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Even students can build one!

Artifacting isn't limited to digital.

I used artifact in this context to mean 'my picture isn't perfect'. Snow is a specific artifact from a source termed 'noise'.

> "The visual processing algorithms they've developed..."

Not hardly. Please don't do that - don't start another MS myth.

Algotithms such as these have been in existence since at least 2002 when 'Augmented Reality' (and display hardware) surfaced at domestic universities. The phrase was originated by Jaron Lanier, the founder of VPL Research - a respected outfit which was started in a Palo Alto cottage; 1984.

It appears a nearby supernova could affect the climate, by ending it:

Dec 1, 2005 ... Is there a possibility that a nearby star could go supernova and destroy the earth? Or have other bad effects on us? ...
imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980521a.html

They said, in part:

If you are talking about the life on Earth, then there is a detailed calculation of the risks due to a nearby supernova on the web:

http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt

The author concludes that a supernova has to be within 10 parsecs (30 light years) or so to be dangerous to life on Earth. This is because the atmosphere shields us from most dangerous radiations. Astronauts in orbit may be in danger if a supernova is within 1000 parsecs or so.

No stars currently within 20 parsecs will go supernova within the next few million years. ...

given the frequencies of radiation that MRI uses and the diffraction limit that applies to far-field imaging

While overall I totally agree with your comment (and thanks for the link to the actual article), MRI is not a diffraction limited imaging modality. See for instance The Basics of MRI (the part reading "Many scientists were taught...")

Al Biles is at the Rochester Institute of Technology, not University of Rochester.

Here are RIT's salary and co-op statistics, broken down by field:
http://oce2.rit.edu/ProgramList/BrowseSalary.asp?category=&sortby=&order=&search=

I'm sure most schools have this information available, even if it's not published online--can't hurt to ask.

My school has a whole page on the things you can do with a math or statistics degree. I would definately call some of them fun.
http://www.rit.edu/cos/math/Students/careers.html

At work we are setting up public use, always on, video conference stations in public locations. One of the large problems we are running into is controlling the 2-4 large flat panels or projectors in these locations. A keyboard and mouse would walk away and is impractical. A secondary device with a lower resolution "mirror" to manipulate would be nice, but still is not practical for several reasons.

My boss wants to be able to point at the machine and have it do something. This is exactly what we are looking for. We are only interfacing with the machine for up to one minute at a time and then it is all talking via the video conferencing with whomever is on the other end of the line.

RIT AG info

Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:

Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books

Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/

Indeed. They should take advantage of the open-source textbooks that already exist... either by simply selecting one for their purposes, or putting together the best pieces from various sources into a coherent textbook that serves their purposes. Here are the open-source textbook (or related information) sites I'm aware of:

Pointers to Textbooks and Content:
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.opentextbook.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Books

Some available lecture notes:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso ----- Features: http://techwatch.reviewk.com/2008/04/ubuntu-hardy-heron-8-04-2/

The server was overloaded; it's back up now, but in case it becomes unstable again... Cached lists of mirrors (for all versions):

        * http://www.ubuntu.com.nyud.net/getubuntu/downloadmirrors
        * http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubuntu.com%2Fgetubuntu%2Fdownloadmirrors

Torrent for 8.04 desktop version i386 ISO:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
        * http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent
            (Piratebay mirror because official tracker is unstable)

Direct links to 8.04 desktop version i386 ISOs:

        * http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
        * http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso

Reminds me of a former professor's work, "GenJam", from Al Biles at RIT.

It really sounds like something similar. Al Biles' software incorporates a genetic algorithm along with training from a human ear to choose "what sounds good".

It looks like the difference is that this generates full chord structures, instead of individual notes, and is designed to work with voices, which aren't as well trained.

Al's project has been at work for quite some time now, but he wrote a couple of chapters for "Evolutionary Music", released in 2007.

• Degree: $Min - $Max, $Median
• Electrical Engineering BS: $30000 - $65000, $52000
• Computer Engineering BS: $52000 - $75500, $57000
• Computer Science BS: $35000 - $85000, $55000

When I was in college I took an ethics class that discussed some criticisms of Tufte's critique of the Morton Thiokol engineers involved in the Challenger launch decision. Here's a paper on it:

http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf

Very interesting read.

Wasn't part of the plot of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/ that Gort, the giant robot, was actually an intergalactic law enforcement agent with the task of seeking out interplanetary violence and eliminating it?

Seems to me that this article is actually trying to set out an approach to build a similar group of robots.

I still don't think this is that great an idea in the greater scheme of things. I was an engineer on a college autonomous robotics project http://mdrc.rit.edu/igvc and our robots, which tended to have tank treads and weigh 500+ pounds, did have a tendency to try to attack us if we left out semi-colons in its code (its default state seemed to be set to kill).

>> In the end, you end up with something that sorts faster than n log (n).

> Not without an infinite number of processors you don't.

If you're sorting n items, and you have n processors, then the Odd-Even Transposition Sort has a worst-case time of O(n).

Before I go any further, I'm a freshman at RIT, which is a pretty geek-heavy place I also reside on the Computer Science House, which is pretty nerdy as well. Right now we're developing a robot to bring us drinks from a networked vending machine to our room, if that helps you any. Despite our extensive use of *NIX elsewhere, we use an Exchange server for email, which works fairly well. Most students just use the web frontend for it, or just forward it to their gmail account. Myself, I use IMAP with it, but it is frequently borked, and requires the installation of a security certificate for use off-campus. That said, a lot of students here have trouble figuring out how to forward x11 traffic and a different username via ssh, much less use pine; our UNIX cluster does have it installed, but I have my doubts about how many people use it.

My school, RIT does neither port blocking nor traffic shaping. You get 1 (one) wired port in your room (which you can plug a router, switch, hub, etc), and any device connected to that port must be registered. Each device is then given a unique external IP and hostname, so if the RIAA comes a'knockin', there's no dispute that it was you doing it.

As a result, they don't care what servers you run since it's you responsible, not them.

Like it or not, your medical information is going to become electronic. Microsoft isn't the first company to propose an Electronic Health Record -- not by far. The Cerner Corporation, for example, has been working modernize the health record since 1980. There are at least two universities in the U.S. which host a major in Medical Informatics, a program specifically designed to produce experts in this very subject.

Try to fight the Electronic Health Record is like trying to fight the use of computers in any other field -- it's inevitable.

This challenge sounds like fun all around. As far as how to design software to accomplish a task like this I have designed just a system(ERC), twice in fact. It is relatively simple to write software to collect data from sensors but the hard part is normally distributing and analyzing that data. The system that I helped write is called ERC or Extensible Robot Core. ERC allows data to be collected and analyzed by several machines in an effort to map the robots environment. A task like sailing seems like a much simpler one than what I have been developing code for as I doubt a sailBot would need to map building techniques such as SLaM. Additionally, I would think that the number of sensors would be very low; a GPS unit, some way of measuring wind speed and direction, and a magnetic compass to keep track of your heading should do it, plus some odds and ends(potentiometers and encoders) to keep track of the positions of all your actuators. On the computation side of things I would think that you could pull this off with nothing but embedded micro-controllers, though it would be easier with a small PC. I personally would opt for a small ITX PC or smaller with one or two micro-controllers to interface between actuators and their feed back sensors. All in all this sounds like a very doable and fun challenge, wish I could participate, I'd love to teach my PC to sail!

In many places, such as in Pennsylvania, often the state troopers will give a +15 MPH leeway

In Texas, I've gotten perhaps 6 speeding tickets in the 20 years I've been driving, and the fastest I ever got a ticket for was 13 mph over, and the lowest was 6 mph over.

(Yes, I was quite surprised by the 6 mph one.)

Most people don't measure their bandwidth usage at all. At least with speeding, you have a speedometer to look at, and the police officer tells you how fast you were going either way. Does Comcast tell you how many GB you used last month when they cut you off? (probably.) Do you talk with your friends and say `I got busted for 500 GB!' `I didn't get busted for 400 GB!' `The actual limit must be somewhere in between!' That, and Comcast probably has historical data to work with -- yes, you used too much data this month, but last month you used far less, so we'll let this month slide ... cops don't usually have this option, unless they were following you for a while.

"Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors..."

Maybe your eyes, but according to actual medical research -- not unsubstantiated mythological numbers -- we can see millions of colors.

For more information, here is a handy link to site with all sorts of nifty data:
http://www.cis.rit.edu/mcsl/outreach/faq.php#q11

Though, if the poster would prefer to stick with "well, that is what we grew up knowing", then continue to also believe we only 10% of our brain and that leeches help with "issues of the blood."

*shrug*

Apple lied in their ad. In America, you get punished for false advertisement (if you get caught, that is). Apple should suck it up, pay a fine and correct their ads with an end note explaining only simulate millions of colors.

After spin injection, electrons in the silicon were then subjected to a magnetic field, which caused their spin direction to "precess" or gyrate (much like gravity's effect on a rotating gyroscope), producing tell-tale oscillations in their measurement.

Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Hate to burst your bubble, but there are universities with ABET accredited curriculum that produce Software Engineers. MSOE, RIT, University of Michigan and many others.

Engineering has nothing to do with engines, and everything to do with a methodology of design and implementation.

Rochester Institute of Technology has an entire Software Engineering department. Students who take the basic Software Engineering course learn about the software development cycle and work in a team to develop a basic program. I don't see how a Computer Science student could graduate without a little background that area. Maybe that's why there's always an abundance of code at The Daily WTF?

Rochester Institute of Technology has an entire Software Engineering department. Students who take the basic Software Engineering course learn about the software development cycle and work in a team to develop a basic program. I don't see how a Computer Science student could graduate without a little background that area. Maybe that's why there's always an abundance of code at The Daily WTF?

That other guy's link seems to be a rip of this: http://www.rit.edu/~djl5698/images/ninjalesson.jpg

BTW, the candy haul was good this year. Many young children were frightened and other people successfully confused by our ninja antics. We also really freaked out one guy by climbing onto his roof and whispering to him through his skylight.

Heh, this post's capcha is "mischief".

Even better, use your scanner as a camera:
http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-demo-scanner-cam.h tml

Should give you an idea of how to do it yourself to get gigapixel sized pictures.

I'm not sure if Posadis will meet your requirements or not. See here: http://posadis.sourceforge.net/

Something else to look into is this code written in Visual Basic* - please don't laugh - I've been using a hacked version for some time now to cache results and to pass certain lookups through tor_resolve. Url: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/projects/caching_dns/.

(If the author is reading this I've been meaning to say "thanks"!)

While your post is marked funny....Being originally from near Syracuse and a graduate of RIT, I have to say that the poster you're referring to is actually almost spot-on.

Weather: Great, for the most part. When it gets to winter and having to drive in some of the massive snowstorms or get up at 6 AM to scrape the car, my opinion went down quickly, but you get that a lot of places. Personally, I enjoyed the winters, and I find the sickly, slushy season that passes for winter here in Northern VA almost offensive in comparison.

Food: Wegmans, of course - best store i've been in outside of places like Whole Foods. Keep meaning to trek over to the store they have here in Fairfax. Outside of that, lots of good produce, especially stuff like apples or corn....Amazing cheddar cheese. The Dinosaur BBQ locations in Rochester and Syracuse deserve every bit of their reputations, even if they are crowded - and they sell their sauces online too :) Great Italian places around too, including an Italian-Greek place near my parents' house that I still try to visit when I go see them.

Space: Having, again, moved to Northern VA, this is one thing I miss terribly. Having a huge yard and being somewhat out in the country may be a pain in the ass sometimes, but being able to see the stars and moon at night with little light pollution or noise is good for the soul.

Jobs: One big reason why I moved - if you didn't have a fairly high amount of experience, the IT job market in Rochester was horrendous. As the other poster said, Kodak and Xerox going downhill didn't help either.

Public Transportation: I had to take the bus once while I was at RIT, and it took a good hour or so each way to get somewhere that would have been maybe 15 minutes in a car. If you're not downtown, it's easy to forget the area even has a bus system. Probably the only other issue besides jobs and shopping that's improved where I am now.

I am a university professor. I don't require my students to purchase textbooks for the introductory physics courses I teach. I provide my complete lecture notes online, and permit students to use older textbooks if they wish; after all, the material we're covering hasn't changed in the past few hundred years, so _any_ textbook they can find will serve as a useful reference.

I write my own homework problems so that my students won't have to purchase a textbook simply for that purpose.

The bookstore hasn't broken my hands, nor has the university reprimanded me. We've just started a new fall quarter this week, and I'm still teaching.

So, in brief, your statement is not correct.

I think that it's been proven (or at least I remember reading somewhere that it has...) that smaller class sizes generally produce higher grades. Most higher-level (post-graduate classes, and advanced topics, generally) classes have very small classes, less than 30, sometimes 10 or fewer, even.

Let's take a situation where your class [not necessarily your class in particular, but since you're a professor, why not - but let's think of teaching a lecture class of 200 students, as an example].
I believe that, even if every possible aspect of your class was presented online, in some form or another (podcasts, videocasts, slides, typed outlines, whatever) - several students would still show up for the lecture. Even in the dryest subjects, with the most boring and unengaging teachers, some students do show up. Is it possible that your attendance rate could drop from 80% to 20%? - Sure. And Good. Instead of lecturing in a large hall to 160 students, you're left with a classroom of 40 - still big, but more manageable, and more personable. Even better - maybe attendance drops to 10% and you're left with only 20 students. Instead of a lecture, it would be almost like a tutoring session.

Present the material, as you would to a class of 200, using visual cues from the 20 students left - most professors only look at the students in the first few rows anyways - and allow questions and discussion. I feel that a student would be much more likely to interrupt a class of 20 to ask a question, than to interrupt a class of 200. There's also a higher likelyhood that you'd actually see this person raising their hand to ask something, as opposed to seeing someone in the middle of the 20th row. Record it all, use video if possible (necessary if you happen to teach visually, or are in a field which necessitates visual teaching) - and post the recording of your tutoring-session-sized lecture for the entirety of your 200 student class to view. You don't really need, as a professor, to personally see to it that each of your students passes - in all reality, it's impossible. Some students will ignore the wealth of information available in the class archives, won't watch the videocasts, read the prescribed texts, or attend the lectures themselves - these people are impossible to reach, and forcing attendance through grades isn't going to help them, once they've fallen behind (by not reading the text, doing assignments, or what-have-you) even if 10% of their grade is participation, they will just stop coming. They 'know' they're going to fail anyway, so why bother. The rest though, that's where possibilities lie, and allowing for someone who doesn't want to/can't make the classes to still gain all the knowledge from the class (partly by hearing the discussions, and the answers to questions posed by the ~20 students which do attend - which generally wouldn't happen, or would happen much less, in a lecture hall of 160) would allow them to gain the credit, while still putting in some amount of work - even if the work doesn't include sitting in a cramped lecture hall for 3 hours twice a week, and walking a half mile to said hall carrying a bag full of books through 6" of snow and 40mph winds with a windchill of -18F [ahh... wonderful memories of RIT...].

Seriously. I'm getting a little sick of the uninformed intellectuals springing onto the attack every time someone feeds them a controversial line.

A lot of our current problems stem from the belief that people are stupid. We get a certain satisfaction from seeing people put down below us. The news media and the government feed on that and deliver one-line characterizations of people, factions, countries, whatever. "The terrorists" are, to a man, religious fanatics that want to see our way of life destroyed. They wake up every morning with nothing but killing America on their minds. Christian fundies are stupid sheeple. Frenchmen are arrogant bastards. Americans as a whole are fat, lazy, imperialist cowboys. The president is a completely evil ignoramus. We should point and laugh at every lawsuit you can spin into something ludicrous, like the McDonald's coffee case. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are 100% politically honest and represent the majority of conservatives and liberals.

So PhDs are stupid ivory tower academics -- especially the women, who probably slept their way to the top. If you see the words "study," and god forbid it's from a PhD, you don't have to go beyond the short mischaracterization of their research provided by all the popular media outlets. Next thing you know, everyone's walking around laughing about the same mischaracterization, and spin becomes reality. We instantly assume the stupidest motives of everyone, except when we've decided they're evil, when we assume the most insidious motive.

"Think for yourself" doesn't mean to root against authority, it means to understand the facts fully before you start spewing out verbal diharreha. How many of you believe that anti-evolutionists deserve nothing but contempt, yet don't actually know the scientific studies and principles that led to the adoption of evolution? How many people that constantly bring up the example of the heliocentric theory will tell me what makes it physically superior to choosing any other fixed point vis-a-vis relativity? And speaking of relativity, who among you can tell me what Einstein actually did?

The original network attached soda machine was created by a group of students from Computer Science House http://www.csh.rit.edu/ at RIT for fun around 1985. It has been a work in progress ever since. I believe they currently have two fully functioning machines. They also hold the patient on network based vending machines, which is why you don't see them for sale. You can find more info here http://www.csh.rit.edu/projects/drink. They also don't need you to scan the soda it is all automatic, and soda drop recognition is done with a laser.

The original network attached soda machine was created by a group of students from Computer Science House http://www.csh.rit.edu/ at RIT for fun around 1985. It has been a work in progress ever since. I believe they currently have two fully functioning machines. They also hold the patient on network based vending machines, which is why you don't see them for sale. You can find more info here http://www.csh.rit.edu/projects/drink. They also don't need you to scan the soda it is all automatic, and soda drop recognition is done with a laser.

According to Wikipedia, the "serious effects" range for Type Ia supernovae is about 1000 parsecs or 3300 light years. If 1950 light years is the correct distance to RS Ophiuchi, we are in the danger zone. Evidently from above posts & links Rho Cassiopeiae is also on the verge, but it's 8000 to 10,000 light years distant and a "mere" type II supernova candiate, anyway. Rho Cassiopeiae = fireworks display. RS Ophiuchi = hand grenade at least and maybe a 2000 lb bunker-buster. Lots of calculations here.

At RIT we used a program called "try", developed by one of the professors there. You can download it from his page: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~kar/software.html

At RIT we used a program called "try", developed by one of the professors there. You can download it from his page: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~kar/software.html

Here is a the uber-mousepad collection http://www.rit.edu/~jpsdss/couch/

In truth, I often do wonder if the things people say are true, that "Society doesn't want people thinking," or that "the people on top don't want the people down below thinking."

Y'know, like RIT

..... now picture that.

my second thought was how.....well, the scanner camera...

http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/alumni/02-04/mich ael/ScannerCamera/

http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-demo-scanner-cam.h tml

http://www.microe.rit.edu/research/lithography/res earch/immersion.htm and no not every student at RIT hates it (comment posted earlier)....actually not that many do...just the antisocial people that sit in their room all day. I pay for the education and reputation....as you can see we do have a very good microe program which im proudly part of. Enjoy the link...

combine this with some really wild slit/film configurations, and you can get some interesting images... check out what andrew davidhazy is doing with moving slit photography, especially some of this stuff. he even has some articles discussing scanner derived camera backs here and here

combine this with some really wild slit/film configurations, and you can get some interesting images... check out what andrew davidhazy is doing with moving slit photography, especially some of this stuff. he even has some articles discussing scanner derived camera backs here and here

combine this with some really wild slit/film configurations, and you can get some interesting images... check out what andrew davidhazy is doing with moving slit photography, especially some of this stuff. he even has some articles discussing scanner derived camera backs here and here