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Bidding is open for a Hitachi S-6180 from the University of Wisconsin... mds.bussvc.wisc.edu

Five grand (and a the winning bid) and it can be yours.

I think that a fusion propulsion system might be much easier to do than a fusion power system. (For one thing, in a propulsion system you want to eject waste products out the back,) That, alas, also implies that the money being but into ITER will not help us much with propulsion, which no one seems to be pushing except a small group at the U of Wisconsin.

You should contact the legal teams at the various universities listed in the summary and tell them about your orientation, so that they can stop misleading their international students. For instance, before commenting, I read the section "What about taxes?" at this link:

http://iss.wisc.edu/intemployer.html

Looking at the cosmic ray particle spectrum (google 'cosmic ray spectrum') one can see stuff at 10^20 eV, that is a lot higher energy than the couple of TeV these particle accelerators achieve (no mean feat). Here's a list of some observatories that look at cosmic rays:

Pierre Auger Observatory : http://www.auger.org/index.html
HESS : http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/
MAGIC : http://magic.mppmu.mpg.de/
Icecube http://icecube.wisc.edu/

Well, if solar electricity is generated and transmitted to 400 miles away where it is then used in 1000 blenders, toasters, etc, the heat effect of that sunlight is now displaced. The effect of moving the sun's heat energy from places which currently receive it the most (best candidates for solar panels) to other regions, the effects is evening out the delivery of the sun's energy, thus effecting weather patterns and ecosystems in many ways.

We already have that occurring with the existing system, and it's nothing compared to Urban Heat Islands. Greenhouse Gases play a role in UHIs, but so do the materials cities are made of.

According to the first link, waste heat may be responsible for up to 1/3rd of the UHI effect. This will certainly get worse as we use more energy, but I have hope that reduction in greenhouse gases will help relieve the UHI problem.

If anything, I'd say that moving solar energy around the globe in large scales has to have less of an effect than pulling sequestered carbon out of the ground and burning it on large scales.

A draft of the actual article is at:

I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)

That has been done: Cotton-top tamarins (Hauser et al., 2001) and rats (Toro & Trobalón, 2005) can do the Saffran-type statistical computations. However, in contrast to what Saffran et al. claim, this type of computations cannot be used at all for learning words from fluent speech; if you give learners just the Saffran-type statistical cues, you can play 6 words in a loop for 600 times, and people don't remember any words at all (Endress & Mehler, 2009). Apparently, the Saffran-kind of statistics lead to a very different kind of memory encoding than what is used for encoding actual words, and is actually also a different mechanism from the one the tamarins used in our experiment.

A draft of the actual article is at:

http://adendress.googlepages.com/endress-affixation.pdf

The experiment did not proceed as you indicated (I'm not criticizing you, I had to go to find the draft to determine this). The monkeys were presented with a "familiarization" stage that consisted of ~30 minutes of "words" where "shoy" was either always a prefix or always a suffix (depending on condition) to one set A of stem syllables, then were presented with a "test" stage where they heard "shoy" sometimes as a prefix and sometimes as a suffix on a different set B of stem syllables. They found that monkeys who had heard "shoy" as a prefix in the familiarization stage looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items that had "shoy" as a suffix (as compared to test items that had "shoy" as a prefix), and that those who had heard "shoy" as a suffix in familiarization looked at the speaker longer after hearing test items with "shoy" as a prefix.

They do seem to have shown that the monkeys can do some sort of abstraction when performing this "shoy-first or shoy-last" sequence analysis. None of the test items ever appeared in the familiarization stage (since the stem syllables of familiarization were different from those of test), so they aren't simply indicating whether they've heard that particular sound file or not. It's also interesting that they could do this in the face of (some) talker variation (due to sex and other factors), as more than one talker was used to produce stimulus materials.

I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)

And yes, I Am A Linguist.

The ban on federal funding limited interest, but no-one is an overstatement:

http://www.news.wisc.edu/11985
http://www.news.wisc.edu/15508

(The second article talks about iPS cells; My take is that they are also willing to work with hES cells.)

The ban on federal funding limited interest, but no-one is an overstatement:

http://www.news.wisc.edu/11985
http://www.news.wisc.edu/15508

(The second article talks about iPS cells; My take is that they are also willing to work with hES cells.)

Note that you apparently converted them to PPT before opening them in OpenOffice (note the .ppt, and not .pptx, in the title bar). This is, I think, what the OOXML import filter for earlier versions of PowerPoint (which you are clearly using) does. It also means that what you're saying isn't very relevant, because you're using the PPT import filter in Impress, not the PPTX one (which is the one I'm saying is pretty crappy).

This is fine if you want something to distribute for informational purposes, and you can even present from it. However, it appears to have some of the same flavor of working with a Photoshop PSD file or a Gimp whatever file in a way that makes heavy use of layers, then saving it as a PNG (which requires flattening those layers), then wondering why you can't really edit the resulting image anywhere near as nicely as before.

Try this experiment. Try to resize that box on the lower left (I'm trying it Impress, but I suspect it'll be the same in PowerPoint). Can't do it reasonably? Can you change the text? No?

That's because it converted the PowerPoint shapes in the PPTX file -- which are freely editable in PowerPoint 2007 -- to raster images, then embeds those images. It "flattened the image".

I've put two new files up there... editing.png shows what I get if I resize the image (I deleted the other things on the slide first, but neither did I cherry pick what I was changing. The other elements of the slide behave the same). I also put up the PPT file that I used for this test. It's converted by using the "Save As Office 1997-2003" export in PowerPoint 2007. I suppose it's possible that other methods (like the standalone converter or import filter for earlier versions of Office that MS distributes) would do something different, but I have my doubts. Regardless, if you can actually make reasonable edits, let me know how you got that "Ppt0000000.ppt" file.

Note that you apparently converted them to PPT before opening them in OpenOffice (note the .ppt, and not .pptx, in the title bar). This is, I think, what the OOXML import filter for earlier versions of PowerPoint (which you are clearly using) does. It also means that what you're saying isn't very relevant, because you're using the PPT import filter in Impress, not the PPTX one (which is the one I'm saying is pretty crappy).

This is fine if you want something to distribute for informational purposes, and you can even present from it. However, it appears to have some of the same flavor of working with a Photoshop PSD file or a Gimp whatever file in a way that makes heavy use of layers, then saving it as a PNG (which requires flattening those layers), then wondering why you can't really edit the resulting image anywhere near as nicely as before.

Try this experiment. Try to resize that box on the lower left (I'm trying it Impress, but I suspect it'll be the same in PowerPoint). Can't do it reasonably? Can you change the text? No?

That's because it converted the PowerPoint shapes in the PPTX file -- which are freely editable in PowerPoint 2007 -- to raster images, then embeds those images. It "flattened the image".

I've put two new files up there... editing.png shows what I get if I resize the image (I deleted the other things on the slide first, but neither did I cherry pick what I was changing. The other elements of the slide behave the same). I also put up the PPT file that I used for this test. It's converted by using the "Save As Office 1997-2003" export in PowerPoint 2007. I suppose it's possible that other methods (like the standalone converter or import filter for earlier versions of Office that MS distributes) would do something different, but I have my doubts. Regardless, if you can actually make reasonable edits, let me know how you got that "Ppt0000000.ppt" file.

Anybody out there know a good emulator for teaching assembly programming?

SPIM is a possibility. It was used in a few courses (operating systems, compilers) at UCB some years ago. (Don't know if it's still used.)

(can convert from and to ODF/OOXML)

Maybe for Word that's true, but between PowerPoint and OO Presenter my experience is that the PPTX import filter on OpenOffice is just trash. (See samples; unfortunately I forget what version of OpenOffice produced them.)

OO certainly does compete with MS office

I would say the following: OO Writer is pretty good, and OO Calc is pretty good. I have some issues with some things, but they're either about relatively minor features (like how Writer's track changes feature kind of sucks) or are just a "I'm used to MS Office" thing.

But PowerPoint vs. Impress I think is still no contest in favor of PowerPoint. This is true if you go back a couple versions of PowerPoint, and the difference just gets bigger with PPT 2k7.

There are two standard academic journals where the specialized stuff in Environmental Economics is published: Land Economics and The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Carlin has published only a single article in Land Econ and none in JEEM during his entire career dating back to the mid-1960s. Furthermore, he only began publishing on the economics of global warming in 2007. Finally, anyone who is first rate coming out of a Ph.D. Econ program in MIT gets a Prof job at Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago, etc. The second raters get placements at Nebraska, Auburn, Oregon State, etc. It is only the dregs that end up as civil servants in places like the EPA. I would almost completely dismiss him except that I did notice that he had co-authored a couple of papers 15 years ago with Kip Viscusi who is certainly not a lightwieght in the field of risk assessment but who has also happily accepted money from Exxon for studying the economics of punitive damages resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill case.

Bottom line: Carlin is a 60 year-old fart who has done no significant research in his entire career and has a political viewpoint that is coloring what little work he has done.

Try this one. Fairly detailed.
http://ecow.engr.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/get/ne/571/corradini/davis-bessenarrative2002.doc
The previous link was the first one on google I clicked on. Also, I noticed the plant engineer is serving time for his part in this.

Tuition is just a way to trim down their applicant pool. The state pays much more of your tuition than you do.

That's a cute one-liner, but if only it were true. The UW-Madison in-state tuition ($8020 for 2009-2010) is about the same as the state subsidy per student ($9379, 2008-2009). This doesn't factor in the additional $8040 per student for room and board. Nonresident of Wisconsin/Minnesota tuition is about $22,000 plus room and board.

Almost no RAID systems can do what ZFS does. Hints: end to end checksumming; self-healing; copy on write; ...

No. This is missing from RAID-on-a-card and software raid like LVM2, but, NetApp Hitachi and EMC all have checksums and all do self-healing. See

(1)
(2)
(3).

ZFS pundits make a big deal about the ``end-to-end"" nature of their checksums, but the storage vendors design aroudn actual observed failures while the ZFS pundits tend to tell anecdotal war stories or defend against hypothetical problems. It's good that ZFS has protection from the failures their competitors have discovered, but the aggressive punditry is dishonest FUD.

NetApp does COW and has similar high-performing snapshots/clones at the cost of needing a defragmenter for databases to stay fast. However NetApp has said defragmenter and ZFS doesn't.

Almost no RAID systems can do what ZFS does. Hints: end to end checksumming; self-healing; copy on write; ...

No. This is missing from RAID-on-a-card and software raid like LVM2, but, NetApp Hitachi and EMC all have checksums and all do self-healing. See

(1)
(2)
(3).

ZFS pundits make a big deal about the ``end-to-end"" nature of their checksums, but the storage vendors design aroudn actual observed failures while the ZFS pundits tend to tell anecdotal war stories or defend against hypothetical problems. It's good that ZFS has protection from the failures their competitors have discovered, but the aggressive punditry is dishonest FUD.

NetApp does COW and has similar high-performing snapshots/clones at the cost of needing a defragmenter for databases to stay fast. However NetApp has said defragmenter and ZFS doesn't.

Yep, very much still a part of a CS education. In fact, I'm in such a class right now. Goes fairly slow for my liking, but certainly gets the job done. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs367-1/

...can be found here:

http://nitrolab.engr.wisc.edu/

has (or will have)

You mean: wioll haven (Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional)
Source: Dr D. Streetmentioner

If it's to save money... maybe they should try not leaving all several hundred of our puplic computers on all night, and for the whole summer and winter vacations!

You are aware that those lab machines will probably be running Condor or BOINC during that time? Just because the machine isn't in use by someone sitting at it doesn't mean that it's doing nothing useful.

• many biological applications need a large amount of data -- and the moment that you need to transfer gigabytes to each of the nodes (as they do not share storage) the whole thing is no longer reasonable.
• you always have to take into account a 1-5% job loss, so if you want e.g. 1000 simulation runs, you should dispatch 1200 runs to be on the safe side. The job loss comes from a) machine being switched off b) machine having all sorts of random troubles (disk full, some weird software interaction) c) some jobs take awfully long to execute, so when 99% of your other jobs are done, you just need to kill the others.
• Sometimes you rather launch the job locally and wait two days rather then spend half a day on preparing and testing the batch submission and get the results next morning (my time is more valuable than the CPU time...)

All in all, you get lots of CPU, but low reliability. Which is fine for many applications. Additionally, not only you prevent energy wastage, but you also use the hardware more efficiently (so that the brand new quad core of the dpts secretary actually gets used in a reasonable way).
By the way -- our admins hate it, when Windows computers are being switched off. They run the updates at night, as during the day the users are likely to stop an update that takes to long. I was being bashed for switching off computers during night :-)
j.

say hello to GSview

Larrabee has a dedicated z-buffer module, there was no place for bringing it up in the article...Plus, much research has already been done in this are which the article didn't cover. Here's an example: Toward a Multicore Architecture for Real-time Ray-tracing -- this architecture benefits from secondary rays by equipping each tile with a shared L2 cache and exploiting locality
Also, 20% increase isn't much....really. With software simulators of new architecture, something between 10-20% increase in speed is within the margin of error.

1. Microbenchmarking becomes too difficult when two or more cores of different types are used
2. Inter-core communication takes a hit because you'll end up designing new flit routers (or even newer protocols) that efficiently route packets within cores that have different communication topology
3. Failure of one core can render the chip useless, whereas in the case symmetric multicore design, failure of one core means other cores are still functional and the company can market them separately.
4. Production issues involving 1,2, and 3 above.

Eventually we'll end up with a dynamic multicore design which seems more promising than asymmetric designs. Some research has been done in this area (symmetric vs. asymmetric vs. dynamic via threading): http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/papers/tr1593_amdahl_multicore.pdf

There's a quick way to tell if someone has actually managed to motivate themselves enough to click, and that's if they epically fail to check a link to see the original source:

Figure 12 of Hauser, Robert M. 2002. "Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success." CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev). Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. The figure is labelled "Wisconsin Men's Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More" and is found at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf

Why do you hate social science?

OK, full disclosure: I don't know anything about defamation law in India. I can only speak to defamation in the United States.

Standards for defamation will vary by state, but very generally it amounts to making a about someone that causes some measurable harm to their reputation, employment prospects, or exposes them to public hatred or obloquy.

In U.S. law, this gets murky because we have the First Amendment. The First Amendment guarantees free speech, but doesn't generally give you carte blance to tell scurrilous lies about people. However, the U.S. Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan set the bar a little higher if you're a public figure trying to bring a defamation suit. If you are such an individual (politician, celebrity, etc.), you have to prove that the statement was made with "actual malice," meaning it was made with knowledge of falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth. If you're not a public figure, you don't have to prove that the defaming party knew what he said was false, although he can assert truth as a defense to your claim.

So to answer your question, sarcasm (probably) wouldn't be enough under U.S. law, and if you're a political organization, you almost certainly wouldn't have a good case.

For ideas:

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm

[Mirror: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:Czfkx2_qDggJ:sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm+http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/wop.htm&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
]

(He had our attention when he rolled into the lecture hall on a liquid-nitrogen propelled tricycle..)

[Prof. Sprott -- sorry about the Slashdotting...]

What? In America we have something called you shouldn't go to jail if you didn't do anything wrong. If you look out your window and someone's being stabbed you can pour a glass of lemonade and set out a lawn chair for all we care, you are not liable. See Duty to rescue. It doesn't go over the reasoning behind it, but this article does. It's pretty dense but I think the issue really boils down to beliefs about our responsibilities to each other. Although we do have welfare tacked on, we're at least supposedly a cold, heartless capitalist regime with no qualms about suppressing and exploiting the poor because that's their place.. unlike more socialist states like the EU. We can hardly feel completely inculpable if a poor person we pass every day starves (that's not to say many people wouldn't intervene) in this dog-eat-dog game of bottom lines without holding these kind of ideas about duty to rescue in more pressing circumstances.

But the killer thing here is that MapReduce says absolutely nothing about the updates problem.

That's because MapReduce is a data processing system, not a data storage system. You should read about BigTable, which is the data storage system we use (I work at Google), which does support updates.

In your comments on this thread, I think you miss the key difference between an RDBMS and a system like BigTable. BigTable is almost perfectly horizontally scalable. When you need more capacity, it really is as simple as throwing more machines at the problem.

RDBMS's can never give you this kind of horizontal scalability, because they make a promise to you that you can transactionally modify any two bits of data anywhere in your database. Fulfilling this promise requires that either your whole database lives on a single machine, or that you use a distributed transaction protocol like 2PC (which totally kills performance).

So when your database gets busier than a single machine can handle, you have to manually partition your database into multiple physical databases. All the nice RDBMS features like transactions, joins, foreign keys, triggers, etc. can only (reasonably) work within a single physical database. The divide between physical databases is something your application code has to deal with -- it has to know to direct its queries to the correct partition. And repartitioning your data to run on more machines later is an invasive procedure, both operationally and to your application's code.

BigTable is designed around the reality that a database of any significant size will need to run on more than one machine. It only guarantees that you can transactionally modify data within a single row. This gives BigTable the ability to move rows around between machines without the application even knowing this is happening. If you add more machines, BigTable can immediately start moving some subset of your rows onto this new machine.

I recommend reading this paper for a far more in-depth look at this pattern. The key point of this paper is:

A scale-agnostic programming abstraction must have the notion of entity as the boundary of atomicity.

BigTable calls such entities "rows."

Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers?

It doesn't surprise me that you can't find good information about this. Even if you found valid pricing for a medium-sized business, I doubt that universities have the same pricing. Universities themselves also negotiate directly with Microsoft (at least the larger ones do), leading to differences in pricing and terms. Unis also often negotiate to obtain student pricing on products like Office. For example:

University of Wisconsin Office 2007 Enterprise: $72
University of Michigan Office 2007 Enterprise: $47

The real question is, if you're "in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions", how do you not have access to the current expenditures on software licensing? What you really need are current expenditures and knowledge about when the current contract expires.

it just bothers me that there is so much unused computing power at lying around now, with the number of thick clients my uni has running idle most of the day you could probably do some interesting simulations with all that power.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/
Schedule it to run whenever the screensaver starts up. Some universities use it to make unused workstations in labs part of a research system or renderfarm.

In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.

docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.

This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)

It also didn't read my presenter notes.

As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.

(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)

In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.

docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.

This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)

It also didn't read my presenter notes.

As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.

(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)

In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.

docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.

This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)

It also didn't read my presenter notes.

As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.

(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)

In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org.

docx has probably received a ton more effort than pptx, but I just did a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, and for an experiment tried opening it in Impress 3, and it failed miserably; it's not even remotely usable.

This is a typical slide from the presentation I'm talking about; this is what it looks like in Impress 3. Even slides with just text render like someone crapped on the slide. (I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt about the fact that the text size changed in case there are font issues; I'm opening it in OO for Linux, not Windows. But the new borders on the text box? The date that flat out wasn't there in the original? The lack of the background color?)

It also didn't read my presenter notes.

As for non-MS Office compatibility features, the lack of a presenter view in Impress makes it a non-starter IMHO.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while Writer is damn good and I have only pretty minor complaints about it relative to Word, once you get outside Writer the comparative quality drops tremendously.

(While I'm at it, if OO wants to provide the PPT killer, provide a better animation system based on keyframing, like Flash or a 3D modeler or something. PowerPoint's is only slightly more fun to use than stabbing your eyes out with a fork for any animations that are intended to convey useful information.)

Neutrinos have observable effects. That's what this thing is for.

They weren't observable until 1935 when they were discovered.
Did they not exist before then?

Neutrinos have observable effects. That's what this thing is for.

I work with the engineers who built the TWO drill heads(UW Physical Sciences Lab). The one in your picture is the Firn drill, which "drills" (really melts) it's way through the first 50 feet of snow. The cooler drill is the enhanced hot water drill, which uses hot water to blast through the ice to a depth of 2,400 meters. The reason for two separate drills is the hot water drill isn't efficient at going through the firn layer, as the water seeps away. Also, having two drills greatly reduces drilling time because the firn drill can start another hole while the hot water drill is drilling through the ice.

To learn more about the drills, the Digital Optical Modules(DOM), they detect the neutrinos(most were also built at PSL), see this page.

I work with the engineers who built the TWO drill heads(UW Physical Sciences Lab). The one in your picture is the Firn drill, which "drills" (really melts) it's way through the first 50 feet of snow. The cooler drill is the enhanced hot water drill, which uses hot water to blast through the ice to a depth of 2,400 meters. The reason for two separate drills is the hot water drill isn't efficient at going through the firn layer, as the water seeps away. Also, having two drills greatly reduces drilling time because the firn drill can start another hole while the hot water drill is drilling through the ice.

To learn more about the drills, the Digital Optical Modules(DOM), they detect the neutrinos(most were also built at PSL), see this page.

I work with the engineers who built the TWO drill heads(UW Physical Sciences Lab). The one in your picture is the Firn drill, which "drills" (really melts) it's way through the first 50 feet of snow. The cooler drill is the enhanced hot water drill, which uses hot water to blast through the ice to a depth of 2,400 meters. The reason for two separate drills is the hot water drill isn't efficient at going through the firn layer, as the water seeps away. Also, having two drills greatly reduces drilling time because the firn drill can start another hole while the hot water drill is drilling through the ice.

To learn more about the drills, the Digital Optical Modules(DOM), they detect the neutrinos(most were also built at PSL), see this page.

I work with the engineers who built the TWO drill heads(UW Physical Sciences Lab). The one in your picture is the Firn drill, which "drills" (really melts) it's way through the first 50 feet of snow. The cooler drill is the enhanced hot water drill, which uses hot water to blast through the ice to a depth of 2,400 meters. The reason for two separate drills is the hot water drill isn't efficient at going through the firn layer, as the water seeps away. Also, having two drills greatly reduces drilling time because the firn drill can start another hole while the hot water drill is drilling through the ice.

To learn more about the drills, the Digital Optical Modules(DOM), they detect the neutrinos(most were also built at PSL), see this page.

This is a huge project with a long list of collaborating organizations http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/collaborators.php. I know there's a large number of Ice Cube folks here at U Wisconsin-Madison.

The scale of the project really is something. Neutrinos interact with other matter very infrequently -- something on the order of 60 billion neutrinos pass through you each second, and you probably never noticed. They need such a large volume so that they can see a reasonable number of interactions. It's crazy stuff.

See Fig. 1

Er, not to deflate the coolness of this mission (and it is a damn cool mission), but Juno was selected in 2005. All that this is saying is that it hasn't been derailed, although their wording obscures this. See the mission website.

Once again, NASA's press office shows that it's keen on issuing a hyped release about any old thing.

FYI, his SIGCOMM '88 paper ("Development of the Domain Name System") is available here.

On the one hand, you've cloud computing resources, which supply minimal information, some source but a LOT of buzzwords, versus distributed computing versus grid computing, where there's a lot more information on what is (and is not) provided, and a lot more code is there. Ultimately, the best way to tell if something is worthwhile is to see if the provider thinks it's worthwhile. Cloud providers don't think it worthwhile to do for profit the work grid providers do for free, ergo cloud providers don't rate their own service highly. If they don't, why should anyone else?

Here are some REAL NUMBERS - if you drive faster you _will_ have more drag and therefore consume more fuel. Yes, there are islands of greater efficiency on your engine and in higher gears you are running more efficiently, but these do not compare to the increase in resistance from driving faster. You can see real data from a 1998 VW Bug run repeatably and reliably for EPA testing here:http://picasaweb.google.com/waterppk/ResistanceNumbers#/ [Sorry for the crappy format, but I'm not going to post these on my website so you guys can nuke it!].

Disclaimer: I'm a mechanical engineering student at UW-Madison, I'm on the hybrid vehicle team and am working on a masters in engine research :) http://www.uwhybrid.org/ChallengeX/ http://www.erc.engr.wisc.edu/

I mean, somethin like this?