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6. add beet sugar to the corn sugar and make Butanol instead of inefficient Ethanol

The key research challenge that must be resolved is that butanol production inhibits microbial growth even at low concentrations. The result is that the product of the fermentation is less than 2% butanol. The overwhelming majority of the fermentation broth is water, so an energy-intensive distillation step is required for purification. This may be acceptable if the goal is to produce butanol for use as a solvent, but if butanol is to gain traction as a motor fuel, energy inputs into the process need to be minimized.

will it include Stalin?

Purdue University had a fully tenured professor of Computer Science who only had a masters degree and I don't think he published too much, but he was a multi-millionaire.

Who? I couldnt find him here under the list of tenured professors. I'd be interested in finding out, thanks. Never heard of someone without a Ph.D. having tenure at one of the bigger colleges like that. But like I said in the first place, 15 over 6 is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. Sure, if you bring in more money they'd be hard pressed to let you go for not publishing as much as they would like (I think I said that ... )

Man, the entirety of my Bachelor's (at 30k+ student school) cost me less than 20k. I paid for bills by working part-time. I know that US universities are a little more expensive and I hear that tuitions are going up, but like more than twice as expensive? That's hard to believe. Are you sure that people aren't just graduating with 40k in debt b/c they don't know how manage their money?

Check out a few of the active research projects and (some free) products specifically designed to support the classroom learning environment -- both lecturing, active learning, peer evaluation, noteblogging, etc. --Ubiquitous Presenter http://up.ucsd.edu/ (yes, I'm a co-inventor) --Classroom Presenter http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presente r/ --(not free, but good) DyKnow http://dyknow.com/ These systems have been designed (and studied) not only to support standard fare of "inking up" lecture materials, but to support improved pedagogies in the classroom -- such as engaging students in trying out their learning, supporting reflection on exercises or demos, empowering students to contribute or share knowledge, etc. All of these products have publications web pages with pubs targeted at the instructor. You can also look for more publications in the proceedings of WIPTE (Workshop on the Impact of Pen Technology in Education). http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/conference/wipte/ If you want to hear from students about what THEY like about Tablet PCs and some of the things they like instructors to do with them check out http://www.studenttabletpc.com/

No offense, but that's bullshit. "it" is not a noun, therefore the quoted use of the apostrophe is not valid. "it's" is short for "it is", "its" is the correct possessive form.

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/its.html

I call bullshit. The first use of the apostrophe is the possessive case. ...

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_a post.html ...

It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.

Why is it so difficult to get?
It's: the apostrophe indicates something is missing: he's (he is), she's (she is), it's (it is).
Its: this is the possessive, since possessive do not have apostrophes: his, her(s), its.

I call bullshit. The first use of the apostrophe is the possessive case. Ex:
John's ball
Joe's socks
Olympic committee's machines
Microsoft's lousy Vista

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_a post.html

In the latter 2 examples, when "It" is used to refer to the Olympic Committee or Microsoft, then "It's" becomes the possessive case.
Ex: The Olympic Committee is looking fot relaible computers. It's choice is the Lenoveo brand.
Microsft makes lousy operating systems. It's recent Vista bombed at most customer locations.

It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.

OK Mr. sharp-pointy-teeth - ever see an artichoke plant in the wild? You're gonna need some serious chompers to get through that.Dinosaurs didn't have marinade sauce and they couldn't boil anything

Not to mention that we see hundreds of cave drawings of bison and deer and other roaming mammals... yet does anyone find it strange that no caveman decided to draw a HUGE monstrous death machine roaming the lands? I mean, not ONE SINGLE MENTION anywhere in all of human culture until we discovered their bones?

That's because they were scared shitless. Would YOU want those pointy-toothed artichoke munching critters staring at you when you woke up? Haven't you heard of PTSD, you insensitive clod.

Before you debunk creationism, you need to use better examples.

Sheesh, the quality of comments around here keeps going downhill....

Haha- so this is the sort of article that I miss when I sleep? Anyway, I have collected some links that somebody might find useful to go start some more research. Maybe setup a basement lab or something.

-- General
* Irazoqui's neurotransceiver [pdf] [2003] The problem with Irazoqui's device is that it is maybe 1% power efficient, so maybe some electronicists can come around and make some suggestions to improve the coil design and so on. He did his testing on rats, not humans.
* Direct brain interface bibliography from the University of Michigan
* Gleamed from an article below: wireless visual cortex implant publications
-- EEG
* Controlling computers with EEG signals
* EEG via soundcard from OpenEEG
* Wireless EEG
-- Slashdot goodness
* Scientists couple nerve tissue with semiconductors
* Post re: neurosilicon junction with PDF
* Thinkware
* Good post w/ links on neurocomputation
* Brain slice experiments
* Neuroscientists at MIT doing direct neural interfaces- but this post sets things into perpsective as well as this one
* Single neuron recordings w/ ref
* Sorry to dash your hopes, but ...
* Autonomously adjusting electrodes? and more
* Artificial hippocampus and stimulating neuron growth / neurogenesis ... with Prozac?
* Implant a chip inside your head- though it does not discuss the specific surgery skills you would need
* Working nerve chip of silicon and snail neurons
* Re: Kevin Warwick- interview- the so-called "Captain Cyborg" since '98 or something
* BrainPort
* Fusing neurons with computers
-- More
* Artificial vision
* The vision quest
*

"lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up"

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations? call me crazy but i don't see high food prices

In case you didn't know, the government does or did pay farmers not to plant. Though this study doesn't say this specifically a study from Reason Foundation, "Free Mind and Free Markets", does have this to say about idle cropland:

E. Farm Output, Land Prices, and the Real-Estate Market

If farmers can grow more food on less land, more land is available for other uses such as open space, commercial development, or housing. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently found that, although cropland acreage has undergone little net change since 1945, whether cropland is harvested, idle, or lays fallow depends on federal programs and economic markets. Strong export markets fueled expansions of cropland in the 1970s and 1980s, but cropland fell as millions of acres were diverted into federal programs. Idle cropland, for example, has varied from 20.5 percent of the total used for crops in 1987 to 5.5 percent in 1982. In 1992, 56 million acres, or 16.6 percent of the total amount used for crops, was idle. An analysis of the causes of farmland loss between 1949 and 1992 by Ohio State University agricultural economist Luther Tweeten found the "lack of farm economic viability rather than urban encroachment" was the principal reason for cropland loss.

And the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau says this:

Acreage Reduction Program The acreage reduction program (ARP) is a voluntary land retirement program administered by the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). A farmer may idle a set portion of their crop acreage base of wheat, feed grains, cotton, or rice. They are not given a direct payment for ARP, but may be eligible for benefits such as CCC loans and deficiency payments. Participating farmers are sometimes offered the option of idling additional land under a paid diversion program that gives them a specific payment for each idle acre. ARP program was eliminated by 1996 Farm Bill.

The Purdue University Department of Agricultural Economics has this to say:

Acreage Reduction Program
From the 1930's, the U.S. has attempted to avoid excess supplies of grain and raise grain prices and farm income by encouraging farmers to voluntarily take some land out of production. The effect of a restriction on land for corn would be to shift the U.S. supply curve to the left.

So yes, the government did encourage farmer to not grow crops. And that's besides the billions of dollars give farmers in subsidies.

no i don't think you understand how biodiesel is produced (yet you seem to support it so vigarously?) a key component of biodiesel is the amount of fertiliser used to produce the crop which uses a lot of - you guessed it - OIL.

Petro based fertilizers aren't need to grow crops. I've been gardening for more than 30 years and not once did I use them. Though al I have right now is a postage stamp sized garden, I'm growing acorn squash, pickling cucumbers, onions, 4 different pepers, 4 tomatoes, and tomatilos. Organic farmers don't use them either. Admittedly though in order to grow feedstock, crops, to produce enough biofuels to replace even a small part of the petro used now without clearcutting forests you need to use petro based fertilizers.

the nasty stuff you refer to is the spent fuel rods, which is easy enough to store.

Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain? If you think it's a good place to store nuclear waste I bet you didn't know Yucca Mountain is in a

"lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up"

let me guess, it's all a conspiracy of the big corperations? call me crazy but i don't see high food prices

In case you didn't know, the government does or did pay farmers not to plant. Though this study doesn't say this specifically a study from Reason Foundation, "Free Mind and Free Markets", does have this to say about idle cropland:

E. Farm Output, Land Prices, and the Real-Estate Market

If farmers can grow more food on less land, more land is available for other uses such as open space, commercial development, or housing. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently found that, although cropland acreage has undergone little net change since 1945, whether cropland is harvested, idle, or lays fallow depends on federal programs and economic markets. Strong export markets fueled expansions of cropland in the 1970s and 1980s, but cropland fell as millions of acres were diverted into federal programs. Idle cropland, for example, has varied from 20.5 percent of the total used for crops in 1987 to 5.5 percent in 1982. In 1992, 56 million acres, or 16.6 percent of the total amount used for crops, was idle. An analysis of the causes of farmland loss between 1949 and 1992 by Ohio State University agricultural economist Luther Tweeten found the "lack of farm economic viability rather than urban encroachment" was the principal reason for cropland loss.

And the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau says this:

Acreage Reduction Program The acreage reduction program (ARP) is a voluntary land retirement program administered by the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). A farmer may idle a set portion of their crop acreage base of wheat, feed grains, cotton, or rice. They are not given a direct payment for ARP, but may be eligible for benefits such as CCC loans and deficiency payments. Participating farmers are sometimes offered the option of idling additional land under a paid diversion program that gives them a specific payment for each idle acre. ARP program was eliminated by 1996 Farm Bill.

The Purdue University Department of Agricultural Economics has this to say:

Acreage Reduction Program
From the 1930's, the U.S. has attempted to avoid excess supplies of grain and raise grain prices and farm income by encouraging farmers to voluntarily take some land out of production. The effect of a restriction on land for corn would be to shift the U.S. supply curve to the left.

So yes, the government did encourage farmer to not grow crops. And that's besides the billions of dollars give farmers in subsidies.

no i don't think you understand how biodiesel is produced (yet you seem to support it so vigarously?) a key component of biodiesel is the amount of fertiliser used to produce the crop which uses a lot of - you guessed it - OIL.

Petro based fertilizers aren't need to grow crops. I've been gardening for more than 30 years and not once did I use them. Though al I have right now is a postage stamp sized garden, I'm growing acorn squash, pickling cucumbers, onions, 4 different pepers, 4 tomatoes, and tomatilos. Organic farmers don't use them either. Admittedly though in order to grow feedstock, crops, to produce enough biofuels to replace even a small part of the petro used now without clearcutting forests you need to use petro based fertilizers.

the nasty stuff you refer to is the spent fuel rods, which is easy enough to store.

Forgetting about mining uranium, where are you going to store spent fuel, Yucca Mountain? If you think it's a good place to store nuclear waste I bet you didn't know Yucca Mountain is in a

OK, first we get past the blogodreck from some site that wants traffic, and look at the Range Fuels site.

This is funded by Kosla Ventures, which is Vinod Kosla's venture capital fund. That's a good sign; he has a decent track record as a VC. (He was one of the founders of Sun, but he later invested in Excite.) Anyway, they're not looking for money; they've got that.

People have been working on cellulostic ethanol for a while. It's not that hard to do; it's hard to do cost-effectively. Here's an overview of the known approaches. Range Fuels uses a heat-driven process, which of course takes energy to run, but is standard chemical engineering. There's other R&D underway to develop a bioengineered enzyme that will digest cellulose at commercially feasible rates. Such enzymes have been created, but they're too slow and making the enzymes costs too much. Work continues.

Anyway, this doesn't look like the big cellulostic ethanol breakthrough. But it's progress.

Switchgrass is one of the better ones. It grows everywhere and is very disease, drought, etc resistant.

Hemp shares those same characteristics. It also has medical uses as well as can be used for bioremediation to cleanup toxic spills and such. Bioremediation can be defined as any process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the environment altered by contaminants to its original condition. In this, switchgrass might also be usuable, I don't know.

You can store the wood for a long time or just leave the trees planted. You don't have that option with switchgrass or hemp -- you can't store the stuff or it will start decomposing.

You're mistaken here, hemp can be left alone to grow on it's own. A long tyme ago I knew someone who's family owned land out in the middle of nowhere South Carolina and they had trees of hemp growing. They had one photo of her standing under a hemp plant towering over her. According to this, hemp fibers can get up to 15 foot long, so I'd image hemp can grow much higher.

Besides, as with any type of farming, the best yields will come from a variety of crops rotated to preserve the land as much as possible.

Agreed!!!

The flip-side to "pretty" code is good documentation. There are too few programmers out there who can both write elegant code and explain what it does just as elegantly. I have his "The Inform Designer's Manual, Fourth Edition" sitting on my shelf right now, and I can honestly say that it is the only manual that I have had the pleasure of describing as a "page turner".

The code itself is equally impressive. Satiated with (helpful) comments, compiles on virtually any platform, easy to read, follow, and modify as you see fit. There's also a separate "Technical Manual" for those who are interested in modifying the original code.

Let's see... Let's not forget nethack. They thought of everything. :) http://www.nethack.org/

And then there are always those little tidbits of code like this inverse sqrt function that fall into the it just works category. Code that mere mortals such as myself can hardly comprehend - let alone write! http://www.math.purdue.edu/~clomont/Math/Papers/20 03/InvSqrt.pdf

"an Ubuntu" is proper, unless the u is pronounced as a y in a word like "you".

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/esliart .html

The replies to this comment seem to be along the lines of "they don't teach that at my university, so you're wrong." As a clarification to the parent, it should be noted that the CS 503 course taught at Purdue (cide1's and my university) has a lab where you have to implement a scheduler, a full virtual memory subsystem with demand paging, and a file system in the Xinu operating system on real hardware. If you break something, the only feedback you get is three beeps and a new boot prompt about 30 seconds later. No debugger. Non-deterministic execution. Minimal crash information. Anger, hate, and suffering. It's remarkably similar to my experience with Linux kernel hacking.

The CS 503 course provides a (relative to Linux) small implementation effort that provides a sample of what programming in a major OS kernel is like. From that perspective, cide1's comment is dead on. You can't expect a college course to give you the full story. At some point, you're going to have to teach yourself. Personally, I am content that I can read "Understanding the Linux Kernel" and "Linux Kernel Development" and understand all the different concepts without having to refer to another book.

Even big brother has a good side. Your big brother Edgar has all the down and dirty on your other brother Acxiom Corp in one neat document called a 10K. If you had any remaining delusions of privacy, let this http://www.secinfo.com/dMc2q.ux.htm and this http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/sf/privacy2.htm l put them to rest.

[PDF] Functional neurotransceiver.

Towards neuro-memory-chip: Imprinting multiple memories in cultured neural networks; Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob. 2007. What interesting device combinations can we imagine with the awesome 2003 P. P. Irazoqui neurotransceiver?

It'd be King James's. I don't know why this is so difficult for everyone.

Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 11:31:14 -0400
From: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: The mother of all grease fires
To: /dev/null@python.bostic.com

Forwarded-by: stripes@uunet.uu.net (Josh Osborne)

From: Brian Reid
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 17:34:09 PDT

I work in the very center of the city of Palo Alto, in a nice office
building. We are surrounded on every side by restaurants, hotels, and so
forth. But we are a computer company, and so our building ends up needing
a lot of electricity. We use about a megawatt (1 million watts).

In order to deliver a million watts of electricity to an office building,
you need a very large transformer. These transformers are too big to put
on poles, and besides in quaint downtown areas nobody likes those poles
any more. So the transformers are put underground. The million-watt
transformer that powers our office building is located in an underground
vault in the middle of a walkway that leads to City Hall. The transformer
is about the size of a small car, and the transformer vault is about the
size of a one-car garage, except that the way you get in is to climb down
a ladder from the street level. The top of the transformer vault is well
ventilated, because a million-watt transformer generates a lot of heat.

Several fine restaurants are near this walkway, along with a bank, an art
supply store, and so forth. There's a lot of foot traffic. This being
California, where it never rains, and this being Palo Alto, where it is
always springtime, the restaurants have outdoor seating areas that are
very popular.

Recently the patrons of one restaurant started to complain that there was
an unpleasant odor in their otherwise idyllic outdoor seating area. Soon
the Health Department was called, and they quickly determined that the
odor was caused by rancid oil that had seeped into the sidewalk. Further
investigation showed that the source of the rancid oil was overflow from
a nearby grating. The grating was marked "City of Palo Alto Utilities",
so the utility department was called.

The utility crew quickly discovered the problem. The oil wasn't really
oil, it was molten deep-frying grease, which was molten because it was
being kept warm by a million-watt transformer. The entire vault was
completely full of used frying grease, about 2000 gallons of it, which
was enough to completely cover the transformer. The heat of the
transformer kept the grease from solidifying.

Police quickly figured out what had happened. Every night for quite a
number of years, one of the nearby restaurants had, at closing time,
emptied its fryer into the transformer vault, thinking that they were
dumping it into the storm sewer. It's quite illegal to dump grease into
a storm sewer, of course, but they probably figured they would never get
caught.

Transformers do occasionally overheat; this is why they are kept in
concrete vaults. If this one had overheated, we would have had the mother
of all grease fires.

Last night they shut off all of the electrical power, pumped out the hot
grease, washed out the vault, and replaced the transformer. It's very
fortunate that nobody was killed.

Today's "daily special" menu did not include the usual fried fish.

---

Unfortunatey, Purdue recently sent an email to all students saying that they will cooperate.

The email is basically covered here as well.
http://www.purdue.edu/securepurdue/copyright.cfm

According to this, they have gone 180 degrees from their former statement. They will go to the cost of tracking down IP addresses, deliver the "settlement" extortion email and deliver names if demanded by subpoena. Worse, they are telling students to cease using and remove all P2P programs, as if any use would make the person a target. This is a disappointment because the earlier quote made it look like they were going to ignore the whole thing.

"Title: Information Regarding Delivery of Mail for Alleged Copyright Violations Body: Some users of the Purdue University Internet network this week will begin receiving notices of threatened legal action from the Recording Industry Association of America. In a stepped-up effort to enforce music copyright, the association is harvesting Internet addresses of computers that allegedly offered music for others to download illegally. It then is sending emails to Internet service providers and asking that the emails be forwarded to these computer users. The notices offer the option of paying a settlement fee or facing legal action. Purdue University, as an Internet service provider, will forward these emails to the user of the specified address when the user can be accurately identified. While the university will do its best to deliver these notices to the proper individuals, it is not responsible for the accuracy of the identification or address to which such notices are sent. It will be up to each recipient to decide how to respond to these notices. All users of Purdue IT resources are ultimately responsible for their own conduct and for responding to any notification received from a copyright owner. Should an individual choose not to pay the settlement, the RIAA may ask Purdue for its logs for the purpose of pursuing legal action. The next step would be for RIAA to file a request to subpoena the name of the computer owner. The university will at all times honor valid subpoenas. Purdue does not generally monitor the content of Internet transmissions. The university, however, can match computers to the addresses they use when connecting to the Internet. Information on your legal obligations and methods to protect yourself can be found at: http://www.purdue.edu/securepurdue/copyright.cfm Individuals with questions regarding the settlement notice should contact legal counsel of their own choosing for advice. Sincerely, Gerry McCartney Interim Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Purdue University Thomas B. Robinson Vice President for Student Services Purdue University" Reactions? Supposedly last week less than 2 dozen letters were forwarded to specific students, but more are expected...

No, hemp does not have a lot of very good uses.

You can make paper out of it, if you don't mind it being fragile, and brown.

No, hemp is not a replacement for any petroleum based products.

Please don't call Missoula a small town, it is one of the largest cities in Montana. I've lived in small towns before, Missoula is not one.

Don't get me wrong, it shouldn't be illegal.

You seem to have trouble understanding the differences between a dependent and independent clause. For example, "have to content ourselves with providing corrections here" is not an independent clause. Here is a link to help with that: Independent and Dependent Clauses.

You also seem to have some issues with anger management. Here is a link to deal with that as well: How to Deal with Anger.

If you are going to complain about someone's grammar, make sure to check your own. "have to content ourselves with providing corrections here" is not a complete sentence; therefore, you should not have placed a comma before "and".

Really?

Use commas to separate independent clauses when they are joined by any of these seven coordinating conjunctions: and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet.

The game was over, but the crowd refused to leave.
The student explained her question, yet the instructor still didn't seem to understand.
Yesterday was her brother's birthday, so she took him out to dinner.

(Source: Using Commas, "Brought to you by the Purdue University Online Writing Lab.")

You do not know what the fuck you are talking about, but thank you for playing. Oh look, I correctly used a comma again!

How many times do I have to say it to you mental midgets? Stop me if I'm wrong, but be damned sure I'm wrong.

Since at first I wasn't sure whether you were correct or not, I looked it up. Although I couldn't find any rules on that page specifically about using both "if" and "then" in the same sentence, I did find sentences where the writer himself used them, such as the one here:

If you answer yes to these questions, then the adjectives are coordinate and should be separated by a comma.

As you can see, he included a comma. Since the sentence came from a web page about grammar, one could reasonably expect it to be grammatically correct itself. Therefore, my usage was correct as well.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you're going to have to find yourself a new pet peeve.

n this work, we identify, demonstrate and mitigate insider attacks against measurement-based adaptation mechanisms in unstructured multicast overlay networks. The attacks target the overlay network construction, maintenance, and availability and allow malicious nodes to control significant traffic in the network, facilitating selective forwarding, traffic analysis, and overlay partitioning. We propose techniques to decrease the number of incorrect or unnecessary adaptations by using outlier detection.

David Zage is a third year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Purdue University under the supervision of Professor Cristina Nita-Rotaru.

For some reason I can't find the link on Purdue's website, but here is the press release as it was e-mailed to me. This is where the newspapers are getting their information. -- cut -- February 7, 2007 Purdue integrity panel completes research inquiry WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University committee appointed to conduct an initial inquiry into internal allegations of research misconduct at Purdue by a professor of nuclear engineering has concluded its work. The committee determined that the evidence does not support the allegations of research misconduct and that no further investigation of the allegations is warranted. The committee was appointed in the College of Engineering under the university's policy on integrity in research to consider allegations against Professor Rusi P. Taleyarkhan regarding a reported confirmation at Purdue of sonofusion, the use of sonic waves in a table-top apparatus to produce nuclear fusion. Purdue's policy on integrity in research requires that all allegations of research misconduct be reviewed under procedures that ensure strict confidentiality. The policy states: "The mere suspicion or allegation of wrongdoing, even if totally unjustified, is potentially damaging to a person's career. Consequently, no information about charges of a lack of integrity in research may be disclosed except to the appropriate university and federal authorities." However, in the interest of ending speculation regarding Purdue?s inquiry, Dr. Taleyarkhan has agreed to allow the university to confirm the existence of the internal review and disclose its final result, according to Joseph L. Bennett, vice president for university relations at Purdue. "Professor Taleyarkhan cooperated fully throughout the inquiry," Bennett said. "Research at a university must be conducted with absolute integrity. When Purdue received internal allegations of research misconduct, Purdue pursued those allegations thoroughly to conclusion in accordance with the confidential procedures required by its published policy. Professor Taleyarkhan is engaged in very promising, significant research, and we hope he will now be able to give his full attention to this important work. Purdue believes that vigorous, open debate of the scientific merits of this new technology is the most appropriate focus going forward." Taleyarkhan led a research team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that first reported the "bubble fusion" phenomenon in a 2002 paper published in the journal Science. Those researchers later conducted additional research at Oak Ridge, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences before Taleyarkhan came to Purdue in 2003 to continue his research. In March 2004 and January 2006 his group published their second and third papers on this subject. Scientists have long known that high-frequency sound waves cause the formation of cavities and bubbles in liquid, a process known as "acoustic cavitation," and that those cavities then implode, producing high temperatures and light in a phenomenon called "sonoluminescence." Researchers have estimated that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level. Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, expensive machines, but acoustic cavitation devices might be built for a fraction of the cost. Contact: Joseph Bennett, (765) 494-2082, jlbennett@purdue.edu Rusi Taleyarkhan (765) 420-7537, rusi@purdue.edu Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu Related Web site: Purdue policy on integrity in research: http://www.purdue.edu/policies/pages/teach_res_out reach/c_22.html

To borrow a quote from Eugene Spafford:

"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts."

This, and other Spaf quotes, and where they came from, can be found here.

i didn't want to get bitched at by the grammar Nazi's.

Doug Comer explains this best, in "How To Criticize Computer Scientists/ or Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And Making Insults More Pointed."

In recent exchanges, members of the faculty have tried in vain to attack other Computer Scientists and disparage their work. Quite frankly, I find the results embarrassing -- instead of cutting the opponent down, many of the remarks have been laughably innocuous. Something must be done about it because any outsider who hears such blather will think less of our department: no group can hold the respect of others unless its members can deal a devastating verbal blow at will.

This short essay is an effort to help faculty make their remarks more pointed, and help avoid wimpy vindictives. It explains how to insult CS research, shows where to find the Achilles' heel in any project, and illustrates how one can attack a researcher.

The Two Basic Types Of Research

Most lousy insults arise from a simple misimpression that all researchers agree on the overall aims of CS research. They do not. In particular, CS has inherited two, quite opposite approaches from roots in mathematics and engineering.

Researchers who follow the mathematical paradigm are called theorists, and include anyone working in an area that has the terms ``analysis'', ``evaluation'', ``algorithms'', or ``theory'' in the title.

Researchers who follow the engineering paradigm are called experimentalists, and include most people working in areas that have the terms ``experimental'', ``systems'', ``compiler'', ``network'', or ``database'' in the title.


Read the rest of the essay.

That's Dr. Jane Prey to you!

http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/conference/wipte/pr ey.cfm

Has a book
http://www.amazon.com/Impact-Tablet-Pen-based-Tech nology-Education/dp/1557534349/sr=1-1/qid=11701004 65/ref=sr_1_1/002-4935735-1745604?ie=UTF8&s=books

She's an academic who went ROGUE!

No; the point was outside the speech marks

No. The point was outside of the speech marks, so, by convention, it was not part of the reported speech.

Urban legend. Something sort of like that did happen, but that was changing pi to 3.2 (not 3) and the proposer believed that pi actually equaled that.

I was looking for the correct option to mod you, but the "wrong" option just wasn't there.

From the Online Writing Lab at purdue:
"Use a pair of commas in the middle of a sentence to set off clauses, phrases, and words that are not essential to the meaning of the sentence. Use one comma before to indicate the beginning of the pause and one at the end to indicate the end of the pause.

Here are some clues to help you decide whether the sentence element is essential:

* If you leave out the clause, phrase, or word, does the sentence still make sense?
* Does the clause, phrase, or word interrupt the flow of words in the original sentence?
* If you move the element to a different position in the sentence, does the sentence still make sense?

If you answer "yes" to one or more of these questions, then the element in question is nonessential and should be set off with commas. Here are some example sentences with nonessential elements:

Clause: That Tuesday, which happens to be my birthday, is the only day when I am available to meet.
Phrase: This restaurant has an exciting atmosphere. The food, on the other hand, is rather bland.
Word: I appreciate your hard work. In this case, however, you seem to have over-exerted yourself."

Because it's bollocks, is why. Given the way the prices of the components of computer systems have changed with respect to one another over time, at some point in history it must have been economically viable to exploit the phenomenon of "recovering overwritten data" -- if it really existed -- for the purpose of expanding storage capacity.

It's never been done because it's physically impossible to recover data which has been overwritten even once. However, if you're a government, it's more politically expedient to claim that you recovered information using techniques like this than techniques like this (or, absit omen, you faked evidence to secure a conviction). If you're a hard drive manufacturer, omitting to point out that overwritten data is unrecoverable might lead to the completely unnecessary destruction of perfectly-reusable drives -- and hence, more sales for you. And if you're a data recovery specialist, you really don't want to admit that anything is beyond your capabilities.

The only machine ever built with anything approaching the mythical capability to recover overwritten magnetic data was a German reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, featuring a "trick record" button which disconnected the erase head (back in those days, they used energised-field erase heads) allowing you to mix a new recording with an existing one (e.g. play an instrument, then sing over it). And even then it was, frankly, a bit crap: no way to monitor the old recording and the result sounded sort of fuzzy due to interference between the old and new recordings' high-frequency bias signals.

Since the NSA has a patent on a technique I think it's a little more than theory =)

The trick of this function is to take the 32 bits of data that are really a float, but process it as if it's an integer. So you take that cumbersome number 21 as a float, then BAM! presto, turn it directly to an integer not through type conversion, but by simply treating those same 32 bits as if they were representing an integer all along.

Let's use the number 21 as an example in the function call.

The binary representation of 21 as a float is 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (broken into 8-bit words for clarity). The function then goes to create a new integer i, whose value is also 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (which happens to be 1101529088 in decimal). The magical line of the code, i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1), takes that integer i, shifts its bits one to the right (turning our 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 into 00100000 11010100 00000000 00000000, or 550764544 in decimal), then subtracts it (still doing integer math here) from 0x5f3759df (which is 01011111 00110111 01011001 11011111 or 1597463007 in decimal), and winds up with 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111 (or 1046698463 in decimal).

Now, for its next trick, it takes that wonky integer 1046698463, and turns it back into a floating point number, by the same trick used above, i.e. simply by looking at those same 32 bits, and pretending they're a float, not an int. The binary representation of 1046698463, 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111, is the same as 0.22202251851558685 in float.

From here on out, it's all floating math. Apply the Newton-Rhapson method (thats the next line), we get x = 0.22202251851558685 * (1.5 - ( (21*.5) * 0.22202251851558685^2 )) = 0.218117811. We return this value at the closing of the function. As it turns out, the inverse square root of 21 is 0.21821789... (thanks Google calc). So, I have no idea WHY the Float to Int to Float trick works, but it works very well.

Whew!

The linked site seems to be down (gee, you think it might be slashdotted?), but this paper seems to be covering the same topic.

It goes both ways. There are some good farmers out there, and some of the worst pollution comes out of factory farms. But, though I am not a "degreed biologist living amongst the rustics" I am married to a nationally recognized environmental journalist, and I do have more than a little environmental background as well. Farms use a hell of a lot of fertilizer and a hell of a lot of pesticides, and though both vary depending on the crop, neither one is remotely environmentally friendly, and there are always issues with estuaries and water table runoff. Don't believe me? Believe the American Chemical Society

And to blame fricking golf courses for the majority of pesticide pollution in this country is laughable. Fertilizer? Maybe. They're up there. But they cover such a small amount of space compared to the amount of land in this country that is under cultivation. Now, home users, with their nice green lawns, again, possible point, but that's not cities, that's the goddamn suburbs.

I've lived quite a lot of my life around farms and farmers...Mostly eastern, so Tobacco, Cattle, Chickens, Pigs, Tomatoes, Tree crops, and Cotton, so I'm not quite as ignorant as you seem to think. And, since I'm sure you have better sources for statistics than I do, I'd really like to see some numbers on "latest techniques" especially where water use and soil conservation come into play. My numbers basically say that water sources are drying up and becoming contaminated and that soil loss (in indiana in 1997) hit a 50 year low...with a mere 2.9 tons per acre.

Frankly, and I've seen it pretty often, I think you're suffering from some serious arrogance. You're completely right, and I'm completely wrong. My points have no merit (drawing down the aquifers? Hello? This is a no brainer.), and yours do, but not because you backed up your assertions (you didn't) and not because you didn't lay out some outlandish assertions (you did), but because you're all educated, and I'm just a dummy from Georgia who should just back off what'n all I don understand...Speaking of "redneck" stereotypes.

So get off it and prove me wrong, or shut the hell up.

Perhaps it is best to think of printing a monochrome image. You do not have "continuous" (i.e. a large number of discrete levels) control over the pixel intensity, unlike a computer monitor where you can directly control intensity of a pixel. Each pixel is binary: either pigment is put down or it is not put down. In order to simulate continuous tones you use digital halftoning, as illustrated. You can think of a 256 level halftone pattern as an 8x8 block of pixels that is filled in algorithmically to give the appropriate level. Halftoning is further complicated by the fact that the pixel size is usually much larger than the addressibility. (A pixel from a 1000dpi printer will generally be much larger than .001 inches. i.e. the pixels overlap considerably.)

You can indeed overlap the three colors, but even if your registration is perfect, you will have at most three bits per pixel when printing with three colors (each color is either present or not). 24 bit color can only be simulated through half-toning, which is essentially overlaying three monochrome half-toned images.

No it doesn't.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_a post.html

The book belongs to Samuel Its. It's Its's book.

Nothing like an ignoramous appointing himself the Grammar Nazi. Messing up something so basic as subject-verb agreement!

I filed a bug for another DoS over a year ago and they still haven't fixed it:

Crash Firefox

The insta-crash only seems to work on Linux though.

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/news_and_events/event s/security_seminar/

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/news_and_events/event s/security_seminar/