She was quiet awhile and then said, Many a night when I was little, alone in that cabin, I wished I could take that fiddle of his up to the jump-off and pitch it and let the wind fly it away. In my mind I'd just watch it go till it was just a speck , and then I'd think about the sweet sound it would make breaking to pieces on the river rocks way down below. from Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier.1

For many years, the only way to attain an education in software engineering has been through the school of hard knocks. A common lament among experienced software developers is that colleges don’t teach students the skills they need to perform effectively on the job. What is needed to give software developers a better start? Formal professional education has traditionally been divided into thre...

Great Britain's 1983 "Christmas Crusade" against drunken drivers, during which the police of England and Wales administered an average of 1350 breath tests daily, is discussed. Although not deliberately planned and organized, the campaign, fueled by press reports, was perceived by many observes to be a national organized deterrent effort. To test the hypothesis that the crusade reduced drunken ...

(d) Suppose list1 contains N1 elements and list2 contains N2 elements. The first while loop is executed O(N1) times. The body of this loop takes O(N1) since GetNextItem takes O(1) and InsertItem takes O(N1). So, the complexity of the first loop is O(N1N1). The second while loop is executed O(N2) times. The body of that loop takes O(N1+N2) time since GetNextItem takes O(1), RetrieveItem takes O(...

Adolescence is often described as a period of heightened risk-taking. Adolescents are notorious for impulsivity, emotional volatility, and risky behaviors such as drinking and driving under the influence of alcohol. By contrast, we found that risk-taking declines linearly from childhood to adulthood when individuals make choices over monetary gambles. Further, with age we found increases in the...