No cannons ( they didn't say invasion ultrasound...) but :

Transesophageal echocardiograpy (heart) : http://pie.med.utoronto.ca/TEE/TEE_content/TEE_standardViews_intro.html

Endobronchial ultrasound (lung and mediastinum) : http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/455720_7

Endoscopic ultrasound (pancreas liver etc) : http://www.asge.org/patients/patients.aspx?id=380

Intravascular ultrasound (coronoary arteries etc) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intravascular_ultrasound

Transrectal ultrasound(guess) : http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/457757-overview

As mentioned by others trans vaginal is pretty common.

Most of these are usefull technologies but not the priority for resource constrained environments. The device featured in the TFA is intriguing. The question is how flexible a crystal they'll put in it, eg how specialized a device will it be will it see only very shallow structures only deep? Can they make a device at this cost with a useful resolution? The answer is probably yes but it will be interesting to see.

I don't consider forum access and access to the making of to really be a feature. The only thing I left out is beta access, which I guess you could argue is a feature. Clearly that's their pitch and clearly there are people willing to put up money for it. That's cool it's a free country. I'm free to think it's silly.

  This is a downgraded version of preordering the super deluxe version of a game which frequently comes with a poster and a making of the game DVD. The only think missing is collectable figure or night vision goggles or something. It's downgraded because the product doesn't exist, you pay before you even know what it is, and the lag from money to product is longer.

  I said NO commitment on not to use DRM. There's the steam base DRM and some publishers add significant additional pain and suffering. My point is you don't even have DRM free as .

This is great for Double fine. I don't see why they've gotten such a brisk response. It's worse than a Gamestop preorder. Give over your money now, for maybe a game in a year. Oh you can watch us make it and join our forums. The game target selling price, not mentioned. Topic: adventures game that's it . I don't see any more detail on the website.. Not even a commitment to not use onerous DRM. This isn't some tiny scrappy Indie, it's a house with AAA titles under it's belt. I like adventure games too but I'll just buy if it gets made and if it's good. To me this is giving charity money to a for profit entity, and there's lots of causes more worthy than the charity home for widows and adventure games.

There are lots of caveats as most of these meters are for detecting contamination rather than dose rate.

The CDV -700 has a pretty thick window so not super sensitive. They are all pretty old so you would be wise to check it carefully before using.

To reliably detect small amounts of radiation contaminating food you will need to spend a fair bit of money on something more sensitive that most of the survivalist supply stores:
http://www.ludlums.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_ludlum.tpl&product_id=300&category_id=115&keyword=3_with&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=95
(they will also do calibration)

Eberline made very good instruments but I can't find them on the web as making them currently. They made also very good equivalent products. You may find a good used one of these.

Proper NIST traceable calibration may be worth your time the meters are generally calibrated for dose rate or energy from a standard Cesium-137 source Cobalt-60 is commonly used and they are both major fission products so they are good choices for the stated application):

One vendor near NY I found on web: http://biomedphysics.com/survey-meter-calibration-and-repair

The Reed College Reactor Facility might also do it. This will likely be the cheapest method (website quotes $50 per probe +shipping): http://reactor.reed.edu/metercal.html

As others have mentioned most smoke detectors use Americium which is an alpha emitter. You need a very thin window and large surface area probe to detect this reliably. These don't make great test sources.

If you can find an older colman style lantern mantle made of thorium (the newer "safer" ones do NOT have thorium) they make great test sources and will set off most Geiger counters and are really useful as you should check to make sure it's working with every use. The probes are delicate, the batteries die etc so if it's important check every time. Keep them in a plastic bag so they don't contaminate your detector!

Good Luck!

You are over reading. That's not my or anyone's expectation.

Currently with Android it's not true that if you buy any current Android phone you cannot be sure it will run certain high profile applications, much less a more obscure one you might really care about. For a consumer device this is a serious problem.

You are correct in that they are all ARM. In this case it seems to me more variability in what parts of Android are used and what a given vendor adds to it.
The early Android tablets are notably a mess as to what runs where (velocity micro I'm looking at you). In this case it's not so clear what defines "Android"

On one side there are a bunch of devices that won't talk to the android marketplace, they are not official, a tablet shipped before the tablet version is out.
On the other side key vendors release apps for specific devices not platform wide (Netflix being a notable example.)

I don't expect write once run anywhere will ever really be true but It's a fair expectation that something written for a specific os will run on that os.

Tight control is clearly the advantage of the apple approach, that's what they do well. Love or hate it it works for them.

I just think there's plenty of precedent for interoperability without so much lockdown being required to maintain compatibility. (though more in the hardware world than software) I personally would like something somewhere in the middle (my current hopes are staked on Meego but that's just hope at this point.)

Win CE was great example of how not to make things work and I'm surprised to see Google fail to learn from that. (just spec out the platform, include certain code required to be the base and then offer those platforms as "certified" android. Or be less confusing only standards compliant be called android and the full OSS bleeding edge wild west roll your own code be called Robot or whatever.

There's other greats stupidity they're replaying from CE like the need to run a task manager on a phone..

Remember Windows CE hand held devices! You would run around the net looking for applications and they would not run (oh sorry was compiled for MIPS and you have and ARM device, or some other screen size or assumed a physical keyboard or was complied for V 2.11 and you running some minor incrementally different version).

It's weird to see the same thing happening all over again. It's great to have an open platform but like an electrical outlet all the plugs fit, or USB or PCI (yes there are occasional incompatibilities) having standards that the developers can rely on is what makes things useful. Android is not even close to Windows (or any good modern desktop Linux Distro that will run on just about any hardware that meets spec and the applications for said OS for the most part will run)

I think many of us would like that kind of reliable application experience sans Apple's vendor lock in on hardware and OS.

As an aside I don't know why we're so willing to welcome Google as our mobile overlords. I personally don't see how the community can catch every bit of data gathering they've built into the code and then make a stable usable version you can compile for whatever hardware you've got. eg I'm unaware of tinfoil hat Android.

While expensive a bit better set up for the little ones (though definitely the over 3 crowd) a set of a ton of little rare earth magnets.:
http://www.getbuckyballs.com/
I have yet to have any adult or child come to the house who could resist playing with them. You make coils rings, try to get them back into a cube. The kids learn about magnetism and polarity but it doesn't scream I'm a science toy and they have fun.

On the same theme as set of large ball bearings 10mm or more in diameter are lots of fun but hard to keep track of.

for electronics
http://www.elenco.com/snapcircuits.html are a bit simplified from the old standby radioshack 150 in 1 kits but are easier for younger children.

seamonkeys are still fun though sad when they die.

Gyroscopes are still fun, though good quality ones are hard to find.

A set of rope and pulleys secured to the ceiling are surprisingly fun. It's a crane, it's an elevator for the toy bear, it's whatever the kid comes up with. I was really surprised with how much fun they have with a pulley.

Games they may not have : dominos, go

Ah we'll see something like Interface (ISBN: 0553372300) is just a few short year. Kinda like fusion as a practical source of electricity...

In alot of scientific disciplines Master's degree's are consolation prizes for people who get part way through the PhD and realize they're in the wrong field. (eg a master's in biology basically qualifies you for a pay raise as a lab tech but not much else) You want to pick a discipline where master's degree in itself is a useful credential. Most fields of engineering, Master of Public Health, Medical informatics are examples. If you're willing to get a PhD there are a million fields where your skills will be rare and valuable (most chemist's neuroscientist;s etc are not coders but would build themselves better tools if they were, fish biology, oceonography you name it just about. )

Look really hard at biostatistics. Pretty much all clinical medical research needs a biostatistician to be published but the Ph.D's don't get promoted checking the work of the clinical researchers and consulting for them. As a master's level statistician you could likely find work in a statistics "core" and get to help lots of different groups analyze their data at a given institution. It stay's pretty interesting because you don't get bogged down working for one group on the same project forever.

Good luck!

It's not posted in Idle it's posted under science. That's the context. Don't post under "science" and label it as written by a neuroscientist studying toxo! (leaving out that he's apparently a graduate student there) There's plenty of room to raise the quality of discussion of ideas outside of large journals like Nature and Science.

How is this science? A slate article siting the economist?

This is a classic example of potentially the ecologic fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy) In brief you have aggregate exposure data and aggregate data about the population and correlate them. From this data you don't have any idea if the exposed people are affected by the condition understudy.
(Anyone here have toxo serologies on the world cup teams?) Clearly there are no other differences between these countries besides their rate of toxo infection.:) See confounding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding).

All this stuff about toxo changing the development of society is entertaining speculation but no data is presented here to make it more than that. There are lot's more plausible pathogens for this (eg tuberculosis, malaria, HIV )

Population level correlations are best used for hypothesis generation, they are not reliable tests of same in most circumstances.

The old three button mouse twm solution for copy paste directory worked ok for me. I'm just not much of a keyboarder. I know I'm the minority here but I'm much faster with a gui. Heck why would I even run X on a PIII otherwise :).