Slashdot Mirror

Good post - you raise some points that I have wondered about.

Back when the Narrabi interferometer was in use, even a cooled photomultiplier might have a quantum efficiency of 10 or maybe 20%. Now, with CCDs, 80 % is possible, so that is a factor of 4 or so right there.

BUT, now there are all of these big light buckets looking for Cherenkov radiation from cosmic rays, and (as you point out) computer resources are dirt cheap, so the question I would have is, could you do useful "parasitic" observations using, say, Veritas ?

Note, by the way, that the various interplanetary gamma ray burst networks are also intensity interferometers. And, to answer your question, the SNR increases by the sqrt of the bandwidth. If you could do bandwidth synthesis, you might be able to really improve your angular precision (not resolution); that is linear in the bandwidth.

No one actually cares about the truth here, any of the issues at play, nor the legality of any programs. Most make it a huge political issue, and is it any surprise that even the "leakers" have all had a political axe to grind with the Bush administration?

They just scream "unconstitutional" and rant about Bush, when the very mechanisms set up in our society to render legal opinions on actions of various components of government and to rule on issues of legality or constitutionality have judged certain things to be legal.

The issue is summed up fairly well by comments of DNI Mike McConnell (video) at Harvard's Kennedy School:

And I'll fast forward to a period of Watergate, when the community was used to do a lot of intrusive observation. Out of that came a bill called FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Here was the dilemma. We need this large, robust, wonderful capability to protect us in the context of the Cold War, but we can't allow it to conduct any observation of U.S. citizens. And our wonderful democracy, we want it both ways. Don't let anybody bother us, make sure we're safe, but don't do anything to look at anything that might reflect my activity.

So the law in 1978 said okay to observe foreign, but if you observe anything in the United States, U.S. person for a foreign intelligence purpose, you must have a warrant. That was the law of the land, but it was an analog law. Where we found ourselves most recently is it's one global network. And so communications overseas by foreigners - terrorists plotting to attack the United States - those communications were passing through the United States. If you go back to the old analog law, it said if you take information from a wire, even though it's a glass pipe called fiber on a wire in the United States, you must have a warrant. So the dilemma for us was we had a terrorist overseas plotting to attack us by speaking with a terrorist in another overseas location and the community was required to get a warrant.

The debate and the dilemma for us is how do you modernize that law for the modern age? And we debated. For two years we debated and we finally came to closure. The good news is when it was finally voted, two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate voted for it and here's what it says today: if it's a U.S. person anywhere in the globe, you must have a warrant. A judge must grant you to conduct surveillance and the purpose of the surveillance can only be for one thing, foreign intelligence. Now, why would you do surveillance of a U.S. person for foreign surveillance? What if it's a spy that's been recruited by a foreign agent and you need to know what they're giving away? You would then have a warrant for surveillance of that person for a foreign intelligence purpose.

The other part of the law is no warrant for a foreign target regardless of where or how you intercept it. And the third part of the law was in today's world it's digital, it's global - you can't do it without the help of the private sector and so the private sector was authorized to give us that help and provided a level of liability protection.

That's the kind of dilemma that we face in making sure we balance our responsibilities for conducting surveillance of foreign targets that might wish us harm and respecting the civil liberties and privacy of American citizens.

...and again in comments on Charlie Rose (video):

CHARLIE ROSE: Okay, wire tapping is necessary and it's okay without a warrant because? In your judgment.

DIRECTOR McCONNELL: Wire tapping is essential. It is now probably more than half of

Requiring some sort of private investigator's license to perform any sort of "investigation" of computers is a really, really bad idea. This has been implemented in a few states and I don't think it is having the desired outcome.

Read Bando v. Gates - it is all over the Internet. It is a very interesting read about someone completely unqualified performing an digital forensic investigation. This is what the "licensing" is supposed to prevent. It also virtually eliminates the possibility of someone being able to perform investigations in multiple states because of the absurd licensing requirements. You see, this is done on a state-by-state basis. Texas may require firearms traning for all licensed investigators while some other state does not. This doesn't help the quality of digital investigations. It only hurts.

I would consider the possibility of someone actually being prosecuted for an unlicensed investigation when they never set foot in the state to be very low. Having their expert witness status rejected is another matter but not one to be taken lightly. If expert witnesses must be licensed, then do not expect to be allowed to testify about your own computer in a licensing-required state.

What this sort of licensing is supposed to do is increase accountability of computer forensic examiners. What it in fact does is restrict the pool of such examiners to a very small group and says nothing about the quality or abilities of those people. Other than their ability to put up with completely unrelated requirements, such as firearms training for a computer investigator. The result of this is certainly going to be that you are not qualified to provide any information about your own computer in any sort of legal matter without such a license. Sure, the license may only be required to perform an investigation when it is a paid service, but that says nothing about expert witness qualification.

Wake me up when they detect booz.

Pssst....hey...wake up!.

Here is the site from Harvard university: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/thesis/repo/view/concentration/

More can be found here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=college+thesis+project&btnG=Search

I provided the citation, that makes it eminently verifiable. If you're capable of going to a seminar or reading papers, you should know how to use ADSABS to look up the abstract. There was this thing called "looking it up" before people got used to being spoon-fed links on the internet. But because you apparently aren't capable of doing your own research: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008DPS....40.1201G

And you should check the seminars' sources. As Kevin Grazier pointed out in his DPS presentation, there's not real study to back up the claims that Jupiter protects things. It just entered conventional wisdom through the back door and people stopped questioning it.

Remember: being told something a lot isn't the same as having it demonstrated.

For those who wonder WTF "growler" is, they meant "Greplaw"

Erm, you mean Groklaw right? That's where the article from the Slashdot submission is from.

Greplaw is a different, if similar, site.

That's an interesting comparison of the economic impact. It's not surprising that people coming and paying money every day adds up to more money than a few dozen games a year bring in. Companies with recurring service fees also tend to do better at milking their clients than those with one-time charges. :)

Coincidentally, I am planning a trip to Boston right now. The MFA is indeed spectacular and enough to entice a Miami boy to venture north into the freezing cold. :)

The New England Aquarium also has my favorite animal; the Sea Dragon. :)
http://www.neaq.org/animals_and_exhibits/animals/sea_dragons/index.php

And The Harvard Museum of Natural History has some quite amazing exhibits, as well. http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/

The system uses something called an orthogonal transfer CCD to remove atmospheric blur from images.

Shoddy. "Something called?" Come on, guys, this is supposed to be "news for nerds". If you can't find it on wikipedia, use google.

orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD)

We have designed and built a new type of CCD that we call an orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD), which permits parallel clocking horizontally as well as vertically. The device has been used successfully to remove image motion caused by atmospheric turbulence at rates up to 100 Hz, and promises to be a better, cheaper way to carry out image motion correction for imaging than by using fast tip/tilt mirrors. We report on the device characteristics, and find that the large number of transfers needed to track image motion does not significantly degrade the image either because of charge transfer inefficiency or because of charge traps. For example, after 100 sec of tracking at 100 Hz approximately 3% of the charge would diffuse into a skirt around the point spread function. Four nights of data at the Michigan-Dartmouth-MIT (MDM) 2.4-m telescope also indicate that the atmosphere is surprisingly benign, in terms of both the speed and coherence angle of image motion. Image motion compensation improved image sharpness by about 0.5'' in quadrature with no degradation over a field of at least 3 arcminutes. (SECTION: Astronomical Instrumentation)

Not having a magnetic field is not necessarily dettrimental to the planet's atmosphere. If Earth's magnetic field failed, the atmosphere would be ionized and would self-magentize. The resulting magnetic field would deflect or redirect the solar wind.
The best example is Venus: it has an enormously dense atmosphere, yet it has no Earth-like, rotation-based magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind. What scientists have found is the effect described above: Venus has an atmospherically-created magnetic field on the sun-facing side of the planet.
Planetary atmospheres disappear because of a low planetary mass, not because of the lacking magnetic field, IMHO.
(Sources: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979Sci...203..745R, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984GeoRL..11..267C)

Not having a magnetic field is not necessarily dettrimental to the planet's atmosphere. If Earth's magnetic field failed, the atmosphere would be ionized and would self-magentize. The resulting magnetic field would deflect or redirect the solar wind.
The best example is Venus: it has an enormously dense atmosphere, yet it has no Earth-like, rotation-based magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind. What scientists have found is the effect described above: Venus has an atmospherically-created magnetic field on the sun-facing side of the planet.
Planetary atmospheres disappear because of a low planetary mass, not because of the lacking magnetic field, IMHO.
(Sources: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979Sci...203..745R, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984GeoRL..11..267C)

Hem the DMCA itself explicitly allows reverse engineering in order to allow interoperability. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html , paragraph f)

A question for you math geeks: can an object of infinite size even HAVE a center?

Well infinite is not the term I'd use here. The potential size of the universe is infinite, but there is a distinct perimeter that is constantly expanding, thank you Edwin Hubble. If you measure the directions of expansion from various parts of the galaxy, they have a distinct point of origin, give or take a really bad Star Trek movie.

The basis of the Copernican Principle is that there is no 'preferred' position in the universe, i.e. no center. The parent article is wrong. So was Copernicus on that small detail. Everything else was bang on and contradicted religious scripture. It's amazing he wasn't burned at the stake for heresy.

Since I keep getting modded down, I feel compelled to provide userful information. I apologize for the way I stated my first comment, but the RIAA is the guardian of an industry so antiquated and oppressive that having sympathy for these guys is a little like feeling sorry for a Georgia slaveholder after watching Sherman's troops fire his mansion and scatter his livestock. Here's an industry so bloated with executives and middlemen, all of them greedily slurping up profit, that the people who actually write the songs and play the music -- the "talent" -- are getting royally screwed in the royalty department. It's been like that for years. Anyways, harvard has the court documents posted here for all to see.

It is taken for granted in this industry (and many others) that more experience == good. There has been some recent research in this area, specifically in engineering management, and the management of innovation, that suggests that when working in innovative, rapidly evolving areas, trying to come up with novel solutions and build novel systems, experience can be /detrimental/ as it acts as a ball and chain to the way things used to be done, and hampers an innovative mindset that tries to figure out a better way to do things.

See, for example, "Innovators' Insights - Which Schools of Experience Should Your Executives Attend?". Anthony, S. D., & Christensen, C.M. Nov 2004. Harvard Management Update. Harvard Business Publishing

Describe the work you are hiring the person for, and ask them why their experience would be an asset and not a detriment to the work you are doing. Ask them to explain their thoughts about learning new skills, using new methodologies, vs doing what they have always done for the past x years over again.

It is my firm opinion that an ability to grow and learn and evolve is the single most useful skill for any employee.

Alpha particles are pretty large entities, being helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), as a result can only travel a few centimetres through air so any machine's case will stop them completely.

Beta particles are electrons or positrons) and can reach about 9 metres through air but less than 5mm through aluminium.

The one that RIAA is suing is pretty young.

For one, the guy's name is Nesson, not Neeson. Also, he is both incredibly brilliant, (one of the very few people to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Law School,) and incredibly eccentric. He's the sort of guy who will give final exams in Second Life or let people create an original Youtube video instead of the traditional test. Here's his class's page about this whole issue: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone/riaa/

Middle of the road crap is all that's profitable. The long tail theory didn't survive contact with Joe Downloader.

It's been discussed at several recent conferences (AGU, LPSC) and was the main focus of Spirit's scientific research all through the last (Martian) summer.

For users of IE, Mr. Pepperman successfully showed that integration does provide some technical benefits. The sharing of code between IE and Windows 98 will result the saving of memory for those who wish to use IE. Furthermore, over 100 ISVs depend on IE-related code to function. (Even a competing browser requires IE DLLs to operate.)

The appeals court said:

Microsoft proffers no justification for two of the three challenged actions that it took in integrating IE into Windows -- excluding IE from the Add/Remove Programs utility and commingling browser and operating system code. Although Microsoft does make some general claims regarding the benefits of integrating the browser and the operating system, it neither specifies nor substantiates those claims.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/08.06/BrainsColorProc.html

They should do a follow-up study where the researchers actually monitor brain activity in addition to reporting experiential observations from the subjects.

Rotating fluids that are perturbed tend to form columns parallel to the axis of rotation called Taylor columns, after G.I. Taylor. On the Earth, these are sometimes seen over seamounts in the oceans, and back when people assumed that Jupiter had a surface, it was hypothesized that the Great Red Spot was a taylor column over an obstruction on the surface below. This now seems highly unlikely, as a solid surface seems highly unlikely. Some more theory is here.

More recently, it has been hypothesized that the belts of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn (which are organized in pairs at opposite latitudes) may be Taylor columns (i.e., that they may extend part or all the way through the planet as cylinders, keeping the same distance from the rotation axis). A Taylor column at the pole could in principle go all the way through the planet, if there was nothing below it, or could mark the size of a rocky core, thousands of kilometers down. Thus my original question.

This explains the idea pretty well :

The proposed atmospheric cylinders were first demonstrated in a series of laboratory experiments 25 years ago to chart atmospheric flow in a wholly gaseous planet. Friederich Busse, University of Bayreuth, Germany, and John Hart, University of Colorado, Boulder, used liquid-filled spheres with high rotation speeds and imposed interior-exterior temperature differences. The experiments showed that the convective and most other disturbances in these fast-rotating spheres of fluid almost always produced cylindrical vortices parallel to the test vessel's spin axis, called Taylor columns.

I found a paper dated April 15, 1993. It looks like the judges were (are?) highly restricted in what they are allowed to ask -- basically, they have to stick to a couple predefined topics, and only ask questions that would be asked had they assumed the other participant in the conversation were human. Also, the human participants (called confederates) are also simply talking normally, and are not specifically trying to convince the judges that they are human. Basically, this is not the true Turing Test we all know and love.

In 1970 many households only had one car.

Because only one car was needed. But once you start having a two-income family, you need two cars: one for dad to get to work, one for mom to get to work.

Most people actually SAVED for what they wanted and needed.

Agreed. If you look at the statistics you'll see that in 1981 the average family saved 10% of their income and spent 4% on servicing credit card debt. In 2001 the savings rate was negative and the average family spent over 12% of their income on credit card debt.

If most people of 2008 could live with what we had in 1970, they'd do just fine. Our expectations for our lifestyle won't allow that.

The problem isn't that people want to live like celebrities today, and that they were content with less in the past, it is that today families have to have two incomes to keep up and maintain a middle class lifestyle. If you actually look at the statistics, average families today have LESS disposable income than in the 1970s. (And it's that disposable income that's buying the TVs, going on vacation, etc.) Why is there less disposable income? Because the fixed costs have gotten a helluva lot higher. Mortgages are larger. Health insurance costs have skyrocketed, as have costs associated with education.

You ought to read The Two Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren. It outlines why there is such a squeeze on the middle class these days, and the main reason is because of the higher cost of the middle class "essentials" (safe neighborhood, good schools, and health care). And one of the primary reasons these costs have spiraled out of control is because of the move to two-income families. This has added a lot more income that families can spend to bid up the prices of homes, of schools, and so on, but it puts strain on the family and makes a family more prone to catastrophe from a job loss, illness, etc. The authors argue that THAT is the reason we have seen such a rise in bankruptcy.

If you prefer watching instead of reading, check out this lecture by the book's author: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

If this is as good as they say, they wouldn't have any secrets and would spill the beans.

The fundamental research was done a long time ago(with picture of prototypes); I've read articles about it in Electronics and Wireless World several times over the years, so it's hardly a secret. Any potentially patentable critical element is going to be kept under wraps, obviously.

I think they have found some weaknesses that restrict the usefulness of this technology.

Or they spent 3 years on R&D fixing those weaknesses, like the article says.

Further information of note from the NYT article:

SiOnyx is already commercializing sensor-based chips as a technology development platform for other companies and for use in next-generation infrared imaging systems.

So we're told:
1- There's a decade of peer-reviewed research behind the technology.
2- They have funding and partners already.
3- They're shipping parts now, not at some unknown time in the future.

Either this is real, or Dr Mazur et al are engaging in an exceptionally elaborate, very public and career-ending series of lies (and it's not as though SiOnyx will be a paying proposition if the tech doesn't work). The part of the operation that does look suspect is their web site (Flash warning), but that doesn't prove anything about the physics involved.

Can't see the forest because of the trees, or because you're too fucking STUPID? The CRA built the framework for the entire Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac debacle and resultant credit crunch that's killing the world economy right now. Just because the Obama the Messiah (to quote Louis Farrakhan) decided to extort Citibank using other portions of that framework doesn't excuse him from the effects of his shakedown.

And because Freddie and Fannie were all too willing to buy up those affirmative-action mortgages, banks soon learned to play ball:

From Confrontation to Collaboration? Banks, Community Groups, and the Implementation of Community Reinvestment Agreements

Banks and other depository institutions have signed more than 300 community reinvestment agreements valued at $350 billion in the two decades since the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This article examines the effectiveness of negotiating CRA agreements in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey. After describing the agreements and the procedures by which they are enforced, the article looks at their impact and discusses several factors that could limit implementation of CRA agreements in the future. The findings suggest that CRA agreements are more effective in some areas than others. They seem most consistently successful in meeting their goals for mortgages, investments in low-income housing tax credits, grant giving to community-based organizations, and in opening (and keeping open) inner-city bank branches. The future of CRA agreements is clouded by several factors, most notably the restructuring and consolidation of the financial service sector.

And one of those factors is finding out that it's not such a great idea to hand out trillions of dollars of mortgages based on social engineering and wishful thinking.

Restating your premise after quoting an article from 1998 that is irrelevant to making your case does not make a logical argument, son. Go back to playing on Free Republic or worshipping pictures of Sarah Palin

Can't see the forest because of the trees, or because you're too fucking STUPID? The CRA built the framework for the entire Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac debacle and resultant credit crunch that's killing the world economy right now. Just because the Obama the Messiah (to quote Louis Farrakhan) decided to extort Citibank using other portions of that framework doesn't excuse him from the effects of his shakedown.

And because Freddie and Fannie were all too willing to buy up those affirmative-action mortgages, banks soon learned to play ball:

From Confrontation to Collaboration? Banks, Community Groups, and the Implementation of Community Reinvestment Agreements

Banks and other depository institutions have signed more than 300 community reinvestment agreements valued at $350 billion in the two decades since the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This article examines the effectiveness of negotiating CRA agreements in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey. After describing the agreements and the procedures by which they are enforced, the article looks at their impact and discusses several factors that could limit implementation of CRA agreements in the future. The findings suggest that CRA agreements are more effective in some areas than others. They seem most consistently successful in meeting their goals for mortgages, investments in low-income housing tax credits, grant giving to community-based organizations, and in opening (and keeping open) inner-city bank branches. The future of CRA agreements is clouded by several factors, most notably the restructuring and consolidation of the financial service sector.

And one of those factors is finding out that it's not such a great idea to hand out trillions of dollars of mortgages based on social engineering and wishful thinking.

At some level, hyperlinks (at least) are standard. They're called "references" and were the closest thing to a hyperlink before the intertubes were invented. Several free services (ADS is one: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ have spiders that walk the literature and create genuine URL-style links between articles. ArXiV is advancing custom along that path, by making many journal articles available for linking to anyone free of charge.

Extended data sets are coming. Astrophysical Journal allows online publication of movies and data to support articles, and I imagine that ArXiV will one day too. (Though they don't have the server space to support many of the data sets that are written about in those PDFs).

Meanwhile, most^H^H^H^Hmany scientific authors are happy to give you their original data -- just write to them and ask for it!

LinkyLinky
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/icq/meteorites.html

But you know what. I am inclined to agree with Pinker but it's absolute statements like these that discredit him.

And the Bell Curve has not only been criticized for racism but also methodology.

I wouldn't consider him "popular science," since he uses hard science in the book and his research is about anything but a popular topic.

Stephen Pinker: Research

The entire point of his book is that intelligence and personality are heritable, in contrast to the "blank slate" theory which suggests human beings can be shaped or educated into having certain intelligence and personality traits.

Every book has been criticized for its methodology. Criticism alone debunks nothing. Do you have a valid counterargument, or are you just trying to insult away the problem?

The DMCA provides specific exceptions that allow reverse engineering for the purpose of obtaining interoperability with a different software or system: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html (paragraph f). Even if an EULA is enforceable, it cannot restrict an user's rights more than what is expressly allowed by law. I could ask in an EULA that an user is not allowed to install a competing software on his machine while my software is installed, but any court would find such a provision moot, since it would clearly fall afoul of several antitrust laws, for example.

I have just joined a similar group, the Harvard Computing Society (http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/). We try to provide more up to date web services to student organizations. We provide web hosting for student groups that is capable of running all the latest web goodies like Drupal, Mediawiki, sql, and the like. We also maintain mailing lists for student organizations, and advocate for better tech practices at Harvard. There are also lots of other cool projects in the pipeline that may or may not go anywhere but are fun to work on: IPtv, content aggregation from student org websites, internet phone, and other off the wall ideas. I am still new to the organization, but everything seems to work very well.

Taking this successful example, I would suggest taking advantage of the fact that you can be less bureaucratic than the school's general IT staff to provide more modern web tools to student organizations.

Why is it that every time federal taxes are reduced, actual revenue, that is the actual amount of money flowing into the federal coffers, increases? I know it's non-intuitive, but it's been repeatedly proven true.

Let's see the actual numbers over time and do some statistics then. I'll wait.

Why do people refuse to acknowledge the fact that reducing taxes actually increases revenues when it's been repeatedly proven to be true?

Because it's not. Jeff Frankel wrote some good commentary on this just recently.

Just to flesh this out and offer a few corrections, as someone who works around the AO LGS at Gemini (and Keck):

Tomduck is correct that an adaptive optics (AO) system uses deformable optics to bring a guide star into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. He fails to mention that this process is in no way inherently dependent upon the use of a laser. Indeed, when a bright natural star is close enough to the target to be used, it is in many ways preferable to using the laser. (For one, the brightness of natural stars tends to be pretty constant, and not subject to the usual game of "so, how many watts shy of nominal power are we tonight?" :) So Gemini's AO system, Altair (read all about it here) is quite often used with natural guide stars (NGS).

A NGS can, incidentally, also be used for guiding - keeping the telescope pointed correctly - as its name implies. This isn't the case for a laser guide star (LGS), which in fact has absolutely no use for pointing, since the laser is fastened to, and aligned with, the telescope. It's a horrible misnomer. :( LGS come into play because the field of view of large (8-10m) telescopes is narrow enough that NGS are frequently not visible at the same time as science targets.

There are three large telescopes on Mauna Kea with LGS capabilities - Keck II has an older-technology sodium dye laser (pumped/amped by about six YAGs), Gemini has a solid-state (crystal) laser, and I'm not certain what Subaru has as I haven't worked with them yet. The W.M. Keck Observatory has funding to put a laser on Keck I also, but I'm unsure when it'll be operational. All of the lasers propagate at around 589nm for sodium fluorescence (this is coincidentally about the same frequency put out by the low-pressure sodium streetlights used in the towns on the island, so astronomers can pretty much ignore this frequency).

Each beam is about 8-12W with an objective lens diameter of typically 30-50cm, spreading a little as it goes up. Not enough power to punch holes in stuff, but enough that the FAA requires aircraft spotters to be positioned outside each observatory to make sure they don't blind the pilots of flights between the west coast and Australia/New Zealand. I've done this work sporadically since 2005 at Keck and 2006 at Gemini, so I have tons of pictures and time-lapse video... here's one of the Gemini beam with me ruining the picture by sitting in front of it.

Along with the FAA, AFSC (that's Air Force Space Command, not the American Friends Service Committee) is rather particular about us not shining the bright lights into the sensitive sensors of keyholes and such things. We look up, they look down, etc.

By the way, if there are any Farkers on the Big Island of Hawaii who think this kind of work sounds like fun, it looks like Keck has openings. It's temp-agency work, and probably the coldest, highest-altitude temp-agency work you'll ever get...

In Scott Adams's survey of members of the American Economic Association, he found 48% Democrats, 17% Republicans, 27% Independents, 3% Libertarian, and 5% Other or not registered. However, in this working paper by Gross and Simmons (at Harvard and GMU, respectively), surveying economists working in academia, they find 34.3% Democrats, 37.1% Independents, and 28.6% Republicans.

Anyone have ideas on what's up with the disparities in the statistics? The only explanation I can think of is that the AEA includes economists in the public sector, where (as one might expect) folks tend to favor government intervention in the economy.

(By the way, for anyone curious, the stats for academia as a whole are 45.2% Democrats, 38.9% Independents, and 15.9% Republicans. In English it's 51.0/47.1/2.0, in computer science it's 32.3/58.1/9.7, and in electrical engineering it's 13.2/55.3/31.6)

I know case studies are important, but it would be nice to see more statisical evidence of the impact of bad IP policy in addition to anecdotal.

Frankly, if you can't quantitative arguments against certain aspects of IP policy, you haven't looked very hard.

I'm interested in copyright, particularly term extensions, so I'll give you a link to something from that area. It's an amicus brief for Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenged the constitutionality of a retroactive extension of the copyright term. This particular brief was signed by 17 well-known economists, including five Nobel laureates.

One of the main problems with a lot of IP policy is that it simply isn't based on evidence - it's based on a "common sense" assumption that more protection = more innovation; an assumption that is simply wrong. Those who seek increased protection should shoulder the burden of proving why, at the expense of the general public, they should be handed a monopoly; but our current policymaking climate doesn't require them to do so.

Agreed. This is the typical way this pans out, the path of least resistance if you will.

Where I've seen greater success is a) biz takes training in tech to understand what's going on. I'm not talking html 101, I mean they take courses for tech managers. b) tech is directly accountable for and has input into biz objectives. Further, they need to understand things like strategic plan and product roadmap.

Harvard Business Review had an article (in may of 2008 IIRC) about a japanese bank that implemented some of these techniques along with a pseudo agile dev methodology (which they intelligently didn't call agile, because some large enterprise and heuristically anti-agile) they called "pathing".

Here is a link to a spot where you can buy copies (ugh, I know, buy) but if you can track down a free copy it's worth a read:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=EGWNZ1OVIAUO0AKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?id=R0803J

If the article is correct, Google is not acting on good faith.

I've tried to read NYT articles in the past, and I'm offended at the quality of their web services. Never again. The Cnet article, no surprise, was only about antitrust issues very generally, and did not mention anything specific or informative in any way. Nevertheless, if the /. summary is fair, then Dan Savage is just biting the hand that feeds him.

To all the people who screamed about how Google is not a monopoly and made Microsoft jokes when Slashdot ran the Yahoo deal antitrust investigation, remember that Google does have more than 70% of the online ad market, and then put yourself in this guy's position. What are your options? MSN ads? You're screwed, because you can't take your business elsewhere.

This Dan Savage has no business whatsoever without Google, yet he complains that Google doesn't give him enough money. Waa.

Now, about this "monopoly" talk, Google's success has been without government coercive measures against would-be competitors and without handouts to Google. So, what's the problem? It's difficult to compete against Google, because Google is better than their competitors. Waa.

Thank you for this post. I have a lot to say on this issue, but I am much too tired to get involved. Evidence to bias https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ -check it out.

So far his lab created membrane bubbles that suck in the nucleotides. Inside those bubbles they had primer-template complexes like:

5'-GATTACA-3'
3'-CTAATGCGATGCCGTAGATC...-5'

Once inside the bubble the nucleotides spontaneously build up at the end of GATTACA... primer (primers are actually longer, 15 bases) complementing template. The proof of that is seen in gel electrophoresis pictures on Fig 4 of the original article in Nature(PDF).

The article is pretty readable, btw.

Mansy SS, Schrum JP, Krishnamurthy M, Tobé S, Treco DA, Szostak JW. Template-directed synthesis of a genetic polymer in a model protocell. Nature. Published online 4 June 2008(PDF warning). Does not require subscription to Nature, because it's straight from his lab page.

Mod parent up (despite limited details).

The design is called Paul-Baker/Mersenne-Schmidt.

Page on the telescope design: http://www.lssto.org/Science/lsst_baseline.shtml
Wikipedia article on telescope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope
Wikipedia article section on the Mersenne-Schmidt design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_camera#Mersenne-Schmidt
Paper on the Mersenne-Schmidt design: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984MNRAS.210..597W

While big commercial labs may be dying, basic science is not going to die. Basic science will move to universities with big endowments (see Harvard) that have no profit-motive (apart from their endowment managers).

This result was likely precipitated 20 years ago by the Bayh-Dole Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act , which brought about the ease of commercialization of university inventions and the rise of "tech transfer offices" within such institutions.

This is an opportunity for great American universities (widely regarded around the world as the top in research) to become even stronger. Having basic science tied up in the back rooms of corporate laboratories is no way to go about advancing human scientific progress. As universities move toward making all their professors' research available freely online, this will in fact be quite the boon to basic science (in America and elsewhere). See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/scholarly_02122008.html

Why, are China and India doing basic science research? My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game. Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets. Consider the fact that UNIX started as an excuse to hack on computer games.

My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. China...not so much. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation. America's technical lead is still quite pronounced today, but not remotely secure.

Why, are China and India doing basic science research? My impression that pretty much *everyone* is getting out of the game. Deregulating telecom and breaking up AT&T did wonders for telephone customers, but it did not do good things for smart people with big budgets. Consider the fact that UNIX started as an excuse to hack on computer games.

Just to make you paranoid, the sum of the mass of oort cloud objects is far more than the mass of the sun and all the planets

Not supposed to be. The mass in the Oort cloud can be estimated by assuming some sort of mass function (i.e., a distributon of number, and thus total mass, with the mass of the object. Unless there a some unknown big objects out there, the total mass is order one Earth mass to maybe 100 Earth masses. And, there have been negative searches in the IR for very large (Jupiter size and larger) objects, so it's almost certainly nowhere near as large as 1 solar mass.

It is interesting that the "knots" seen in the Helix Nebulae are likely to be super-comets (Sedna sized bodies ablating under the bright glare of the dying central star), so if you want to get a look at an Oort cloud, here is a good one.

Just to make you paranoid, the sum of the mass of oort cloud objects is far more than the mass of the sun and all the planets

Not supposed to be. The mass in the Oort cloud can be estimated by assuming some sort of mass function (i.e., a distributon of number, and thus total mass, with the mass of the object. Unless there a some unknown big objects out there, the total mass is order one Earth mass to maybe 100 Earth masses. And, there have been negative searches in the IR for very large (Jupiter size and larger) objects, so it's almost certainly nowhere near as large as 1 solar mass.

It is interesting that the "knots" seen in the Helix Nebulae are likely to be super-comets (Sedna sized bodies ablating under the bright glare of the dying central star), so if you want to get a look at an Oort cloud, here is a good one.

Most panels are able to withstand hail stones of up to 1" in diameter , or more with a thin (0.188") acrylic cover sheet.

The damage, if any, will likely just occur to the glass cover, which could possibly be replaced without replacing the whole panel.

For example here is a picture of a plume from Enceladus that was colorized for emphasis:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1874

But more specific examples for your question are these images:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia06139.html
From the caption: "Red and green colors represent infrared wavelengths and show areas where atmospheric methane absorbs light."

http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/00_releases/press_030100a2142.html
In this case a picture in the X-ray spectrum allows them to see the temperature of the gas surrounding two colliding galaxy clusters; 50 to 100 million degrees C!