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Earlier this month, Stanford University announced that it will no longer charge tuition to students whose families make less than $100,000 a year. The move is part of a series of steps Stanford and its peer institutions have taken in the last decade to create more diverse classes. Some schools have replaced loans with grants for low-income students, eliminated home equity from calculations of expected family contributions, and nixed early decision programs, which disadvantage low-income students. While these steps are welcome, they aren’t significant enough to make these universities truly diverse. If schools are serious about providing a culturally rich...

YUGOSLAVIA: FASCIST PROPAGANDA IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TODAY William Dorich I personally took great exception to this unbridled racism since I lost 17 of my relatives during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Vojnic in 1942 by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. I lost the last 5 relatives of my name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" from Croatia. My relatives were too old and too sick to flee. They were found a month later with their throats slit. Dateline 23rd February 2007...

Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike behavior battle video game players. These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a new wave of real-world products. The advances can also be seen in the emergence of bold new projects intended to create more...

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

FreeRepublic Team Ranked #1,550 (of 41,708 teams)

FR Team ranking up to number 1782 of 41608

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162

Any Freepers "folding@home"???? For those not familiar with F@H -> some diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer and even "mad cow" disease are believed to be linked to protein (mis)folding. A scientist team from Stanford University studies this phenomenon to try and find a cure to these diseases. To do this, they have designed a software (folding@home) which enables people to donate unused power from their computer to speed up medical research!

Brain Rewards Us for Laughing: Study Fri December 26, 2003 02:53 PM ET By Merritt McKinney NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - They say laughter is the best medicine, and a new study may help explain how laughter makes us feel good. Researchers report that humor seems to activate brain networks that are involved in rewards.Humor is no laughing matter, according to Dr. Allan L. Reiss of Stanford University in California, who led the research."Humor has significant ramifications for our psychological and physical health," he told Reuters Health. Our sense of humor, he said, "often dictates if, how and with whom...

Four big international companies, including the oil giant Exxon Mobil, said yesterday that they would give Stanford University $225 million over 10 years for research on ways to meet growing energy needs without worsening global warming. Exxon Mobil, whose pledge of $100 million makes it the biggest of the four contributors, issued a statement saying new techniques for producing energy while reducing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases were "vital to meeting energy needs in the industrialized and developing world." Many scientists and environment experts said the Stanford project was likely to be a valuable new assault on a serious environmental...