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Some reading on geoengineering:

An Overview of Geoengineering of Climate Using Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols"
20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea

One shortcut might be to learn from the hideous mistakes of others:

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~xmath/mirror/www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZegWedG-jk4

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/LCSR-Computing/some-docs/emacs-chart.html

I have used Open Office and the math entry part is what I would classify as adequate for simple math, however there are much better GUI typesetters such as Framemaker but you have to pay for it. Even Microsoft has a document preparation system and it also costs. I have not used it but talking to those who have Framemaker is preferred.

Because LaTeX is a "mark-up language" many people who are used to a GUI find it a bit difficult to get into it, however if you buy the LaTeX book the first page is rather good in that it actually gives you basic hints of how not to read it. The problem is that for math there is no alternative but to read the book.

Granted you have to get your head around using LaTeX particularly with regard to maths however if you are required to display math on a paper I would assume if anyone is smart enough to write and understand mathematical formulas then writing the those formulas in LaTeX would be a fairly straight forward. Even if you don't have the LaTeX book which IMHO is essential there are plenty of web examples such as here and here.

...and her penis is now 23 million miles long.

You can do this too! Simply follow these simple instructions and Make Penis Fast!

Yeah, with a little elbow grease and a 4600 pound, 4 kilowatt magnet. Which most of us have lying around at home.

No respectable engineering professor grades on a curve.

Are you nuts? If you're correct, does that mean I should throw out my degree from the Rutgers University School of Engineering? I spent a significant amount of time in both the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering departments and close to 100% of my professors used a curve. The concept of using the median grade in a class as a "C" or so and using standard deviations as incremental grade levels is pretty standard. It also means that when the median is high, it's very hard to get an A. For instance, in one of my classes, the median and distribution necessitated that an "A" grade mean that the score for the class was 95/100 or better. This is an unpopular thing to do, but also the fair thing. Saying no good professors use a curve is a blanket and misinformed statement.

http://diamond.businessobjects.com/node/18669 http://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/undergrad/srt/forum/calendar.php?s=&action=getinfo&eventid=1 http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/calendar.php?do=getinfo&e=31&day=2000-3-15 https://www.naropa.edu/forum/calendar.php?do=getinfo&e=2&day=2008-3-15

robots are expensive but expendable, with personality backup even 'death' is not much of an issue to a self aware robot.

Asimov wrote a short story about this sort of situation Runaronud

Car break-ins and things like house intrusions are all easier to accomplish in the dark.

That depends. In many cases, break-ins are actually aided by ambient lighting, because people skulking around with flashlights are a lot more likely to be noticed, and unless you're skilled at ninjitsu, you're going to need some light. Motion-activated lighting is generally superior for crime prevention as it attracts attention. Yes, ambient lighting helps prevent people from tripping over things, but there's good evidence that in a lot of scenarios it increases, not decreases, crime.

See this site for more detailed discussion on the pros and cons.

Every time I fly into an airport at night, I look down with awe at all the streets lit up brightly. Usually I see very few cars making use of that lighting, and far fewer people. It baffles me to contemplate the vast quantity of energy that is being expended lighting up unused areas all night long, and I have to wonder seriously whether the benefits outweigh the costs. At the very least, I wish most night lighting were motion-activated; on roads, motion detectors coupled with short-range radio signals between lights could provide anticipatory lighting for travelers but save huge amounts of energy when there is no one about.

Actually, I want to know if the E8 theory predicts those negative strangelets that people were worried were going to pop out of the LHC one day and destroy the world.

http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jholden/strange/node17.html

A professor of mine is working on using swarms of cell phones as a distributed self organizing sensor and computing network. Part of the project involved a new programming language to specifically deal with the spatial distribution of the phones.
Here's his page on the project: http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~uli/Sarana/ (summary PDF at the bottom)

Although it's true that providing soy milk to infant boys (and probably girls) is unwise, I've seen no evidence that it's bad for older boys. Also, I've seen no evidence that I've turned into a tranny despite having drunk about 1-2 liters of it a week for several years now!

For the majority of humans, milk is most likely worse for adults, as most of us have some degree of lactose intolerance. Also, calcium blocks the absorption of iron (leading to anemia), so regardless of your age, too much milk is definitely bad for you. I learned this this the hard way as a child who drank about a liter of milk per day! (It took a while for the doctor to ask the right question in analyzing where my anemia came from.)

this is not new! we have been doing this in the CILab for years at rutgers http://biomedical.rutgers.edu/faculty.php?id=23

Notice the energy conversion efficiency is 0.57% and the fabrication process is quite sophisticated, requirng exotic Fullerene chemicals and other sonatic lab gear.

Compare that to a classic Dye-sensitized cell one can make at home with titanium dioxide and rasberry juice... but delivers 0.45% energy efficiency.

The DIY solar cell recipe below achieves nano-level self-assembly with TiO2 instead of bucky balls and outputs 0.43 V and 1 mA/cm2. Titanium Dioxide is very inexpensive because it's most common ingredient used in white pigment. http://www.solideas.com/solrcell/english.html

How useful is this much power? Consider that a cheap Nokia phone requires 3.7 volts at 140, which equates to 0.518 watts of power needed to charge it. That means one of the cells above,no larger than a square foot, could do the job... on a sunny day. http://www.knowprose.com/node/8906

Interesting note that a 14 year old girl won a Discovery Channel Science Award testing one of these home-made TiO2 cells. http://school.discovery.com/sciencefaircentral/dys c/finalists/profiles/kumar_asmita.html

I've found some backup as apparently a few MIT guys in the late 70s also thought is was necessary to spent at least SOME time and persistance to be able to describe the game.

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/Tin kertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html

"Silverman analyzed the game. To appreciate the complexities involved even in this childhood pastime, readers might consult the game tree shown on the opposite page."

Conclusions

In conclusion, we have successfully fabricated polymer photovoltaic
devices based on C60-modified SWCNTs and a conjugated
polymer P3HT. The composites were made by first
microwave irradiating a mixture of SWCNT-water solution and
C60 solution in toluene, followed by adding a conjugated polymer
P3HT. The best power conversion efficiency of 0.57% under
simulated solar irradiation (95 mW cm22) was achieved on a cell
annealed at 120 uC for 10 min. Introduction of SWCNTs into the
composite not only enhanced the short circuit current density,
JSC, because of faster electron transport via the network of
SWCNTs, but also improved the fill factor due to the morphology
change. The net effect was improved power conversion
efficiency as compared to cells without SWCNTs. Further
optimization is necessary to further improve the performance.
These results clearly indicate that the polymer : C60-SWCNT
composite is an excellent candidate for the fabrication of low cost
polymer photovoltaic cells, because C60 is significantly less
expensive than PCBM, and only a small amount of the more
expensive SWCNT is needed in the photoactive composite.

You know that you have not full information but have an opinion anyway, because of how you feel the world should be -- the definition of religion!

Oh, get real. I pointed out that the only example of absolute moral you gave was not agreed by society at the time CS Lewis held the speech... and that CS Lewis did not speak out against it either.

And to insinuate that the Catholics don't believe in a hell with fire and pain must be trolling.

Furthermore, I was quoting from the chatechism of the church (an official, is slightly simplistic summary its teaching), from the Vatica website.

Furthermore, the most important point is that it is self chosen. The sufferings, whatever they are, are the unavoidable result of human nature combined with hatred of God. See this

I also refered to CS Lewis's concept of hell in The Great Divorce. It is a good (fictional) illustration of the above.

It can also be argued to be an efficient strategy in many human cultures, as seen in game theory.

It is an efficient strategy for the group or species (thus favoured by evolution), not for an individual. From the point of view of an individual making a choice, why should you care whether something is an efficient stratagy for survival for humanity or not?

If your point is that this explains why this behaviour evolved, then that does not really matter from the point of view of an indivdual making a moral choice.

At Rutgers University, we have a home grown tool called NetDB that we use to manage IP allocations, assignment of networks to individual departments, corresponding DNS, and custom Access Control Lists. It works rather well. Network Operations allocates a network for a department and assigns it to the appropriate Network Contact Group (NCG). From that point, the people who have certain privileges on that NCG have the ability to add/remove DNS for it and create custom access lists. The tool knows what OSPF areas to allocate addresses from based on zones, and all in all is pretty neat. Here is some documentation (including screenshots) for ideas should you decide to ever work on your own tool.

At Rutgers University, we have a home grown tool called NetDB that we use to manage IP allocations, assignment of networks to individual departments, corresponding DNS, and custom Access Control Lists. It works rather well. Network Operations allocates a network for a department and assigns it to the appropriate Network Contact Group (NCG). From that point, the people who have certain privileges on that NCG have the ability to add/remove DNS for it and create custom access lists. The tool knows what OSPF areas to allocate addresses from based on zones, and all in all is pretty neat. Here is some documentation (including screenshots) for ideas should you decide to ever work on your own tool.

I tend to think the authors of the article are refering to the problems of a "useable form" for the structures and easy access of many of these databases. The first problem is mearly a problem of converting between the various structural file formats out there, something a good programmer (or grad student) can solve is a few weeks or less. The second is a bureaucrat issue and not a scientific one.

"An" an "a" have nothing to do with plural or singular forms. You use "an" when it precedes a vowel sound.

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/a.htm l

...someone will be using Tinkertoys. :-)

Yes, you are one of those arse holes. Why the pfuck do people have to be grammar nazis when the error being pointed out really isn't one of the more serious ones. In fact, considering the audience, the proper word choice was exactly what the poster submitted. It's entirely appropriate to select a more colloquial form of writing posting on slashdot. We're not writing term papers for college literature here.

A nice web site that points out why your grammar comments are retarded is :
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/t.htm l

from the site:

Than I versus Than Me.
Than, as used in comparatives, has traditionally been considered a conjunction; as such, if you're comparing subjects, the pronouns after than should take the "subjective case." In other words, "He's taller than I," not "He's taller than me"; "She's smarter than he," not "She's smarter than him." If, on the other hand, you're comparing direct or indirect objects, the pronouns should be objective: "I've never worked with a more difficult client than him."

There are some advantages to this traditional state of affairs. If you observe this distinction, you can be more precise in some comparisons. Consider these two sentences:

He has more friends than I. (His total number of friends is higher than my total number of friends.)
He has more friends than me. (I'm not his only friend; he has others.)
The problem, though, is that in all but the most formal contexts, "than I" sounds stuffy, even unidiomatic. Most people, in most contexts, treat than as a preposition, and put all following pronouns in the objective case, whether the things being compared are subjects or objects. "He's taller than me" sounds more natural to most native English speakers.

This isn't a recent development: people have been treating than as a preposition for centuries. Consider the following from big-name English and American writers:

Matthew Prior, Better Answer: "For thou art a girl as much brighter than her,/ As he was a poet sublimer than me."
Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, 1.10.58, "I am fitter for this world than you, you for the next than me."
Lord Byron's letter of 2 November 1804, "Lord Delawarr is considerably younger than me."
Robert Southey, Well of St. Keyne, 51: "She had been wiser than me,/ For she took a bottle to Church."
William Faulkner's Reivers, 4.82: "Let Lucius get out . . . He's younger than me and stouter too for his size."
So what should you do? I don't have a good answer, other than the most general advice possible: try to size up your audience, and figure out whether they're likely to be happier with the traditional or the familiar usage.

If we set up a solar array on the moon that tapped 1% of the Sun's energy, converted that energy to microwaves, which would be beamed to earth and received by microwave towers, it would supply all the power we'd need. http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~veron/moon.pdf

I'm sorry if my sentence was confusing. The "in the US" part was meant to apply to the bandwidth situation. Since I'm in the US, I didn't want to speak incorrectly about the bandwidth capabilities of non-US areas, so I qualified my statement.

Wavelets aren't so complicated, they're actually rather cool. Ask her to teach you the Haar wavelet with basic lifting steps. A good set of notes on wavelets is here.

Yes, but to be clever, the player might do something like encrypt the player key with some other key that it stores in plaintext. But, the bottom line is that *at some point* the player key will be in memory. I did basically the same thing for a project in an information security class. Our task was to locate a key in a 1MB memory dump to decrypt a GIF which was encrypted with AES-128. Java's crypto library was able to brute force test a million keys against the first 128 bits of the image (enough to see if the first 3 bytes are ASCII GIF) in about a minute and a half on 1 GHz G4. Decrypting one frame with all the keys in a memory dump can be quick. Even if you dumped all 1GB of your memory and tried it, thats 1500 minutes using the technique mentioned above. Not super quick, but you can improve that by only searching high entropy areas of memory (this could help a lot). In any event, this is most likely simpler than reverse engineering the EXE.

Why do we still teach CS and engineering majors tons of higher math?

I'll quote from a professor I had in the past and one whom I incredibly respect, as he understands moreso than any professor I've had before or after what it truly means to teach:

Here's a question which students may ask at times during semester: "Why do I need to learn this stuff since a computer can do it?" Certainly a computer can tell you that 25.46 multiplied by 38.04 is 968.4984, but if I type PLUS instead of TIMES, I'll read 63.50. I should have enough "feeling" to look at the answer and know that something is fouled up, somewhere. Similarly, if I ask a computer to find an antiderivative of (x2+2)/(x2+1), the answer will be x+arctan(x) (yes, yes, "+C"). But if I omit one or another pair of parentheses (or both) I get these answers: 2x-2/x,(x3/3)+2arctan(x), (x3/3)-(2/x)+x. This is rather a simple indefinite integral, and things get much more complicated with more complicated questions. Students should know the "shape" of the answer (so 25.46 multiplied by 38.04 is hundreds, not 63.50!). And that, to me, is an important aim of the course.

As much as it means there is more for the student to learn, I think it's important.

What "other studies" are those, and what is their response to the recent studies which indicate the opposite, such as the one I cited, or this one (PDF link)?

I agree. However, watermarks can be pretty useless. Most are vulnerable to collusion. Assume for the moment that iTunes downloads didn't have copy protection DRM, just watermarks. Now how about five of us get together and download the same file on iTunes. Then, we get together and "average our files." Often times this will destroy the watermark but leave the original media intact. There is definitely research to create collusion resistant fingerprinting (see Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting for Multimedia by W. Trappe, M. Wu, Z. Wang, and K. J. R. Liu, for instance). In the end though, just like regular DRM, it's a losing battle and there are always ways around it.

Most libraries' collections are very similar to most other libraries' collections, and the greatest overlap occurs with the books that are the most important.

Because the original Google 5 libraries have their holdings entered into WorldCat, a statistical study was done that showed that those five libraries would account for 33% of the 32 million books in that database. It also showed that 61% of the books held by the Google 5 are uniquely held by only one library. Essentially, the holdings of libraries follows a common pattern of a short high followed by a very long tail. If, even with their long tails, these 5 major libraries account for only 1/3 of books that libraries have entered into WorldCat, imagine how many libraries it will take to find and digitize the long tail of that one bibliographic database.

Less ephemeral works (the kind typically preserved in library collections a century later) generally all had their copyrights renewed in the U.S

The rate of copyright renewal was very low. According to Lessig ("Free Culture" p. 135) "In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright." I've seen estimates that about 90% of the books published between 1923 and 1978, when renewal was abolished, were never renewed. That means that there are MANY public domain books in that time frame, only we can't easily know which ones they are. You can look them up in the renewal database, but my impression is that the database is not considered to be complete, and therefore not entirely reliable. If you find the book in the database, it was renewed. If not...

And there is a POLICY here where you absolutely, positively, HAVE TO have MS Office and USE IT here at Woodbury University.

This would seem like an alternate universe to me, coming from Rutgers where, like many other universities, not using Word is the norm and people look at you funny when you don't use TeX or some variation thereof. I can't imagine having to use Word for any real work. It's a pain to just write a simple letter.

Many colleges, Rutgers included (where I work), offer courses on the Software Engineering. The problem is that very few (if any) schools make the course required. Making the course required could go a long way to helping future software developers. I, myself, never took the course and was floored when I went into the software world when I realized I knew nothing about professional software development beyond the coding/theory.

Feel free to browse the course material

Actually it was not correct.

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/t.htm l#that

The Recount Tally. The final tally of December 2000 did not actually recount all of the state's ballots. There were the now-famous disputes over chads, hanging chads, and dimples, with different judgments among counties and counters. If these disputes had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the NORC study show, the electoral result would have been reversed, but by the thinnest of margins. If there had been a constant statewide recount, Gore would have won, but by merely one hundred votes, approximately. For example, if ballots were counted only if holes went completely through punch cards, Gore would win by 115. If even "dimples" were permitted, Gore would have won by 107.

This chart claims that Dutch is closer to English.

Have you seen any Dutch? To me, it looks like English with a lot of 'j's thrown in.

There's a big difference between saying "no I did not have relations with this woman" while knowing you did, and saying "I swear to uphold the constitution", and then doing something which in your opinion doesn't violate the constitution and then having someone else determine that it does.

The Senate voted on the Articles of Impeachment on February 12, with a two-thirds majority, or 67 Senators, required to convict. On Article I, that charged that the President "...willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury" and made "...corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence" in the Paula Jones lawsuit, the President was found not guilty with 45 Senators voting for the President's removal from office and 55 against. Ten Republicans split with their colleagues to vote for acquittal; all 45 Democrats voted to acquit. On Article II, charging that the President "...has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice"..., the vote was 50-50, with all Democrats and five Republicans voting to acquit.

This phenomenon has been used in stores and most notably shopping malls for a long time. Specific music and specific scents increase the amount of sales significally.

Article about study: http://ur.rutgers.edu/medrel/viewArticle.html?Arti cleID=4506

You used the phrase "more eyeballs" past its "use by" date. Please report to 6236S 6030W for reeducation.

>Please explain what Monica Lewinsky voluntarily blowing the President has to do with Paula Jones. Paula Jones' lawyers were trying to demonstrate a pattern. Clinton "denied having 'sexual relations' with Ms. Lewinsky under a definition provided to him in writing by her lawyers, and also said that he could not recall whether he was ever alone with her" (from http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/e-gov/e-politicala rchive-Clintonimpeach.htm).

And I won't even get into the NJSC replacing Torch with Lautenberg.

I will. First off, the election law wasn't 100% clear for the situation that occurred. "The Court agrees with plaintiffs that the statute simply does not contain a legislative declaration that the filling of a vacancy within forty-eight days of the election is prohibited." The jurisprudence in New Jersey regarding election law, otoh, is very clear. "Election laws are to be liberally construed so as to effectuate their purpose. They should not be construed so as to deprive voters of their franchise or so as to render an election void for technical reasons."

The court determined that the voter was better served by allowing a replacement candidate than upholding a vague and arbitrary deadline for changes on the ballot due to withdrawl of a candidate. Why don't you read the decision for yourself.

Both forms are valid. But "dwarfs" was the more common until Tolkien chose to use the V form. Look in a dictionary. Also, note Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937). Disney isn't an authority on language, but I think they might have noticed if their title was mispelled. See also Snow White bibliography all versions listed use "seven dwarfs", including several 19th C editions which predate the Disney movie.

Tolkien mentioned he had problems with editors over that, and also his use of "Elvish" rather than "Elfin". It seems obvious to us that Middle Earth elves weren't "elfin".

there aren't REAL ghosts/fairy princesses/vampires/PIRATES

I beg to disagree:

fairy princesses: You've obviously never seen a gay pride parade or been to New Orleans at Mardi Gras.

vampires: Sure there is

Pirates: See here.

Ghosts: (whoops, I thought you said goats.)

Neither TLA nor the PR article mentions the use of Linux, after a lil'googling it seems this "fact" comes from here, any ideas ?

A bunch of MIT students created a tic-tac-toe playing computer a LONG time ago, out of *Tinker Toys*.

I know it was a long time ago, because:
a) I saw it in the Boston Computer Museum in 1991 and it had been "broken for years"
b) Nobody plays with Tinkey Toys anymore... And hasn't since about 1975.

Ah, here's a neat article from Sci Am in 1989 (probably the one I read which caused me to seek it out in 1991): http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/Tin kertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html

For the impatient, there is a photo on the last page.

Yes, I did read what you said. Assuming you're not just trolling, then clearly you're not understanding as you didn't understand what the other person who posted C code wrote. The remainder of the list isn't unreachable as you're storing a temporary pointer to it. http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/cpp/list_howto /#simple_implementation -- be sure to read the commentary on the code which explains how the reverse function works. It's O(n). See also Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1 for this similar singly linked list reversal code.

When I read the title of this book, I expected it to be about efficient one-pass algorithms, i.e. ones that you can do quickly on a stream of network information without using a ton of memory or CPU time per packet. I took a course in grad school a few years back about this, and it's a pretty interesting (and relatively recent) subject. You can read more about it here (home page of my prof): http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~muthu/.

Most good math majors would have already gotten their calculus out of way in high school

Are you crazy? The most you can generally do in high school is Calc 1 and Calc 2 (differential and integral calculus, respectively). Above and beyond that I've taken Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, and classes for Laplace Transforms, Fourier Series, and Partial Differential Equations. I will graduate with a minor in Mathematics. Among other things, if I satisified all the major requirements (I will have more math credits than math majors, but not the "right" classes), I would have to take Real Analysis I which is officially called "Advanced Calculus I." So that's basically 5 calculus classes above and beyond what you can do in high school. Rutgers' Math Department's requirements are pretty stringent.