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I have spent the past two years implementing Modeling Physics in my high school classes. It is based on a solid few decades of ongoing physics education research and has been recognized as one of the most effective physics education methods yet developed. The Department of Education agrees.

What it does not include in any significant amount is lecture. And while I'm not a top level expert in modeling physics just yet, I do my best to keep students engaged in the learning cycle as we go through each physics phenomenon to model, from constant velocity motion through forces and energy and beyond.

I can honestly see using the Khan academy as an aide to students who need practice with the mathematical problem solving that comes after we study a physical phenomenon, but it can't substitute for the inquiry, investigation, experimentation, and construction of various types of models that have replaced lecture.

I have spent the past two years implementing Modeling Physics in my high school classes. It is based on a solid few decades of ongoing physics education research and has been recognized as one of the most effective physics education methods yet developed. The Department of Education agrees.

What it does not include in any significant amount is lecture. And while I'm not a top level expert in modeling physics just yet, I do my best to keep students engaged in the learning cycle as we go through each physics phenomenon to model, from constant velocity motion through forces and energy and beyond.

I can honestly see using the Khan academy as an aide to students who need practice with the mathematical problem solving that comes after we study a physical phenomenon, but it can't substitute for the inquiry, investigation, experimentation, and construction of various types of models that have replaced lecture.

Your gut feel is entirely wrong. Sorry.

You will certainly feel differently because the inertia of the car changes. Again, the feel is entirely unimportant. You have to measure things, and you have to know that you're friction limited, and that can only be done with a reasonably good ABS system. That's why folks who discount ABS are quite silly IMHO.

To give you a visual aid in understanding how braking distance is unaffected by curb weight, look at a graph in this presentation (unfortunately it's PPT). You need to discount the idiotic fit they applied to the data as it's really meaningless. Cars/trucks with curb weights between 2500 and 6000 lb all stop between 100 and 150 feet, seemingly randomly distributed. I presume it's from 60mph to 0. Curb weight is pretty much unrelated to braking distance, all you see in that data is experimental error and varying tire/pavement conditions.

I suggest you learn networking as well as Ethernet, oh and take your lithium your Bipolar is showing.

Here is some reading material that might be too advanced for you, but I like to share...

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/passive_ethernet_tap.jsp -- how to receive only network traffic.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~sksrini2/Projects/TFTP/AP36.pdf -- basics on how to broadcast data on transmit only, might be too advanced for you.
http://www.stearns.org/doc/one-way-ethernet-cable.html -- more info for your basic education.

and that was with 3 seconds of Google searching... another thing you seem to be incapable of understating, there are a lot of websites out there that can help you learn how to use a search engine and google.

Also look up what UDP broadcast is, you seem to be significantly deficient in your education as a whole. Networking is hard, you should leave it to those of us that know what we are doing and actually have an education in it.

Dont worry the Office of Naval Research and Air Force Office of Scientific Research have your blogs, web 2.0, twitter ect, covered via the Social Computing Data Repository http://socialcomputing.asu.edu/pages/about

There are a few under-achievers, from families with cultures which do not value academic achievement, or who have been given incentives by the government not to value academic achievement, but the majority of students are being pushed or pushing themselves to excell.

"U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200707.html#20070702

"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'"

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104

"Dynamic" US engineers vs. "transactional" foreign engineers.

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051213

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051227

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200601.html#20060110

"the mean literacy test score for U.S. adults (272) was 2 points above the mean for all adults in the 20 country survey (270)... Larger, statistically significant, literacy gaps between us and them unfold when you separate immigrant from native-born test takers, as is done in 17 high income countries surveyed by ETS. U.S. natives scored 8 points above the average native of the 17 high income countries. U.S. immigrants scored 16 points below the average immigrant in the 17 countries." --- Edwin S. Rubenstein 2005-12-22 _V Dare_ "The stupid American? Think again"

http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051222_nd.htm

"I've mentioned the TIMSS test, for instance, which showed that if [Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming] -- none of which has a substantial under-class -- had been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been out-scored only by Singapore (professor David Berliner, 'Our Schools Versus Theirs', Washington Post, 2001 January 28)... This [both the TIMSS and PISA tests] once again shows, tragically, that the U.S.A. is not doing enough to bring up the educational performance of its under-class. But if one takes the white score as 'main-stream', the U.S.A. would rank 7th out of 27, instead of 18th."

http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200603.html#20060317

http://courses.ed.asu.edu/berliner/readings/timssroped.html

"while our average test scores are mediocre, the U.S.A. is a leader with respect to the gap between our best and worst performers. Our best and brightest are equal to, or better than, those of other advanced countries. Our worst rank, well, among the worst anywhere. For several reasons, immigrants exert more of a downward test score drag here than in other advanced countries. First, they account for a larger share of the population. Only 7 of the 27 OECD countries have larger foreign born population shares than the U.S.A. Second -- and more importantly -- our immigrants do poorly on standardized tests compared to the immigrant populations of other advanced countries. The U.S.A. ranked 18th out of the 20

All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...

Like this one ?

They are all available - I would suggest you start by browsing the gallery.

All the interesting stuff is on the far side of the moon. Wonder when they'll release those high-resolution photos...

Like this one ?

They are all available - I would suggest you start by browsing the gallery.

Alternative to downloading 500+ MB .tif from overwhelmed server...

Moon

I wasn't saying Google would not return anything relevant, I was saying simply typing the literal question into Google and then reading off the title of the first result is almost never going to work.

I tried it with the questions on this site: http://asunews.asu.edu/20101103_jeopardyquestions

A few of the Google results do have the answer in the title of some of the results, but Watson still needs to understand what the question is asking for and have some way to know which piece to pull out:
Jeopardy Answer: Pseudonym of labor activist & magazine namesake Mary Harris Jones
Google Result 1: Book Nook Cafe - In the Public Domain (showing 1-43 of 43)
Google Result 2: The Daily Bleed: A Calendar Better Than Boiled Coffee! History Mom...
Google Result 3: Mother Jones: The Woman | Mother Jones

It's easy for us to pick out the correct phrase from result 3, but Watson, if it were simply using Google, would still need some algorithm to understand that "Daily Bleed" is not right, that "Book Nook" is not right, that "History Mom" is not right, and that it only needs the first 2 words from result 3. That's the tricky part, understanding what is being asked for.

Please look into Modeling Physics. It is a research-based physics curriculum that originated at Arizona State University. There are now extensions to chemistry, mathematics, and biology.

It is a strongly constructivist approach to teaching physics, where observations and laboratory experiments (including all phases of experimental design and analysis) lead to mathematical and other models of the phenomena under study. From what I have read of PSSC, some of the positive aspects of PSSC are present in Modeling today.

If you look at the list of participants, it may provide a clue:

Participants are:
- Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
- Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
- James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

If you follow up the connection of James Elser to NASA, it turns out to be a project called "Follow the Elements"

http://astrobiology.asu.edu/Astrobiology/Home/Home.html

So I'm guessing that they've found certain exo-planets in the Goldilocks zone that have the right balance of precursor elements/molecules for life.

Some of the key people are involved in the following programme

http://astrobiology.asu.edu/Astrobiology/Home/Home.html

This is could be interesting!

However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?

Yes and no.

It was an intro physics class, but at Harvard (with many pre-meds in the course; not sure if majors or not). Certainly the students were motivated and had had physics in high school. The point is that students could do calculations, but they didn't understand, in a fundamental way, Newton's Laws (kinda the point of an intro physics class). If you really don't understand them, then you haven't learned what that course is all about. Here's my favorite quote when one of the students was given the assessment with that question, that asked about everyday phenomena, like colliding cars and trucks: "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" (again, a Harvard student taught by someone who was regarded an excellent lecturer). When the results came back on the assessment, sure enough, these students largely didn't understand the fundamentals.

In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI and http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990 Mazur (sorry, both are quite long) describes the same thing with circuits -- students could do the math, but couldn't describe what would happen if a light bulb was pulled out of a simple one. In short, they didn't fundamentally understand the concepts. There is a large literature in physics education research that on a fundamental level students don't understand the key concepts. One leading paper on this (the leading one?) is http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/fci.pdf (some 1,000 cites from the scholarly literature) . It makes for sobering reading.

Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker.

Rather than "dumb," this literature finds that such techniques leads to students who (i) can do calculations as well as those in a traditional class and (ii) have a better fundamental understanding. This really isn't too surprising as they're actually doing physics with a lot of frequent feedback from their clicker responses and discussions with each other to carefully crafted questions designed to help ferret out their common misconceptions. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (quite short) where students are much more engaged than in the typical lecture. Part of that is students committing anonymously to a question (via clickers). With no questions, there is a strong temptation for students to say, "Yeah, I understand that." Many times, in fact, they don't.

Yes, the clicker is just a means to an end (shouldn't all technology in teaching be that?) -- getting students to commit anonymously to an answer. As Mazur says in http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf , you can get the same basic results with cards that students hold up and where they can't easily see each other's cards. As you say, and I'm sure that Mazur agrees, key is the discussion with other students and with Mazur.

One more direct role for technology here is that students at first do on-line homeworks that are used to guide the selection of ques

I dunno, Dyna, but your response seems to represent an even narrower view than GP.

If you are really as familiar with the academy as you claim to be, you fully well know that when people say "Research University," they are really referring to "R1" universities, which is based on the old Carnegie classifications which are no longer used (although you can still find one of the old lists if you hunt hard enough).

The current classifications of institutions generally accepted to be "research universities" are on these three lists.

You also evidently haven't been on the job market in the last decade. There are plenty of regional universities that outright declare they have little to no interest in research, where most faculty publish an average of 0 to 1 article/conference proceeding/book/whatever per 5 years. Even mentioning research in one of these places may be enough to nix your chances at working there - teaching and only teaching is the focus; there is no pretense. The opposite is true too - I applied for several jobs where I felt that if I even mentioned "I enjoy teaching undergraduates," I would've been flown home early.

Did you see the original image? The hole is about 9x11 pixels square. That’s a pretty rough guess, if it’s what they’re working off.

That was from the University press release, by the way, not the cnet article.

If you've got a full meal ahead of you, have a read of The Mind of God by Paul Davies or Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne (Physics).

With a bit less time, for a snack, nibble on the short article Creation and Evolution not Creation or Evolution by R J Berry (Geneticist) and you should start to have a few ideas for conversation with biscuits.

I checked several of the

bibliography references

. Unfortunately (for me I guess) it seems state of the current work is highly theoretical and the only available applications are in MatLab.

It would be interesting to get a concrete implementation for audio or picture processing. I tried playing with SLEP but the MatLab examples do not process concrete pictures (only pseudo randomly generated data).

Let's hope we get some more concrete software in a short time

Look at the Earth within Google Earth, see how they're sealing
it all up? Now they're hiking water prices which is leading people
to seal up their land with rocks and concrete. It's all a LIE.
The economy is fake, money is fake, most of our lives are ruled
by all of these fake human (or inhuman?) layers of complicated
filth! Prices for everything are going up, people are losing their
jobs, up go the rates for everything and the fat cats on top
roll in cash while we're sold out for the banks and what
do the people do? Well we're busy talking about the late night
wars and other fabrications to keep us distracted and divided.
Gloom and doom on the TV, drones starting into the controlled
box of social slavery. Read the book Bowling Alone (see Amazon)
to see how we're being divided more and more and isolated despite
our so-called technological wonders like Twitter and Facebook.
A society who doesn't know their neighbor unless something like
Katrina happens, then some people start to "awaken" to things.
You won't find your awakening in Hollywood, it's all carefully
prepared to condition you to violence and blackening the precious
human image of God. Praise be YHWH, praise be Jesus, praise be
The Holy Spirit! Switch off those televisions and get to know
and love your human neighbors, now.

Those in power who STEAL from us will answer to a higher power.

YOU do not OWN your homes! Fail to pay taxes and you're OUT!
This is the freedom? More and more THEY are dictating what
you can plant, what flags you can fly, where you can smoke,
the race to control your every move and thought is building
as they amass more and more data on you and your neighbors,
they know you and your connections better than you probably
do!

Take a look at these presentations and their clever mapping
and collection of your cell data:

Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, 2008
The workshop is/was sponsored by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/sbp08/program.html

Second Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, 2009
http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/sbp09/program.html

We're being robbed from the inside, like the bees and the mites,
where are you going to go? Their eyes and
ears are in almost every home, we are divided and isn't that
how a nation falls? Are you sure the back of your neck
doesn't read: FCC Approved underneath a black light?

Peace IS the answer, by knowing and loving one another,
but you've been fooled to believe that's the stuff
of fairy tales.

And so you sleep to the tune of masturbating bears
and other noise.

Look at the Earth within Google Earth, see how they're sealing
it all up? Now they're hiking water prices which is leading people
to seal up their land with rocks and concrete. It's all a LIE.
The economy is fake, money is fake, most of our lives are ruled
by all of these fake human (or inhuman?) layers of complicated
filth! Prices for everything are going up, people are losing their
jobs, up go the rates for everything and the fat cats on top
roll in cash while we're sold out for the banks and what
do the people do? Well we're busy talking about the late night
wars and other fabrications to keep us distracted and divided.
Gloom and doom on the TV, drones starting into the controlled
box of social slavery. Read the book Bowling Alone (see Amazon)
to see how we're being divided more and more and isolated despite
our so-called technological wonders like Twitter and Facebook.
A society who doesn't know their neighbor unless something like
Katrina happens, then some people start to "awaken" to things.
You won't find your awakening in Hollywood, it's all carefully
prepared to condition you to violence and blackening the precious
human image of God. Praise be YHWH, praise be Jesus, praise be
The Holy Spirit! Switch off those televisions and get to know
and love your human neighbors, now.

Those in power who STEAL from us will answer to a higher power.

YOU do not OWN your homes! Fail to pay taxes and you're OUT!
This is the freedom? More and more THEY are dictating what
you can plant, what flags you can fly, where you can smoke,
the race to control your every move and thought is building
as they amass more and more data on you and your neighbors,
they know you and your connections better than you probably
do!

Take a look at these presentations and their clever mapping
and collection of your cell data:

Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, 2008
The workshop is/was sponsored by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/sbp08/program.html

Second Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, 2009
http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/sbp09/program.html

We're being robbed from the inside, like the bees and the mites,
where are you going to go? Their eyes and
ears are in almost every home, we are divided and isn't that
how a nation falls? Are you sure the back of your neck
doesn't read: FCC Approved underneath a black light?

Peace IS the answer, by knowing and loving one another,
but you've been fooled to believe that's the stuff
of fairy tales.

And so you sleep to the tune of masturbating bears
and other noise.

Download them while you can and spread the word

http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/sbp08/program.html

Papers:

Integrating Multi-Agent Technology with Cognitive Modeling to Develop an Insurgency Information Framework (IIF)
LeeRoy Bronner and Akeila Richards (Slides)

Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents: A Case Study with Hezbollah
Aaron Mannes, Mary Michael, Amy Pate, Amy Sliva, V.S. Subrahmanian and Jonathan Wilkenfeld (Slides)

An approach to modeling group behaviors and beliefs in conflict situations
Norman Geddes and Michele Atkinson (Slides)

Computational Models of Multi-national Organizations
Alexander Levis, Smriti K. Kansal, A. Erkin Olmez and Ashraf M. AbuSharekh (Slides)

Clustering of Trajectory Data obtained from Soccer Game Record -A First Step to Behavioral Modeling
Shoji Hirano and Shusaku Tsumoto (Slides)

Inferring Social Network Structure using Mobile Phone Data
Nathan Eagle, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, and David Lazer (Slides)

Human Behavioral Modeling Using Fuzzy and Dempster-Shafer Theory
Ronald Yager (Slides)

Behavior Profiling for Computer Security Applications
David Robinson, George Cybenko, and Vincent Berk (Slides)

Mining for Social Process Signatures in Intelligence Data Streams
Robert Savell and George Cybenko (Slides)

An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to Expert Identification in Social Networks
Muhammad Ahmad and Jaideep Srivastava (Slides)

Modeling and Supporting Common Ground in Geo-Collaboration
Gregorio Convertino, Anna Wu, Craig H. Ganoe, Luke (Xiaolong) Zhang, and John M. Carroll (Slides)

Modeling Malaysian Public Opinion by Mining the Malaysian Blogosphere
Brian Ulicny (Slides)

Reading between the Lines: Human-centered Classification of Communication Patterns and Intentions
Daniela Stokar von Neuforn and Katrin Franke (Slides)

Automating Frame Analysis
Antonio Sanfilippo, Lyndsey Franklin, Stephen Tratz, Gary Danielson, Nicholas Mileson, Roderick Riensche and Liam McGrath (Slides)

Metagame Strategies of Nation-States, with Application to Cross-Strait Relations
Alex Chavez and Jun Zhang (Slides)

Using Topic Analysis to Compute Identity Group Attributes
Lashon Booker and Gary Strong

Posters:

Conceptualizing Trustworthiness Mechanisms for Countering Insider Threats
Shuyuan Mary Ho (Slides)

Particle Swarm Social Model for Group Social Learning in Adaptive Environment
Xiaohui Cui, Laura Pullum, Jim Treadwell, Robert Patton and Thomas Potok (Slides)

Social Network Analysis: Tasks and Tools
Steven Loscalzo and Lei Yu (Slides)

Behavioral Entropy of a Cellular Phone User
Ram Dantu, Santi Phithakkitnukoon, and Husain Husna (Slides)

Community Detection in a Large Real

A friend of mine wrote a blog response to this: http://cjannett.personal.asu.edu/wordpress/?p=15

Not in July and August. http://geoplan.asu.edu/aztc/monsoon.html

Of course, drops come in lots of different sizes, but I'm guessing that one was on the large side. At some point the drop will get too large for surface tension to properly hold it together and it breaks up -- (assuming it's falling in gravity, anyways.)

its a victimless crime to you, because you don't give a fuck about the hard work put in by the people who actually get off their asses and create stuff.

I guess you mean those "people" (i.e. Corporations) whose creative contributions are shining beacons of light onto our collective dark and gloomy cultural heritage. How did we ever survive, progress and create without string copyrights with healthy extension periods, strict HADOPI laws, intellectual property policing I will never know.

Fucking pathtic

Indeed.

why didn't anyone in the Star Trek universe ever come up with the idea of using warp drives as weapons in a systematic way? A runabout crashing into a borg cube at warp seven would do quite a bit more damage than a photon torpedo, I would imagine. I guess kinetic energy just isn't "futuristic" enough.

According to some of the best speculative physics out there, warp drive must operate by either manipulating space-time itself, or by creating an artificial wormhole or some other means of traveling in extra dimensions. Within your local frame of reference your velocity would be quite low, as would your kinetic energy. You could also move at EXACTLY the speed of light by reducing the relativistic mass of your vessel to zero. Still no kinetic energy weapon there.

Using warped space itself as a weapon is a possibility, but who is to say that phasers don't already do some of that. Phasers certainly can't work merely by firing a beam of photons at the target, like a laser. If they did work like lasers, you wouldn't be able to see the beam.

Sublight engines, on the other hand, might be a possibility as the basis of a kinetic energy weapon. IIRC impulse drive could move a starship somewhere around 1/2c.

Arguably people get staph infections in hospitals because hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing. It leaves the hardiest, and fastest spreading bacteria and viruses to fill the vacuum rather than the millions of common germs that our body knows how to deal with.

Actually, "hardiest" and "fastest-spreading" are generally mutually opposed. Most mutations to develop antibiotic resistance are costly and inefficient compared to non-resistance. This is why these traits, which spontaneously appear in the population from time to time, do not become dominant without the use of antibiotics or other outside pressures to cull the herd in favor of resistance.

However, you are right in some contexts. Some genes for resistance to antibiotics also aid in resistance to certain disinfectants.

"Compounds such as household disinfectants and other antibacterial agents can also select for antibiotic resistance. Triclosan and pine oil, which are widely used in home cleaning products are able to select for multidrug-resistant mutants, either by mutation in the target genes or in the regulatory mar system, providing a pleiotropic resistance to disinfectants, multiple structurally unrelated antibiotics, organic solvents and oxidative stress agents. Constitutive expression of an MDR efflux pump which confers resistance to triclosan is also reported in P. aeruginosa. Given the increased use of these agents in households, one can imagine dramatic changes in the environmental flora that impact antibiotic resistance."

-- TM Barbosa, SB Levy. The impact of antibiotic use on resistance development and persistence. Drug Resist Update. 2000;3:303-11.

In the case of music copyrights, one can also thank the Gershwin estate among others for lobbying on behalf of copyright extension - Gershwin's music is big business and the copyright holders would like to make sure that American Airlines (as one past example) would have to keep paying large sums of money for the rights to use "An American in Paris" for as long as possible.

The commissioning phase will end approximately 60 days after launch, when LRO will use its engines to transition to its primary mission orbit.
LRO is now in a commissioning orbit! - June 27

So we're at least 56 days from "first light" and the mapping program will go for 1 year, and as there's nothing to suggest that the Apollo landing sites will be first or last imaged, a good estimate is 8 months or so from now.

If that's "soon" to you, then I guess you're older than I am :)

Found it here: http://plato.asu.edu/LockhartsLament.pdf

The whole idea behind his essay is that he liked playing with numbers and shapes as if it's an art, but he doesn't seem to realize most people don't share this love for math, like pretty much 90% of any student population. This is me speaking as a just-graduated senior: the things he suggests is beyond the ability of most math students in high school.

• The original source linked PDF turned HTML by Google Scholar (actually does a fine job!)
• A Mathematician's Lament
• A Mathematician's Lament
• A Mathematician's Lament
• A Mathematician's Lament
• A Mathematician's Lament

From what I can tell, they all look to be the same length and size and hopefully are not older revisions of this paper.

The "DNA origami" are artificial strands of DNA that are held together at specific locations by staple strands. The strands are made to order from a commercial source. Software we wrote allows us to draw arbitrary (3D and 2D) shapes and have the purchase order automatically generated! It's really a wonderful nanotechnology, ideal for aqueous based situations where specific scale and proximity is required. Drug delivery is not the ideal application but for some reason this author seemed to think so. Specific aptamers allow us to bind a variety of things to the origami including fluorescent dyes, proteins, and other nanoparticles. Two important points: 1. Have no fear of the Grey Goo from this one. Particular DNA strands need to be added for the structures to grow. Self assembly yes but only with the added (and unnatural) building blocks. 2. Our work on DNA "origami" is funded by the NIH. Sorry, no black helicopters. Please feel free to read to your heart's content and contribute if you are able: http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/centers/smb/

According to this article (http://asunews.asu.edu/20080229_pizzarello), an un-contaminated meteorite was was found to have amino acids with mixed chirality, but with a bias towards the left-handed (up to 15%), not the 50%-50% suggested in the article linked in the submission. So to some extent, this supports what you said.

Even so, the technique described in the submitted article could work. It's all about signal to noise. If some feature of a planet reflects vastly more chiral bias than a rocky moon or asteroid in the same system, that could indicate that it harbors life.

On the other hand, the rovers took 90 sols to do what a competent geologist with similar equipment on the scene could do in an afternoon. Assuming a 90-to-1 capability ratio, the rovers have done about three weeks of equivalent work. I think there is a place for manned exploration of space. On the gripping hand, it probably will cost at least 90 times as much to get that geologist to Mars when the time comes.

Not bagging on the rovers, especially since I work in the lab that operates Mini-TES, so yay unmanned missions!

They mapped their milestones with photographs & videos:

  Clink

Judging from the demo video, the display is in levels of grey, not in colour :(
And not all that flexible (it would have to be quite large to be rolled). But quite resilient, which is still fairly good compared to what we've got nowadays.

They mapped their milestones with photographs & videos:

Clink

Does anyone know where to find a video of the RGB display? A video of the immediate predecessor of the above is available here ( dynamic stress testing )

jdb2

A mirror doesn't "absorb all the energy and then re-emit it", at least not in any meaningful sense.

Check your quantum physics. In fact, there are only a couple of ways that photons interact with matter... if there's no interaction at all, the photons pass right through. That's "transparency". There's also the photoelectric effect, where photons interact with electrons, which rise to higher energy states, absorbing the photons. The new configurations aren't stable, so the electrons rapidly fall back to their original state, which emits a new photon. On a reflective surface, the atoms are aligned in such a way that the new photons are lined up very precisely, such that they match the photons that were absorbed. Otherwise, you might get a spectral reflection (i.e. shiny), but not coherent. In non-reflective surfaces, the photons are absorbed and the electrons either remain in their excited state, or photons are emitted that are different than the photons that were absorbed (for example, when you shine a black light on a white surface, the emitted photons are at a different wavelength than the absorbed photons). Either way, the entropy of the material is increased (i.e. it is heated), though the entropy is obviously greater when no new photon is re-emitted. There are other quantum interactions possible at higher energies, but the idea is the same.

There's a good layman's explanation here, and a more comprehensive look in Dick Feynman's book.

> No, half of the people in this country are at or below median intelligence.

IQ is based on the assumption that intelligence distribution is normal. In the normal distribution, the average is the same as the median, and yes, half the people in the world have below-average intelligence. That does not mean that half the people in this country have below average intelligence, because IQ averages vary by country. If you look at the table of IQs by country (which are averages, BTW), you'll see that the US has the average IQ of 98, meaning that slightly more than half the people in this country have below-average intelligence: 55.3%. By comparison, in Equatorial Guinea, where the average IQ is 59, 99.7% of the population has below average intelligence. You can get the numbers by calculating the error function with this calculator, 59 is 41/15(SD)=2.73(3) standard deviations.

A mission somewhat similar to what you're describing is already in the works.
The Thor Mission

After being released from the observer, the impactor will streak through the Martian atmosphere to an impact site lying between 30 degrees and 60 degrees latitude, in either the northern or southern hemisphere of the Red Planet.

On a lighter note, I suspect that will be the Mission that finally finds life. The Martians have been ok with US sending little robots crawling around in the middle of nowhere. I can't see the Generals in the Martian Planetary Defense Dept being happy with us bombing them (FROM SPACE!).

Actually an impact analyzer has been proposed. In addition to doing some pretty nifty stratigraphic science, you gotta admit, kinetic strikes from orbit is freakin' cool. :-)

Full disclosure: Phil Christensen is my boss.

The article itself links to an article from a year ago:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Spirit_Rover_on_Mars_finds_water_made_'silica-rich_soil'

It's taken a year for the paper to be published in Science, along with more evidence of other silica outcrops.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080522145222.htm

Original sources:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5879/1063
http://www.mars.asu.edu/news/news-silica.html

Should we even care about small time dreamers anymore? Should the entire process of patent reform have to grind to a halt in order to allow "Joe Inventor", if he exists or indeed ever existed, to still play the patent lottery game? $300,000 dollars per patent seems just fine by me.

Yes, there are still useful patents and techniques put out by the little guys and lone inventors, especially ones that can be used in the third world. Here a two I found from a quick Google search, and I remember another one that involves a special buried clay pot.

http://researchmag.asu.edu/stories/dewey.html
http://www.acfnewsource.org/science/3rd_world_invention.html

I appreciate your skepticism, but at least for vision it does kind of work out that way for one reason or another. I think it's interesting to note though that to compensate for differences in sensitivities of the chromophores in our cones, we employ a ratiometric perception of color based on different chromophore activation.

http://acept.asu.edu/PiN/rdg/color/color.shtml

Currently, chips (both computational and memory) are protected against soft errors using multiple methods. There are rad hardening methods (both hardware and software) and most of the latest research involves using error correcting codes. Simply duplicating the output and comparing can only detect errors in one bit. The more the times you duplicate, the more you can detect (it progresses as n-1), and the max length of error that can be corrected is half that. However, this takes a lot of space (duplication that is), so generally other codes such as Hamming or BCH codes are used.

The main problem using codes and everything is that cosmic ray errors cause whats called single event upsets and most codes can not detect 100% of errors where the hamming weight of the error (sum of number of ones in the error vector) is larger than the designed specification of the error. The problem comes when the SEU manifests itself as a multi-bit fault and the error vector cannot be detected by the code. SEU's are the most common type of errors in space application : See http://www.eas.asu.edu/~holbert/eee460/see.html

The contribution of the cosmic error detector is that if you know you have a cosmic ray at some point in time, you can flush and redo your computation (for computation channels eg microprocessors etc) or flush that line in memory (for memory channels) in case of SEU's and that is a pretty big deal.

If congress is so concerned about bullying, why not crack down upon it in the workplace where researchers estimate 90% (Management Communication Quarterly, 16, 471-501) of individuals experience Employee Emotional Abuse at some point of their employment, often leading to lost productivity and increased healthcare costs, where the vast majority of the time, the abuser continues this behavior after the victim leaves the organization to someone else. (e.g. the project leader who takes it upon himself to become everyone in the group's ad-hoc supervisor and foams at the mouth when he doesn't get his way or his arbitrary, non-enforcable preferences aren't met or is in direct violation of the union contract.) If "sexual harassment" is so illegal an unethical, why not any kind of workplace intimidation of a non-sexual (or non protected-class) nature not illegal in any way?

However, in private civil matters between ordinary citizens, Congress is only doing this (I hope) to win the "please think of the children" vote. I'm truly hoping that they don't honestly believe they are going to actually be able to stop it. This is the 21st century version of "Jamie is a whore" written on a bathroom stall.

Does it suck? Yes. Is the guilty party an asshole? Probably (if it was unprovoked). Does it need big government to save us from the mean kids? No. Period.

Not only were the cameras weighing 45+ pounds each, but the kite itself was made of lead!! (See illustration) http://activetectonics.asu.edu/kites/06eq.html