In my mind, the weak link here is clearly the watch. Watch technology isn't very complicated (read: very big), and how many designs could their possibly be?
The watch is running Linux; how many possible programs can there be? More than there are particles in the universe...
There are lots of challenge/response identification schemes that run nicely on my old 200 Mhz PII box that would be very hard to crack with current technology, so I would have faith in that part of the system.
If you live in the state of New York, there is already a statewide "Do not call" registry and you can sign up at the webpage at this link. It definitely reduced unsolicited calls for us dramatically.
I got a bunch of iBooks (for myself and grant-supported research students who are writing code for some of my projects) and the machines are great. We can move source code from there to our Beowulf clusters no problem, the students love them, and they were $1100 a year ago for the most recent batch (ed pricing, the ed pricing on Dell laptops was $1000 and that was for a clunker.) They are even cheaper now. Our `killer apps' are vi and gcc, basically, and under OS X stuff works like they expect it to, from their Unix experience, pretty much.
I've been able to recruit strong research students by giving them iBooks as well as a decent stipend, and Airport works so well that it's saved me the trouble of worrying about wiring the lab they use and they love using Airport all over the place. I've got some dedicated and loyal students who are doing lots of cool things and being able to give them good machines is definitely responsible for part of that.
There was a recent Guardian article about how Kazakhstan was looking towards importing European nuclear waste as a way of rescuing their economy. The company planning this expects to use abandoned uranium mines; the company president was quoted as
We get $10 for extracting a cubic metre of uranium. We would get $100 to deposit the same amount of nuclear waste.
(I think he meant extracting uranium ore- $10/ m^3 is a very good price for uranium...)
It makes more sense when you realize that they already have their own huge radioactive disposal problem, and the marginal cost of a little bit more disposal is much less than what other, far more crowded European countries would be willing to pay to get it off their hands. They are the ninth largest country in the world with a population of 16 million, so there is significantly more room for waste disposal than in nearby Western Europe, which may be the region in the world most sensitive to waste disposal concerns of all kinds.
Just as in other environmental decisions, there are immediate and long-term goals that need to be balanced. Economic factors affect these decisions- an affluent community would rather have an expensive recycling facility, whereas an impoverished community would think it is nuts to spend big bucks on that and would go with the cheaper, traditional solution of a town dump, complete with perpetual tire-fire. These decisions are motivated by economic factors- given ample resources, most everyone would prefer a cleaner environment. But not everyone is willing to pay for it, so there ends up being disparity between decisions that affect the environment based upon local economic conditions.
Internationally, this comes as third-world countries which are happy to exchange cleaner air for lower-cost production which allows essential economic growth. Presumably, residents (or at least political representatives of residents) value the immediate economic boon over the long-term consequences. In the case of disposal, since there are already large waste-disposal issues of their own, the marginal cost of slightly larger waste-disposal issues apparently is outweighed by the massive price other countries would be willing to pay to get it off their hands. Unfortunately, decisions like these (trading in a long-term cost for a short-term benefit), are often political, and political decisions rarely favor long-term sustainable policies over short-term boons.
The most impressive open-souce computer algebra system is Axiom, which has a homepage here.
The compiler Aldor for Axiom is available for download. Axiom was developed at a number of places, including IBM, and it being released as open-source is something that has only been finalized in the last couple of months, so the distribution is just beginning to be more widely available.
One thing that comes up a lot with Beowulf clusters that people don't always realize is deciding what the bottleneck is. There are basically three possible limitations:
Processor-bound clusters- these have adequate network and storage support and are held back by the number of CPUs.
Network-bound clusters- these have inadequate network capability and much of the time the processors are waiting for information over the network.
Storage-bound clusters- these can have adequate processor-to-processor network capabilities, but share a slow hard drive, so time is spent waiting for IO.
Of course, the same cluster can be bound in different ways depending upon the applications that are being run. It is important to realize what the limitations are for your desired tasks and focus your improvements there. I have seen several clusters where they spent an ungodly amount of money on Mirrinet and a massive amount of time getting it working when they were running easily-parallelizable tasks that were really bound just by the number of CPUs.
You can hang external monitors off of $999 iBooks (as pointed out by others) and the towers if you really cannot imagine being without your 17" monitor. What many people don't realize is that it can be possible to hang a different monitor off your old CRT iMac or the eMac. Why you would want to do this is a different question, since the internal displays are pretty reasonable... I know for sure that the older CRT iMacs had a standard VGA cable buried in there. When a buddy of mine got the first variety of iMac in 1998, we hung a 21" monitor and it drove it very nicely. Of course, it looks like crap since your formerly sleek computer is in pieces, but if you have a nice monitor around, and don't mind a desk that looks like a tornado hit it and a voided warranty, it may be worth doing. The eMac doesn't have to be disassembled to get external video- it has its own little external mini-VGA port. It can only drive external monitors at the same resolution as the internal monitor, though. 17" monitors can be nice, but the eMac display is pretty nice, and the price is pretty good- check out LowEndMac's various pages: eMac deals, flat panel iMac deals and CRT iMac deals and of course Dealmac and the Dealmac basement if you are trying to get a good price.
Wanting the Superdrive definitely cuts down on the opprtunity for a great deal, but I see an eMac refurb G4/800, 256/60/SuperDrive for $1,399 which is pretty impressive for writing DVD stuff.
To illustrate the difference between the proportional weight of rural voters and urban voters, it may help to look at this map showing net return on the Federal dollar per state. (similar data in tabular form is here. A state that gets as much Federal spending as it sends to the Federal government has a ratio of 1.0; the states that get more than they contribute include New Mexico ($2.07 in Federal spending for every Federal tax dollar) and Montana (1.62 ratio) and states that get less than they spend include California and New York ($.87 spending per dollar) and Connecticut has the lowest ratio at.63
There is similar textual data at this link, which compares the 1990 data to the 2000 data.
With 10,000 machines converted already, and 100,000 scheduled for next year in a region with 1.1 million people, that is very impressive- and they only started in April. How did they do it? It sounds like they took a page from AOL and carpet-bombed the region with CDs:
So far, the government has produced 150,000 discs with the software, and it is distributing them in schools, electronics stores, community centers and as inserts in newspapers. It has even taken out TV commercials about the benefits of free software.
It would be great to see something like that spread more widely, but hey, it's a great start!
Remember that the last DOJ probe into Microsoft was derailed by the change from Clinton to Bush (things were looking promising, but right before the elections there was a go-slow/wait-and-see pause) that resulted in a much more `business-friendly' administration that did not pursue the settlement very agressively.
With this in mind, maybe if Sun starts something now they are hoping that in two years there may be another administration that might think that monopoly power abuse is actually a bad thing and will pick up the ball then... It can't hurt to start something now with that hope...
One of the fundamental problems with working towards election reform is that those in power were placed there by the old system, and thus presumably have a vested interest in NOT changing it. The electoral college was designed so long ago to address a number of logistical concerns that are no longer an issue (I'm sure the founding fathers could not possibly have envisioned that elections could be decided within hours of (or even before...) polls closing) that there should have been discussion about changing it long before the recent electoral fiasco.
The current electoral system has a number of flaws, as any electoral system will have (per the article.) But the particular flaws that whatever the current system has are exactly the ones are that most likely to favor those who are currently in office- why should they change it?
Absentee voting, for all the publicity it generated in certain recent elections, is appropriate for a wide range of situations. Every state I've voted in (seven, not all in the same year!) has had absentee provisions that would apply to awful commutes, for example. I do believe that there are some regions where in order to qualify for absentee status, you need to swear that you will be out of the district for the entire day, but I believe those are rare. Furthermore, in many districts, you can get "permanent absentee voter" status and just always vote conveniently by mail. It may have been meant for 80-year-olds, but that's no reason why everyone else can't have the convenience of voting easily and at a leisurely pace.
This issue is not brand-new, at least not to a lesser extent. The wireless keyboard on the PCjr from the mid 80s had line-of-sight IR connections that you could do all kinds of fun tricks with. I remember a few gems:
Writing a 'burglar-alarm' program that sat there expecting the space bar to be pressed constantly. Then putting the keyboard across the way with a book sitting on the space bar. If anyone walked by and interrupted the beam, the alarm would go off. Fun to do across people's cube entryways. (Yes, I was writing software that was supposed to work on those things...)
Normal TV remotes would interfere with the keyboard signal and cause the PCjr to beep annoyingly and not recognize commands. I have fond memories of taking a remote to computer stores and surreptitiously pointing it from my pocket at the PCjr when the salesman at Sears was demonstrating the wonders of the wireless keyboard to someone. (Yes, I was an Apple II/Mac partisan and actually thought there was some danger the PCjr was going to take over the world... How could I have known that it was going to be one of the most remarkable flops of all time? )
Associate professor usually means recently tenured or not super-productive after getting tenure a while ago. Here is a (generally correct) classification of the animals you might see in the US-version of a typical academic zoo:
Professor/Full Professor: tenured and promoted to generally the highest rank, though some institutions have "Distinguished Professor"
Associate Professor: promoted from assistant professor, usually with tenure
Assistant Professor: untenured faculty member who is on the tenure-track and will probably be considered for tenure after 5 years or so from starting
Lecturer: someone whose job expectations are usually entirely from teaching with no research expectations. Can be tenured or (usually) not, depending upon institution.
Visiting Professor: researcher visiting from somewhere else, not tenure-track.
Instructor: vague title usually non-researcher
Postdoc: non-tenure track position, limited term, for someone with a PhD, usually entirely a research job, though there are sometime some teaching obligations.
The tenure decision is made usually in the fifth or so year and in principle involves research, teaching and possibly departmental/university service as criteria for awarding tenure. Almost always, tenure is awarded simultaneously with promotion from assistant to associate. Usually, consideration for promotion from associate to full is after about six years of being associate professor and being productive in research. There are exceptions- some bigshots are hired with tenure or a higher-rank upon arrival, and sometimes people move institutions with all kinds of complicated arrangements.
One thing that is a very troubling about much of the qualitative information presented in almost any argument (such as this 83%, conveniently deleting the polar regions to get a higher/more impressive number) is that it undermines the credibility of claim trying to be established.
Even if the underlying claim is sound, when it is presented in a way that is obviously desgined to exagerrate the effect (hasn't everyone read How to Lie with Statistics and How to Lie with Charts by now?) it ruins the credibility and undermines whatever (possibly valid) point they were trying to make.
For example:
If a baseball announcer says someone has "19 hits in their last 33 at-bats" you can bet that the 34th at-bat ago was not a hit, and probably not the several before that, either. Why 33? They are biasing the impression by choosing the statistic that most inflates the impression they want to convey.
If the quarterly results of a corporation were +$34, +$2, -$900million, +$75 you would probably expect to hear something like "profitable in three of the last four quarters!"
Political debate about just about everything is rife with distorted, possibly true but carefuly crafted to be misleading, data that it makes it very hard as (in principle) an unbiased observer to decide what is really going on.
True honest analyses are unbelievable rare, but there have been some uplifting ones memorable to me:
I remember in the late 80s when David Gaines was forming the Mono Lake committee to fight the drop in water levels at Mono Lake in California. The members were primarily biologists, and after some study, the decision was that the lake level should not be below x feet (I don't remember the exact value.) So the lawsuits were filed to prevent the lake from dropping below x. Some of the more political-type folks around were saying- "we should ask for x+50- that way, there is some room for comprimise when they don't give us what we want." All the biologists and science-types said "No, there is no compromise- our science shows the lake needs to be at level x, end of story. No inflated demands expecting comprimise- this is what needs to happen." That was a refreshing instance of increasingly-rare honest quantitative analyses of public policy decisions, and unfortunately such examples are few and far between in the public debate.
The preprint is posted on the arXiv.org web site, which is exactly that, a place to put preprints. Preprints that appear there have not been subject to peer review, so at this point, this is an annoucement of a result, which is very different than a number of mathematicians with the appropriate background agreeing that this is a proof.
The abstract from the arXiv is: This paper proves that any simply connected closed three dimensional stellar manifold is stellar equivalent to the three dimensional sphere.
and the intro of the paper says that "Since every 3-dimensional manifold can be triangulated and any two stellar equivalent manifolds are PL homeomorphic, our result does imply the famous Poincare conjecture."
There is a nice front end to the math part of the arXiv from UC-Davis at this link
Of course, including those would have diminished the fraction of land used and you can see why they would want to delete those areas. But those areas are not very productive ecologically/economically- not much potential for farms at the south pole. If my subsistence depened upon it, I would happily trade a hundred square miles of Antarctica for a dozen acres in a temperate, productive climate. The notion of variable productivity is hard to capture, so they ignored it (unwisely, perhaps, to make a simplified point.) The point is still that we should be paying more attention than we are now, presumably.
The comparison gets even more favorable when you factor in the durability issue. My Sony VAIO Superslim-whatever was a nice machine and it was nice not carring the cdrom/floppy stuff around since I only used it when at home, but boy was that thing fragile. Sony's business model is that when something breaks, you send it back to Fremont and it always took several weeks. Even the screws on the base (which kept falling out) were not available to Sony distributors to fix. I cannot be without my laptop for several weeks at a time- and I had to send it back to be fixed four times in just over two years. The thing was ridiculously fragile, had awful battery life, and external video was a hassle.
My iBook seems to have been built for 10-year olds, has great battery life, and has been ridiculously sturdy. The one time it needed attention was when I dropped the screw into the innards upgrading the RAM (oops), and my local Apple place dismantled the whole thing and put it back together while I sat in their lobby using a loaner in under an hour. The 12" screen is great (why would anyone with non-ancient eyes want the 14" model- it's the same screen res, just bigger, heavier (ok, slightly better battery life) and costs way more? I wonder how many people buy it just because it costs more...) and of course Airport is wonderful. It's light, has a sharp display, and good battery life and seriously, I can't think of anything I would want more these days. My killer apps are ssh, vi, gcc and perl so I'm totally happy...
You don't say what your skill set is that limits things so dramatically- it's hard to be specific without knowing that. One thing to consider instead of telecommuting, though, is to plan on taking technical positions at the various institutions that your wife may be doing postdocs at. A few issues:
Technical jobs at universities or research labs don't pay as well as their corporate counterparts, but for many people, the environment is more reasonable.
Large universities and research labs are always shorthanded when it comes to sysadmins and network people, for example relying upon students (or ex-students) for a large part of their expertise.
Universities are pretty accustomed to reasonably rapid turnover in technical positions, for a number of reasons. So just being someplace for three years is not unusual or a big downer from their side, unlike some corportate positions.
There are a lot of interesting problems that arise in scientific computation settings, for example, if your skills are applible there.
Many women in research/academia have similar concerns of finding acceptable employment for both halves of a couple, commonly known as "solving the two-body problem." Many universities have progressive methods for helping to solve two-body problems, at least if there are interested in getting strong women faculty.
Though there can be bad things about both halves of a couple working at the same place, there are also some really nice things too.
That being said, if your wife does want to continue down the PhD path to research and academia, she may find this book: Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia as helpful as I have. She (and I) may not agree with everything in there, but it certainly makes you think about a lot of things that you might not have otherwise.
had these awhile at the Hass School in Berkeley
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 2
There have been for at least a year pretty sophisticated vending machines in the student areas of the Hass School of Business at Berkeley if you are nearby and want to see one in the flesh. They work off of credit cards and sell things like inkjet printer ink, disposable cameras, and a good assortment of office/school supplies, in a space not much larger than a typical vending machine. I remember playing with one, ordering everything in the machine, and getting a total of about $1500- I didn't complete the purchase...
One of the things that seriously separates humans from other animals is our ability to think, and to think abstractly. Too often the comments are made about algebra- "I'll never use this..." "What is this good for?"
Even if algebra problems per se never occur in whatever "real life" people end up having, the ability to think quantitatively is essential for an reasonable person. Thinking more abstractly about problems of many kinds is essential- for developing efficient code, for having a reasonable business plan, for managing one's person finances, for voting in a responsible way, and basically for being a productive member of society. The evidence for poor critical/mathematical thinking is everywhere- people falling for Ponzi schemes, short-sided economic policy, unwise credit-card debt, bad laws, ridiculous jury decisions, and the list goes on. The proper perspective about mathematical reasoning is that it is fundamental for most productive people, and essential for all citizens.
Unfortunately, this perspective is usually not instilled by our current generation of underpaid, frequently under-qualified (more than half of the math and science teachers in CA have "emergency certification", which can be extended indefinitely since there is no adequate supply of properly trained and willing math and science teachers.) Instead, students are often exposed to math teachers, who, to be honest, don't actually like math or understand its central role as a foundation for science and modern reasoning. Kids are smart- if a teacher doesn't like math and is just going through the motions, they pick up on that. And given the sympathy that students get from parents, teachers, etc for the horror of "word problems" it isn't a surprise that mathematical reasoning skills are a consistent weak point of students at all levels in the US.
Everyone agrees that more resources should be directed at education, but people have been agreeing on that for at least 30 years with much of the same problems enduring. Good education is more expensive an investment than many decision-making bodies are willing to undertake, and that shows in the wide disparity in education between the "haves" and the "have nots". Until there is a significant change in how much energy and money people are willing to invest in education, it seems that these phenomena will continue.
Moreso than any other subject, mathematics has more of a linear structure- meaning dependence upon previous material.
If you have a bad teacher for 7th grade English, you may never quite be the greatest at diagramming sentence grammar, but the chances are high that you can overcome that shortcoming and still learn to compose good essays, read literature for more than just content, and so on. Other subjects also have the potential to recover from a bad teacher or missed material.
But mathematics has much more of a reliance on prerequisite material. If you have a bad instructor and don't develop good algebra skills, you will struggle and have a great deal of difficulty in algebra 2, trig, etc. When people find out that I do research in mathematics, (a casual conversation-killer if there ever was one) they often have a story, something like "I was always good at math until Mrs. Crabapple in 10th grade" or something like that. One bad experience leads to poor understanding in that subject, and, unfortunately, is rarely overcome and years of struggle result.
I've seen people get derailed at all levels and it really is a problem that needs addressing. At the undergraduate level, sometimes it is particularly painful to witness when a student passes a class (such as first-semester calculus) without learning the material. This can put them into a hopeless limbo- they have no chance of passing the next class, and will probably fail it a few times, but they cannot take the preceding class since they already passed it (sometimes even with a reasonable grade.)
There is a unfortunate stigma to taking something a second time, and that stigma undermines healthy mathematical learning. Sometimes it takes seeing things more than once, or from more than one teacher, before it makes sense. Passing students who just barely have a grasp of the material does them little good and may doom them to years of floundering.
Until there is more recognition of this fundamental aspect of mathematical learning, there will be way too many people who grow up dreading "story problems" and "meaningless algebra"
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The watch is running Linux; how many possible programs can there be? More than there are particles in the universe...
There are lots of challenge/response identification schemes that run nicely on my old 200 Mhz PII box that would be very hard to crack with current technology, so I would have faith in that part of the system.
If you live in the state of New York, there is already a statewide "Do not call" registry and you can sign up at the webpage at this link. It definitely reduced unsolicited calls for us dramatically.
I've been able to recruit strong research students by giving them iBooks as well as a decent stipend, and Airport works so well that it's saved me the trouble of worrying about wiring the lab they use and they love using Airport all over the place. I've got some dedicated and loyal students who are doing lots of cool things and being able to give them good machines is definitely responsible for part of that.
It makes more sense when you realize that they already have their own huge radioactive disposal problem, and the marginal cost of a little bit more disposal is much less than what other, far more crowded European countries would be willing to pay to get it off their hands. They are the ninth largest country in the world with a population of 16 million, so there is significantly more room for waste disposal than in nearby Western Europe, which may be the region in the world most sensitive to waste disposal concerns of all kinds.
Just as in other environmental decisions, there are immediate and long-term goals that need to be balanced. Economic factors affect these decisions- an affluent community would rather have an expensive recycling facility, whereas an impoverished community would think it is nuts to spend big bucks on that and would go with the cheaper, traditional solution of a town dump, complete with perpetual tire-fire. These decisions are motivated by economic factors- given ample resources, most everyone would prefer a cleaner environment. But not everyone is willing to pay for it, so there ends up being disparity between decisions that affect the environment based upon local economic conditions.
Internationally, this comes as third-world countries which are happy to exchange cleaner air for lower-cost production which allows essential economic growth. Presumably, residents (or at least political representatives of residents) value the immediate economic boon over the long-term consequences. In the case of disposal, since there are already large waste-disposal issues of their own, the marginal cost of slightly larger waste-disposal issues apparently is outweighed by the massive price other countries would be willing to pay to get it off their hands. Unfortunately, decisions like these (trading in a long-term cost for a short-term benefit), are often political, and political decisions rarely favor long-term sustainable policies over short-term boons.
The compiler Aldor for Axiom is available for download. Axiom was developed at a number of places, including IBM, and it being released as open-source is something that has only been finalized in the last couple of months, so the distribution is just beginning to be more widely available.
Of course, the same cluster can be bound in different ways depending upon the applications that are being run. It is important to realize what the limitations are for your desired tasks and focus your improvements there. I have seen several clusters where they spent an ungodly amount of money on Mirrinet and a massive amount of time getting it working when they were running easily-parallelizable tasks that were really bound just by the number of CPUs.
No- you weren't. And some of us kept waiting for the legendary Cropduster to be released...
You can hang external monitors off of $999 iBooks (as pointed out by others) and the towers if you really cannot imagine being without your 17" monitor. What many people don't realize is that it can be possible to hang a different monitor off your old CRT iMac or the eMac. Why you would want to do this is a different question, since the internal displays are pretty reasonable... I know for sure that the older CRT iMacs had a standard VGA cable buried in there. When a buddy of mine got the first variety of iMac in 1998, we hung a 21" monitor and it drove it very nicely. Of course, it looks like crap since your formerly sleek computer is in pieces, but if you have a nice monitor around, and don't mind a desk that looks like a tornado hit it and a voided warranty, it may be worth doing. The eMac doesn't have to be disassembled to get external video- it has its own little external mini-VGA port. It can only drive external monitors at the same resolution as the internal monitor, though. 17" monitors can be nice, but the eMac display is pretty nice, and the price is pretty good- check out LowEndMac's various pages: eMac deals, flat panel iMac deals and CRT iMac deals and of course Dealmac and the Dealmac basement if you are trying to get a good price.
Wanting the Superdrive definitely cuts down on the opprtunity for a great deal, but I see an eMac refurb G4/800, 256/60/SuperDrive for $1,399 which is pretty impressive for writing DVD stuff.
To illustrate the difference between the proportional weight of rural voters and urban voters, it may help to look at this map showing net return on the Federal dollar per state. (similar data in tabular form is here. A state that gets as much Federal spending as it sends to the Federal government has a ratio of 1.0; the states that get more than they contribute include New Mexico ($2.07 in Federal spending for every Federal tax dollar) and Montana (1.62 ratio) and states that get less than they spend include California and New York ($.87 spending per dollar) and Connecticut has the lowest ratio at .63
There is similar textual data at this link, which compares the 1990 data to the 2000 data.
It would be great to see something like that spread more widely, but hey, it's a great start!
With this in mind, maybe if Sun starts something now they are hoping that in two years there may be another administration that might think that monopoly power abuse is actually a bad thing and will pick up the ball then... It can't hurt to start something now with that hope...
The current electoral system has a number of flaws, as any electoral system will have (per the article.) But the particular flaws that whatever the current system has are exactly the ones are that most likely to favor those who are currently in office- why should they change it?
Absentee voting, for all the publicity it generated in certain recent elections, is appropriate for a wide range of situations. Every state I've voted in (seven, not all in the same year!) has had absentee provisions that would apply to awful commutes, for example. I do believe that there are some regions where in order to qualify for absentee status, you need to swear that you will be out of the district for the entire day, but I believe those are rare. Furthermore, in many districts, you can get "permanent absentee voter" status and just always vote conveniently by mail. It may have been meant for 80-year-olds, but that's no reason why everyone else can't have the convenience of voting easily and at a leisurely pace.
The tenure decision is made usually in the fifth or so year and in principle involves research, teaching and possibly departmental/university service as criteria for awarding tenure. Almost always, tenure is awarded simultaneously with promotion from assistant to associate. Usually, consideration for promotion from associate to full is after about six years of being associate professor and being productive in research. There are exceptions- some bigshots are hired with tenure or a higher-rank upon arrival, and sometimes people move institutions with all kinds of complicated arrangements.
Hope that helps!
Even if the underlying claim is sound, when it is presented in a way that is obviously desgined to exagerrate the effect (hasn't everyone read How to Lie with Statistics and How to Lie with Charts by now?) it ruins the credibility and undermines whatever (possibly valid) point they were trying to make.
For example:
True honest analyses are unbelievable rare, but there have been some uplifting ones memorable to me:
I remember in the late 80s when David Gaines was forming the Mono Lake committee to fight the drop in water levels at Mono Lake in California. The members were primarily biologists, and after some study, the decision was that the lake level should not be below x feet (I don't remember the exact value.) So the lawsuits were filed to prevent the lake from dropping below x. Some of the more political-type folks around were saying- "we should ask for x+50- that way, there is some room for comprimise when they don't give us what we want." All the biologists and science-types said "No, there is no compromise- our science shows the lake needs to be at level x, end of story. No inflated demands expecting comprimise- this is what needs to happen." That was a refreshing instance of increasingly-rare honest quantitative analyses of public policy decisions, and unfortunately such examples are few and far between in the public debate.
The preprint is posted on the arXiv.org web site, which is exactly that, a place to put preprints. Preprints that appear there have not been subject to peer review, so at this point, this is an annoucement of a result, which is very different than a number of mathematicians with the appropriate background agreeing that this is a proof.
The abstract from the arXiv is:
This paper proves that any simply connected closed three dimensional stellar manifold is stellar equivalent to the three dimensional sphere.
and the intro of the paper says that "Since every 3-dimensional manifold can be triangulated and any two stellar equivalent manifolds are PL homeomorphic, our result does imply the famous Poincare conjecture."
There is a nice front end to the math part of the arXiv from UC-Davis at this link
Of course, including those would have diminished the fraction of land used and you can see why they would want to delete those areas. But those areas are not very productive ecologically/economically- not much potential for farms at the south pole. If my subsistence depened upon it, I would happily trade a hundred square miles of Antarctica for a dozen acres in a temperate, productive climate. The notion of variable productivity is hard to capture, so they ignored it (unwisely, perhaps, to make a simplified point.) The point is still that we should be paying more attention than we are now, presumably.
Theodore Gray, of Mathematica fame, and recent winner of an IgNobel prize for his wooden periodic table table has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.
The guy (Theodore Gray, I have one of his Mathematica textbooks, I think) who made the wooden periodic table table is hilarious, and also has a page nicely documenting what happens when you drop sodium into water, which includes a nice quicktime video of a drop of sodium into a lake.
The comparison gets even more favorable when you factor in the durability issue. My Sony VAIO Superslim-whatever was a nice machine and it was nice not carring the cdrom/floppy stuff around since I only used it when at home, but boy was that thing fragile. Sony's business model is that when something breaks, you send it back to Fremont and it always took several weeks. Even the screws on the base (which kept falling out) were not available to Sony distributors to fix. I cannot be without my laptop for several weeks at a time- and I had to send it back to be fixed four times in just over two years. The thing was ridiculously fragile, had awful battery life, and external video was a hassle.
My iBook seems to have been built for 10-year olds, has great battery life, and has been ridiculously sturdy. The one time it needed attention was when I dropped the screw into the innards upgrading the RAM (oops), and my local Apple place dismantled the whole thing and put it back together while I sat in their lobby using a loaner in under an hour. The 12" screen is great (why would anyone with non-ancient eyes want the 14" model- it's the same screen res, just bigger, heavier (ok, slightly better battery life) and costs way more? I wonder how many people buy it just because it costs more...) and of course Airport is wonderful. It's light, has a sharp display, and good battery life and seriously, I can't think of anything I would want more these days. My killer apps are ssh, vi, gcc and perl so I'm totally happy...
That being said, if your wife does want to continue down the PhD path to research and academia, she may find this book: Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia as helpful as I have. She (and I) may not agree with everything in there, but it certainly makes you think about a lot of things that you might not have otherwise.
There have been for at least a year pretty sophisticated vending machines in the student areas of the Hass School of Business at Berkeley if you are nearby and want to see one in the flesh. They work off of credit cards and sell things like inkjet printer ink, disposable cameras, and a good assortment of office/school supplies, in a space not much larger than a typical vending machine. I remember playing with one, ordering everything in the machine, and getting a total of about $1500- I didn't complete the purchase...
One of the things that seriously separates humans from other animals is our ability to think, and to think abstractly. Too often the comments are made about algebra- "I'll never use this..." "What is this good for?"
Even if algebra problems per se never occur in whatever "real life" people end up having, the ability to think quantitatively is essential for an reasonable person. Thinking more abstractly about problems of many kinds is essential- for developing efficient code, for having a reasonable business plan, for managing one's person finances, for voting in a responsible way, and basically for being a productive member of society. The evidence for poor critical/mathematical thinking is everywhere- people falling for Ponzi schemes, short-sided economic policy, unwise credit-card debt, bad laws, ridiculous jury decisions, and the list goes on. The proper perspective about mathematical reasoning is that it is fundamental for most productive people, and essential for all citizens.
Unfortunately, this perspective is usually not instilled by our current generation of underpaid, frequently under-qualified (more than half of the math and science teachers in CA have "emergency certification", which can be extended indefinitely since there is no adequate supply of properly trained and willing math and science teachers.) Instead, students are often exposed to math teachers, who, to be honest, don't actually like math or understand its central role as a foundation for science and modern reasoning. Kids are smart- if a teacher doesn't like math and is just going through the motions, they pick up on that. And given the sympathy that students get from parents, teachers, etc for the horror of "word problems" it isn't a surprise that mathematical reasoning skills are a consistent weak point of students at all levels in the US.
Everyone agrees that more resources should be directed at education, but people have been agreeing on that for at least 30 years with much of the same problems enduring. Good education is more expensive an investment than many decision-making bodies are willing to undertake, and that shows in the wide disparity in education between the "haves" and the "have nots". Until there is a significant change in how much energy and money people are willing to invest in education, it seems that these phenomena will continue.
Moreso than any other subject, mathematics has more of a linear structure- meaning dependence upon previous material.
If you have a bad teacher for 7th grade English, you may never quite be the greatest at diagramming sentence grammar, but the chances are high that you can overcome that shortcoming and still learn to compose good essays, read literature for more than just content, and so on. Other subjects also have the potential to recover from a bad teacher or missed material.
But mathematics has much more of a reliance on prerequisite material. If you have a bad instructor and don't develop good algebra skills, you will struggle and have a great deal of difficulty in algebra 2, trig, etc. When people find out that I do research in mathematics, (a casual conversation-killer if there ever was one) they often have a story, something like "I was always good at math until Mrs. Crabapple in 10th grade" or something like that. One bad experience leads to poor understanding in that subject, and, unfortunately, is rarely overcome and years of struggle result.
I've seen people get derailed at all levels and it really is a problem that needs addressing. At the undergraduate level, sometimes it is particularly painful to witness when a student passes a class (such as first-semester calculus) without learning the material. This can put them into a hopeless limbo- they have no chance of passing the next class, and will probably fail it a few times, but they cannot take the preceding class since they already passed it (sometimes even with a reasonable grade.)
There is a unfortunate stigma to taking something a second time, and that stigma undermines healthy mathematical learning. Sometimes it takes seeing things more than once, or from more than one teacher, before it makes sense. Passing students who just barely have a grasp of the material does them little good and may doom them to years of floundering.
Until there is more recognition of this fundamental aspect of mathematical learning, there will be way too many people who grow up dreading "story problems" and "meaningless algebra"