Dropping out of grad school with F's: how will this affect job prospects?

Question: I am currently getting ready to finish my first semester of a graduate program (was on track for Ph.D but that does not matter anymore). I made the decision to quit half way through the semester due to some family issues that came up. Anyway, ever since that, I pretty much lost all motivation to study with the persistence that I had before - up to the point where on a subconscious level my brain refuses to absorb any more information. I will likely be receiving at least 1 F for the semester. My question is this - after I leave the program I will be looking for job in industry - I am a Civil Engineer as an undergraduate. How will having an F on a 1 semester transcript in graduate school affect my job prospects?
Comment: Please change the title to express your specific question.
Comment: I would recommend asking this question at The Workplace stack exchange since it's about interviews and hiring rather than academia per se. Frankly, many of us go straight from grad school to professor positions and have little experience with industry. I don't even understand the premise of the question: why would the people hiring you have access to your transcript? Do you have to submit it as part of the application package?
Comment: Did you continue your graduate studies at the same institution where you did your undergraduate studies? If not, then I would assume you could get by without even giving your grad transcript to prospective employers.
Comment: It will affect your job perspectus negatively with respect to those with higher skills, and won't have much impact with regards to those who have lower skills.
Answer: Did you try seeing if you could formally withdraw, rather than do so "de facto"? A withdrawal means that you normally don't receive grades for courses (although some schools note a withdrawal while having a failing grade in a course).
The likelihood that a future employer will overlook this depends largely on who's doing the applicant screening. If your "direct boss" is handling the process, you have a chance of convincing them that the grades aren't reflective of your true abilities. On the other hand, if a human resources "specialist" is handling the screening process, a grade of F will unfortunately mean your application will probably end up in the "circular file."
Answer: You will be looking for a job in industry. I don't think your job prospects are completely determined by the F's on the transcript of your first semester of the graduate program. Of course, those F's hurt your chances. Your resume could be filtered out by the human resources when they see the F's on your graduate school transcript if they ask to see that transcript. But, they usually pay attention to your undergraduate transcript and your skills set. If your undergrad transcript is fine and you have the skills/experience they are looking for, you still have reasonably good job prospects.
On the other hand, if it is not too late to withdraw from the class, do it to avoid the permanent bad record. If it's too late, try your best to not to fail the class. I know it's hard after you have gone through the personal issues. But, you don't want to ask yourself the question "What if I tried?" years later.
Wish you good luck!
Comment: Some larger employers have strict GPA cutoffs. The F would be disastrous.
Comment: Also, not every job requires graduate school level knowledge. Sometimes, graduate school grades are neglected by industry employers, large or small.
Comment: @aeismail I agree. The OP does not have to limit himself to those top large companies.


Getting errors when switching screen to RootViewController

Question: I'm hopeless at the moment, I need some help here.
So from the beginning:
I've made a view based app which I want to use as the main app. And I have build another app which is a navigation based one.
I combined the two projects into one, I dragged and dropped the navigation one in de first app I've made. I added the header file to the .m file of the view based one. So far so good. But when I add this code:
<code>-(IBAction)search
{
  RootViewController *search = [[RootViewController alloc] initWithNibName:nil bundle:nil];
  search.modalTransitionStyle = UIModalTransitionStyleCrossDissolve;
  [self presentModalViewController:search animated:YES];
}
</code>
Then I'll get two errors which is:
Undefined symbols for architecture i386:
  "_OBJC_CLASS_$_RootViewController", referenced from:
      objc-class-ref in Home.o
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture i386
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
So what I'm trying to do here is when I click on a button in the main app the screen needs to go to the main one from the other app.
I tried changing the RootViewController into UINavigationController and that worked, but it's not the fullscreen of course. I need to show the RootView Controller.
Can someone help me? Or if you need more info please let me know!
iPhone 4S, Mac OS X (10.7.3), XCODE
Comment: Combine the two projects into one by just adding the required class files into the new project.
Comment: Hi Kirby and Jason,
Thank you for the answer, but I already done this? See my screenshot: http://www.the-developers.nl/screenshot.png

So What to do?
Answer: You need to add RootViewController.m to the project that's complaining. The RootViewController.h by itself will not work.
Comment: Hi Kirby and Jason,
Thank you for the answer, but I already done this? See my screenshot: http://www.the-developers.nl/screenshot.png

So What to do?


Split Grid data into 4

Question: I am using ArcGIS software
I have a Feature Class layer that represent a Grid network, which consists of rectangles that covers all the areas.
I want to use it to generate another feature class layer with smaller grid, by dividing each rectangle into 4 quarters.
What is the best way to do it with ESRI software?
is  there a geoprocessing tool that can do that?
Comment: Have you looked at [Create Fishnet](http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help../index.html#//00170000002q000000)?
Comment: Can you edit your Question to clarify whether it is a feature class or a raster (grid) dataset that you are trying to create, please?
Comment: I added more description
Answer: I suggest, as @Barbarossa said you try Create Fishnet, however, here is another approach you may like:
Imagine you have a grid network like some panels shown here:
Use Feature To Point (Data Management) to create the centroids of the polygons/ panels. Make sure the inside option box is checked. Then you should get something like this:
Make a copy of your grid network, select all the features and move it as shown here (you have to turn on snapping and  move the selection center to the starting point of the arrow) :
Finally intersect the two grid networks and you should get such a result:
Comment: That is a smart way to do it. but I didn't know how to do snap the corner to the point.
When I enable snapping I can snap the point layer to the edge of the polygon, but it doesn't do it for the vertics on the lower left corner.
Comment: When you select the panels, you see a small "x" in the center of your selection. You have to hold Ctrl and move it to the starting point of the arrow. Then you will be able to move the selected panels to the desired point.
Answer: If you want a geoprocessing tool, Ian Broad put together a custom grid tool that creates quarter grids (and quarter quarter section grid). You can find it on the ArcGIS site here or on Ian's site
Comment: I tried a similar tool and it might be the same tool, but the owner now changed his web site.
The problem is that tool was so slow
Anyway I fixed the problem
Answer: Actually it turns out the Fishnet is very fast.
I tried the method that Arash described, and it worked but it was very slow.
I tried open source tools that do that, and they were slow.
Fishnet had an amazing performance.
It is just you need to pay attention to its parameters, and it has tons of parameters.
And it can be called in many different ways
It takes you many trial and error to find the best way to call it, but it is worth the time, because still it is faster than any other tool.

Split Grid data into 4


How can I format MacBook hard drive from OSX install disc?

Question: I did some research and I found that rEFIt makes the OSX install disc nit recognize a Tiger partition. I've read that the solution includes backing up and then formatting. I am going to do this sans the backup. How can I format the drive using an OSX? Will this the Tiger fix the issue of the installer not seeing partition?
Answer: Look for the disk utility in the menu bar on top.
Answer: You can do an erase and install from the Tiger disk which will restore everything back to scratch.


How to wait/block until a semaphore value reaches 0 in windows

Question: Using the semop() function on unix, it's possible to provide a sembuf struct with sem_op =0.  Essentially this means that the calling process will wait/block until the semaphore's value becomes zero.  Is there an equivalent way to achieve this in windows?
The specific use case I'm trying to implement is to wait until the number of readers reaches zero before letting a writer write.  (yes, this is a somewhat unorthodox way to use semaphores; it's because there is no limit to the number of readers and so there's no set of constrained resources which is what semaphores are typically used to manage)
Documentation on unix semop system call can be found here:
http://codeidol.com/unix/advanced-programming-in-unix/Interprocess-Communication/-15.8.-Semaphores/
Answer: Assuming you have one writer thread, just have the writer thread gobble up the semaphore. I.e., grab the semaphore via WaitForSingleObject for however many times you initialized the semaphore count to.
Answer: A Windows semaphore counts down from the maximum value (the maximum number of readers allowed) to zero. WaitXxx functions wait for a non-zero semaphore value and decrement it, ReleaseSemaphore increments the semaphore (allowing other threads waiting on the semaphore to unblock). It is not possible to wait on a Windows semaphore in a different way, so a Windows semaphore is probably the wrong choice of synchronization primitive in your case. On Vista/2008 you could use slim read-write locks; if you need to support earlier versions of Windows you'll have to roll your own.
Answer: I've never seen any function similar to that in the Win32 API.
I think the way to do this is to call WaitForSingleObject or similar and get a WAIT_OBJECT_0 the same number of times as the maximum count specified when the semaphore was created.  You will then hold all the available "slots" and anyone else waiting on the semaphore will block.
Comment: If you have numerous write thread, then this scheme will deadlock if any write thread takes a single "slot" since no write thread will be able to grab all "slots".
Answer:
The specific use case I'm trying to implement
  is to wait until the number of readers reaches
  zero before letting a writer write.

Can you guarantee that the reader count will remain at zero until the writer is all done?
If so, you can implement the equivalent of SysV "wait-for-zero" behavior with a manual-reset event object, signaling the completion of the last reader.  Maintain your own (synchronized) count of "active readers", decrementing as readers finish, and then signal the patiently waiting writer via SetEvent() when that count is zero.
If you can't guarantee that the readers will be well behaved, well, then you've got an unhappy race to deal with even with SysV sems.


What does these generic parameter constraints mean?

Question: I'm using a method with this as the 1st parameter:
Action<IFieldsetter<Contact>>

How do I read this? Does is mean that this must be an Action object where the Action constructor is constrained to accept only something that implements IFieldsetter? And it looks like IFieldsetter itself is being constrained, but I don't understand this part at all.
Comment: This is not a constraint. It's a (nested) generic type. Like `List`, except instead of `string` there's another generic type. So it's an `Action` which accepts an `IFieldsetter`, which is an IFieldsetter which (presumably) sets a field of type `Contact`.
Answer: It's not an actual constraint, but just the type it needs. So, that method's first parameter is an Action (i.e. delegate), which has only one parameter, and that parameter is a IFieldsetter<Contact>, whatever that means. My guess is that IFieldsetter exposes a setter and in this case it must handle the type Contact, but you should be the one who knows for real what they are and do! Post the code of this interface and this class if you need further help.
For example, if it was Action<IEnumerable<String>>, it would mean that the delegate receives a list of strings as a parameter. Here's some code:
// Your method with the *special* parameter.
private void ChrisMethod(Action<IEnumerable<String>> method)
{
    string[] exampleList = { "First", "Second", "Third" };
    method(exampleList);
}

// The method that can be used as parameter.
private void ParameterMethod(IEnumerable<String> list)
{
    foreach(string str in list)
        Console.WriteLine(str);
}

public void Main()
{
    ChrisMethod(ParameterMethod);
}

A constraint on a type parameter is a different thing. You can learn more about that here.
Answer: A C# System.Action (MSDN) is a delegate object where Action<T> is the equivalent of a delegate function matching void FunctionName(T). So you can set it to a function and later on call that function.
The section generics block <Contact> applies to the IFieldsetter, so you have an Action that takes an argument of IFieldsetter<Contact>. Without knowing anything about the IFieldsetter I can't tell you what it's going to do with the Contact generic argument there.
In order to use this, you'll can have something resembling the following:
void Main()
{
    FunctionThatDoesStuff(SetField);
}
void FunctionThatDoesStuff(Action<IFieldsetter<Contact>> action)
{
    var setter = new IFieldsetter<Contact>();
    action(setter);
}
void SetField(IFieldsetter<Contact> setter)
{
}

Answer: This is nested generic type parameter. From the outermost layer, you can see that this is an Action<T> delegate. And the delegate needs an argument of type T. In this case, T is replaced by IFieldsetter<Contact>. i.e. Action<IFieldSetter<Contact>> needs an argument of type IFieldSetter<Contact>. Now the IFieldSetter<T> interface sets a field of type T. And in this case, T is replaced by Contact so IFieldSetter<Contact> sets a field of type Contact.
Let's sum up: Action<IFieldsetter<Contact>> represents an Action delegate that needs an argument of type IFieldSetter which can set a field of type Contact. Now do you understand?
Answer: Action<IFieldsetter<Contact>> means Action delegate accepts a parameter of type that implements a generic interface IFieldsetter. suppose a class is implemented with IFieldsetter intercae with Contact as the generic parameter as shown below.
public class Test: IFieldsetter<Conatct>
{

}

Now instance of this test class can be passed as parameter to the Action deletegate.


How to quickly change multiple colors in the same text area?

Question: As shown in the following image, how can I change the color of "Ms" or "Mr" in one go?
Is there any existing function that can be used or is it possible to script?
Answer: Use "Recolor Artwork"
With the text area selected, click on the "Recolor Artwork" button (or go to Edit → Edit Colors → Reclor Artwork):

Under "Current Colors" is a list of all the colors present in the selected artwork. The "New" column is where you set the colors to change to. You can also combine or swap colors:

Clicking the new color box will bring up the color picker. Choose your new color:

You can also change colors by altering Hue/Saturation/Brightness etc. or visually on a color wheel by switching to the 'Edit' tab.
Click OK once you are happy with your changes.
The result:
Answer: I'm not sure Illustrator has these capabilities. There are three ways to "hack" this though.
One would be to assign different character styles to "Mr." and "Ms." and then just edit the global style.
Another would be to have the "Mr." and "Ms." as separate text objects.
And the fastest way, that unfortunately removes the possibility of editing, would be to convert all text to outlines, and then just select the words you want to re-colour. Use "Direct Selection Tool" (A) for this. Also, you can copy the text beforehand, and remove the names after you converted them to outlines, changed the title colour, then paste the previous editable names.
Let me know if any of this works for you.
If you would've worked in inDesign, you could've just use the "Find and Replace" function, as it is quite powerful.
Answer: Another solution is to save the colours to use on the text (but can be used on any kind of artwork, not just text) in the swatches panel and set it to global. In this way you can modify the colours on your text just by changing the saved swatches.

Tick this box to save your colours as global

If you already have saved your colours as swatches but forgot to make them global you can still change them by:

Double clicking on the swatch you wish to change to global
Select the global option


deploying a web service war file to websphere

Question: I am trying to deploy a web service war file to websphere.
I have tested the web service in Eclipse using Tomcat and it worked.  However, once I deploy the war file to Websphere, the service (as outputted in tomcat) does not display.  In deploying to websphere, i checked the DEPLOY WEB SERVICES under the SELECT INSTALLATION OPTIONS.
When I created the war file from Eclipse, I right clicked the application and clicked export file, selected war file and there it went.
Was there something I missed in creating the war file? Or, in the deployment?
thanks.
Answer: Maybe too late?...See this case for a reasonable explanation.


Simulation of QED

Question: Can anyone point me to a paper dealing with simulation of QED or the Standard Model in general? I will particularly appreciate a review paper.
Answer: Is there a reason that you are interested in QED in particular? For processes within current experimental ranges, the standard perturbative treatment is incredibly accurate, and simulations are not really necessary.
A sector of the standard model where simulations are incredibly important is in strong interactions (QCD) for which a perturbative treatment is not satisfactory as one heads to the IR (low energy). A good reference to start at could be: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-lat/0506036
Comment: @BjornWesen:  It's not impossible to simulate QED on a lattice.  It's actually quite a bit easier than simulating QCD.  But it's rather pointless, because the perturbative approximation is so good.
Comment: I've looked for the same thing and the only thing you find is a lot of lattice QCD talk normally, so I second the question and it would be especially interesting to hear if for example it is impossible or very impractical to simulate QED in the same way for fundamental reasons (the fact that there are other methods currently giving better results for some classes of problem formulations is another issue, IMO). Anyway, interesting introduction you linked!
Comment: Nevertheless, I still haven't found any good description of it.. if it really is that more simple than lattice qcd, then you'd expect some descriptions to exist, if nothing else than to "warm up" the reader to lattice qcd..
Answer: The Standard Model theoretical first and second order terms plus QCD approximations are input  as generators for the Monte Carlo simulations for the LHC data :

Most of the emphasis is on the simulation of events that contain a hard process, although I
  will return to mention minimum bias collisions later. Since the hard interaction is generally the
  process of interest it acts as the trigger around which the simulation of the whole event is built.
  In the previous generation of simulation these were almost always 2 : 2 processes, but one of
  the largest areas of development in recent years, which I will describe in detail below, has been
  the inclusion of higher order corrections, both in terms of multi-parton tree-level processes and
  also NLO corrections to the low parton multiplicity processes.

These Monte Carlos have in addition as input the description of the detector and the processes that prescribe the tracks and hits to simulate   the signals of the interaction  in the detector.
Keep in mind that in high energy physics the Monte Carlo method is an integration method, convoluting all the inputs, theoretical and detector dependent. Events are generated as if they are real events and a data base is created which is studied and compared to the real data.

Simulation of QED


Ubuntu 12.10 shows no launcher or menu

Question: I have 'upgraded' to Ubuntu 12.10 from a previous nice version that always worked.  I have installed from a CD downloaded from this site.  I start the PC (HP Pavillion zv5200) and arrive at a signon screen which has my username and "Guest".  This screen shows the menu at the top with power, time, calendar, etc.  So I enter my password and I am taken to a screen which only shows a wallpaper, nothing else.  If I move the mouse and 'push' against the left limit I do not get a launcher app.  Nothing.  The only thing that works is opening a terminal (ctrl+alt+F1).  I have tried several of the hot-key combinations I've read about on the site but none do anything, nothing happens.  Can anyone help?  Thanks very much!
Answer: I had the same problem but none of the above worked for me. Uninstalling compizconfig-settings-manager also didn't work.
In the end I found the answer here, as I was seeing the same 'Fatal: glXQueryExtensionsString is NULL for screen 0' errors in a terminal when trying to start unity. I realised I was using a proprietary ATI display driver before I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10. I issued the commands below in a terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy

and then rebooted my PC. Unity then reappeared when I logged in.
There's an explanation here of why the upgrade fails in the first place. I was using an AMD Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card (ATI RV635). Use:
lspci | grep VGA

to find out what graphics card you are using.
Answer: There are know issues with restricted video drivers, compiz, and/or unity 3D (one or all or maybe something else too).  If the other answers that suggest reseting compiz and unity don't work, try running unity 2D. At the login screen, right click the Ubuntu circle thing to the right of your name, click Ubuntu 2D, and login as normal.
Answer: Usually, some settings brought over from the previous version are incompatible with the current way of doing things. As of 12.10 you can no longer use 'unity --reset' to fix this, but there is a work-around.
Have a look here : How do I reset my Unity configuration?
Make sure you are following instructions for ubuntu 12.10, not the older instructions.
Comment: Thanks for your answer.  I tried several of the proposed solutions and none worked, one required a reinstall, the two involving download resulted in 'package not found'.
Answer: The "unity --reset" may not be working on Ubuntu 12.10 but you could try the following:
unity-reset

If that does not solve your problem you could try the following to reset your Unity:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:amith/ubuntutools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-reset

Then you can use the unity-reset and everything should be restored.
If that doesn't work check this site for more information:
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/10/how-to-reset-compiz-and-unity-in-ubuntu.html
Answer: I would like to report my trajectory and dealing with No Launcher.

It started with X-server problems in 12.04. because I couldn't log
in with both lightdm or gdm. I only could log in by terminal.
I decided to execute do-release-upgrade to upgrade to 12.10.
With the new release I found that I could only log in with gdm, but the Desktop appeared without launcher or top bar.
In this forum I discovered that the Launcher problem was related with some AMD drivers.
To find out what is my graphic card, I did :
lspci | grep -i vga
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller:
Advanced Micro Devices [AMD]
nee ATI Manhattan [Mobility Radeon HD 5400 Series]
I also discovered that in a terminal, I can execute the command: unity and recover my launcher.
In the same terminal I had the following error:
Compiz: Unity is not supported  by your hardware. Enabling software rendering instead (slow)
I installed Catalyst 12.6 Legacy driver, Now I have a permanent square in the right bottom corner, displaying: AMD Unsupported hardware.
From a terminal I execute again the command: unity and recover my launcher. I feel that with this driver the laptop is not slow and is working almost normal. I am surviving like this!
Answer: My launcher started becoming hard to reveal, then was only enabled by the Super key, then after a restart was replaced with a black bar slightly to the right of where the launcher should be. I tried all the above methods to no avail.
On a hunch I created a new user and the launcher is working as it should be, but only in that user. I don't have a solution, but am guessing some evil file or device is the culprit.

Ubuntu 12.10 shows no launcher or menu


multiprocessing.freeze_support()

Question: Why does the multiprocessing module need to call a specific function to work when being "frozen" to produce a windows executable?
Comment: Without checking into it too much, I'd guess that it's because multiprocessing needs to know about the python interpreter it's running in so that it can invoke more of them, and because packaging like py2exe do unusual things to the modules included which also need to be accounted for to import them.
Comment: I appreciate your extremely helpful comment on my answer regarding comparators!
Answer: The reason is lack of fork() on Windows (which is not entirely true). Because of this, on Windows the fork is simulated by creating a new process in which code, which on Linux is being run in child process, is being run. As the code is to be run in technically unrelated process, it has to be delivered there before it can be run. The way it's being delivered is first it's being pickled and then sent through the pipe from the original process to the new one. In addition this new process is being informed it has to run the code passed by pipe, by passing --multiprocessing-fork command line argument to it. If you take a look at implementation of freeze_support() function its task is to check if the process it's being run in is supposed to run code passed by pipe or not.
Comment: One thing which is not 100% clear is the object/method which prepares the new process to be run must call freeze_support()? And that could be anywhere within the object/method but before the Process.start() method is called?
Comment: I would like to get an answer to this question posed by @Har as well, if you know it.  The PyInstaller recipe calls for invoking that outside of one's custom the Process class.  Is that needed? Can I not just put that freeze_support() in that object's init()? That would be a hell of a lot cleaner!
Comment: Or, in the "static" class scope space (sorry I don't know the Python terminology for such)?  This is what I'm talking about btw: https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/wiki/Recipe-Multiprocessing

multiprocessing.freeze_support()


Type 'xxx' is not defined, BC30002 error

Question: It is possible to create an instance of a C# class within a aspx.vb codebehind file?
When I try this within the Page_Load event:
Dim oFlow As New Flow(HttpContext.Current.Request)

I get the Type 'Flow' is not defined. The Flow class itself is located here:
App_Code/CSCode/Cust/Frm/Flow.cs
There's no namespace associated with this class.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
cheers,
devin
Answer: There seems to be a few articles on google which say that it is possible to call a C# class from VB directly using a reference. However I have never used this method before. Here is what I would suggest:

Create a new project inside of your solution
Create this project as a c# class library
Compile that project either in debug or release (this will create a .dll in the projects debug/bin or release/bin folder).
Go back to your ASP.Net VB project and make a reference (right click the project in the explorer and your should see the reference option) to the DLL you just created.

Now you can call the c# code just as you would any other class library from your VB code. Also, if you need to make changes to the C# code all you have to do is make them, compile again, and since it is referenced in your VB project everything will be updated auto-magically.
Hope this helps.
Answer: Thanks for the response.
The reason why I was having issues is because I'm using IIS 6 on my windows xp box along with the XP PRO IIS Admin Tool and I didn't have the correct site running.
Once I switched over to the proper site within the XP PRO IIS Admin Tool and then recompiled, I was able to call my C# class from within the .vb page without a hitch and intellisense recoginized the class as well :)
cheers,
devin


Integration testing strategy resources

Question: I am looking for resources on strategies for writing bottom-up, end-to-end integration tests. These tests will be for a large-scale C# .NET application that uses MS silverlight and ASP.NET MVC. The tests will be written in NUnit. I am new to writing integration tests and would ideally like a good 'one-stop-shop' resource or two that will help outline the process (conceptually) and ensure that I cover all the bases, and do so in an efficient manner using best-practices.
Answer: Visual NUnit seems to be the way to go.
Answer: I use WatiN (http://watin.org/documentation/getting-started/). It integrates with NUnit and it's very easy to set up.

Integration testing strategy resources


LCD Lifespans Constantly Running

Question: I am creating an arduino alarm clock/light sculpture, but I can't for the life of me find any information about the lifespans of LCDs that are running 24/7 for a very long time. If anyone has any information on them, please tell me. Specifically, I am using this one.
Comment: Let me turn the question around for you. How long do you **want** it to last, realistically? A year? 10 years? 100 years?
Comment: it should be years and years; i have several going for years now.
Answer: The lifespan of the LCD and the electronics is just like any electronics part. When it is bad quality it will last a few years, when it is good quality it is more than 10 years.
A LCD watch from the 1970s might still work today. That is a few decades.
The backlight might get dim. That depends on the quality of the led and how bright it is set. The cheapest leds have only 50% brightness left after a few months. I suppose they didn't put the cheapest led in that display. I expect it to be okay for many years. Don't set it to the highest brightness. A resistor for the backlight of 220 Ω is common, you could start with 470 Ω and see if that is bright enough.
I see sometimes that the backlight display is directly connected to 5V, without resistor. If you have done that, then you have reduced its lifespan.
There are a few weak parts: The potentiometer for the contrast, the large capacitors on the Arduino board (if there are any), and the power supply.
If the display is more or less at the same room temperature, you could replace the potentiometer with a single resistor of 100Ω to 10kΩ from the LCD contrast pin to GND.

LCD Lifespans Constantly Running


PhoneGap: Scaling down a webpage with viewport

Question: I am creating a quick prototype of an App we are going to be building at work so we can do a quick user test on some functionality.
My designer created my images at a 640px width to match the resolution of the iPhone 5. So to make things simple and quick I used this viewport tag:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=0.5, maximum-scale=0.5, user-scalable=no">

This work perfectly in mobile Safari but now that I have wrapped it in PhoneGap it is behaving like the scale is set to 1. Any thoughts on what I need to do to fix this?
Thank you.
Comment: The maximum scale might not have been needed, but it is in my snippet so I left it in.
Answer: I found it. There is a 'config.xml' in the root of the project. Setting this line:
    <preference name="EnableViewportScale" value="true" />

To be 'true' like my snippet here shows, made the app scale correctly like it did online.
Comment: hi i found this in staging config.xml,can you please tell where should i put this line
Answer: just tested, preference is not complete solutioin, do following:
config.xml:
preference name="EnableViewportScale" value="true" />
main activity, enable viewport in settings AFTER loadurl:
    super.loadUrl(Config.getStartUrl(),1);
    WebSettings settings = appView.getSettings();
    settings.setUseWideViewPort(true);
    settings.setLoadWithOverviewMode(true);

Comment: Works, combined with this.appView.setInitialScale(50); (for .5 initial-scale) and  in config.xml
Answer: I see above a possible mistake. Maybe my betters can comment.
1) The initial questioner seems to want to scale. The end of the line states "user-scalable=no". This could result in no scaling - scaling 100%. Browsers let you scale no matter what, right? So Safari result was a red herring.
Also, the inital and maximum scale are the same.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=0.5, maximum-scale=0.5, user-scalable=no">

2) According to Sebastions reply, perhaps the correct value is "50" not "0.5".


Python library to detect a bank/financial institution name in a string

Question: I would like to extract bank names from a given text like wells Fargo, chase....is there a python library for this? I know there is entity tagger in space and flair but they only identify the entity (org/person)
Comment: Have you tried creating a list of bank names and using the regex python module to extract the bank names from the text
Answer: As mentioned in the comment you can use regex but you would need to define a set of rules for it. You can try with LexNLP which is trained on legal documents and use it to extract data type like address, companies and persons.
Answer: It might be solved with Name Entity Recognition
There you go an example using spacy. I highly recommend you to check its documentation.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it might be computationally expensive and time-consuming
<code>import spacy

nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("Apple is looking at buying U.K. startup for $1 billion")

for ent in doc.ents:
    print(ent.text, ent.start_char, ent.end_char, ent.label_)
</code>
Comment: I tried lg model as well. Too many false positives. Try this give Xxxx xxx, this will be classified as person. Not sure what exactly the algo logic is


References for survival analysis

Question: I am looking for a good book/tutorial to learn about survival analysis. I am also interested in references on doing survival analysis in R.
Comment: community wiki please. Your question does not have an 'objective best' answer.
Answer: I like:

Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data (Klein & Moeschberger)
Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model (Therneau)

The first does a good job of straddling theory and model building issues.  It's mostly focused on semi-parametric techniques, but there is reasonable coverage of parametric methods.  It doesn't really provide any R or other code examples, if that's what you're after.
The second is heavy with modeling on the Cox PH side (as the title might indicate).  It's by the author of the survival package in R and there are plenty of R examples and mini-case studies.  I think both books complement each other, but I'd recommend the first for getting started.
A quick way to get started in R is David Diez's guide.
Comment: Very late comment, but your links both link to Survival Analysis by Klein and Kleinbaum, instead of the two books you mentioned.
Answer: For a very clear, succinct and applied approach, I highly recommend Event History Modeling by Box-Steffenmeier and Jones
Answer: "Survival analysis using SAS: a practical guide" by Paul D. Allison provides a good guide to the connection between the math and SAS code - how to think about your information, how to code, how to interpret results. Even if you are using R, there will be parallels that could prove useful.
Comment: Although this is the only Paul Allison text I have read, I would like to say various other texts of his have come highly recommended for me to read. Even if you don't use SAS (I have in the past so I was familiar with the code, although when I read this book I had completed migrated to other software) it is a really excellent book on survival analysis.
Answer: David Collett. Modelling Survival Data in Medical Research, Second Edition. Chapman & Hall/CRC. 2003. ISBN 978-1584883258
Software section focuses on SAS not R though.
Answer: Take a look at the course page for Sociology 761: Statistical Applications in Social Research. Professor John Fox at McMaster University has course notes on survival analysis as well as an example R script and several data files.
For another perspective, see  Models for Quantifying Risk, 3/e, the standard textbook for actuarial exam 3/MLC. The bulk of the book, chapters 3-10, covers survival-contingent payment models.
Answer: I learned from Hosmer, Lemeshow & May "Applied Survival Analysis: Regression Modeling of Time-to-Event Data" (2nd ed., 2008), which covers the basics. It also helped that I found a really cheap copy...
Comment: The link was dead. That is why it is always nice to include a full title for the reference.
Answer: Survival Analysis: A Self-Learning Text
by Kleinbaum and Klein
is pretty good.  It depends on what you want.  This is more of a non-technical introduction.  It's focused on practical applications and minimizes the mathematics.  Pedegocially, it's also intended for learning outside of the classroom.
Answer: I found "Analysis of survival data" by Cox and Oakes (Chapman and Hall Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability - vol. 21) to be very readable and informative.  No material on survival analysis in R though.
Answer: Dirk F. Moore
Applied Survival Analysis
Using R
Answer: Sage pubs book, Introducing Survival and Event History Analysis by Melinda Mills, has been build for an R users' adience.
Answer: I'm surprised no one has mentioned it, but there is a book that exactly meets your specifications:
Tableman & Kim. Survival Analysis using S. Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Answer: For survival analysis with R see Event History Analysis with R by Broström. With alot of R examples of survival analysis on historical demographic data.
Answer: The book we used as a text book is called
Applied Survival Analysis by David W Hosmer
This book is from a biostat perspective and I found it was covered almost everything I used in my work. Also they have R/state/SAS code on their website according to their examples in the book.
Answer: The book "Survival Analysis, Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data" written by Klein & Moeschberger (2003) is always the 1st reference I would recommend for the people who are interested in learning, practicing and studying survival analysis. This book not only provides comprehensive discussions to the problems we will face when analyzing the time-to-event data, with lots of examples of variety, and useful techniques we can apply to correct the "bias" induced from the above problems, but also prepares tons of practical notes and theoretical notes to lead us to the front door of the beautiful applications and methodologies in survival analysis.
The 2nd book I would recommend is "The Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data" by Kalbfleisch & Prentice (2002). Both professors are masters in this challenging field, and in this book they lecture not-so-trivial concepts in a very clear way and derive lots of state-of-the-art techniques at that time, with their guidance we are well prepared to step into the abundant world of survival analysis.
If we really spend quality time to study these two books, we can acquire lots of fundamental and deep knowledge to analyze censored and/or truncated data, which will cause seriously biased conclusions if we just ignore these problems inherently almost everywhere in real-world applications. Enjoy reading.
Comment: Kalbfleisch and prentice is full of errors.
Answer: Tutz & Schmid "Modeling Discrete Time-to-Event Data" (2016). It is fairly terse, dry and technical but has only 200+ pages and contains some references to R packages and functions. The authors suggest in the preface that while most of the textbooks focus on continuous time, this one focuses on discrete time. An advantage of discrete time modelling is amenability to smoothing and regularization methods that have proliferated in recent decades.

References for survival analysis


How should I create the pendant shown below?

Question: I use Creo Parametric to model. I tried to model the pendant shown below, but nothing worked. I first made an extrusion of a circle. Then, I created the outer arc using sweep. I was able to get the shape of the pendant through 'pattern.' My original idea was to create a bend in the pendant, import two of the same part files, and then assemble them using Boolean operations. But, I am unable to get the curvature/convex bent-shape. When I tried spinal bend, it returns an error. How do I approach this correctly? Please help. The error is shown in the second figure.
Comment: This looks like three features to me - revolve (profile in your last picture) extrude cut to make one petal (per second picture) then pattern bodies. (And also add the ring at the top)
Comment: @r13 - I understand this, that's what I was describing how to model!
Comment: @JonathanRSwift No, I did not use revolve. I created an extrusion of a planar petal, then I used spinal bend to make it curved. Then I tried using pattern to make pattern out of it, but I got a regeneration error. Any ideas how to do it in Creo? Meanwhile I will try another software, if it works
Answer: An elementary way to make it (or something resembling) is to make the surface by revolving an ellipse 180 degrees (or a half ellipse 360 degrees). Then one can extrude it to the normal direction to the wanted thickness. Many programs also allow creating a shell with wanted thickness around a solid. In the most simple programs one must revolve a profile which already has the wanted final thickness.
The holes can be drawn in plane and extruded to bars. Subtract them from the shell and that's it - add only the ring.
Another a little different approach is to make one petal and bend it. Bending a piece can be tricky or it's not at all implemented in simplest programs. I have a simple one which has a kind of bending .The next example is made there (=a low cost program named Moment of Inspiration, "MoI")
The bending in MoI is only a geometric trick. MoI is definitely not a valid metal engineering tool because it has not a slightest idea of how real metal would behave. That capability would need some real money to be purchased.
See the next image:

The planar petal is a XY-plane surface limited by 4 circular arcs which are joined. The curve in the right is a quarter of an ellipse. That will be rotated 90 degrees and used as the bending profile.
The ellipse arc is rotated to YZ plane and a corresponding reference line is drawn on the petal in XY plane:

MoI has geometric deformation named "Flow" which forces the piece under deformation so that the reference line becomes the wanted profile. Here's the result:

The original is still there. I keep (and hide) it for safety because the program is not a parametric CAD.
Extrusion makes this solid:

It's extruded to Z-direction. It's not physically realistic, it's jumping over where the fence is lowest; See NOTE1.
An upside down copy is made. The pieces are placed to overlap a little:

The final shape (minus the ring) can be made by making rotated copies and an union of them. I rotated 30 degrees/petal to make a little less dense version:

The edge strokes disturb. Without them one can see better how the surfaces fit:

Here's a high zoom into show the joints:

One can see that there's a little error at the joints. That's because the petals have only a single curvature, their overlaps cannot form a smooth continuous surface, there  must be steps. The surface normals point to different directions where adjacent petals meet.
NOTE1: Extrusion to surface normal direction would be more realistic. The easy way to get it is to extrude the planar version and to flow (=bend) the already extruded version:

That makes easily exactly fitting cusps, but the crossings in the middle of petal edges have still the same steps as in the previous version:

That impossibility to make a smooth surface by joining rotated single curvature petals can be the cause of your error message. I cannot verify it (= no Creo nor other high cost professional CAD software available)
Making a smooth surface by joining rotated petals is possible if the petals have both needed curvatures. The easiest way to get it is to project the planar petal shape onto a revolved surface:

The circle is the reference surface. The dome below it is a revolved quarter of an ellipse. This is the result of the projection (project is a mode of Flowing):

Extruding and making rotated copies gave this result:

This is a smooth surface, as expected. High zoom in doesn't show any steps at the joints:
Comment: Thank you for your valuable answer! I have tried the exact same thing in Creo (in Creo, the Flow option is called Spinal Bend). I am able to make a single petal with a bend, but when I extend it to a pattern of petals, the model shows some regeneration error. What do I do in that case? I have updated the erroneous model's image in the original question.
Comment: Thank you for the help! I will try to model it in MoI or some other software now.
Comment: If you are interested in freeware which can make the exactly fitting projected version I recommend to try Design Spark Mechanical. Here's one of my attempt's in DSM: https://i.stack.imgur.com/8ms6F.png That program is a decimated version of SpaceClaim. Many professional CAD file formats, sheet metal and making drawings are for ex. disabled, but the core of geometry making is still there, It's free and intended for hobbyists.
Comment: I will use DSM then, thank you so much!
Comment: I don't see any issues making this with Creo using the steps in my comment!
Comment: @JonathanRSwift can you add an answer. I would at least upvote if you showed how to model it so that the halves were originally planar  petal patterns (=laser cut sheet metal) and then pressed to the wanted curved form between revolved ellipsoid mold surfaces. What I have shown may be useful in graphics, but  it's not more metal engineering than sketching a cartoon style vessel is shipbuilding.
Comment: Hmmm - the original reference images are not for a manufactured item though, and the question was about replication of the model in the images... I feel that doing it with sheet metal tools, while interesting, wouldn't answer this question?
Comment: The questioner aimed to something that cheap- and freeware succeeded to make but Creo didn't. I guess there's in Creo's  settings something which contradicted.  Showing a realistic model which  presents a plausible manufacturing procedure, not only something visually resembling earns to be called engineering.  Making (and mangling) images has another website https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com.


publishing message to external Kafka Broker from docker container

Question: In my IDE, I am able to utilize a spring-boot application that would produce message(with Kafkaproducer) to an external kafka broker. But once I have hosted my spring-boot application in docker container, my application can no longer submit to the broker.
Here is the error message:
    o.s.k.support.LoggingProducerListener: Exception thrown when sending a message with key='null' and payload='....' to topic Category:
org.apache.kafka.common.errors.TimeoutException: Failed to update metadata after 60000 ms.
    org.springframework.kafka.core.KafkaProducerException:
Failed to send; nested exception is org.apache.kafka.common.errors.TimeoutException: Failed to update metadata after 60000 ms.

what I used to run docker was: docker run -p 9001:9001 -d image_name in which 9001 is my spring-boot port, I am able to Post to the port, just that once my message was posted, it won't get to the external broker.
I think I have the general concept that Docker containers are living in isolated land where you have to open/map the port in order to access it(like my -p 9002:9002), but does it work the same way to access out from container? if so, can someone please show me how I can run the docker container in order to be able to access to the external broker(let's say the broker URL is "192.168.1.1:9000")? I don't think I am able to modify anything on the broker now, but my assumption is that if I can access via my IDE, why not in docker? Thanks for all the help!
Answer: it was due to my ip-forwarding = 0, once that is turned on I am able to do outgoing request.


What is the simplest known metabolic pathway?

Question: What chemical process that can be defined as "metabolic" is the simplest found in any organism, and are there even simpler theoretical metabolic pathways, that are simpler than any found in known organisms?
Comment: How would one objectively identify a metabolic pathway as "simple"? What are the criteria for simplicity?
Comment: We don't do definitions much in biology. Certainly we define our terms in any discussion, but generally in our own terms, rather than by appeal to some authority. "Pathway" is a synthetic human concept — we, not Nature —define the first step and the last step, draw a ring round connected reactions of our choice, and call it a pathway.  Please go back and finish reading the [Tour] to find out what questions are acceptable here, then the Help on asking — particularly the need to provide context. What is the biological problem you are facing. And, as Bryan requested, define your terms.
Answer: Trivially: the protonation/deprotonation of water.
This is a process that happens spontaneously without any other inputs or outputs or catalysis under physiological conditions.
It feeds into basically every other biochemical process, and cannot be reduced into any of them.
I really agree with the commenters, so this answer goes to show that your definition is more about how you choose to draw the box around your focal point than it is about how biology works.
Comment: I appreciate this answer a lot. While I understand the problem with my intitial framing, I think you were able to see through the inexactitude of my framing and get to the real point of my question. Thank you all for the input on how I can better express and think about my questions, and thank you for trying to see the real question beneath my shortcomings in asking it clearly.
Comment: @blacktopshaman don't be too harsh on yourself. this stuff is hard.
Comment: This will not wash. The protonation of water is not a metabolic reaction, much less a metabolic pathway. First, metabolic reactions are generally regarded (any hit from a Google search or text book of biochemistry) as enzyme-catalysed reactions reacting on metabolites — chemical intermediates in energy generations, anabolism or elimination of waste products. Water participates in such reactions but is hardly regarded as a metabolite and its ionization does not require catalysis. Similarly, definitions of metabolic pathways refer to reactions in the plural, generally using the word "sequence".


Difference between Pure and Applied Mathematics?

Question: So, I have been looking into college courses to see what I want my major to be, and I noticed that M.I.T offers two specified types of Mathematics. Pure and Applied. What is the major differences in Pure vs. Applied and what are examples of each?
Comment: In general, applied math relates to the world in a very direct sense, while pure math is more theoretical.
Comment: So, would applied would be used more often?
Answer: The lines between these two divisions, much as in all divisions within mathematics, is often blurred.  However, the traditional division between the two is that Applied Mathematics has a very clear connection to physical real-world problems.  At its heart are PDE's, but also included are things like numerical methods and (once upon a time) what are now called computer science and statistics.
Pure Mathematics is mathematics for its own sake, pursuing questions based on the internal attractiveness of the questions.  At its heart is number theory.
Comment: I'm not sure that any subject can be said to be *at the heart of* Pure Mathematics, but if there was, it would probably be Logic & Set Theory.  Even Group Theory is more central to Pure Math.  Number Theory's distinction is that it is probably the only currently active major subject area that people outside of mathematics may have heard of and might have some understanding of.
Comment: @NikolajK PDE's are studied by first, second and third year undergraduates nowadays. At my university anyway.
Comment: Alright. Thank you, a lot. I think I understand now.
Comment: Did you note you were writing "PDE's" in an answer for someone who writes he's looking into collage course.
Comment: Certainly at MIT they are.
Comment: Oops, just realized that this thread is years old.  Sorry.
Answer: The best way to tell the difference between "pure" and "applied" mathematics is to compare the kinds of problems faced in each. Consider the following list of questions:

How can we model, mathematically, the movements of a human heart?
How quickly might a particular virus spread through a population of people?
What's the best way to throw a skipping stone? That is, how can we maximize the number of bounces on the surface of the water before the stone sinks?
Why do whirlpools form? Is there an optimal strategy to escape from one?
How can we accurately predict what the weather will be like in 3 days time? Is it possible to accurately predict what the weather will be like in 3 months time?
Why do soap bubbles form spheres? In cases where they do not form spheres (YouTube link), what kinds of shapes might they form?
Consider $k$ runners on a circular track of unit length. At time $t = 0,$ all runners are at the same position and start to run; the runners' speeds are pairwise distinct. A runner is said to be lonely at time $t$ if the distance along the track from them to the nearest other runner is at least $1/k$ at time $t.$ For which values of $k$ is every runner lonely at some time?
For which $m\times n$ chessboards does there exist a knight's tour? What about if the knight is allowed to go off one side of the chessboard and come back on the other side (cf. Asteroids)?
What is the area of a circle of radius $r,$ and what's its perimeter? Can we find a relationship between the two that also relates the volume of a sphere of radius $r$ to its surface area?
Can we find integers $a$ and $b$ with $b\neq0$ such that $\pi=a/b?$ What about if we replace $\pi$ by $\sqrt{2}?$
Given a number $n,$ is there some easy way to compute the number of prime numbers less than $n?$ Is there some easy way to estimate the greatest prime less than $n?$
Pick a positive integer. If it's even, then divide it by $2;$ if it's odd, then multiply it by $3$ and then add $1.$ For which starting values do we eventually reach $1$ as a result of repeating this process?

All of these questions have some kind of mathematical answer. I would say the first half are "applied" problems and the second half are "pure" problems. Broadly speaking, a problem is "applied" if it is phrased in terms of physical phenomena. That being said, question 6 leads to some very interesting pure mathematics, and question 7 has been clearly stated in terms of physical, everyday things. Hopefully, this is enough indication that there is not always such a clear distinction between "pure" and "applied."
It should be noted that I have certainly failed to give an indication of the breadth of either area: applied mathematics is much more than those six questions above, and pure mathematics is much more than the other four. When the time comes, I'm sure you'll be able to find more examples of the kinds of problems solved in mathematics by looking through your university library. I don't see any reason why you should choose in advance; I advise you to keep your options open, if you can.

EDIT: I have just realized that I am more than a year late to the party. Nevertheless, my answer might be helpful to someone, so I'll leave it here.
Comment: Modeling is only one part of applied math -- applied math also has a great emphasis on developing efficient algorithms to solve problems such as linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, ODEs and PDEs, and optimization problems.
Comment: Yes, of course! I agree completely. However, it's somewhat difficult to state such problems in a way which is understandable to someone who is "looking into college courses." Moreover, I find it difficult to make such areas sound *interesting* without getting involved in the necessary background first. Similarly, pure mathematics is more than "problems with numbers" or the like; much of pure mathematics is to do with "understanding the mathematical universe," or, in less poetic terms, "theory-building."
Answer: It can be boiled down to (my choice of) Algebra, Number Theory, Topology and Gemoetry versus Statistics, Mechanics and Applications ot Physics.
Answer: As previous answers mentioned, there is a lot of overlap between Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics because they might use similar techniques or concepts. What makes them different is the goals set on in Applied Mathematics versus Pure Mathematics, I am just going to refer them to AM and PM respectively.  For AM the goal is typically to advance mathematics for the sake of some practical purpose, now this might still be quite theoretical, for instance people in mathematical physics might be creating new math for the sake of advancing our understanding the physical world. While in PM is advanced for the sake of advancing mathematics without a concern for its practical applications, even if practical applications do exist or not.
What is important to also emphasize is that one field is not necessarily more difficult than the other one. For instance there are mathematicians who study the mathematical ideas behind General Relativity, this involves very technical concepts that require studying a lot of PM but serves AM as it allows us to have better physical understanding of our universe. Whether PM is harder or not than AM I believe is not a very useful conversation though.
Answer: I would have to say that pure mathematics involves pure numbers (and other objects that don't have units of measurement) while applied mathematics involves quantities (numeral values and units of measurement such as volts or dollars).
For example, if you are studying physics or statistics without using any units of measurement, then these would be forms of pure mathematics (mathematical physics and mathematical statistics).  But if you are studying them using units of measurement, then they are applied mathematics (applied physics and applied statistics).
Answer: AFAIK "applied" means applied to problems outside mathematics, while pure deals with problems just relevant for mathematics (at that time).
Also there might be considerations of solving problems for specific instances or solving them efficiently instead of just knowing that they are solvable.
Answer: Pure Mathematics means going deep into math only for the sake of stuying and advancing mathematics and only mathematics. Pure Math is studied not for the sake of any academic purpose, however applied math is studied in order to know how to advance other fields using math.


parse bitcoin addresses from transactions received through the P2P protocol using python

Question: I'm trying to extract public keys and transaction amounts from tx commands using python. Everyone on this stack exchange has been extremely helpful, but I think it's time to try and leverage a library to do this heavy lifting for me. Does anyone know any libraries where I can simply pass in the tx data without any parsing, so including info like magic number, and output details of the transaction?
Comment: software recommendations are off-topic but search engines do a good job of finding candidates : https://www.google.com/search?q=python+bitcoin+parsing+library or search here https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/search?q=python+parse
Comment: I don't think this is a software recommendation rather than a question on how to extract all outputs' addresses and amounts on new transactions seen on the network.
Comment: Is it actually a requirement to start with the network messages or do you just want to learn about each transaction?
Answer: I'm assuming that you are actually just interested in getting information on every transaction your node sees, rather than the actual p2p traffic.
If so, here is how I would approach your problem:

Run a Bitcoin Core full node. If you only care about unconfirmed transactions, consider making it a pruned node. If you want to collect data on all transactions, make it a non-pruning node and enable the transaction index with txindex=1.
Install PyZMQ
Enable ZeroMQ.
Listen to the hashtx ZMQ notifications
hashtx notifies about all transactions, either when they are added to mempool or when a new block arrives, so you may get multiple notifications for the same txid.
For each hashtx notification you receive, check if the transaction is seen for the first time, then call bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction <txid>. In the response, read the value and address fields for each element of the vout vector. Optionally read n to get the output's index. Note that some outputs don't have addresses, e.g. P2PK and nulldata (OP_RETURN) outputs.
Optionally: Store the resulting outputs in a database using their "outpoint" (txid:n) as the key.

Note that some txs you see in your mempool may get replaced by a later transaction. If you want to make sure you only keep transactions that end up being part of the best chain, you may want to track transactions in blocks rather than transactions in the mempool, and be sure to handle blockchain reorganizations.
If that's too slow for your purposes, you can get a whole block explorer of your own by running an instance of mempool.space or Esplora. Alternatively, you can probably pay for an API key to get this (public!) data from a number of different block explorers.
Note that you might need to smooth out some corners on this approach if you want use it, I have not tested this. There might also be easier more efficient ways, I never tried to solve this problem myself.


Could the information of flight crew or maintenance personnel be provided to passengers?

Question: Many passengers experience insecure or anxious feelings during flight. If they were provided aircraft performance info, flight crew or maintenance personnel's info(say personnels have many years of experience), which indicates flight is checked and safe, they may not be worried during flight.
I wonder if there's any regulation or law regarding to this issue. Does anybody happen to know it?
Thanks!
Comment: ...then what would happen to anxious passengers if they were told the crew was relatively young and inexperienced?
Comment: "One compass, and one radio altimeter are broken. An engine is due for maintenance, and the tires will need to be changed after the next landing. Our captain is going through a divorce, the purser is a psychopath, and this plane is 25 years old. According to the regulations, everything is up to standards & we can operate the flight safely. Enjoy your flight and don't worry!"     ;)
Comment: The fact that we're going flying, means that I as the captain, along with any number of others in Dispatch, Maintenance, Operations, and other places, all agree that everything is up to standards & we can operate the flight safely.  If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be pushing back from the gate.  So no, you aren't going to get a massive data dump that includes the coffee maker in the aft galley being replaced last week and 1001 other irrelevant details.
Answer: Averaging roughly 300 commercial flights per year, I have yet to meet someone anxious or insecure due to missing aircraft performance info or flight crew info, simply because they would still not be able to gauge relative safety to a self-comforting level. The average person with flight anxiety is essentially irrationally afraid of dying due to little knowledge of publicly available transportation safety statistics and math. Have a look at http://planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm.
While interesting for some, offering information on aircraft performance info, flight crew or maintenance personnel's info - apart from the questionable legal standpoint - with the implicitly needed hinting towards safety would be lying, as there is no quantifiable correlation between such information and safety. I happily stand corrected.
Comment: You _average_ 300 flights per year? Realizing that getting from A to B often means stopping in C & D along the way and requires 3 flights, that's still a _lot_ of days in the air! Yikes!
Comment: @FreeMan: In the 21hrs between my reply and your comment, I boarded 4 flights in Europe. Yes, it's a lot of days (about 900-1000hrs) in the air. This amount of flying has obviously earned me the highest status with the largest alliances, so I don't have to endure traditional hassle getting from A to B.
Answer:
If they were provided aircraft performance info, flight crew or maintenance personnel's info(say personnel have many years of experience), which indicates flight is checked and safe, they may not be worried during flight.

Not a bunch of log and personnel files, but various certificates guarantee a flight is "checked and safe". The most important ones I can currently think of are the air operator's certificate (given to an airline) and the airworthiness certificate (given to an aircraft).
To address the regulatory aspects of your question:

personnel info will be subject to privacy regulations and therefore would not be shared with passengers;
maintenance logs are often company confidential, and are therefore not shared.
Comment: The FAA makes safety-related maintenance issues [public information](https://av-info.faa.gov/sdrx/).


Can I transfer just some game data to a new SD card?

Question: Yesterday I bought Pokemon Yellow, and have been playing it for hours on end. Then today, I got the new Pokemon 20th Anniversary 3DS as a gift. I want to dedicate the new SD card to Pokemon, but I was wondering if I could transfer only the Pokemon Yellow and Pokemon Bank Data over, or would I have to bring all my other games with it?
Comment: You can pop the SD card into the computer and see if it looks like the data is separate.  Just don't copy/move anything for now until you're certain it is ok.
Comment: I'm pretty sure you can only copy over an entire SD card, not just certain parts of it.
Comment: You mean that you still want to use both 3DS? Becayse you can't have your NNID on two different consoles.
Answer: No
You must transfer all or nothing. Nintendo does this to protect it's digital content from piracy and such. You must transfer your entire account. I got the new 3ds Hyrule Edition and performed the wifi transfer from my old 3ds and it was a very strict and unforgiving process. Also only one 3ds can be attached to each account per Nintendo's account help page.
Also see: Can I use my Nintendo Network ID on multiple 3DS systems?
You could theoretically set up a new account on your new 3ds and use that account only for Pokemon. But you would have to buy Yellow again and start the game over.


Do Oracles of Ages & Seasons play in Game Boy Color mode or Game Boy Advance mode on the 3DS?

Question: In the original release for The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons the games supported some extra content when played on a Game Boy Advance. Is that the case with the downloadable versions for the 3DS as well?
Comment: I know it can be found easily with a little bit of googling, but I thought I should provide [A Link to the Past](http://zeldawiki.org/Advance_Shop) (pun intended), for anyone who's wondering what the extra content for the GBA is.
Answer: The 3DS version is the original GameBoy Color version (so it's missing the Advanced Shop, but you can edit your saves to add in the exclusive rings).
All of the colouring tweaks found in the Advance version are also missing.
GBA with the Advance shop open on the left. 3DS Virtual Console version on the right.
Answer: From various posts found on GameFAQs (example, another example), I think you can assume that the Advance Shop is unfortunately missing in both Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons.
I did not find any official source yet, but there is a sufficient amount of people on the internet complaining about it to be sure that they are missing.


The origin of list data structure

Question: Does anyone know when the list data structure was mentioned in computer programming/algorithms? Who gave birth to this list concept?
Comment: What do you mean by list? Is it [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_(abstract_data_type))?
Answer: Knuth gives a good overview on the history of lists and linked data structures. From The Art of Computer Programming, Volume I, Section 2.6:

Linked memory techniques were really born when A. Newell, J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon began their investigations of heuristic problem-solving by machine.
Answer: The first use of linked lists in their modern form seems to have been by Peter Luhn in 1953, when he implemented a chaining-based hash table on the IBM 701 machine.
Linked lists are often misattributed as being due to Newell et al. during their development of the IPL language (an early version of lisp), but that wasn't until 1956. The IPL language did popularize linked lists, however. It just didn't invent them.
A good reference is pages 457 and 458 of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Vol 1.
Answer: List processing is simultaneously three things in the
development of computer science. (1) It is the creation
of a genuine dynamic memory structure in a machine
that had heretofore been perceived as having fixed
structure. It added to our ensemble of operations those
that built and modified structure in addition to those
that replaced and changed content. (2) It was an early
demonstration of the basic abstraction that a computer
consists of a set of data types and a set of operations
proper to these data types, so that a computational
system should employ whatever data types are appropriate to
the application, independent of the underlying
machine. (3) List processing produced a model of designation,
thus defining symbol manipulation in the
sense in which we use this concept in computer science
today.
Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975 Alan Turing Award Lecture - Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon)

The origin of list data structure


How does quantum energy in gas molecules become kinetic molecular energy?

Question: For instance, assume a carbon-dioxide molecule absorbs a 2000 nm photon. Does the absorbed energy results in raised quantum energy levels in the molecule's electrons?  When this molecule collides (yes, I know that it's not a collision in a hard-sphere sense) with another molecule, is there an increase in the kinetic energy of the two-molecule systems with a corresponding quantum energy decrease in the molecule that just absorbed the photon? Can you suggest references where I may find quantitative relationships about the energy conversion/transfer?
Answer: Since this question has languished so long, it is overcome by events - namely by finding the answer myself.
Though molecular vibration is quantum, it may be approximated classically with a spring-mass system.  A molecule of a particular resonant frequency can absorb a photon of the same frequency.  When that occurs, the photon's energy, momentum and angular momentum are imparted to the molecule.  The molecule's new translation, rotation, and vibration may be determined using energy and momentum conservation.  The vibrational amplitude may be determined from residual energy after translation and rotation have been determined.
The vibrational energy may be transferred to other molecules in a gas during collisions.


Why does an increase in Y' channel contrast result in apparent desaturation?

Question: And is this the same phenomenon we see when colours appear less saturated during the middle of the day versus dawn and dusk (when luma contrast is reduced)?
Answer:
Because you did not also increase the chroma contrast. As a 1st order approximation the perceived saturation goes with the chroma : luma ratio, best kept constant.
No, that would be due the Hunt effect, and it is a matter of human color appearance versus simplified math.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_appearance_model


WSO2 4.5 Identity Management Server - Can't write users to external LDAP

Question: We have an issue with WSO2 Identity Server Version 4.5.0 where we have swapped out the default embedded Apache DS and replaced it with OID (Oracle Internet Directory).
We have updated the user-mgt.xml and other configuration files the way we think they should be.
However, we cannot write users/roles back to LDAP from WSO2.
We can write create users/roles directly in LDAP when logged in through Directory Studio.
We can view users/roles in WSO2.
We can also delete a user in WSO2.
We have gone through the user docs on configuring the user store: https://docs.wso2.org/display/IS450/Configuring+Primary+User+Stores#ConfiguringPrimaryUserStores(Carbon4.2.0v2)-ConfiguringanexternalLDAPorActiveDirectoryuserstore
It is only the writing to LDAP through WSO2 that is not working so it must be a WSO2 configuration issue.  I have the UserStoreManager configured to ReadWriteLDAPUserStoreManager
Again - reading, and deleting works fine through WSO2.
Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions on where to look to solve this problem?
Comment: Did you disable the embedded LDAP? (ie: embedded-ldap.xml, set it false)
Answer: We discovered the problem. We switched out the default LDAP for an external LDAP but the schema definitions were off a bit and we had SCIM enabled in user-mgt.xml.
There's a good explanation here:
http://sureshatt.blogspot.com/2013/06/scim-user-provisioning-with-wso2.html


What are the parameters for determining if a question gets tweeted?

Question: I assume it's automated. I know it's for "interesting questions." Just curious if it's a matter of views, upvotes, or something else.
Answer: Our StackExchange overlords have programmed a giant AI, capable of understanding (and answering) every SE question. You may have heard of the "Watson" prototype that they resold to IBM because it was performing well below expectations.
Now, they don't allow it to actually answer questions,[1] because that would just amount to killing their Business Model, but it analyzes questions to catch the good ones, and tweets them.

Or maybe they do. That @Robusto guy is definitely fishy.
Comment: I think you're on to something! Robusto: anagram for Robot-Us, or U.S. Robot. Dang. They even had it throw in a bit about "his" [tp-less farmer grandad](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23488/what-is-the-etymology-of-cornhole/23489#23489) yesterday. A regular android.
Comment: U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc.?
Answer: I think it has something to do with the number of votes and the diversity of voters a question gets.  If you get a number of upvotes in quick succession because your question is really exciting, it's likely to be tweeted.  I also think a diversity of voters help the likelihood of being tweeted; 5 votes from 5 people is better than 5 votes from 2 people.  You'll notice that certain types of tags which get a lot of voting, particularly single-word-requests, are particularly prone to being tweeted, rising up the hotness scale, getting a lot of upvotes from cross-site traffic, so that bizzarely it leads to one's highest voted answer, the answer most "valuable to the community", to be a maybe one or two sentence dictionary definition giving a synonym.
Comment: I'm curious, how can a question get 5 votes from 2 people? Or do you mean a question and its answers?


Automatically assign taxonomy term if custom meta value exists

Question: I currently have a custom meta field for adding a video url to the post. I'd like for the existing taxonomy term "video" to be automatically assigned to the post upon saving if the meta field has any value.
Answer: You should hook onto the save_post action.
<code>add_action( 'save_post', 'add_video_taxonomy' );

function add_video_taxonomy( $post_id ) {

    // you should check if the current user can do this, probably against publish_posts
    // you should also have a nonce check here as well

    if( get_post_meta( $post_id, 'video_url', true ) ) {
        wp_set_post_terms( $post_id, 'video', 'your_custom_taxonomy_name', true );
    }

}
</code>
Comment: Thanks! This worked well. I didn't mention this above but in case anyone else needs it I had to use 'wp_set_object_terms' instead since the post in question is a custom post type.


CKEditor Plugin Causes Editor to be Hidden

Question: I'm attempting to use CKeditor on a website, and I need to be able to click to go to links within the editor itself. As this is not possible with the stock editor, I attempted to install the plugin at the following link: https://github.com/mlewand/ckeditor-plugin-openlink
Having downloaded the plugin and tried to install it, when I activate the plugin in config.js the editor on the site page now has the attribute style="visibility:hidden", and when I manually change this to visible via the browser debugger, it shows a default texture rather than the CKeditor editor. It's possible my method of installation of the plugin is to blame, as I'm finding no other instances of people having this issue. The download of the plugin contains a folder "icons" and a folder "lang", as well as plugin.js (the plugin file itself) and a readme.
To install, I simply pasted the relevant contents of the lang files into their respective counterparts in the main CKeditor fileset, and for the time being I ignored the icons folder, as it simply contains the image file for the tool icon; I also commented out the code which calls for this image so as not to have conflict. I then moved plugin.js into the plugins folder within the CKeditor fileset, within its own subfolder plugin as with the stock plugins already present. I then added the lines in the config called for by the readme. I finally added to the config
config.extraPlugins = 'plugin'; to enable the plugin. Once I updated all files on the server, it became clear that activating the plugin caused the editor to disappear as I mentioned. If anyone knows why this might be or what I may have done to interfere with the files incorrectly, I'd greatly appreciate it. Currently I'm unsure as to what I could have done better during installation. I can elaborate further if I've been at all unclear. Thank you.
I'll add that here(plugin activation in ckeditor) appears to be a similar issue, although the answer given and the specific issue don't quite seem to apply. If they do, feel free to mark this as a duplicate and I apologize for the redundancy.
EDIT: It appears that the reference added in config.js and the plugin folder name needed to correspond to the name in plugin.js, as I've now discovered.
Answer: Important to note that plugin name in plugin.js, name of plugin folder, and reference in config.js must all correspond.


What to do when sewer backs up

Question: What should I do when a (house's main) sewer backs up? How can I make it not back up, or at least stop it from backing up more once it has already started backing up?
Comment: What do you mean by "sewer"? Are you referring to the main sewer line for your house? An outside manhole? A basement floor drain, or some other specific drain in your house (toilet, sink, laundry)? Very different problems/answers, depending on what exactly is backing up and why.
Comment: Is it actually backing up (i.e. Flowing from street into the house) or is it just blocked?
Answer: You have a couple of options.
If this does not happen often, you can likely put a stopper in the drains which backup in the house, and just wait until the sewer is no longer clogged.  To do this, you can purchase a "test plug" for each drain that is experiencing the backup (if you also get backup in a toilet, you will need to pull the toilet to install the plug).  Of course, the downside of this approach is that you need to be at home when the backup occurs, and you need to go through the hassle of plugging the drains / pulling toilets / etc every time it happens.
If you want a more permanent solution, you can install a backflow prevention valve on your sewer lateral.  This will likely involve digging up your yard, splicing the lateral, and installing the valve.  With this option, you do not need to be present to prevent the sewer backup.  However, this will essentially block off your sewer lateral until the sewer stops backing up.  This may cause some backup in your house (if, for instance, you take a shower while the backflow preventer is tripped).

What to do when sewer backs up


Monotonicity of $\ell_{p}$ norm and Holder's inequality

Question: For any vector $x \in \mathbf{R}^{n}$, and any natural numbers $p \geq q \geq 1$, we have that $\lVert x \rVert_{p} \leq \lVert x \rVert_{q}$. Some proofs of this fact are given here and here. However, I am interested in proving this result using Holder's inequality. This is left as an exercise for the reader in An Introduction to Inequalities by Beckenbach and Bellman. In that text, they prove the case when $p = 3$ and $q = 2$ as follows. First, we write
$$
\sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{3}
= \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}| |x_{i}|^{2}.
$$
We note that the right side of this equation is the inner product of $(|x_{1}| , \ldots , |x_{n}|)$ and $(|x_{1}|^{2} , \ldots , |x_{n}|^{2})$. Applying the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality to this inner product, we have that
$$
\sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{3}
\leq
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{2} \right)^{\frac{1}{2}}
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{4} \right)^{\frac{1}{2}}.
$$
To continue, we note that
$$
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{2} \right)^{2}
-
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{4} \right)
=
\sum_{i=1}^{n} \sum_{\begin{subarray}{c} j=1 \\ j \neq i \end{subarray}}^{n} |x_{i}|^{2} |x_{j}|^{2} \geq 0 ,
$$
where the inequality follows from the fact that a sum of nonnegative quantities is nonnegative. Rearranging this inequality, and taking square roots, we have that
$$
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{4} \right)^{\frac{1}{2}}
\leq \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{2}.
$$
Applying this result to one of our earlier inequalities, we have that
$$
\sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{3}
\leq \left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{2} \right)^{\frac{3}{2}}.
$$
Taking the cube root of both sides yields the desired result. The text says that "the proof for arbitrary rational $m \geq n \geq 1$ can be obtained by a corresponding application of Holder's inequality." In analogy with the proof given above, using Holder's inequality instead of Cauchy's inequality, we have that
$$
\sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{p}
= \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}| |x_{i}|^{p-1}
\leq
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{q} \right)^{\frac{1}{q}}
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{\frac{q (p-1)}{q-1}} \right)^{\frac{q-1}{q}}
\leq
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} |x_{i}|^{q} \right)^{\frac{p}{q}}.
$$
In order to justify this chain of inequalities, we still need to show that
$$
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} x_{i}^{\frac{q(p-1)}{q-1}} \right)^{\frac{q-1}{q}}
\leq
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} x_{i}^{q} \right)^{\frac{p-1}{q}}.
$$
Letting $z_{i} = x_{i}^{\frac{q}{q-1}}$, this inequality is equivalent to
$$
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} z_{i}^{p-1} \right)^{q-1}
\leq
\left( \sum_{i=1}^{n} z_{i}^{q-1} \right)^{p-1}.
$$
But I am stuck at this point. (Recall that $p \geq q \geq 1$.) Any thoughts? Note that this comes from an elementary textbook, so ideally the answer should only use precalculus mathematics.
Answer: Apply Hölder's inequality in the following way:
$$\sum_{i=1}^n |x_i|^p = \sum_{i=1}^n |x_i|^{q-1} |x_i|^{p+1-q} \le \left( \sum_{i=1}^n \left(|x_i|^{q-1}\right)^{\frac{q}{q-1}} \right)^{\frac{q-1}{q}} \left( \sum_{i=1}^n \left(|x_i|^{p+1-q}\right)^{q} \right)^{\frac{1}{q}} \le \left( \sum_{i=1}^n |x_i|^{q} \right)^{\frac{q-1}{q}} \left( \sum_{i=1}^n |x_i|^{q} \right)^{\frac{p+1-q}{q}} = \left( \sum_{i=1}^n |x_i|^{q} \right)^{\frac{p}{q}}.$$
Comment: I think the proof is incomplete. The second inequality is actually the special case that 1-norm is larger than any p-norm. The power is not integer, so you cannot use combinatorics to justify the inequality.
Comment: Nice. I would only add that the second inequality is equivalent to $\sum |z_{i}|^{k} \leq (\sum |z_{i}|)^{k}$, which is obvious because the difference between the right and left sides of the inequality is the sum of all the cross terms in $(\sum |z_{i}|)^{k}$, all of which are nonnegative.
Answer: The last inequality you have to show is actually Hölder's inequality, but for the exponents $p':=p-1$ and $q':=q-1$. This suggests a proof by induction.


C++ Sound Processing

Question: I'm looking for a library that could be used to manipulate audio files. Essentially what I would like to do is:

Load an MP3/WAV file
Get a 15 second clip of the file
Overlay another MP3/WAV file ontop of it
Render as a new MP3/WAV file
Answer: It doesn't support MP3 for patent reasons, but libsndfile is a very nice open-source (LGPL) library for loading and saving audio in a variety of other audio formats, including WAV.
As for the overlay part, that's easy once you've got the samples loaded into memory... you just sum each sample in file A with its corresponding sample in file B (and possibly scale the resulting sample value down a bit by multiplying by a constant, if you're worried about clipping).
Answer: The library libsox from sox (and not http://libsox.sourceforge.net/ which is something completely different) seems to have a simple API which can be used. The documentation gives the following example for stereo to mono mixing:

Representing samples as integers can
  cause problems when processing the
  audio. For example, if an effect to
  mix down left and right channels into
  one monophonic channel were to use the
  line

<code>    *obuf++ = (*ibuf++ + *ibuf++)/2;
</code>

distortion might occur since the
  intermediate addition can overflow 32
  bits. The line

<code>    *obuf++ = *ibuf++/2 + *ibuf++/2;
</code>

would get round the overflow problem
  (at the expense of the least
  significant bit).
Answer: You can use any common MP3 codec API to decode the stream, work with it, and save it again.  For instance you could use libLAME for this part.
As for mixing, you could either do it yourself (e.g., naively, add two samples and divide by two -- which might not sound too good), or find a proper library for it.
You might also be interested in a related Stack Overflow question at best c audio library linux
Answer: You might try giving this a look over
http://terminatorx.org/
I was looking at it to do something similar.
Answer: A very good C++ audio/synth library is STK. It does loads of stuff and is under BSD/MIT type license ie you can use it to develop commercial products. Wav is supported but not MP3. For MP3 you could use irrklang, for example, which is free for non-commercial use (also MAD by underbit, is used by loads of people).

C++ Sound Processing


How can I color a part of a letter in Illustrator?

Question: I'm trying to color the arms of a capital T in Georgia font on Illustrator for a project, but I can't do it. Can someone explain to me how to accomplish this?
Answer: One method would be utilize the Shape Builder tool and Pathfinder..

Convert the T to outlines via Type > Convert to Outlines
Draw colored rectangles to cover the areas you want colored
Select All this
Grab the Shape Builder Tool, hold down the Option/Alt key and click the areas you don't want to remove them
Lastly, select all again and click the Merge button on the Pathfinder Panel(This step won't appear as though it does much. However, it removes the black areas behind the colored areas)

Note that my rectangles weren't aligned well to the center stroke of the T. This results in a sliver of color running down the sides of the center strokes. Just be certain to align the rectangles well with the center stroke. I didn't want to zoom in for the animation.
If you wish to do this on live type, this won't work. But there are other, more complex, methods which will. I can detail those if more information is added to the question.
Answer: I don't know why you can't do it, but I guess you might not be aware of difference between text and shapes in Illustrator. With shapes, you have more control and you can cut shapes into multiple parts, so you can fill different colors in each of them.
You can easily convert text into outlines (using Object > Expand or Type > Create Outlines feature) easily and proceed accordingly.
You can also try a gradient fill for a text if you don't want to create outlines and fill color, but that would take some time and result wouldn't be so perfect. You'll need to adjust the gradient sliders a lot to give sharp look at right places.
Note that once you create text into shapes, you won't be able to edit the text, because the text is actually gone and what you see is only the shapes. So one should usually outline/expand text once its typeface and weight has been finalized.


What will I stand to gain from killing Paarthurnax and getting back in good standing with the Blades?

Question: So, I have brought 3 followers to the blades
I then was asked to kill Paarthurnax. If I don't kill him, the blades no longer speak to me.
I've finished the main story line.
At this point, do I gain anything from killing Paarthurnax, will I be able to have all my followers hang out at the temple? Is there a way to actually bring the blades back up?
Comment: Aside, the [Paarthurnax Dilemma](http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18465) mod gives you the option to spare him and argue the case for mercy to the Blades.
Comment: Name names. Don't skirm around the point.
Comment: since this one was asked first, we should go close the other as dupe: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/44633/is-there-any-advantage-for-killing-paarthurnax
Comment: @spartacus The other question has a *much* better answer, though; we should either migrate that here or close this one as the dupe.
Comment: @MichaelEdenfield we should just flag this and get a mod to merge the 2
Answer: Here are the advantages/disadvantages as shown on UESP:
If Paarthurnax dies:

Arngeir retracts the Greybeard's hospitality, and it is no longer possible to ask him for the locations of Word Walls .
Paarthurnax will no longer be around to provide meditation bonuses to certain Shouts .
The Blades will welcome you once again, enabling the completion of Delphine 's recruitment quest.
Esbern will offer to take bones and scales in order to create a potion which grants a powerful permanent bonus to damage versus Dragons (currently, however, the potion is bugged and does nothing).
The Greybeards will not host a peace treaty, making the Civil War questline mandatory to complete in order to proceed with the Main Quest (if Season Unending has not been completed and the Civil War questline has not already been completed).

If Paarthurnax lives:

The quest will never disappear from the journal, and the dialogue options concerning the player's decision will remain for all the characters concerned. (This may be a glitch, as Paarthurnax is labeled essential after the Main Quest is completed). (Edit: Tell the Greybeards you wont kill Paarthurnax to remove from journal. Works sometimes, but not every time.)
Arngeir will still disclose the location of Word Walls.
Paarthurnax will still provide meditation bonuses for Shout words.
Paarthurnax will appear for an extra cutscene after Alduin's defeat, wherein he details his plans to rein in the Dragons and teach them to live under the Way of the Voice.
Delphine's recruitment quest will remain uncompleted.
Esbern will not offer to create the potion.
Comment: The wiki is not entirely correct.  I was able to complete Delphines' recruitment quest after being asked to kill Paarthurnax, but not doing so.
Answer: You need to kill Paarthurnax to get back into blades. Some sources suggest that it is not possible to kill that dragon after the main quest, but regardless I have managed to kill it straight after the main quest line.
Wiki shows all the pros and cons for killing this dragon
Comment: a summary of the pros would make a good answer.
Comment: I killed Paarthurnax too after killing alduin. I don't remember doing a peace treaty but I definitely killed Tullius by siding with Ulfric.
Answer: If you have Steam theirs a mod called The Paarthurnax Dilemma by Arthmoor. That lets you talk the blades out of killing him.
Answer: It seems the results will not be very good at this moment, so just beware.
Here are results for kill Paathurnaax:
If he's dead,

The blades will greet you with warm welcome in Sky Haven Temple whenever you talk to them.
The greybeards won't be able to talk to you since you killed Paathurnaax. Arngier will say: "We have nothing to say to each other. Paathurnaax's muder is beyond my powers of forgiveness."
Because of the treachery to Paathurnaax, the greybeards won't host the peace treaty of the civil war and the dragon menace if you haven't did Season Unending and talked to the Blades instead of the Greybeards.
Since they can't talk to you, they won't be able to let you find out all the locations of the words of power because of the dialogue. Even if you force it with cheats, it still won't work.
Since Paathurnaax is dead, he won't let you meditate on word of power.

If you let him alive,

The blades will still tell you to kill him. The quest will be stuck in your journal. You can remove it by talking to the greybeards about what the Blades are up to about the dragon.
Arngier will still tell you about word of power now that you explore by yourself.
Paathurnaax will be at the end to the game talking about the prophecy of the dragosn and Dragonborn.
Esbern won't create the potion.

It's better to not kill him. The Greybeards care about the voice and and dragonborn and the prophecy. The Blades all they care about is the dragonborn and alduin and paathurnaax.
Answer: If you've already completed the main quest, you're actually unable to kill Paarthurnax. He's marked as Essential after you finish the main quest. If you'd like to remove the quest-log entry, you can try talking to Arngeir and telling him you don't intend to kill Paarthurnax - that should remove it from your journal, though reports are mixed about just how effective that is.
(Some users report that they are still able to kill Paarthurnax after completion of the main quest.)
Comment: I was perfectly able to go and kill Paarthurnax after the main quest line was done, im level 31 with around 250 hours of playtime (Traveled a lot collecting) so as long as your quest log still holds the quest im pretty sure you will be able kill him whenever you please


Question about Sound Formats

Question: so there seems to be a lot of different sound formats out there youtube is using 5.1. and there's also 6.11 7.1 10.2. with all these sound formats do you need to pay special action when you recording?
Comment: So is this question about how to record a track so that it takes advantage of (say) 5.1 surround?
Comment: Since most people are going to be listening to the likes of youtube on headphones, the simple left and right channels are already avaiable. Most recording by the man in the street are in that format.
Answer: No. You don't need to do anything. You can mix to stereo and everyone can play back stereo.
If you want to produce content that takes advantage of the capabilities of any surround formats, then you have an overwhelming array of options on how you do that.
The simplest is to just record a bunch of mono sources and then mix them together with a surround mixer with surround monitoring and then author the mix with the appropriate encoding(s) for the format(s) you want to deliver in.
If you want, you can always record sources with two or more mics and then mix them appropriately as above, which you can also do with a stereo mix.
In the end, the choices and mixing processes are all essentially the same as when you want the final mix to be stereo, it's just the cost and complexity of both the mixing software and hardware and the mixing process can increase a lot as you add more surround channels.
Comment: thank you so basically  it will still be good even if i dont do anything. But if i want it even better i need to further research right?
Comment: @doodlerdoodle I don't know what you mean by "good" or "better". If you want to mix surround sound, you need mixing software or hardware that has surround panning and then you need to have a surround monitoring system. Since it's unlikely anyone is going to have a surround sound music listening setup, it's normally not worth it unless you're mixing sound for film. Think about how many people listen to music on headphones. Surround mixing is expensive to set up and then most people won't even notice it. I'd forget about it.

Question about Sound Formats


How can transition metals form so many bonds with ligands?

Question: For instance, copper can form $\ce{[Cu(H2O)6]^2+}$ so it accepts 6 electron pairs from $\ce{H2O}$ molecules to form dative covalent bonds. However it has one electron in the 4s subshell and 10 in the 3d subshell. To which shell does it accept these electrons? Is it to the 4d subshell? And how are these accepted electrons arranged?
Answer: Copper is  in +2 oxidation state so it has configuration $\ce{[Ar] 3d^9}$. Since 4s, 4p and 4d orbitals are vacant, Cu will show $\ce{sp^3d^2}$ hybridisation and will accept these elctron pairs in its 6 $\ce{sp^3d^2}$ hybridised orbitals. Read more about VBT here http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch12/valence.php