ahhhh the naivety of dj245. im not trying to blanket defend all .mil company projects but your oversimplified comments give away your ignorance. i cannot speak to your experience with alvin as i am not familiar with that program, but the secure id twic (theyre actually called PIV) card you mention needs to be just that - SECURE! those badges are standardized across all us government agencies including space, defense and executive branches. no program manager in charge of a contract with the us govt to secure all physical *and* logical facilities (yes they are also used for workstation login authentication) with a standardized id card is going to touch a COTS product with a 10 foot pole. these things need to be developed in house for a million national security reasons but most importantly so that the congressmen that approved the program can sleep at night, regardless if it cost them "100x as much." do you want your air force flying jets with guidance and communication systems developed by a software company in china? no? "but it costs 100x less!"

As an engineer who graduated with a BS in Biomedical Engineering and now does programming for the federal government any type of mathematics will help you with your programming skills. Math analysis; vectors, euclidean space differentials are definitely more practical particularly if you are going to deal with any form of physics, mechanics or statistics logic/formula in your programs. Discreet math is also a very valuable course as well however after algebra, geometry and calc 1, the absolute most important advanced mathematics course you can take with regards to programming is LINEAR ALGEBRA which deals with solving multi-dimentional problems through vectors and matrix. This becomes invaluable when visualizing complex variables in programming (eg. arrays). Trust me.

whether or not you would prefer a computer or a human to respond in emergency situations is irrelevant here. the simple fact today is that commercial pilots rarely do any manual flying and havent done so in a long time. literally from the minute of throttle up on departure to hitting the brakes on arrival - just about every system on a commercial airline is automated. if i had prepared and skilled pilots in the cockpit i would personally prefer them to respond but the fact is that most of these pilots are so dependent on these automated systems lately that they would likely respond poorly in the event of an emergency.

biomedical

this issue permeates all aspects of our lives these days. the media controls the general spread of information. thank god for places like slashdot.

PS - MATLAB is a simple and extremely useful mathematical program language that would be a great place to start for your uses. It served us well in our research in this area.

I did some extensive undergraduate research at Rutgers University, New Brunswick utilizing NN for pattern recognition and modeling the human visual system. They have a whole laboratory as part of the Biomedical Engineering Dept dedicated to this area of study. Google EVANGELIA MICHELI-TZANAKOU and you should be able to find her email. She is an expert in this field and has held seats in the IEEE society for her knowledge in this area. She was my mentor for my senior design projec. She has a harsh personality but would be more than willing to point you in the right direction. Good luck!

in response to INT QRK below im not disputing the rules im telling you what actually goes on.

as a recently graduated engineering student, and having taken my share of advanced calc and physics, i would actually recommend an undergrad physics book geared towards engineers. this is probably the best place to start in understanding how the equations you mentioned apply...