Slashdot Mirror

Does anybody have a copy of the actual paper, which the blog post doesn't link to: http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/

My university only has a subscription up to 2006, and I can't find it elsewhere.

I guess the point is that is if the World used only Nuclear Power to generate electricity, no one would be concerned about their CO2 footprint from using Electricity. It you add up all those externalities to Nuclear power you get a CO2 emission rate similar to Wind Power.
Estimates for Nuclear Power.
Estimates for Wind and Solar PV

I guess the point is that is if the World used only Nuclear Power to generate electricity, no one would be concerned about their CO2 footprint from using Electricity. It you add up all those externalities to Nuclear power you get a CO2 emission rate similar to Wind Power.
Estimates for Nuclear Power.
Estimates for Wind and Solar PV

Sure, there are hand-waving mechanisms consistent with the mainstream astronomy view that are interesting to entertain as hypotheses. But if, as you claimed, solar EM phenomena would indeed be well-understood, there would instead be models encompassing the major observable phenomena with quantitative accuracy.

As to coronal heating, a picture does more than a thousand words. Have a look at this soft X-ray image of the sun: http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest/sxt/full/sxtdag_512.gif. Does that not look awfully like energy production in the corona? Not surprisingly, several experiments have been done that have verified the existence of an energy production mechanism under coronal conditions, though an appropriate theory is still lacking. The mechanism occurs in a low-pressure plasma containing helium and hydrogen, see for example http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf and http://www.springerlink.com/content/3u3v2eqnv9y1jmwg/.

Pure hydrogen plasmas without helium do not show anomalous energy release. Given that, it can be understood why the solar wind is strongly modulated by how much helium is present: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070530114957.htm

Well you wouldn't want a Hardon in your Tract, would you?:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/72656781214715n4/

('Preview (Small, Large, Larger, Largest)').

For more of the same ('This may strike you as the geek equivalent of looking up "arse" in the dictionary'), see:

http://www.badscience.net/?p=238

It's not just water.

I believe sugar, fat and edible oils can be heated up in a microwave oven too.

Microwave heated oils may be less healthy than conventionally heated oils:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0yblxvnrnhmd8p4e/

So are you volunteering your child to take part in the double-blind study? See, that's the problem, it's actually really difficult to do research in this area - in fact it's difficult to do any double-blind research in pharmaceuticals for children because no-one would volunteer for the study. What can be done are observational studies and collection of statistics, and so far the MMR is deemed to be safe.

Our parents/grandparents' generation had no problem accepting vaccinations when they were first introduced because they saw the effects of the infections themselves firsthand (e.g. measles encephalopathy). Our generation hasn't experienced this so we focus on the vaccination itself and worry about the tiny percentage who get the side effects.

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This is a common misconception. Think about a society were there is no tea or car (somewere in africa). Do you think their children would choose tea set and car toys based on gender?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9524256?dopt=Abstract
http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v22/n48/full/1207139a.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WWY-45K1406-T&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b88d0fc0f181cae87b8a1bd7686a8caf
http://books.google.com/books?id=7NAvFJ-oDn0C&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=p52+oncogenesis&source=web&ots=f9fRAXEbkc&sig=Kdl7bxvWMFM18E2deunfget71ds&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA74,M1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/25300q641u238965/

Note that in the above papers, Epstein-Barr explicitly subverts the P52 mechanism to its own ends (which is an interesting result).

That article actually discusses a Paper from 2006, so it's not exactly recent.

Nonetheless I can see why you might get the misconception that this is an issue for the physics community. I assure you that very few of us ever consider free will seriously, much less think that our research has bearing on the issue. Nonetheless, you should allow for some flexibility - their definition of "free will" may not confirm to the latest philosophical dictum, but it is consistent with physics. They are talking about freedom of choice, i.e. whether or not the initial conditions of the universe determine our every action. I think it's perfectly reasonable for physicists to discuss that topic framed in that manner, since that is their area of expertise.

I think this entire article is a load of attention seeking BS, and I will not believe a word of it until I see a proper peer-reviewed research paper in a medical journal that debunks stretching.

Geeze. I've noticed a certain hyper-skepticism among Slashdotters. Please note that the New York Times is not known for trumping up pseudoscience with no support in the literature.

Others have responded that the article is not "debunking stretching", just pointing out problems with certain kinds of stretching. And at least one other poster gave references, some of whom involved people interviewed for TFA. More specifically with respect to the studies mentioned in TFA:

The article cites Duane Knudson, a kinesiology professor at CSU. Peer reviewed research paper.

The article mentions a Las Vegas stretching study. Peer reviewed research paper.

The article mentions Malachy McHugh, a researcher in NYC. Peer reviewed research paper.

The article mentions a collegiate volleyball study. Peer reviewed research paper.

And so on.

that is a fair point, I don't know much about the types of cases they use :) and when I read magnesium I read it as the metal rather than an alloy. On the upshot, I never did say it was pure Ti either, and in my line of work/study I have to be precise with what I mean when I start throwing around element names. Othwerwise it's like saying FePt and NiFe are the same, since they are both made of iron.

One's a hard magnet, FePt in the right phase which might be used for high density perpendicular recording in the future, possibly as nanowires, or nanoparticles link 2, and the other's a soft magnet, NiFe, or permalloy, which can be one of the layers in a TMR read head.

One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.

I repeat myself for emphasis: there are methods to produce a secret, secure, election that is verifiably correct to an arbitrary degree of certainty. If you don't understand how, do everyone a favor and follow the links and read the material.

We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.

Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.

One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneir's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.

We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.

Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.

"You mean the stuff that was damaging the Peregrine Falcon's eggs, and was later banned, only to have us find out that the eggs became even softer AFTER the ban?"

DDT and its byproducts persist in the environment for *years*, and they would persist in the fatty tissues of any falcon for the rest of their lives, continuing to affect egg shell thickness long after it stopped getting introduced into the environment and their food. A lag between a ban on the use of DDT and the return of peregrine falcon eggshell thickness is entirely expected. (Also, the ban occurred in the U.S. initially, but DDT was still being used in Mexico where many of the birds winter -- so they were still getting exposed).

While it is true that careful and targeted use of DDT to protect humans from malaria can save lives, it is also true that widespread use did seriously affect peregrine falcon, bald eagle, and several other bird populations. In parts of the world with heavy DDT use they almost went extinct (while populations elsewhere were unaffected). Strangely enough, these populations have recovered subsequent to the ban. There is a strong negative correlation between eggshell thickness and DDT/DDE concentrations. It has taken decades to improve because the stuff is so persistent in the environment and in animal tissues.

I wouldn't be surprised if PCBs and other organochlorines are an issue too, but to discount the effect of DDT/DDE is to ignore an awful lot of evidence. The introduction to this paper provides some of the background (the first page is accessible for free). To suggest that there's no connection to DDT/DDE is pretty ridiculous.

The whole point is: we don't HAVE to kill off whole other species in the process of saving humans if we use it properly (i.e. sparingly and carefully targeted).

Actually it was recently demonstrated that you can positively identify a hidden volume exists within a TrueCrypt volume, defeating plausible deniability. In addition, it was also recently demonstrated that regardless of the encryption algorithm used, it's possible to get a silhouette of high contrast encrypted images.

So if they really wanted, they could identify the hidden volume exists, then apply this second technique to identify that images exist on it. To border agents, this is probably tantamount to admitting on the spot that you're smuggling kiddy porn across the border, and you may find that it's more than your laptop which is detained.

Your best protection is to transfer the images separately from your laptop. Store them on Amazon S3 with a tool such as JungleDisk, and download them when you get home (this is a good idea in case something damages your laptop while traveling too).

The electric field is a myth but ultrasound does the trick.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m525p1x560025246/

This seems like a rehash of Prof Yvo Desmedt's Things that Think project from MIT's media lab.

They have been focusing on the security and privacy impact of networked / intelligent devices since the mid 90s.

Hopefully these guys will be included (there's no mention of them in the article) as they've already looked at a lot of the key problems and solutions.

I agree, tech support on campuses today can quickly become anachronistic; that is, if they are not have the requisite intellectual curiosity or do not have the cajones to spearhead new technologies like cloud computing (for distributed mathematical modeling), online E2E voting (for student elections), Educational MMORPGs and a list of other systems being developed now ready for deployment to the student population ASAP. You should have programmers on staff that can help contribute or partner with your CS department for folk that can contribute to these wonderful OS projects. It is important for you to realize that if you do not participate you are accepting other institutions philosophies of style, privacy and security that may be incompatible with yours or be forced to pay some contractor to customize it for you. You would be surprised how useful you will become when you start asking people not only what they want help with today but attempt to understand their needs well enough to plan ahead for what they will be clamoring for tommorow.

Stop playing WOW in the server room and start reading journals about UI Design, Human Computer interface and cybernetics for more advanced theory. Why should you study these journals instead of just reading the old faithful IT pulp mag, this website or some other "tech website"? Because you need to not only see what is coming down the consumer pipeline in a couple of months or be beta testing a new whiz bang software package; you need to understand where all this interaction is heading and how you can get ahead of the curve technologically by enmeshing your department in the active process of problem solving individual and institutional scale issues by being able to posit your own design philosophy coherently into the future and apply it cogently and adaptively as variables change.

Rats do that as well. If you set up a rat trap (poisoned bait, spring-loaded trap, or even a one-way trap-door), the first rat will fall for the trap, but the others will avoid anything that is close to a dead or trapped rat.

Even fruit-flies can learn to Avoid the side of a box that heats up

Snails are capable of associative learning as well. Even if they only have around 5000 - 1 million neurons.

Traditional depackaging attacks are carried out by depackaging the chip, attaching probes to the interesting testpoints, and then powering the circuit. No power also means that it is hard for the attacker to read the value, as it depends on how good (i.e. low leakage) the transistors are that make up the RAM (usually they will leak the value in a few milliseconds). The key for encryption is typically 128 - 512 bits, which is very easy to clear.

You can read more about coating based PUFs here
Basically, I simplified it, but what actually happens is that the key (the signature from the PUF) is generated, used and deleted as one step. For the additional step of deletion of data on the chip, that can be easily accomplished by using gating transistors on the reset line of the SRAM.

How can the existing machines be too big?

Infant dialysis occurs in the US...Chronic dialysis in the infant less than 1 year of age:.

CDs were around for a long time before burners were available (for practical definitions of "available"). Most of the people who had CD players and changers in the late '80s and early '90s didn't even have a computer, much less a computer that was fast enough to run a CD burner, much less the means to afford said burner.

True. However, in the early days of the CD people were also very careful with handling their CDs because they were used to handle the much more fragile LPs. Also, the market wasn't full of cheapo CD players that would wear-out the medium. So, in most cases, the worn CDs do not come from the early days of the CD.

CD changers for cars were in the $300-$500 range, and were more common than single-disk in-dash players. Burners were thousands of dollars + the cost of the computer to hook them up to.

Not true. Check this article. It is clear that (at least in the Netherlands) the car CD players were the least common type of CD player up to the mid 90s. At that time, the prices of CD burners started plummeting.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/7m14576m226l30j7/

Journal: Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry
Article title: Effect of nonvalence interactions on the orientation of the phenyl ring at the tricoordinated phosphorus atom
Article date: 28 December 1981

all "magical thinking" in the field of artificial intelligence was reserved for fiction.

There's so much rigorous mathematically described hooey in AI that its hard to tell the naive geniuses from the crackpot morons. Consider this paper by Solomonoff. Brilliant stuff! A fantastic read. Then, at the end, it says:

In our view, however, the most interesting situation in machine learning, arises when we do not know ahead of time what program will solve a given problem and where the machine discovers the program itself. It seems to be very hard to find out much about this by theory alone. Running experiments is crucial.

This is Solomonoff's way of reminding us that he is a mathematician and hasn't actually run any experiments. His other papers make similar pronouncements in the footnotes about the uncomputability of his math or acknowledge the requirement of perfect (aka impractical) training data, etc. He makes it abundantly clear that is work is purely theoretical and unimplementable, but does this stop enthusiastic amateurs from reading his papers and declaring that AI is "solved"? Well no, of course not.

In two seconds of googling, I was able to locate this:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/t64u02292024k516/

I'm sure additional research could lead to additional information, but I have a hearing to get to this afternoon.

--AC

somehow the link did not come through... http://www.springerlink.com/content/32p6733743573016/

Iris scans are a really bad idea. An iris gives away way too much information. In particular it allows to diagnose many illnesses:

Not too difficult at all, actually. I do a fair amount of work with UHF RFID tags, and their processors are doing some fairly involved work while being powered by an electric field up to a couple of meters away. This article mentions an RFID chip that requires 3.15 microWatts to operate. This paper describes the constraints in an RFID system fairly well.

I have no idea where people come up with this junk. All of this discussion of theory vs. law vs. fact is depressing on a supposed 'geek' web site.

Here's the best paper I've seen on this collection of words in science: Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path

I came across it at the ever more sane Ars Technica.

There are enough loopholes in the general theory of relativity to allow antimatter to fall up rather than down in a gravitational field.

Uh, no there are not. Gravity (or geometry, same thing in the theory) depends on mass energy in General Relativity. Stuff (with mass energy) follows the metric (the local geodesic). Even photons (which are their own anti-particles) follow the geodesic - and that has certainly been tested. Equivalence principle tests also show that different sorts of nuclear matter (including neutrons) individually follow the geodesic. Anti-matter certainly has mass energy, and (with matter) can be converted to photons and is no different in the theory. In other words "there is only one type of geodesics and there are no antigeodesics for antimatter."

The original article talks about "flavors" of General Relativity. Ain't so such beasties. Period. If you go to the real original article, you find a proposal for a 1% test of the equivalence principle for antimatter, and no such claims of flavors. Now, the equivalence principle has been tested to better than parts per trillion, and part of the mass energy in ordinary matter is made up of antimatter (in virtual particle pairs), so (based on the experimental evidence) I would claim that this test will be negative and is not actually that interesting as new physics. (The articles say that these older tests are "model dependent," but they are not model dependent enough to matter for this.)

That doesn't mean that this shouldn't be done (everything should be tested in physics, and different tests are always useful), but the prediction of General Relativity is clear : if anti-matter has anti-gravity, then General Relativity is wrong. The experimental evidence is also clear : this isn't going to be accurate enough to matter. Will make for some good public relations, though.

I'm still thinking about collapsed waveforms and the difference between the macroscopic and the microscopic. I have played with superconductors (in an engineering sense) so its still unclear to me how you differentiate.

I shouldn't have to point the obvious to you - get a calendar, and check the date. Compare the date to when you took those tours. Notice they aren't the same.

Yea, we had armed nukes 90 miles off our coast then. If they wanted to anyone could have loaded up a boat filled with arms and landed in the US within hours. Heck even today Cuba is used as a transit stop for drugs, as are other Caribbean nations.

I attend UCF, and will be starting my graduate degree in the Fall semester after attending graduation next week. This is old news.

When I started attending UCF for my EE, this had already been done. I have recently completed (last Thursday) Dr. Wu's class on Genetic Algorithms (Evolutionary Computation). This work was used by (grad) students as a starting point for their research for the class project.

Let me express how this is old news.

2003 - http://www.springerlink.com/index/M26H2CEEAGWG4FD5.pdf

1993 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=410654

1999 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=785430

2002 (quantum cicuits) - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1029883

2003 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1217659

1998 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=685786

2003 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1323832

2002 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1004425

1998 - http://www.springerlink.com/index/71ub9hh22qrlx5lk.pdf

I attend UCF, and will be starting my graduate degree in the Fall semester after attending graduation next week. This is old news.

When I started attending UCF for my EE, this had already been done. I have recently completed (last Thursday) Dr. Wu's class on Genetic Algorithms (Evolutionary Computation). This work was used by (grad) students as a starting point for their research for the class project.

Let me express how this is old news.

2003 - http://www.springerlink.com/index/M26H2CEEAGWG4FD5.pdf

1993 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=410654

1999 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=785430

2002 (quantum cicuits) - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1029883

2003 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1217659

1998 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=685786

2003 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1323832

2002 - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1004425

1998 - http://www.springerlink.com/index/71ub9hh22qrlx5lk.pdf

The IPCC was established to provide the decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information about climate change. The IPCC does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they need to deal objectively with policy relevant scientific, technical and socio economic factors. They should be of high scientific and technical standards, and aim to reflect a range of views, expertise and wide geographical coverage.

Link?

An ad hominem attack is no more valid in a scientific political discussion than any other discussion.

I'll have to beg your forgiveness; the "global warming isn't a threat / is not our fault" line has been embraced by the same slice of the body politic that claims DDT doesn't hurt baby eagles, smoking doesn't cause cancer, and you can cut taxes forever and still pay for a war.

• The sceptics are like those who opposed abolition of slavery
• The sceptics are like the holocaust deniers

Birds use the quantum zeno effect to navigate? Is that so? And there I was thinking it was because they had iron oxide crystals embedded in their beaks, oh how silly that all sounds now :)

http://www.springerlink.com/content/tcwlla3ptdd5u2ae/

how about this, then:

Iraq
  - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542840,00.html
  - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542881,00.html
  - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542888,00.html

breakup of Yugoslavia
  - http://www.springerlink.com/content/j339272hr6267766/ ... that's pay per view, or you find it in a "good library"
  - if you have access to the mythical "good library", you might attempt to check out this: Tim Judah, 'German Spies Accused of Arming Bosnian Muslims', in Daily Telegraph from 20 April 1997; it's not available on the net ... take it with as many grains of salt you think it's safe.

Name of "Gehlen" and the phrase "starting the cold war" ring a bell when on the same page ?

It looks like the US are not alone in all those conflicts you quoted, but are the only country with enough balls to take responsibility. As for USA going in Iraq "for the oil", if that's true, it's Europe's oil supply that the troops belonging to USA and the other "willing" countries are protecting.

Other examples of an European country starting some trouble and USA going in to clean up the mess ? How about the Vietnam War ? Or the WWII ? WWI, anybody ?

Edgar Rice Burroughs (the one who wrote the Tarzan and Martian Princess pulp "masterpieces") wrote also a novel (The Lost Continent (1916)) about USA not getting into WWI, but instead cutting all communication with Europe. After a few decades, a ship crosses the interdiction line during a storm, sinks near the coast of England, and the crew discovers that the war ended with the last Briton killing the last German and later succumbing to his wounds, leaving the Europe a desert populated only by animals escaped from zoos. How about such option ? Is it acceptable to you ?

The perpetual "holier than thou" attitude is getting tiresome. Ever wondered why the Eastern European "Untermenschen" stick with either US or Russia ?

Yeah, it's great that we're just now rediscovering genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, CIGS cells, multicore processors, carbon nanotubes, and satellite communications. We know that the Romans did all of these things thousands of years ago.

Yes, some people in historic times did some really darned impressive things, long before we would have thought they would have. No, most of our modern knowledge has not been "lost and rediscovered again and again and again."

Back on the original topic: I think it's perfectly reasonable that some day we might be able to recover even older sounds. And perhaps images.

Sound:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/02w307324378k4jm/

"A theoretical model of the acoustic effect of crystallization is suggested based on the representation of a stepwise character of formation or disappearance of macrolayers and macroregions on a growing (or melting) surface. According to this model, the picture of oscillations reproduces in basic features the form of the signals observed in experiments. The oscillation frequency of the liquid is determined by the frequency of generation of jumps at the crystallization front, while the comparatively large values of peak pressures in acoustic waves are a consequence of the resonance phenomena."

Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.

Images:

Many materials, both natural and manmade, suffer photodegradation. This is a process in which sunlight excites certain compounds and creates free radicals inside the material, which then, catalytically or not, damage the material from its original state. It seems quite possible to me that holographic information related to what frequencies of light struck where at what angles (and potentially even at what periods of time) could be restored by doing a detailed layer-by-layer atomic scale inspection of the material in question. Certainly I would expect poor temporal resolution (if any at all), but say, if you had an artifact that was in a single room for most of its existance, and then ended up buried with no further exposure to light, perhaps you could reconstruct the average appearance of the room.

Interesting idea, they're very different branches of mathematics so I'm having trouble working out how to combine them.

The idea in regression is to transform the IVs such that there is a linear relationship between them and the DVs. The transformations people make of IVs to make the relationship simple are a bit of a black art. Most people just get by with log since it solves any polynomial. It's easy enough to just keeping adding higher order polynomials until regression predicts a coefficient of 0 to tell you that you've gone too far, but that doesn't help much if the equation you're trying to predict parameters for is not efficiently modelled by a polynomial.

As for using differentiation to find the optimal transformation function, it's an interesting idea and I'm too tired now to work out if you could use it. A google search doesn't turn up anything quickly, with the following at least trying to determine the transformations automatically instead of guessing. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/ancham/1991/63/i20/f-pdf/f_ac00020a022.pdf?sessid=6006l3

The problem I keep coming back to is predicting the height of a ball bobbing on the surface of the sea given all the appropriate parameters. The see is best modelled as the combination of waves (duh), but I can't think of anything except the intuition of the modeller that would detect this case and suggest log was not an appropriate general function. I recall covering hmm, was it Maclaurin expansion, in my senior numerical methods course, but I never thought of applying that to regression at the time. Relying on google again turns up http://www.springerlink.com/content/44teyxefx9pa8058/ which looks relevant but I'm not subscribed to springer so can't view any more than the abstract.

Do you know how Sony makes their blue LED/Lasers? That would be a useful thing to find out before saying that Prof. Rothschild's patent has nothing to do with LED fabrication, much less Sony.
Perhaps Sony uses Zinc/Cadmium/Selenide etc., as shown here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v074j46847410755/ [a paper by Sony on green-LEDs made with such a material]

I would guess increasing the conductivity of these Zinc-based semiconductors is the big deal...

Such companies are not really off the hook, but a level of indirection can often diffuse blame. Humans have a judgment bias that sees indirect harm as less bad than direct harm. Legally there's no difference (murder-for-hire vs. hire), but ethically people have to work harder before they see the two harms as equivalent.

For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.

For more information, check See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior (Gino, Moore and Bazerman 2008) and The Preference for Indirect Harm (Royzman and Baron 2002, Social Justice Research).

The vast majority of the billions of animals grown for food out there are NOT fed by allowing them to freely graze "in forests and other areas". Most of them live out their lives in intensive factory farming operations. They are mostly fed vegetable and grain based diets, designed to make them grow quickly. So if you were to eat only meat, you would not avoid the need to grow vegetables. In fact, to grow a pound of beef in north america, it takes at least 2.6 pounds of grain (if you take the numbers from the beef industry at face value). And all this grain is not grown anywhere near the feed lots, either. It is shipped to the cows from all over the world, again requiring large amounts of fossil fuels. And I haven't even mentioned the methane that is produced by cattle in enormous quantities, or the methane produced by their manure. And this is just for cattle. You also need to factor in the billions more pigs, chickens, etc.

Your only valid point is that too much of the vegetables we buy comes from too far away, and that is why it is not only important to eat less meat (note I didn't say NO meat), but it is also important to purchase as much seasonal, local produce as possible. One criticism you missed, however, is the popularity of heavily processed meat substitutes (eg: "Tofurkey"). They probably consume far more energy per pound than most meats.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_operation
http://www.beeffrompasturetoplate.org/mythmeatproductioniswasteful.aspx#Sixteen%20pounds%20of%20grain
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=asj
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.htm
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h307k69711m5nh00/

Show me a source other than TMNT, the DC universe, or the marvel universe that describes the use of radiation and mutagenic (carcinogenic) agents in order to produce viable food. I would be ever so entertained.

Show me a source other than TMNT, the DC universe, or the marvel universe that describes the use of radiation and mutagenic (carcinogenic) agents in order to produce viable food. I would be ever so entertained.

France gets 80% of its power from nukes. A much simpler study would be to compare the incidence of leukaemia in France vs another country like the US which gets very little power from nukes. Quick search yielded not exactly what I was looking for, but it'll work:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/ux252n888q73r61p/

"...living within a 35 km radius of the French nuclear-waste reprocessing plant operating in La Hague, Normandy. During the period 1978-90, a total of 23 cases was diagnosed, giving an incidence rate of 2.99 per 100,000 which is close to the expected rate. In the 'canton' in which the nuclear plant is located, three cases of leukemia were observed compared with 1.2 expected, giving a standardized incidence ratio of 2.5."

Basically near the actual reactor they found 3 cases when they expected to find 1.2. If you know some basic statistics then you know that you generally need more then 3 data points to come to any conclusions (aside from "we need to study this further"). However the 23 number listed above is approximately what I learned in school was the minimum for decent statistics, and it falls in-line with expectations.

This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.

How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences :)