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while I was walking down the street a guy came out of a building, hopped on a unicycle, and rode away. I found the whole experience random and strange. I turns out there is a whole club for jugglers and unicyclists. This machine might be a real hit at one of their meetings.

And some people learn a single rule and never learn that it is not universal. Grammar school, elementary school, middle school, and high school are all compound nouns. Some compound nouns are widely hyphenated, some are not, and some are widely accepted written either way. Here's a more-complicated-but-more-useful set of rules for when to use a hyphen. :), But as its author notes, the rules are in flux.

Everyone's entitled to an opinion as to how fast we should collectively permit our language to (d)evolve. But when your going too be an grammar-Nazi, its important that you did it write.

The "lot of people" you deride for dropping the hyphen include the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. It's time to ease up on the attitude or go join a community that speaks exclusively Middle English--excuse me, "Middle-English".

In further news, the State of Illinois passes a law regulating the value of pi to exactly 3.000.

You realize that happened, right? Only it isn't 3.0, it's 3.2

If everybody on Wall Street was making decisions based on the Magic 8 Ball would we blame the ball or the foolishness of those misapplying it?

Well, I went and posed that question, and the answer was "Absolutely!" Obviously this model is open to interpretation, which some would say is a strength.

Jerry Woodall, from Purdue, gave a talk at SNS's FiRe conference in San Diego about this process http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html. As many others have said, essentially, aluminum is a not-bad way to store electricity which can later be used to crack water. I agree with what others have said, that fuel cells are not a particularly good solution for transportation, but if we're ever going to do fuel cells, this aluminum dodge is the best trick i've seen for carting around the means to produce hydrogen.

Meanwhile, you can browse interactive maps of US antropogenic fossil fuel CO2 emissions based on the data produced by Project Vulcan at Purdue. Google Earth browser plugin is needed, or you can load all data in a KML file in Google Earth directly. There is also a flythrough video explaining the different data views. Full disclosure - I'm the programmer who created the maps. Yes, the page is slow to load, but once a layer is accessed, it'll stay cached.

This research seems very similar to what came out of Purdue six months ago. I guess having two methods is better than one, but this article isn't quite so dramatic given the Purdue research.

I am a chemical engineer too. The fact is that there is nothing made commercially today that does not have a toxic component in the supply chain somewhere, be it in building the manufacturing facility, transporting it to the end user, or during its end use.

Also, the article showed the researchers using a furnace to deposit gallium nitride during LED production, and this article also refers to GaN:

http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2008b/080717SandsLighting.html

http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/041011.Delp.forensics.html

Have you asked your school? Most schools have a study abroad office dedicated directly to this. Some schools even have a program setup specifically for certain majors paired up with other universities.

You could also look at a Maymester or Summer program. It would let you travel while not having to take a semester off from school.

because like any other engineering degree, I have to take technical courses every semester

I was unaware of this 'requirement' at my school. As long as I got X classes done by graduation they didn't care when I took it.

I don't ever remember this in my

Have you asked your school? Most schools have a study abroad office dedicated directly to this. Some schools even have a program setup specifically for certain majors paired up with other universities.

You could also look at a Maymester or Summer program. It would let you travel while not having to take a semester off from school.

because like any other engineering degree, I have to take technical courses every semester

I was unaware of this 'requirement' at my school. As long as I got X classes done by graduation they didn't care when I took it.

I don't ever remember this in my

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Ross Anderson, professor at Cambridge University.

It replaces and expands upon Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and Practical Cryptography by Ferguson & Schneier to make a more holistic approach to security encompassing the entire system, not just using the latest (coolest) encryption techniques. Most real-life systems are broken by going around or ignoring the encrpytion.

Another classic is

TCP/IP Illustrated by the late Richard Stevens
Most people need/read only Volume I: The Protocols, but there is also Volume II: The Implementation which is wonderful albeit with a smaller following, though Volume III which is considered a big disappointment to many (I've never read the vol 3) isn't worry buying unless you're specifically interested in its contents.

The only serious alternative to TCP/IP Illustrated is Douglas Comer's series Internetworking with TCP/IP which is the series I learnt about TCP/IP programming with. Still highly recommended.

For Software development, The Mythical Man-Month by computing pioneer Frederick Brooks should be required reading, and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister should be handed to every new IT/IM or software manager with their promotion or hiring (if they haven't read it already). Computing would suck so much less if we all held ourselves accounting to the basic ideas in these two books.

For historic, 3 books + bonus item that would have to be included are:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth

Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948 by Norbert Wiener

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, by Alan Turing and published in 1950 in Mind

Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson in 1974, is most often pointed to as the "birth" of hypermedia.

The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured the Altair 8800 on its cover.

http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/Localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/Indiana_Pi_Story.htm

or you could have just typed "law pi 3" in google....

That would be It's Such a Beautiful Day

Always liked that one myself - as much as Bradbury's story about the man who rebelled against the omnipresent communications devices that infested the near future, The Murderer.

Sometimes science fiction entertains, sometimes it bores, sometimes it warns...

Water is an excellent heat sink, but any company would likely run into serious environmental backlash if they wanted to use a lake or river as their heat sink. Just like on land, organisms in the water can be seriously disturbed by a change in temperature of even a few degrees. If the waste heat is seriously that large a problem, I'd recommend a man-made water cooling solution like a cooling tower, not too dissimilar from what goes on a power plants. Of course, most industrial or utility cooling tower sizes and appearances don't give off that special "nuclear" feel.

Looks that way. Now when does Linux takeover the desktop market?

Let me consult my oracle:

Hmph. Outlook not so good.

Maybe it means that Thunderbird will start to take over ... ;)

Well gee, the first hit on google for 'indiana pi 4':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
And if you don't like WP there's this: http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/Localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/Indiana_Pi_Story.htm
But hey, don't let anything like 'facts' get in the way of spreading lies.

Edsger Dijkstra once said, 'the use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense,'

Dijkstra was not known for being conservative in his statements of opinion. His "GOTO considered harmful" essay did a lot of good, but it also did quite a bit of damage. To the point where we ended up with a variety of "considered Harmful" Considered Harmful essays.

(I wonder if ""Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful is soon to follow? Oh wait. That already happened in '87.)

A more conservative viewing of COBOL would show that it held a useful place in history, but is now antiquated. You'd need to be extremely conservative to think that COBOL has a place for growth in the modern world.

...

Oh snap. We got another one.

In 1997, the Gartner Group estimated that there were 240 billion lines of Cobol code in active apps, and billions of lines of new Cobol code are being written every year.

Let's be realistic here.

1. 1997 was 11 years ago
2. Everyone was preparing for Y2K
3. Those billions of lines of code were often replacing billions of lines of coded that were removed

As someone who once worked with mainframes, I can tell you that COBOL isn't dead. However, it's not exactly thriving, either. Legacy systems do their jobs well, so there is little reason to replace them. Instead, many companies use technologies like Java->CICS connectors to bridge the gap between old and new. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to be developing "millions of lines of COBOL".
Quite the opposite, in fact. Business moves more quickly today than in any period in history. And with business moving so quickly, companies find they need to develop new aspects to their businesses. Those new aspects often take the form of new opportunities to develop new software.

If anything, I think COBOL is still hanging on because the mindset for technology is still external facing. Remember the Dot Com Boom? Well, one of the side effects was that technology shifted from optimizing internal operations to interacting with customers directly. Which is not a bad thing, except that internal operations shouldn't be neglected. Thus I see a lot of companies with inefficient internal procedures because they have not invested in proper internal technology infrastructure. This has left a niche where old COBOL programs are nursed along despite a growing amount of manual work for employees at many companies.

Wouldn't it be nice if technology could solve their problems? Well, it can. All we need is someone to make the investment.

With the economy going bust at the moment, I have a feeling the pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Companies are going to need to tighten their belts and become more competitive on price. Which means that they need more efficient operations. With the massive advancements in technology and ensuring code quality in the last 10 years, I fully expect that companies will soon have systems every bit as solid as their COBOL mainframes. Except they will be designed with more rapid change and flexibility in mind.

...for mentioning "his denial" in the summary, you just turned this into a damn forum for "truthers." You know, the people who are do deluded, they thing that Purdue University and Popular Mechanics are part of the "vast right wing conspiracy." Seriously, I've read some of their ideas on the boards. They'll literally go A->B->C->D->E->F->G and be like "and that proves Purdue University's study is faked by the gov't."

You should inform your security folks that changing passwords on a regular basis does not increase security, and as you have stated tends to reduce it.

no. UV is 3 x 10^15, Microwaves are 3 x 10^9 Good article: http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch23/radiation.php

The benefit of periodically changing your password is highly debateable. See Dr Eugene Spafford's blog article on the subject: http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/password-change-myths/ Aside from that, widespread adoption of OpenID would be a hacker's dream. It's no more difficult to steal credentials under OpenID than it is under a conventional login. Steal one set of credentials and you have access to everything the person does under OpenID. Today, I can use extra caution when loggin in to a bank, ebay, paypal, etc -- only doing it on a well-trusted machine, for example. With OpenID, I have to use that same paranoia on every site where the id is recognized. If you're smart you won't use OpenID for anything that really matters. And you might be surprised what really matters. Your email account is at the top of the list (think banking password reset requests...)

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080626KlimeckArsenic.html

You make up nonsense about new music codecs...

You are absolutely correct. There are no promising technologies that will improve music compression.

Ok, so many have tried, all have failed.

It may take a decade to test the assertions that this so called proof attempts to demonstrate.

Perhaps we could give the guy a consolation prize, wait for the work to be "proven" wrong and then off course, issue an Apology:

http://www.math.purdue.edu/~branges/apology.pdf :-)

-Hack

PS: Does anyone find it STRANGE that the guy who can solve this problem has issues finding a job?

WTF?

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/041011.Delp.forensics.html

Was also a previous slashdot story

http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/10/14/1742224.shtml

The ideal scientists is like the ideal gas, a nice model. Most people, including those with PhDs, believe in things. Examples such as "No replacement for displacement," "goto is evil," and "Windows Sucks Linux rules" are examples of belief. One may be able to cite evidence of a larger engine being better than a smaller one with a turbo charger, and would reconsider their beliefs if a really efficient turbo charger was made. However, that stated maxim represents one of their "beliefs."

Uhmm, the "no replacement.." seems to be some kind of rule-of-thumb for technicians (not engineers, never mind scientists); "goto is evil" is from a well-argued paper"Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by the well-respected computer scientist, Edsger Dijkstra and is an important work in software engineering (though, not scientific..); the last is not worth discussing.

It's absurd to call these "beliefs", particularly when you also described them as "maxims" - a far better description, as it means "a well-established proposition or principle". Simple belief is, as you might agree, not a good way to establish the usefulness of some proposition. Science however is. Adopting maxims that result from science (directly, or percolated down through the woolier fields of engineering) is *perfectly* acceptable when, as you say, no one has the time or ability to derive everything from first principles for themselves.

Your attempt to conflate everyday technical or engineering maxims with belief, so as try implicate science because some scientists may adhere to some maxims is just disturbing though. Engineering != science, and the scientific process is deliberately mindful of the fallability and even occasional dishonesty of man.

Does anyone know why Purdue's 'Steele' system isn't on the list?

Purdue university seems to have a reasonable solution. They send all the surplus (computers, furniture, lab equipment, etc) to a warehouse outside of town. Other departments get first crack at anything, then the equipment is sold to the public. Every few months they hold an auction to clear out stuff that hasn't been bought and anything left after that gets dumped. This seems like a good model to me.

http://www.purdue.edu/surplus/

That would be true, save that your parent post was referring to original post using the phrase "quote-unquote" just before actually using quotation marks. This would be akin to one speaking the following while doing the air-quote gesture: the air-quote quick brown fox. You would, hopefully, give them a funny look for doing such.

Further, his use of apostrophes to indicate the plural of a symbol, from my understanding, is an acceptable use, though it seems that the use of apostrophes to indicate plurals on numbers, symbols, and acronyms has fallen out of favour more recently in academia. This is well evidenced by the following page at Purdue:
Now: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html
2000: http://web.archive.org/web/20000815222842/http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_apost.html

Perhaps you're referring to our Biofuels Conference?

"We checked our model's performance by analyzing the period from 1961 to 1985 for which, of course, we do not need a prediction," Diffenbaugh said. "The model performed admirably, which tells us we've got a good understanding of how to represent the physical world in terms of computer code. It's certainly not perfect, but we'll need a computer at least 100 times as powerful as the cluster we used to really improve the accuracy. We would like to have access to such computing power in the future." If models didn't even fit our past data, you wouldn't have scientific consensus on this issue.

This video shows orange juice in the making.
The video to the burger maker is here: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/rube/rube.index.html

Enjoy

Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...?

From the looks of a report on Purdue's website, it's been undergoing research since at least 2003.

Time to convert all their deLoreans... um... space shuttles, to use Mr. Fusion - http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2007a/070201LadischBio.html

I think Figure 5 says it all, this was already done 4 years ago. It shows about 60% stopped, or at least reduced usage.

http://projects.resnet.purdue.edu/docs/ResNet%20Bandwidth%20Notifications.pdf

I'm a Mechanical engineer and I've had more embedded work than most CS people that I know.

Granted I'm a Mechatronics concentration and my senior year I had enough credits done to be allowed to take graduate level classes. I learned assembly, embeded C, VHDL, circuit design (sort of a major thing for an ME), some high level state space programming and making them all work together. The courses exist, it's do the students want to take them?

I voluntarily took a C/C++ CS 200 level course one year because I was interested in programming. (95% of MEs get nothing beyond very basic Matlab programming and the thought of doing anything any thing 'extra' is insane.) Sadly I did better than 99% of the class of actual CS majors. Kids who 'liked computers' and wanted a major with computers.
-
Some projects from the course I took. Looks like the website hasn't been updated in years: http://meweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~me588/Previous_Projects/previous.html

This is not the first use of multi-party computation. MPC is probably the most advanced cryptographic tool theoretical crypto has produced in the last 35 years. (The strongest flavour being Universally Composable MPC). Also, though the intuitive concept of secure MPC was introduced by Yao the later results of Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson in their 1986 paper How to Play Any Mental Game is the one upon which modern MPC is based and the result which is usually cited in cryptographic literature. (My guess is the wired article author got the bit about Yao from wikipedia.) It is in this paper that the security requirements of such a protocol are first formally described using what is now called the ideal/real paradigm. Essentially a secure protocol computing some joint functionality of all players inputs should be as secure as if there where a totally honest trusted third party who would gather their input, compute the function and privately hand the outputs back to all players. (This paradigm is probably at least as important a contribution to modern crypto as the actual MPC protocol they presented in the paper.)

The problem with MPC protocols is that since they are so very general and powerful they tend to also be horribly inefficient (though polynomially bounded (i.e. in P). Never the less the constant are often horrible and could require on the order of n^2 rounds of communication. Another hurdle in their wider adoption in the field of security is that they represent a significantly more complicated concept then say encryption or a hash function and so tend to be a difficult sell to non-cryptographers.

However at least one company, Cryptomathics of Aarhus, Denmark are working on an implementation of MPC. The main client being the danish government which wants to use the product to setup an online market through which local farmers can to sell there goods. The idea being that by using an MPC protocol to do this rather then some central (government run) server no body needs to trust anyone else, not even the government; just their own implementation of the software on their computers. As long as that is correct and uncorrputed they are guarenteed all the security they could hope for.

Of course there is always the argument that you might well be better off trusting the government to host the entire show then your own computer, but on the other hand even IF the government runs some online auction server, you still need to connect to that remote system from your own computer. So a secure server is still not going to help you protect yourself from local corruptions. At least now that is the ONLY thing left to worry about.

The other interesting thing is

b. Any person deploying a biological, chemical or radiological detector shall immediately notify the police department if such detector indicates an alarm, notwithstanding whether the person holds a permit for such detector, by following such procedures as are prescribed by rule of the commissioner and/or are included as a term of the permit itself.

so if I commit a misdemeanor by having an illegal NBCR detector, it's a misdemeanor of me not to report the activation of my illegal detector without regard to whether I have reason to believe the alarm to be giving a false indication! an other interesting problem may be what happens when all of the new cellphones in NYC have to be registered because the have radiation detectors built in.

I attended a talk that Steve Meyer (one of the presenters of the paper) gave at Purdue as part of the CERIAS Security Seminar Series. Link to the video is here. It's definitely worth a watch.

I have no love for 'Monsatan', but the benefit of biotech research for, e.g., corn is undeniable. Do a quick google search on the subject, and you'll see tons of graphs like those contained in this article.

Ironically enough, organic farming is only economical because of the biotechnology developed and funded by the likes of Pioneer Hi-Bred, and the companies that were amalgamated into Syngenta or Monsanto. Their research is what produced the varieties with such productive genetics compared to the wild progenitor that organic farms of commodity crops can even have a chance of being economical.

Some researchers at Purdue came up with a technique back in May that's probably better than this. It uses a Gallium/Aluminum alloy. Aluminum, when exposed to water, produces hydrogen and aluminum oxide. Normally aluminum produces an aluminum oxide layer immediately on any exposed surface, preventing further reaction. This alloy doesn't have that problem. It's unclear precisely how much platinum they require for this process from the news release, but Platinum is far more expensive than either Aluminum or Gallium. Another advantage is that the Gallium is unaffected and can be reused, while the aluminum oxide can readily be converted back to pure aluminum through Fused Salt Electrolysis. The cost of aluminum would make the cost of using this more than the equivalent of the current ~$3/gallon of gas. If there were enough demand and, using the recycling method, the cost of aluminum could be brought down to make it cheaper than the current cost of gas, however. Of course, electricity for the electrolysis has its own environmental impact...

Brownback is from Kansas, and the fictional urban legend is about Alabama

Yes, that's where the fake story of it being set to 3 is from.

But the time it was actually legislated to be 3.2 was in Indiana

It's especially amusing that it was set to 3.2 as that's not even a correct value if you round it, as 3 would be.

While that may be true in some places, it's not true everywhere. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2005/051014.Reactor.ABC.html

Are you really naive enough to think that current crop plants are "natural" in any way?

Hint: they aren't.

"Natural" corn (maize).

"Natural" cabbage (also "natural" cauliflower, mustard, turnip, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and canola. Yes, these were all essentially the same thing at one time -- they all came from a group of closely-related species).

"Natural" carrot.

"Natural" apple.

"Natural" wheat looks like a lawn that's gone to seed. "Natural" squash, pumpkins, and melons are egg-sized or smaller.

Oh, and your "natural" olive oil? Did it come from olives the size of a pea? And how about that "natural" butter? Did it come from cows that this or ones that looked like this?

We've been Frankensteining food for millenia, my friend.

Ever notice how the "natural food" freaks are invariably brutally ignorant of the fundamentals of biology and the history of agriculture? In fact, I'd bet money that you've rarely been off pavement in your life.

Yeah. And I'm the one who gets stuck saying "proven," when all the EFL lists list it as a regular verb (see The Purdue ESL Pages for an example). See "prove" in there? No? I didn't think so. I look like an idiot every other week at work.

I read somewhere that the Russians did experiments with growing plants with 2 weeks of sunlight followed by 2 weeks of relative darkness at low temperature. (Not lunar nighttime temperature, but above freezing.) It seems that there are plants can acclimatize to such conditions. (In particular, peas.) They remain dormant and are able to survive for the 2 weeks when the temperature is lowered less light is available, then continue growing. Using specially tuned LEDs, we could provide the interim power for the 2 weeks "economically." (Relatively speaking. NASA contractors would probably charge million$!)

Here's some folks in New Zealand doing experiments that simulate lunar agriculture. There are many papers related to lunar agriculture as well.