n 1996, I found a tiny package floating around the Internet called VMware. I booted up my Linux laptop and proceeded to install this little animal. Within minutes I started the application and booted my first virtual PC. Compelled to investigate further, I decided to load Windows 95, completely convinced that it would fail miserably — Win95 on Linux, are you kidding me? To my surprise, I was br...

Families that bought land in the Barber Orchard subdivision near Waynesville, North Carolina, thought they were acquiring a piece of nirvana. Mountains rise all around; the air seems fresh and the water clean. But when one resident had his well water tested on the advice of a former orchard worker, the dream turned into a nightmare. The water was found to contain DDT, DDE, and benzene hydrochlo...

Software-engineering academics focussed for many years on the costs of developing the first version of a product, and ignored the costs of subsequent maintenance. We taught our students the 'waterfall model', and biased research towards the sort of tools and ideas that complemented it, such as formal methods. Meanwhile the economics of software had changed. Software is now so complex that the o...

Karma is a central feature of Buddhist ethics, but the question of its classification in terms of ethical theory has so far received little attention. Granting that karma is foundational to Buddhist ethics and arguing that what is fundamental to the Buddhist understanding of karma is the saṃskāric modification of the agent, this article relates the doctrine of karma as understood in Theravāda B...

Religion, culture, socioeconomics, political factors, and even geography play important roles in the spread of HIV in Thailand. The author discusses these factors, emphasizing the role of Thailand's significant commercial sex trade. Politics, poverty, and geography together form much of the basis of the patterns of HIV's spread throughout Thailand. Although 80% of the Thai population lives i...

I often fantasize about the ideal long-term care facility: a facility without regulations or resulting need to document everything. In this dream — we will call it Nirvana nurses, certified nursing assistants, dieticians, therapists, and social workers spend very little time on computer more interacting with residents. Freed from burden of documentation, nurses assistants can do what they best:...

We describe the conceptual design of an advanced laser guide star facility (LGSF) for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), to be built in collaboration with the LBT’s international partners. The highest priority goal for the facility is the correction of ground-layer turbulence, providing partial seeing compensation in the near IR bands over a 4 field. In the H band, GLAO is projected to improv...

Although we are prepared to spend dizzying sums on health care no one seems quite sure what health is. The World Health Organization made a bold offer in 1948. Their definition of health is ‘not merely the absence of disease or infirmity but a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’. But this utopian vision is an unattainable ideal, bearing no relation to the struggles of real...