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The guy was the MacGyver of his time. Imagine what he could've done with stuff like duct tape, gasoline or a Chevy small block 350.

Today's submissions that were rejected include a new digital imaging chip from the folks at Univ of Rochester and the Gnope.Org release (PHP GTK Toolkit).

29 Reasons

3.14159/Pi Joel Tetreault and Dan Vitek

Building A Histidine Jessica Raaum

Come On Down (The Electron Transport Chain) Sam Reid

Come On Down (The Electron Transport Chain)

Erica Joel Tetreault

Glucose, Glucose

Hooray For NMR Spectroscopy!

Myofibrils

Necessary But Not Sufficient

The Nucleus I Like Best

Organic Chemistry Eric Chase and Gregorio del Laboratorio

Oxidative Phosphorylation

The Phantom

The Professor And The Punk Gregorio del Laboratorio and Do Peterson

Take Me To The Liver Gregorio del Laboratorio and Do Peterson

That's What Slugs Are For Jessica Raaum

Twinkle, Twinkle, T2*

The Waltz Of The Ribosomes Gregorio del Laboratorio

29 Reasons

3.14159/Pi Joel Tetreault and Dan Vitek

Building A Histidine Jessica Raaum

Come On Down (The Electron Transport Chain) Sam Reid

Come On Down (The Electron Transport Chain)

Erica Joel Tetreault

Glucose, Glucose

Hooray For NMR Spectroscopy!

Myofibrils

Necessary But Not Sufficient

The Nucleus I Like Best

Organic Chemistry Eric Chase and Gregorio del Laboratorio

Oxidative Phosphorylation

The Phantom

The Professor And The Punk Gregorio del Laboratorio and Do Peterson

Take Me To The Liver Gregorio del Laboratorio and Do Peterson

That's What Slugs Are For Jessica Raaum

Twinkle, Twinkle, T2*

The Waltz Of The Ribosomes Gregorio del Laboratorio

You fail to acknowledge words in common usage because they don't suit your view of things, apparently. And you get modded up for it. Interesting.

Only once they've been through the white-hot flame of detailed scientific enquiry are they referred to as theories.

All hail science, discriminator of all truth, peerless in its discernment. Amen.

"Are you interested in the basic methodology? I have some open source cites, you will probably have to go to an engineering university library to find the journals though. It's tough reading but interesting."

YES. The few googled tidbits on Helliwell and Siple Station are very interesting. So do you work here :) :)..? I work here and so I have access to Nature, Science, PRL and am somewhat familliar with the techniques it appears you are using (electron cyclotron resonance heating....?)...

It would be possible to rebuilt all the package collection on top of a different RPM based distribution, but it would be a LOT of work. Volunteers accepted :-)

What about Iceland? I believe they have an extensive geothermal energy system that provides not only electricity, but also heat for those cold Reykjavik nights ;). So how are the Australian firms making it "main-stream"?

Some more info

it was interesting to see how many people instantly looked up the dude who was charged with rape as soon as the news got out. Needless to say, he deleted his account about a day later.

it was interesting to see how many people instantly looked up the dude who was charged with rape as soon as the news got out. Needless to say, he deleted his account about a day later.

SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.

You wish. There are two groups that dominate the public arguments for passive SETI: those who directly anthropomorphize alien civilizations and those that use a thought-out logic that is still steeped in assumptions of human-like intelligence. While this may be reasonable both are really large asumptions that limit our search. The anthro's are screwed becuase any signals using channels of the EM spetrum that we like will have to compete with cellphones, radios random electronics - even those in the detector.

The reasonable logic fellows, such as Carl Sagan, simply look at what parts of the radio spectrum that has no significant natural sources of interference. This is the dominate method in current projects. However, there are many of these dead spots. The most prominate quiet channel to a human being the channels surrounding the frequency of hydrogen's spectrum (aka the 'watering hole.') It is in this streach of frequencies that projects like SETI@home are looking for signals.

The deafing silence of this area should be telling: there seems to be Nothing - natural or artificial - at those frequencies. Like looking for lost keys by researching the same empty spots, SETI carefully combs these small streaches frequencies for any possible signal. This technique is not problematic becuase of focusing on parts of the Electromatnetic (EM) spectrum that humans find economicaly and technically useful but becuase the eschew those spans of spectrum on purpose. Instead of assuming human-like intellegence, the watering-hole gazers are assuming a (still) human-like intellegence acting in the opposite fashion that a human would.

In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth.

Considering that if the anthropomorphism above is plausible then they would use similar channels that we use. Not the 'water hole' or other quiet parts of the EM spectrum, but transmissions in area that we find usefull. In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.

Either purposfully sent of just radio chatter, any signal is so attenuated at stellar distances that you must search for the precise signal used in the transmission. Both group assumes that a society would setup and transmit for thousands if not millions of years a steady and powerfull signal or set of targets signals. There is a huge cost for powering and maintaining such equipment over such a timespan. There is very little payback on the timescales of our societies for performing such an ET-friendly transmission. This means billions of channels in the spread of frequencies the FCC allocates to 1 station to play Brittney Spears music. And any signal is likely to be little more than a carrier signal for the local pop-music or military radar. Hence the huge processing requirements for projects like SETI@home to sift such needles in the radio haystack.

To the benefit of both, the encyclopedia galactica may be being beemed at us right now. We just may have the dial on the wrong station.

Not to be confused with the Google File System. A lot of people confuse them (same TLA), so it's important that sysadmins are clear that they are very different. If you install G[lobal]FS, you're getting something that has different goals in distributing the data than those of the Google servers. Google's FS has only a modicum of documentation, and no public implementation available. If you want to replicate GoogleFS, you'll have to guess as to the parts that their documentation doesn't cover.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program. :-)

I wonder if the animal rights activists that are objecting to this possibility of making biodiesel from dead cats are really considering the relatvie costs in animals harmed in the production of feline diesel and petrodiesel. Perhaps the toal number of animals harmed in the production of petrodiesel (from pulling crude from a well, shipping that crude, refining, shipping the refined fuel, all the way to combustion) is greater than the production of biodiesel from a (already) dead cat.

This paper (http://www.courses.rochester.edu/nobis/animals/Da vis-LeastHarm.htm) for instance argues that people who choose a vegan diet out of concern for the welfare of animals actually do more harm by taking their nutrients from foliage harvested via machinery that if they just ate the cows that harvested if for them.

See Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (PDF).

How is this new?

http://fsc.lle.rochester.edu/

In service since the 1970s...

Yeah I KNOW like totally NO useful science has come out of any of this nonsense!

Here's the thing. I am currently posting this message as I sit at my desk in this building. You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade to see what Fast Ignition MAY offer us in terms of inertial fusion power. Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin. Kodama et. al. have shown a neutron yeild increase of over three orders of magnitude when they coupled 500 J of chirped pulse (heater) light to their imploding cone in shell targets. We will be able to couple a ~3Kj heater pulse to the targets normally imploded on our current 30Kj 60 Terawatt system which currently holds the world record for neutron production at ~5X10^14 neutrons per pulse. This will therefore put us VERY close to the ignition regime and in fact one of the reasons the building of the new laser was approved was to examine the "near ignition parameter space" of scaled implosions to determine if the National Igniton Facility will ignite its capsules with high gain.

As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.

Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.

Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....

To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.

Here's the thing. I am currently posting this message as I sit at my desk in this building. You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade to see what Fast Ignition MAY offer us in terms of inertial fusion power. Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin. Kodama et. al. have shown a neutron yeild increase of over three orders of magnitude when they coupled 500 J of chirped pulse (heater) light to their imploding cone in shell targets. We will be able to couple a ~3Kj heater pulse to the targets normally imploded on our current 30Kj 60 Terawatt system which currently holds the world record for neutron production at ~5X10^14 neutrons per pulse. This will therefore put us VERY close to the ignition regime and in fact one of the reasons the building of the new laser was approved was to examine the "near ignition parameter space" of scaled implosions to determine if the National Igniton Facility will ignite its capsules with high gain.

As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.

Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.

Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....

To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.

Here's the thing. I am currently posting this message as I sit at my desk in this building. You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade to see what Fast Ignition MAY offer us in terms of inertial fusion power. Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin. Kodama et. al. have shown a neutron yeild increase of over three orders of magnitude when they coupled 500 J of chirped pulse (heater) light to their imploding cone in shell targets. We will be able to couple a ~3Kj heater pulse to the targets normally imploded on our current 30Kj 60 Terawatt system which currently holds the world record for neutron production at ~5X10^14 neutrons per pulse. This will therefore put us VERY close to the ignition regime and in fact one of the reasons the building of the new laser was approved was to examine the "near ignition parameter space" of scaled implosions to determine if the National Igniton Facility will ignite its capsules with high gain.

As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.

Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.

Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....

To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.

How is this new lab different from what these folks are doing?

I didn't glance at TFA but....

I thought the University of Rochester already had one of these bad boys. Can this new one actually be used for power a town?

As an MBA student (Simon school), it seems like many people here don't appreciate the role of management. There are good managers, and there are bad managers, just like there are good techs and bad techs.

Most of the concentrations don't relate to the kind of management that this post is discussing: namely, the kind that deals directly with employees in technical positions. However, those that do include manufacturing operations amangement, service operations management, and possibly marketing. The other concentrations are at a higher level, and deal with things like corporate accounting, financial decisions, corporate organization, corporate strategy, investing, and so-on and so-forth.

I'm in business school for investing, however, I am very influenced by Philip Fischer, thus think that investing in companies with competent management at all levels is critically important (poor management can run any company -- no matter current financial position -- into the ground). I highly recommend Philip Fischer's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits & Other Writings ; I have found the book so useful that I have it very extensively underlined and annoted. I think that reading this book will give people a good understanding of what is necessary for a company to succeed in terms of quality-of-organization*.

For a book -- actually a "novel" -- that deals specifically with the kind of management (low-level) that this post is dealing with, I'd highly recommend Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement . This book is the story of a plant that's going under, told from the perspective of the manager, who is highly technically competent. However, technical competence -- and even good people skills, which he has from the start -- isn't enough to ensure good management. A manager needs to know how to leverage his tehcnical and people-skills to benefit the firm, in terms of profit (specifically, NPV).

Now, one issue barely discussed in this book directly -- but that the reader gets a sense of -- is that alot of times managers have the wrong incentives. There are different ways to create incentive-structures for a division. Basically, it comes down to (crudely) a profit-center vs. a cost-center. If a manager is very constrained, it may be appropriate to treat his division as a cost-center, rewarding him based on how much he can reduce real costs. However, in many cases, a profit-center would be more reasonable. There are other larger issues, such as the tendency of many mechanisms of managerial performance to bias management decisions for short-term profitability at the expense of NPV (that is, disconsidering long-term profitability). This is an issue of corporate governance at the micro-scale, and one solution is to have retroactive bonuses that can still be paid off after managers leave, depending on how well the division is situated (this encourages managers to manage for the long-run, and to find good successors).

In any event, the manager being described by the original poster seems to be incompetent, in that he is actually hindering the work of his subordinates by constantly requiring them to help him with simple tasks that anyone should be able to deal with. However, the tone of many here seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what managers are there for. Managers are there to organiz

As an MBA student (Simon school), it seems like many people here don't appreciate the role of management. There are good managers, and there are bad managers, just like there are good techs and bad techs.

Most of the concentrations don't relate to the kind of management that this post is discussing: namely, the kind that deals directly with employees in technical positions. However, those that do include manufacturing operations amangement, service operations management, and possibly marketing. The other concentrations are at a higher level, and deal with things like corporate accounting, financial decisions, corporate organization, corporate strategy, investing, and so-on and so-forth.

I'm in business school for investing, however, I am very influenced by Philip Fischer, thus think that investing in companies with competent management at all levels is critically important (poor management can run any company -- no matter current financial position -- into the ground). I highly recommend Philip Fischer's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits & Other Writings ; I have found the book so useful that I have it very extensively underlined and annoted. I think that reading this book will give people a good understanding of what is necessary for a company to succeed in terms of quality-of-organization*.

For a book -- actually a "novel" -- that deals specifically with the kind of management (low-level) that this post is dealing with, I'd highly recommend Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement . This book is the story of a plant that's going under, told from the perspective of the manager, who is highly technically competent. However, technical competence -- and even good people skills, which he has from the start -- isn't enough to ensure good management. A manager needs to know how to leverage his tehcnical and people-skills to benefit the firm, in terms of profit (specifically, NPV).

Now, one issue barely discussed in this book directly -- but that the reader gets a sense of -- is that alot of times managers have the wrong incentives. There are different ways to create incentive-structures for a division. Basically, it comes down to (crudely) a profit-center vs. a cost-center. If a manager is very constrained, it may be appropriate to treat his division as a cost-center, rewarding him based on how much he can reduce real costs. However, in many cases, a profit-center would be more reasonable. There are other larger issues, such as the tendency of many mechanisms of managerial performance to bias management decisions for short-term profitability at the expense of NPV (that is, disconsidering long-term profitability). This is an issue of corporate governance at the micro-scale, and one solution is to have retroactive bonuses that can still be paid off after managers leave, depending on how well the division is situated (this encourages managers to manage for the long-run, and to find good successors).

In any event, the manager being described by the original poster seems to be incompetent, in that he is actually hindering the work of his subordinates by constantly requiring them to help him with simple tasks that anyone should be able to deal with. However, the tone of many here seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what managers are there for. Managers are there to organiz

As an MBA student (Simon school), it seems like many people here don't appreciate the role of management. There are good managers, and there are bad managers, just like there are good techs and bad techs.

Most of the concentrations don't relate to the kind of management that this post is discussing: namely, the kind that deals directly with employees in technical positions. However, those that do include manufacturing operations amangement, service operations management, and possibly marketing. The other concentrations are at a higher level, and deal with things like corporate accounting, financial decisions, corporate organization, corporate strategy, investing, and so-on and so-forth.

I'm in business school for investing, however, I am very influenced by Philip Fischer, thus think that investing in companies with competent management at all levels is critically important (poor management can run any company -- no matter current financial position -- into the ground). I highly recommend Philip Fischer's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits & Other Writings ; I have found the book so useful that I have it very extensively underlined and annoted. I think that reading this book will give people a good understanding of what is necessary for a company to succeed in terms of quality-of-organization*.

For a book -- actually a "novel" -- that deals specifically with the kind of management (low-level) that this post is dealing with, I'd highly recommend Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement . This book is the story of a plant that's going under, told from the perspective of the manager, who is highly technically competent. However, technical competence -- and even good people skills, which he has from the start -- isn't enough to ensure good management. A manager needs to know how to leverage his tehcnical and people-skills to benefit the firm, in terms of profit (specifically, NPV).

Now, one issue barely discussed in this book directly -- but that the reader gets a sense of -- is that alot of times managers have the wrong incentives. There are different ways to create incentive-structures for a division. Basically, it comes down to (crudely) a profit-center vs. a cost-center. If a manager is very constrained, it may be appropriate to treat his division as a cost-center, rewarding him based on how much he can reduce real costs. However, in many cases, a profit-center would be more reasonable. There are other larger issues, such as the tendency of many mechanisms of managerial performance to bias management decisions for short-term profitability at the expense of NPV (that is, disconsidering long-term profitability). This is an issue of corporate governance at the micro-scale, and one solution is to have retroactive bonuses that can still be paid off after managers leave, depending on how well the division is situated (this encourages managers to manage for the long-run, and to find good successors).

In any event, the manager being described by the original poster seems to be incompetent, in that he is actually hindering the work of his subordinates by constantly requiring them to help him with simple tasks that anyone should be able to deal with. However, the tone of many here seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what managers are there for. Managers are there to organiz

As an MBA student (Simon school), it seems like many people here don't appreciate the role of management. There are good managers, and there are bad managers, just like there are good techs and bad techs.

Most of the concentrations don't relate to the kind of management that this post is discussing: namely, the kind that deals directly with employees in technical positions. However, those that do include manufacturing operations amangement, service operations management, and possibly marketing. The other concentrations are at a higher level, and deal with things like corporate accounting, financial decisions, corporate organization, corporate strategy, investing, and so-on and so-forth.

I'm in business school for investing, however, I am very influenced by Philip Fischer, thus think that investing in companies with competent management at all levels is critically important (poor management can run any company -- no matter current financial position -- into the ground). I highly recommend Philip Fischer's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits & Other Writings ; I have found the book so useful that I have it very extensively underlined and annoted. I think that reading this book will give people a good understanding of what is necessary for a company to succeed in terms of quality-of-organization*.

For a book -- actually a "novel" -- that deals specifically with the kind of management (low-level) that this post is dealing with, I'd highly recommend Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement . This book is the story of a plant that's going under, told from the perspective of the manager, who is highly technically competent. However, technical competence -- and even good people skills, which he has from the start -- isn't enough to ensure good management. A manager needs to know how to leverage his tehcnical and people-skills to benefit the firm, in terms of profit (specifically, NPV).

Now, one issue barely discussed in this book directly -- but that the reader gets a sense of -- is that alot of times managers have the wrong incentives. There are different ways to create incentive-structures for a division. Basically, it comes down to (crudely) a profit-center vs. a cost-center. If a manager is very constrained, it may be appropriate to treat his division as a cost-center, rewarding him based on how much he can reduce real costs. However, in many cases, a profit-center would be more reasonable. There are other larger issues, such as the tendency of many mechanisms of managerial performance to bias management decisions for short-term profitability at the expense of NPV (that is, disconsidering long-term profitability). This is an issue of corporate governance at the micro-scale, and one solution is to have retroactive bonuses that can still be paid off after managers leave, depending on how well the division is situated (this encourages managers to manage for the long-run, and to find good successors).

In any event, the manager being described by the original poster seems to be incompetent, in that he is actually hindering the work of his subordinates by constantly requiring them to help him with simple tasks that anyone should be able to deal with. However, the tone of many here seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what managers are there for. Managers are there to organiz

As an MBA student (Simon school), it seems like many people here don't appreciate the role of management. There are good managers, and there are bad managers, just like there are good techs and bad techs.

Most of the concentrations don't relate to the kind of management that this post is discussing: namely, the kind that deals directly with employees in technical positions. However, those that do include manufacturing operations amangement, service operations management, and possibly marketing. The other concentrations are at a higher level, and deal with things like corporate accounting, financial decisions, corporate organization, corporate strategy, investing, and so-on and so-forth.

I'm in business school for investing, however, I am very influenced by Philip Fischer, thus think that investing in companies with competent management at all levels is critically important (poor management can run any company -- no matter current financial position -- into the ground). I highly recommend Philip Fischer's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits & Other Writings ; I have found the book so useful that I have it very extensively underlined and annoted. I think that reading this book will give people a good understanding of what is necessary for a company to succeed in terms of quality-of-organization*.

For a book -- actually a "novel" -- that deals specifically with the kind of management (low-level) that this post is dealing with, I'd highly recommend Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement . This book is the story of a plant that's going under, told from the perspective of the manager, who is highly technically competent. However, technical competence -- and even good people skills, which he has from the start -- isn't enough to ensure good management. A manager needs to know how to leverage his tehcnical and people-skills to benefit the firm, in terms of profit (specifically, NPV).

Now, one issue barely discussed in this book directly -- but that the reader gets a sense of -- is that alot of times managers have the wrong incentives. There are different ways to create incentive-structures for a division. Basically, it comes down to (crudely) a profit-center vs. a cost-center. If a manager is very constrained, it may be appropriate to treat his division as a cost-center, rewarding him based on how much he can reduce real costs. However, in many cases, a profit-center would be more reasonable. There are other larger issues, such as the tendency of many mechanisms of managerial performance to bias management decisions for short-term profitability at the expense of NPV (that is, disconsidering long-term profitability). This is an issue of corporate governance at the micro-scale, and one solution is to have retroactive bonuses that can still be paid off after managers leave, depending on how well the division is situated (this encourages managers to manage for the long-run, and to find good successors).

In any event, the manager being described by the original poster seems to be incompetent, in that he is actually hindering the work of his subordinates by constantly requiring them to help him with simple tasks that anyone should be able to deal with. However, the tone of many here seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what managers are there for. Managers are there to organiz

I threw this together in all of 5 seconds. http://www.cif.rochester.edu/~trevdak/md5.php

You should get it into your head that noone is "supporting" Saddam. People are supporting the rule of international law and sovereignty of nations. People are opposing "unilateral", "pre-emptive", "might is right" and "who's gonna stop us!" crap which reaks of 1930s Germany. People are opposing hubris motivated stupididty like "exporting democracy" at a point of a gun to the Middle East while ignoring every last bit of cultural and historical data about the region. That is what is going on. Saddam and his impotent antics are secondary.

That's the basis of science ... putting forward a theory and then measuring that theory against the facts.

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

Evolution is a fact. It has been observed in the fossil record, and observed in the present day.

"Observation" proves anything. For hundreds of years everyone "observed" that a heavy stone falls faster than a feather. The Scientific Method proves things: http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html 1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
Observation alone does not satisfy #3 and #4.

Our school uses WebRFM as basically a web-based file management client. It's ugly, but it works. http://mail.rochester.edu/

The HORDE Gollem is a promising project also. http://www.horde.org/gollem/

University of Rochester had (2004-2005) a pilot program where Napster services were provided free to the students. We're not sure where the funding for it came from, but it wasn't from tuition. We had several administration-student talks and the general consensus was that it would be very unfair to include that as part of our bill (particularly since Napster is Windows-only).

Look at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2005.html and see the number of papers by Microsoft Research. SOSP 2003 (occurs every 2 years) http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers.shtml has papers by Microsoft. OSDI 2004 - http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi04/tech/ There are many other prestigious conferences that MSR puts many papers into.

Jim Gray (databases), Butler Lampson (systems), among others all work at MSR.

Your facts are incorrect.

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature.

That comment is both copyright infringment and plagiarism (which is worse). You copied from this book without attribution, a link, or any indication you were not the author of that text.

Compare against this weblog to see how to quote from a text in an intellectually-honest style.

This is so stupid. I fully concur with with nrlightfoot. There is NO WAY any scientist working on something like this would ever, EVER say this even has anything remotely to do with railguns. Firstly, if you used it as a weapon, the projectile would vaporize as soon as it encountered atmosphere!! Second, it is not at all capable of accelerating large (Kg scale) projectiles relevant to weaponry applications. This technique is only used for equation of state measurements and shockwave/fluid dynamics interaction experiments. Furthermore, the achieveable pressure regimes attainable by this method are not really groundbreaking. High power lasers for fusion research are also used to do the exact same thing except they accelerate the pusher plate not by magnetic induction but by initiating fast foam layer vaporization. The NOVA laser at LLNL attained about the same megabar pressures back in the 90's, though its nice to see there is another method now available to do this (that is, besides detonating nuclear weapons- the only other method I'm aware of). Now that I think of it, the reporting on this achievement is universally bad (no surprse there really) and I can't really tell how the pusher was accelerated in this experiment. It COULD be that since it was a metal plate they actually did use the magnetic field of the Z machine to directly accelerate it however, it was so small and thin I very strongly suspect that if in fact this method was used the current induced in the metal foil would've been so immense that it would've instantly vaporized. No, I rather think what they did was to use the Z-pinch of the machine to heat a plasma inside a hohlraum to very high temperature so that it emits a giant pulse of X-rays (this is the usual modus operandi of the Z-machine) which was then used to vaporize a metal or foam pusher which then accelerated the aluminum plate....

Weird! I'm reading that book right now! :) If you want more info on this stuff I suggest checking out the online version of the Lab for Laser Energetics Review publication. We have the past 10 years of it up for free viewing. Its pretty dense stuff (heh) but if you can handle dark sun I don't think you'll have a problem.

Yes we very often see the CEA guys poking around here. Probably doing scaled implosions to verify LMJ's ignition capability... Do you know if the CEA is planning any large chirped pulse stuff?

FYI folks, the whole Inertial Confinement Fusion thing is done everyday at the University of Rochester, splitting a massive beam into a Bucky Ball shape is how it's been done for a long time:

http://www.lle.rochester.edu/index.html

They are the scientists that invented it and use it today.

"Each laser charges up to one terrajoule of energy, then outputs one terrawatt for one second."

Juuust slightly off...by a factor of a billion or so! :-) Actually the NIF will fire each of its 192 beams simultaneously with an energy of ~10kJ for a duration of 2-3 nanoseconds for a total of nearly 2 MJ on the target. The overall power of the laser will be somewhere near 500 Terawatts (trillion watts) and despite what the AP article says, that will never secure its stature as being the "worlds most powerful", that title is currently held by the Rutherford Appleton laboratory's Vulcan Petawatt laser, capable of achieving nearly 1 thousand trillion watts of power. The OMEGA EP laser, to be completed in 1-2 years will achieve over 2 Petawatts of power. These lasers only deliver few kJ total energy though.

yes its just another definition of ignition. spectrum of energy emitted by the H? I'm not sure I understand what you're after. If it is the energy of the products of the DT reaction you're interested in then its H-3 + H-2--> He-4 (with a kinetic energy of 3.5 MeV) and a hot neutron with a KE of 14.1 MeV. If it is the actual electromagnetic radiation from the hot plasma you are talking about then it just radiates like a blackbody at ohhh say 100 million degrees :o) which happens to be mostly in hard X-rays.

Incidentally, as long as I'm posting here I'd like to say that (no surprise really, its a science article) the AP article gets it a bit wrong. The NIF will never achieve the status of "most powerful" laser on earth. Highest energy laser on earth? At 2 MEGAjoules yes it will be the most energetic. But not the most powerful. The maximum power of the NIF is estimated at 500-750 Terawatts (trillion watts) (I'm approximating). However, the OMEGA EP laser which will be finished in 2007 (before NIF) will achieve a power of over 2 PETAwatts or 2 million billion watts. Several times that of the NIF.

uhmmm...yeah, so I RTFA and I'm really curious as to where the X-ray laser demo is going to take place... X-ray lasers aren't like pocket laser pointers. There are only a few places in the world that can achieve them. Either you use a MASSIVE laser which focuses on a piece of metal forming an ultrahot plasma that can lase superradiantly (without a resonator cavity because the gain is so high in the lasing plasma) for a few nanoseconds (first demonstrated on the NOVA laser at LLNL in 1984) OR you use a huge ass particle (electrons) accelerator to form a free electron laser with a magnetic undulator. In fact, I don't think X-ray FELs have been achieved anywhere on earth yet, period. I would guess that the only lasers in europe capable of making an X-ray laser are the Vulcan at the CCLRC in the UK and maybe LULI in France. So how is this happening in Brussels?

Actually, there is no least-harm paradox. If you want to minimize the number of animals that die on account of your diet, it's best to eat a vegetarian (or preferably, vegan diet), which causes fewer deaths than one based on large free-range ruminants.

Reference: Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis's omnivorous proposal.

We've 'created' odd critters, such as ligers, but they can't reproduce on their own, and most likely would not have mated of their own accord in the wild since they live in such different areas. Inspection of the available fossil record shows, if anything, the gradual DE-speciation of earth, not the increase/betterment that we would expect if following macro evolution to its logical conclusions.

Scientists have no reasonable explanation available for where the stuff came from to produce the Big Bang. By insisting that matter has existed for ever, they have created their own faith and belief system, but have assigned god status to matter, rather than a deity who made it.

Any observed and extrapolated results (for that's what a hypothesis is, an assumption based off a sample of data) must lead back to a point where there was nothing, or that what we have now has existed for eternity.

The definition of the Scientific Method, as quoted from [http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Append ixE/AppendixE.html], "The scientific method is the process by which scientists, collectively and over time, endeavor to construct an accurate (that is, reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary) representation of the world."

Nowhere in the realm of Science is there a way of proving or disproving creationism or macroevolution. Later in the article: "the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. That is, when testing an hypothesis or a theory, the scientist may have a preference for one outcome or another, and it is important that this preference not bias the results or their interpretation." Scientists who do not pursue every avenue of explanation, allowing for results which indicate that their personal preference or bias may be wrong, are not true scientists. "The scientific method is intricately associated with science, the process of human inquiry that pervades the modern era on many levels. While the method appears simple and logical in description, there is perhaps no more complex question than that of knowing how we come to know things."

I happen to be a creationist. I believe the Genesis account of creation, and I believe that God made the earth look 'old' to start with. Considering that we have no idea what a 'young' planet would look like -- we've never seen one being made -- there's no scientific reason to discard the Biblical account of creation in favor of an account of spontaneous generation of life in all its different out-workings as we see it today. I also firmly believe in microevolution, the process of minute changes made and propagated through succeeding generations of a given organism. It's seen daily in the birth of children, where each child gets a unique mixing of the DNA of their parents. There are little teeny changes between generations in terms of resistance to disease, tolerance for certain foods, etc. But there's no recorded point where a species jumped from itself into another, new one.

The 'new' definition of science in Kansas is just a realization that there has been error in the past, and they want to correct it now. Every major scientific discovery has changed the way people think and feel, and has given new light on old beliefs and thoughts. The world is flat. The earth is the center of the universe. Man can't fly. They've all been proven wrong through better observation, experimentation, and the willingness to throw out the old ways of thinking that have true flaws in them.

Also, it can be hard to obtain (search for "bona fide institution" in this http://www.cs.rochester.edu/users/faculty/nelson/c esium/cesium_faq.htmlpage!

As a poor-person's alternative, try an alloy of
22% Sodium 78% Potassium (by weight)
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/Brands/Fine_Chemicals/ Product_Focus/Suparna/Sodium_Potassium_Alloy.html this alloy is liquid down to -12C

If you have the inclination
(THIS IS DANGEROUS!),
you could probably make it at home by electrolysis from the hydroxides
(YOU COULD HURT YOURSELF OR SOMEONE ELSE VERY BADLY!)
http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2001-10-05/chem/colu mn.html
(THIS IS DANGEROUS!)

Trivial, yes - so I presume you can provide me an example of a species diverging? So far as I know, we haven't actually seen one species change into another, merely a species adapting to it's environment.

Pray, enlighten us mortals, then. (Or do I need to find a mountain top first?)

Assuming that science is the formulation of ideas based on what we see, based on this definition, I think it is interesting to note that Darwin formed a theory based on what he saw in the Galapagos Islands.

It seems to me that a lot of people have a tendency to try to back up what they believe by finding data, and not so much finding conclusions based on the data.

All arguments about the workings of quantum encryption can refer to this paper. One key assumption is that you only send a single photon, not two or none. If none arives you wasted that bit-slot, but a second photon allows eavesdropping. Traditional sources generate photons according to Poisson statistics, which means that you can't accurately meter out one photon at a time. The standard fix for this is to attenuate the signal so that the average N is much less than 1 photons per measurement slot. This effectively means you only get (roughly) a photon every 1/N slots, but you still get 2 arriving together every 1/N^2 slot. The first part is both wastful, the second vulnerable.

The current paper merely how to generate single photons more reliably using diamonds as microcavities. Essentially the diamond is a tiny laser resonator on the scale of a single wavelength (1 micron), and can only support one optical mode, so any single spontaneously generated photon goes into that mode, and your output is single, narrow wavelength photon, but no doubles. In some ways this has ceased to be a "L.A.S.E.R." since the Light is not Amplified, and the Emmision of Radiation is not Stimulated, but spontaneous. Maybe I would call it Light Organized from Spontaneous Emission of Radiation, but I digress...

If you wat to look at such microcavities, see this paper

thermonuclear ignition will be achieved in the laboratory in the year 2010 (+or- 2 years). so yes, there will be a breakthrough in fusion in the next 10 years but it will not be due to 60$ a barrel oil. it will be a result of slow and steady progress in the field over the last 40 years and a decision in the early 90s to build the NIF. is this the breakthrough you were talking about? no perhaps not. but the breakthrough you were probably referring to (economical fusion power) is possible and it is still a good bet that this type of breakthrough will also occur in the next 10 years. the Univ. of Rochester's lab for laser energetics will switch on the most powerful laser in the world in 2 years. this laser, at ~3 PETAwatts will be equivalent to about 2% of the total power recieved by the earth from the sun and will be used to attempt "fast ignition" experiments which may indeed make fusion power economical.

On the contrary, like any scientist who reads the literature, I see applications of the scientific method to evolution all of the time.

Do you know what the Scientific Method is? Isn't it this?

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html

Evolution does not make it past step 1. Even if Darwinian evolution where true, the process itself would be unobservable. It is either happening so slowly that it is unobservable, or it it happened in the past which makes it unobservable. I believe the rule is that you can't move on to step 2 until you've satisfied step 1. Right?

III. Common Mistakes in Applying the Scientific Method

As stated earlier, the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. That is, when testing an hypothesis or a theory, the scientist may have a preference for one outcome or another, and it is important that this preference not bias the results or their interpretation. The most fundamental error is to mistake the hypothesis for an explanation of a phenomenon, without performing experimental tests. Sometimes "common sense" and "logic" tempt us into believing that no test is needed. There are numerous examples of this, dating from the Greek philosophers to the present day.

Another common mistake is to ignore or rule out data which do not support the hypothesis. Ideally, the experimenter is open to the possibility that the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. Sometimes, however, a scientist may have a strong belief that the hypothesis is true (or false), or feels internal or external pressure to get a specific result. In that case, there may be a psychological tendency to find "something wrong", such as systematic effects, with data which do not support the scientist's expectations, while data which do agree with those expectations may not be checked as carefully. The lesson is that all data must be handled in the same way.

Another common mistake arises from the failure to estimate quantitatively systematic errors (and all errors). There are many examples of discoveries which were missed by experimenters whose data contained a new phenomenon, but who explained it away as a systematic background. Conversely, there are many examples of alleged "new discoveries" which later proved to be due to systematic errors not accounted for by the "discoverers."

In a field where there is active experimentation and open communication among members of the scientific community, the biases of individuals or groups may cancel out, because experimental tests are repeated by different scientists who may have different biases. In addition, different types of experimental setups have different sources of systematic errors. Over a period spanning a variety of experimental tests (usually at least several years), a consensus develops in the community as to which experimental results have stood the test of time.

http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html

Darwin not only observed and took notes during his voyage, but he also studied the practice of artificial selection and read the works of other naturalists to form his Theory of Evolution.

On the contrary, like any scientist who reads the literature, I see applications of the scientific method to evolution all of the time.

Do you know what the Scientific Method is? Isn't it this?

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html

Evolution does not make it past step 1. Even if Darwinian evolution where true, the process itself would be unobservable. It is either happening so slowly that it is unobservable, or it it happened in the past which makes it unobservable. I believe the rule is that you can't move on to step 2 until you've satisfied step 1. Right?

III. Common Mistakes in Applying the Scientific Method

As stated earlier, the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. That is, when testing an hypothesis or a theory, the scientist may have a preference for one outcome or another, and it is important that this preference not bias the results or their interpretation. The most fundamental error is to mistake the hypothesis for an explanation of a phenomenon, without performing experimental tests. Sometimes "common sense" and "logic" tempt us into believing that no test is needed. There are numerous examples of this, dating from the Greek philosophers to the present day.

Another common mistake is to ignore or rule out data which do not support the hypothesis. Ideally, the experimenter is open to the possibility that the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. Sometimes, however, a scientist may have a strong belief that the hypothesis is true (or false), or feels internal or external pressure to get a specific result. In that case, there may be a psychological tendency to find "something wrong", such as systematic effects, with data which do not support the scientist's expectations, while data which do agree with those expectations may not be checked as carefully. The lesson is that all data must be handled in the same way.

Another common mistake arises from the failure to estimate quantitatively systematic errors (and all errors). There are many examples of discoveries which were missed by experimenters whose data contained a new phenomenon, but who explained it away as a systematic background. Conversely, there are many examples of alleged "new discoveries" which later proved to be due to systematic errors not accounted for by the "discoverers."

In a field where there is active experimentation and open communication among members of the scientific community, the biases of individuals or groups may cancel out, because experimental tests are repeated by different scientists who may have different biases. In addition, different types of experimental setups have different sources of systematic errors. Over a period spanning a variety of experimental tests (usually at least several years), a consensus develops in the community as to which experimental results have stood the test of time.

http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html

Darwin not only observed and took notes during his voyage, but he also studied the practice of artificial selection and read the works of other naturalists to form his Theory of Evolution.

Ok, I looked it up. You're confusing Sistina's (now Red Hat) Global File System with the Google File System. The two ARE NOT THE SAME.

Here's Red Hat:

http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/

Here's Google:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-g hemawat.pdf (PDF)
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:m0TMQYgIlIoJ: www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat .pdf+Google+File+System&hl=en&client=safari (HTML)