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Actually the American Dream is a bit of a myth, especially these days.

Pew did some research on it, but this article has some great graphs illustrating how social mobility has declined in America (and many other places).

People born in the 80s have a much poorer chance of moving up in the world than their parents. Their fortunes are much more closely tied to their parents'.

Americans tend to overestimate social mobility by quite a margin, which stops them taking action (via the ballot box) to fix it.

https://insight.kellogg.northw...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

School shootings have become a regular occurrence in the USA. A "normal" part of everyday life. How did this happen?

Sensational news media mostly. The rates were much higher in the early 90's and just like most crime, the overall rates are much lower now than in the past. However, the old saying of "it bleeds, it leads" is still relevant and no one wants to read stories about how things are generally better than in the past. That's essentially what Trump's Make America Great Again boils down to: the notion that things have gotten worse and we can see that people like to buy into this notion when it isn't true.

I do recall reading some previous research that linked gun violence in schools with economic troubles. I couldn't find a full-text version of the paper, but here's an overview of the research: https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/about/news/2017/infographic-hagan-school-shootings.html. The authors are just claiming that there's a correlation, so the cause may be deeper, but it was an interesting take that I hadn't seen before.

It doesn't sound like anyone is denied effective treatment in the current system

The FDA is one of the toughest regulatory agencies in the world for getting a treatment approved. Thalidomide was kept out of the U.S. by the FDA, while it was approved in Europe. While that was a huge FDA success, the long-term effect has been that the FDA tends to err far on the side of caution (you cannot have a critical failure like Thalidomide if you don't approve anything).

The problem is that there are two failure modes here. If the FDA approves a drug which turns out to be dangerous, the negative effects are widespread and public. But if they don't approve a drug which turns out to be safe, there's very little negative publicity because life goes on as before. In the former case, you're counting lives which were obviously and visibly harmed. In the latter case, you're counting lives which could have been saved but weren't, and so are indistinguishable from the drug or treatment not existing. So there's a natural disparity in the visibility of the two failure modes. The optimal balance of these two failure modes is when the number of people who die or are harmed from approved drugs which turn out to be dangerous, is the same as the number of people who die or are harmed because a drug which can treat them (and will turn out to be safe) has not yet been approved.

But the the FDA success with Thalidomide has resulted in the agency trying to balance the publicity of these two failure modes, rather than balancing the number of people harmed by the two failure modes. And since publicity favors not approving drugs, the FDA has become one of the toughest pharmaceutical regulatory agencies in the world. As a result, there are effective treatments which have been approved in other developed countries like the EU, which haven't yet been approved in the U.S. Wealthier Americans simply travel abroad to seek these treatments, which is why you don't often hear about people being denied treatment.

Affirmative action is, by definition, a deliberate act.

But it gave us W and it gave us Trump: so if you are worried about who will tank the country and who takes more in tax money than they produce, pick a red state and leave the Dreamers alone.

Also, you really misunderstand the Constitution if you think it was designed to keep the states "mostly sovereign." Under the Constitution, states cannot coin money, or regulate trade across their boundaries, or tax the Federal Government, or declare war, must give full faith and credit to sister state's judicial processes, etc. They tried "mostly sovereign" with the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, it did not work well, and (despite the word Perpetual) was quickly replaced with the Constitution; the Electoral College and the Senate were thrown in to make the small states (and states with smallish White populations) comfortable with giving away so much of their sovereignty.

Akhil Amar has an interesting idea for reforming the Electoral College, and he provides a good deal of history along with it http://scholarlycommons.law.no... .

How funny you claim something is "factual" with no proof behind it - at this point people are pretty used to liberals simply lying about something that want to be true but is the opposite of what they say.

In the end, the lies you tell and believe yourself hurt you more than anyone else...

Oh, I want to add:

Which is why I support removing all party affiliations from all government voting material. It is easy to paint (D) or (R) or (L) or (S) candidates as a whole, but much harder if none of that was available.

I support this.

Then we have TWO people who are trying to make the same foolish change. If you think party identification is a problem, what makes you think that a mere change to the ballot materials will help? Even Eddie Murphy knew that people could remember a name.

No, what you should do is look for the real problem, which is a lack of representation arising from the current system. You can see it in the Electoral College, but also the House, and even the Senate. Winner-Take All, First-Past-the-Post, and the lack of proper apportionment as well as Gerrymandering all contribute to a non-representative electoral system.

You might as well be focusing on the order of names on the ballot for all the good your solution will do in the end.

Edholm's Law of Bandwidth is very similar to Moore's Law, but there is a longer delay in cost reduction due to a longer supply chain in Bandwidth (i.e. you local provider taking more profit before being disrupted by a cheaper competitor)

This article on the evolution of the Sun says, "The energy output of the Sun has not fluctuated by more than perhaps 0.1% to 0.2% in human history – not bad for a nuclear reactor that has no regulatory committee, no engineers, and hasn't had a safety check in nearly five billion years." Granted, human history doesn't stretch back 50 million years, but 50 million years is an eye-blink compared to the billions of years ago when the Sun is theorized to have been 70% dimmer than today.

I wish TFA had cited a source for that claim rather than just stating it as if it was something "everybody knows".

Ahem, from the first line of the wiki article:

In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a way to interpret the Constitution's meaning as stable from the time of enactment, and which can only be changed by the steps set out in Article Five of the Constitution.

Which negates your assertion that the philosophy of originalism is somehow against the amendment process.

I didn't make that assertion, my statement was rather different(and I will discuss it further later), and that's merely an intro to an article, which is a very shallow statement, and you have to more deeply examine the actual details of their arguments. Which would require you to read the entire page.

Or even the cited article for that very line: Originalism and the Fourteenth Amendment, Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 33, p. 909, 1998

It discusses the patters and practices of the Originalists. Familiarize yourself with them. Really, you made a very poor attempt at rejoinder, I suggest you consider its faults.

I see that they do argue against how the 14th amendment is currently applied.

Yes, that Amendment is one of the biggest troubles for the Originalists, and why they prefer to ignore it as much as possible. They can't entirely, though, so they have to work around it.

Practices matter.

Of course, to be fair to them, it IS the one most prone to being called up for litigation, as it is a more general statement of principles than others.

What they really have a problem with, however, is the final clause. See if you can figure out why.

But to say they are against amendments in general is false.

Except what I said was that originalists were a group known for relying entirely on the Founding fathers(specifically for using as their moral compass, in case that wasn't clear) to the point of indifference to anything else. They don't, as a matter of habit, look at the 17th Amendment, or the 19th, for example. Or other statements, agreements and even binding treaties. And as a matter of practice, when presented with some issue, they stop discussions, and try to end it.

That's rather different from your representation of my words. Sorry if it was my failure to express myself properly than lead you to your misapprehension.

That said, I do find them rather deficient in their support for the Amendment Process. Such as they seek to advance, tend to be across narrow agendas, rather restrictive and less informative than I would choose.

The right teacher, someone like Richard Feynman:

Check out his book "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman".

http://www.earth.northwestern....

As with pretty much all 3rd-party emulators, the creators know full well what it's going to be used for.

Be that as it may, the US legal system has still ruled that emulator software is in and of itself legal.

Only the copying of game software, as well as BIOS software with some exceptions, is illegal under US copyright law.

The two cases that have explicitly stated this were seen by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, specifically:
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp
and
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Bleem LLC

The former explicitly stated emulator software is legal, and the latter explicitly allowed for BIOS copying and reverse engineering when the BIOS contains trademarked material (IE company logo and such) and is excepted by the DMCA.

http://www.lawtechjournal.com/notes/2002/12_020819_leung.php
and
(PDF warning) http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=njtip

So you send ballots to everyone, even those who have no desire to vote, and have not bothered to study any of the issues at all because of that.

It's cute you this makes them less informed than the average voter. 'Cause the people who "care so much" tend to vote for the first candidate on the ballot. http://insight.kellogg.northwe...

http://scholarlycommons.law.no...

Blackstone declared that "[a] corporation cannot commit treason, or felony, or other
crime." He regarded the point as so obvious that it needed no elaboration.

For some strange reason the persons within corporations who *do* commit such crimes in the name of the corporation are rarely punished.

Oh, and also:

http://science1.nasa.gov/scien...

Basically, Apolo astronauts found a camera from a probe mission whose previous handlers sneezed on it. It was on the moon for a total of three years, and the bacteria were still growing.

A similar outcome found here, this time deliberately:

http://helix.northwestern.edu/...

New Zealand, which has been used in the past by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, is considered a prime location because rockets launched from that deep in the Southern hemisphere can reach a wide range of Earth orbits

OK New Zealand is 35 to 45 degrees south of the equator, while the USA (contiguous states) range from 25 to 47 degrees north.

Equitorial orbits are certainly best attained from launching near the equator. I'm not sure but I think that even non-equatorial orbits are best attained from a near equator launch to take advantage of the earth's rotational velocity then change the orbital plane. Even if some orbits are easier to attain when launched away from the equator, don't non-equitorial orbits swing as far North and as far South, meaning that New Zealand has no advantage over the USA?

Altogether it loooks like New Zealand is a particularly bad place to launch from, easily bettered by the southern USA or Northern Australia

There is, in fact, evidence that your concerns are well founded. I wish I had a reference for it but the research demonstrated an uncomfortable likelihood that a search against a large pool of DNA profiles would nearly inevitably return several false matches.

And that was before considering that few DNA samples are perfect in the first place.

A lot of people would have a lot less confidence in DNA matches if they knew that really only a tiny sampling of the DNA's characteristics are spot checked for a match. They definitely do not match them up codon by codon like many people imagine.

deja vu all over again

"Latent print examiners have long claimed that fingerprint identification is "infallible." 1' The claim is widely believed by the general public, as evidenced by the publicity generated by the Mayfield and Cowans cases, with newspaper headlines like "Despite Its Reputation, Fingerprint Evidence Isn't Really Infallible.' 12 Curiously, the claim even appears to survive exposed cases of error, which would seem to puncture the claim of infallibility.'" Such cases have been known since as early as 1920 and have not disturbed the myth of infallibility.' 4 Today, latent print examiners continue to defend the claim of infallibility, even in the wake of the Mayfield case.' 5 For example, Agent Massey commented in a story on the Mayfield case, "I'll preach fingerprints till I die. They're infallible. 16 Another examiner declared, in a discussion of the Mayfield case, "Fingerprints are absolute and infallible."' 17 http://scholarlycommons.law.no...

"The rhetoric of infallibility proved helpful in establishing the admissibility of forensic DNA tests and persuading judges and jurors of its epistemic authority.7 It has also played an important role in the promotion of government DNA databases. Innocent people have nothing to fear from databases, promoters claim. Because the tests are infallible, the risk of a false incrimination must necessarily be nil. One indication of the success and influence of the rhetoric of infallibility is that, until quite recently, concerns about false incriminations played almost no role in debates about database expansion. The infallibility of DNA tests has, for most purposes, become an accepted fact-one of the shared assumptions underlying the policy debate.
In this article, I will argue that this shared assumption is wrong. Although generally quite reliable (particularly in comparison with other forms of evidence often used in criminal trials), DNA tests are not now and have never been infallible. Errors in DNA testing occur regularly. DNA evidence has caused false incriminations and false convictions, and will continue to do so. Although DNA tests incriminate the correct person in the great majority of cases, the risk of false incrimination is high enough to deserve serious consideration in debates about expansion of DNA databases. The risk of false incrimination is borne primarily by individuals whose profiles are included in government databases (and perhaps by their relatives). Because there are racial, ethnic and class disparities in the composition of databases, the risk of false incrimination will fall disproportionately on members of the included groups.8,9" http://www.councilforresponsib...

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~mue...

I just finished my teaching my first semester of a computer programming class. I used NetLogo, a descendant of Logo. I hadn't used it much before, but a group at the Santa Fe Institute here in New Mexico was working to have more CS taught in high schools. They were going with netlogo, and the programming curriculum had an emphasis on scientific modelling rather than traditional CS topics like search/sort algorithms.
I was skeptical of Netlogo at first, as my real world experience was mostly with Python/Django, but the kids really took to it. There was some classic Logo programs (Spirographs), but CS topics like recursion (drawing a fractal tree) and sorting (a bale of turtles sorted on different criteria, with different algorithm efficiencies) were covered too. There was some great modelling though, for ecosystems or a disease spread model.
For my second semester of the class I'm switching to Python, to give the kids a different perspective on programming.

It would seem from http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/e... last week's coverage that Newlink had already violated the terms of their license.

How would it seem so, since the very article that you link says "BioProtection Systems Corporation (BPS), now a wholly owned subsidiary of NewLink Genetics Inc., has performed at or above expectations thus far." Outside critics don't get to retroactively cancel a contract signed five years ago because progress under the contract doesn't meet their post-hoc expectations.

Seems like they sat on it as long as possible, then sublicensed to Merck.

Funny, the very article that you linked to says that "[l]ast week, we announced the beginning of clinical trials of the vaccine in Canada." Do you have any direct knowledge of the typical work and time involved in setting up clinical safety trials? I doubt it. Note the following:

Preclinical Testing: A pharmaceutical company conducts certain studies before the future drug is ever given to a human being. Laboratory and animal studies must be done to demonstrate the biological activity of the drug against the targeted disease. The drug must also be evaluated for safety. These tests take on the average 3 1/2 years.

At this point though, who cares about the lousy $50M,

TFA.

[T]hey should just get on with producing the fricking stuff while testing in parallel.

Because mass producing an experimental drug that has not been shown to be safe, much less effective, in vivo goes against more than a half century's worth of applied medical knowledge and ethics, notwithstanding the losses you would suffer if you stockpiled a drug that failed clinical trials? But hey, you can assume safety since nobody has been hurt yet, right?

All the facts they asked for. They have the power to subpoena anyone they want.

Are you sure about that?

The prosecutor decides what subjects the grand jury investigates, and what witnesses and documents to subpoena. He questions the witnesses. He advises the grand jury on the rele- vance of the evidence, drafts the charges, advises the grand jury on the law, and requests the grand jury to return an indictment.' 2 The grand jury cannot return an indictment without the signature of the 4 prosecutor.' 3 This power can easily be misused.

Looks to me like the grand jury can only get information that the prosecutor wants them to get.

It's a tricky case. Basically, the doctrine says that a fugitive can't say "I'm not subject to this court" (by fleeing justice) and simultaneously use the court to his advantage, in different aspects of the same matter.
I am not a lawyer (IANL), but as far as I can see, this case is very similar to Degen v. United States (1996). In that case, the Supreme Court explicitly said that the government was not justified in using the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement to dismiss a challenge of forfeiture.
Reference and discussion: http://scholarlycommons.law.no...

The summary of that case (from http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990... ):
"Principles of deference to the other branches of government require a court to invoke its inherent power only as a reasonable response to the problems and needs that provoke it. No sufficient reason justifies disentitlement here. Since the court's jurisdiction over the property is secure despite Degen's absence, there is no risk of delay or frustration in determining the merits of the government's forfeiture claims or in enforcing the resulting judgment. Also, the court has alternatives, other than disentitlement, to keep Degen from using liberal civil discovery rules to gain an improper advantage in the criminal prosecution, where discovery is more limited. Finally, disentitlement is an excessive response to the court's interests in redressing the indignity visited upon it by Degen's absence from the criminal proceeding, and in deterring flight from criminal prosecution in general; it is a response that erodes rather than enhances the dignity of the court."

fully synthetic biology is closer than you realize.

This is from 2 years ago-- Researchers succeed in creating fully artificial cell membranes

This from about 4 years ago-- First fully reproducing bacterium with fully synthetic genome

This is from last year-- Creating synthetic ribisomes

For real, being able to fully engineer a cell from the ground, all the way up, is fast leaving the exclusive realm of science fiction, and entering the realm of science fact.

One thing it will cost is the deal that no new construction will happen at the lakefront. It is supposed to be park land open to the public. There is almost sure to be a lawsuit to prevent it being built east of Lake Shore Drive. Montgomery Ward was instrumental in creating that precedent, which has, nevertheless, been violated several times.

I'm guessing by your excessive use of " " you're trying to question the validity of the study based on the name of the university. http://www.northwestern.edu/

You are just SO wrong

http://news.medill.northwester...

Since its birth 4.5 billion years ago, the Sun's luminosity has very gently increased by about 30%.3 This is an inevitable evolution which comes about because, as the billions of years roll by, the Sun is burning up the hydrogen in its core. The helium "ashes" left behind are denser than hydrogen, so the hydrogen/helium mix in the Sun's core is very slowly becoming denser, thus raising the pressure. This causes the nuclear reactions to run a little hotter. The Sun brightens.

This looks like the original press release: http://news.unm.edu/news/new-evidence-for-oceans-of-water-deep-in-the-earth

Here's an explanation of what's going on.

The paper is already used as a reference on the Wikipedia page for Ringwoodite.

Here are the research pages of the various authors:

Brandon Schmandt, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of New Mexico

Steven D. "Steve" Jacobsen, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

Thorsten W. Becker, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Southern California

Zhenxian Liu, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Kenneth G. "Ken" Dueker, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wyoming

Exactly right. Neuroscientists have shown memories are distorted every time you use them; thus memories that are recalled frequently are less accurate than those infrequently recalled. [citation]

We use Facility Online Manager (FOM):

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Visit http://www.FOMNetworks.com/ to see the features of FOM©

FOM may be used (but not limited) to manage the following resources:

        Scanning probe microscope (SPM) including AFM, STM, MFM
        Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM)
        Optical Microscope, confocal microscopes
        Specimen preparation instruments
        Cleanroom instruments
        X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), X-ray spectrometer, Synchrotron Radiation Facility
        Spectroscopic instruments including Absorption, Fluorescence, X-ray, Flame, Visible, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Raman, NMR, Photoemission, Mossbauer, etc.

The irony here is Feinstein over dramatization of this event given what she authorizes on the SIC. Using this incident to call for stricter drone laws is like being hit by a paper airplane and calling for the FAA to investigate.

She probably remembers it as a scary military drone. Human memory is weird like that, stories grow bigger over time. Remember Clinton disembarking from a chopper under sniper fire in Bosnia?

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game.html

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime. All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on? Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.) Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this. I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

You are a liar. Here, let me quote:

If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian.

Homicides are not a good measure of defensive actions. Defensive homicides are what happens when the criminal does not back off when warned, is too violent too fast for a threat backed by a gun to work, etc. The vast majority of defensive gun uses are simply displays. Like the guy up thread with the gun on his lap. The criminals were there, and may have been working themselves up to act, but left because of the gun.

Your assertion that a gun has to kill to do it's job is both myopic and factually incorrect. Heck, often a simple display indicating this victim will not go down as easy as they thought is enough to prevent the crime.

Why would you need to LIE to support your position unless your position was wrong? You sir, are a LIAR.

You may be wrong yourself. If you look at the FBI Crime Reports, you will see that there are 37 criminal firearm based homicides for every self-defense homicide by a civilian. The USA has a much higher gun death rate than other developed countries, and when you look within the USA itself, you find that Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the U.S., where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide., or put simply more guns, more crime.

All of the above citations go to original or academic sources. So what could be going on?

Well, firstly, the NRA attempts to stop scientists from studying gun violence. (In a similar vein, the junk-food industry tries to limit the study of the health effects of sugar.)

Secondly, the NRA keeps its own datasets to do it's own "research" to reach its own conclusions, which (call me crazy), keeps the donors happy. Those would be the gun manufacturers. Most large industries do this.

I'm open minded on the issue, and follow it because I have an academic interest in cognitive bubbles. If you are interested learning a different perspective on the issue, then read this. You don't have to believe a word of it; however, if you *can* read it, and accurately repeat back the arguments made, then that would indicate enough cognitive flexibility to really be informed about the issue, and be an expert. Ideologues do not have this flexibility, but want to maintain the self-concept of being an expert, which explains most of what is wrong with politics.

Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.

I'm fairly confident that E.J. Corey would not describe his Nobel prize-winning research as something that "a skilled technician" could do. And by your logic, my cell phone is a better mathematician than any human that has every lived. Your friend's algorithm is undoubtably cute, but would fail in practice the vast majority of the time.

In reality, it is impossible to perform a total synthesis in silico or really to do any chemistry ab initio because the subtleties are too complex to understand, let alone model. People have been claiming for years now that organic chemistry is dead--that it has been relegated to following recipes because every molecule of interest can be prepared using "known" reactions. In reality, no one has managed to come close to supplanting the work of the talented scientists who make molecules for a living. The most useful application of math in total synthesis, in my opinion, is using explicit, exact, known transformations to build chemical networks to shorten and optimize existing synthetic routes (e.g., in industry).

People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...

People with too much mathematical training fail to realize that the vast majority of science cannot be abstracted. They fall into the trap of hindsight, thinking that the elegant equations that "govern" (I disagree strongly with that common phrasing) natural processes is evidence that everything can be understood in the abstract language of mathematics. What they fail to understand--because they are largely unaware of it--is that actual scientific discovery requires intuition and creativity; more the Sherlock Holmes type than the Feynman type.

Feynman is, in fact, an excellent example of how math benefits science that lends credence to Wilson's argument. Once the difficult exploratory work has been done, and a robust experimental framework is in place to generate data, it is exceedingly useful for mathematically-inclined people to make sense of it all by formulating theories. However, no matter how gifted a mathematician, no amount of abstract thinking can compete with practical knowledge.

You need to read this more carefully. The government in the US does NOT have the right to stop you without a reason unless you are in a border checkpoint or point of entry.

I read it, but just because you typed it doesn't make it true -- if you don't believe me, how about a spokesman from the DHS?

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/news.aspx?id=101659

DHS spokesman Jason Ciliberti says the ACLU’s description of the zone as "Constitution-Free" couldn’t be further from the truth and that the check points follow rules set by Supreme Court rulings.

"“The 100-mile zone absolutely is not a Constitution-free zone,” said Jason Ciliberti, a supervisory border patrol agent with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “Those 100 miles are what essentially is said to be a reasonable distance from the boundary from the United States, and the Supreme Court has come down firmly on our side and said that what we’re doing is not unreasonable.”

“The vast number of those encounters is very brief,” Ciliberti said. “If [necessary], agents do take some time to conduct investigations. But, of course, they conduct those investigations with due diligence and as minimally invasive as possible.”

Even the DHS says that they are conducting checkpoints within that 100 mile "extended border".

Personally, I'd rather work for someone with an actual vision beyond "let's send up some robots and get results in a decade and a half so we can justify sending up some more robots".

My wife's alumni magazine had a puff piece about the president of SpaceX earlier this year. It was mostly puff of course but had just a few good pieces of information about SpaceX to get an impression about the company. It is most definitely the type of place a government agency cannot be:

Four years into the job, Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.”

Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee.

Government employment rules would never allow something like that to happen.

It got there by challenging conventional wisdom, she adds. Most launchpad air conditioning systems, for instance, cost nearly half a million dollars, but SpaceX execs wondered why it cost so much more to cool an area the size of a conference room than the $75,000 it cost to cool their entire headquarters and manufacturing plant. The company brought the cost down to about $35,000, says Shotwell.

No government-funded agency would ever seek efficiencies that risk allowing budget reductions in future years.

“Even before we had ever launched a rocket, Gwynne had sold about 10 launch services,” Hughes notes. “There are very few people who could have done that.”

A start-up can overcome a lot of early failure if they can still sell future services. It takes talent to do that.

This is what I am looking into to make myself more marketable... http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/program-areas/graduate/predictive-analytics/

Crap article, from a crap blog, copied from a press release. It's so Slashdot.

Here's the actual paper on the research. The physics is interesting. It's a way to make optical gyros better. Currently, good fiber-optic gyros have drift rates around 1 degree per hour. Ring laser gyros can do better, and mechanical gyros still beat the optical systems on long-term drift. This proposal is to develop a way to get a few more orders of magnitude less drift out of optical gyros.

Low-end MEMS gyros have drift rates of several degrees per minute, but there's steady progress, and degrees-per-hour MEMS gyros now exist.

In "Future impact: Predicting scientific success", Acuna, Allesina, Kording predict the future h-index of scientist using their current h-index, the square root ofnumber of articles published, years since first publication, number of distinct journals, and the number of articles in top journals. They vary the coefficients of a linear regression with the number of years in the forecast and note that, in the short term the largest coefficient is (not surprisingly) the scientist's current h-index, but in the long term, the number of articles in top journals and the number of distinct journals become more important for the 10 year h-index forecast. They achieve an $R^2$ value of 0.67 for neuro-scientists which is significantly larger than the $R^2$ using h-index alone (near 0.4).

Additionally, they provide an on-line tool you can use to make your own predictions. (Click here to see this comment rendered in Tex.)

Thankfully, the analogous problem with Jell-O(R) was solved 25 years ago.

If you live in the US - it may not matter.

I know of one case where a developer went to the employer, had the legal team sign off on his side project being his own and years later when it was successful, they took it.

The case was DDB Technologies, Inc. v. MLB Advanced Media. Here is a link to a pdf of a law journal discussing the case - http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol7/iss3/3/

I used primarily the HD-580 for about seven years, until I switched to Stax electrostatic headphones (Omega 3, that cost about $5000). The 580 were around $250 when I bought them new on eBay and one could probably find them now for $200. Over this time period I auditioned several dozen headphones (I don't have speakers as I move frequently) and in the under $250 range there's nothing that compares. It's a sort of a sweet spot. Anything above that price point is an incremental improvement; most things below are a significant degradation. Even the $5K Stax are not that greatly better (but hey, felt good to buy myself a little present, and it was an excuse to build a high voltage hybrid solid state/tube headphone amp instead of plunking another $5K after one... http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/bluehawaii_moda1.png )

There is a free educational package that is good fun - NetLogo - http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ It has some models for chemistry in there. Basically it shows chemistry as a complex system using agent based models. But for a ten year old, it's fun because it's visual and intuitive. An idea.

Science!

The mohave is hundreds of miles further away from the equator than Brownsville. The closer to the equator, the lower amount of fuel you need to reach certain orbits. The rotation of the earth adds to your relative speed, and this amount of speed provided increases the closer to the equator you get.

Why is it better to launch a spaceship from near the equator?

Well, human hearing, not including intensity levels beyond threshold of pain, covers 120 dB. Moreover, narrowband signals are perceptible when several dB _below_ broadband noise. This makes me say that audio is not quite a solved problem even on the electronics side (let alone on the speakers side). Various things seem to pop up, and not just from crazed audiophiles. Recently I was reading how it turned out that some amplifiers who were specced at very low THD only made that measurement at moderate signal levels, and had very large distortion for low signals (one ironic example was the hugely overpriced Halcro amplifiers). The thermal memory issue may be another thing.
I did an informal ABC/HR test a year and a half ago with four people, which was blind but not doubleblind as the switching was done by telling another person to switch. It was with the DAC I mentioned. I had two IV's which I could switch in after the DAC using a small relay. One was using the AD797. The other one was derived from Hawksford's discrete current feedback IV (figure 4-4 in http://www.essex.ac.uk/csee/research/audio_lab/malcolmspubdocs/C111%20Current%20steering%20transimpedance%20amplifier.pdf ). To get the distortion of the Hawksford IV near -120 dB (checked with rented distortion analyzer), we added extra gain so we could use more feedback. For testing, we tested each person one at a time using Stax electrostatic headphones fed by this hybrid transistor/tube amp, which is about 5 ppm THD: http://gilmore2.chem.northwestern.edu/images5/gilmore4_1.png
We did eight trials for each person. One couldn't tell the reference (5/8). The other three could tell it (averaging 7/8).
Did another test. There were two of the Hawksford IV per channel, set up as differential since the DAC and the amp were both balanced. Connecting the emitters of the current mirror transistors between the two separate IVs dropped the differential output 3rd and 4th harmonics further (slightly raised 2nd for single ended operation) (I'm pretty sure this infringes on a Nelson Pass patent...). I used a relay for that as well, and did the test switching that connection on and off. Two people could tell the difference (averaging 6.5/8).
Small sample size, not double blind, and ultimately anecdotal. Nonetheless it was sufficient to convince me that the audio hobby has more mysteries to reveal than seems at first.

I got to interview a couple of the authors on this study -- Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick -- for my book, Brain Trust. In fact, online dating is only a piece of their exploration into romantic interactions. They've got an awesome paper out titled Smooth Operating: A Structural Analysis of Social Behavior in which they pick apart the words, actions and mindsets that create "smooth" initial romantic encounters. (One finding: you shouldn't be too passive or too aggressive in the way you steer conversation topics.) They also looked at speed dating , finding among other things that people who rate everyone highly are themselves rated low (liking everyone comes off as desperate), and that the sex that sits is more liked than the sex that rotates. Ack! If only I'd known this in middle school!

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

For those in the sciences, it seems like the trend is more that older people are more productive. Consider the fact that the average age physicists produce their nobel prize winning work is 48, or the average age at which a biomedical researcher receives his/her first R01 grant is 42.

I welcome our new master of batteries! Our lives our saved! All ye hail King...

...hold on, what was his name again? Ah, here it is...

...King Kung!

(I know, I know, terrible...sorry, I'm a bit of a nerd...I couldn't resist)

First off, I disagree with your assertion that New York public sector pensions are fully funded. The state uses its own actuarial standards to make this determination, while if private sector standards were used there is a $120 billion dollar shortfall.

The United States taxpayers have a $3 trillion unfunded pension liability for aging, unionized, public sector workers.

The problem with the system is that the various government entities are allowed to negotiate far-in-the-future terms in union contracts. This has allowed them to buy union votes with money from the future. Money from the future has no limits, and no representation (future tax payers that are still too young to vote, not born yet, etc), so there has been literally no limit to the vote buying.

I propose a simple rule for public sector workers: Both the offering and the accepting of future benefits should be illegal and criminally punishable. All compensation for this years work should be paid for this year, by this years tax payers. Period.

Of course companies are free to expand how they like. However, they cannot make deals with manufacturers that force competitors out or unfairly leverage their position in another market to another. Apple has done that.

There... fixed that for you.

BTW, I'm typing this from my brand new 2011 Macbook Air. I've been using Macs exclusively since the dark days of Gil Amelio. I'm an Apple developer. However, I am not going to delude myself. Apple hasn't been playing fair for a while now. I enjoyed watching Apple smash the RIAA into bits, but ever since the iPhone I've had no more love for Apple. I don't worship them blindly the way you people do. I have and will never own an iPhone as long as they keep it locked down and rape developers of 30% gross at the App store.

Android is freedom. iPhone is for consumer slaves. Go Google! Smash the F'in iPhone!

Two words: Butterfly Ballot. My theory has long been that Democrat organizers bussed a bunch of elderly to the polls and told them "If you don't vote for the second guy, you'll lose your Social Security!" Normally, the first name on the ballot is the Republican and the second name is the Democrat.

If they "normally" put the Republican first, that in itself is a means of skewing the election, since being first improves chance of winning.

But that's so obvious that I doubt it's the policy anywhere. It's pretty standard practice to list candidates in random order. Which will likely be different for every variation of the ballot (e.g. different election for dog-catcher).