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POPSFreeBookZone - free eBooks FreeBookZone lists free computer science, engineering books, programming manuals, lecture notes and coursewares, all of which are freely available over the internet.
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POPSPoor People Are Fat and A Nation of Whiners Progressive thinking from dinosaurs? Gramm's views have not changed since the 1970's. Where are the stats? What are the solutions? Last time I looked, name calling never actually solved anything. Labling groups of impoverished people and witty adjectives for their plight might make a magazine cover, but in reality it does not make a bad situation any better. The "Al Gore Syndrome" at work agian. Talk, Talk, Talk...soluntions implemented = NONE. Perhaps he'll win the Nobel Peace Prize for his insults and remarkable discovery that "Poor People Are Fat". Pehaps if they stopped whining about us being a "Nation of Whiners" and actually started "doing" the right thing for the "Poor, Fat People" - we could get along towards a solution for the US, and Worldwide, crisis. Roll up your sleeves, Boys, and actually DO something already, will ya!!!
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POPSGoodbye To Faulty Software? The program that performs the computation is equivalent to the proof of the theorem. By proving the theorem the program is guaranteed to be correct. It is not that simple, of course, but so promising is type theory that since 1989 the EU has been funding a string of projects to develop it under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. That style of working is going to change so that we spend more effort on actually writing programs than testing them.
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POPSGender difference real or fiction? In search of bridges across the math gender gap, Sapienza and her colleagues analyzed data from more than 276,000 children in 40 countries. The large number of subjects and broad range of social systems represented were key to the validity of the study. Each child took the 2003 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized assessment of math, reading, science and problem-solving ability. The team used four tools to measure how well women were integrated into each society compared with men. These tools were the 2006 Gender Gap Index (GGI) developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
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POPS"Haughton's Drop", Hanging, Dublin Zoo, Darwin, Wallace, history Haughton House in Dublin Zoo is being restored to its ancient glories in honour of the great patron and scientist. On a visit to Bronx Park, New York he became a bit bored by the record of perfection which he received on all sides, so he enquired about the financial aspect of the institution: how did they pay for their obviously princely expenditure? So-and-so, he was told, but of course the main source of income was gate-money. “What ?” asked Haughton, “do you mean you charge people to get in?” “Of course; don’t you?” “Oh! no - we let them in free; then we enlarge one of our celebrated lions and charge them to get out! We do better that way.”
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POPSThe Shape of Music The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for manipulating musical scales turn out to be closely analogous to those used to connect individual chords. And some composers have displayed a profound understanding of the higher-dimensional geometry of musical chords. In fact, one can argue that Romantic composers such as Chopin had an intuitive feel for non-Euclidean higher-dimensional spaces that exceeded the explicit understanding of their mathematical contemporaries.
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POPSInnumeracy's John Allen Paulos on credulity and love A great post from 3quarksdaily (Feb. 2008) about the human desire to believe in something, even a fraud. Context: Paulos has put together a book debunking probabilistic arguments for God's existence. The clip doesn't do it justice -- RTWT ("read the whole thing").
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POPSSocial Events can be predicted This has been long overdue. But I wonder, whether a historical model could be used instead of a mathematical one. The results would be broader and more imprecise, of course. But nevertheless, I wonder, that potential has ever been fully looked into.
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POPSIntute : a search for Free Energy Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology offers a free, easy to use and powerful tool for discovering the best Internet resources for teaching, learning and research, covering the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science.
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POPSNASA Peculiar Thermometer: Painting By Numbers ..10 second video...UAH Satellite Temperatures March, 2008 - looks cool Not surprisingly, the missing areas in Canada and Africa were cold. The NASA data thus becomes disproportionately weighted towards warm areas - particularly in the northern hemisphere. As can be seen in the UAH satellite map above, the warm areas actually made up a relatively small percentage of the planet. The vast majority of the earth had normal temperatures or below. Given that NASA has lost track of a number of large cold regions, it is understandable that their averages are on the high side. Additionally, NASA reports their global temperature measurements within one one-hundredth of a degree. This is a classic mathematics error, since they have no data from 20 per cent of the earth's land area. The reported precision is much greater than the error bar - a mistake which has caused many a high school student to fail their exams.