That means mathematically for CO2 to increase the temperature by 1C degrees that a single molecule of CO2 must be capturing and radiating back 2500C degrees.
I'm afraid your math is missing two parts: one, the thermodynamics of the problem, the CO2 molecules aren't sitting there in a vacuum, they're rattling around in thermal equilibrium as part of the atmosphere; two, the direction of outgoing vs. incoming radiation. So, in order of what happens:
any given CO2 molecule happens to be really good at absorbing IR (much more so than the rest of the stuff you list) while being transparent in the visible. Yep, very true, just go into a lab and measure absorption spectra. Turns out some even less common items like methane are even better at it, but let's consider just CO2 for now.
Next, that CO2 molecule, with the extra eV or so of IR energy it picks up from that one IR photon coming from some warm parking lot, can get rid of the bonus energy in one of two ways. It can give up that energy in a collision with other air molecules, turning the energy into thermal energy: air warms up slightly.
Or, it can spit an IR photon back out in a random direction. If the IR is coming from ground warmed up by sunlight, it's headed up into the air. When the CO2 re-radiates, half the time it's still going up. Half the time it's shining back down. So, in this very simple view, half the energy stays trapped... also warming things up slightly. Nowhere required a 2500K blackbody as you implied, two ways to get heat trapped.
Making sure all the details are accounted quantitatively for is a bigger job (what's the exact absorption for each atmosphere component? What fraction is re-emiited vs collided away?): but people have done it. Important test: does all that work it agree with reality? Yeah, pretty much. Average temperature of a bare rock in orbit at 1AU is below freezing. Average temperature of the Earth with a CO2-laced atmosphere: not below freezing. Even just comparatively the simple energy balance equation outlined above gets this part right. In fact, yay for the greenhouse effect, or we'd be closer to Mars-like climate than what we are. A large fraction of the cold nasty Mars weather is due to its lack of a decent thick atmosphere (even though what's there is mostly CO2, there's not enough to help out very much), more so than the "it's a bit farther from the sun 1/r^2" contribution. And vice-versa for Venus: it's huge column depth of CO2 makes it the lead-melting sweatbox that it is, much more so than being slightly closer to the sun.
So while we may have been having temperature increases since the end of the last ice age, it is hard to say for certainty if things are speeding up or not,
Turns out that it's not hard to say. That's not even a particularly tricky bit of data analysis.
but mathematically it just seems unreasonable that CO2 is the culprit. Perhaps the Earth itself is radiating more heat, we are seeing quite a bit more volcanic activity so maybe more magma is closer to the surface. Or perhaps it is just the heating from the Sun cycles and as we start to enter the coming minimum the cooler temperatures will prevail.
Geologists say no to the first, although volcanic activity can contribute to greenhouse gases. And it also goes the other way, by reflective aerosols that cool things (this is where some cool potential geo-engineering ideas were born). As an astronomer I can say with more certainty that solar cycles do not change the overall energy output of the sun enough to account for what we're seeing now. Why? We measure that solar radiation as seen at the earth really well, and have been doing so for quite a few solar cycles. Not enough delta-luminosity.
Or maybe it is just the natural cycle of heating after an ice age.
There are certainly larger cycles, and of all the things you said, this is the least bo
As soon as they announced the newest release (2018) was subscription based, I went looking for alternatives (OSS and perpetual license).
So, what did you find out? I'm in the same boat, but haven't gone and done my homework yet. Someone below suggested Banktivity, but I'm not a Mac user.
I had been hoping that since Quicken got spun off from Intuit that the software would get better (getting worse woujld be difficult at this point), but I'm completely not interested in a subscription data hostage situation to find out.
As a student, I took no test prep courses and did really well on these things (National Merit scholar and all). My oldest son just did the same, no special prep classes. I was a fairly "meh" student, but did well on standardized tests (my boy is better at both aspects, yay for him). Lucky for me.
If I were to take it now, though, like you I also probably wouldn't do as well as I did when I was a student: even having a job as a professor. Why? As a student I was taking tests of all sorts all the time. And that was in the day before all the school-based state mandated standardized tests, so students now, even more so.
My point? When you're a student, you're practicing taking tests, so you'll do better on tests than those of us who aren't. Test prep? Yeah, sort of. But you don't have to pay for extra practice when you're doing it for a living as a student. For what it's worth, I suspect I'd also not do as well at taking tests, doing homeworks, all the other student-y things I no longer practice at daily. Does that make school irrelevant too, since obviously educated me wouldn't do as well at it as I used to? Nope. All it's saying is that practice matters.
they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't. SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
On the math side of things, definitely not.
Our university went though years of trying to figure out the best way to place freshmen in the sequence of math courses, even designing our own math placement test. It's a hard problem. You don't want to set up someone to fail by tossing them in over their head. Likewise, you don't want to waste someone's time by putting them in a class full of stuff they already know.
Guess what? The single best predictor of success in the vital calculus series of classes (which are pre-reqs for lots of of ther STEM courses) was the student's math ACT score. Better than custom placement tests. Better than high school transcripts. Actual data over many years as analyzed by a department full of actual statisticians concerned about their own students' success.
Were "test prep" courses a factor? I don't know. But, if the test prep was inflating student math ACT scores, then it was also inflating their success in university calculus, so sounds like money well spent if that was the root cause.
I'd also like to call "BS" on the raft of cynical posts in this thread claiming universities are only interested in scamming students out of tuition. While the US university system has plenty of faults, that's not one of them. Student success is a driving concern in academia. Maybe even to an extreme, as we are currently in the grips of an "assessment" frenzy that tries to quantify it in an overly bureaucratic way.
They (variously, according to the tech in use a the time) either get an electronic copy of their scantron's answers, or have the paper copy of the test that they've marked in addition to the scantron. Either takes some effort on the student to cross-check, so this isn't a 100% efficient process. But it is remarkable in the lack of discovered problems by the large percentage of point-hounds in any given class.
Just had a thought, though. The scantron ballots I've used to vote do use black pen, presumably to make it harder to change marks for a better paper trail. Perhaps the very pen-ness of the voting ones, not being #2 pencils, causes reliability problems.
At my last job exam scores were calculated with Scantron machines. Though the Scantron was faster than grading by hand, it is unreliable, so every sheet had to be double-checked by a human. The people had to correct the Scantron results rather often.
Really? When teaching large intro courses, I have to resort to scantron grading or go mad. Not an ideal way to do tests, but sufficient for freshman survey courses.
Anyway - I have never had a student come to me and say "this question right here - the scantron got it wrong." And believe you me, if it had ever happened, I'd hear about it several femtoseconds after the student got their grades back. So, after untold tens of thousands of bubbles filled in by my students over the years, not one error that I know about. That's pretty reliable. Maybe my university uses special ultra-premium hardware. (probably not).
Not counting the occasional instruction-ally challenged person who ignores the "#2 pencil" thing and uses pen. I have no idea why computers are blind to ink. Mental note - when Skynet takes over, smear ink on yourself to evade the hunter-killer robots.
This is exactly why I watch less football. I can't find an option that will let me stream whatever live games I want. There are all kinds of packages I *could* buy, but they don't want to sell me what I actually want.
This! I used to be able to subscribe to audio of games on nfl.com for ~$25-$30 a season. Living "out of market", I can't listen on the radio while doing whatever else consumes a Sunday afternoon. I used to be able to hand over some $$ to the nfl and listen to my team's radio guys over the internet.
But, they stopped that service. Now, if you want the radio, you have to pay $100 or more for a package of recorded TV broadcasts. I have no interest in watching the game later, it's live sports. So, they don't get my $30 anymore because they more than tripled the price and added in something completely worthless to me in exchange.
well a couple years old. but that's old in gravity
Not quite... a couple years ago, the gravitational waves were observed. The theory says they should be traveling at "c", but there was no way to check that this was true.
This time, seeing light at almost the same time as the GWs is an observation which says "yeah, that theory about GWs moving at the speed of light is pretty darn close to spot on". That's what the article was getting at.
Not a single person standing up to actually show any evidence that the earth is "round" and instead you all rely on insults and bullshit. For slashdot, belief in a round earth is just RELIGION, like belief in evolution and global warming.
High school kids with weather balloons take pictures of its roundness every day. If religion were this easy to prove, we'd all be theologians.
Grad schools discriminate in favor of international students.
Two key factors why:
1) international students generally pay more money to the schools
At the undergrad level, where students are actually paying tuition, this is true: universities go out of their way to recruit international students who pay full freight. Without such students, domestic tuition would be even more than it is. Really.
However, this article is about graduate students in fields where most of them are supported by assistantships, so the school gets teaching or lab minion time out of them rather than money. So: not relevant to this discussion.
By the way, this is in no way news. In CS and engineering, even thirty years ago there was often only a "token US student" in many grad classes. Why? US students with an undergrad CS or engineering degree are hot to go get a real, well-paying job, not spend a few more years as an apprentice.
Presence of the ring should not be unexpected. The particles were probably launched into space from the surface because of planetoid's low gravity and fast rotation. Of course I'm assuming that the ring is perpendicular to the rotation axis.
TFA says there are two small moons, one of which is in the ring plane. For the Jovian planets, the rings seem to be fed by debris from impacts on their small moons near the ring planes: so this same story seems plausible here, too.
Also note: 1/2 the prize went to Weiss (Idea and a lot of the implementation), and the other half to Thorne (idea) and Barish (rest of implementation). So if you've got to boil a big thing down really simply (and the Nobel people do), that's how they did it.
Kip Thorne has done a lot of impressive work, not just on LIGO. In this context though, Thorne, Weiss, and Ronald Drever (who died last year and thus wasn't eligible for the Nobel), proposed a detector of this type in the 1980s. Barry Barish got the prize as the LIGO director.
A bit more context - Barish was more than merely a director. While the idea was certainly Thorne and Weiss, Barish was the guy who came in and made the whole project actually work.
As with most modern science, hundreds of scientists and engineers have worked over decades to get the result being celebrated. But if you have to pick three, this is a good choice. Note that while the Nobels are constrained to three people, the Breakthrough Prize is not: it was awarded to the whole collaboration last year.
The galaxy does have a magnetic field, which is rather chaotic rather than dipole shaped and weighs in at the micro-gauss level. There are a number of different ways to measure this both in our own galaxy and in other similar galaxies.
To get charged particles of these energies (> 10^20 eV) to bend in less than a galactic radius, you need a lot more B than that, and that large a B is not seen.
Oh, and a a different concrete example is given in TFA:
Shara found that the star system responsible for the nova in 1437 A.D. shows dwarf novae in photos from the 1930s and 1940s, which supports his claim that both phenomena originate from a single source.
So: confirmation of an idea about how this system might work, shows that novae and dwarf novae are closely related.
Now that the system is ID'd with an exact start time, studies of the system as it is today are way more useful, since we now exactly how long it took to get from the explody bit to the debris as it's seen today. Let's you test your models of what goes on in such a system far more rigorously.
Listen to any lecture by Leonard Susskind and tell me that lectures can't be extremely helpful. I imagine there are professors in every field who are as amazing at elucidating topics.
True, and a great example of someone who's good at it.
I suspect this is a pernicious way for the school to deprecate professors and their wages. Regardless of their stated reasons, I'm certain that this was done to save money, and not to make better students.
False. In fact, quite the opposite: the style in TFA is substantially more expensive both in salary and floorspace. Lectures and big lecture halls exist primarily because mass production of anything (even education) is way cheaper.
True, different people learn differently. But another big variable is what the topic is. If it's a problem solving course (math, physics, CS, many parts of engineering) the "work stuff out" active learning is more likely to work well. If it's more "absorbing information" (say, anatomy, some chunks of o-chem or biology), then the gains aren't as large.
We're replacing our lower level physics lectures because of this, and doing our best to measure the effects. The upper level physics courses, it turns out, were always more like the new model, if for no other reason than the classes have always been very small and it simply works better for everyone to be working things out rather than the prof talking to a few students.
Giving access to my credit cards to the Samsung control freaks. I don't think so. I mistrust Google a bit less, which is why I also won't use their Android Pay thing.
The very fact that I can't even disable this on my phone (it auto-revives on phone reboots) let alone uninstall it disqualifies it in my book. If you don't trust me enough to manage my own phone's apps, no way do I trust you with my money.
Yes, I know that I could root the phone. No, I shouldn't have to do this.
How many of researchers doing science for a living are actually talented and are actually producing useful/meaningful work? Because if you aren't very good, there's always this escape of publishing their poor quality work in one of these journals, perpetuating their title as researchers/scientists and allowing them to make a living without any contribution to society.
Nope. If you're publishing only in crap journals, you're not getting jobs or grants, because the people giving out those grants and hiring people for jobs are generally not morons. If they are, they don't keep their ability to spend that money.
So, to answer your question: if you're doing science for a living, you're probably producing meaningful work, or you're either a) not doing it for very long; or b) a really really good con man. I suspect the same is true for most fields. What's your field? How's it work there?
Many people reading slahdot are coders. If someone came on here and broadly proclaimed "all code review is messing only with whitespace, no one really does it, therefore coders must all be frauds", would that fly?
Not only have others done the same thing before, even without these examples, "peer review" is almost always a load of bullshit. Unless someone repeats the experiment/study/analysis themselves as a peer-reviewer, the peer review tends to be little more than a grammar and spelling check, did everyone label their figures correctly, etc.
Hmm. Ever actually done it yourself, or are you simply making shit up? Either received comments from a peer reviewer, or made them yourself?
Perhaps you're confusing peer-reviewing with the journals editorial staff. Once the peer review is done, they do a professional job of the spelling, grammar, layout, labeling, etc. But that step doesn't happen till the "worth publishing or not?" question is answered, and is done by professional editors not other scientists.
Most scientists spend a decent fraction of time peer-reviewing. I can assure you that for real journals, not these fake ones in the article, what you say is generally not the case. Definitely not "almost always". People who put in the work to be a scientist, for the most part, do so because they like the work, care about it, and tend to do a decent job at it.
Ahh! So that's what you meant. Couldn't figure it out from context. Got mixed up with the AC earlier i the thread who was really confused about astronomy.
For what it's worth - yes, the aerosols in the atmosphere would dissipate globally. But, interestingly, it's also actively being studied for local usage. For instance, what if LA is going to get clobbered by a nasty heatwave today, will dumping a load of it over the city help shade things be a few degrees_this afternoon_, before it wanders off. Sunblock for a region: enough to prevent a AC-induced brownout.
Slashdot Mirror
That means mathematically for CO2 to increase the temperature by 1C degrees that a single molecule of CO2 must be capturing and radiating back 2500C degrees.
I'm afraid your math is missing two parts: one, the thermodynamics of the problem, the CO2 molecules aren't sitting there in a vacuum, they're rattling around in thermal equilibrium as part of the atmosphere; two, the direction of outgoing vs. incoming radiation. So, in order of what happens:
any given CO2 molecule happens to be really good at absorbing IR (much more so than the rest of the stuff you list) while being transparent in the visible. Yep, very true, just go into a lab and measure absorption spectra. Turns out some even less common items like methane are even better at it, but let's consider just CO2 for now.
Next, that CO2 molecule, with the extra eV or so of IR energy it picks up from that one IR photon coming from some warm parking lot, can get rid of the bonus energy in one of two ways. It can give up that energy in a collision with other air molecules, turning the energy into thermal energy: air warms up slightly.
Or, it can spit an IR photon back out in a random direction. If the IR is coming from ground warmed up by sunlight, it's headed up into the air. When the CO2 re-radiates, half the time it's still going up. Half the time it's shining back down. So, in this very simple view, half the energy stays trapped ... also warming things up slightly. Nowhere required a 2500K blackbody as you implied, two ways to get heat trapped.
Making sure all the details are accounted quantitatively for is a bigger job (what's the exact absorption for each atmosphere component? What fraction is re-emiited vs collided away?): but people have done it. Important test: does all that work it agree with reality? Yeah, pretty much. Average temperature of a bare rock in orbit at 1AU is below freezing. Average temperature of the Earth with a CO2-laced atmosphere: not below freezing. Even just comparatively the simple energy balance equation outlined above gets this part right. In fact, yay for the greenhouse effect, or we'd be closer to Mars-like climate than what we are. A large fraction of the cold nasty Mars weather is due to its lack of a decent thick atmosphere (even though what's there is mostly CO2, there's not enough to help out very much), more so than the "it's a bit farther from the sun 1/r^2" contribution. And vice-versa for Venus: it's huge column depth of CO2 makes it the lead-melting sweatbox that it is, much more so than being slightly closer to the sun.
So while we may have been having temperature increases since the end of the last ice age, it is hard to say for certainty if things are speeding up or not,
Turns out that it's not hard to say. That's not even a particularly tricky bit of data analysis.
but mathematically it just seems unreasonable that CO2 is the culprit. Perhaps the Earth itself is radiating more heat, we are seeing quite a bit more volcanic activity so maybe more magma is closer to the surface. Or perhaps it is just the heating from the Sun cycles and as we start to enter the coming minimum the cooler temperatures will prevail.
Geologists say no to the first, although volcanic activity can contribute to greenhouse gases. And it also goes the other way, by reflective aerosols that cool things (this is where some cool potential geo-engineering ideas were born). As an astronomer I can say with more certainty that solar cycles do not change the overall energy output of the sun enough to account for what we're seeing now. Why? We measure that solar radiation as seen at the earth really well, and have been doing so for quite a few solar cycles. Not enough delta-luminosity.
Or maybe it is just the natural cycle of heating after an ice age.
There are certainly larger cycles, and of all the things you said, this is the least bo
As soon as they announced the newest release (2018) was subscription based, I went looking for alternatives (OSS and perpetual license).
So, what did you find out? I'm in the same boat, but haven't gone and done my homework yet. Someone below suggested Banktivity, but I'm not a Mac user.
I had been hoping that since Quicken got spun off from Intuit that the software would get better (getting worse woujld be difficult at this point), but I'm completely not interested in a subscription data hostage situation to find out.
As a student, I took no test prep courses and did really well on these things (National Merit scholar and all). My oldest son just did the same, no special prep classes. I was a fairly "meh" student, but did well on standardized tests (my boy is better at both aspects, yay for him). Lucky for me.
If I were to take it now, though, like you I also probably wouldn't do as well as I did when I was a student: even having a job as a professor. Why? As a student I was taking tests of all sorts all the time. And that was in the day before all the school-based state mandated standardized tests, so students now, even more so.
My point? When you're a student, you're practicing taking tests, so you'll do better on tests than those of us who aren't. Test prep? Yeah, sort of. But you don't have to pay for extra practice when you're doing it for a living as a student. For what it's worth, I suspect I'd also not do as well at taking tests, doing homeworks, all the other student-y things I no longer practice at daily. Does that make school irrelevant too, since obviously educated me wouldn't do as well at it as I used to? Nope. All it's saying is that practice matters.
they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't. SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
On the math side of things, definitely not.
Our university went though years of trying to figure out the best way to place freshmen in the sequence of math courses, even designing our own math placement test. It's a hard problem. You don't want to set up someone to fail by tossing them in over their head. Likewise, you don't want to waste someone's time by putting them in a class full of stuff they already know.
Guess what? The single best predictor of success in the vital calculus series of classes (which are pre-reqs for lots of of ther STEM courses) was the student's math ACT score. Better than custom placement tests. Better than high school transcripts. Actual data over many years as analyzed by a department full of actual statisticians concerned about their own students' success.
Were "test prep" courses a factor? I don't know. But, if the test prep was inflating student math ACT scores, then it was also inflating their success in university calculus, so sounds like money well spent if that was the root cause. I'd also like to call "BS" on the raft of cynical posts in this thread claiming universities are only interested in scamming students out of tuition. While the US university system has plenty of faults, that's not one of them. Student success is a driving concern in academia. Maybe even to an extreme, as we are currently in the grips of an "assessment" frenzy that tries to quantify it in an overly bureaucratic way.
Just had a thought, though. The scantron ballots I've used to vote do use black pen, presumably to make it harder to change marks for a better paper trail. Perhaps the very pen-ness of the voting ones, not being #2 pencils, causes reliability problems.
At my last job exam scores were calculated with Scantron machines. Though the Scantron was faster than grading by hand, it is unreliable, so every sheet had to be double-checked by a human. The people had to correct the Scantron results rather often.
Really? When teaching large intro courses, I have to resort to scantron grading or go mad. Not an ideal way to do tests, but sufficient for freshman survey courses.
Anyway - I have never had a student come to me and say "this question right here - the scantron got it wrong." And believe you me, if it had ever happened, I'd hear about it several femtoseconds after the student got their grades back. So, after untold tens of thousands of bubbles filled in by my students over the years, not one error that I know about. That's pretty reliable. Maybe my university uses special ultra-premium hardware. (probably not).
Not counting the occasional instruction-ally challenged person who ignores the "#2 pencil" thing and uses pen. I have no idea why computers are blind to ink. Mental note - when Skynet takes over, smear ink on yourself to evade the hunter-killer robots.
This is exactly why I watch less football. I can't find an option that will let me stream whatever live games I want. There are all kinds of packages I *could* buy, but they don't want to sell me what I actually want.
This! I used to be able to subscribe to audio of games on nfl.com for ~$25-$30 a season. Living "out of market", I can't listen on the radio while doing whatever else consumes a Sunday afternoon. I used to be able to hand over some $$ to the nfl and listen to my team's radio guys over the internet.
But, they stopped that service. Now, if you want the radio, you have to pay $100 or more for a package of recorded TV broadcasts. I have no interest in watching the game later, it's live sports. So, they don't get my $30 anymore because they more than tripled the price and added in something completely worthless to me in exchange.
well a couple years old. but that's old in gravity
Not quite... a couple years ago, the gravitational waves were observed. The theory says they should be traveling at "c", but there was no way to check that this was true.
This time, seeing light at almost the same time as the GWs is an observation which says "yeah, that theory about GWs moving at the speed of light is pretty darn close to spot on". That's what the article was getting at.
Not a single person standing up to actually show any evidence that the earth is "round" and instead you all rely on insults and bullshit. For slashdot, belief in a round earth is just RELIGION, like belief in evolution and global warming.
High school kids with weather balloons take pictures of its roundness every day. If religion were this easy to prove, we'd all be theologians.
Grad schools discriminate in favor of international students.
Two key factors why: 1) international students generally pay more money to the schools
At the undergrad level, where students are actually paying tuition, this is true: universities go out of their way to recruit international students who pay full freight. Without such students, domestic tuition would be even more than it is. Really.
However, this article is about graduate students in fields where most of them are supported by assistantships, so the school gets teaching or lab minion time out of them rather than money. So: not relevant to this discussion.
By the way, this is in no way news. In CS and engineering, even thirty years ago there was often only a "token US student" in many grad classes. Why? US students with an undergrad CS or engineering degree are hot to go get a real, well-paying job, not spend a few more years as an apprentice.
Presence of the ring should not be unexpected. The particles were probably launched into space from the surface because of planetoid's low gravity and fast rotation. Of course I'm assuming that the ring is perpendicular to the rotation axis.
TFA says there are two small moons, one of which is in the ring plane. For the Jovian planets, the rings seem to be fed by debris from impacts on their small moons near the ring planes: so this same story seems plausible here, too.
Also note: 1/2 the prize went to Weiss (Idea and a lot of the implementation), and the other half to Thorne (idea) and Barish (rest of implementation). So if you've got to boil a big thing down really simply (and the Nobel people do), that's how they did it.
Kip Thorne has done a lot of impressive work, not just on LIGO. In this context though, Thorne, Weiss, and Ronald Drever (who died last year and thus wasn't eligible for the Nobel), proposed a detector of this type in the 1980s. Barry Barish got the prize as the LIGO director.
A bit more context - Barish was more than merely a director. While the idea was certainly Thorne and Weiss, Barish was the guy who came in and made the whole project actually work.
As with most modern science, hundreds of scientists and engineers have worked over decades to get the result being celebrated. But if you have to pick three, this is a good choice. Note that while the Nobels are constrained to three people, the Breakthrough Prize is not: it was awarded to the whole collaboration last year.
The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California,"
Because one of the two is is a totalitarian communist regime and the other is....
Wait, I take that back.
The galaxy does have a magnetic field, which is rather chaotic rather than dipole shaped and weighs in at the micro-gauss level. There are a number of different ways to measure this both in our own galaxy and in other similar galaxies.
To get charged particles of these energies (> 10^20 eV) to bend in less than a galactic radius, you need a lot more B than that, and that large a B is not seen.
Shara found that the star system responsible for the nova in 1437 A.D. shows dwarf novae in photos from the 1930s and 1940s, which supports his claim that both phenomena originate from a single source.
So: confirmation of an idea about how this system might work, shows that novae and dwarf novae are closely related.
Now that the system is ID'd with an exact start time, studies of the system as it is today are way more useful, since we now exactly how long it took to get from the explody bit to the debris as it's seen today. Let's you test your models of what goes on in such a system far more rigorously.
Listen to any lecture by Leonard Susskind and tell me that lectures can't be extremely helpful. I imagine there are professors in every field who are as amazing at elucidating topics.
True, and a great example of someone who's good at it.
I suspect this is a pernicious way for the school to deprecate professors and their wages. Regardless of their stated reasons, I'm certain that this was done to save money, and not to make better students.
False. In fact, quite the opposite: the style in TFA is substantially more expensive both in salary and floorspace. Lectures and big lecture halls exist primarily because mass production of anything (even education) is way cheaper.
True, different people learn differently. But another big variable is what the topic is. If it's a problem solving course (math, physics, CS, many parts of engineering) the "work stuff out" active learning is more likely to work well. If it's more "absorbing information" (say, anatomy, some chunks of o-chem or biology), then the gains aren't as large.
We're replacing our lower level physics lectures because of this, and doing our best to measure the effects. The upper level physics courses, it turns out, were always more like the new model, if for no other reason than the classes have always been very small and it simply works better for everyone to be working things out rather than the prof talking to a few students.
Giving access to my credit cards to the Samsung control freaks. I don't think so. I mistrust Google a bit less, which is why I also won't use their Android Pay thing.
The very fact that I can't even disable this on my phone (it auto-revives on phone reboots) let alone uninstall it disqualifies it in my book. If you don't trust me enough to manage my own phone's apps, no way do I trust you with my money.
Yes, I know that I could root the phone. No, I shouldn't have to do this.
How many of researchers doing science for a living are actually talented and are actually producing useful/meaningful work? Because if you aren't very good, there's always this escape of publishing their poor quality work in one of these journals, perpetuating their title as researchers/scientists and allowing them to make a living without any contribution to society.
Nope. If you're publishing only in crap journals, you're not getting jobs or grants, because the people giving out those grants and hiring people for jobs are generally not morons. If they are, they don't keep their ability to spend that money.
So, to answer your question: if you're doing science for a living, you're probably producing meaningful work, or you're either a) not doing it for very long; or b) a really really good con man. I suspect the same is true for most fields. What's your field? How's it work there?
Many people reading slahdot are coders. If someone came on here and broadly proclaimed "all code review is messing only with whitespace, no one really does it, therefore coders must all be frauds", would that fly?
Not only have others done the same thing before, even without these examples, "peer review" is almost always a load of bullshit. Unless someone repeats the experiment/study/analysis themselves as a peer-reviewer, the peer review tends to be little more than a grammar and spelling check, did everyone label their figures correctly, etc.
Hmm. Ever actually done it yourself, or are you simply making shit up? Either received comments from a peer reviewer, or made them yourself?
Perhaps you're confusing peer-reviewing with the journals editorial staff. Once the peer review is done, they do a professional job of the spelling, grammar, layout, labeling, etc. But that step doesn't happen till the "worth publishing or not?" question is answered, and is done by professional editors not other scientists.
Most scientists spend a decent fraction of time peer-reviewing. I can assure you that for real journals, not these fake ones in the article, what you say is generally not the case. Definitely not "almost always". People who put in the work to be a scientist, for the most part, do so because they like the work, care about it, and tend to do a decent job at it.
Well, the aerosols bit, I mean. I don't want the local consequences of a volcano in my neighborhood anytime soon :)
For what it's worth - yes, the aerosols in the atmosphere would dissipate globally. But, interestingly, it's also actively being studied for local usage. For instance, what if LA is going to get clobbered by a nasty heatwave today, will dumping a load of it over the city help shade things be a few degrees_this afternoon_, before it wanders off. Sunblock for a region: enough to prevent a AC-induced brownout.
GP post is right, summer in NA (now) is when our mostly-round earth happens to be furthest from the sun. Elliptical orbits and all.