Every spring I get depressed. Last month I had the stunning realization that graduate student recruitment is a major cause of my spring depression. Each year, as the days lengthen, graduate programs engage in their ritualistic seduction of prospective students. In the past 15 years, US institutions, including the most elite and respected, have evolved mating displays worthy of birds and fish. T...

Basic Chinese 2 [4] Tuesday, 02/06 to 04/17 10 Classes 5:30 to 7 p.m. Brown Hall [2] Room 4010 Chinese Ink Painting Session 2 [3] Wednesday, 02/07 to 04/18 10 Classes 5:30 to 7 p.m. Brown Hall [2] Room 4025 Intermediate Chinese Language 1 [4] Wednesday, 02/07 to 04/18 10 Classes 5:30 to 7 p.m. Brown Hall [2] Room 4010 Intermediate Chinese Language 2 [4] Wednesday, 02/07 to 04/18 10 Classes 5:30...

According to Sacks, it was Friedberg’s construction of a maximal recursively enumerable (r.e.) set that sparked interest in the distributive lattice of r.e. sets, modulo finite sets, under inclusion. Among the major results are the Lachlan’s characterization of the principal filters of hh-simple sets and Soare’s proof that the maximal sets form an orbit. We study the modular lattice L* of r.e. ...

Problem 1. As mentioned in class, the convex hull is a somewhat non-robust shape descriptor, since if there are any distant outlying points, they will tend to dominate the shape of the hull. A more robust method is based on the following iterative approach. Given a planar point set P in general position (see Fig. 1(a)), let H1 be the convex hull of P . Remove the vertices of H1 from P and compu...

China has recently experienced an increased demand for Western-style marketing and business practices due in part to a burgeoning economy and recent entry into the WTO. Market-based education has diffused rapidly across China as Chinese universities have started to imitate their Western counterparts and have entered into joint venture agreements with them. First, increased demand for Western-st...

As consumers are getting better at avoiding the traditional marketing campaigns companies are using, it has become crucial for companies to differentiate their marketing. One way of doing this is to use guerrilla marketing, a marketing type more extreme, innovative and attention capturing than traditional marketing. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how the use of guerrilla marketing aff...

14 Spring 2010/ Vol. 16, No. 3 www.acm.org/crossroads Crossroads Besides public data repositories, scientific collaborations maintain community-wide data resources. For example, in gravitational-wave physics, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory [3] maintains geographically distributed repositories holding time-series data collected by the instruments and their associated met...

Muscle contractions that load in-series springs with slow speed over a long duration do maximal work and store the most elastic energy. However, time constraints, such as those experienced during escape and predation behaviours, may prevent animals from achieving maximal force capacity from their muscles during spring-loading. Here, we ask whether animals that have limited time for elastic ener...