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This is a treatment for Fragile X Syndrome, in which autism COULD be a result, but not always. You can find a good comparison at the National Fragile X Foundation

Fragile X has a very defined set of characteristics, mental and physical.

My brother suffers from Fragile X and I have taken care of him for most of his life. We participated in a study at the UC Davis Mind Institute in which they recently completely a very comprehensive research program into the disorder. It's only within the last 10-15 years they've really understood enough to properly diagnose patients with Fragile X.

A little over a week ago, I was at a conference and heard a talk by Francois Gygi, a researcher who was one of the big users of Blue Gene/L. He is the principal author of Qbox, a code written to perform quantum-level simulations of condensed matter (i.e. liquids and solids), on massively parallel machines. If I remember correctly, his team was able to use all 65k processors with about 80% parallel efficiency, an impressive achievement for which they won the 2006 Gordon-Bell award. The code is based on density functional theory in a plane-wave basis, so it makes heavy use of FFTs and matrix-matrix multiplies. The tricky part is organizing the topology of the communications, and the fact that there are no tools for debugging/optimization at that scale. So I believe there are some useful appliations that scale very well.

From Norm Matloff's discussion about these unethical practices he quotes Jennifer Pack of Cohen and Grisgby:

You can also advertise in local and ethnic newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier.

The Courier is a newspaper that caters to blacks. Good thing they don't know about computers, right Jennifer?

Grapes were always hand picked, and now they use mechanical harvesters. If the same economics can be applied to oranges, it won't take long for mechanical harvesters to become popular.

This sums it up:

"Mechanical harvesting is also cheaper, especially as yields increase: most estimates say that hand harvesting costs $125 to $150 a ton, while machine harvesting costs $65 to $85 a ton. Four hand harvesters can pick about one acre of grapes a day; a mechanical harvester, which uses a crew of five to harvest around the clock, can harvest 10 to 20 acres a day."

As to your question, I could tell you a lot about why this is so. 1st, cued recall is much easier than free recall. The cue helps stimulate the appropriate associative networks facilitating recall. In particular, a primary focus of mine is cued recall, or recognition. I use the dual process model of recognition: Recollection and Familiarity.

Familiarity, as experienced, is the feeling of familiarity we get when we see something that we've seen before, aside from actually remembering anything about it, which is recollection.

I highly recommend the seminal: Yonelinas. A.P. (2002). The nature of recollection and familiarity: A review of 30 years of research. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 441-517.

You can get it here: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/Yonelinas/index _files/page0003.htm

I took a class from Jim Crutchfield and he said the same thing. Apparently Wolfram stole Mathematica to begin with, though his website makes him out to be a child genius that created the program over a long weekend.

This is true. And here at UC Davis we have done the scientific research to prove it.

or use OpenSEES which is free and open source
http://opensees.berkeley.edu/index.php or http://sokocalo.engr.ucdavis.edu/~jeremic/PDD/

PloS Biology just published a bunch of papers using metagenomics to study the ocean genome. They sailed a yacht from Nova Scotia to the South Pacific, stopping now and then to scoop up a bucket of sea water, filter out the microbes, extract DNA on mass and shotgun sequence them. They discovered enough new proteins to *double* the size of the GenBank database (molecular biology geeks will be impressed by this). Read all about it here. Or just read about it on our blog.

Seriously, I have had phishing email for some of these 80.77.x.y websites recently as well. A "Good on ya!" to MicroSoft & UC Davis! Root the bastards out and stomp 'em!

I'm not sure if boycotts would work or not for the companies that use illegal labor. I'm curious how much money it would take to get an American to bend over 2000 times a day in the hot sun to pick strawberries. I'm guessing it would probably take well over $10/hr. However, it would force the industry to try even harder into engineering expensive complicated machinery to automating some of the process of crop labor. Prices would go up for everyone but American laborers would get paid more, but is the average American going to want to pay more for this? If they did Wal-Mart wouldn't being making the mad money they are now, even with the fact Wal-Mart treats legal Americans like crap, people continue to shop there.

And about H1-B Visa Workers, here is an article I came across written several years ago: Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.

We need to start putting some kind of law that forces companies that are headquartered in the US to pay an wage equivalent to the minimum wage here in America. Although if a company has enough workers overseas it still may be worth the extra overseas/communication costs to pay people overseas that an American minimum wage. Although then companies might start to move their HQ elsewhere.

I've been wondering what industry is next to ship out of the US, and some banks have already started to ship some of their financial dept overseas. Until then try hard not to buy stuff from companies that do this (Nike, Gap, Smuckers, Wal-Mart...), although the problem is its in so many industries and so many products its almost impossible to boycott them all. I try to buy off-brands, so-so-brands and brands I know that are US based (the few there are) and spread the money across many companies, although lots of off-brands are by the name-brands so you can never know where your money is going.

Read this Congressional testimony, by Dr. Norman Matloff at UC Davis. It explains the whole "programmer shortage" scam.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

For anyone interested, here's a link to my former CS professor's page on the subject containing several good articles.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html/

Seems like just a few changes from the Graph-based Intrusion Detection System developed by UC Davis 8 years ago.

See Norm Matloff's website:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

It isn't just about H-1B visas, it also documents significant, serious age discrimination in the IT industry. It starts at about age 35, plus or minus a few years, which, I gather from your statement, is about your age. No wonder you're feeling a bit old. But the age discrimination is driven by the same motivation as the H-1B visa pressure: money. Younger programmers are willing to work unreasonably long hours for their salaries. At 8 hours a day five days a week, a person puts in 2000 hours a year. At an average of 10 hours a day, 2500 hours a year, effectively cutting his/her salary by 25% (Company's cost savings is less due to fixed cost of overhead). This is a significant savings to a company. Once you start to realize that a good life isn't defined by the next release date and you start to work more 8 hour days, your value to the company goes down. They can't complain because they're not paying you overtime. But they can lay you off. You're too old. At 35.

According to this California white paper, the payoff is within the first 4-6 months of operation. Also the cost per kWH is lower than most other alternative energy sources.

Screw him and the ITAA horse he rode in on! He's nothing but a corporate shill who wants to destroy yet even more American livelihoods. He just wants to allow cheap high-tech coolies into this country. There are plenty of skilled workers available. They are older (strike 1). They won't work long hours for low pay (strike 2). They are mobile (strike 3). The IT job market wasn't what it was prior to the dot-com collapse and probably won't recover for a long time. But it is telling that this fucktard says we need more H1-B's. So that means there are jobs out there. Now the trick is to find them.

A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language

No, this is not off topic. Friends don't let friends use Visual PHP#.net.

What you need to learn about quantum computation is a function of what you know. If you know some mathematics, these are good: Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics and A Concise Introduction.... If you don't, I strongly suggest studying linear algebra, at least until you're 100% happy with tensor products of complex vector spaces, learning basic probability theory and then trying the second paper above.

Maybe he stated that because it's true.

If you can produce a reputable, peer-reviewed study to the contrary, please share. Articles by Dailey and Cameron do not qualify.

Hey, me too! Even IE used the blue globe back in the day.

http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=7891

E-mail this story
Printable version
Improbable "Buckyegg" Hatched

September 28, 2006
        graphic: purple and blue balls inside an egg-shaped structure
        Buckyegg (Christine Beavers/graphic)

An egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists at UC Davis, Virginia Tech and Emory and Henry College, Va. The unexpected discovery opens new possibilities for structures for fullerenes, which could have a wide range of uses.

"It was a total surprise," said Christine Beavers, a chemistry graduate student working with Professors Alan Balch and Marilyn Olmstead at UC Davis. Beavers is first author on the paper, published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Fullerenes, sometimes called "buckyballs," are usually spherical molecules of carbon, named after the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. The carbon atoms are arranged in pentagons and hexagons, so their structures can resemble a soccer ball. An important rule -- until now -- is that no two pentagons can touch, but are always surrounded by hexagons.

The "buckyegg" compound was made by collaborating scientists at Virginia Tech, led by Professor Harry Dorn. They heated a mixture of carbon and other ingredients under special conditions to make a mixture of fullerenes, then shipped the products to UC Davis, where Balch's group worked on characterizing their structures.

When Beavers started to map out the structure, she found two pentagons next to each other, making the pointy end of the egg. Initially she thought that the results were a mistake, but she showed the data to Marilyn Olmstead, an expert on X-ray crystallography, and they decided that the results were real. The egg contains a molecule of triterbium nitride inside.

The experiment was actually part of a project to find new, more predictable ways to make fullerenes, Beavers said. The researchers were trying to make fullerenes with atoms of terbium, a metal from the lanthanide series of the periodic table, trapped inside. Metals similar to terbium are used as contrast agents for some medical scanning procedures. By putting these metals inside fullerenes, the researchers hope to make compounds that could be both medically useful and well-tolerated in the body.

The other authors on the research paper are Tianming Zuo and Kim Harich at Virginia Tech and James Duchamp at Emory and Henry College. Funding was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Direct link to story http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=7891

They should be focusing on alternative energy sources themselves because oil isn't going to last forever and they can get a jump on the future with their own research.

First of all, what makes you think they aren't? Read here, here, here, and here, for example.

Secondly, what makes you think a bunch of ex-divorce lawyers in Sacramento who don't have a dime of their own at stake have better ideas about investing in new energy research than folks with PhD's in chemical engineering and economics, who work at a major oil company's research division, and who have their pensions on the line?

Third, the way government research typically works, and works best, is when you already have a gaggle of researchers doing the work because the science (and not a popular vote) says it's worth pursuing, and you have them compete for funding. That's how the NSF works, or DARPA, for example. The stiff competition means only the best (with some obnoxious exceptions) get funded and you need to produce sound results to keep your funding. What do you suppose happens when you turn the process around and begin with the huge pile of cash, then wait to see who it attracts? Do you think you will get the best research? Or will you get a whole lot of goofballs, incompetents, and perpetual-motion weirdos who are just sane enough to use plenty of politically-correct buzzwords in their application?

Fourth, maybe the folks on the other side should also think long-term, too. If you're in the alternative-energy biz, shouldn't you be focussing on alternative capital sources (such as the marketplace), since free money from the taxpayers can't last forever?

ROFL ...

what a bunsh of garbage you wrote, sorry. You deserve a +5 funny, but not +5 Interesting.

One example: For reasons I do not entirely understand, it is assumed that the majority of particles captured will be the anti-particle, thus adding a negative amount of mass to the black hole.

2 mistakes in one row:
a) no, its not assumed that the majority of particles captured will be anti particles.
b) no, anti particles don't have a negative mass, they have an ordinary mass like any particle, and that is a positive one.

What happends in case of hawkins radiation is simple:
We assum there is a "vacuum fluctuation". A virtual pair of a particle and its anti particle is spontanous created. Usually they annihilate each other imediatly again. Now if such a pair comes into existence very close to the event horizon of a black hole, one part my fall into the black hole while the other particle escapes. The escaping particle has a measureable amount of energy. So suddenly in the universe is more energy than before, that can't be. The law of energy conservation dictates the black hole must have lodt energy. The explanation is: the particle that dropped into it had negative energy. So the black hole lodt energy, and that is mass. Hu ... yeah, sounds wiered. A quite good explanation you can find here: http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/Text/Carlip.html#Ha wkrad

angel'o'sphere

from TFA: The safety agency said the batteries were not unique to Dell, meaning that other companies using Sony batteries may also have to issue recalls. Sony has sold its batteries to most of the major computer makers.

I think that's a yes.

also here shows that sony batts have been problematic before. I also remember a recall (3+ years ago) for sony camcorders due a battery leakage. One cam apparently caught fire.

Ah Slashdot. It's always the ignorant guy who has to get insulting. I take it from your simple setup of you and your buddies that you have never set up a scientific experiment. Or if you have you have let go of that training in this instance. Perhaps it's my fault and I should have been more clear. I will do so here.

Firstly, no experiment planned by the test subject would be considered valid. Nobody is going to let a supposed psychic set up the conditions for their own testing. James Randi has volumes to say on that matter so I refer you to him if you want more clarity. So in terms of the analogy, you and your buddies at a baseball diamond with a video camera proves nothing. Heck, I could go to a baseball diamond with a video camera and saw a lady in half. Have I proved that I'm magical?

Secondly, "proving" does not mean having evidence of something ever happening. Not in this case. If that were so then the argument for psychic functioning would have been resolved long ago. It happens. It happens under laboratory conditions too (see reference below). What has not yet been demonstrated under laboratory conditions is "does it happen in a statistically significant number?" (Actually, that's a debatable point depending on how you do the stats. Reference = An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning) In other words, is a persons ability to know something greater than the chance of guessing. If it's not greater than chance than it's not a phenomena. It's just random luck.

Look at the baseball analogy in this light. With just current baseball statistics (where 0.30 is a great batting average) is the home run an actual phenomena or is it just chance? It all depends on how you do the stats. Over all pitches thrown home runs are statistically insignificant. It's just chance. But batter by batter there are those players who have a greater statistical likelihood to hit a home run. They get paid a lot more because of it.

Take one of those players (Sammy Sosa? Mark McGuire?) and put them in a laboratory with conditions arranged by the experimentors. Perhaps the first random factor that would need to be removed would be the pitcher. Too much variation. A machine would be designed that would throw a certain kind of pitch all the time. Or perhaps that is also too random. Maybe the ball should be attached to a high speed mounting that runs on a rail? This is where assumptions come in to play. Since we're all (relatively) familiar with baseball the odds are the the experimentor would choose some reasonable pitch, say a 70 mph fastball right in the strike zone. In the tests of psychic functioning we don't have this advantage. What if we set up the pitching machine to throw 160 mph curveballs? How about a 25 mph pitch at an elevation of 8 ft off the ground? We would call that a ball (an unreasonable pitch), but in an experiment to detect "mind reading" how would we know what constitutes an unreasonable condition? We're totally in the dark here. Already, in our baseball experiment, we see that the conditions can be set up where our subject can hit a home run every time or not at all. What if he was just "off his game" that day? I would actually be very curious to see if just the environment, not in a ball park but in a lab, would affect the psychology of the player enough that his home runs would become statistically insignificant, ie. no greater than chance. Neither Sammy nor Mark can hit a homer "at will". Not unless they set up the conditions themselves, which is not a valid test.

That's the state of psychic research today. It's very statistically oriented and some researchers claim that it has been proven (repeatedly) while others disagree with their statistical method or experimental arrangement and say nothing was proven. Both sides agree that the subject got the right answer sometimes - a home run. The question is do we have any McGuires or Sosas. Until we can say that the phenomena is proven it is near impossible to have a conversation about about how it works. This apparatus is an attempt to gather enough data to say one way or the other.

;->

I will agree that in most cases psychology is the more likely case. What I was getting at with the baseball analogy is that in this field there is always the statistical factor. A person may get the correct answer but did they do so with a statistical liklihood greater than chance. In total volume of all pitches thrown home runs are statistically insignificant. When we focus in on some players they are able to hit home runs with a likelihood that is greater than chance, and they have salaries that reflect this. My question is, would those numbers hold up in the lab? I think it would depend on the design of the experiment. Given that there is familiarity with the mechanics of baseball we could easily design an experiment that would increase or decrease the likelihood of successs, depending on what the researcher wanted to show. We don't have that advantage with so-called psychic phenomena. We're totally in the dark. According to some researchers (Jessica Utts) there is already solid statistical evidence for psychic functioning. Others disagree with her methods and thus claim there is no evidence. (I stole the baseball analogy from her An assessment of the evidence for psychic functioning )

The overall point I was getting at is that there are very few human activities that have been replicated in the lab. I would actually be surprised if most major league hitters could replicate their batting averages under laboratory conditions, but nobody is claiming they can't hit. Yes, I know that claims of telepathy require greater proof than claims of hitting a ball, but how is such proof to be gathered?

;->

  It's dual-intent in the sense that staying home is dual-intent because they could apply for a visa, or being a citizen is dual-intent because you could renounce your citizenship. (Granted that unlike some visas applying for permanent residency doesn't void it, but that doesn't mean it's any faster road to permanent residency than its absence.)

If we compare job levels during irrationally exuberant boom times of 1999 to job levels during the recession of 2002, we'll find "unemployment insurance" running out not only among programmers but among every other field.

In how many other fields where unemployment insurance (no need for sneer-quotes, that's the official name) was running out were there simultaneously calls for importing workers in those fields because of a "desperate labor shortage"?

So let's have such requirements in IT too and let's see how many of the 100,000 unemployed actually can make it through. Most IT jobs are highly skilled and anyone with half a brain who wishes to be in IT shouldn't be able to just because he wants to.

A lot of people in the profession would like such a barrier to entry. How would you implement it? Unlike lawyers, we don't make the laws; unlike doctors and professional engineers we can't appeal to "public safety"; and by our nature and the nature of our employers and the current era forming a trade union is not likely.

What would be the requirements? Many who are in the field today got their undergraduate degrees (or didn't get them) before there were computer science or computer engineering degrees. Good practices are learned on the job, and particular languages and other implementation skills are a very fast moving target.

I can't speak for the other 99,999 unemployed engineers, but I was buzzword-compliant as to education, training, skills and experience. There are similar claims in various articles that Americans don't have necessary skills, but this is rarely backed up by "Here is this job, it needs these skills, I will pay relocation and offer $125,000/year for an American who has these skills or who can become current in them in 3 months time."

H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.

Do you have any evidence that there is skills-based competition?

Advanced degrees are only a surrogate measure, both foreign and domestic, but apparently the H1-B exemption allowing 20,000 more visas for those holding US advanced degrees is going unfilled.

There may be some who do run-of-the-mill programming jobs but that doesn't discount them as run-of-the-mill, its the visa program that ties them to an employer and doesn't give them an opportunity to go for cutting-edge jobs. They can't change employers as projects change. Disconnect the visa from the employer and you won't see many of them doing run-of-the-mill jobs at "prewailing" rates. There may still be some who come through contacts but the market will take care of such low quality workers.

There are good strategic reasons to offer protectionism for domestic high-tech workers, but I'd get off the bandwagon at that point, where the playing field has been leveled by making H1-B workers no more indentured or otherwise disadvantaged (and thus cheaper) than domestic workers. Here we are in complete agreement.

  It's a non-immigrant visa. It allows these folks to get a taste of the American experience for 3 years, send the money home, and get some experience they take home when they leave.

Do they ever thank the thousands of folks who have contributed immensely to the economy?

  When your Unemployment Insurance is running out because it's taken more than 6 months to find a job in your profession, one in which you're told there is some pressing shortage of labor, thanking the loyal citizens of other countries who are competing for the same jobs on an unlevel field may not be topmost in your mind.

If H1B was indeed only to hire cheap labor, has anyone wondered why we don't see foreign architects, accountants, lawyers, professors, health care workers etc in the same numbers as IT professionals since it is allowed by law?

Given that one must be PE, CPA, member of the bar, etc. to work in those fields, there is little to wonder about.

Considering a 5% unemployment rate, 65,000 is less than 0.45% of the total unemployed.

  That's interesting. What do those two numbers have to do with each other?

  The total of unemployed programmers is around 100,000, with more than that number underemployed or working in other fields. (I'm just going to go with Professor Matloff's figures here. The visa is good for 3 or 6 years, and the cap was higher in recent years, so there are several hundred thousand workers currently on H1-B (463,000 as of 2002 (Matloff's note 277 citing Angell.)

What the U.S. should be worried about is not the few jobs that go to these brilliant foreign talent

H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.

but the day when these people do not wish to come to the U.S. anymore!

Why wouldn't they want to come?

  It's a non-immigrant visa. It allows these folks to get a taste of the American experience for 3 years, send the money home, and get some experience they take home when they leave.

Do they ever thank the thousands of folks who have contributed immensely to the economy?

  When your Unemployment Insurance is running out because it's taken more than 6 months to find a job in your profession, one in which you're told there is some pressing shortage of labor, thanking the loyal citizens of other countries who are competing for the same jobs on an unlevel field may not be topmost in your mind.

If H1B was indeed only to hire cheap labor, has anyone wondered why we don't see foreign architects, accountants, lawyers, professors, health care workers etc in the same numbers as IT professionals since it is allowed by law?

Given that one must be PE, CPA, member of the bar, etc. to work in those fields, there is little to wonder about.

Considering a 5% unemployment rate, 65,000 is less than 0.45% of the total unemployed.

  That's interesting. What do those two numbers have to do with each other?

  The total of unemployed programmers is around 100,000, with more than that number underemployed or working in other fields. (I'm just going to go with Professor Matloff's figures here. The visa is good for 3 or 6 years, and the cap was higher in recent years, so there are several hundred thousand workers currently on H1-B (463,000 as of 2002 (Matloff's note 277 citing Angell.)

What the U.S. should be worried about is not the few jobs that go to these brilliant foreign talent

H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.

but the day when these people do not wish to come to the U.S. anymore!

Why wouldn't they want to come?

The IEEE , Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO and researhers such as Norm Matloff speak up against the H-1B abuse.

Lots of folks speak up against it.

The hired gun lobbyist Harris Miller loses to Jim Webb. Miller ran an unaplogetic pro H-1B and pro-outsourcing campaign. Seems the voters in Virginia don't like Harris Miller's record.

Heck, even Milton Friedman calls it a subsidy.

I do remember seeing something very similar when I was younger too.
How acid lakes are formed.
Another description.
You were thinking about Maurice and Katja Krafft, the French vulcanologists that lost their lives in Japan in 1991.

The googles, they do nothing.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html

http://www.itpaa.org/modules.php?name=News&file=ar ticle&sid=622

First of all, we all know large companies like IBM and Microsoft are trying to deflate IT salaries (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html). So it's hard to believe anything they say. But even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, the people who make these statements are completely out of touch with reality. My experience has been, if you aren't in Silicon Valley, it's still incredibly difficult to get a decent job, even five years after things fell apart. In my search, I've been told that a lot of companies in the RTP area were wiped out, and the work still hasn't come back. I'm seeing non entry-level jobs, requiring a B.S. in computer science that pay less than what my cousin was making doing data entry. Data entry! That's not a joke.

A lot of people are saying that it's only the low end jobs that are going. But I don't think that's true. Anything can be outsourced. It's easier to send an entire research department to India than to send a few low level IT people. There are upfront costs, but an indepent research lab doesn't have to worry about communicating over seas. I remember seeing an ad for a DSP engineer with an advanced degree, lots of experience, management ability, and ready to move to India.

It's not just outsourcing. The cap on h1b visas is about 65000 a year. I believe the majority of those tend to be software related. The cap has been as high as about 200000. How many total engineers and scientists graduate each year in this country? There are other "problems" as well. With modern hardware and software tools, one software developer can now do what it used to take an entire team of people to do. We've automated ourselves out of work!

Those exciting jobs she was talking about are few and far between. Unless you have a 3.9 GPA masters from Caltech or MIT, don't expect to get one of those jobs any time soon. And definitely not without ten years experience. Oh, and you have to be willing to move anywhere in the country and work long hours. If you're in the defense industry (for which the demand is very artificial) your odds might be a little better, but things are still awful on the commercial side. You could also go the phd route. If you're willing to work as poor postdoc until you're in your 30s and you have the discipline and the talent, you might get a good job earning real money by middle age. But if you don't succeed, you're worth almost nothing. A few years experience in IT is worth more than 10 (or 20 or 30) years research experience if you're in an IT type field.

If you're going to go into software, I think the best thing to do is start a small company . The work exists; it's just a matter of who's going to be doing it.

I believe this relates to shannon's theorem as used in audio. This states that a continuous waveform may be reconstructed completely from samples taken at greater than twice the highest component frequency of the waveform (Nyquist rate) -- and the waveform can be analyzed for frequency content via fourier analysis. This is EXTREMEMLY important in digital audio -- because that's how it works and how we reconstruct an analog wveform from 1's and 0's.
Admittedly, throwing the ipod reference in was a troll, but that's how digital audio works ladies and gents -- and that's how your ipod works too.
http://graphics.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/PhDStudie s/Winter2000/SamplingTheory.html

I second that. I was laid off three times in 2001, and did not find another permanent position until 2003. After reading this paper it was clear to me that, being 45, I was dried up in IT and would not see another opportunity. My current job SUCKS DONKEY BALLS - I work for a bunch of 1d1075 that know nothing of process or how to put a program together. But, the company's paying (mostly) for my education where I'm going to get a business degree and shuffle off this mortal IT coil. As soon as I get the paper, I'm outta here faster than you can offshore my position. Wish me luck.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

"Yay, would this mean outsourcing is going down, or that the industry is growing? Also, does this mean that it's actually worth it for me to continue my education and get a degree in Computer Engineering? "

The answer to the second question is no..... It's just the same pattern repeating itself. (1998, 1999, 2000, 2005...)

... Tech companies are now forced into the domestic JOB market as the H-1B quota is closed for the remainder of the federal fiscal year (til Oct 1).

Hence ALL the squealing by President Bush and the industry lobbyists.
Lobbyists perpetuate their scam by claiming every position staffed by a contractor/consultant as unfilled !!

...specifically, the MITS Altair 8800. There's a wonderful section in Steven Levy's Hackers about it and how baffled the company was at the intense demand for such a thing; from the link above, "...results of a program were indicated by the pattern of flashing lights on the front panel." That wasn't a status display, it was the output.

After doing quite a bit of research, I discovered two things.

First, there is no "U.S. Code" (I assume you mean federal law) governing corporate profits.

Second, virtually every state has a law that DOES require maximizing profits.

http://blj.ucdavis.edu/article/533/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_resp onsibility
http://www.business-ethics.com/resources/article_c orporatelaw.html

Each of these links add information, but because the laws are specific to each state, I'm not going to look them up for you.

Regardless, the point is clear.

An average toiletseat is apparently more hygienic than an average kitchencounter.

Generally. But maybe it's time to mention again the research reports starting in the mid 90s saying that wooden cutting boards are the most sterile surfaces.

These studies have now been repeated by a number of labs. You can find them by googling for "cutting-board bacteria", which right now gets 88,400 hits.

Some of the reports describe smearing a board with bacterial cultures, culturing them overnight in a warm, moist incubator, and in the morning finding all the bacteria dead. (But they don't recommend treating your cutting boards that way.)

There has been a bit of hypothesizing about this. One suggestion from botanists starts with the fact that plants don't have immune systems. The wood in a tree is dead and can't repair itself. So how does a tree manage to live for centuries without being devoured by bacteria? The idea is that woody plants have evolved ways of filling the dead wood cells with gunk that inactivates or kills bacteria and fungi. But further research is needed.

Anyway, one conclusion from this is that you are better off using dense woods for cutting boards and counter tops. The inevitable cracks and scratches will contain far fewer bacteria than surfaces of other tested materials.

What I wonder is why I haven't read any comparisons between wooden cutting boards and toilet seats. Maybe the toilet manufacturers have discovered a better bacteria- and fungus-killing material than maple wood.

What I want is a wooden keyboard, of nice maple or cherry wood. I wonder if anyone makes them? Hey, why not ask google? Yep - there are several manufacturers. Some of them look really pretty. Maybe I'll get one.

Whenever one of these spontaneous particle pairs pops out of the vacuum, there is always one matter particle and one antimatter particle. Shouldn't there be an equal probability that either one could fall into the black hole (unless it's a charged black hole, of course)?

If equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles are going in, then shouldn't they balance each other out and result in a net effect of zero?

And what about anti-matter black holes? Granted, anti-matter is so rare that it's extremely unlikely to arise in nature. But if one did arise, then by absorption of positive matter, would we not have the exact opposite dilemmas that we have with regular black holes? E.g. if a "regular matter" black hole evaporates naturally, then anti-matter black holes should naturally grow, and vice-versa.

I'm not sure if you meant "most efficient for humans". Otherwise Studies show otherwise..

1. our Miocene hominoid ancestor was probably not an efficient quadruped since modern hominoids are inefficient quadrupeds, and 2. hominid bipedalism is as efficient as average mammalian quadrupedalism at normal speeds. The first point was proved by Taylor & Rowntree, who tested two chimpanzees for energetic efficiency during bipedalism and quadrupedalism and found the surprising result that the two patterns used about the same amount of energy. Both gaits used 50% more energy than the average quadrupedal mammal. Such a result makes sense because the hominoid body is adapted to a certain style of arboreal locomotion which makes terrestrial gait energetically costly. The second point is confirmed by recalculating the energy expenditure of humans and chimpanzees walking at normal speeds: the human energetic cost is about average for the mammals, but the chimpanzee still uses about 50% more energy per body weight.

To sum up:
For non-human hominids, their is no efficiency gain for bipedalism.
For humans, bipedalism is the most efficient and we are the best at it,
but our best is only equal to the average mammalian quadruped gait.
and it just plain sucks to be a chimpanze on the ground no matter what.

Here's a link with some interesting info.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_s Ec5

There are some of us still employed in our 40s. I'm 48 and have been coding since I was 38. So I buck the trend. One reason is I write good code. My stuff works. I avoid becoming a victim of age discrimination because I'm also a karate instructor the size of a linebacker and can still beat most men in a fight. So my coworkers don't yet think of me as old. They just think I'm nuts.

But the vast majority of my coworkers and new hires are in their 20s. Most of the programmers I know who have been laid off in their 30s or 40s, did not fare very well in their searce for new jobs. Many ended up doing something else. There are counter-examples like me but I am not typical.