The red light cameras are why this is such a horrible idea. As it stands, they mail you a ticket which you can just throw away, because that does not count as a formal service, and they have so many to deal with that they are unlikely to send someone to your house. If a light goes off in a bored cops car because someone 100 yards ahead has an unserved photo radar citation, you are now going to court. There may also be alerts for sex offenders, previous DUI convicts, etc.
I have always thought that to be primarily the fault of the students. Of course, practices such as allowing "equation sheets" greatly encourage this sort of thinking among the students. Why waste effort stitching everything together in your head when you can start every problem just two or three algebraic steps away from the answer, clear the burdening requirement with a C, and move on to become a terrible engineering student?
I did not mean precisely at the critical point, just that the entire body of the pilot should not be dramatically displaced. I still think that the critically stable point is a reasonable goal, considering that the computer can continually adjust the individual motors to keep the thing upright, and there is no gravitational torque to continually fight for any ground speed. A free gimbal would demand that the motors be powerful enough to correct for chaotic forces from a swinging 100KG mass in addition to maintaining normal flight, and an active gimbal would add a lot of unnecessary weight, and I doubt that would be more efficient.
It is hard to guess from that picture where the actual center of mass is anyway, since the power source is likely contained in that bulb under the pilot, but it looks to me like the goal was to keep the center of mass near the plane of the rotors, and this seems like the simplest and most efficient design considering that all rotors are under computer control anyway.
That would make it more stable, but harder to maneuver. With the center of mass in the plane of the rotors, it only takes very slight modifications to the torque to rotate it, and is probably the more power efficient way to do it. There is much more micromanaging of the controls to keep it level this way, but this is all done by computer and the pilot is fucked in any case if the computer fails.
It has been a while since I was obsessing over this stuff as a kid, but I believe that was one of the innovations behind the F-16 when it was introduced. It was so unstable that a human could not fly it; the manual controls were essentially a DC offset on the rapid control from the computer. This made it incredibly maneuverable.
Clearly you don't drive on weekends between midnight and 3 am, during which time I have been stopped for failing to signal, wide turns, and even because "at first I thought your tail lights were out but I guess they are just a little dim." Of course all of these were accompanied by sobriety checks. I was once late for the first day of a new job after a cop pulled me out of morning rush hour traffic to cite me for having a 12-inch crack in my windshield. I am curious where you live.
I think I somehow parsed "was no warming happening before humans arrived" as something like "would be no warming in the absence of humans." That's what I get for reading slashdot while thinking about the physics I was working on in the other window.
In that case, my point would have been that accelerating and causing are two very different roles. Perhaps a better term would be human-augmented global warming.
I was not saying that these jobs are or will be a sizable fraction of the total number of jobs in the economy, just that the fraction does not monotonically decrease with population so devastatingly. I see no argument here as to why the number of jobs will not roughly scale according to demand. Microsoft has 100K employees because a growing demand provided increased revenue that allowed them to hire more specialists, to increase functionality (maybe MS is a bad example here) on a variety of fronts.
The absolute number of jobs does not generally increase so that you can throw more people on the same problem; it increases so that a larger number of issues can be addressed simultaneously, ideally to strive to offer greater functionality than competing products. As the demand increases, the increasing revenues facilitate this, even if no additional labor is required to distribute the service to a larger base.
You mentioned solar. You would be amazed how many varieties of photo-voltaics are out there, as well as the variety of niches for such things. Different manufacturers, technologies, and variations on fabrication processes have created products that widely span both spectra of power per unit area and power per installation cost. A customer's specific configuration of available area and budget will point them to specific manufacturers of a specific technologies; there a therefore many fronts for healthy competition. There is also a lot of variety in the mounting methods. Solyndra had a clever rack of cylinders that offered minimal stress to the mount under high wind loads. Many companies are working on "building integrated photo-voltaics" with lots of variety regarding partial shading performance, fire risks, installation costs, etc. These peripheral innovations, after the core invention, demand constant research and development work to stay competitive, and the competition in this industry is very real. There are always new fronts for additional design personnel, (much of this doesn't even require "crazy PhD types"), and more can be sustained with higher revenue streams, which follow from increased demand/population.
These arguments are all quite qualitative, as are yours, so I am not going say whether the number of design specialist opportunities is actually approximately proportional to the population, but I doubt it is too bleak. I think you would have a hard time producing any statistics that showed the fraction of the population engaged in professional research doing anything but increasing.
Of course, little of this is specifically applicable to industries dominated by abusive monopolies.
There aren't enough innovative 'good' jobs available because design oriented jobs DO NOT SCALE with the population.
I have never studied this, but perhaps you could clarify. They are not producing a consumable product, but with everything being equal, if the population doubles, the amount of money available for design jobs doubles, and in a free market this would be more likely to fund two competing designers, rather than reward one disproportionately while nobody else tries to get in on the lucrative profession.
In graduate school, I have made 14.5 and 16K for the nine-month contract (pre- and post-prelims). I always found full time summer employment, on or off the university, only sometimes for my advisor, and that can pay around 10K, which is probably the biggest difference between our situations. I have never, as a graduate student or otherwise, tried to take classes or research credits over the summer. I have worked on my dissertation project for pay over the summer, but for that 25% of the year I generally do not consider myself to be a student. I haven't had to take any classes for a couple of years now, which really helps. Frankly, I am not sure I could handle it again. I am in my 17th consecutive semester of post-secondary education, and the only thing that makes it bearable is not having classes anymore. Switching programs and starting over would be a nightmare.
I would not be able to handle graduate school as well as a full time job. That is a truly admirable undertaking. I hope you ultimately benefit from it, but should you not complete the program, you would be better off with research experience on your CV than classes. I am not sure what kind of program you are in or at which stage, but if you anticipate dropping without the degree, you should definitely be using the opportunity to do some applied research that would be relevant to a career.
Be careful how you leave though, because you can easily blacklist yourself from further PhD opportunities. I don't think it would matter so much for a master's program, but having a previous attempt at a PhD subjects you to a lot of behind-the-scenes scrutiny during the admissions process. If they are going to fund you, they need to know that whatever happened will not happen again. Having failed the comprehensive exams at a previous institution, for example, pretty much immediately disqualifies you.
I am a third 27 year old graduate student. I took good ACT scores to a state school and graduated with two bachelor's degrees and $4K in a savings account. My master's in physics was paid for at a somewhat better public school en route to PhD, and I average, as a PhD candidate who continually finds good summer employment, about $25K/year. Sharing a house with my wife helps (just splitting rent and bills), but I have even acquired a small sailboat and a respectable firearm collection, without assistance from my family, and without ever taking any student loans. I have a $3000 truck that I barely use (I commute by bicycle), and we found a nice house in a bad area of town to keep the rent cheap (everything is insured). I had to give up drinking in bars so much whenever I decided to get a boat, but I have managed to live quite nicely as a student.
It has happened to me once as well. Although that was with the border patrol; I had to sit at the checkpoint for several minutes while they made nearly a dozen passes with the dog before they had me pull off to the side so they could search my truck.
Not that such a thing exists, but if it did, infrared may not be the way to go. If something has adapted to live in Siberia, it will be well insulated which means that the temperature of the outermost layers of skin and/or fur will remain close to ambient temperatures. Polar bears, for example, are not effectively detected on infrared cameras.
I was originally from Tulsa, OK. My entire family believes precisely that. Many of them did not finish highschool and I am the first to even think about college (now 5 years into a doctorate), but these people do exist in legitimately frightening numbers. Education tends to isolate you from much of the voting public.
Actually, if you only have charge of one algebraic sign, there is always a convenient point of reference (a center of charge, analogous to a center of mass) from which there is no dipole moment. Any other point of reference would give you a dipole moment due to the displacement of the entire particle, not its internal properties. A distributed electric monopole is analogous to a mass, as far as deformations go; the first perturbation away from 'sphericity' would be to make it a subtle ellipse, which is a quadropole deformation. This is the lowest possible deformation in a mass distribution since a change in monopole moment implies matter/energy is created, and a change in dipole moment implies that the center of mass accelerates, and you are therefore looking at an incomplete picture.
What you are stating is analogous to a Taylor expansion in which, just because the linear coefficient is zero (i.e. you are expanding about a maximum or minimum), you assume all higher corrections are zero and the function is constant.
As someone who has taught university physics courses, I am of the firm opinion that physics exams (and the others, though I cannot speak with authority there) should NEVER be open book.
The wonderful thing about physics and the similar, non-engineering, disciplines, is how remarkably little rote knowledge is necessary. Much of general physics I revolves around the kinematic equations. These are just the rearranged Taylor expansions of a function and its time derivative, assuming all derivatives higher than the second are zero (constant forces), with the only a priori knowledge being F=mA. It takes students less than a minute to start from this point and rearrange to suit a given problem, but if this is how they are taught, they will not have to start so primitively, because the largest aid to remembering an equation is knowing exactly how to derive it and what it means. Students with equation sheets will just look at a problem, write down all of the quantities present in the problem, and search the equation sheet for something relating these quantities. If the problem is sufficiently involved, or the equation sheet deficient, they will get it wrong, because the reliance on a sheet for homework and knowing there would be one on the exam has led them to do problems in this fashion. There is no esoteric list to memorize, because the only "knowledge" actually required on the first exam is Newton's second law, and everything else follows from calculus and practice. Later, the set of axioms may be expanded to the conservation of energy, the work-energy theorem, Maxwell's equations, Schroedinger's equation, etc., and some phenomenological models such as Ohm's law or friction forces will be introduced, but there are still remarkable few things to memorize.
If you did physics by referencing dozens of equations related to a single topic as if they were disjoint pieces of knowledge, you were doing it wrong and/or poorly instructed.
High intensity lasers change the optical properties of the air such that the effective refractive index becomes a slight function of the intensity. Asymmetric laser profiles, shaped in the just the right ways, can be constantly refracted as they travel and produce curved beams. Here is an example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5924/229.full.
This approach is of course inefficient, impractical, and not used by the current weapon, because it ionizes the air along the way, but line of sight is not a fundamental problem with lasers in atmosphere.
It is more like "Aha, Big Bang Theory version 1.9874 is incorrect. Let's patch it to Big Bang Theory 1.9875" Einstein did not disprove "gravity" as a concept, he extended the current understanding with a new theory that was also valid in the extreme cases that Newton's theory could not handle. Similarly, finding an anomalous fossil that defies our current understanding of evolution does not mean that the "theory of evolution" should be discarded. We would search for the mechanism causing the inconsistency and incorporate it into the next "version" of the theory. The previous version was falsified, but "the theory" lives.
Hunter/gatherers on the African savannah no doubt slept like babies, on the nights they didn't get eaten by a leopard.
I have actually noticed that while camping, I don't seem to sleep hardly at all; I am constantly aware of the wind and any footsteps outside my tent, but when waking up the next morning, I am far more alert than I ever feel waking up at home. Last weekend, I spent two nights in a 16' sailboat with a minimal cabin, and two kayaks tied up outside. I spent what certainly felt like most of the night with my eyes closed but well aware of the sound of the kayaks bumping against the hull, in constant fear that my anchor had slipped and that bumping was not due to the kayaks. I saw the sun rising each morning as I was drifting in and out of total and partial awareness. But three quick beers after waking up, I was still far more alert than I would have been at 9 or 10 am on any weekday.
Last night and the night before, I slept in a very comfortable bed, and was completely oblivious to any surrounding stimulus. Now it is 4:30, and I am still sipping coffee in an almost vain effort to keep my eyes open. It makes sense to me that the natural way to sleep would be on edge, with some actual awareness retained, and that certainly seems to work better for me than just being out. We didn't just climb down out of the trees onto a memory foam mattress in a locked condo.
Of course, the two examples I gave are also situations in which there is minimal exposure to modern distractions...
That can work in a small class; I had several classes with less than 10 students as a physics undergrad where that was the case, and it worked well due to the amount of discussion in lecture and the resulting constant threat of it being outed as a lazy bastard should you actually be one.
I have since TA'ed general physics classes that took the exact approach you mention, and I cannot stress enough what a horrible idea it is in a class with 300 students. People assume, often correctly, that regardless of the stated policy on curving, the instructor will not fail two thirds of the class and most other students are as lazy as they are.. A quarter of the students never look at the solutions and just try to memorize old exams. Another quarter read over the solutions but never attempt the homework on their own. About 40% "reverse engineer" the solutions then pat themselves on the back for doing "unnecessary" homework. The remaining 10% actually make an effort to solve the problems without simultaneously consulting the solutions.
In my opinion, there would be no problem with this approach if the instructor were willing to fail 80% of the class, but they never are. One professor here did actually fail the majority of the students in his general physics class, and the engineering department threw a fit. Since the people teaching general physics are usually newer non-tenured professors or staff lecturers, they generally buckle.
In contrast, when I was lecturing general physics one summer, one student spent three hours in my office working on a mandatory three layer Gauss' law problem, and reteaching himself calculus. In my experience, there are few if any students who start out that unprepared that would be willing to put in the effort on an assignment they didn't actually have to do, when they can just, often correctly, assume that they can look over old exams when the time comes and make a C because half the class is doing the same worthless stuff.
Agreed. Poor enforcement leads to a general tolerance of unjust laws, that can be selectively enforced against brown people, gays, guys who are just dicks to the police, etc. Strict enforcement, regardless of the fairness of the law, would result in much more public outrage over unfair laws.
If you decide to take and continue
in this course, you are agreeing to submit your papers online, when so instructed, to a plagiarism-prevention program called TurnItIn.com. When you set up your individual account with TurnItIn.com for this class, make sure you understand and consent to all the terms that the program provides you at that point. You should note that TurnItIn.com – always without your name and any personal information – will retain your paper as part of their database so that students who plagiarize from it can
be detected. Because of this program, the vast majority of you who do your own work and cite your
sources of information properly will not have to compete with students who commit undetected
plagiarism. Anyone who has questions or problems with TurnItIn.com may talk privately about these
with the instructor.
I think this is only a big deal to people who enjoy making a big deal of things. There may be lots of other stuff in the syllabus that you do not agree with, such as the effort required for a decent grade, or a topic that implies the earth is older than 10k years. You either submit to certain rules of "the system", or learn on your own at the public library because you don't give a fuck about the system's endorsement anyway.
I have yet to see any such rules that blatantly hurt or exploit students, especially considering turnitin.com. You would not have earned any money from that paper in the absence of turnitin.com, and if you would have, turnitin in no way impedes you from doing so anyway. You just see someone making money in a way that involves your work, and think you are entitled to a piece of it even though you have done nothing nontrivial on top of what you would have done otherwise, they have taken nothing from you, and they are even providing you, the honest student, a valuable free service by protecting the worth of your degree.
Instructors already archive many assignments (finals must be stored for a year at my school), and I doubt there is any problem, legal or otherwise, with two instructors comparing physical documents to identify cheating. What is the big difference?
Slashdot Mirror
The red light cameras are why this is such a horrible idea. As it stands, they mail you a ticket which you can just throw away, because that does not count as a formal service, and they have so many to deal with that they are unlikely to send someone to your house. If a light goes off in a bored cops car because someone 100 yards ahead has an unserved photo radar citation, you are now going to court. There may also be alerts for sex offenders, previous DUI convicts, etc.
I have always thought that to be primarily the fault of the students. Of course, practices such as allowing "equation sheets" greatly encourage this sort of thinking among the students. Why waste effort stitching everything together in your head when you can start every problem just two or three algebraic steps away from the answer, clear the burdening requirement with a C, and move on to become a terrible engineering student?
I did not mean precisely at the critical point, just that the entire body of the pilot should not be dramatically displaced. I still think that the critically stable point is a reasonable goal, considering that the computer can continually adjust the individual motors to keep the thing upright, and there is no gravitational torque to continually fight for any ground speed. A free gimbal would demand that the motors be powerful enough to correct for chaotic forces from a swinging 100KG mass in addition to maintaining normal flight, and an active gimbal would add a lot of unnecessary weight, and I doubt that would be more efficient.
It is hard to guess from that picture where the actual center of mass is anyway, since the power source is likely contained in that bulb under the pilot, but it looks to me like the goal was to keep the center of mass near the plane of the rotors, and this seems like the simplest and most efficient design considering that all rotors are under computer control anyway.
That would make it more stable, but harder to maneuver. With the center of mass in the plane of the rotors, it only takes very slight modifications to the torque to rotate it, and is probably the more power efficient way to do it. There is much more micromanaging of the controls to keep it level this way, but this is all done by computer and the pilot is fucked in any case if the computer fails.
It has been a while since I was obsessing over this stuff as a kid, but I believe that was one of the innovations behind the F-16 when it was introduced. It was so unstable that a human could not fly it; the manual controls were essentially a DC offset on the rapid control from the computer. This made it incredibly maneuverable.
Clearly you don't drive on weekends between midnight and 3 am, during which time I have been stopped for failing to signal, wide turns, and even because "at first I thought your tail lights were out but I guess they are just a little dim." Of course all of these were accompanied by sobriety checks. I was once late for the first day of a new job after a cop pulled me out of morning rush hour traffic to cite me for having a 12-inch crack in my windshield. I am curious where you live.
I think I somehow parsed "was no warming happening before humans arrived" as something like "would be no warming in the absence of humans." That's what I get for reading slashdot while thinking about the physics I was working on in the other window.
In that case, my point would have been that accelerating and causing are two very different roles. Perhaps a better term would be human-augmented global warming.
You should look up the word "anthropogenic".
I was not saying that these jobs are or will be a sizable fraction of the total number of jobs in the economy, just that the fraction does not monotonically decrease with population so devastatingly. I see no argument here as to why the number of jobs will not roughly scale according to demand. Microsoft has 100K employees because a growing demand provided increased revenue that allowed them to hire more specialists, to increase functionality (maybe MS is a bad example here) on a variety of fronts.
The absolute number of jobs does not generally increase so that you can throw more people on the same problem; it increases so that a larger number of issues can be addressed simultaneously, ideally to strive to offer greater functionality than competing products. As the demand increases, the increasing revenues facilitate this, even if no additional labor is required to distribute the service to a larger base.
You mentioned solar. You would be amazed how many varieties of photo-voltaics are out there, as well as the variety of niches for such things. Different manufacturers, technologies, and variations on fabrication processes have created products that widely span both spectra of power per unit area and power per installation cost. A customer's specific configuration of available area and budget will point them to specific manufacturers of a specific technologies; there a therefore many fronts for healthy competition. There is also a lot of variety in the mounting methods. Solyndra had a clever rack of cylinders that offered minimal stress to the mount under high wind loads. Many companies are working on "building integrated photo-voltaics" with lots of variety regarding partial shading performance, fire risks, installation costs, etc. These peripheral innovations, after the core invention, demand constant research and development work to stay competitive, and the competition in this industry is very real. There are always new fronts for additional design personnel, (much of this doesn't even require "crazy PhD types"), and more can be sustained with higher revenue streams, which follow from increased demand/population.
These arguments are all quite qualitative, as are yours, so I am not going say whether the number of design specialist opportunities is actually approximately proportional to the population, but I doubt it is too bleak. I think you would have a hard time producing any statistics that showed the fraction of the population engaged in professional research doing anything but increasing.
Of course, little of this is specifically applicable to industries dominated by abusive monopolies.
There aren't enough innovative 'good' jobs available because design oriented jobs DO NOT SCALE with the population.
I have never studied this, but perhaps you could clarify. They are not producing a consumable product, but with everything being equal, if the population doubles, the amount of money available for design jobs doubles, and in a free market this would be more likely to fund two competing designers, rather than reward one disproportionately while nobody else tries to get in on the lucrative profession.
In graduate school, I have made 14.5 and 16K for the nine-month contract (pre- and post-prelims). I always found full time summer employment, on or off the university, only sometimes for my advisor, and that can pay around 10K, which is probably the biggest difference between our situations. I have never, as a graduate student or otherwise, tried to take classes or research credits over the summer. I have worked on my dissertation project for pay over the summer, but for that 25% of the year I generally do not consider myself to be a student. I haven't had to take any classes for a couple of years now, which really helps. Frankly, I am not sure I could handle it again. I am in my 17th consecutive semester of post-secondary education, and the only thing that makes it bearable is not having classes anymore. Switching programs and starting over would be a nightmare.
I would not be able to handle graduate school as well as a full time job. That is a truly admirable undertaking. I hope you ultimately benefit from it, but should you not complete the program, you would be better off with research experience on your CV than classes. I am not sure what kind of program you are in or at which stage, but if you anticipate dropping without the degree, you should definitely be using the opportunity to do some applied research that would be relevant to a career.
Be careful how you leave though, because you can easily blacklist yourself from further PhD opportunities. I don't think it would matter so much for a master's program, but having a previous attempt at a PhD subjects you to a lot of behind-the-scenes scrutiny during the admissions process. If they are going to fund you, they need to know that whatever happened will not happen again. Having failed the comprehensive exams at a previous institution, for example, pretty much immediately disqualifies you.
I wish you the best of luck.
I am a third 27 year old graduate student. I took good ACT scores to a state school and graduated with two bachelor's degrees and $4K in a savings account. My master's in physics was paid for at a somewhat better public school en route to PhD, and I average, as a PhD candidate who continually finds good summer employment, about $25K/year. Sharing a house with my wife helps (just splitting rent and bills), but I have even acquired a small sailboat and a respectable firearm collection, without assistance from my family, and without ever taking any student loans. I have a $3000 truck that I barely use (I commute by bicycle), and we found a nice house in a bad area of town to keep the rent cheap (everything is insured). I had to give up drinking in bars so much whenever I decided to get a boat, but I have managed to live quite nicely as a student.
It has happened to me once as well. Although that was with the border patrol; I had to sit at the checkpoint for several minutes while they made nearly a dozen passes with the dog before they had me pull off to the side so they could search my truck.
Not that such a thing exists, but if it did, infrared may not be the way to go. If something has adapted to live in Siberia, it will be well insulated which means that the temperature of the outermost layers of skin and/or fur will remain close to ambient temperatures. Polar bears, for example, are not effectively detected on infrared cameras.
I was originally from Tulsa, OK. My entire family believes precisely that. Many of them did not finish highschool and I am the first to even think about college (now 5 years into a doctorate), but these people do exist in legitimately frightening numbers. Education tends to isolate you from much of the voting public.
I remember reading as a child that this was the suspected point of the sail structures found on many dinosaurs.
Although perhaps what is measured here is a dipole moment as defined from the center of mass. I guess that also makes sense.
Actually, if you only have charge of one algebraic sign, there is always a convenient point of reference (a center of charge, analogous to a center of mass) from which there is no dipole moment. Any other point of reference would give you a dipole moment due to the displacement of the entire particle, not its internal properties. A distributed electric monopole is analogous to a mass, as far as deformations go; the first perturbation away from 'sphericity' would be to make it a subtle ellipse, which is a quadropole deformation. This is the lowest possible deformation in a mass distribution since a change in monopole moment implies matter/energy is created, and a change in dipole moment implies that the center of mass accelerates, and you are therefore looking at an incomplete picture.
What you are stating is analogous to a Taylor expansion in which, just because the linear coefficient is zero (i.e. you are expanding about a maximum or minimum), you assume all higher corrections are zero and the function is constant.
As someone who has taught university physics courses, I am of the firm opinion that physics exams (and the others, though I cannot speak with authority there) should NEVER be open book.
The wonderful thing about physics and the similar, non-engineering, disciplines, is how remarkably little rote knowledge is necessary. Much of general physics I revolves around the kinematic equations. These are just the rearranged Taylor expansions of a function and its time derivative, assuming all derivatives higher than the second are zero (constant forces), with the only a priori knowledge being F=mA. It takes students less than a minute to start from this point and rearrange to suit a given problem, but if this is how they are taught, they will not have to start so primitively, because the largest aid to remembering an equation is knowing exactly how to derive it and what it means. Students with equation sheets will just look at a problem, write down all of the quantities present in the problem, and search the equation sheet for something relating these quantities. If the problem is sufficiently involved, or the equation sheet deficient, they will get it wrong, because the reliance on a sheet for homework and knowing there would be one on the exam has led them to do problems in this fashion. There is no esoteric list to memorize, because the only "knowledge" actually required on the first exam is Newton's second law, and everything else follows from calculus and practice. Later, the set of axioms may be expanded to the conservation of energy, the work-energy theorem, Maxwell's equations, Schroedinger's equation, etc., and some phenomenological models such as Ohm's law or friction forces will be introduced, but there are still remarkable few things to memorize.
If you did physics by referencing dozens of equations related to a single topic as if they were disjoint pieces of knowledge, you were doing it wrong and/or poorly instructed.
High intensity lasers change the optical properties of the air such that the effective refractive index becomes a slight function of the intensity. Asymmetric laser profiles, shaped in the just the right ways, can be constantly refracted as they travel and produce curved beams. Here is an example: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5924/229.full.
This approach is of course inefficient, impractical, and not used by the current weapon, because it ionizes the air along the way, but line of sight is not a fundamental problem with lasers in atmosphere.
It is more like "Aha, Big Bang Theory version 1.9874 is incorrect. Let's patch it to Big Bang Theory 1.9875" Einstein did not disprove "gravity" as a concept, he extended the current understanding with a new theory that was also valid in the extreme cases that Newton's theory could not handle. Similarly, finding an anomalous fossil that defies our current understanding of evolution does not mean that the "theory of evolution" should be discarded. We would search for the mechanism causing the inconsistency and incorporate it into the next "version" of the theory. The previous version was falsified, but "the theory" lives.
Hunter/gatherers on the African savannah no doubt slept like babies, on the nights they didn't get eaten by a leopard.
I have actually noticed that while camping, I don't seem to sleep hardly at all; I am constantly aware of the wind and any footsteps outside my tent, but when waking up the next morning, I am far more alert than I ever feel waking up at home. Last weekend, I spent two nights in a 16' sailboat with a minimal cabin, and two kayaks tied up outside. I spent what certainly felt like most of the night with my eyes closed but well aware of the sound of the kayaks bumping against the hull, in constant fear that my anchor had slipped and that bumping was not due to the kayaks. I saw the sun rising each morning as I was drifting in and out of total and partial awareness. But three quick beers after waking up, I was still far more alert than I would have been at 9 or 10 am on any weekday.
Last night and the night before, I slept in a very comfortable bed, and was completely oblivious to any surrounding stimulus. Now it is 4:30, and I am still sipping coffee in an almost vain effort to keep my eyes open. It makes sense to me that the natural way to sleep would be on edge, with some actual awareness retained, and that certainly seems to work better for me than just being out. We didn't just climb down out of the trees onto a memory foam mattress in a locked condo.
Of course, the two examples I gave are also situations in which there is minimal exposure to modern distractions...
That can work in a small class; I had several classes with less than 10 students as a physics undergrad where that was the case, and it worked well due to the amount of discussion in lecture and the resulting constant threat of it being outed as a lazy bastard should you actually be one.
I have since TA'ed general physics classes that took the exact approach you mention, and I cannot stress enough what a horrible idea it is in a class with 300 students. People assume, often correctly, that regardless of the stated policy on curving, the instructor will not fail two thirds of the class and most other students are as lazy as they are.. A quarter of the students never look at the solutions and just try to memorize old exams. Another quarter read over the solutions but never attempt the homework on their own. About 40% "reverse engineer" the solutions then pat themselves on the back for doing "unnecessary" homework. The remaining 10% actually make an effort to solve the problems without simultaneously consulting the solutions.
In my opinion, there would be no problem with this approach if the instructor were willing to fail 80% of the class, but they never are. One professor here did actually fail the majority of the students in his general physics class, and the engineering department threw a fit. Since the people teaching general physics are usually newer non-tenured professors or staff lecturers, they generally buckle.
In contrast, when I was lecturing general physics one summer, one student spent three hours in my office working on a mandatory three layer Gauss' law problem, and reteaching himself calculus. In my experience, there are few if any students who start out that unprepared that would be willing to put in the effort on an assignment they didn't actually have to do, when they can just, often correctly, assume that they can look over old exams when the time comes and make a C because half the class is doing the same worthless stuff.
In Arizona, it is legal for people to carry concealed weapons by default.
Agreed. Poor enforcement leads to a general tolerance of unjust laws, that can be selectively enforced against brown people, gays, guys who are just dicks to the police, etc. Strict enforcement, regardless of the fairness of the law, would result in much more public outrage over unfair laws.
If you decide to take and continue in this course, you are agreeing to submit your papers online, when so instructed, to a plagiarism-prevention program called TurnItIn.com. When you set up your individual account with TurnItIn.com for this class, make sure you understand and consent to all the terms that the program provides you at that point. You should note that TurnItIn.com – always without your name and any personal information – will retain your paper as part of their database so that students who plagiarize from it can be detected. Because of this program, the vast majority of you who do your own work and cite your sources of information properly will not have to compete with students who commit undetected plagiarism. Anyone who has questions or problems with TurnItIn.com may talk privately about these with the instructor.
I think this is only a big deal to people who enjoy making a big deal of things. There may be lots of other stuff in the syllabus that you do not agree with, such as the effort required for a decent grade, or a topic that implies the earth is older than 10k years. You either submit to certain rules of "the system", or learn on your own at the public library because you don't give a fuck about the system's endorsement anyway.
I have yet to see any such rules that blatantly hurt or exploit students, especially considering turnitin.com. You would not have earned any money from that paper in the absence of turnitin.com, and if you would have, turnitin in no way impedes you from doing so anyway. You just see someone making money in a way that involves your work, and think you are entitled to a piece of it even though you have done nothing nontrivial on top of what you would have done otherwise, they have taken nothing from you, and they are even providing you, the honest student, a valuable free service by protecting the worth of your degree.
Instructors already archive many assignments (finals must be stored for a year at my school), and I doubt there is any problem, legal or otherwise, with two instructors comparing physical documents to identify cheating. What is the big difference?