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India To Build Neutrino Observatory
TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"
In what language?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In Hindi.
Yeah....and....the translation please?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Sorta, but not exactly. Sure, it eventually trickles and creates that Keynesian multiplier.
But, and here's the important part, so would spending that money on something more useful like schools or water pumps. The money spent on those would create just as many jobs, you know, and you'd also have some schools or clean water instead of a national penis size symbol.
Think of it this way. If you spend X dollars, a Keynesian multiplier of Y says effectively you've put X*Y dollars into the economy. But if you invested that original X into something pointless, effectively you now only have X*(Y-1) that actually goes into anything the country actually needs. Unless Y is at least in the hundreds, you'll still see a difference.
And actually a more reasonable multiplier to expect is somewhere around 1.25 to 1.5. The highest ever multiplier recorded for a government investment was 1.73.
So basically even if you're uber-lucky, a million invested in useless crap will also bring 730,000 that trickles into more useful stuff. Whereas if you invested that million into something useful, well, now you'd have 1.73 million worth of useful stuff.
Basically that multiplier isn't a blank check to do any stupidity whatsoever with the public money. It doesn't mean you can just blow it on any crap and let the multiplier distribute it for you. At the end of the day, a million wasted is still a million wasted.
But it gets even better, actually. The multiplier itself is different for different things you do with the money. A million invested in something could have a multiplier as low as 0.23 (actual historical case too: yes, it's possible for such an investment to actually be a loss) or as high as 1.73. Like any investment, basically, you get a different ROI. It doesn't mean just blow the money or anything and expect it to trickle just the same.
Or in less complicated terms, think of it like this: a country has a certain amount of resources, including manpower. Tying up X thousand people into one project (including making those bricks and supplying the factory and whatnot) means X thousand you won't have for something else. Even if it creates Y thousand other jobs somewhere else too, that original X thousand is still tied up in activity A instead of activity B. If A is less needed than B, that's not a good use of manpower.
Also, I'd say that one should look at the actual conditions in a country before cheering for a waste. The exact multiplier and number of jobs created depend a lot on the local conditions. The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, where really at worst you just diverted some people from marketing jobs and services and other ultimately just ways to do something when you don't need them in actual production, may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Teri = Your MaKi = Mother's Chooth = Derogatory word for Vagina
Yes, folks should use more polite terms, like, "Pussy Galore" (James Bond), or "Alotta Fagina" (Austin Powers).
Does anyone else have other examples of international super spies having sidekicks, whose names are euphemisms for female genitalia?
Oh, and good luck to India on this project. Although one could argue that the money would have been better spent on social infrastructure projects, I believe that high tech projects like this tend to "bootstrap" countries.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I could be wrong, but I feel that progress needs to happen on all fronts. Research, industry, infrastructure, quality of life, etc.
Ideed $270 million could be used to give everyone in the country 24 cents or provide an incentive for the best and brightest to stay in the country and for bonus points inject money into the Indian high tech industrys.
"Dr Jaikumar expects the project to enhance understanding of the universe and the Earth's structure, as well as volcanic activity and how tsunamis are formed." Oh okay, but HOW do neutrinos affect volanic activity and tsunamis exactly? Could we get a 1-2 sentence further explanation of what the heck you are talking about?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I am simply amazed that they would prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house.
It's pretty clear to me that they are not doing this simply for the sake of showing off (i.e. "being number 6"). There's plenty of other scientific endeavors a country can spend its wealth on to show off (for example, a space program). Particle physics is hard science. You don't get into it unless you're trying to do hard science.
You know there's millions of homeless people in America right? Perhaps we should shut down NASA too.
Half the population is living in slums
Nonsense, unless you call the huts that a lot of tribes live in or cabins built in the mountains as slums too. People are fairly self-sufficient and are generally healthier than the average city yuppie. A very small number of people are actually in such a dire situation that they're dying from starvation.
Most parts of the country have only intermittant electricty
Rural areas do have this problem, but every place from small towns and cities have regular power supply. It is definitely not a problem in "most" of the country.
There is almost no safe water (by Western European standards)
There are almost no people with weak immune systems (by Western European standards)
The majority of the population is functionally illiterate.
Now where did you get that from? And what do you mean by that?
The roads are amongst the most dangerous in the world
They're definitely not as safe as the ones in the more developed countries.
Pollution (air, water, and waste) is a HUGE problem
in the entire world, not just in India.
I'm a caucasian male American who lived in NOIDA, UP, India from May 2004 through Jan 2006.
Your responses do not reflect the reality that I lived in India.
"Slums" is a very generous word for some of the conditions I saw. Hell, in the US, at least one can squat in a relatively stable structure. A ripped tarp over a frayed rope firmly anchored into a large pile of dirt and gravel; with three families living in/around it. A three story brick building under construction; at least one worker family living in it. I'd see the open cooking fires at night and hear a newborn baby crying when I went out onto my balcony to smoke a cigarette.
The electricity was indeed intermittent. Some days there was no electricity at all. On the days that I had electricity, there was always an outage from 1-4 hours, every day, without fail. The electricity was also of shit-poor quality. India is on a 240V standard, but one day the voltage in the outlet could be 170V and then next day 280V. I lost an iBook power adapter to a night with a 295V spike. The power lines supplying my office building literally melted down, because the office in the floor above installed air conditioners that drew too much current.
Functionally illiterate is quite accurate. Most people I saw were uneducated and could not read. When I was told that the Chief Minister of Bihar (a political position roughly equivalent to Governor of a US state) was illiterate, I didn't believe it. As it turns out, it was true: Rabri Devi
Don't get me wrong. I love India. Living there was one of the best experiences of my life. However, there are much higher priorities than a neutrino observatory.
Suspend all research spending?
Not ALL research spending, but how about research spending on project directly related to solving these issue first?
How do you know that they're not doing that?
Just because a story is published about India doing physics research, how does it logically follow that they're not also working on social and economic issues?
Putting moderation advice in your
California used to be the power supply joke of the developed world. How are things now?