And considering the 16th century microscopes had but one lens and no artifical light sources, you won't find anything similar to that in a modern day lab. http://www.az-microscope.on.ca/history.htm
Except, perhaps, a hand-held magnifying lens!
Your list left off a few important advances...
SEM vs TEM (you mentioned electron microscope, but they're very different beasts)
Darkfield microscopes.
Atomic force microscopes.
Tomographic microscopes (although I suppose confocals are as good an example of this class as any)
X-ray diffraction microscopes.
Gigapixel microscopes (very new approaches to making high resolution images that span macroscopic dimensions).
Serial electron microscopes.
Near-field optical microscopes.
And probably more that I'm forgetting. There has been amazing progress in instrument building!
Yes, exactly. I'm an alumnus. Often when I say, "it's Caltech, not Cal Tech," people look at me funny. By way of explanation, I carry on, "it's a private institution, not part of the UC system." If they continue to have crossed eyes, then, "look, Berkley is Cal Berkley because it's really the University of California at Berkley, Davis is Cal Davis because it's the University of California at Davis, and the same is true for for UCLA, UCSF, UC Irvine, UCSB, etc., but Caltech is the California Institute of Technology, not part of the UC system." By this time, they've either walked away, or have written me off as a total loon, but the point has been made: Caltech, not Cal Tech.
An increasing number of displays nowadays have wide aspect ratios. On such screens, there's plenty of horizontal space, but vertical space can be at a premium. It's hard to see why anyone with a wide display would not want the toolbar to be vertical...
When I started doing typesetting in earnest (mid-to-late 1980s), TeX was the only way to go. Other programs to do typesetting didn't hyphenate correctly or use ligatures, forget take care of widows and orphans. Since then, I've typeset probably three shelf-feet of material, what with course notes, papers, technical notes, talks, abstracts, resumes, conference proceedings, academic theses, books, etc. Along the way, I have built a solid and rich set of macros.
Slowly, slowly, the consumer-level tools have approached doing as good a job as TeX did 20 years ago.
If there's one area where the TeX typesetting model falls down, it's that it contains a deep assumption that the page is blank. Thus making text flow around objects (like images or figures) that do not span the entire horizontal extent is difficult. More modern typesetting tools deal with this much, much better.
One thing that the KDE developers and testers seem to be not paying attention to is having the toolbar on one of the vertical edges of the screen.
This is my preferred location (the reasons why aren't important, but it makes far more sense to me to put the tool bar there).
None of the KDE screenshots show this location. Few of them even show the toolbar at the top of the screen. While it is possible to put the toolbar on a vertical edge with KDE 4.0 (haven't tried with 4.1), it is horribly buggy and ultimately unusable.
This was not the case with KDE 3 where the vertical placement worked fine, and elements like the pager and clock were well adaptable to the new location. Elements that in KDE 4 are really, really broken with a vertical toolbar.
It seems with KDE 4, we've taken a large step backward in design.
Dan doesn't seem to know much about batteries. Check out batter power discharge curves and such...
http://www.mpoweruk.com/performance.htm Remaining power is estimated based on the charge of the battery. If you notice on those graphs, when you get out to the end of the stored charge, it drops off very quickly, which is why the gauge goes from half to empty quickly.
Those curves are for a new, single cell.
If the battery charge meter precipitously drops on a not-so-new multi-cell battery (most laptop batteries are multi-cell), it is more likely indicative of a failed cell within the battery.
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity.
I'm a hard-core TeX user. Not a LaTeX user (sorry, I disagree violently with Leslie Lamport's aesthetics, and the code just isn't solid enough), but a TeX user.
Although TeX may be at times frustrating, there are two things that I know to be true, and provide comfort:
1. Although there may be opacity in the system, logic and rationality pervades its design, so that, given sufficient time and effort, I can understand exactly what, how, and why something works or does not work the way it does. This is huge. I will never, ever, understand many of the operational choices in OpenOffice and Word because they are not based on a rational, logical framework, leading to the impression that they are both horribly idiosyncratic.
2. TeX is bug free. If text isn't laying out the way I want it to, it's because my code is not correct, not because there's some problem with TeX. In contrast, I've lost track of the number of bugs I've seen in OO and Word.
You can, and should, clamor that LaTeX is not bug free. It isn't, and very often the packages distributed for it are riddled with bugs. The IEEE Transactions class is one, embarrassing, example. But then, if you roll your own packages, like me, you have no one else to blame when they don't work correctly, and can take comfort that when they do, you've done a good job and your documents are beautiful.
The biggest problem with any of the WYSIWYG editors I've used (and, having typeset two conference proceedings that solicited contributions in LaTeX and Word, I've seen many and varied instances of this) is that the settings are not explicitly represented in the visible document, and so become hidden and often missed. If you aren't careful, it's very easy to have one paragraph appear in a slightly different font than the next, or to have one stretch of lines be ragged right and the rest be fully justified, or have the hyphenation settings change from one portion of the document to the next. It's horrible, and fixing this is a royal pain. Having explicit formatting within a compiler paradigm is the only way to go when producing professional quality documents.
I agree. It fits well with one of the basic unwritten tenets at MIT which is to make the world a better place. MIT has spent an incredible amount of money and human effort to create excellent curricula in many fields. Sharing this work with whomever wants it helps everyone, including MIT.
Sure, Stanford is great, as is CMU, and a handful of other places. But MIT has a global reputation for excellence second to none for a reason.
My last name on Google produces over ten thousand results (prolific family, I guess), some of which are not so obscure (eg, my brother runs a major web site, my research has appeared in The Economist, on the AP wire, and other international news outlets, our mother has published a large handful of scientific papers, our father designed one of the now-standard architectures for multipliers that appears in numerous textbooks, and we have half a dozen or so patents between us). On Cuil, there are no results. None. Zero.
Cuil's lying about indexing more pages than Google in one way or another. Either they aren't in fact indexing that many, an outright lie, or they have indexed them, but can't do anything with that information, a lie of omission.
Cuil's image-with-each-hit idea is cute, but personally, I find it to be fluff. Give me text-only when I want information, images-only when I want images. Forcing a pairing makes it look like USAToday, rather than an information source.
It turns out that measuring hearing sensitivity is more challenging than one might initially imagine. I've worked in a lab at Caltech were some of the researchers worried about this and, well, I was surprised at how difficult it is to get accurate data. And at how easily we can be fooled by uncontrolled, informal experiments, like listening to a YouTube audio track processed through an unknown signal stream, played under non-ideal conditions through consumer-grade equipment.
If you've had your hearing tested in an audiology lab, then, assuming they did a proper job of putting you in an anechoic chamber and had blinded staircase tests with calibrated drivers, and they said that you had extended upper-range sensitivity, I'd be more inclined to believe that you're hearing 19 kHz. (It turns out I just had my hearing tested this past week, and although my hearing was normal at 9 kHz, they didn't bother testing anything higher; I was a bit disappointed by this.)
Although it is certainly possible to find a 34 year old able to hear 19 kHz, it is far more likely you're hearing an aliased tone at a lower frequency.
AWith the tone and sample rate I used (19kHz and 44.1k) at least the high quality encoder whistles at, some other frequency. Sounds like somewhere less than 10kHz to me.
Like, say, 3.05 kHz? That's what one would expect from a non-linear mixing of the sampling frequency and the signal you've injected. There are so many potential sources for non-linear mixing that it's hard to start a meaningful list, but here goes: gain control, compression, resampling, clipping, aliasing, unintentional digital-to-analog-to-digital conversions, non-idealities in the audio driver amplifier, etc. The problem could originate at your end when you created the audio stream, at the far end when they normalized it, at the near end during playback, etc. And that's just off the top of my head.
But, non-linear mixing between the signal and sampling rate is probably the culprit.
FWIW, I can hear 19 kHz waves. So this trade-off affects me.
You won't hear 19 kHz much longer. Seriously, not because of this or any other particular factor (although there are many), but because everyone experiences upper-range hearing loss as they get older, and it starts at an astonishingly early age.
The OP forgot that the MIT curriculum -- the lectures themselves -- are already largely available. The course materials for nearly two thousand courses at MIT are available here: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
So are all of the lectures from an experiment in Computer Science education that predates MIT's open courseware, http://aduni.org/ .
I have 1940 radios with the original electrolytics in them and they work just fine.
I do as well! I get a big kick out of them. But I have many more radios with electrolytics that have failed with messy results. We all should recall the recent motherboard debacle where inferior-grade electrolytics were used that affected even IBM's desktop computers.
But I've also known (or, ahem, have caused) tantalums to fail. When I've been able to discern what went wrong, it's never been the case that my father's rule of thumb was used. My saying this is anecdotal, but my father's designs have been manufactured to thousands of instruments and while there have been failures in the field, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have been due to tantalum caps dying.
(Another plug for my dad's engineering: the instruments he designed are used for EPA-mandated monitoring of atmospheric pollution -- any Slashdot readers in places like Los Angeles who get daily reports of air quality predictions on their local news are getting data that originated in his designs. But here's the plug: I once met an EPA inspector at a party. Her job was to go around to the trailers around the metropolitan area where these instruments are installed and verify that they were working correctly. She said, "[company name]'s instruments are great! They're always working!" She didn't, yet, know that my dad had designed them, and it was cool to get unbiased feedback like that.)
Tantalums have a bad reputation for unreliability. They are less forgiving to overvoltage than electrolytics. My father, who designs some of the most reliable instrumentation I've seen anywhere (he estimates a 30-year lifetime for his devices, and that's with 100% duty cycle, continuous use), derates tantalum capacitors by a factor of 2 and has no problems with them failing. (Eg, if you have a max expected voltage of 5 V, use a tantalum that's rated at for at least 10 V.) Electrolytics, on the other hand, have well-known lifetime issues, even when run conservatively, because the electrolytic chemistry is inherently corrosive.
High quality CFLs have a CRI of at least 98; 95 CRI is not what I, personally, consider high quality.
I cannot speak to the CFLs you have unless you want to share more details about them, but, in general, CFLs do not flicker anything near the frequencies humans can see. Traditional flicker fusion frequency, although highly dependent on factors like overall illumination, color saturation, and contrast, is about 30 Hz, give-or-take. There is, however, a large body of evidence that even higher order visual areas can be entrained at 135 Hz, although, mostly, we don't see anything much above 80 Hz in normal everyday life. (I am a neuroscientist studying the visual system.) Standard CFLs flicker at 40 kHz or higher -- yes, that's three orders of magnitude faster than we see, and two orders of magnitude faster than we have evidence that the visual system responds in any fashion at all. Flicker is not an issue for these bulbs when they are working correctly.
That said, I have, personally, experienced failing CFLs that audibly whine. These are clearly no longer working at 40 kHz. I can imagine that two CFLs in the same area might produce beating at a relatively low frequency (either audible or visible). But, also, bear in mind that ultrasonic sound waves alone can produce feelings of distraction and unease.
I suspect that you're experiences are due to something other than just a CFL blub alone, such as beating between two bulbs, or beating between the bulbs and your computer screen (LCD or CRT?), or something else.
Well, they won't flicker, they won't contain mercury, and they won't be too big to fit in many light fixtures.
Even if LEDs aren't any more efficient than current CFLs, they'll be a lot more attractive to people who don't like or can't use fluorescent lights.
Have you actually looked at high-quality CFL bulbs? A good daylight bulb is a thing of beauty. No flicker (and, you know, CFL bulbs have never had flicker because they are run at much, much higher frequencies than you visual sytem can see), proper color balance, small, reliable, quiet.
Note that I'm not talking about the two or four foot long fluorescent bulbs that you might have in your office. Those are probably not daylight balanced and probably flicker at 120 Hz (yes, 120 Hz, not 60 Hz, because both half cycles push current; unless you're in part of the world which runs on 50 Hz mains, in which case they flicker at 100 Hz). Their ballasts also have a tendency to buzz.
Good CFLs are wonderful.
Note, also, that many LED bulbs you can get these days are simply awful because they flicker at 60 Hz (yes, 60 Hz, because they're arranged in cascading diode fashion and only conduct on every other half cycle) and the phosphors are terrible. They also lose brightness at an astonishing rate and are horribly temperature sensitive (hotter chip, lower light output). The 60 Hz issue can certainly be fixed with better circuitry (ie, bridge rectifiers and some low-pass filtering) and one hopes that the phosphors and lifetime improve.
Wait, phosphors in an LED? What am I smoking? Yes, it's true, most white LED bulbs for sale are actually UV emitters that excite phosphors. And just like fluorescents, the better the phosphors, the better the output spectrum. While it is possible to generate white-ish light from a combination of red, blue, and green LEDs, because the aging curves are different for the three classes of emitters, the color balance is dynamic over the bulb lifetime. And, also, the spectrum is terrible -- even the spectrum from fluorescents is better -- because it's essentially three isolated wavelengths instead of a continuous spectrum.
LEDs have a long, long way to go before they can be used in living or working spaces.
I wholly agree, and find that Conway's "Perl Best Practices" does an excellent job of just this, for people who are writing Perl. In the book, Conway goes through a number of different options and describes why they're just bad ideas, arguing mostly from a maintenance and clarity perspective, and cogently suggests superior options.
Let's see a state with an Amazon distribution center tax it, and then let's see Amazon.com close it down. That which happened to Ohio and Michigan, will happen again.
Absolutely. Amazon is big enough that it can dictate terms to the states where it resides. Say Amazon has a distribution center in, oh, Nevada (no clue if this is true or not), and Nevada decides to start imposing sales tax on Amazon. Do you think Amazon would blink before moving if, say, Colorado (again made-up scenario), were to offer them massive tax incentives? Do you think that Colorado wouldn't jump at the opportunity to land a business like Amazon?
Why would Colorado be hypothetically interested in my speculative scenario? Because having Amazon in their state creates (a) direct local jobs at Amazon itself, and (b) indirect jobs at other companies because of the increased services necessary to run Amazon, both of which (c) boost the local economy, giving (d) the state legislators massive bragging rights to their constituents.
States that are trying to tax Amazon will have rude awakenings when their neighbors realize the opportunity it creates.
That said, if the US Federal government passes legislation requiring on-line retailers to charge local tax according to recipient address, it might be very difficult for Amazon to wiggle out of that. Unless, of course, they move entirely to Canada. It's a dangerous game to piss-off large companies.
A number of other posters have suggested this answer, but I wanted to emphasize it.
You are lucky enough to have a massive, desirable resource that is underutilized while we are in the midst of an academic funding environment which has been called the worst ever for supporting basic and applied research. You, as an academician, have an unwritten duty to help other academicians, and so rather than think of geeky ways to mess around with your new toy, why not share your wealth?
Here are the advantages:
1. You can wrangle additional publications out of it by being an author on published papers by providing sufficient support. Publications are the lifeblood of academics.
2. You can use it to leverage improved relations (or establish relations) with other departments within your university, or across universities. This might not seem like it would be worth much to you, but it will be impressive to your supervisors and department heads (they can take credit for it), and will make you look good in their eyes.
3. You can leverage it to good-news PR. University administrations love good PR. Talk to your PR department. Involve your department.
4. You can do good in the world.
I, personally, run an analysis of neural recordings every so often using Matlab that takes about a week on a reasonably modern dual-core system. It sure would be nice to have that finish in 1/500 as much time! There are about 20 or so researchers who are doing work like mine, and none of them, to my knowledge, are using a high-performance computing environment to analyze their data. It just isn't within their means. I'm not talking about some esoteric, arcane basic science research (although I'm a huge, huge proponent of that), but helping the paralyzed to walk again.
if there is anything science teaches us, it is that we are not the center of everything
I'd put that one further:... we are not the center of anything except our egos. We live on an ordinary rock in a middling orbit around a slightly-less-massive-than-normal star in a cluster of ordinary stars in an ordinary arm of an ordinary galaxy that is unremarkable amongst its billions of brethren. Nothing special here!
With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work, why are journals such an important part of academic research?
Ease of accessibility is orthogonal to the question of what the role of academic journals is in modern society. Journals perform one basic service: vetting. The more prestigious the journal, the more exacting the vetting (and, nominally, the converse is true). There are journals which accept well under 30% of submissions. It is entirely based on reputation, and the only way of developing reputation is to have a long, consistent history of certain behaviors. Journals, good ones at least, publish high-quality work.
In what field does the appearance of a printed article mean certain obsolescence? Certainly none of the ones I'm familiar with, consider publishing in, and read on a regular basis.
Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,...
While the reviewing process can be slow in some cases, the mean time to publishing for most high-quality academic journals is (warning, purely subjective experience:) under a year. What journals are routinely taking over two years from initial submission to appearing in print? I'm not personally aware of any that take this long.
and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain.
Difficult? In what way? If you have a subscription, journals go out of their way to make it easy to get copies of the articles. In fact, journals make it easy to access the abstracts so as to entice you to purchase the content. If you are an academician, you likely have an affiliation with an institution that would already have a subscription. If you work in industry, the cost of purchasing an article shouldn't be prohibitive. Google Scholar in addition to a wide variety of indexing services make it nearly trivial to find out about articles. With the new NIH mandate that any NIH-funded research must be publicly available after one year, nearly all biologically-related research will be free and easy. I smell a troll.
Does this hinder technological advancement?
I cannot imagine anyone would think that technological advancement (the fact that the OP does not say "scientific" advancement is perhaps a sign that the whole posting is a troll) has been held back appreciably over the last 50 years.
There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?
Such as? I'm not familiar with any. Peer review and journal publication are symbiotic. Or did you think that the Slashdot model is peer review? It's definitely related (I've had discussions about Slashdot with editors of PLoS and Nature which, I suspect, influenced their earlier implementation of community review).
What do they offer our society?
This is a troll.
Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
No, as other responders have written, journals are gatekeepers to the permanent record of what is considered to be high-quality knowledge. You don't hear criticisms about accuracy levied at Nature and Science the way you do at Wikipedia, and while there are occasional retractions, the top journals are well-regarded because they are, in large part, careful. That said, one way of evaluating academic productivity is to measure publication rate. But then, one way of evaluating business productivity is to measure quarterly profit. Both are good, and both are incomplete unless you consider other factors as well.
On the whole, the questions posed in this posting are all somewhere between just naive and outright trolls.
Did you read TFA? They had to work very hard, all night long to maintain their redirected pages, cycling through 50 different (presumably free) hosting accounts, repeatedly moving the DNS entry. They could have just given back the registration, but instead they worked for hours to maintain the disruption, going without or sleeping very little. That sounds like evidence of intent to cause harm. But, if the quote in the Wired article is genuine, there is no question about it being intentional harm with wide impact, and therefore terrorism: "Comcast is just a huge corporation, and we wanted to take them out, and we did."
That was hardly a "harmless hack". There is a lot of money tied to that domain and when it's down, it's a serious problem for a lot of people. That said, I agree that charging them as cyber-terrorists would be severe overkill. And if they had been from China, Iran, Pakistan, or Syria, would you still think the same thing? It was a terrorist attack intended to disrupt a major part of the infrastructure, period. If these two are indeed guilty as accused, they should be charged and punished appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
And considering the 16th century microscopes had but one lens and no artifical light sources, you won't find anything similar to that in a modern day lab.
http://www.az-microscope.on.ca/history.htm
Except, perhaps, a hand-held magnifying lens!
Your list left off a few important advances ...
SEM vs TEM (you mentioned electron microscope, but they're very different beasts)
Darkfield microscopes.
Atomic force microscopes.
Tomographic microscopes (although I suppose confocals are as good an example of this class as any)
X-ray diffraction microscopes.
Gigapixel microscopes (very new approaches to making high resolution images that span macroscopic dimensions).
Serial electron microscopes.
Near-field optical microscopes.
And probably more that I'm forgetting. There has been amazing progress in instrument building!
It's "Caltech", not "Cal Tech".
Yes, exactly. I'm an alumnus. Often when I say, "it's Caltech, not Cal Tech," people look at me funny. By way of explanation, I carry on, "it's a private institution, not part of the UC system." If they continue to have crossed eyes, then, "look, Berkley is Cal Berkley because it's really the University of California at Berkley, Davis is Cal Davis because it's the University of California at Davis, and the same is true for for UCLA, UCSF, UC Irvine, UCSB, etc., but Caltech is the California Institute of Technology, not part of the UC system." By this time, they've either walked away, or have written me off as a total loon, but the point has been made: Caltech, not Cal Tech.
Slashdot editors, please take note.
An increasing number of displays nowadays have wide aspect ratios. On such screens, there's plenty of horizontal space, but vertical space can be at a premium. It's hard to see why anyone with a wide display would not want the toolbar to be vertical...
Exactly my thinking.
When I started doing typesetting in earnest (mid-to-late 1980s), TeX was the only way to go. Other programs to do typesetting didn't hyphenate correctly or use ligatures, forget take care of widows and orphans. Since then, I've typeset probably three shelf-feet of material, what with course notes, papers, technical notes, talks, abstracts, resumes, conference proceedings, academic theses, books, etc. Along the way, I have built a solid and rich set of macros.
Slowly, slowly, the consumer-level tools have approached doing as good a job as TeX did 20 years ago.
If there's one area where the TeX typesetting model falls down, it's that it contains a deep assumption that the page is blank. Thus making text flow around objects (like images or figures) that do not span the entire horizontal extent is difficult. More modern typesetting tools deal with this much, much better.
One thing that the KDE developers and testers seem to be not paying attention to is having the toolbar on one of the vertical edges of the screen.
This is my preferred location (the reasons why aren't important, but it makes far more sense to me to put the tool bar there).
None of the KDE screenshots show this location. Few of them even show the toolbar at the top of the screen. While it is possible to put the toolbar on a vertical edge with KDE 4.0 (haven't tried with 4.1), it is horribly buggy and ultimately unusable.
This was not the case with KDE 3 where the vertical placement worked fine, and elements like the pager and clock were well adaptable to the new location. Elements that in KDE 4 are really, really broken with a vertical toolbar.
It seems with KDE 4, we've taken a large step backward in design.
Dan doesn't seem to know much about batteries. Check out batter power discharge curves and such...
http://www.mpoweruk.com/performance.htm Remaining power is estimated based on the charge of the battery. If you notice on those graphs, when you get out to the end of the stored charge, it drops off very quickly, which is why the gauge goes from half to empty quickly.
Those curves are for a new, single cell.
If the battery charge meter precipitously drops on a not-so-new multi-cell battery (most laptop batteries are multi-cell), it is more likely indicative of a failed cell within the battery.
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity.
I'm a hard-core TeX user. Not a LaTeX user (sorry, I disagree violently with Leslie Lamport's aesthetics, and the code just isn't solid enough), but a TeX user.
Although TeX may be at times frustrating, there are two things that I know to be true, and provide comfort:
1. Although there may be opacity in the system, logic and rationality pervades its design, so that, given sufficient time and effort, I can understand exactly what, how, and why something works or does not work the way it does. This is huge. I will never, ever, understand many of the operational choices in OpenOffice and Word because they are not based on a rational, logical framework, leading to the impression that they are both horribly idiosyncratic.
2. TeX is bug free. If text isn't laying out the way I want it to, it's because my code is not correct, not because there's some problem with TeX. In contrast, I've lost track of the number of bugs I've seen in OO and Word.
You can, and should, clamor that LaTeX is not bug free. It isn't, and very often the packages distributed for it are riddled with bugs. The IEEE Transactions class is one, embarrassing, example. But then, if you roll your own packages, like me, you have no one else to blame when they don't work correctly, and can take comfort that when they do, you've done a good job and your documents are beautiful.
The biggest problem with any of the WYSIWYG editors I've used (and, having typeset two conference proceedings that solicited contributions in LaTeX and Word, I've seen many and varied instances of this) is that the settings are not explicitly represented in the visible document, and so become hidden and often missed. If you aren't careful, it's very easy to have one paragraph appear in a slightly different font than the next, or to have one stretch of lines be ragged right and the rest be fully justified, or have the hyphenation settings change from one portion of the document to the next. It's horrible, and fixing this is a royal pain. Having explicit formatting within a compiler paradigm is the only way to go when producing professional quality documents.
I agree. It fits well with one of the basic unwritten tenets at MIT which is to make the world a better place. MIT has spent an incredible amount of money and human effort to create excellent curricula in many fields. Sharing this work with whomever wants it helps everyone, including MIT.
Sure, Stanford is great, as is CMU, and a handful of other places. But MIT has a global reputation for excellence second to none for a reason.
EGAD, man, that's brilliant! Someone with points, please mod the parent up!
My last name on Google produces over ten thousand results (prolific family, I guess), some of which are not so obscure (eg, my brother runs a major web site, my research has appeared in The Economist, on the AP wire, and other international news outlets, our mother has published a large handful of scientific papers, our father designed one of the now-standard architectures for multipliers that appears in numerous textbooks, and we have half a dozen or so patents between us). On Cuil, there are no results. None. Zero.
Cuil's lying about indexing more pages than Google in one way or another. Either they aren't in fact indexing that many, an outright lie, or they have indexed them, but can't do anything with that information, a lie of omission.
Cuil's image-with-each-hit idea is cute, but personally, I find it to be fluff. Give me text-only when I want information, images-only when I want images. Forcing a pairing makes it look like USAToday, rather than an information source.
It turns out that measuring hearing sensitivity is more challenging than one might initially imagine. I've worked in a lab at Caltech were some of the researchers worried about this and, well, I was surprised at how difficult it is to get accurate data. And at how easily we can be fooled by uncontrolled, informal experiments, like listening to a YouTube audio track processed through an unknown signal stream, played under non-ideal conditions through consumer-grade equipment.
If you've had your hearing tested in an audiology lab, then, assuming they did a proper job of putting you in an anechoic chamber and had blinded staircase tests with calibrated drivers, and they said that you had extended upper-range sensitivity, I'd be more inclined to believe that you're hearing 19 kHz. (It turns out I just had my hearing tested this past week, and although my hearing was normal at 9 kHz, they didn't bother testing anything higher; I was a bit disappointed by this.)
Although it is certainly possible to find a 34 year old able to hear 19 kHz, it is far more likely you're hearing an aliased tone at a lower frequency.
AWith the tone and sample rate I used (19kHz and 44.1k) at least the high quality encoder whistles at, some other frequency. Sounds like somewhere less than 10kHz to me.
Like, say, 3.05 kHz? That's what one would expect from a non-linear mixing of the sampling frequency and the signal you've injected. There are so many potential sources for non-linear mixing that it's hard to start a meaningful list, but here goes: gain control, compression, resampling, clipping, aliasing, unintentional digital-to-analog-to-digital conversions, non-idealities in the audio driver amplifier, etc. The problem could originate at your end when you created the audio stream, at the far end when they normalized it, at the near end during playback, etc. And that's just off the top of my head.
But, non-linear mixing between the signal and sampling rate is probably the culprit.
FWIW, I can hear 19 kHz waves. So this trade-off affects me.
You won't hear 19 kHz much longer. Seriously, not because of this or any other particular factor (although there are many), but because everyone experiences upper-range hearing loss as they get older, and it starts at an astonishingly early age.
The OP forgot that the MIT curriculum -- the lectures themselves -- are already largely available. The course materials for nearly two thousand courses at MIT are available here:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
So are all of the lectures from an experiment in Computer Science education that predates MIT's open courseware, http://aduni.org/ .
I have 1940 radios with the original electrolytics in them and they work just fine.
I do as well! I get a big kick out of them. But I have many more radios with electrolytics that have failed with messy results. We all should recall the recent motherboard debacle where inferior-grade electrolytics were used that affected even IBM's desktop computers.
But I've also known (or, ahem, have caused) tantalums to fail. When I've been able to discern what went wrong, it's never been the case that my father's rule of thumb was used. My saying this is anecdotal, but my father's designs have been manufactured to thousands of instruments and while there have been failures in the field, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have been due to tantalum caps dying.
(Another plug for my dad's engineering: the instruments he designed are used for EPA-mandated monitoring of atmospheric pollution -- any Slashdot readers in places like Los Angeles who get daily reports of air quality predictions on their local news are getting data that originated in his designs. But here's the plug: I once met an EPA inspector at a party. Her job was to go around to the trailers around the metropolitan area where these instruments are installed and verify that they were working correctly. She said, "[company name]'s instruments are great! They're always working!" She didn't, yet, know that my dad had designed them, and it was cool to get unbiased feedback like that.)
Tantalums have a bad reputation for unreliability. They are less forgiving to overvoltage than electrolytics. My father, who designs some of the most reliable instrumentation I've seen anywhere (he estimates a 30-year lifetime for his devices, and that's with 100% duty cycle, continuous use), derates tantalum capacitors by a factor of 2 and has no problems with them failing. (Eg, if you have a max expected voltage of 5 V, use a tantalum that's rated at for at least 10 V.) Electrolytics, on the other hand, have well-known lifetime issues, even when run conservatively, because the electrolytic chemistry is inherently corrosive.
High quality CFLs have a CRI of at least 98; 95 CRI is not what I, personally, consider high quality.
I cannot speak to the CFLs you have unless you want to share more details about them, but, in general, CFLs do not flicker anything near the frequencies humans can see. Traditional flicker fusion frequency, although highly dependent on factors like overall illumination, color saturation, and contrast, is about 30 Hz, give-or-take. There is, however, a large body of evidence that even higher order visual areas can be entrained at 135 Hz, although, mostly, we don't see anything much above 80 Hz in normal everyday life. (I am a neuroscientist studying the visual system.) Standard CFLs flicker at 40 kHz or higher -- yes, that's three orders of magnitude faster than we see, and two orders of magnitude faster than we have evidence that the visual system responds in any fashion at all. Flicker is not an issue for these bulbs when they are working correctly.
That said, I have, personally, experienced failing CFLs that audibly whine. These are clearly no longer working at 40 kHz. I can imagine that two CFLs in the same area might produce beating at a relatively low frequency (either audible or visible). But, also, bear in mind that ultrasonic sound waves alone can produce feelings of distraction and unease.
I suspect that you're experiences are due to something other than just a CFL blub alone, such as beating between two bulbs, or beating between the bulbs and your computer screen (LCD or CRT?), or something else.
Well, they won't flicker, they won't contain mercury, and they won't be too big to fit in many light fixtures.
Even if LEDs aren't any more efficient than current CFLs, they'll be a lot more attractive to people who don't like or can't use fluorescent lights.
Have you actually looked at high-quality CFL bulbs? A good daylight bulb is a thing of beauty. No flicker (and, you know, CFL bulbs have never had flicker because they are run at much, much higher frequencies than you visual sytem can see), proper color balance, small, reliable, quiet.
Note that I'm not talking about the two or four foot long fluorescent bulbs that you might have in your office. Those are probably not daylight balanced and probably flicker at 120 Hz (yes, 120 Hz, not 60 Hz, because both half cycles push current; unless you're in part of the world which runs on 50 Hz mains, in which case they flicker at 100 Hz). Their ballasts also have a tendency to buzz.
Good CFLs are wonderful.
Note, also, that many LED bulbs you can get these days are simply awful because they flicker at 60 Hz (yes, 60 Hz, because they're arranged in cascading diode fashion and only conduct on every other half cycle) and the phosphors are terrible. They also lose brightness at an astonishing rate and are horribly temperature sensitive (hotter chip, lower light output). The 60 Hz issue can certainly be fixed with better circuitry (ie, bridge rectifiers and some low-pass filtering) and one hopes that the phosphors and lifetime improve.
Wait, phosphors in an LED? What am I smoking? Yes, it's true, most white LED bulbs for sale are actually UV emitters that excite phosphors. And just like fluorescents, the better the phosphors, the better the output spectrum. While it is possible to generate white-ish light from a combination of red, blue, and green LEDs, because the aging curves are different for the three classes of emitters, the color balance is dynamic over the bulb lifetime. And, also, the spectrum is terrible -- even the spectrum from fluorescents is better -- because it's essentially three isolated wavelengths instead of a continuous spectrum.
LEDs have a long, long way to go before they can be used in living or working spaces.
I wholly agree, and find that Conway's "Perl Best Practices" does an excellent job of just this, for people who are writing Perl. In the book, Conway goes through a number of different options and describes why they're just bad ideas, arguing mostly from a maintenance and clarity perspective, and cogently suggests superior options.
Let's see a state with an Amazon distribution center tax it, and then let's see Amazon.com close it down. That which happened to Ohio and Michigan, will happen again.
Absolutely. Amazon is big enough that it can dictate terms to the states where it resides. Say Amazon has a distribution center in, oh, Nevada (no clue if this is true or not), and Nevada decides to start imposing sales tax on Amazon. Do you think Amazon would blink before moving if, say, Colorado (again made-up scenario), were to offer them massive tax incentives? Do you think that Colorado wouldn't jump at the opportunity to land a business like Amazon?
Why would Colorado be hypothetically interested in my speculative scenario? Because having Amazon in their state creates (a) direct local jobs at Amazon itself, and (b) indirect jobs at other companies because of the increased services necessary to run Amazon, both of which (c) boost the local economy, giving (d) the state legislators massive bragging rights to their constituents.
States that are trying to tax Amazon will have rude awakenings when their neighbors realize the opportunity it creates.
That said, if the US Federal government passes legislation requiring on-line retailers to charge local tax according to recipient address, it might be very difficult for Amazon to wiggle out of that. Unless, of course, they move entirely to Canada. It's a dangerous game to piss-off large companies.
A number of other posters have suggested this answer, but I wanted to emphasize it.
You are lucky enough to have a massive, desirable resource that is underutilized while we are in the midst of an academic funding environment which has been called the worst ever for supporting basic and applied research. You, as an academician, have an unwritten duty to help other academicians, and so rather than think of geeky ways to mess around with your new toy, why not share your wealth?
Here are the advantages:
1. You can wrangle additional publications out of it by being an author on published papers by providing sufficient support. Publications are the lifeblood of academics.
2. You can use it to leverage improved relations (or establish relations) with other departments within your university, or across universities. This might not seem like it would be worth much to you, but it will be impressive to your supervisors and department heads (they can take credit for it), and will make you look good in their eyes.
3. You can leverage it to good-news PR. University administrations love good PR. Talk to your PR department. Involve your department.
4. You can do good in the world.
I, personally, run an analysis of neural recordings every so often using Matlab that takes about a week on a reasonably modern dual-core system. It sure would be nice to have that finish in 1/500 as much time! There are about 20 or so researchers who are doing work like mine, and none of them, to my knowledge, are using a high-performance computing environment to analyze their data. It just isn't within their means. I'm not talking about some esoteric, arcane basic science research (although I'm a huge, huge proponent of that), but helping the paralyzed to walk again.
if there is anything science teaches us, it is that we are not the center of everything
... we are not the center of anything except our egos. We live on an ordinary rock in a middling orbit around a slightly-less-massive-than-normal star in a cluster of ordinary stars in an ordinary arm of an ordinary galaxy that is unremarkable amongst its billions of brethren. Nothing special here!
I'd put that one further:
With the ability to get information anywhere in the world in seconds, and the virtually immediate obsolescence of any printed work, why are journals such an important part of academic research?
...
Ease of accessibility is orthogonal to the question of what the role of academic journals is in modern society. Journals perform one basic service: vetting. The more prestigious the journal, the more exacting the vetting (and, nominally, the converse is true). There are journals which accept well under 30% of submissions. It is entirely based on reputation, and the only way of developing reputation is to have a long, consistent history of certain behaviors. Journals, good ones at least, publish high-quality work.
In what field does the appearance of a printed article mean certain obsolescence? Certainly none of the ones I'm familiar with, consider publishing in, and read on a regular basis.
Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
While the reviewing process can be slow in some cases, the mean time to publishing for most high-quality academic journals is (warning, purely subjective experience:) under a year. What journals are routinely taking over two years from initial submission to appearing in print? I'm not personally aware of any that take this long.
and the information is very difficult (or expensive) to obtain.
Difficult? In what way? If you have a subscription, journals go out of their way to make it easy to get copies of the articles. In fact, journals make it easy to access the abstracts so as to entice you to purchase the content. If you are an academician, you likely have an affiliation with an institution that would already have a subscription. If you work in industry, the cost of purchasing an article shouldn't be prohibitive. Google Scholar in addition to a wide variety of indexing services make it nearly trivial to find out about articles. With the new NIH mandate that any NIH-funded research must be publicly available after one year, nearly all biologically-related research will be free and easy. I smell a troll.
Does this hinder technological advancement?
I cannot imagine anyone would think that technological advancement (the fact that the OP does not say "scientific" advancement is perhaps a sign that the whole posting is a troll) has been held back appreciably over the last 50 years.
There are certainly other venues for peer review, so why journals?
Such as? I'm not familiar with any. Peer review and journal publication are symbiotic. Or did you think that the Slashdot model is peer review? It's definitely related (I've had discussions about Slashdot with editors of PLoS and Nature which, I suspect, influenced their earlier implementation of community review).
What do they offer our society?
This is a troll.
Are they just a way to evaluate the productivity of professors?"
No, as other responders have written, journals are gatekeepers to the permanent record of what is considered to be high-quality knowledge. You don't hear criticisms about accuracy levied at Nature and Science the way you do at Wikipedia, and while there are occasional retractions, the top journals are well-regarded because they are, in large part, careful. That said, one way of evaluating academic productivity is to measure publication rate. But then, one way of evaluating business productivity is to measure quarterly profit. Both are good, and both are incomplete unless you consider other factors as well.
On the whole, the questions posed in this posting are all somewhere between just naive and outright trolls.
Did you read TFA? They had to work very hard, all night long to maintain their redirected pages, cycling through 50 different (presumably free) hosting accounts, repeatedly moving the DNS entry. They could have just given back the registration, but instead they worked for hours to maintain the disruption, going without or sleeping very little. That sounds like evidence of intent to cause harm. But, if the quote in the Wired article is genuine, there is no question about it being intentional harm with wide impact, and therefore terrorism: "Comcast is just a huge corporation, and we wanted to take them out, and we did."