Seriously, the rate of change of a voltage with time.
For some information about the optical spectrum of strontium, see the food loaf entry.
Sex-selective abortion has caused the ratio to increase in much of East Asia and South Asia. In the Chinese regions of Hainan and Guangdong, the SBR was 1.30 in 2005.
Historically, the sex ratio as a function of age has declined as children grow older (i.e., boys exhibit greater mortality than girls), and in the last century, in the West, the ratio has been a continuously decreasing function of age right through adulthood. (Until the nineteenth century, death during childbirth caused women to have a lower life expectancy at birth, and raised the sex ratio of adults.) In many of the same countries and populations that have unusually high SBR, female infanticide apparently increases the sex ratio further. The Chinese census of 2000 determined that the average sex ratio (for people of all ages) was 1.36 in Hainan. That was the highest regional average; the lowest was Tibet (1.03), and the national average was 1.17. In some parts of India, according to its 2001 census, the sex ratio for children aged 6 and under exceeds 1.25.
There are a number of biological and environmental factors that influence SBR, and it is not inconceivable (sorry) that these account partially for the high SBR numbers in Asia. In studies done during the 1950's, the SRB was found to be correlated with the father's profession.
Not getting any respect? Isn't it time you moved up to an MRBM?
SREML and diminished slow-wave sleep appear to be traits of depressed patients, whereas increased REM density appears to be a more reversible characteristic associated with depressive episodes, according to
- Thase, M. E., Reynolds, C. F. 3rd, Frank, E., Jennings, J. R., Nofzinger, E., Fasiczka, A. L., Garamoni, G. and Kupfer, D. J., 1994: ``Polysomnographic Studies of Unmedicated Depressed Men Before and After Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,'' American Journal of Psychiatry 151(11), pp. 1615-22.
SRF resulted from the mating of the Society for Study of Fertility (SSF) with Reproduction magazine. Evidently they were the same species of magazine.
SRG is a private nonprofit that transmits ten radio and three TV channels in the four official languages of that country. It's funded by license fees and by advertising. Oh great, the worst of two worlds.
Here's the news on March 11, 2006: The Long Wait is over! The campaign for the 2008 US presidential nominations has finally begun in earnest, with the first straw poll. It was reported that delegates from 26 states attended this conference of Southern Republicans, which seems to suggest an unsuspected (susurrate, susurrate) aspect of the Republicans' ``Southern strategy.'' The conference was held in Memphis, Tennessee, and 1427 of the 2000-odd (or is that ``2000 odd'' or ``over 1500'' as others reported?) delegates cast votes in the straw poll. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist ``won'' with 36.9% of the first-place (hence: ``fp'') votes. (This was rounded up to 37% by many news outlets. It was actually just 526 out of 1427; do yer ain math.) ``Mitt'' Romney (I don't know his first name), a former governor of Massachusetts, placed second with 14.4% of fp votes. (This was rounded down to ``14%'' by some news outlets, and rounded further down to 13% by Reuters.)
Everyone seemed eager to stress that the results were not very significant, especially at this point et cetera et cetera, though it might give the two ``winners'' some public-attention oxygen. (Most citizens don't know the names of their own senators, you know? So Frist, the Senate majority leader, is not yet well-known.) Many reports noted that the venue probably helped Frist. Indeed, 52% of all ballots were cast by Tennessee delegates.
In fact, the straw poll numbers are significant. Frist got 430 fp votes from his own state's delegates, or about 58%. Tolerable, though not stellar, for a favorite son. Former Tennessee Senator Albert (``Al'') Gore, son of the late Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., narrowly lost his home state, and the election, in the 2000 US presidential election. Among the remaining delegates, Frist polled about 14% of fp votes.
The two front-runners nationally, Arizona Senator John McCain and former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, used different strategies in the straw poll. Giuliani declined an invitation to speak and did not appear on the ballot. McCain showed up but urged delegates to vote for George W. Bush as a write-in. I really want to make a joke here about ``ineligible'' and ``illegible,'' but it would be too strained. Bush is prevented by the 22nd amendment from being elected to a third term. With 10.3% of the vote, Bush tied for third place with Sen. George Allen of Virginia. McCain placed fifth with 4.6% and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee sixth with 3.8%. The vote share of the other ``potential presidential candidate'' who spoke at the SRLC, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, was not reported in anything I saw immediately afterwards, but it was it was very probably less than 3.7%. That leaves at least 16% of the fp votes unaccounted-for.
``SRN News is the only Christian-focused news organization with fully-equipped broadcast facilities at the U.S. House, Senate, and White House manned by full-time correspondents -- ensuring timely, on-the-spot coverage of breaking news.'' In principle, the notion of ``Christian-focused'' is problematic. In practice, I have no problem with it.
With a little sprucing up --- a lampshade, a more comfortable bed, a picture hanging on the wall, a carpet, a coat of paint, tolerably thick walls, a window to open to get rid of the rancid acidic stench of eighty-proof vomit -- one of these could pass for a little room in a London B&B . Okay, a lot of sprucing up. With an attached tiny bathroom and earthquake evacuation instructions, it would resemble a room in a Tokyo ``businessman's hotel.'' It would be the same size, anyway.
In the typical modern New York City version of an SRO hotel, ventilation and musical entertainment are provided by the economized construction: the walls do not reach the ceiling (chicken wire or perf board or something provides desultory security), so you can hear the chorus of your stoned snoring neighbors who haven't showered since they were released. You can sleep through that with a bottle of Ripple in your gut. (I mean the contents of the bottle of Ripple -- the Ripple itself. "[A] bottle" here is used as a quantifier, equivalent to 13 or 17 ounces or whatever.)
An SRO hotel is not a toney place to take your date.
At that time of year, the teeming masses float down the river in truck-tire inner tubes. I paddled; people commented ``New Yorker.'' At a wide, slow part, naked idiots dive off a cliff. I mean idiots not wearing clothes.
There's an annual charity event that involves a rubber-duck lottery. To participate, you buy a numbered duck. You never actually take possession of this duck -- you simply pay for the duck with a particular number to be ``yours.'' The ducks are dumped almost unceremoniously into the river by a dump truck, and later that day the first duck to cross a downstream finish line wins its purchaser some prize.
Rubber and inert masses drift to success. That's the secret of the Salt.
There's a story that during WWII, some German prisoners escaped from a POW camp with a map and a plan; they made their to the Salt river thinking they'd make good their escape by stealing a boat. Nice story anyway.
SRP-54 binds GTP
At IAOP-2001, R. K. Shaltens, L. S. Mason, and J. G. Schreiber of NASA Glenn reported on their continuing work on SRPS's (title: Stirling Radioisotope Power System as an Alternative for NASA's Deep Space Missions).
PSU's form consists of two kinds of questions: required, university-wide questions, and department-selected questions. The required questions used to be just two, apparently, asking students their overall evaluation of the course and the instructor. Now (or perhaps this was always, I'm not sure of the history and the questions are forgettable) there are two other required questions, asking whether the course is being taken as an elective and what grade the student expects. The last question is quite useful, since studies have shown that student evaluations are more highly correlated with the grades students expect than with anything remotely resembling an objective measure of instructor effectiveness or course utility. (Of course, if grades were an objective and absolutely calibrated measure of student learning, student grades would give some indication of teaching effectiveness.)
So far, perhaps, so good. The remaining questions, up to fifteen of them, are chosen by each instructional unit (typically a department) from a list of approved questions. This makes sense, since not all the same questions are appropriate for art courses as for economics courses, say. Further, each unit must use the same questions for all its courses. This makes some sense, since it allows different courses and instructors in a unit to be compared (well, it makes sense if this sort of comparison is desirable). A problem arises with departments that offer courses so different that useful questions regarding some courses are meaningless or worse for others (for the sake of argument, we're assuming that the evaluations are of some positive utility; play along now).
I have never taught a lab course since grad school, but for six years my students had to fill out evaluations that asked them to grade (overall) the lab component of the course and the lab TA's in particular. Students faced with this question knew that they were smarter than the form, but had no way to know how stupid the processing of the form might be. So they couldn't know what effect leaving the question unanswered might have. Thus, I normally had at least a couple of students rate the lab and the lab TA's. This was good, since it probably avoided a zero-divide.
I hope the above example suggests how the requirement to use the same questions across the full spectrum of courses in an instructional unit is a surmountable problem. By the same token, it suggests that with a little bit of intelligent wording, it would be possible to use a single form across the entire institution. But let's not quibble about the deck chairs, because here comes the iceberg.
The remaining questions must be selected from a pool of 177. For example,
- Rate the instructor's skill in relating course material to real life situations.
- Rate the instructor's skill in relating cases and other
exercises to practical situations.
- Rate the effectiveness of the examples used to clarify difficult concepts.
- Rate the clarity of the examples used.
- Rate the adequacy of the amount of examples used to clarify difficult concepts.
- Rate the question-writer's understanding of grammatical-number concepts. Oops, it's not on there.
- Rate the instructor's skill in using examples and illustrations.
For redundant redundancy, see the entire list. According to PSU's SRTE homepage, ``Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence supports the SRTE program by generating and processing the survey forms and preparing individual faculty reports.'' Schreyer is a German surname; it's an archaic spelling of the noun Schreier, meaning `crier' (like ``town crier'' or announcer), from the verb schreien, `to shriek.'
It's necessary at this point to say something about how SRTE's and variously named equivalents are used. In principle, one of the main purposes of these is to provide useful feedback to instructors so that they can improve their and their courses' effectiveness. In practice, this is not the case. I have never studied my evaluations and thought -- ``ah yes, this is what I need to work on.'' My deficiencies and limitations as a teacher are clear enough to me, and I can articulate them better than my students. More or somewhat better-designed teaching evaluation instruments would not affect the extent to which I improve what I might but have not improved. This is pretty much the universal view.
That is not to say, however, that teaching evaluations are without any utility and do not affect how courses are taught in subsequent years. Teaching evaluations serve to quantify students' satisfaction with a course. This satisfaction is affected by some factors over which an instructor has little or no control: for example, an instuctor whom students find unpersonable will always suffer in evaluations, and instructors, like noninstructors, cannot very well ``improve'' the persona they project. Most factors affecting student satisfaction, however, might be summarized under the single heading of ``difficulty.'' Students are unhappy if they have to work hard. This is not an entirely unreasonable basis on which to evaluate a course and instructor. A poorly organized course, an ignorant instructor, badly selected problem sets, capricious (but not totally capricious) grading, and most other things that can make a bad course generally do force the conscientious student to work harder.
If poor teaching methods were all that affected students' effort, and hence their satisfaction and the course evaluations, then those evaluations might be genuinely valuable. But this ignores the elephant in the living room, which is content. Differences in teaching methods account for a small part of differences in evaluations. Most of the variation arises from the amount of material covered. In practice, an instructor who receives poor evaluations in a course improves them by making the course easier, or by letting a less demanding instructor teach it.
When I get some time, I'll come back and finish this entry. Then I will
- explain why this is not really a cop-out,
- explain why this really not a cop-out, and
- tell an interesting anecdote or two.
When volleyball teams switch sides of a court (to cancel the advantage any asymmetry -- as from sun position, say -- might give), it's called ``switching sides,'' as far as I know. A side-out is when the team receiving the serve wins a rally; it is awarded serve for the next play, but no point.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
The first Social Security check, serial number 00-000-001, was issued to Ida Fuller of Brattlesboro, Vermont, in the amount of $22.54, on January 31, 1940.
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
That name makes one think: sure, when you're underwater you are under water, but this is almost a surprising way of expressing the idea that you're in the water. In fact, when you're only ``in the water,'' part of you is usually not just above but completely out of the water. And usually when you're under a load of work, the work is all around you! Sooo confusing!
For more stupid reflections of this sort, see the anti- entry.
Writing standardized tests flatters the authors' conceit that they have knowledge enough to grade them.
Cf. ISEE.
An expensive particle accelerator elementary particle research in the multi-TeV range. ``Superconducting'' refers to the magnets. Superconductors are used not to achieve high magnetic fields but to keep power consumption down to earthly levels. Dipole magnets (most of the magnets) keep the particles circling as they are accelerated by electric fields; the magnetic field is ramped to keep the particles in a circle of constant radius as their energy increases. (Quadrupole magnets in pairs keep the particle beams focused.) As the particle energy increases beyond the capacity of a small ring to hold, the particle beam (consisting of bunches of particles) is cascaded through a sequence of rings of increasing radius. Between the initial ion source and linear accelerator and collision ring, the SSC was designed and partially built to use three intermediate rings: low-, medium- and high-energy boosters (LEB, MEB, HEB) with circumferences of 600 m, 4.0 km, and 10.8 km, respectively. The HEB would have fed a collider ring with a circumference of 87.1 km. Only the HEB and the colliding ring would have used superconducting magnets.
In the colliding ring, counter-rotating proton and antiproton beams would move in slightly off-center circles, colliding nearly head on at two intersection points 180 degrees apart.
Using counter-rotating beams is trickier than using a single beam colliding against a stationary target, and because a particle beam is a sparse thing compared to a solid target, the event rates are much higher with a stationary target. However, a stationary target is not an option for relativistic reasons. The relevant energy for interpeting the interparticle dynamics of a collision is the center-of-mass energy. In the nonrelativistic (NRNR) regime, the kinetic energy K of a particle is given in terms of rest mass m and velocity v by the formula
1 2
K = - mv .
2
For a collision between two particles of equal rest mass (like a proton and an
antiproton), one stationary (in the ``lab'' frame) and one moving at velocity
v, the center-of-mass moves at velocity
v/2 in the lab frame, and each particle has kinetic energy
K' = K/4. Hence, in the c.m. frame,
the total kinetic energy is 2K' = K/2 -- i.e., half the
total kinetic energy of the system in the lab frame. Relativistically, the
decrease in energy is much more dramatic.
Like its North American analog [the Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS)], this society is having trouble getting together a homepage. Hmm.
Here's the closest thing to an SSFH website that I could find.
The Beatles warned you're gonna lose that girl. Billy Joel said tell her that you really love her. Bon Jovi, Depeche Mode, Jonny Lang [sic], and other artists have explained: ``Lie To Me!''
Related initialism: STS.
There is a great deal of principled resistance to the use of SSN's as a national form of identification, which shows up in legislation forbidding various organizations from requiring a person to reveal his SSN except for the specific purposes of the SSA. This is motivated in part by a jealous regard for personal freedom and privacy, and by a suspicion of the purposes of government or of powerful businesses. In addition, however, there is a less evident factor that news media appear to have some discomfort in reporting. That is that in various fundamentalist exegeses of the Book of Revelations, the end times will have a world government by the antichrist in which there will be a universal system of personal identification numbers. The end times, of course, will be upon us before you know it.
![[NEC chip stereogram]](images/19-7.gif)
I suspect that the name itself is a kind of anglicismo, influenced by the American phrase ``public safety,'' although I also see a few instances of ``seguridad pública'' on a few webpages from outside Mexico (mainly Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile; El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala; Spain).
I must mention a more distant antecedent, and a poorer one in various respects: the Comité de salut public, which under the leadership of Robespierre conducted a (or ``the'') reign of terror from 1793 to 1794 that killed around 20 or 40 thousand people. The name seems problematic to me, and seems to be problematic for the TLF as well, which mentions the CSP under salut without explaining it, only pointing to a public entry where it is not mentioned at all. Spanish salud pública means `public health,' and is a faux ami of the French salut public. The CSP's name is typically rendered as `committee of [or for] public safety' in English, which is why an English-speaker may make the connection.
However, there don't seem to be other contexts in which salut is translated as `safety.' Safety in English corresponds more closely to sûreté or even securité. (Incidentally, there was also a nominally independent Comité de sûreté générale that was supposed to supervise the police force, though it was effectively an organ of the CSP during La Terreur.) Considering that the CSP was created to defend the revolution against real enemies within and without France, I think that `committee for national salvation' may be a more accurate translation, consistent with similar modern expressions.
The noun salut actually corresponds to two different verbs: sauver, `to save,' which provides the relevant senses here, and saluer, `to salute, greet.' (These are cognate with the Spanish verbs salvar and saludar, which are associated with the distinct nouns salud and saludo, resp. Actually, Spanish reflexes of Latin salvo include not only salud but salvación and various other words.) The saluer-related senses of salut might have been influential in some possibly unconscious way: Salut et fraternité was a standard formula used as a salutation in the revolutionary era. Salutaire, not too incidentally, does mean `salutary.'
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
Before I could start the class, I was stopped cold in my tracks. My eyes were riveted to a very busty lady wearing a western shirt with "SLOW SLOW QUICK QUICK" written in huge block letters right across her chest.
Due to her ample figure, the letters literally seemed to jump out at you. After I overcame my astonishment, I composed myself enough to ask her to explain the story behind the shirt.
The lady said her Husband had been having trouble keeping the rhythm of Two Step when they danced. (slow slow quick quick, of course). She smiled wickedly as she added that he never could take his eyes off of her chest either.
An elementary school teacher by day, Ms Slow Slow Quick Quick thought a little Kindergarten-level visual aid trick might help her Husband hear the music a little better when they hit the Winchester later on. By now the entire class was rolling on the floor.
It was a very funny joke except for her husband. As she talked, I watched a this poor soul stood next to her staring at the floor in crimson embarrassment. From his body language he clearly didn't think this practical joke was nearly as funny as the rest of us did.
We finished our class as best we could despite the enormous distraction. I have to admit I had to make a special effort not to gawk at the woman throughout the entire night, but most of the men were not so discreet.
As it happens, the two-step is not slow-slow-quick-quick. It's quick-quick-slow-slow. For people with no sense of rhythm this may seem the same thing, except for the first two steps. People with no sense of rhythm probably also wonder why vertical bars are drawn through the stave in sheet music. Pleasant distractions weren't the only reason that guy had trouble keeping to the rhythm.
In the summer of 1979 I was working at the cyclotron at Princeton University, which was housed in basement level B of the physics building (Jadwin Hall). While there I got to see the letter sent by the SSS to Mr. B. Cyclotron, reminding him of his legal responsibility to register for the draft. I haven't found out yet exactly when the Jadwin Hall cyclotron was originally commissioned, but Jadwin Hall itself was only dedicated in 1970. Maybe the SSS confused it with the tiny older cyclotron then in Palmer Hall (now Frist Hall). The Jadwin Hall cyclotron was decommissioned in 2004 and 2005.
Really?
``The society meets annually at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. If interest warrants, sessions may be organized at the Eastern and Central Division meetings as well. Although the Society for Skeptical Studies is primarily a philosophical society, non-philosophers are also encouraged to become members.''
The SSSA serves an Internet Glossary of Soil Science Terms.
This is also called CCSS7; there are more links at that entry.