Robot Program at the Ayers Robotics Laboratory at Northeastern University.

This robotic lobster imitates the real lobster behavior. (Credit: Jan Witting, Northeastern University)

The Entomopter family of crawling and flying insect-based robots is designed at Georgia Tech. They can be used as surveillance tools and can fly both indoor and outdoor. There are currently two versions. "This generation of the Entomopter is designed for operation in two atmospheres: a 50-gram terrestrial version and an aerospace version designed for use in different gravitational environments." The Entomopter might even be used on future Mars missions.

You'll find much more details by visiting the Entomopter Project website.

Here is a rendering of the Entomopter-based robot flying over Mars (Credit: Georgia Tech).

And this one shows the Entomopter-based Mars surveyor looking over the cliffs. (Credit: Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere, at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), researchers are building cricket-inspired robots, which can walk and jump. Roger D. Quinn, professor of mechanical engineering at CWRU and director of Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab, is working with his team are not only working on robots inspired by cockroaches and crickets, but also on a hybrid mechanism called Whegs (wheels plus legs).

You'll find more information, including diagrams, pictures and movies at the

The Little Schemer, a very unusual book on LISP (well, OK, on Scheme, but close enough.) It is a fun read, written in a sort of oddball Socratic method style, and it also has a sequel, the Seasoned Schemer.

A really good introduction, I think, for someone who is interested in more "theoretical" aspects of computer science; what you learn from that book is directly applicable to CS, but also mathematics, analytic styles of philosophy, &c.. Another way to look at it is as a more advanced, and more technical, companion to Godel, Escher, Bach.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dchase/moon.gif

Again, the Little Schemer teaches you to think like a programmer, all examples, it's a let loose and do it yourself type book. Knowning Dan Friedman, one of the authors, I'd highly recommend it.

If your mom wants to know how to program webpages, teach her HTML, and PHP/Perl/ASP (take your pick). Learning these languages won't teach you how to program though.

Funny enough, I once heard someone say at a job fair "I know how to program, I can program HTML".

Keep deluding yourself buddy...

I've always thought The Little Schemer would be good for this kind of thing.

This sort of thing has been tried without much success so far. There have been intriguing electromagnetic signals recorded over the years (e.g. see this table). However, nobody has been able to come up with a method of prediction using EM that has achieved acceptance among earthquake seismologists. It's much easier to find funny signals after a quake than before.

The ones I'm most familiar with are extensions of Common Lisp. There are 3 CL web servers, each with dynamic HTML generation capability (AllegroServe, Araneida, CL-HTTP). Then there's Lisp Server Pages, Active Lisp Pages, etc., and another whole load of CGI solutions. I use (and highly recommend) AllegroServe. There is a whole big list over at Cliki (which runs on Araneida).

There are many CGI bindings for various Scheme implementations, and the PLT web server is kind of popular. I'm not very familiar with Scheme web solutions though, so I probably left something out.

There is a lot of activity with Smalltalk-based web apps. Seaside is a continuation-based framework that gets a lot of attention. There's also AIDA/Web, and an unfinished mod.Smalltalk. I am not very familiar with Smalltalk web solutions either, so I probably missed a few.

Python is a very popular option, and Zope seems to be a very popular framework. I don't know anything about web programming in Python aside from that.

Take pretty much any of the recent lightweight (in the conference meaning of the term) languages, and you're bound to find good options, almost all of them better in terms of security and speed than PHP; I can't think of a single one that has a more annoying syntax or more convoluted and limited semantics than PHP, though. Another thing that you should consider is the website we're posting on is pretty interactive, and kind of popular, and it's written in Perl.

is this at all related to fart knocking? Because I spent a good deal of my time in jr. high school learning all about that....

test

The brief summary is that there are currently two problems, that I know of offhand, with lambda in Python:

• Statements are not allowed, only expressions.
• Modifying the value of a variable in an enclosing scope is not allowed.

In languages that implement lambda correctly, lambda and functions are equivalent: you can do anything inside a lambda that you can do inside any other function. In fact, in Scheme, Lisp, Javascript and Perl, lambdas *are* functions and vice versa - there's no significant distinction (other than how a function is associated with its name, if any).

Significantly restricting what you can do inside a lambda makes about as much sense as restricting what you can do inside a function: it cripples the construct. You can't get a real sense for what lambda can do, using Python, because in Python, lambda can't do what it can do in other languages.

A good language to learn to get a better understanding of lambda is Scheme. You can try this tutorial, and download PLT's DrScheme to play with it.

The nice thing about Google is that their ads aren't really distracting in anyway - not blocking up the page or flashing like on Yahoo or ZDnet or MSN.

Burstnet (they provide ads for a lot of sites) has started doing ads in flash. It's annoying, especially because it looks like opera, or the flush plugin has a bug, and sometimes flash will cause opera to eat up all the cpu usage it can get at. After figuring out what the problem was, I effectively made it so I can't access burstnet anymore. :P (And I've had problems with their ads not loading and causing trouble)

Apparently other people don't like that sort of stuff too. Look at someone's host file that I found.

From a 2000 speech by William Mayer of Northeastern University, link [emphasis added]:

"... in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the basic rules of the presidential nomination process were almost entirely rewritten ... In response to the very bitter and chaotic Democratic national convention of 1968, the Democrats created a special commission to re-examine their party's rules: the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, more commonly known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission, after the two men who served as its chairmen. ... In just four years, the McGovern-Fraser Commission managed to put together a comprehensive set of recommendations that entirely recast the rules for selecting delegates, and then compelled fifty different state parties to abide by their provisions. The result has been described by one political scientist as "the greatest systematic change in presidential nomination procedures in all of American history."

... the work of the McGovern-Fraser Commission also had an important effect on the operations of the Republican Party. This came about partly because the Democratic party reformers helped promulgate new standards of openness and participation that the Republicans felt compelled to emulate, partly because when Democratic state legislatures changed their laws to correspond to the Democrats' new national rules, they usually applied the new provisions to the Republicans as well. Whatever the precise reasons, the Republican nomination process also changed quite dramatically during these years. As the number of presidential primaries increased, for example, it rose just as fast in the Republican party as in the Democratic.

... the nomination process was rocked by a second major set of changes. In 1974, in response to the Watergate scandals, Congress passed a law -- technically, a set of amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 -- that completely restructured the ways that candidates could raise and spend money while running for president. This law, with only a few modifications, is still in effect. It has lots of critics; but no one I know of denies that it is an important landmark in American electoral history.

The first election cycle to which both sets of rules applied was, of course, 1976. And though both parties had contested nomination races that year, it was the Democratic race that received most of the attention afterward and that did most to shape the view of the new nomination process that came to be held by practitioners, journalists, and scholars alike.

... the 1976 Carter campaign strategy became the prototype ... Almost every candidate since 1976 has felt compelled to emulate the four major premises of the Carter campaign: announce early, target Iowa and New Hampshire, do a lot of personal campaigning in those states, and then try to ride a wave of momentum to the nomination. As one Democratic strategist would comment in 1986, "Now there is only one strategy. It doesn't matter whether you are a Walter Mondale with deep ties to the party or whether you are a newcomer -- you both do the same things."

... the 1976 campaign had an enormous impact on the way that political commentators and political scientists viewed the presidential selection process. In the first place, it was the 1976 race that first established "momentum" as the great buzzword, the crucial concept, in understanding and interpreting a presidential nomination race. No election since then has run its course without a host of articles and reports speculating about which candidate has the momentum and how that may change in response to the most recent set o

At my school we have the School of Engineering Technology which is a more well rounded CS and CE learning experience. There is some coding, but there is also hardware, and theory with a dash of EE and networking. I left CS and went to it (Not because I didn't like coding, Calc kicked my tushie Frosh year), and it was quite an enjoyable experience. Some of my friends were also CS refugees and there were a few in the same boat as you, and they also did quite well in the environment, albeit with a little difficulty in the coding classes.

At my school we have the School of Engineering Technology which is a more well rounded CS and CE learning experience. There is some coding, but there is also hardware, and theory with a dash of EE and networking. I left CS and went to it (Not because I didn't like coding, Calc kicked my tushie Frosh year), and it was quite an enjoyable experience. Some of my friends were also CS refugees and there were a few in the same boat as you, and they also did quite well in the environment, albeit with a little difficulty in the coding classes.

It turns out that Northeastern University has decided to post pictures of a post-Superbowl riot near the campus of Northeastern University. The intent seems to be to identify the rioters and vandals who destroyed cars and property. It seems that officials at Northeastern believe that the rioters may be somehow affiliated with the university (and few dispute that idea).

As of now, Northeastern's web site only has a couple dozen photographs of vandalism in action. But they do have videos from nearby video cameras... it may just be a matter of time before they post some video clips.

Clearly these rioters were both stupid and committed crimes, so there's no need to debate the criminal aspects of their activity.

But is it OK for anyone to secretly videotape activities in the street? Is it OK for Northeastern to pin their students based on video and film taken by random observers?

We already hit 1Bsec two years ago. Slashdot's article on this is disturbingly missing (note article title), but luckily this link lists the milestones.

But we're talking about 1.073 billion here, a 'gig' of seconds, not a billion... c|net just doesn't know a damn thing, even after all these years.

(Does it disturb a single other person than me that reporters for technology sites don't know any more about computing than reporters for, like, Fox News?)

Anyway, have a merry 1072310400.

Use pkill instead.

Specifically latex, and more specifically pdflatex for pdf output and tex2page for html. With some hacking you should be able to script tex2page into outputting text as well.

To some extent the texinfo folks have solved this problem as well. The DocBook stuff mentioned elsewhere might be very nice but I have no experience with that.