Engineering Commons^™

Making Random - Cryptography And The Generation Of Random Sequences, Samuel Barton

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The algorithm utilizes the behavior of modern operating systems to generate random bits by putting the process to sleep for 10 microseconds, and then comparing the actual number of microseconds slept to the expected amount. The reason why this works for generating \random" bits is that modern operating systems do not wake processes exactly when they request. This is due to process scheduling. The algorithm uses the randomness in actual sleep time to generate each bit.

The bits are not truly random, as if a person were able to force the algorithm to always execute, then we would not have …

Excel Programming For A Visual Degree Progress Report, Brady Therrien

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The University of Southern Maine is like many colleges in the fact that its engineering program has a lot of extensive requirements that a student must achieve before receiving a degree. These include but are not limited to the core and department curriculums, GPA, and Residency Requirements. Most of these are easily accessible to the student on MaineStreet to track progress like the example degree progress report in Figure 2. This progress report shows all of the information by what requirement each class satisfies so it can be really time consuming to scroll through them all, for example, to see …