I've seen this issue from both sides. On the academic side, if you are fortunate enough to get a faculty position, the pressure to bring in lots of grant money, and to graduate as many PhD students as possible is tremendous. The amount of grant money and the numbers of current students and graduated students are easy to enter into simple spread sheets that any administrator can read quickly. These are two main criteria for getting tenure. What happens to the students afterwards seems to be a less important metric.
"The Hero the World Needs" refers to the success of this BOT fighting parking tickets
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Parking tickets are a problem that you want to get rid of. BOT fails and you pay the ticket.
In contrast, an airplane ticket provides a service that you decided that you want or need. With your ticket and reservation in hand, you are starting with something positive. This will get you there and back. So you send your google information, credit card, and other information to donotpay.com in hopes that your ticket/reservation is not screwed up, your information is not hacked, and you will get a refund. And the fine print on customer service is that it may or may not be available. Many of the tickets on a flight cost more because the traveler needed/used the convenience of purchasing them a few weeks before traveling.
Seems the self driving car developers have been focusing on the hard problem of how to make a car self driving and safe. Packaging the sensors to handle a car wash is one of the less-hard problems. Probably need some sort of diagnostic to make sure it is clean and functional before going back on the road. Also sensors that can tolerate driving in dust, rain, and slush. If these items are not on the developer to do list, then add them. They will get solved because they are not super hard and they have to be solved to make money.
CSBF's been busy protecting loan sharks, er payday lenders.
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
And now you want them to also find time to probe criminals at Equifax?
Silly Rabbit! Just who do you think they really work for now?
"The published data is not sufficient to establish the location of the pollution source,"
Suppose something like this happened in the US. One can easily imagine a similar statement from the current head of the US EPA.
The plan as described appears to assume the balloons will stay in nearly same lat and long once launched or at least with in line of sight of PR. To find out of this is true or not for Puerto Rico, have a look at earth.net.org specifically over PR at 70 mbar pressure which corresponds roughly to the proposed height of these balloons.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#...
In fact the wind speed at that height is about 20 km/hr. So in 24 hours the balloons will travel about 500 km which is beyond line of site from where they were the day before. Also PR is about 50 x 150 km.
The only way to impose some choice about where the balloon goes is by changing the amount of gas in the envelope to cause the balloon to rise or fall to altitudes where the wind velocity is different. Using earth.nullschool.net to see the winds velocities over PR for different heights, this approach doesn't look promising.
I have the dubious pleasure of "enjoying" the services of Wells and Century Link. A few years ago, I could not walk into that bank without an employee, under the guise of better customer "service" trying to hawk credit cards, various of combined account services, and other crap. Even the tellers. For internet the choices here are the race to the bottom competition between Comcast and Century Link. Don't want to pay for cable, so we have CL. And for $45/month we get 3/0.7 Mbs down/up. Called yesterday to ask what are we paying for. Dude on the other end runs a test and says 3.5/0.7, refused to tell us what we should be getting, and tried to hawk an upgrade. The people really getting shafted here are low level employees these ratf*ck companies.
Turns out a lot of this wind power is coming from "red" states, like Kansas for example. From the nytimes
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
"Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative state.
Yet by the time the law was scrapped, it had become largely irrelevant. Kansas blew past that 20 percent target in 2014, and last year generated more than 30 percent of its power from wind. The state may be the first in the country to hit 50 percent wind generation in a year or two, unless Iowa gets there first.
Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election."
Thoughts and Prayers to the congressman and his family and to the other victims of the shooter. Wish all a speedy recovery from this sad and senseless tragedy.
But does it seem a bit ironic that its very very likely that the congressman, his ball team, and friends at the NRA have vigorously supported the shooters right to own as many guns as he wanted?
When I graduated from college in 1983 I was given a HP15C. It's 33 years old, well traveled, and still going strong. I've used it since it was given to me and have never purchased or received another calculator.
I'll plan to pass it down to my daughter.
It is very easy to be fooled by 3 sigma fluctuations, especially on an analysis of data that has already been collected.
The problem is the statistical penalty. how many searches were made and not reported?
If you do 100 tests on random data, you will find a three sigma effect that is just a statistical fluctuation.
One reason why 5 sigma, and not 3 sigma is the requirement for discovery in physics (eg the Higgs)
Actually there might be.
This paper suggests that the term that OPERA *might* be missing is the v*dx/c^2 factor that comes out of the Lorentz transformation equations. Suppose you synchronize two clocks next to each other using a signal from a satellite clock moving at v. (There will be a small difference in the rate of the clocks on the ground and the satellite clock, but that is small. GPS receivers can correct for this factor.) Now suppose the two synchronized clocks on the ground are moved apart so they are separated by a distance dx and not resynchronized by the satellite clock. To an observer on the ground, they will remain synchronized. To an observer on the satellite, moving more or less in the direction defined by the two clocks, the clocks will not appear synchronized. Their difference will be v*dx/c^2 where v is the velocity of the satellite, dx is the separation, and c is the speed of light. The clock "in front" as seen by the satellite will be ahead in time of the clock behind by this amount. If you plug in the typical velocity of a GPS satellite about 4000 m/s dx of 730,000 m and c = 3x10^8 m/s, you get about 30ns.
Now suppose you force both clocks to be synchronized to the satellite (which is what a GPS receiver does.) Then the clocks will not be synchronized on the ground. This is not an effect that typical GPS receiver include because it depends on knowing how far away another receiver is, and on the assumption that they are using a particular satellite clock. van Elburg than argues there should be a factor of 2 included which brings the difference to 60ns which is close to the discrepancy observed.
This explanation has parallels to a famous homework problem in special relativity about train robbers in a tunnel trying to trap a fast train that (at rest) is longer than the tunnel. The key to the answer is the v*dx/c^2 factor.
Whether this v*dx/c^2 factor is a problem for the OPERA experiment is unclear, but possible. The detector and neutrino detectors are using GPS clocks in common mode, meaning they use satellites that both see. The explanation assumes they are only using the GPS satellites that are traveling in an orbit that is roughly parallel to the neutrino path. GPS satellites are arranged in 6 orbits, but perhaps the are using just the orbit(s) that all happen to travel roughly parallel to the CERN/detector line. It also assumes that the particular GPS receivers used do not include this effect, or the effect was not included elsewhere in the analysis.
So perhaps there is something to see here.
A few things sound strange about this report.
The title does not mention "observation of", or "evidence for" . Instead it is
"Search for new particles decaying into electron pairs of mass below 100 MeV/c2"
This means the author either chose not to use the stronger words of observation, or evidence in the title, or was unable to convince the referees to allow it.
Nuclear emulsion is a low rate detector. If this effect is real, it reasonably likely that someone would have seen it by now, particularily the work did not require an accelerator.
I did my dissertation in particle physics looking at an apparent enchancement in the number of +/- particle pairs produced with low relative velocity. They were produced by 28 GeV/c proton collisions on liquid hydrogen. I noticed an enhancement that at first look had the signature of some new particle or resonance. It was really exciting for a few days. It was not a new particle. Rather it was an enhancement, predicted back in the 1920's due to a modification of phase space arising from the attractive electromagnetic force between particles of opposite charge. It was interesting because the dominant force in the collision producing these particle was the much stronger strong-nuclear force. With a bit more work, I was able to show this enhancement for several types of charged particle pairs. (And finish my thesis.)
I doubt this enhancement is what is happening in this axion claim. But there are mechanisms for creating enhancements that are not axions, especially if the statistics are limited and the number of trials (statistical penalty) not counted properly.
Finding axions would be an extraordinary claim. It would need to be supported by extraordinary proof. It seems unlikely this paper contains either.
I work with the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray observatory located in the Pampas of Argentina. The detectors of the observatory cover an area of about 60x60 km.
Near the middle of this array, myself and a small group of colleagues constructed an ultra-violet laser "test beam" facility. Sort of simulates the signature of a cosmic ray, but traveling upward.
http://casab.physics.utah.edu/clf
Slashdot Mirror
google "Old Sparky"
I've seen this issue from both sides. On the academic side, if you are fortunate enough to get a faculty position, the pressure to bring in lots of grant money, and to graduate as many PhD students as possible is tremendous. The amount of grant money and the numbers of current students and graduated students are easy to enter into simple spread sheets that any administrator can read quickly. These are two main criteria for getting tenure. What happens to the students afterwards seems to be a less important metric.
"The Hero the World Needs" refers to the success of this BOT fighting parking tickets https://www.theguardian.com/te... Parking tickets are a problem that you want to get rid of. BOT fails and you pay the ticket. In contrast, an airplane ticket provides a service that you decided that you want or need. With your ticket and reservation in hand, you are starting with something positive. This will get you there and back. So you send your google information, credit card, and other information to donotpay.com in hopes that your ticket/reservation is not screwed up, your information is not hacked, and you will get a refund. And the fine print on customer service is that it may or may not be available. Many of the tickets on a flight cost more because the traveler needed/used the convenience of purchasing them a few weeks before traveling.
Seems the self driving car developers have been focusing on the hard problem of how to make a car self driving and safe. Packaging the sensors to handle a car wash is one of the less-hard problems. Probably need some sort of diagnostic to make sure it is clean and functional before going back on the road. Also sensors that can tolerate driving in dust, rain, and slush. If these items are not on the developer to do list, then add them. They will get solved because they are not super hard and they have to be solved to make money.
Satellites? Show me the guy with a beard, surrounded by pairs of animals, and building a big wood boat. Hell, it's not even raining yet.
CSBF's been busy protecting loan sharks, er payday lenders. http://www.latimes.com/busines... And now you want them to also find time to probe criminals at Equifax? Silly Rabbit! Just who do you think they really work for now?
"The published data is not sufficient to establish the location of the pollution source," Suppose something like this happened in the US. One can easily imagine a similar statement from the current head of the US EPA.
The plan as described appears to assume the balloons will stay in nearly same lat and long once launched or at least with in line of sight of PR. To find out of this is true or not for Puerto Rico, have a look at earth.net.org specifically over PR at 70 mbar pressure which corresponds roughly to the proposed height of these balloons. https://earth.nullschool.net/#... In fact the wind speed at that height is about 20 km/hr. So in 24 hours the balloons will travel about 500 km which is beyond line of site from where they were the day before. Also PR is about 50 x 150 km. The only way to impose some choice about where the balloon goes is by changing the amount of gas in the envelope to cause the balloon to rise or fall to altitudes where the wind velocity is different. Using earth.nullschool.net to see the winds velocities over PR for different heights, this approach doesn't look promising.
I have the dubious pleasure of "enjoying" the services of Wells and Century Link. A few years ago, I could not walk into that bank without an employee, under the guise of better customer "service" trying to hawk credit cards, various of combined account services, and other crap. Even the tellers. For internet the choices here are the race to the bottom competition between Comcast and Century Link. Don't want to pay for cable, so we have CL. And for $45/month we get 3/0.7 Mbs down/up. Called yesterday to ask what are we paying for. Dude on the other end runs a test and says 3.5/0.7, refused to tell us what we should be getting, and tried to hawk an upgrade. The people really getting shafted here are low level employees these ratf*ck companies.
Turns out a lot of this wind power is coming from "red" states, like Kansas for example. From the nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... "Two years ago, Kansas repealed a law requiring that 20 percent of the state’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2020, seemingly a step backward on energy in a deeply conservative state. Yet by the time the law was scrapped, it had become largely irrelevant. Kansas blew past that 20 percent target in 2014, and last year generated more than 30 percent of its power from wind. The state may be the first in the country to hit 50 percent wind generation in a year or two, unless Iowa gets there first. Some of the fastest progress on clean energy is occurring in states led by Republican governors and legislators, and states carried by Donald J. Trump in the presidential election."
Thoughts and Prayers to the congressman and his family and to the other victims of the shooter. Wish all a speedy recovery from this sad and senseless tragedy. But does it seem a bit ironic that its very very likely that the congressman, his ball team, and friends at the NRA have vigorously supported the shooters right to own as many guns as he wanted?
save $10! $50 gets you 1 carryon bag and 1 pilot for your flight ($60 if purchased separately)
When I graduated from college in 1983 I was given a HP15C. It's 33 years old, well traveled, and still going strong. I've used it since it was given to me and have never purchased or received another calculator. I'll plan to pass it down to my daughter.
It is very easy to be fooled by 3 sigma fluctuations, especially on an analysis of data that has already been collected. The problem is the statistical penalty. how many searches were made and not reported? If you do 100 tests on random data, you will find a three sigma effect that is just a statistical fluctuation. One reason why 5 sigma, and not 3 sigma is the requirement for discovery in physics (eg the Higgs)
not.
Actually there might be. This paper suggests that the term that OPERA *might* be missing is the v*dx/c^2 factor that comes out of the Lorentz transformation equations. Suppose you synchronize two clocks next to each other using a signal from a satellite clock moving at v. (There will be a small difference in the rate of the clocks on the ground and the satellite clock, but that is small. GPS receivers can correct for this factor.) Now suppose the two synchronized clocks on the ground are moved apart so they are separated by a distance dx and not resynchronized by the satellite clock. To an observer on the ground, they will remain synchronized. To an observer on the satellite, moving more or less in the direction defined by the two clocks, the clocks will not appear synchronized. Their difference will be v*dx/c^2 where v is the velocity of the satellite, dx is the separation, and c is the speed of light. The clock "in front" as seen by the satellite will be ahead in time of the clock behind by this amount. If you plug in the typical velocity of a GPS satellite about 4000 m/s dx of 730,000 m and c = 3x10^8 m/s, you get about 30ns. Now suppose you force both clocks to be synchronized to the satellite (which is what a GPS receiver does.) Then the clocks will not be synchronized on the ground. This is not an effect that typical GPS receiver include because it depends on knowing how far away another receiver is, and on the assumption that they are using a particular satellite clock. van Elburg than argues there should be a factor of 2 included which brings the difference to 60ns which is close to the discrepancy observed. This explanation has parallels to a famous homework problem in special relativity about train robbers in a tunnel trying to trap a fast train that (at rest) is longer than the tunnel. The key to the answer is the v*dx/c^2 factor. Whether this v*dx/c^2 factor is a problem for the OPERA experiment is unclear, but possible. The detector and neutrino detectors are using GPS clocks in common mode, meaning they use satellites that both see. The explanation assumes they are only using the GPS satellites that are traveling in an orbit that is roughly parallel to the neutrino path. GPS satellites are arranged in 6 orbits, but perhaps the are using just the orbit(s) that all happen to travel roughly parallel to the CERN/detector line. It also assumes that the particular GPS receivers used do not include this effect, or the effect was not included elsewhere in the analysis. So perhaps there is something to see here.
A few things sound strange about this report. The title does not mention "observation of", or "evidence for" . Instead it is "Search for new particles decaying into electron pairs of mass below 100 MeV/c2" This means the author either chose not to use the stronger words of observation, or evidence in the title, or was unable to convince the referees to allow it. Nuclear emulsion is a low rate detector. If this effect is real, it reasonably likely that someone would have seen it by now, particularily the work did not require an accelerator. I did my dissertation in particle physics looking at an apparent enchancement in the number of +/- particle pairs produced with low relative velocity. They were produced by 28 GeV/c proton collisions on liquid hydrogen. I noticed an enhancement that at first look had the signature of some new particle or resonance. It was really exciting for a few days. It was not a new particle. Rather it was an enhancement, predicted back in the 1920's due to a modification of phase space arising from the attractive electromagnetic force between particles of opposite charge. It was interesting because the dominant force in the collision producing these particle was the much stronger strong-nuclear force. With a bit more work, I was able to show this enhancement for several types of charged particle pairs. (And finish my thesis.) I doubt this enhancement is what is happening in this axion claim. But there are mechanisms for creating enhancements that are not axions, especially if the statistics are limited and the number of trials (statistical penalty) not counted properly. Finding axions would be an extraordinary claim. It would need to be supported by extraordinary proof. It seems unlikely this paper contains either.
I work with the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray observatory located in the Pampas of Argentina. The detectors of the observatory cover an area of about 60x60 km. Near the middle of this array, myself and a small group of colleagues constructed an ultra-violet laser "test beam" facility. Sort of simulates the signature of a cosmic ray, but traveling upward. http://casab.physics.utah.edu/clf