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At the time, many colleges were simply using dialup modems to connect to the university network, one computer at a time. Students in the rooms had no choice but to do the same. Administration of machines was performed, in many of the colleges, by essentially clueless PC-tweaker guys who had never used Unix in their lives and consequently had no idea what CS students wanted and knew was possible. So, around this time, students and a few of the more clued-in staff around the crescent started lobbying their respective administrations, most of whom knew nothing about IT, to start networking their colleges. After *much* butting heads up against heritage-listed stone walls, every college was connected to the wider university network through a very nice fibre-optic link.

At the same time, many of the colleges realised that their PC-tweaker "consultants" didn't have the skills required, and a different solution was required. Whitley went down the student-administered route. Other colleges did not, including my own. While I did consider pushing for it at the time, there are various issues, some of which are general arguments against student-administered IT systems and covered elsewhere, and others were largely political and specific to my particular college.

Anyway, Whitley do deserve plaudits for their system, and I'm glad it works for them. They have been somewhat lucky to have talented and dedicated students to fill the IT committee's role, and they'll have to be careful to make sure that continues.

I still hope that UC kicks their arses in the "chicks footy" (women's Aussie Rules football) tournament this year :)

I am in a similar position to the original poster. I am just about to graduate (6 months from when I was meant to, but anyway), from the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. There basic policy, from what I can garner from this statute is that so long as there is no commercial exploitation, i.e., making money from it, of the IP, then the uni doesn't care what you do. If you do make money from it, then either the uni wants a piece of the pie, or, you must get permission from the IP officer of the uni. That is how things such as Mercury can be released under the GPL.

As for the publishing of thesis, they don't want these published commercially because that means the won't be able to include this in there citation statistics to show that they are the "premier research institution in Australia", as shown here. The more research they do, the greater the income for them.

I am in a similar position to the original poster. I am just about to graduate (6 months from when I was meant to, but anyway), from the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. There basic policy, from what I can garner from this statute is that so long as there is no commercial exploitation, i.e., making money from it, of the IP, then the uni doesn't care what you do. If you do make money from it, then either the uni wants a piece of the pie, or, you must get permission from the IP officer of the uni. That is how things such as Mercury can be released under the GPL.

As for the publishing of thesis, they don't want these published commercially because that means the won't be able to include this in there citation statistics to show that they are the "premier research institution in Australia", as shown here. The more research they do, the greater the income for them.

Now I interview candidates for our company. I was so amazed to find out how clueless some of the candidates who did even had a Masters degree about real world matters. (ie if I ask some one which language you would pick for a certain project, C++ / Java, most of them weren't able to make a judgement using technical merit. That was one simple example). I am not tarnishing degrees at all. I have met some great minds from Univs.

What I was told is US bachelors are a bit shallow and people do the 'real' thing in masters. Dunno how true this is. But from my experience interviewing candidates this seems to have a bit of truth in it.

My take is
Get a degree if you can, but also get as much work experience as possible while you are studying. This will prepare you real world and will give you a taste for it early on. That is what I did, and it certainly helped me land on very good jobs later. Your intern doesn't have to be good paying job. Just get the experience and references. BUild up your network. This will help you a lot when you are looking for a full time job later.

I had a friend back in Univ, who is a high-scorer (avg 95%) and a very keen / hard working student. I am a 75-80% student. But I had very atractive offers purely b/c I had managed to find some summer / part time work (course related of course) when ever I can.

In today's market, if you have a good foundation (a degree) and some solid work experience (summer / part time) you are GOLD .

Actually, my comment was accidentally attached to yours instead of another, where a claim of being able to measure cosmological age from carbon dating was asserted. That being said, it looks liek you'd likely enjoy reading some Kuhn.

Basically I encouter as much problem with NN4.6 as you do. So mostly I use Netscape 3.04 with JS java turn off for most task, (Netscape3 with JS on is suicide)

On my libretto 223 32meg, I can honestly say NN3 is faster than IE5, slightly. And that's what is matters. I only use slashdot, dejanews and ebay anyway. I will only use IE5 when I go to fansy sites. It takes 10 seconds to open NN4.6 on this win98 machine. However I will switch to mozilla as soon as possible. (whenever they make switch window fast enough, m16 is too slow) The nightmare of this win98 gives me remind me daily that I shouldn't use any ms product.

Hopefully SUN will learn something from Netscape, I speak this from my heart. You really ought to try out the sweet 3.04, if you have forgotten how fast it is.

CY

Try here for a recent PhD graduate at the University of Melbourne who has investigated exactly that possbility.

There are other posts from me elsewhere in this thread that have a few more links, as well.

Found a link that points to a very similar piece of research at the Earth Sciences department of the University of Melbourne, although this researcher is talking about the Urban Heat Island, discussed elsewhere in this thread. Such heat islands may be up to 10 degrees celsius at midnight - it that can't cause local weather patterns, what can?

I wish Slashdot had an "Edit Post" option...

I can tell you, he is NOT in the least bit proud to have sent others looking in the right direction by his mistake!!

An excellent reference on extra-solar planets in general is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

Second, the name of the NSDAP is a euphemism, as calling the regimes in China, Cuba, CSSSR and the other likes communist countries.

Communism bases on the equality of men, whereas the ideology of the NSDAP bases on hierarchy and the stupideous idea that certain ethnic groups are superiour to others.

That national-socialism and stalinistic-communism countries resemble in their means is merely based on the fact that they are dictatorships.

In theory, communism isn't the diametral opposite of democracy.

If you had read the "Das Kommunistische Manifest" (The Communist Manifesto) from Engels and Marx you would've noticed that people elect their leaders.

I find communism an theoreticaly attractive but inpracticable idea which leads more or less directly to dictatorship (what I do not find attractive).

I personally find that democracy and capitalism aren't perfect systems, but they're the best known to me.

Capitalsim surely kills. As life does.

Codon Usage Database
DNA is encoded as a series of nucleotides (G,A,T,C), but interpereted in groups of three, called "codons." This is a database of the frequencies of all 4^3 combinations for various species.

Info on Blast and FastA
We can also compare the genomes of various species to see how similar they are. The above link is a short description of how two of the major programs work, BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and FastA (not an acroynm). There's some theoretical background on genome sequence comparison on Dr. Just's page.

If you want use BLAST to search for for things with similar genomes, just grab your favorite chunk of DNA and take it on down to the BLAST homepage at the NCBI, and let it search for chunks of DNA that are similar.
Don't know any gene sequences for you favorite organism? Then head to NCBI and type its scientific name into the "Search GenBank" box at the top.

If you're tired of this computer stuff, learn how actual DNA is scanned onto microarrays for analysis. Or, better yet, learn to build your own!

(And to think I was browsing Slashdot because I wanted to take a break from studying this.)

Professor Graeme Clark developed the bionic ear, also called the Cochlear Implant, in the 1970s. This can give hearing to the deaf. Hopefully somebody will be able to do the same thing for the blind.

http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/p ubs/guides/csirac/

Including a link to the CSIRAC simulator.

Robin

Details of CSIRAC can be found here

Also, documentation is available (not online) here