I'm not entirely sure most high schools know what math is, either. Or science in general.
Exactly. This isn't a problem specific to computer science. Every subject taught at the high-school level will be hugely disconnected from what that field actually is. High-school math classes are not "real math" (solving theorems, etc.), they are really just practicing with some basic mathematical tools and tricks, some of which are useful in real life, some of which are necessary (but not sufficient) for studying deeper mathematical topics, and some of which are just busywork.
High-school history classes involve memorizing history factoids, without much learning about how to think critically about the historical record or how to do original research. Physics classes are about plugging values into simple formula, in order to get comfortable with the notion of explaining complex real-world phenomena analytically... but what high school students learn/do is of course a pale imitation of "real physics". Computer classes in high school are no different.
It would probably make sense to call high-school classes about keyboarding and using software "computer classes" and not "computer science classes". (Are there high schools that actually use the term "Computer Science"? That's not been my experience.) Similarly you could pedantically insist that in high school the classes be called "Basic Arithmetic Computation Training" instead of "Math" and so on. But really what should be happening is:
1. Reform high-school level classes, to the extent possible, so that they actually delve into subjects rather than just teaching them in a rote fashion. Obviously there are limits to what you can cover at the high-school level, but wherever possible students should be exposed to the deeper concepts, formalisms, and strategies of a field. (Crucially: even if they don't understand it at first! You typically have to learn a non-trivial subject a few times before you truly understand it.)
2. Have some information in high school classes about what work in a given field is 'really like'. It's fine (even necessary) to teach keyboarding in high school. But at least describe to students what a "real" computer programmer and computer scientist do. Give them a hint of what the fields are "really like".
Of course this is easier said than done. Typically a high-school level educator will not have any experience with what that field is "really like" and so they are not really able to give a good description of either the deep understanding of the field or what the day-to-day work in that field is like.
There are advantages to these "do it in the cloud" ideas, though. Google's promoting of Chrome OS makes the advantages clear: you can access your documents from anywhere, you don't need to worry about your current device getting lost/stolen/damaged/corrupted, because all your important data has been copied off of the computer. No need to worry about installing applications or keeping them secure and up-to-date, since web-apps take care of that for you. And so on...
What I'm not so sure about is if this is really the best possible implementation of the "store it in the cloud" concept. Google's design seems to be: have all the documents and applications in the cloud, and download the minimum necessary to your local computer to get your work done. The disadvantages have been pointed out many times: lack of net connection makes getting anything done painful or impossible (even with some amount of local caching, it doesn't work that well), latency of the network slows down application performance, third-party has full access to all your data. And so on...
It seems like a better model would be to continue to use your local computer for data and storage and running applications, but have the computer synchronize all files to "somewhere in the cloud" on a very routine basis (like, every time you save a document or the application auto-saves). Other computer you authorize then synchronize from the cloud, as needed. The copy in the cloud can be encrypted, so only you have access to your sensitive data. Applications could actually work similarly: your computer synchronizes a list of installed applications and settings, so that other computers have access to the same work environment. At its most basic, this is probably what most geeks already do: organize files on their computer but have some offsite backup location. One could package the whole thing up so that it is much more slick and automated. In my opinion this would be have almost all of the advantages of Google's offering, without the drawbacks (a lack of a net connection just delays the backup-sync; you can still work normally).
My point is that the ideas of "in the cloud" are not bad. They are good ideas. The problem is that the implementations are not the best. Obviously companies have more to gain in terms of data mining (by having access to your data) and lock-in (by hosting the closed-source applications for you) by doing it their way... But hopefully we will see more competing efforts (Ubuntu One might be a step towards that...).
The analogy has some flaws, though. Traffic is a problem, so you build more roads/lanes, so more people buy cars and commute (because there are more roads/lanes!) and so congestion remains a problem. However, there is a point at which you build enough roads/lanes/bridges that the traffic problem would actually be solved. The problem with roads is that they take up space, which is a very finite resource, so there are very hard limits on how much we can expand them. In practice the number of roads required for no one to ever hit traffic would be ridiculous.
Now think about network traffic. There is a similar problem: the network is congested, you add capacity, users realize this and consume more, and the new network is still congested. But notice two important things:
1. The network may still be "as" congested (100% usage), but each user is now getting a lot more data through. So it's not like the situation hasn't improved. It's still congested, but people are getting more data/utility out of the network. The added capacity wasn't wasted: people are using it. That's good.
2. Unlike for roads, we are nowhere near the practical physical limits of adding capacity. There are monetary challenges, of course, but we're not running out of places to put fiber-optic cables. Doubling the size of the current buried cables wouldn't bother anyone, and the costs are manageable. (Imagine if it were that painless to double the capacity of highways; we'd do it in a heartbeat.)
Network congestion is not an unsolvable problem. Just add capacity. The only limit right now is money. Companies have no incentive to put money into infrastructure, consumers don't have enough options to "vote with their wallet", and government dropped the ball with respect to oversight on the subsidies they've given out.
One thing worth looking into are the desks sold by AnthroCart. They can address some of the points you mentioned (power availability, ergonomics,...).
AnthroCarts are not cheap, but they are solid, can carry substantial weight, and will last a long time. They are also modular: you can buy more pieces to extend them (adding shelves, etc.), or alter the height of shelves if necessary. Most of the pieces are on wheels (with locks) which is perfect for a workspace with constantly changing projects (need the wiring station in another room? Just roll it there.). You can also buy power bars that integrate directly to the Anthro desks/tables, so that all your equipment stays plugged in but is easy to move around. Many of the models also have adjustable-height work surfaces, which is great for adjusting keyboard height or moving the work surface as needed...
No, I don't work for them. Just a happy customer. The downsides are the cost and that assembly takes longer than other furniture (because they use things like actual screws instead of crappy quick-connect pieces).
Good points. (Relatedly, see this TED talk about how the fashion industry thrives despite lack of copyright protection.) Let's think about various things that can and cannot be copyrighted (many examples taken from that TED talk):
Creative things that cannot be copyrighted:
-Recipes, cooking styles and techniques, etc.
-"Look and feel" of food
-Fashion/jewelery/etc.
-Furniture
-Sculptural design of vehicles
-Magic tricks, jokes, etc.
-Sports techniques/moves/plays/strategies
-Fireworks displays
-Hairstyles
-Smells/perfumes
-Rules of games
Creative things that can be copyrighted:
-Pictures/photos/etc.
-Movies/video/etc.
-Books/essays/etc.
-Software
-Music/musical scores/sound recordings/etc.
-Choreography
-Sculptures
-Architecture
From these lists we can infer a few things. Firstly, it should be clear that the usual heuristic rules people carry around about copyright are not reflected in the laws. Those who defend copyright often talk in terms of an artist's "right" to control their work, yet clearly there are many artistic endeavors in the first list that go without protection. Similarly discussion about artistic incentives seem strange, given that some creative acts are afforded the incentive of copyright and others are not.
Which brings us to the second thing worth noting. Do the protected acts (second list) generate far more valuable creativity/art than the first? It can be very difficult to measure the impact and importance of creative work. (For what it's worth, the economic activity associated with the unprotected items dwarfs the protected ones.) So let's consider an easier question: Is there a lack of creative output for non-protected art (first list)? The answer is pretty clear: despite a lack of legal protection against copying, the activities in the unprotected list are vibrant, interesting, innovative, and rapidly advancing. Despite the lack of protection/incentive (arguably, because of it) these industries create interesting new products, artists devote themselves to inspiring works, and large sectors of the economy grow as a result.
So the question becomes: considering that we have ample evidence that many creative activities can thrive without protection, what is the justification for copyright protection? I do agree that there are some differences between the lists (e.g. it's trivially easy nowadays to copy music, whereas copying a hairstyle requires more effort and a skilled craftsperson to do the work each time). But even in cases of very close analogy (photographers claim they need protection for prints of their work; meanwhile the fashion industry has found a way to stay relevant without protection, even though they are just selling a style/look/etc. that others can and to copy).
I think there are many examples where creativity thrives without copyright. That doesn't mean that copyright isn't a good idea (maybe creativity thrives even more when protected?), but it does mean we should be very suspicious of simplistic arguments that claim creativity/art wouldn't exist in a world without restrictions on copying.
Media reports also love to conflate "we've uncovered the root cause of X to be Y" with "X is not the person's fault--it's the fault of Y".
The problem with this logic is that, unless you believe in the supernatural (e.g. souls), every single action a person takes is ultimately understandable in terms of causative factors (genetics, childhood, upbringing, opportunity, diet, exercise, lifestyle, job, friends, etc.). This is just a generalization of our understanding that everything in the universe has a cause that can in principle be understood, though of course in practice many systems are so complex that they are intractable. (Again, unless you subscribe to a not-logically-consistent worldview.)
Such thinking of course raises serious questions about "free will", and while that is an excellent topic for philosophy debates, we need to acknowledge that for things like morality, justice, law, and social order to have any meaning at all, we must accept that people are responsible for their actions, even though those actions have, of course, root causes that are ultimately external to the person in question. I'm not saying it's obvious where to draw the line between "not their fault" and "their fault"... What I am saying is that using something crude like "we've found a gene/chemical/influence that causes/increases-the-incidence-of/predisposes action X" as the dividing line for responsibility is ridiculous, since the inexorable march of science is just going to put more and more behavior into that category as time goes on.
So, please, please, please... mainstream media, get over your silly fallacy that explanation negates responsibility.
Yes, you can probably use an anonymous proxy and/or randomly scrambling your device's external signature (MAC address, browser string, response time, etc.) in order to make it harder to track you.
What I wonder is if companies will start differentiating between "good consumers" and "bad consumers". Right now we have access to many services because of an implicit agreement: "I'll let you access the site but you'll see some ads". But if they have a very fine-grained way to determine what consumers respond to ads, and what consumers don't respond to ads, that might drastically change this balancing act. In particular, they would just block "bad consumers", meaning anyone who doesn't spend a lot of money in a way correlated to the ads they see. Anyone who tries to hide their behavior using proxies, randomizing their devices, or otherwise making their behavior inconsistent (e.g. swapping devices with other people) will get labeled as "bad".
On the one hand you might say "Great! I won't have to see ads anymore!" But in reality it will mean that any "bad consumer" will just be blocked from any ad-supported site (or maybe just de-prioritized so the site is unbearably slow). Now, it would difficult to condemn such actions: companies have the right to run their site as they see fit. It might also lead to a differentiated Internet, where some people (who are willing to be tracked and who spend "enough" to satisfy advertisers) go to ad-supported sites, and other people (who are "bad consumers") simply pay for access to sites/services without ads. Maybe that would be a good thing (advertising currently hides a lot of costs).
It's something to think about. If the advertisers have sufficiently fine-grained data, they can not only decide what ad to show you, but decide whether you're even worth the effort to give access to the site at all.
I think the point of people who ask "Where is the prototype?" is not so much that they want a physical object to actually exist, but that they want the patent to be specific enough that it applies to a particular real-world instantiation of the concept, and is not an attempt to patent the concept as a whole.
Ideally, a patent is a sort of contract between the inventor and the public. The public (via the government/patent office) says "We will give you the incentive of a temporary monopoly if you publish all the details of your invention, so that everyone can benefit from it after the patent expires." The idea is to both encourage innovation and to release implementation details into the public domain (otherwise everything would be a trade secret and there would be lots of duplicated effort). But that contract is broken when the inventor only releases vague information, not providing the difficult implementation details.
So I don't think the inventor needs to have a physical prototype in his garage. But the patent needs to be sufficiently detailed that someone (either the inventor or someone else) can go off and build a prototype. If it takes tons of additional R&D to go from the patent to something even vaguely useful, then I question whether that patent should have been awarded in the first place, since it didn't contain enough detail to fulfill its end of the contract.
Well an Arduino would not be the right choice if you were building a large run of a commercial product. But we're talking about DIY here. The advantage of using something more powerful and general purpose like an Arduino is:
1. Easier to rapidly prototype, tweak your setup, or add features. (It's faster to re-code your Arduino than to rewire some electronics you soldered.) You can increase the scope/complexity of your project quite easily.
2. If you're already familiar with the Arduino, and have one on-hand, it's faster/easier/cheaper to use that. (Again, not everyone has a box of Arduinos, but the DIY-ers that this tutorial is aimed at may very well have some on-hand.)
3. When you're done with this project, you can remove the Arduino and re-purpose it easily.
Obviously you can make a cheaper/faster/more-efficient sound trigger using equipment more basic and specialized than an Arduino. (You can also build far better toys using dedicated materials rather than Legos.) For playful building/testing/etc. using an Arduino is quite useful. And, yes, there is an advantage to a DIY community ("all the cool kids") settling on a common set of general-purpose tools, since it lets them exchange design plans, code, experience, etc.
Even if this subset is very, very small... it is probably still bigger than the number of people "saved" from terrorist-related deaths by having all this additional onerous security.
It's all about tradeoffs. The fact that these scanners will cause more deaths than they prevent makes them a bad tradeoff. Because terrorism is so rare, most proposed security has too high a burden to be justified. The safeguards that make sense are those that have low burden and don't otherwise increase risk (e.g. reinforced cockpit doors).
But the "per mile" argument is absolutely relevant when assessing the increased number of deaths caused by people opting to drive instead of fly. The danger of flying scales (roughly) with the number of takeoffs and landings that are performed. The danger of driving scales with the number of miles driven. When you look at the actual numbers, it turns out that flying is safer for any distance over which people practically take planes (even for flights of 30 minutes in the air, the number of miles covered is such that driving the same distance would be more dangerous).
So the point is there is a subset of flights for which a person has to make a rational choice: should I go by plane (which is fast in the air but still takes quite awhile because I have to get there early, there is airport security, risk of delays, ground transportation to my final destination on the other end, etc.) or should I go by car (which might take a bit longer but is more fully under my control). As flying becomes more and more annoying, more people will decide to take their car (at least for a certain subset of trips), which will increase the number of deaths overall.
This is a problem. It's also a problem that the radiation from a backscatter x-ray machine increases your odds of dying from cancer. And because terrorist deaths are so rare, it turns out that the scanners will probably increase the number of deaths overall, since they will create more cancer deaths than they can possibly solve by reducing terrorism deaths.
So the scanners increase the death-rate in the US in at least two ways.
Yes, in principle if photons had mass that could lead to something like dark matter.
However, in practice we know this isn't the case. First of all, if photons had mass (and quantum mechanics as we understand is roughly correct), this would modify a whole slew of predictions in all kinds of bizarre ways (down to fundamental things like the number of particles we observe and the stability of matter). Basically, the only way to match all our experimental data is with a massless photon.
Even beyond that, however, the measured distribution of dark matter (which we can infer based on things like galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, large-scale structure in the universe, etc.) does not match the measured distribution of photons (which we can calculate based on the positions of known light-emitters, like stars).
It's a neat idea, but appears not to be the case in our universe.
For the comparison to be fair, you have to take into account the subsidies that the oil industry receives, which are not insubstantial. (In sheer dollar terms, they dwarf the subsidies that go to alternative energies.) Actually most major industrial sectors have managed to lobby for subsidies of one kind or another (whether direct cash or tax breaks).
Also worth noting is that gas has a massive infrastructure currently in place. So even if electric vehicles are cheaper in the long-term, once we reach steady-state (hence a "good idea"), it may be that they are somewhat more expensive in the short-term, as we build up our infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and know-how (things tend to get cheaper as we engineer them better and better). In such cases, the argument for government subsidies is that the government spends a small amount of money in the short-term, subsidizing an industry that will save the populace large amounts of money in the long-term.
You may disagree with that particular analysis, and think that EVs won't be a net gain in the long-term, but saying that good ideas don't need subsidies is short-sighted.
You joke, but I think this pretty much nails it. There's a lot of content out there that is just a bunch of numbers wrapped up in some formulaic sentences. The results of sports games is an obvious example. Analyses of political campaigns might also be amenable. Perhaps even presenting the results from surveys or scientific studies.
The important thing here is that this isn't replacing deep, insightful thoughts and analysis, which still has to be done by a human. If you want a reasoned opinion that pulls together the statistics, external factors (e.g. a player's mind-set or personal life), and adds in some humor, then you're going to want a skilled human doing the writing. But if your interest is more along the lines of "Who won, by how much, and what were the main things that led to them winning (e.g. was it strong offense or good defense)?" then auto-generated content is fine. In fact, as with all aspects of automation, the point is to free up humans from doing the boring, silly tasks, so that they can concentrate on the more important tasks.
After reading some of the auto-generated articles (Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes) I must say I'm quite impressed with how good the content is. Obviously it won't be winning any prizes, but I can't say that it's any worse than human-generated summaries of matches. It goes through the details, throwing in some contextual commentary (e.g. "the underdogs") obviously based on a nice database of stats. What's even better is that the articles also present some of the stats themselves, allowing the reader to skip the writeup and focus on the numbers/graphs if they prefer.
So, frankly, I see this as a good thing. It's a waste of human talent (even mechanical-turk caliber talent) to write a bunch of formulaic summaries when a computer can clearly do a decent job. This lets the humans focus on tasks that are more difficult to automated.
I don't give a crap about tampons, or Roth I.R.As, or some new Genital Wart drug.
You're assuming that targeted advertising means you won't get ads for those kinds of products, since you think you're not interesting in those products. That's not quite true. Advertising dollars do the most good on 'fence-sitters'. Ad dollars are wasted if the person has no interest in the product (e.g. live in an area where it isn't available). But ad dollars are also mostly wasted if the person is already well-versed in a given subject: an expert on CPUs is more difficult to sway with flashy ads. Whereas middle-of-the-road consumers can be strongly affected by ads, often just because of brand recognition.
Example: Let's take your tampon example. When a guy gets a call from his girlfriend telling him to pick up some tampons while he's at the pharmacy, what is he going to buy? Hopefully he'll buy the brand that she likes. But failing that, he'll probably buy the brand that seems the most 'reputable', which basically means the brand he remembers from various commercials. When non-experts buy computers or other electronics, they're going to tend towards the brands they recognize. And so on...
Another aspect of marketing is to create new customers. You may not care about Roth I.R.A.s right now, but there are companies that want you to care, so that they can convert you into a customer. So, the very fact that you don't care about them, and have no particular opinion about them, makes you an ideal target for their advertising. (An expert in such matters is far more difficult to convert via advertising.)
So, just because you think tampon and I.R.A. ads are pointless to you, doesn't mean advertisers think that. In a highly targeted ad situation, you may well see ads for things that you don't (currently) care about.
All this to say that targeted advertising by no means implies "not-annoying" advertising. It's probably better than completely random advertising (there are certainly some classes of products that I don't care about and will never buy)... but it has its own annoyances. Ads, by their nature, are trying to convert your way of thinking, and thus will tend be disruptive and annoying to the target (at least in aggregate; obviously some commercials are fun). Keep in mind that what the advertisers do with their targeting data is not really in your best interest: they will be targeting you with attempts to change your spending patterns; they won't care about annoying/boring you with their ads, so long as there is a (statistical) increase in money being spent on their products.
your efficiency per square foot may be crap, but your square footage can be huge. That's assuming, of course, this stuff ends up being cheap. The manufacturing process should be ultra cheap, but I don't know about producing the solution. It should be a lot cheaper than traditional panels, but will it be cheap enough to make it worth it? That's the question.
That's exactly right. The promise of organic photo-voltaics is that they will be so much cheaper to produce that the lower efficiency won't matter. But one of the harsh realities is that a photo-voltaic setup has certain fixed base costs (think of how much it costs to physically install each 1 m^2 panel, and tie it into a house's electricity system). Thus, according to industry partners, there is actually an efficiently level below which a solar material is not worth using even if it were completely free to produce. So, for organic solar cells to become commercially viable, they need to improve efficiency, even while reducing costs. Of course we're now reaching levels where it is indeed viable to use organic photo-voltaics, see for example Konarka's flexible solar panel that is built into a bag, so that it charges your cellphone; but there is a threshold of efficiency necessary to offset fixed installation costs.
It's transparent because the film has a hexagonal structure - extremely thin (and therefore transparent) at the center of the hexagon, thick (and therefore opaque) at the edges of the hexagons.
Actually it's a little bit more interesting than that. In addition to being thinner at the center, the light-absorbing polymer is not well-ordered (amorphous) in the center region, which leads to it being worse at absorbing light. At the edges of the hexagons, the polymer orders better, which allows it to absorb light more efficiently. This makes the structure more intelligent, in principle: if the honeycomb structure acts as one half of the conduction pathway (necessary for a photo-voltaic), then it makes sense to have the material close to it do the light-absorbing, and have the material further away (center of hexagons) which cannot participate in light harvesting, just be transparent. So this in principle allows one to design more efficient semi-transparent solar cells.
Peeling back the layers of hype a bit, however, these kinds of solar cells are horribly inefficient. The best materials we currently have to make plastic solar-cells ("organic photo-voltaics") have pretty poor efficiency. Making a solar cell that's semi-transparent just makes the efficiency (per unit area) even worse. But, this is fairly fundamental research: by demonstrating that they can tune the light-absorbing capabilities of the polymer based on its ordering (and control ordering by using the honeycomb patterning and preparation parameters), this provides useful information about how to make higher-performance plastic solar-cells. So this research may actually end up being more important for conventional solar cells ('opaque') than it is for window-coating solar-cells or whatever.
P.S.: The materials used in the paper have an absorption maximum at 503 nm (green), so they probably create a purplish tint. The absorption spectrum can be tuned to change the tint, however this will impact the solar collection efficiency.
Disclaimer: Some of the co-authors are colleagues of mine. However I wasn't involved in this work in any way.
Anyone who claims that electric vehicles generate zero pollution is misinformed. However:
1. Electricity doesn't only come from coal. In some places, electricity primarily comes from coal, but in other places, it primarily comes from hydro-electricity or other sources. So, the environmental impact of electric vehicles depends on where the electricity comes from, and it's by no means as simple as saying "all electric vehicles effectively burn coal".
2. By concentrating the polluting aspects of energy-production, it is easier to control. Getting millions of cars to upgrade (or even just maintain) their catalytic converters is a non-starter. Upgrading (or properly maintaining) the scrubbers on a single power plant is more feasible. As new technology enables greener power plants, the entire fleet of electric vehicles benefit.
3. Even if electric vehicles currently rely (partially) on CO2-releasing energy sources (e.g. coal), the long-term possibility is to migrate to other kinds of electricity production. Relying on burning fossil-burns locks one into CO2-releasing infrastructure. However, electric cars immediately 'benefit' from switchovers in the energy grid, as, for instance, more solar-panel and wind-farm sources are added to the grid. Using electricity for intermediate energy storage/transmission, allows us to gradually rebuild our infrastructure to be greener, which softens the switching costs.
4. For fair comparisons, one must also include every part of the chain in both cases. For instance it is true that electric vehicles require extensive mining and manufacturing, and incur transmission losses... but of course the use of fossil fuels requires extensive drilling operations (with associated spills, etc.), refining, and requires transportation (pipelines/tankers/gas-trucks). Each of these steps have variable levels of environmental impact. The intention is of course to have the chain with the lowest impact possible. The two chains are not identical in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, such as transmission losses and the environmental impact of mining materials for batteries. But the idea of investing in electric vehicles now, even though they are not perfect, is to migrate towards an infrastructure where our vehicles have a lesser environmental impact. The end state, where instead of having millions of separate combustion engines, we create power using higher-efficiency power plants (including many that do not generate CO2: nuclear, solar, wind, etc.), is a net gain (even taking into account the impact of transmission losses, mining, etc.).
I wonder if investing in iconic Hollywood paraphernalia is actually a better investment strategy than real estate...
The problem is that these well-publicized stories about massive prices for movie props or other fan items can leave people with the impression that movie props in general have investment value. However what you don't hear about is the massive number of movie props that are totally worthless. Sure, if you can know ahead of time what movies are going to become cult classics, then you can buy up their props or early merchandise for cheap, and sell it decades later at a massive profit. However if you have that kind of prescience then you could probably make even more money investing directly in the movies or in some other market.
The fact is that these high-profile sales represent a vanishing minority compare to all the movie props and movie merchandise that is absolutely worthless. And once items become extremely valuable, they become like many other kinds of art. Yes, they do tend to go up in value over time, so you could buy this costume and try to resell it years later. But the market for resale is quite small and fickle, so the investment is not at all liquid, and the investment is fairly risky. Not a great combination if your intention is to make money. Rich people buy expensive art as status symbols (or because they genuinely like it), they don't make much money from the value of the art appreciating over time. (Yes, there are always exceptions.)
So, no, investing in Hollywood paraphernalia is not a good investment strategy.
Thanks for the link to reticular chemistry. I'll check that out as it seems promising (a lot of self-assembled structures really are too soft and floppy for the high-performance applications they are proposed for).
I'm also pleased you mention XRD since GISAXS/GIXD is the other half of my research program!
Block copolymer self-assembly is an innovative technology capable of patterning technologically relevant substrates with nanoscale precision for a range of applications from integrated circuit fabrication to tissue interfacing, for example. In this article, we demonstrate a microwave-based method of rapidly inducing order in block copolymer structures. The technique involves the usage of a commercial microwave reactor to anneal block copolymer films in the presence of appropriate solvents, and we explore the effect of various parameters over the polymer assembly speed and defect density. The approach is applied to the commonly used poly(styrene)-b-poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS-b-PMMA) and poly(styrene)-b-poly(2-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P2VP) families of block copolymers, and it is found that the substrate resistivity, solvent environment, and anneal temperature all critically influence the self-assembly process. For selected systems, highly ordered patterns were achieved in less than 3 min. In addition, we establish the compatibility of the technique with directed assembly by graphoepitaxy.
Are these co-polymers being use as an organic electronic material say in OLEDS or are they designed so that they have a specific configuration to essentially after assembling they are in the pattern you want them to be?
The dream is to have the block-copolymer blocks be functional. So, say one block is the donor and one the acceptor in an organic photovoltaic. Or the blocks form an OLED as you suggest. Or one block has a sensing element and the other block acts as electrode contacts. Or one block has reaction centers that can be metallized to generate wires.
The current state of the art is more primitive, with the assembled block-copolymer being used as a resist, since the two blocks will have different etch contrast. So in the case of the Toshiba work (Hitachi is working on something similar) the block-copolymer nano-dot pattern was used as a resist to etch into a magnetic layer and thus form magnetic nano-dots with a much higher area-density than could be done with conventional optical lithography (or something similar to that: they have not released full details). We're still not at the stage where we can build something as complex as a transistor using block-copolymers as the resist(s), but we're getting there.
are they designed so that they have a specific configuration to essentially after assembling they are in the pattern you want them to be?
Originally the hype about self-assembly was that the molecules would spontaneously form the devices you want ("Pour the components together in a beaker and a computer pops out!"). I think the field is getting more realistic now, and accepting that self-assembly has to be coupled with other techniques (such as optical lithography to control the larger-scale positioning, or annealing tricks, as in TFA, to direct the assembly) to create fully-functional devices. But self-assembly can still provide a level of nano-control and cost savings compared to more laborious techniques.
As another poster points out, the microwaves are being used as a heat source (not for patterning), instead of oven annealing. It turns out that a microwave can cause the material to assemble much faster than conventional oven annealing, which is pretty exciting.
As for the "Why use self-assembly for lithography?" the basic idea is this: Conventional optical lithography is limited by the diffraction of light (as you mention). So for typical visible-light optical schemes, the best you can do is pattern features on the order of ~100 nm (using a bunch of tricks you can push a bit below this, which the semiconductor industry has done with fantastic results). In self-assembly, you design molecules that spontaneously form nanostructures of a well-defined size. So instead of enforcing a particular size-scale using light and patterning masks (top-down fabrication), you design the required size-scale into the molecules themselves (bottom-up fabrication).
In the work described in TFA, they were using block-copolymers, which are polymers (long chain-like molecules) that are have two chemically-distinct "blocks". So one half of the chain is of one kind of material, and the other half of the chain is another type of material. Like so:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
Because the "A" and "B" subunits don't like each other (they are sufficiently chemically distinct), they want to separate from one another (like oil and water not mixing). But because they are bound to one another using a covalent bond (the "-" in my diagram), they can't fully separate, and instead form nano-structures with a size-scale dictated by the length of the A and B blocks. So you can control the size using the lengths of the blocks, control the segregation using the chemistry of the two blocks, and control the morphology (the structures that form) using the ratio of the A block length to the B block length.
This process is fantastic at making well-defined structures at the nano-scale (down to 10 nm has been demonstrated; down to 5 nm seems do-able). However one still has to control the positioning of these structures. So a lot of work has gone into combining self-assembly with conventional photo-lithography. The conventional lithography defines the long-range registry and pattern; the self-assembly lets you fill in that pattern with ultra-small structures. In case you think this is all theoretical, Toshiba recently announced a working prototype hard-drive with magnetic dots made using these techniques.
Disclaimer: Part of my research is in this area, so I may be biased towards thinking this is cool/novel/useful.
Your overall point about the safety of WiFi stands, however:
if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.
Actually that's only true in the linear regime of optical response. Non-linear optical effects come into play at extremely high intensities. Briefly: because molecular bonds are not perfectly harmonic oscillators, they can in fact interact with frequencies of light outside of their nominal band. So you can have all kinds of interesting effects like frequency doubling or harmonic generation. One manifestation of nonlinear optics is for a molecule to absorb a photon outside of its nominal absorption band (in two-photon absorption, a molecule absorbs, for example, two infrared photons that have a total energy equal to the usual absorption of a single visible-light photon).
The reason these effects only become pronounced at high light intensities is because the probability of them occurring is exceedingly low, and they are typically multi-photon events (so the probability increases non-linearly as the density of photons increases). Of course, certain classes of molecules are better at amplifying these subtle effects. So, even though a given bond isn't damaged by a single photon of a given wavelength, it actually is possible for that bond to be damaged by a sufficiently high flux of those same low-energy, long-wavelength photons. So, in theory at least, sufficiently intense WiFi could break regular old chemical bonds.
Your point stands however, as being an exceedingly good approximation for the intensities regular WiFi. The flux of microwave photons you would need to cause absorption with even a single bond would be so ridiculously large that we can safely ignore it.
This is a bit of a rant, and I'm putting it as a reply to you, even though I don't really know whether you subscribe to this fallacy...
Your "when you try to fix one problem, you almost always invent a new one" is folk wisdom and, as such, unconvincing. Creating new problems, even unanticipated ones, is not really a counter-argument against a suggested action. What matters is whether the proposed solution leads to a better or worse outcome than no solution at all. For instance organ transplants are rife with side-effects, risks, and problems. But an organ transplant is still often justified: e.g. when it saves a person's life, it's probably worth the downsides. Obviously it would be nice to have solutions without side-effects, but here in the real world every decision is about weighing pros against cons.
Similarly with geo-engineering. Will there be side-effects? Yes, almost certainly. Will there be unintended and unforeseen problems? Yes, probably. Does that mean we shouldn't even consider such options? No, we should certainly consider them.
Buried in the folk wisdom of "creating more problems" is some notion that we have no hope of predicting the outcome of complex events, and so we shouldn't even try. But taking a position on an issue like "Is it a net positive to put a shade between the Earth and the Sun?" inherently means that you believe that you are able, in fact, to predict the outcome with some confidence. Namely, you believe you sufficiently understand the problem and myriad of counter-balancing forces, such that you know that, on average, more harm than good will come from that kind of intervention. But, if you're able to make that kind of prediction ("Making those kinds of changes in this complex system will lead to outcome X, where X is bad.") then why is it impossible to make other kinds of predictions ("Making those kinds of changes in this complex system will lead to outcome Y, where Y is good.")?
Put otherwise, if we were really in a state of complete ignorance with respect to a decision, then all we could do would be to flip a coin. By taking a side ("We're better off not messing with it.") you inherently agree that we can, in principle, predict the outcome of meddling. In which case, we should be able to mount enough evidence to propose a solution that, on the balance, we predict will do more good than harm.
I'm not saying that this particular solution is a good idea. It may turn out that all geo-engineering solutions are, on the balance, bad ideas. But I dislike this defeatist "better not meddle" attitude. Either: (1) the balance of evidence says that solution X is a bad idea, in which case we shouldn't do it; or (2) the balance of evidence says that solution X is a good idea, in which case we should do it; or (3) we have no data one way or the other, in which case we may as well just flip a coin. The problem is that people don't acknowledge that "doing nothing" is inherently a decision. You may have other reasons for thinking that "doing nothing" is the better idea: e.g. it is cheaper to do nothing... but in that case just be honest and say "Since the evidence isn't persuasive, I say we do nothing for now, but if someone can mount enough evidence of X being a good idea, then I will support it". Having a generic "don't meddle" rule may make you seem wise to some people, but it's actually a lazy and fundamentally unscientific stance.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not entirely sure most high schools know what math is, either. Or science in general.
Exactly. This isn't a problem specific to computer science. Every subject taught at the high-school level will be hugely disconnected from what that field actually is. High-school math classes are not "real math" (solving theorems, etc.), they are really just practicing with some basic mathematical tools and tricks, some of which are useful in real life, some of which are necessary (but not sufficient) for studying deeper mathematical topics, and some of which are just busywork.
High-school history classes involve memorizing history factoids, without much learning about how to think critically about the historical record or how to do original research. Physics classes are about plugging values into simple formula, in order to get comfortable with the notion of explaining complex real-world phenomena analytically... but what high school students learn/do is of course a pale imitation of "real physics". Computer classes in high school are no different.
It would probably make sense to call high-school classes about keyboarding and using software "computer classes" and not "computer science classes". (Are there high schools that actually use the term "Computer Science"? That's not been my experience.) Similarly you could pedantically insist that in high school the classes be called "Basic Arithmetic Computation Training" instead of "Math" and so on. But really what should be happening is:
1. Reform high-school level classes, to the extent possible, so that they actually delve into subjects rather than just teaching them in a rote fashion. Obviously there are limits to what you can cover at the high-school level, but wherever possible students should be exposed to the deeper concepts, formalisms, and strategies of a field. (Crucially: even if they don't understand it at first! You typically have to learn a non-trivial subject a few times before you truly understand it.)
2. Have some information in high school classes about what work in a given field is 'really like'. It's fine (even necessary) to teach keyboarding in high school. But at least describe to students what a "real" computer programmer and computer scientist do. Give them a hint of what the fields are "really like".
Of course this is easier said than done. Typically a high-school level educator will not have any experience with what that field is "really like" and so they are not really able to give a good description of either the deep understanding of the field or what the day-to-day work in that field is like.
There are advantages to these "do it in the cloud" ideas, though. Google's promoting of Chrome OS makes the advantages clear: you can access your documents from anywhere, you don't need to worry about your current device getting lost/stolen/damaged/corrupted, because all your important data has been copied off of the computer. No need to worry about installing applications or keeping them secure and up-to-date, since web-apps take care of that for you. And so on...
What I'm not so sure about is if this is really the best possible implementation of the "store it in the cloud" concept. Google's design seems to be: have all the documents and applications in the cloud, and download the minimum necessary to your local computer to get your work done. The disadvantages have been pointed out many times: lack of net connection makes getting anything done painful or impossible (even with some amount of local caching, it doesn't work that well), latency of the network slows down application performance, third-party has full access to all your data. And so on...
It seems like a better model would be to continue to use your local computer for data and storage and running applications, but have the computer synchronize all files to "somewhere in the cloud" on a very routine basis (like, every time you save a document or the application auto-saves). Other computer you authorize then synchronize from the cloud, as needed. The copy in the cloud can be encrypted, so only you have access to your sensitive data. Applications could actually work similarly: your computer synchronizes a list of installed applications and settings, so that other computers have access to the same work environment. At its most basic, this is probably what most geeks already do: organize files on their computer but have some offsite backup location. One could package the whole thing up so that it is much more slick and automated. In my opinion this would be have almost all of the advantages of Google's offering, without the drawbacks (a lack of a net connection just delays the backup-sync; you can still work normally).
My point is that the ideas of "in the cloud" are not bad. They are good ideas. The problem is that the implementations are not the best. Obviously companies have more to gain in terms of data mining (by having access to your data) and lock-in (by hosting the closed-source applications for you) by doing it their way... But hopefully we will see more competing efforts (Ubuntu One might be a step towards that...).
The analogy has some flaws, though. Traffic is a problem, so you build more roads/lanes, so more people buy cars and commute (because there are more roads/lanes!) and so congestion remains a problem. However, there is a point at which you build enough roads/lanes/bridges that the traffic problem would actually be solved. The problem with roads is that they take up space, which is a very finite resource, so there are very hard limits on how much we can expand them. In practice the number of roads required for no one to ever hit traffic would be ridiculous.
Now think about network traffic. There is a similar problem: the network is congested, you add capacity, users realize this and consume more, and the new network is still congested. But notice two important things:
1. The network may still be "as" congested (100% usage), but each user is now getting a lot more data through. So it's not like the situation hasn't improved. It's still congested, but people are getting more data/utility out of the network. The added capacity wasn't wasted: people are using it. That's good.
2. Unlike for roads, we are nowhere near the practical physical limits of adding capacity. There are monetary challenges, of course, but we're not running out of places to put fiber-optic cables. Doubling the size of the current buried cables wouldn't bother anyone, and the costs are manageable. (Imagine if it were that painless to double the capacity of highways; we'd do it in a heartbeat.)
Network congestion is not an unsolvable problem. Just add capacity. The only limit right now is money. Companies have no incentive to put money into infrastructure, consumers don't have enough options to "vote with their wallet", and government dropped the ball with respect to oversight on the subsidies they've given out.
One thing worth looking into are the desks sold by AnthroCart. They can address some of the points you mentioned (power availability, ergonomics, ...).
AnthroCarts are not cheap, but they are solid, can carry substantial weight, and will last a long time. They are also modular: you can buy more pieces to extend them (adding shelves, etc.), or alter the height of shelves if necessary. Most of the pieces are on wheels (with locks) which is perfect for a workspace with constantly changing projects (need the wiring station in another room? Just roll it there.). You can also buy power bars that integrate directly to the Anthro desks/tables, so that all your equipment stays plugged in but is easy to move around. Many of the models also have adjustable-height work surfaces, which is great for adjusting keyboard height or moving the work surface as needed...
No, I don't work for them. Just a happy customer. The downsides are the cost and that assembly takes longer than other furniture (because they use things like actual screws instead of crappy quick-connect pieces).
Good points. (Relatedly, see this TED talk about how the fashion industry thrives despite lack of copyright protection.) Let's think about various things that can and cannot be copyrighted (many examples taken from that TED talk):
Creative things that cannot be copyrighted:
-Recipes, cooking styles and techniques, etc.
-"Look and feel" of food
-Fashion/jewelery/etc.
-Furniture
-Sculptural design of vehicles
-Magic tricks, jokes, etc.
-Sports techniques/moves/plays/strategies
-Fireworks displays
-Hairstyles
-Smells/perfumes
-Rules of games
Creative things that can be copyrighted:
-Pictures/photos/etc. -Movies/video/etc.
-Books/essays/etc.
-Software
-Music/musical scores/sound recordings/etc.
-Choreography
-Sculptures
-Architecture
From these lists we can infer a few things. Firstly, it should be clear that the usual heuristic rules people carry around about copyright are not reflected in the laws. Those who defend copyright often talk in terms of an artist's "right" to control their work, yet clearly there are many artistic endeavors in the first list that go without protection. Similarly discussion about artistic incentives seem strange, given that some creative acts are afforded the incentive of copyright and others are not.
Which brings us to the second thing worth noting. Do the protected acts (second list) generate far more valuable creativity/art than the first? It can be very difficult to measure the impact and importance of creative work. (For what it's worth, the economic activity associated with the unprotected items dwarfs the protected ones.) So let's consider an easier question: Is there a lack of creative output for non-protected art (first list)? The answer is pretty clear: despite a lack of legal protection against copying, the activities in the unprotected list are vibrant, interesting, innovative, and rapidly advancing. Despite the lack of protection/incentive (arguably, because of it) these industries create interesting new products, artists devote themselves to inspiring works, and large sectors of the economy grow as a result.
So the question becomes: considering that we have ample evidence that many creative activities can thrive without protection, what is the justification for copyright protection? I do agree that there are some differences between the lists (e.g. it's trivially easy nowadays to copy music, whereas copying a hairstyle requires more effort and a skilled craftsperson to do the work each time). But even in cases of very close analogy (photographers claim they need protection for prints of their work; meanwhile the fashion industry has found a way to stay relevant without protection, even though they are just selling a style/look/etc. that others can and to copy).
I think there are many examples where creativity thrives without copyright. That doesn't mean that copyright isn't a good idea (maybe creativity thrives even more when protected?), but it does mean we should be very suspicious of simplistic arguments that claim creativity/art wouldn't exist in a world without restrictions on copying.
Media reports also love to conflate "we've uncovered the root cause of X to be Y" with "X is not the person's fault--it's the fault of Y".
The problem with this logic is that, unless you believe in the supernatural (e.g. souls), every single action a person takes is ultimately understandable in terms of causative factors (genetics, childhood, upbringing, opportunity, diet, exercise, lifestyle, job, friends, etc.). This is just a generalization of our understanding that everything in the universe has a cause that can in principle be understood, though of course in practice many systems are so complex that they are intractable. (Again, unless you subscribe to a not-logically-consistent worldview.)
Such thinking of course raises serious questions about "free will", and while that is an excellent topic for philosophy debates, we need to acknowledge that for things like morality, justice, law, and social order to have any meaning at all, we must accept that people are responsible for their actions, even though those actions have, of course, root causes that are ultimately external to the person in question. I'm not saying it's obvious where to draw the line between "not their fault" and "their fault"... What I am saying is that using something crude like "we've found a gene/chemical/influence that causes/increases-the-incidence-of/predisposes action X" as the dividing line for responsibility is ridiculous, since the inexorable march of science is just going to put more and more behavior into that category as time goes on.
So, please, please, please... mainstream media, get over your silly fallacy that explanation negates responsibility.
Yes, you can probably use an anonymous proxy and/or randomly scrambling your device's external signature (MAC address, browser string, response time, etc.) in order to make it harder to track you.
What I wonder is if companies will start differentiating between "good consumers" and "bad consumers". Right now we have access to many services because of an implicit agreement: "I'll let you access the site but you'll see some ads". But if they have a very fine-grained way to determine what consumers respond to ads, and what consumers don't respond to ads, that might drastically change this balancing act. In particular, they would just block "bad consumers", meaning anyone who doesn't spend a lot of money in a way correlated to the ads they see. Anyone who tries to hide their behavior using proxies, randomizing their devices, or otherwise making their behavior inconsistent (e.g. swapping devices with other people) will get labeled as "bad".
On the one hand you might say "Great! I won't have to see ads anymore!" But in reality it will mean that any "bad consumer" will just be blocked from any ad-supported site (or maybe just de-prioritized so the site is unbearably slow). Now, it would difficult to condemn such actions: companies have the right to run their site as they see fit. It might also lead to a differentiated Internet, where some people (who are willing to be tracked and who spend "enough" to satisfy advertisers) go to ad-supported sites, and other people (who are "bad consumers") simply pay for access to sites/services without ads. Maybe that would be a good thing (advertising currently hides a lot of costs).
It's something to think about. If the advertisers have sufficiently fine-grained data, they can not only decide what ad to show you, but decide whether you're even worth the effort to give access to the site at all.
I think the point of people who ask "Where is the prototype?" is not so much that they want a physical object to actually exist, but that they want the patent to be specific enough that it applies to a particular real-world instantiation of the concept, and is not an attempt to patent the concept as a whole.
Ideally, a patent is a sort of contract between the inventor and the public. The public (via the government/patent office) says "We will give you the incentive of a temporary monopoly if you publish all the details of your invention, so that everyone can benefit from it after the patent expires." The idea is to both encourage innovation and to release implementation details into the public domain (otherwise everything would be a trade secret and there would be lots of duplicated effort). But that contract is broken when the inventor only releases vague information, not providing the difficult implementation details.
So I don't think the inventor needs to have a physical prototype in his garage. But the patent needs to be sufficiently detailed that someone (either the inventor or someone else) can go off and build a prototype. If it takes tons of additional R&D to go from the patent to something even vaguely useful, then I question whether that patent should have been awarded in the first place, since it didn't contain enough detail to fulfill its end of the contract.
Well an Arduino would not be the right choice if you were building a large run of a commercial product. But we're talking about DIY here. The advantage of using something more powerful and general purpose like an Arduino is:
1. Easier to rapidly prototype, tweak your setup, or add features. (It's faster to re-code your Arduino than to rewire some electronics you soldered.) You can increase the scope/complexity of your project quite easily.
2. If you're already familiar with the Arduino, and have one on-hand, it's faster/easier/cheaper to use that. (Again, not everyone has a box of Arduinos, but the DIY-ers that this tutorial is aimed at may very well have some on-hand.)
3. When you're done with this project, you can remove the Arduino and re-purpose it easily.
Obviously you can make a cheaper/faster/more-efficient sound trigger using equipment more basic and specialized than an Arduino. (You can also build far better toys using dedicated materials rather than Legos.) For playful building/testing/etc. using an Arduino is quite useful. And, yes, there is an advantage to a DIY community ("all the cool kids") settling on a common set of general-purpose tools, since it lets them exchange design plans, code, experience, etc.
Even if this subset is very, very small... it is probably still bigger than the number of people "saved" from terrorist-related deaths by having all this additional onerous security.
It's all about tradeoffs. The fact that these scanners will cause more deaths than they prevent makes them a bad tradeoff. Because terrorism is so rare, most proposed security has too high a burden to be justified. The safeguards that make sense are those that have low burden and don't otherwise increase risk (e.g. reinforced cockpit doors).
But the "per mile" argument is absolutely relevant when assessing the increased number of deaths caused by people opting to drive instead of fly. The danger of flying scales (roughly) with the number of takeoffs and landings that are performed. The danger of driving scales with the number of miles driven. When you look at the actual numbers, it turns out that flying is safer for any distance over which people practically take planes (even for flights of 30 minutes in the air, the number of miles covered is such that driving the same distance would be more dangerous).
So the point is there is a subset of flights for which a person has to make a rational choice: should I go by plane (which is fast in the air but still takes quite awhile because I have to get there early, there is airport security, risk of delays, ground transportation to my final destination on the other end, etc.) or should I go by car (which might take a bit longer but is more fully under my control). As flying becomes more and more annoying, more people will decide to take their car (at least for a certain subset of trips), which will increase the number of deaths overall.
This is a problem. It's also a problem that the radiation from a backscatter x-ray machine increases your odds of dying from cancer. And because terrorist deaths are so rare, it turns out that the scanners will probably increase the number of deaths overall, since they will create more cancer deaths than they can possibly solve by reducing terrorism deaths.
So the scanners increase the death-rate in the US in at least two ways.
Yes, in principle if photons had mass that could lead to something like dark matter.
However, in practice we know this isn't the case. First of all, if photons had mass (and quantum mechanics as we understand is roughly correct), this would modify a whole slew of predictions in all kinds of bizarre ways (down to fundamental things like the number of particles we observe and the stability of matter). Basically, the only way to match all our experimental data is with a massless photon.
Even beyond that, however, the measured distribution of dark matter (which we can infer based on things like galactic rotation, gravitational lensing, large-scale structure in the universe, etc.) does not match the measured distribution of photons (which we can calculate based on the positions of known light-emitters, like stars).
It's a neat idea, but appears not to be the case in our universe.
For the comparison to be fair, you have to take into account the subsidies that the oil industry receives, which are not insubstantial. (In sheer dollar terms, they dwarf the subsidies that go to alternative energies.) Actually most major industrial sectors have managed to lobby for subsidies of one kind or another (whether direct cash or tax breaks).
Also worth noting is that gas has a massive infrastructure currently in place. So even if electric vehicles are cheaper in the long-term, once we reach steady-state (hence a "good idea"), it may be that they are somewhat more expensive in the short-term, as we build up our infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and know-how (things tend to get cheaper as we engineer them better and better). In such cases, the argument for government subsidies is that the government spends a small amount of money in the short-term, subsidizing an industry that will save the populace large amounts of money in the long-term.
You may disagree with that particular analysis, and think that EVs won't be a net gain in the long-term, but saying that good ideas don't need subsidies is short-sighted.
You joke, but I think this pretty much nails it. There's a lot of content out there that is just a bunch of numbers wrapped up in some formulaic sentences. The results of sports games is an obvious example. Analyses of political campaigns might also be amenable. Perhaps even presenting the results from surveys or scientific studies.
The important thing here is that this isn't replacing deep, insightful thoughts and analysis, which still has to be done by a human. If you want a reasoned opinion that pulls together the statistics, external factors (e.g. a player's mind-set or personal life), and adds in some humor, then you're going to want a skilled human doing the writing. But if your interest is more along the lines of "Who won, by how much, and what were the main things that led to them winning (e.g. was it strong offense or good defense)?" then auto-generated content is fine. In fact, as with all aspects of automation, the point is to free up humans from doing the boring, silly tasks, so that they can concentrate on the more important tasks.
After reading some of the auto-generated articles (Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes) I must say I'm quite impressed with how good the content is. Obviously it won't be winning any prizes, but I can't say that it's any worse than human-generated summaries of matches. It goes through the details, throwing in some contextual commentary (e.g. "the underdogs") obviously based on a nice database of stats. What's even better is that the articles also present some of the stats themselves, allowing the reader to skip the writeup and focus on the numbers/graphs if they prefer.
So, frankly, I see this as a good thing. It's a waste of human talent (even mechanical-turk caliber talent) to write a bunch of formulaic summaries when a computer can clearly do a decent job. This lets the humans focus on tasks that are more difficult to automated.
I don't give a crap about tampons, or Roth I.R.As, or some new Genital Wart drug.
You're assuming that targeted advertising means you won't get ads for those kinds of products, since you think you're not interesting in those products. That's not quite true. Advertising dollars do the most good on 'fence-sitters'. Ad dollars are wasted if the person has no interest in the product (e.g. live in an area where it isn't available). But ad dollars are also mostly wasted if the person is already well-versed in a given subject: an expert on CPUs is more difficult to sway with flashy ads. Whereas middle-of-the-road consumers can be strongly affected by ads, often just because of brand recognition.
Example: Let's take your tampon example. When a guy gets a call from his girlfriend telling him to pick up some tampons while he's at the pharmacy, what is he going to buy? Hopefully he'll buy the brand that she likes. But failing that, he'll probably buy the brand that seems the most 'reputable', which basically means the brand he remembers from various commercials. When non-experts buy computers or other electronics, they're going to tend towards the brands they recognize. And so on...
Another aspect of marketing is to create new customers. You may not care about Roth I.R.A.s right now, but there are companies that want you to care, so that they can convert you into a customer. So, the very fact that you don't care about them, and have no particular opinion about them, makes you an ideal target for their advertising. (An expert in such matters is far more difficult to convert via advertising.)
So, just because you think tampon and I.R.A. ads are pointless to you, doesn't mean advertisers think that. In a highly targeted ad situation, you may well see ads for things that you don't (currently) care about.
All this to say that targeted advertising by no means implies "not-annoying" advertising. It's probably better than completely random advertising (there are certainly some classes of products that I don't care about and will never buy)... but it has its own annoyances. Ads, by their nature, are trying to convert your way of thinking, and thus will tend be disruptive and annoying to the target (at least in aggregate; obviously some commercials are fun). Keep in mind that what the advertisers do with their targeting data is not really in your best interest: they will be targeting you with attempts to change your spending patterns; they won't care about annoying/boring you with their ads, so long as there is a (statistical) increase in money being spent on their products.
your efficiency per square foot may be crap, but your square footage can be huge. That's assuming, of course, this stuff ends up being cheap. The manufacturing process should be ultra cheap, but I don't know about producing the solution. It should be a lot cheaper than traditional panels, but will it be cheap enough to make it worth it? That's the question.
That's exactly right. The promise of organic photo-voltaics is that they will be so much cheaper to produce that the lower efficiency won't matter. But one of the harsh realities is that a photo-voltaic setup has certain fixed base costs (think of how much it costs to physically install each 1 m^2 panel, and tie it into a house's electricity system). Thus, according to industry partners, there is actually an efficiently level below which a solar material is not worth using even if it were completely free to produce. So, for organic solar cells to become commercially viable, they need to improve efficiency, even while reducing costs. Of course we're now reaching levels where it is indeed viable to use organic photo-voltaics, see for example Konarka's flexible solar panel that is built into a bag, so that it charges your cellphone; but there is a threshold of efficiency necessary to offset fixed installation costs.
It's transparent because the film has a hexagonal structure - extremely thin (and therefore transparent) at the center of the hexagon, thick (and therefore opaque) at the edges of the hexagons.
Actually it's a little bit more interesting than that. In addition to being thinner at the center, the light-absorbing polymer is not well-ordered (amorphous) in the center region, which leads to it being worse at absorbing light. At the edges of the hexagons, the polymer orders better, which allows it to absorb light more efficiently. This makes the structure more intelligent, in principle: if the honeycomb structure acts as one half of the conduction pathway (necessary for a photo-voltaic), then it makes sense to have the material close to it do the light-absorbing, and have the material further away (center of hexagons) which cannot participate in light harvesting, just be transparent. So this in principle allows one to design more efficient semi-transparent solar cells.
Peeling back the layers of hype a bit, however, these kinds of solar cells are horribly inefficient. The best materials we currently have to make plastic solar-cells ("organic photo-voltaics") have pretty poor efficiency. Making a solar cell that's semi-transparent just makes the efficiency (per unit area) even worse. But, this is fairly fundamental research: by demonstrating that they can tune the light-absorbing capabilities of the polymer based on its ordering (and control ordering by using the honeycomb patterning and preparation parameters), this provides useful information about how to make higher-performance plastic solar-cells. So this research may actually end up being more important for conventional solar cells ('opaque') than it is for window-coating solar-cells or whatever.
P.S.: The materials used in the paper have an absorption maximum at 503 nm (green), so they probably create a purplish tint. The absorption spectrum can be tuned to change the tint, however this will impact the solar collection efficiency.
Disclaimer: Some of the co-authors are colleagues of mine. However I wasn't involved in this work in any way.
Anyone who claims that electric vehicles generate zero pollution is misinformed. However:
1. Electricity doesn't only come from coal. In some places, electricity primarily comes from coal, but in other places, it primarily comes from hydro-electricity or other sources. So, the environmental impact of electric vehicles depends on where the electricity comes from, and it's by no means as simple as saying "all electric vehicles effectively burn coal".
2. By concentrating the polluting aspects of energy-production, it is easier to control. Getting millions of cars to upgrade (or even just maintain) their catalytic converters is a non-starter. Upgrading (or properly maintaining) the scrubbers on a single power plant is more feasible. As new technology enables greener power plants, the entire fleet of electric vehicles benefit.
3. Even if electric vehicles currently rely (partially) on CO2-releasing energy sources (e.g. coal), the long-term possibility is to migrate to other kinds of electricity production. Relying on burning fossil-burns locks one into CO2-releasing infrastructure. However, electric cars immediately 'benefit' from switchovers in the energy grid, as, for instance, more solar-panel and wind-farm sources are added to the grid. Using electricity for intermediate energy storage/transmission, allows us to gradually rebuild our infrastructure to be greener, which softens the switching costs.
4. For fair comparisons, one must also include every part of the chain in both cases. For instance it is true that electric vehicles require extensive mining and manufacturing, and incur transmission losses... but of course the use of fossil fuels requires extensive drilling operations (with associated spills, etc.), refining, and requires transportation (pipelines/tankers/gas-trucks). Each of these steps have variable levels of environmental impact. The intention is of course to have the chain with the lowest impact possible. The two chains are not identical in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, such as transmission losses and the environmental impact of mining materials for batteries. But the idea of investing in electric vehicles now, even though they are not perfect, is to migrate towards an infrastructure where our vehicles have a lesser environmental impact. The end state, where instead of having millions of separate combustion engines, we create power using higher-efficiency power plants (including many that do not generate CO2: nuclear, solar, wind, etc.), is a net gain (even taking into account the impact of transmission losses, mining, etc.).
I wonder if investing in iconic Hollywood paraphernalia is actually a better investment strategy than real estate...
The problem is that these well-publicized stories about massive prices for movie props or other fan items can leave people with the impression that movie props in general have investment value. However what you don't hear about is the massive number of movie props that are totally worthless. Sure, if you can know ahead of time what movies are going to become cult classics, then you can buy up their props or early merchandise for cheap, and sell it decades later at a massive profit. However if you have that kind of prescience then you could probably make even more money investing directly in the movies or in some other market.
The fact is that these high-profile sales represent a vanishing minority compare to all the movie props and movie merchandise that is absolutely worthless. And once items become extremely valuable, they become like many other kinds of art. Yes, they do tend to go up in value over time, so you could buy this costume and try to resell it years later. But the market for resale is quite small and fickle, so the investment is not at all liquid, and the investment is fairly risky. Not a great combination if your intention is to make money. Rich people buy expensive art as status symbols (or because they genuinely like it), they don't make much money from the value of the art appreciating over time. (Yes, there are always exceptions.)
So, no, investing in Hollywood paraphernalia is not a good investment strategy.
Thanks for the link to reticular chemistry. I'll check that out as it seems promising (a lot of self-assembled structures really are too soft and floppy for the high-performance applications they are proposed for).
I'm also pleased you mention XRD since GISAXS/GIXD is the other half of my research program!
Fast Assembly of Ordered Block Copolymer Nanostructures through Microwave Annealing Xiaojiang Zhang, Kenneth D. Harris, Nathanael L. Y. Wu, Jeffrey N. Murphy, and Jillian M. Buriak, ACS Nano, Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nn102387c.
Here is the abstract:
Are these co-polymers being use as an organic electronic material say in OLEDS or are they designed so that they have a specific configuration to essentially after assembling they are in the pattern you want them to be?
The dream is to have the block-copolymer blocks be functional. So, say one block is the donor and one the acceptor in an organic photovoltaic. Or the blocks form an OLED as you suggest. Or one block has a sensing element and the other block acts as electrode contacts. Or one block has reaction centers that can be metallized to generate wires.
The current state of the art is more primitive, with the assembled block-copolymer being used as a resist, since the two blocks will have different etch contrast. So in the case of the Toshiba work (Hitachi is working on something similar) the block-copolymer nano-dot pattern was used as a resist to etch into a magnetic layer and thus form magnetic nano-dots with a much higher area-density than could be done with conventional optical lithography (or something similar to that: they have not released full details). We're still not at the stage where we can build something as complex as a transistor using block-copolymers as the resist(s), but we're getting there.
are they designed so that they have a specific configuration to essentially after assembling they are in the pattern you want them to be?
Originally the hype about self-assembly was that the molecules would spontaneously form the devices you want ("Pour the components together in a beaker and a computer pops out!"). I think the field is getting more realistic now, and accepting that self-assembly has to be coupled with other techniques (such as optical lithography to control the larger-scale positioning, or annealing tricks, as in TFA, to direct the assembly) to create fully-functional devices. But self-assembly can still provide a level of nano-control and cost savings compared to more laborious techniques.
As another poster points out, the microwaves are being used as a heat source (not for patterning), instead of oven annealing. It turns out that a microwave can cause the material to assemble much faster than conventional oven annealing, which is pretty exciting.
As for the "Why use self-assembly for lithography?" the basic idea is this: Conventional optical lithography is limited by the diffraction of light (as you mention). So for typical visible-light optical schemes, the best you can do is pattern features on the order of ~100 nm (using a bunch of tricks you can push a bit below this, which the semiconductor industry has done with fantastic results). In self-assembly, you design molecules that spontaneously form nanostructures of a well-defined size. So instead of enforcing a particular size-scale using light and patterning masks (top-down fabrication), you design the required size-scale into the molecules themselves (bottom-up fabrication).
In the work described in TFA, they were using block-copolymers, which are polymers (long chain-like molecules) that are have two chemically-distinct "blocks". So one half of the chain is of one kind of material, and the other half of the chain is another type of material. Like so:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
Because the "A" and "B" subunits don't like each other (they are sufficiently chemically distinct), they want to separate from one another (like oil and water not mixing). But because they are bound to one another using a covalent bond (the "-" in my diagram), they can't fully separate, and instead form nano-structures with a size-scale dictated by the length of the A and B blocks. So you can control the size using the lengths of the blocks, control the segregation using the chemistry of the two blocks, and control the morphology (the structures that form) using the ratio of the A block length to the B block length.
This process is fantastic at making well-defined structures at the nano-scale (down to 10 nm has been demonstrated; down to 5 nm seems do-able). However one still has to control the positioning of these structures. So a lot of work has gone into combining self-assembly with conventional photo-lithography. The conventional lithography defines the long-range registry and pattern; the self-assembly lets you fill in that pattern with ultra-small structures. In case you think this is all theoretical, Toshiba recently announced a working prototype hard-drive with magnetic dots made using these techniques.
Disclaimer: Part of my research is in this area, so I may be biased towards thinking this is cool/novel/useful.
if one photon can't do any damage, neither can a thousand photons.
Actually that's only true in the linear regime of optical response. Non-linear optical effects come into play at extremely high intensities. Briefly: because molecular bonds are not perfectly harmonic oscillators, they can in fact interact with frequencies of light outside of their nominal band. So you can have all kinds of interesting effects like frequency doubling or harmonic generation. One manifestation of nonlinear optics is for a molecule to absorb a photon outside of its nominal absorption band (in two-photon absorption, a molecule absorbs, for example, two infrared photons that have a total energy equal to the usual absorption of a single visible-light photon).
The reason these effects only become pronounced at high light intensities is because the probability of them occurring is exceedingly low, and they are typically multi-photon events (so the probability increases non-linearly as the density of photons increases). Of course, certain classes of molecules are better at amplifying these subtle effects. So, even though a given bond isn't damaged by a single photon of a given wavelength, it actually is possible for that bond to be damaged by a sufficiently high flux of those same low-energy, long-wavelength photons. So, in theory at least, sufficiently intense WiFi could break regular old chemical bonds.
Your point stands however, as being an exceedingly good approximation for the intensities regular WiFi. The flux of microwave photons you would need to cause absorption with even a single bond would be so ridiculously large that we can safely ignore it.
This is a bit of a rant, and I'm putting it as a reply to you, even though I don't really know whether you subscribe to this fallacy...
Your "when you try to fix one problem, you almost always invent a new one" is folk wisdom and, as such, unconvincing. Creating new problems, even unanticipated ones, is not really a counter-argument against a suggested action. What matters is whether the proposed solution leads to a better or worse outcome than no solution at all. For instance organ transplants are rife with side-effects, risks, and problems. But an organ transplant is still often justified: e.g. when it saves a person's life, it's probably worth the downsides. Obviously it would be nice to have solutions without side-effects, but here in the real world every decision is about weighing pros against cons.
Similarly with geo-engineering. Will there be side-effects? Yes, almost certainly. Will there be unintended and unforeseen problems? Yes, probably. Does that mean we shouldn't even consider such options? No, we should certainly consider them.
Buried in the folk wisdom of "creating more problems" is some notion that we have no hope of predicting the outcome of complex events, and so we shouldn't even try. But taking a position on an issue like "Is it a net positive to put a shade between the Earth and the Sun?" inherently means that you believe that you are able, in fact, to predict the outcome with some confidence. Namely, you believe you sufficiently understand the problem and myriad of counter-balancing forces, such that you know that, on average, more harm than good will come from that kind of intervention. But, if you're able to make that kind of prediction ("Making those kinds of changes in this complex system will lead to outcome X, where X is bad.") then why is it impossible to make other kinds of predictions ("Making those kinds of changes in this complex system will lead to outcome Y, where Y is good.")?
Put otherwise, if we were really in a state of complete ignorance with respect to a decision, then all we could do would be to flip a coin. By taking a side ("We're better off not messing with it.") you inherently agree that we can, in principle, predict the outcome of meddling. In which case, we should be able to mount enough evidence to propose a solution that, on the balance, we predict will do more good than harm.
I'm not saying that this particular solution is a good idea. It may turn out that all geo-engineering solutions are, on the balance, bad ideas. But I dislike this defeatist "better not meddle" attitude. Either: (1) the balance of evidence says that solution X is a bad idea, in which case we shouldn't do it; or (2) the balance of evidence says that solution X is a good idea, in which case we should do it; or (3) we have no data one way or the other, in which case we may as well just flip a coin. The problem is that people don't acknowledge that "doing nothing" is inherently a decision. You may have other reasons for thinking that "doing nothing" is the better idea: e.g. it is cheaper to do nothing... but in that case just be honest and say "Since the evidence isn't persuasive, I say we do nothing for now, but if someone can mount enough evidence of X being a good idea, then I will support it". Having a generic "don't meddle" rule may make you seem wise to some people, but it's actually a lazy and fundamentally unscientific stance.