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And, it is said, many people major in elementary education for precisely that reason. Our elementary school teachers are therefore not only ignorant of science; they are hostile to science. That hostility must, inevitably, rub off on the young people they teach.

This is a logic error: non sequitur. It may be said that many people major in education for that reason, but that certainly does not necessitate hostility towards science, and as a doctoral student in educational psychology, I'd like to see the citations you are referencing when you make those statements, Dr. Goodstein.

For that to happen, we would have to pay teachers more, at least as much as what graduating doctoral students get. And they should be paid more. But that's not the whole answer. Just as important, schools would have to learn to treat these teachers with professional respect, and society would have to afford them the honor and admiration that professionals expect.

Is paying teachers more, or "treating teachers with respect" really going to do anything about our problems in education? There is a curious omission that I've seen in nearly every discussion of increasing the effectiveness of our educational systems: better methods of teaching. These problems were all quite successfully addressed with programmed instruction, or the application of basic principles of the experimental analysis of behavior to the problem of instructional design. The problem has been solved; the solution hasn't been accepted.

Several years ago I adapted a program of instruction called The Analysis of Behavior: A Program for Self-Instruction for the Internet. Over six hundred people have used the program quite succesfully, and I haven't worried one iota about the amount of respect that I get from those individuals. How they interact with their environments is another question.

And, it is said, many people major in elementary education for precisely that reason. Our elementary school teachers are therefore not only ignorant of science; they are hostile to science. That hostility must, inevitably, rub off on the young people they teach.

This is a logic error: non sequitur. It may be said that many people major in education for that reason, but that certainly does not necessitate hostility towards science, and as a doctoral student in educational psychology, I'd like to see the citations you are referencing when you make those statements, Dr. Goodstein.

For that to happen, we would have to pay teachers more, at least as much as what graduating doctoral students get. And they should be paid more. But that's not the whole answer. Just as important, schools would have to learn to treat these teachers with professional respect, and society would have to afford them the honor and admiration that professionals expect.

Is paying teachers more, or "treating teachers with respect" really going to do anything about our problems in education? There is a curious omission that I've seen in nearly every discussion of increasing the effectiveness of our educational systems: better methods of teaching. These problems were all quite successfully addressed with programmed instruction, or the application of basic principles of the experimental analysis of behavior to the problem of instructional design. The problem has been solved; the solution hasn't been accepted.

Several years ago I adapted a program of instruction called The Analysis of Behavior: A Program for Self-Instruction for the Internet. Over six hundred people have used the program quite succesfully, and I haven't worried one iota about the amount of respect that I get from those individuals. How they interact with their environments is another question.

Napster was banned at those universities where bandwidth was already at a premium.

I recently graduated from the University of Rochester. We had a pretty healthy bandwidth situation, so they didn't care too much about napster.

They did do one thing that was sort of anal: A guy was shut down after he set up a search engine that allowed anyone on campus to search everybody else's Windows-shared files (usually mp3's and pr0n). His server had to scan everybody's computer once for open shares, and then on the second pass it would record all those openly shared files. The people who got it shut down were the ones with the firewalls... they didn't like the fact that their machines were scanned every day, even though any idiot could have done this by just browsing all the network shares manually. But this automated service was viewed as an invasion of privacy. (I'm sure the intellectual property issues didn't help him either.)

... Alright, now what can we do with it?

While I'm sure this question has been aimed at the more creative of you by your phb's, it has an insidious quality about it in this discussion. Namely that someone is getting close to creating a really efficient highly energetic system. Great, then what do we do with it?

While I'm sure this'll risk being labeled redundant, I noticed that several posts raise the question of getting energy out of this system.

The answer, at least since Cestesibus's chronicler Hero recorded it, has been to let the system transfer energy into an expanding liquid, and use that liquid (air, steam, etc) to drive a mechanical system.

An interesting paper (warning, pdf) supporting an alternative fusion concept describes obliquely how magnetohydrodynamics may provide an inductive transfer of current from the plasma mass to the surrounding apparatus with an efficiency ranging from 70 to 95% depending on the fuel used to form the plasma mass.


Nietzsche on Diku:
sn; at god ba g
:Backstab >KILLS< god.

Unfortunately, the Discover article does not contain a link to the lab itself. Here it is: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/external_index.html. Just dont /. the site!

• Lisp
• Forth, and this other Forth one and this one. mmm forth, every good programmer should learn this beauty.
• x86 Assembly pretty boring stuff
• Pascal, well not my favorite either
• Cobol (this list while compile in cobol).
• Fortan. They say it still outcranks C in some areas if you can believe it. (I don't)

Why, we might just be inventing steam engines now!

Eheheh Remember: The Steam Engine was invented in England - by Watts.It began the Industrial Revolution in England. The American Revolution took place after both. Basically - be mindfull of who you infer 'we' are.

I find it amusing that Americans think the modern world is a result of their un-abridged Capitalist 'Democracy'(TM)*; a product of the noble American Revolution. Its strange to think that Americans believe their present system is a reflection of the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence - it is not, in fact it is an exact copy of the thing it was designed to prevent, that which the revolt dispensed with.

Time will tell what the story of the US is, perspective within America is difficult because of the proximity of the times, and the dizzying reality of it. It may appear that American Democracy(TM)* == Technological Wonder == American Capitalism, but Id bet the apparent 'victory' of the US 'System' is more a result of having the good grace of not endured 100 years of modern warfare at home and having the benefit of an virgin territory to rape** in addition to the natural accelerating returns on R&D/science in this unique crux in world history - not because of 'it'. I'll bet time will not have such a pleasant view of the last 200 years of USAian History - that America will inevitably collapse in on itself based on greed, immaturity and popular apathy in a grossly spectacular manner. Lets all hope that American hubris dosnt take the rest of us with it.

What does this have to do with Katz's article? Nothing, and neither does your fictional non sequitur

*Please Read .sig
**Good for America's Capitalists, bad for everything else.

I ran into a few people from his company at the Alife VI Conference in LA in 1998. The Creatures game was part of what they were discussing, but not really. They were really excited about a new contract they had with DERA. (British Defence Evaluation Research Agency, public/private defence contractor org, and home of the Harrier jet)

They had contracted to build more adaptive and intelligent combat flight enemies for the simulations. The pilots were able to predict how the existing rule based systems worked, and were becoming rigid in their own reactions. So they contacted these guys, and they built a system (way less complex than the characters in Creatures) pretty quickly.

The first version that they came out with was incredibly effective, but you'd be unlikely to come across this strategy in a human pilot: barrel roll incessantly, pull up if the enemy is above you, and fire when they're in your sights. Very simple rules, works no matter what the position of the enemy, and would pulp a human pilot. After some tweaking, they ended up with something that more resembled human behavior.

But the first round got them thinking. In a dogfight, maneuverability is key. A plane can handle maybe 15 Gs, a human pilot 8-10 tops. If a fighter plane weren't dependent on the limitations on the human pilot, it would win against a plane having such limitations, *every time*. or nearly. be able to pull sharper turns, more extreme maneuvers, etc.

Based on this, and the way the flight sim was coded (the neural net flying the plane got its inputs from the data that would be available from the actual instruments), they were proceeding with a proposal to put this puppy in a live plane. Haven't heard anything more about it, but I still get the willies when I see the Creatures box in stores.

--Shameless SelfPlug Check out the papers I published on social environments and language origination using multiagent sims.
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/www/u/stoness/
(about halfway down the page

See this page.

He may have been referring to something like this page's discussion of anisotropy in EM interactions which doesn't have to do with different velocities of light but might have been misremembered as such.

I'm a freshman at the University of Rochester (not to be confused with RIT [Sorry abou that link!]) and we got to see 13 Days in early December. Whne the movie began to encounter all sorts of weirdness, one of the guys running to show got up and told us that there was nothing they could do since I was just a messup with the satellite signal. This leads me to my question:

Does anyone have any info on the system used to send movie previews to colleges via satellite? Encryption? Any way to hijack the signals?

Yes, but far more important than mere nutrition or sanitation, our modern computers will enable our capitalist ruling class to finally achieve their centuries-old dream of enslaving and monitoring everyone on the globe!

OK, so the Panopticon prison is really an old idea, dating from the end of the eighteenth century. For that matter, Lucian, in ancient Rome, invented, but could not implement, the manned Lunar expedition... But Bentham's panopticon originally was applied against the inmates of a single penetentiary, not the population of the whole planet; and with the limited technology of his time even that was practically impossible to implement. No longer! The millenium is in sight!

One might argue (if one were unafraid to be labeled as a Kommie subversive) that such a scheme is deeply immoral. Arguments such as that, however, have never restrained any ruling class ever. Besides, we know that the one and only moral imperative that counts in this world today is that one which demands, "greater, and greater, and ever greater returns for stockholders".

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Yes, cesium is a common decay daughter of virtually all isotopes of uranium. Fortunately, most radioactive isotopes of cesium have relatively short half-lives and transmute into something else. Because cesium is probably the nastiest element that there is, and that's even when it's not an isotope that pegs your geiger counter with gamma radiation. Imagine sodium (remember your high school chemistry classes?) but an order of magnitude worse.

Want to know more about cesium? Sing the songs of cesium? Check those links out.

Neat cesium compounds:

Cesium ozonate (Cesium trioxide)
Formula: CsO3.
Molecular Weight: 180.9
Description: Unstable, bright red compound. Strong oxidizer. Decomposes with release of Oxygen. Reacts vigorously with water. Highest known oxide of Cesium, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cs7O. Prepared by reacting Cesium or its lower oxides with ozone.
Uses: Curiosity, Exploding red ink.

Cesium Chloroxenate
Formula: CsClO3Xe
MW: 347.66
Properties: Explodes
Uses: Chemical curiosity, possible rodenticide
Toxicity: Unknown
Comments: One of the few known compounds involving a noble gas, a halogen, and an alaklai metal. Explodes if you look at it cross-eyed.

Yes, cesium is a common decay daughter of virtually all isotopes of uranium. Fortunately, most radioactive isotopes of cesium have relatively short half-lives and transmute into something else. Because cesium is probably the nastiest element that there is, and that's even when it's not an isotope that pegs your geiger counter with gamma radiation. Imagine sodium (remember your high school chemistry classes?) but an order of magnitude worse.

Want to know more about cesium? Sing the songs of cesium? Check those links out.

Neat cesium compounds:

Cesium ozonate (Cesium trioxide)
Formula: CsO3.
Molecular Weight: 180.9
Description: Unstable, bright red compound. Strong oxidizer. Decomposes with release of Oxygen. Reacts vigorously with water. Highest known oxide of Cesium, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cs7O. Prepared by reacting Cesium or its lower oxides with ozone.
Uses: Curiosity, Exploding red ink.

Cesium Chloroxenate
Formula: CsClO3Xe
MW: 347.66
Properties: Explodes
Uses: Chemical curiosity, possible rodenticide
Toxicity: Unknown
Comments: One of the few known compounds involving a noble gas, a halogen, and an alaklai metal. Explodes if you look at it cross-eyed.

I hope people see this, 'cause it's really interesting.

This is a great system, but I believe that it has been found to be a difficult problem computationally.

Check out: Computational Politics for an example

Yes it is possible to reuse spent nuclear fuel rods by breeding the U-238 into fissionable Plutonium-239. However there are serious problems with this, namely the unbelievable toxicity of plutonium, the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation that would be produced by entering said Plutonium into commercial circulation, the huge amount of waste produced in separating and purifying the Pu and the necessary use of liquid metal coolants(very dangerous, can't use water like normal reactors) in the core. It was for these reasons that the US abandoned all hopes for breeder reactors in the 70's and 80's along with Britain, France and Germany (contrary to the suggestion by another poster that "Carter did it").

That said, you mentioned you thought there is no concerted effort to develop nuclear fusion power. I would agree that there is NOT enough money being put into research for fusion, however, FUSION IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE AND CONTROL!

I work at the University of Rochesters' Omega Laser (most powerful in the world for now) which is used for inertial confinement fusion research and it takes pretty much the most clever engineering of the smartest scientists in the world just to produce stable fusion reactions that last mere millionths of a second long. No one knows how to design a fusion reactor that does not suffer from turbulent plasma instabilities and that achieves high density ultrahot ion temperatures at the same time. Pull of the design of a stable fusion reactor and the nobel is yours for the taking.

A google search for "+iphone operating system" reveals this page that says the CIDCO iPhone uses JavaOS. It doesn't specifically talk about the InfoGear phone, but they use the same trademarked name. The InfoGear phone appears to be an updated version of the CIDCO product, and both are compared on the specifications page.
--

First of all, Rochester University does not exist. It's the University of Rochester, or UR. Second of all, Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT, is a different school, even in a different town. I looked at both, and graduated from UR. We UR people really don't like getting confused with RIT. UR is a science and humanities school. Our Computer Science program is a science program, not a technical one. RIT is a technical school. UR is smaller, but its reputation is much greater, and has been invited at least once to join the Ivy League.

try this for a view of the same article without the weird font.

OK, I found an even better page that contains Hero's treatise on pneumatics. Has a whole slew of nifty Greek gadgets. Whether any of these gadgets were actually used I have no idea.

A brief history of the steam engine.

For a bit more technical info (although a bit old), see http://www.rochester.edu/College/McNair-Program/19 96Journal/BiologyAbstracts96.html. Vicente Planelles seems to have two patents, US05639619 and US05721104, for testing anti-HIV drugs using VPR, but I couldn't find any for using VPR against cancer..

I use it to maintain several web sites, and one of the servers has a public login for people to try it out:

http://www.bcs.rochester.edu:808/
login: guest
pass: &lt;html&gt;

If you want the source code just email me and I'll give you the latest set of Perl scripts and the installer script. Just don't redistribute it.

Ja.
-Paul