Slashdot Mirror

There's a link there: https://pt.usc.edu/2019/03/08/...

There is no need for journalists to add another layer between us and researchers any more thanks to the internet.

Remember playing the telephone game as a kid? It's better to get info from the horse's mouth than have it passed down and muddled through extra layers.

You mean the town with the reactor of ancient design (again, thanks to people like you) that was built in a fucking quake zone with emergency generators at sea level "protected" by walls that were easily topped by the tsunami caused by said quake? The accident that was completely preventable, that was flagged years before it happened, but yet people did nothing? But yeah, "nuclear bad."

About half of the LA water supply comes from the Colorado River:
https://viterbi.usc.edu/water/

I, too, would like better reliable data

A list of music copyright infringement cases may help.

In one of the most progressive industries

Sure, for old, white and male values of 'progressive'.

in one of the most progressive countries in the world

You're number 20 on this list and the number of first world countries you're ahead of isn't that high.

That you believe what you typed is one of the problem with systematic biases. They are hard to identify and confronting when they are.

Here's a study that takes a stab at 'why'. It's a small sample, but among other factors female directors who have been successful on short films find it harder to attract funding or investment in feature films.

Here's a list of successful female directors talking about the problems they have experienced based solely on gender.

I've found those from a quick google search and memory of some similar articles. You raise mechanics, but a similar search shows females interested in being a mechanic facing even more overt cultural pressure to not. You imply that maybe women don't want to be directors, but a trivial search shows considerable evidence that counters this.

Culture is self re-inforcing. Biases are hard to identify. There's a massive difference in gender among feature film directors. There's a marked difference in the usual path of successful directors (from short films and documentaries, to longer, feature films) based on gender. Small wonder that this means that less females choose a path where an equal amount of work does not result in an equal outcome, or have to have a backup plan for when they can't pick up funding or have to spend another decade getting 'experience' that their male colleagues don't seem to need.

Here's a report that looks at female directors and compares their careers to male directors. One of the differences they report is that directors will often start with short films before moving on to longer or feature films. The initial disparity in numbers between male and female directors at the short film level then becomes even more stark. Female directors report difficulty in finding or attracting funding (not the only problem, sample size is small and selective). We're not talking about a situation where women don't want to become directors of feature films. They do. They can't. Your mechanic analogy is off the mark.

The problem with cultures is that they tend to be self-reinforcing. Women, knowing that their chance of being able to make a career beyond short film will make less of an effort in a direction that's unlikely to yield results. When putting together people to work on or with, people are likely to ask for people that they have worked with before and who they know they can work with, again.

It's complicated and complex, as many social structures are. Identifying biases are difficult and confronting. The numbers, alone, are a sign that there is _likely_ to be some kind of systematic bias or biases. Holding your hands over your ears and demanding proof before you'll act is childish. Let's investigate. There's smoke; maybe there's a fire. Maybe we'll find that it's just weird, but women really don't want to direct, but here's a list of qualified female directors talking about some of the different ways that they've experienced barriers to their careers based solely on gender.

The article says the new highway will have transparent concrete over the solar panels. Google didn't find much for me on "transparent concrete", but "translucent concrete" finds stuff.

http://illumin.usc.edu/245/translucent-concrete-an-emerging-material/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete

P.S. I found the above by first searching for "transparent concrete" and Google found a BoingBoing article with only a little info. But after reading the introductory sentence I searched for "translucent concrete Aron Losonczi" and found lots of stuff.

Gay tend to be DINKs (double income no kids), so they have high household incomes and can afford nice houses. They pay property taxes to support the schools, but don't have kids, leading to higher per student educational spending. They contribute to a thriving urban culture and nightlife.

Do you have any sources or figures for that?
Exactly how much of an impact are they having and in what ways?

Do you have any evidence that proves that higher per-student educational spending leads to better educated students? I was under the impression that there was no correlation between spending and outcome regarding education.

If an increase in spending does directly improve student education, how much of that increased spending is due to the homosexual people who live there and how much better is that than typical heterosexual households in the same income bracket?

Furthermore, if there's shown to be an increase in tax dollars from homosexuals how do you compare and weight that against children born in heterosexual households? If we don't care about the continuation of our country, or even of our species, then disregard this one.

Incidentally, have you ever read this paper...?

There are medical schools in the UK that have been doing this sort of thing for years now, although rather than "cases" they present "case-studies", and ask their classes to work through them. In other words the students are doing exactly what they would once they become doctors, in a safe environment, where no-one is reliant upon their calculations or diagnoses, and where the outcomes are known, and can be discussed in detail at the end. Initial indications are that this involved form of learning is far superior to a chalk and talk lecture covering the same subject matter.

Kirschner, Sweller and Clark disagree with you on that.

I might recommend the following along with the associated free textbook: https://lagunita.stanford.edu/... Textbook: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth... Afterwards you can look at the more advanced free textbook: http://statweb.stanford.edu/~t...

Researchers have also found that in-app mobile ads have even higher costs. The press release (here) and paper (here) showed that apps with these ads consume an average of 16% more energy – but up to 33% more; 48% more CPU time, resulting in noticeable slowdowns in the app’s response time; and uses around 79% more network data, costing an estimated 1.7 cents every time they’re used. For app developers there was also a cost in terms of increased maintenance effort, increased complaints, and lower ratings.

For those who don't know, COCOMO is an algorithm that was developed in 1981 by Barry Boehm for estimating the cost of building software (typically in person-hours). The numbers in the article were generated by the basic COCOMO calculation in David Wheeler's free SLOCCount toolset.

One drawback is that SLOCCount uses the basic COCOMO calculation, which is based on historical data gathered by Boehm in 1981. Here's a COCOMO-81 calculator in case you want to play with your own code. Sometimes its estimates are pretty good, but I've sometimes found that applying line counts from my projects in some modern languages (especially functional ones like Scala) throw it off. That could definitely affect the "1,356 developers 30 years" estimate in the article.

Wheeler has a good discussion of COCOMO in SLOCCount if you want to learn more about it.

And then you still need to demonstrate, that our society is particularly rewarding of such attitudes

http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files...

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/gr...

I don't have to demonstrate it. Many peer reviewed papers have already demonstrated it. If wealth decreases compassion, and wealth has grown exponentially for the already wealthy, then as a society we are rewarding people for decreased compassion.

In fact, we reward the most sociopathic with the greatest rewards. Just look at the fallout from the 2008 financial collapse. The only people that made out were the ones that caused the collapse.

For all the whining by GGers that this is aimed at them

GGers are just classic narcissists. They never learned to care about anyone other than themselves, so when someone says "but your behavior is unacceptable" to them they can't stop and think about someone else for two seconds, they just keep showing you on the picture where the internet touched them — by making them feel like they weren't the most important precious unique snowflake in the blizzard. They have no empathy, no sympathy. They have never encountered real adversity. People who have are too busy to cry about ethics in gaming journalism, even as a front.

the first major hate group being blocked is a forum aimed at attacking victims of a condition that's usually medical

Yes, but you can't expect a rational response. Also, it's not clear as to how much of that is choice and how much is bred in. What you eat effects your intestinal flora, which goes on in turn to effect your digestion. But, poop transplants can make fat people thin or thin people fat, so that's a clear sign that you can't just immediately change your diet and expect the same results someone else gets. It might take a long time to alter your gut biota.

Interestingly, I suspect fasting is actually the most effective way to change things without a source of someone else's poop. It not only has an effect on your intestinal bacteria, but it also stimulates stem cell-based regeneration in your body. It has something to do with increased stem cell production, and decreased white blood cell production. So relatively short intermittent fasts (3-7 days) may be the best weapon for change... again, besides putting someone else's crap up your ass.

You'd need an uncompressed image, so jpeg is right out.

The classics are here Lena, mandrill, etc.

We have known how to do stereolithography really fast since 2012. The interesting thing here is that the process has been improved so resolution isn't that bad.

I find it hard to believe the DK2 or the new WXQGA AMOLED screens on the next gen are still too low rez?

20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with 1 arc-minute separation. Or 2 pixels per arc-minute. At a viewing distance of 2 feet, this works out to just about 300 DPI. Which is where the 300 DPI spec for printers and 227 PPI spec for Apple's Retina laptop displays come from. You cannot distinguish the pixels at 2-3 feet if you have 20/20 vision.

Half of this spec - 150 DPI on printers, ~100 PPI on monitors - is considered "good enough" for most purposes. A 24" 1080p monitor is 91 PPI, so "good enough" for viewing from about 3 feet away.

A WXQGA screen (2560x1600) breaks down to 1280x1600 per eye. For the pixels to be small enough to be invisible to the eye, the image has to be smaller than 10.7 degrees by 13.3 degrees. That's a tiny image - a bit bigger than your fist at arm's length. For a "good enough" image, the image has to be smaller than 21 degrees by 27 degrees. Which is still tiny (roughly 2x2.5 fists at arms length). If the image is any bigger than that, you easily see the pixels.

So there's a lot of progress which needs to be made, not just in display resolution but in GPUs to drive those higher resolutions, before these VR units will stop being "too low rez." 4k and 8k displays are going to be much more important for VR than for big screen TVs.

(One possible workaround on the GPU side is for a camera to monitor where you're looking at, and only render that spot in high resolution. The image your eyes send to the brain is really crappy, with just a tiny spot in high resolution. GPUs have to render the entire scene in that high resolution because they don't know where your eyes are looking. But if you can track where the eye is looking, you can eliminate a lot of the GPU's workload. On a monitor this doesn't really work because other people can't watch the screen at the same time you are. But on a head-mounted display, there is no problem.)

Well, I don't know about that, but at least it was better than Oculus Rift, if images in TFA are anything to go by. Something like semi-spherical 320 by 240 degrees with 3D zone of maybe 120 by 240 degrees in the middle, or thereabouts.

20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute. So at 2 pixels per minute, your 320x240 degree angle of view translates into 38,400 x 28,800 pixels.

The human eye gets away with it because only a tiny amount of the center of your vision has that resolution. The rest is a blurry, indistinct mess. Alas, Oculus Rift does not know where in that 320x240 degree field you are looking at so it can't take advantage of this fact. In the future, maybe we'll have head-mounted projector displays which track where your eyes are looking, and project a high-resolution image only at that spot, while the rest of the field is projected at low-resolution. It would certainly reduce the burden on 3D graphics hardware.

Some representations of what our eyes really see.

Please do tell us about how the "official" prosthetic costing $40,000 are totally not a ripoff even though they can be replaced by $45 printed prostetics because each one is hand carved by highly skilled gnomes from their own bones and tied together with unicorn hair and anything else will kill the wearer in the first 5 minutes

I can't.

Because I don't have the money or resources to clinically evaluate a $45 prosthetic hand.

This I do know:

The poor have been milked for generations by frauds and fools marketing medical miracles at dime store prices. When the geek sees a buzz word like "3-D Printing" in a headline, his capacity for critical thinking goes south.

To test his computer models of neural control, Valero-Cuevas is using a very faithful physical system: cadaver hands. Hand surgeons help him connect the hands' tendons to strings driven by electric motors.

The activity of the motors is controlled by the neuron software, as if the motors were muscles themselves. This way the simulated neurons are confronted with the same problem the nervous system faces: controlling the hand as a marionette driven by complex muscles and tendons.

The goal is for the software and hardware to work in concert to control the cadaver hand the same way a healthy person can move his or her hand --- complete with stretch reflexes, muscle tone and compliance.

''We are studying the very fundamental mechanisms of how muscles have tone and how you modify that to get function, and how their disruptions lead to the pathological characteristics of hypertonia, spasticity and dystonia, which are very common in cerebral palsy, stroke and spinal cord injury,'' Valero Cuevas said. ''But we don't really know where they come from, and we're trying to understand that.''

The complexity in just one little finger

Each finger tendon is controlled by between six and 10 muscles, and in turn, each simulated muscle is controlled by a population of 256 independent neurons.

''The irony is not lost on us that we're combining one of the oldest scientific disciplines, hand anatomy, with some of the newest elements of ultra-fast parallel computing,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''We're using this to answer central questions about evolution, health and disease, and how all these systems work.''

One application of this work is the design of better prosthetic hands, where there is still a major engineering challenge to make artificial hands that can be effective manipulators of objects. The most advanced current prosthetics are effective grippers, but the ultimate goal is truly dexterous manipulators.

''We see it as an impasse,'' Valero-Cuevas said. ''Over a century of trying to develop something that's better than the split hook prosthesis. We now have modern robotic hands and prosthetic hands that are amazing grippers, but they're not dexterous manipulators. They're great at holding things, but is it the Luke Skywalker hand that would be able to pick something up, reorient and operate it? Think of all the operations that are needed to use your smartphone with one hand.''

Perfecting a fully functioning prosthetic hand

They are neither Islamic, nor [blah]

This gang consists of 100% muslims, 0% atheists, 0% christians, 0% buddhist, 0% hindu and 0% other religions. Whatever they do, is all in name of the islam. Everything they do, they do because their great example Muhammed (nsfw) did it as well. Everything they do, they do because the quran requires them to. Every throat they chop, is because quran (sura) 47:4 tells them to. If there were no islam, they had not one single reason to do what they are doing now.

Could you please explain how they are not "islamic"?

A search of www.merriam-webster.com returns: the word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. So you are correct, this is not an official English word.

But its de facto use is seen at:
http://gapp.usc.edu/graduate-p...
http://aws.amazon.com/training...
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~al...

Lookif selfie can be a word, why can’t we let architecting in?

I (and several others) purchased a blood sugar meter. Basically, we would check our blood sugar levels (BSL) at 1 and 2 hours after eating. We all found that some foods would take us up to 120 (the upper limit for our experiment), but some foods blasted BSL up to 200.

I did this too and noticed the same (though not above 160). I found the following helped reduce those spikes: (a) split one meal into two meals 3-hours apart (b) long walk and/or brief intense spot exercise - which, I've read, helps burn off some of the stored energy in the muscles causing them to pull fresh from the blood stream. Either case, though especially the intense spot exercise, showed about a 30 point reduction in blood sugar.

You might also be interested in this: Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system.

Allah's Apostle said, "Five are regarded as martyrs: They are those who die because of plague, abdominal disease, drowning or a falling building etc., and the martyrs in Allah's cause. <- source

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

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

Also given the lack of funding currently in our systems ...

Everybody loves infographics.

TC:DR (too colorful: didn't read) version:
This is based off the 2011 numbers
The US spent $1,909 more per child that year than the next most overfunded nation. $2,090 more than the most successful education system in the graphic (Finland). For all this spending, the US roughly ties with Russia (who spent $5,893 less per child that year).

It isn't funding.

I'm all for letting Europe handle it's own problems as are most Americans. We watched for years as Yugoslavia tore itself apart and no one did anything. Thousands of bodies paraded on the nightly news here with lots of stuff about "ethnic cleansing." They finally drummed up enough support to get action on it. I wasn't for it as I felt like it was their civil war and it should run it's course. By the way, we spend more per kid on schools now than we ever did and we get less education. It isn't all about money. I'd put our hospitals up against anyones though.

http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u...

http://hospitals.webometrics.i...

Terrific suggestion regarding Debian benchmark!

There are some pretty good stats on productivity from Cocomo II group: http://csse.usc.edu/csse/research/COCOMOII/cocomo_main.html. First off you measure in terms of normalized lines of code which ends up being close to the same across languages. From there you can examine how large programs are in varieties of languages in terms of normalized lines of code and you get productivity measures:

Assembly .4
C 1
COBOL 1.5
C# 2.5
Java 2.5
Visual Basic 4.5
Perl 6
SQL 10

etc...

Perl vs. Python for relatively similar levels of experience I'd assume the differences in productivity is going to be close to 0. You seem to need rather dramatic differences on high/low level scale to get much of a productivity boost. So for example C# and Java are both 2.5; Perl and Smalltak are both 6.

It's not so much that as soil viability. We already manage soil by round-up treating the field, tilling everything over, planting seeds, repeated round-up treatment from time to time if the crop is round-up ready, etc. We also till organic fertilizer (cow shit) into the soil at the first run, and later add chemical fertilizer as needed. We also apply pesticides by air spraying.

We do this for crop density, but it's not a great practice to keep the soil viable. Too much chemical herbicide treatment and soil depletion. The soil is kept viable by the addition of chemical fertilizers and a lesser addition of organic matter. My suggestion is merely that we could greatly improve soil viability by using more organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.) between crops and applying worms for continuous enrichment; this has the advantage of improving soil quality continuously in many ways beyond simple nutrient content, but the caveat that use of chemical herbicides and pesticides could harm the worms to a point that compromises their viability for this use. That means we would also need to grow food with worm-safe weed and pest control practice--either alternate practices or restriction to chemicals which do not harm worm viability.

It appears Round-Up may be toxic to red worms. From this paper the author conjectures that it may only kill smaller red worms; I conjecture that it could be killing a random subset (variation in tolerance), sterilizing (breeding problems), killing eggs, or killing young worms. A random subset would be the best possible outcome here, as a 20% higher mortality rate at random would still retain viability. Propagation problems (breeding, egg destruction, or death of juveniles) would be the worst, as this would cause a steady population decline.

Pesticides will likely kill worms. Pyrethrin will, for example.

I'm sorry, I can't agree with most of that reply. What I'm referring to is awards for "participation", which has nothing to do with effort. We have created a system that actually builds a false sense of worth in students. People that have ability above the norm are termed "gifted" and punished for fucking up the curve. Isolated, uncool geeks and nerds are going to do poorly if they do not have challenges that would humiliate their contemporary classmates. With the exception of sports (where it is OK to abuse the less gifted) everyone else must be equal... until they hit the market place at 18. Thus the only option the (often themselves gifted) parents have is to get their kid the hell out of a school or district that will not work in the best interests of the student. Making everyone feel good only benefits low grade teachers and administrators. Looking at results via cost per student tells us we are not going about education in the correct manner
http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/
and there is no way for any parent to change that by demanding change at the school level... THEY have to do what is best for their kid, and maybe that kid can grow to occupy a place where accountability will roll down hill and change the system... but given the way things work in the upper levels, I don't hold much hope for that happening.

I sympathise, really, but the decision of how many lost jobs a conservation effort is worth is a local policy one, and it really doesn't weigh on global climate change. If the local authorities didn't consider the possibility that a drought might hit around the same time they were reducing water availability, it sounds like they fucked up. What I can tell you is that if the climate changes significantly, you're going to be running into conflicts between conservation and human livelihood more often as people adjust to a changed water table.

I think you've completely missed the point of what happened there, and it provides some important lessons that relate directly to climate change. The marketing around the science is much more mature around climate change, but it works the same.

See, this started when scientists raised the alarm about a noticeable drop in the population of the delta smelt in the bay area and tributaries. Environmental groups began a lawsuit, and as usual were able to leverage support from the EPA. The delta smelt is not really an important species by itself. But the population reduction is a signal of an environmental issue. The cause, really, was pollution from agricultural run-off from all the chemicals used on the corporate farmland in the water shed. But since Monsanto has so much influence with Washington bureaucrats, that issue was dismissed. You can find some decent description of the real issues online.

Instead, the EPA came up with a plan to treat the symptom, pointed to the aquifers and irrigation equipment pulling water from the rivers for the San Joaquin valley. And they cut off the water. That resulted in the death of vast acres of rich farmland, laid off workers, family farms going bankrupt, and the only benefit is to temporarily treat a symptom of an issue.

In appeal, the judge that looked at all the evidence wrote that “cutting water exports to California cities and farms is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘capricious.’” But by that time (3 years later), the damage was done and the once-productive farmland was mostly desert.

So this issue, just like climate change, started with some good science, but proceeded into the mainstream with greedy corporations and naive environmental groups calling for policy changes that hurt working people and empower the wealthy and well-connected. You have been warned.

Catcha: Slavery

As for feminism not being "man-hating," either you're woefully ignorant of the current Feminist Narrative (TM), or you're just deluding yourself.

I am actually doing a research study on current gender (male and female) roles, viewpoints, and media influence. While, yes, there are extremists on both sides, looking to them as representation of a cause would be like looking at Westboro Baptist as the embodiment of Christian churches. While they are fighting a similar cause, the methods are drastically different and less respectable. Honestly, hardcore feminists sometimes make things worse for women because they are not paying attention to how their actions are portrayed in the eyes of the opposite gender. Regardless of what others are doing, try to take an objective look at the issue at hand (female non-equality in media). The fact is that there are more men in important/respectable roles while women are usually cast for their sexuality. Think of the women that you do see in magazines, movies, TV shows, billboards, commercials; do they actually seem representative of women?

Also, after a quick Google search, I didn't find anything about a Trademarked Feminist Narrative. There were a few articles and papers that were a similar title, but if you have a link, it would be appreciated.

Someone has actually done this, sans switchable nozzles or gel. They were able to make centimeter high objects of decent resolution in minutes.

http://sail.usc.edu/span/beatboxing/mmedia/Proctor-Beatboxing-JASA2013.pdf

Its not spending that is the issue. The US outspends all other countries and doesn't get results. Hint, if you look into it about half of it goes to administrators in buildings where students are not at. So increase spending even more will still not get results.

Unfortunately the people who have given the solutions have been called idiots, racists, and bigots so its not likely to improve ever.

No, they were not vegetarians. We have all sorts of archaeological evidence showing early man ate animals. The fact that most other primates don't is irrelevant.

Yeah chimps TOTALLY don't eat meat, no meat at all. Thats indisputable.

Oh wait... http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html

Neither do orangutan.

Oh wait... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21364-vegetarian-orangutans-eat-worlds-cutest-animal.html

And surely not gorillas.

Oh wait... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100305-first-proof-gorillas-eat-monkeys-mammals-feces-dna/

And of course gibbons don't eat meat. Being omnivores.

Ok did the research, she "invented" the wheel, they have been using this method since at least 2007. Her method uses "a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. "
http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf

Not so novel: "Incorporating the utilization of carbon nanotubes cathode and TiO2 nanotubes anode in energy storage, a nonaqueous hybrid supercapacitor was developed in order to significantly increase the energy density of the supercapacitor."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18019169/

Also dr yat li which she claims was "supervising" her seems to think he invented it a year ago without her help. Notice his name is on this article with other doctors but her name is missing: "Hydrogenated TiO2 Nanotube Arrays for Supercapacitors"
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl300173j

She basically did a chemistry experiment that had already been done and published, she invented nothing

http://www.usc.edu/CSSF//History/2013/Projects/S0912.pdf

Unfortunately, the is no article besides a one-page summary. It sucks. That's not science, that's bullshit to me.

I don't know where you got your numbers from, but the energy density this supercap has is on par with batteries: 20Wh/kg. Now look at the size of the caps she has. Those are samples that weigh grams. Whatever fits in a cellphone will weigh probably on the order of 100g, and will store on the order of 1 Wh. I don't see kilowatts for charging, never mind that you absolutely don't have to charge in 20s. A one minute charge cuts the power by a factor of 5, and anyone sane will go with what's economical and makes business sense, not with what was put on a headline somewhere.

Never mind that it doesn't matter much what the energy rate (power) is, what matters is the stored energy. 1 Watt-hour is 0.86 kg*Kelvin for water. Assuming whatever the phone and battery are made out of have the heat capacity comparable to water, releasing 1 W-h will heat things up by 10 degrees C.

In other words: yes, it's as harmless as any current battery technology. Get over it.

My other gripe: couldn't that girl publish this stuff like everyone else out there? All we have is stupid news articles and a single-page PDF summary. Weren't they supposed to have write-ups submitted with the project? WTF is all this stuff? To me it's not $5k-worthy science if it's secret.

but unless she has achieved actual breakthroughs in the field, this is again not nearly as newsworthy as the headline suggests.

She has. The only problem here is that the news itself is dumbed down to the point of being utterly pointless.

Science reporting at it's finest.

Methods/Materials
To improve supercapacitor energy density, I designed, synthesized, and characterized a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. Good conductivity of H-TiO2 combined with the high pseudocapacitance of polyaniline results in significantly higher overall capacitance and energy density while retaining good power density and cycle life. This new electrode was fabricated into a flexible solid-state device to light an LED to test it in a practical application.

Results
Structural and electrochemical properties of the new electrode were evaluated. It demonstrated high capacitance of 203.3 mF/cm2 (238.5 F/g) compared to the next best alternative supercapacitor in previous research of 80 F/g, due to the design of the core-shell structure. This resulted in excellent energy density of 20.1 Wh/kg, comparable to batteries, while maintaining a high power density of 20540 W/kg. It also demonstrated a much higher cycle life compared to batteries, with a low 32.5% capacitance loss over 10,000 cycles at a high scan rate of 200 mV/s.

Bringing the numbers closer to human-scale, a 300 parts per million is the same as 3 parts per 10,000. Similarly 400 is 4 parts per 10,000. So basically, we've gone from 3 molecules per 10,000 to 4 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 molecules of air.

In the same period, plankton levels have declined over 1% per year since the late 1970's. John Martin at MBARI postulated that the decline was due to a decline of dissolved iron in the oceans. He's quoted as saying "Give me a tanker full of iron and I'll give you an ice age." A series of experiments, IRONEX and SOFEX demonstrated that he was right - adding iron caused the plankton to bloom. The SOFEX bloom lasted longer than the 45 days allotted to collect plankton samples. IRONEX demonstrated that the predators could find the bloom and feed on it.

You want to reduce CO2 levels? Stop hunter-gatherer style fishing and start farming the oceans. Of course, then the problems will be keeping the earth warm enough to avoid another ice age and preventing fish rustlers from making off with your harvest.

The issues with the US education system do not appear to be the result of insufficient funding.

In a study from the University of Southern California, they say that LA Freeway construction costs are roughly $20M per mile.

So his $50k buys him 13 feet of roadway.

The guy who invented the Oculus started out by giving simple instructions to build your own:
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/open-source/fov2go/

A smart phone and some 35mm slide 3D glasses gives you a very compelling experience.

It is great to see Rod and other folks exploring and discussing their work in building cheap and effective virtual reality displays and peripherals.

I hope that there won’t be too much criticism on his build concerning price. Please note that he’s including a low cost, but in comparison, a moderately priced tracker. From the build writeup, you can see how you could replace it with something else. All in all, it’s a pretty cheap device to make. Consider the doors it opens. An open approach and open discussion of such builds is valuable and appreciated.

Some other thoughts: the Rift was spun out of some Open Source designs that we had Palmer Luckey work while he was here at the ICT Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. After witnessing the Kickstarter and seeing the implications it’s already had worldwide, I think that it and these DIY head mounted displays are very important to advancing the VR industry and community. I’m happy to see all the interest and I’d like to see a broad range of hobbyists, scientists, engineers, and companies experimenting and improving on these designs, and discovering how to build the next generation of immersive experiences.

Like Rod, I and my colleagues at Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/ are also firm believers in sharing our work, Open Sourcing what we can, and helping anyone who wants to play with these technologies. We’ve been improving and packaging our various Open Source reference designs for low cost head mounted displays and immersive viewers. We’ll be discussing these items at the 2013 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, FL next week.

To help out the community and add to the conversation, we’ll be open sourcing a lot of data in the next few days. We’ll share our parts lists, 3D printer STL files, and various software packages that will help you create your own immersive experiences. We do have some foldable foam-core viewer designs, but we have been working on 3D printed viewers as well. The prices on 3D printers are coming down and ordering a print from an online 3D print company is fairly easy. We have a Stereo Unity package that lets developers easily create and edit Stereo Project Scenes in Unity and some nice Distortion Correction software for Unity that counters the fisheye distortion that you see with low cost magnifier lenses.

You can see our designs as well as our code at http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/open-source/. We’ve even been working on a few unofficial Oculus Rift Mods which we’ll be releasing any day now.

It is great to see Rod and other folks exploring and discussing their work in building cheap and effective virtual reality displays and peripherals.

I hope that there won’t be too much criticism on his build concerning price. Please note that he’s including a low cost, but in comparison, a moderately priced tracker. From the build writeup, you can see how you could replace it with something else. All in all, it’s a pretty cheap device to make. Consider the doors it opens. An open approach and open discussion of such builds is valuable and appreciated.

Some other thoughts: the Rift was spun out of some Open Source designs that we had Palmer Luckey work while he was here at the ICT Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. After witnessing the Kickstarter and seeing the implications it’s already had worldwide, I think that it and these DIY head mounted displays are very important to advancing the VR industry and community. I’m happy to see all the interest and I’d like to see a broad range of hobbyists, scientists, engineers, and companies experimenting and improving on these designs, and discovering how to build the next generation of immersive experiences.

Like Rod, I and my colleagues at Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/ are also firm believers in sharing our work, Open Sourcing what we can, and helping anyone who wants to play with these technologies. We’ve been improving and packaging our various Open Source reference designs for low cost head mounted displays and immersive viewers. We’ll be discussing these items at the 2013 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, FL next week.

To help out the community and add to the conversation, we’ll be open sourcing a lot of data in the next few days. We’ll share our parts lists, 3D printer STL files, and various software packages that will help you create your own immersive experiences. We do have some foldable foam-core viewer designs, but we have been working on 3D printed viewers as well. The prices on 3D printers are coming down and ordering a print from an online 3D print company is fairly easy. We have a Stereo Unity package that lets developers easily create and edit Stereo Project Scenes in Unity and some nice Distortion Correction software for Unity that counters the fisheye distortion that you see with low cost magnifier lenses.

You can see our designs as well as our code at http://projects.ict.usc.edu/mxr/open-source/. We’ve even been working on a few unofficial Oculus Rift Mods which we’ll be releasing any day now.