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The problem is that they replaced an engineer with a pointy haired boss with an MBA.

I'm sure you're referring to Steve Wozniak as Steve Jobs was just a sales person. While Jobs went to Reed College he didn't graduate.

There are lots of caveats as most of these meters are for detecting contamination rather than dose rate.

The CDV -700 has a pretty thick window so not super sensitive. They are all pretty old so you would be wise to check it carefully before using.

To reliably detect small amounts of radiation contaminating food you will need to spend a fair bit of money on something more sensitive that most of the survivalist supply stores:
http://www.ludlums.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_ludlum.tpl&product_id=300&category_id=115&keyword=3_with&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=95
(they will also do calibration)

Eberline made very good instruments but I can't find them on the web as making them currently. They made also very good equivalent products. You may find a good used one of these.

Proper NIST traceable calibration may be worth your time the meters are generally calibrated for dose rate or energy from a standard Cesium-137 source Cobalt-60 is commonly used and they are both major fission products so they are good choices for the stated application):

One vendor near NY I found on web: http://biomedphysics.com/survey-meter-calibration-and-repair

The Reed College Reactor Facility might also do it. This will likely be the cheapest method (website quotes $50 per probe +shipping): http://reactor.reed.edu/metercal.html

As others have mentioned most smoke detectors use Americium which is an alpha emitter. You need a very thin window and large surface area probe to detect this reliably. These don't make great test sources.

If you can find an older colman style lantern mantle made of thorium (the newer "safer" ones do NOT have thorium) they make great test sources and will set off most Geiger counters and are really useful as you should check to make sure it's working with every use. The probes are delicate, the batteries die etc so if it's important check every time. Keep them in a plastic bag so they don't contaminate your detector!

Good Luck!

This story makes me think of David Horowitz and his skewed take on academic freedom. I encourage everyone to read or listen to him debate prof. Peter Steinberger of Reed College in which Steinberger explains precisely why approaches like this go directly against the principles of academic freedom: http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/2210/ReedCollegeSteinbergerDebate082806.htm

Audio version here: http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/winter06/columns/noc/steinberger.html

Some colleges have long refused to participate in the US News rankings not necessarily because of this type of problem, but because it would be a tacit validation of what is a transparently worthless metric (numeric rankings? really?) for evaluating a college education. That it's crooked is almost irrelevant.

One alternative is to bow out http://web.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/college_rankings.html of the rankings game and take a principled stand as Reed College has done. One way of thinking about attending a fine school like this is that you "want to go to a school that isn't interested in selling out its education." Perhaps not surprisingly, US News didn't actually remove Reed from the rankings, they just ranked Reed (lower) with an incomplete data set. The other alternative could be called 'open source' ranking. The University and College Accountibility Network http://www.ucan-network.org/ ranks colleges in a common format, has useful information, and best of all, you don't have to buy a copy of US News to get the rankings!

plays of 2500 years of age are still played in the theater. Star Trek will never be dead.

To follow your example...the fish generally don't pretend to procreate for pleasure and no one objects when they DO procreate.

There's evidence suggesting that fish do have sex for reasons other than procreation. Whether this be pleasure (fish can feel pain--I submit that if a creature can feel pain they can feel pleasure), or for other social reasons (see the paragraph about bonobos using sex to relieve tension), or to establish dominance (which I would argue the other animals aren't too happy about) the fact remains that human mores about sex appear to run counter to the rest of nature.

The Sony / Philips venture is widely (and incorrectly) recognized as the start of CD technology, but it simply isn't true. In fact, Sony, Philips, and many other manufacturers ended up paying royalties to Battelle (Russell's company) after several infringement lawsuits. A very nice writeup about the entire history and some insight into the resulting conflicts can be found here: http://web.reed.edu/reed_magazine/Nov2000/a_the_discoverer/index.html As far as the 360/PS3 sales figures.... meh. I have to be honest and say that debate has been beaten to death and I just don't feel like looking it up, so I'll concede that one.

Ah. The key concept here is real vs. pretend life. Pretend life is not something that is suddenly new with the advent of online gaming or even with computers at all. People have been having pretend adventures and tragedies for most of recorded history. One of the big reasons for this is because it's a great way to learn. Now the seemingly "new" complication of the involvement of real money is minor, perhaps trivial. Here's why: anyone who is investing in Linden Dollars is doing so from a home with an internet connection. So they aren't homeless and they aren't having to spend every spare dime on food. They are in fact spending the money on entertainment. Yes there are people who are making a real world living by supplying and enhancing that entertainment, but that too is a trade that is thousands of years old. So what we have is a situation where someone may spend some money on entertainment and not get nearly so much entertainment as they should have for their money. Haven't we all seen "Phantom Menace", good they we are all familiar with the sensation. I saw "Phantom Menace" in the theater, and I was out $12, I wasn't entertained but I did learn that the new Star Wars trilogy wasn't going to be as good as the first. Now the lady in the article, she's out $144. I wonder how much she has dumped into the State Lottery? Or miracle diets pills? Or any other thing that promises a dream? Maybe she in place of that dream she has got a lesson, the other purpose of entertainment.

I figured out the puzzle in your signature!! It reads: Alex.Solla@reed.edu, doesn't it? Now where's my free maths advice, private advertizer?

Please don't retaliate by inventing asprin or making beautiful music on the violin, I hate that. Why can't you just form an unruly mob, trample each other, and shoot guns in the air until the falling bullets threaten you like normal folks? Can't we all just fail to get along?

So true. Here's some background info on the man now thought to have played the major role in the chemical synthesis of Aspirin: "Dr. Eichengruen was a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and after the war he told his story: he had planned and directed the synthesis of aspirin along with the synthesis of several related compounds, and he was responsible for aspirin's initial surreptitious clinical testing (remember that the head of the Bayer pharmacology lab was against testing)." Link.
Of course, this link has to be balanced by the fact that the President of Iran (soon to have nuclear weapons) would like to remind us that the Holocaust is a lie fabricated by the Jews. Link. Keeping that "fact" in mind, maybe Eichengruen lied about the whole thing (just like he lied about the Holocaust, according to The President of Iran).

But really, wouldn't you rather just hire a slashdotter like me? http://www.reed.edu/~sollaa/

My small liberal arts college gives every one of its Mac-loving students a shell account with Pine already configured for them.

Every time I hear someone complain about the bloated IMP (Horde) Webmail we use, I say "No... there is another...."

Yeah. I spent quite a bit of time at Reed's TRIGA Mk1. Cerenkov radiation is purty.

Here's a nice paper. I studied under Mark Bedau, so I might be biased. In any event, if that counter-example didn't convince you, I'll try to think up an objection to strong alife or find a new counter-example.

Hi,

I think you mean alex.solla@reed.edu.

Just wanted to help out the email harvesters to accelerate your penis enlargement and blow-up doll offers. HTH! HAND!

This crappy screenshot is from the Keyboard tab of the Mouse & Keyboard system preference pane: http://www.reed.edu/~warde/fkeys.png

What about those of us with a BA who work in the IT industry?

Individual schools may make some distinction between BA and BS degrees, but as far as I know there's no generally accepted distinction. I got a BA in math from reed college, which (percentage wise) has been one of the most succesful producers of future PhDs in a number of technical subjects. (See http://web.reed.edu/ir/phd.html. Whether future production of PhD's is really a sensible measure of quality is a separate question; the point is that they're giving out BA's to people specializing in math and science, and those people are clearly getting a background in their subjects sufficient to be succesful in further graduate study.)

--Bruce Fields

My point: GA really do know how to design safe reactors.

(Background: nuclear reactors operate in a so-called "critical" state, where exactly enough neutrons are produced by nuclear reactions to balance those lost by escape or absorption. In a working reactor, about 0.7% of those neutrons come from spontaneous decay of fission products; they're called "delayed" neutrons, because you have to wait for the fission product to decay over the next few seconds before the neutron comes out. Those few delayed neutrons make all the difference, because the time scale for fission-and-moderation is measured in microseconds. The other 99.3% of the neutrons are called "prompt", and you usually want to make sure you don't make a prompt-critical assembly, unless you're in the business of making nuclear weapons. Blowing the rods instantaneously out of a reactor core is one of the more dangerous things you can do with it, unless the core was designed specifically for that use.)

• registration of MAC address tied with student ID, contingent upon:
• mandatory XP SP2, with Automatic Updates on and installing without prompting
• mandatory use of site-licensed Symantec Anti-Virus (in "unmanaged" mode)
• system initially scanned by staff and certified virus-free

I know exactly what you mean. Chuck Palahniuk describes it as a town of fugitives and refugees. It's the kind of place where pedestrians and bicyclists have the right of way, regardless of what the street lights might read, and you don't turn into a street until after everyone has crossed (the opposite of Dallas, at least). It's also the kind of place where an office lunch is just as likely to be held in a bar as in the local sandwich shop. Speaking of bars, the area's known for its microbreweries as well. And there's Powell's Books, of course, the largest bookstore in the world, in case you get bored with walking around...

The city itself's only a couple hundred thousand people. You can see a couple mountains from downtown, depending on where you are and how hazy/misty the weather is. There's great scenery just minutes away in every direction. The west stretch of Highway 26 is also called Sunset Highway, for good reason - it runs out to the coast, which has some excellent beaches (look up Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock on Google images for pretty pictures). The weather is generally milder than Dallas; I didn't have air conditioning in my apartment, and only felt I needed it about 3 weeks out of the year, and I kept a kitchen window partly open almost all winter long. As for rain, when I moved up there the average rainfall was 31 inches, and Dallas' was 33 - it's just that Dallas has a few gully-washers yearly, whereas Portland enjoys mist or drizzle a couple times a week much of the year.

I do have to warn you though, it does (or did) have the highest suicide rate in the U.S, probably due in part to the fact that the sky is often overcast, there's less peak light (unless you mean on mountain peaks) at that lattitude, and so forth. However, I actually prefer those conditions to the ones down here, so I was happy during the winter months.

reply 2:

Nice travel-guide-related website: Lonely Planet

events calendar

Powell's history page [comment regarding my relationship with them through my excellent former employer deleted]
If that's not bookish enough, try Reed. "Reedy" is a fitting name for most of the students.

public gardens If you're at all interested in nice gardens to walk through, the International Rose Test Garden is a great place to walk around.
If you have more time, the Japanese Garden is pretty must the only garden outside Japan considered to be "real" (the Mt. Fuji-stand-in doesn't hurt, either)

At some point, if you drink alcohol, or even just eat, you might end up visiting one of these. They've converted a lot of old schools, etc. into pubs along with the usual locations.

You probably won't want to go out there if you don't have much time on your trip, but see if you can recognize this hotel from the picture. [It's this one, Slashdotters]

The Columbia River Highway runs east of Portland, and includes some nice scenery of Multnomah Falls and the Gorge area.

Out west is Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock.

Oh, tying almost everything in town is the MAX, the light rail service. Gues

I'm taking issue with your claim that students and scientists (specifically student scientists) are well served by using Apple computers.

Some background. I am an undergraduate student studying science. I am an Apple Certified Technician. I have pretty much exclusively used Macs my entire life. I work for the IST department of my college.

The amount of Macs (~2% of all computers)on my campus is lower (by a little more than half) than Apple's market share. As I attend a small (1000 students) private college, I know all the students that own Macs. None of them (apart from me) are science students. Very few of them are "creative" (film or art) users. Most tend to be "just" students. The only thing they tend to have in common is coming from a wealthy background.

As much as I love using Macs, it's my opinion students are unlikely - and, I think in most cases, ill advised - to bring one to college.

Why?

Easy: compatibility and software.

For example. I'm having to dump my eMac to use my old PC. My organic chemistry textbook includes activities with ChemOffice Ltd (student cost: $70). ChemOffice Ltd does not exist for OS X. ChemOffice Ultra 8.0 does exist for OS X, but (a) only ChemDraw is carbonized (Chem3d [etc.] has to be run in Classic mode, which sucks) (b) ChemOffice Ultra 8.0 costs $490 for students.

To give a more inclusive examples: networking to printers, browsing computers on the network, and taking full advantage of Exchange server capabilities (LDAP) are much easier (or, simply, are possible) on a PC. The common student would be much better servered using a PC and spending the time she'd spend configuring her Mac studying instead.

I know that there's a wealth of software that fink/x11 is bringing to OS X, but ease of use and ease of accessability to the software seems to be the sticking point. Sure, I'd much rather stay with my eMac and run some x11 or unix software to do my molecular modelling. However, search as I may I haven't found any good options that work well with the instructions the book gives me.

Right now Apple seems to be in a situation much like HP's calculators are; like an HP calculator, a Mac is (in my opinion) a much better product than the competition (Wintel in the case of Macs, TI-8x calculators in the case of HP calcs). However, since the other has become a standard, it is assumed that every(rather than the typical) student is a PC user with a TI calculator. No (or very few) alternatives are available for those students who are not.

At any rate. This is, I suppose, a roundabout way to ask who, exactly, you know in the sciences that's big on Macs. In lab we have an awesome Sun setup (running Spartan) for modelling. I only know one chem professor that uses a Mac. The Physics dpt uses iBooks for student labs because of the lab software that's available for them ("Determine the rate of acceleration..."), but other than that everything's Sun or Wintel.

And let me add this to avoid one "easy" thoughtless response: yeah, my household does make more than $75k/year, but that still doesn't mean that I'm going to pay $420 more for software when I'm going to be using the same features in it that I would in the $70 version. Not to be a prick, but the way one gets to have money is by not spending it on outrageously priced items when equally competent options are available at significantly lower costs.

There are definately students who benefit from owning a Mac (film, art and [arguably] language students come to mind). Science and math students are probably done a disservice by purchasing a Mac (ex: let me know how to transfer files from my eMac to my HP48GX - I can do it on my clunker wintel laptop though). I think the general student probably is better served by getting a PC because of the time and hassles they'll save at most schools. 'Course, if they're going to Reed, then they're lucky and can use their Mac and be happy, healthy, prosperous and wise.

I work in the computer service dept. of an all-Apple liberal arts college, and the thought of searching for an "Apple-quality" laptop makes me chuckle. The original iBook and Powerbook G3 were both pretty solid machines, for their time. But I would not, under any circumstances, buy a new iBook or TiBook.

The white iBook's biggest problem is its constantly failing LCD. The majority of the iBooks we see make an awful creaking noise when the lid is opened, which is the sound of the plastic LCD housing separating. We also see many batteries failing within 1-2 years. And no PC Card slot? No (independent) dual display? No Airport Extreme (802.11g)? Only a G3? Make no mistake, the iBook is a -budget- laptop.

The G4 Powerbook is built like a supermodel - sleek, sexy... and extremely fragile. The only exception, however, is the new 12" Powerbook - it's a little early to pass judgement, but the newest models seem to be incredibly solid. There's all kinds of extra structural reinforcement (which make it a bitch to work on), but the difference is immediately obvious. If anyone wanted to buy an Apple laptop, this would be the one.

That said, my next laptop would most certainly be an IBM. If Apple were Volkswagen, IBM would be BMW. I have a friend with an older T20, and I swear you can hear the lid hermetically seal when you close it. The BIOS is AMAZINGLY configurable. IBMs run Linux like a champ; hell, they used to SELL them with Caldera OpenLinux preloaded! My housemate also has a Thinkpad, and when she went to reinstall Windows, the machine did an automatic factory restoration... without a CD. Those little touches convinced me that a Thinkpad is the only laptop ever worth buying. That is, if you can get past those damn eraser-head trackpoints.

I wasn't saying that a "moral right" concept as such exists in the U.S. as it does in Europe (it was probably a bad idea on my part to use a term that has a specific meaning in another legal system), but that the "life of author" branch of the copyright term owes its origin to "moral" concepts as much as to economic incentive ones.

I think the problem boils down to US competitiveness with Europe. Europe recognizes Moral rights (which last the author's lifetime), and the Lobbyists display to US lawmakers and say "See - Europe extends copyright to the life of the author - we're missing out!".. but they neglect to point out that it's a moral right, not an economic right.. and since the US doesn't recognize moral right, they simply extended the economic right "to compensate".

I would like to try to check out the arguments made in favor of copyright extensions in any Congressional hearings on the subject -- just to see if there are any half-way legitimate arguments I am missing. (Does anyone have any links?)

Try this one; it's from the Sonny Bono hearings.

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/h ju 43666.000/hju43666_0.htm

The main thrust of the arguments seems to be "We need to be better than Europe!"

Vincent Vecera (a policial science student) posted an (admittedly one-sided) interpretation of these hearings (and others) here (it's in PDF format though.)

Alpha emitters are great for this kind of work, because alpha particles have a high interaction cross section once they're inside the body. That concentrates their damage in a small space. (You can handle blocks of alpha-decay material without hazard, because the alpha particles plough into your epidermis and stop there, wreaking terrible damage on ... tissue that's already dead.)

I bopped on over to one of the online charts of the nuclides to check out the decay chain of Ac-225. Indeed, the next two daughters are alpha-emitters, but the first one, Fr-221, has a 5-minute half-life. That ought to give it plenty of time to get ducted around into your bloodstream and into the rest of your body before emitting the next two alphas and a couple of beta particles, eventually transmuting to stable Bismuth.

So the developers aren't being quite candid when they say that the daugter alpha particles could inflict additional damage on the tumor. Sure, they could -- but (with the antibody bonds long since broken by the recoil from the initial decay) that atom could end up anywhere in your body before decaying again.

This stuff is interesting -- I used to make radioactive saline at the Reed Reactor Facility for medical uses, so I poked around the chart of the nuclides to see how one would make Ac-225. Ideally, you want to start with a nice, stable (or at least long-lived) element, kick a neutron into it (by lowering the ore into a nuclear reactor), and let it turn into what you want via a series of rapid decays. (That's one way to make the Americium 241 in smoke detectors; I'll leave the source element as an exercise for the reader). But Ac-225 doesn't seem to have any such nice precursor decay paths with short half-lives. The half-life is short enough that you wouldn't want to get it from spent fuel (too `hot' until after the Ac-225 is gone!), so I'm not entirely sure how you'd make it.

Infact, it's for very few people. Although, yes, I think it is wise to encourage school children to use alternative operating systems to expand their minds, yadda yadda...

I can't but empathize for the ordinary students who are going to school to get an ordinary degree and later an ordinary job. These kids will only be retarded in their persuits if you force them to learn Linux when they will really only benefit from a Windows education in the long run.

If your budget allows, provide a box, maybe two. But not a whole lab of 10 computers over 100 schools. Don't waste your 10 computer budget on dedicated linux machines which will be used rarely by rare individuals.

At the collegiate level, I've schooled at Dartmouth College which provided a small corner of absolutely never used SGI machines and at Reed College which has a lab of LinuxPPC machines, all completely idle. The respective linux/unix machines are nice for me to dick around on, but not the average student. Additionally, that's all I do on them- dick around. I'm not about to write a term paper with Emacs when there is a Macintosh lab just down the hallway.

A nice example (and a link to a better explanation) of this effect can be seen here.