Everspin previously used the crossed-lines writing technique (shown here http://thefutureofthings.com/upload/image/articles/2006/mram/mram-write.jpg), but has now switched to spin-transfer torque based devices. Several other companies are also working on this, so things to improve rapidly. PR release at (http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/14/everspin-throws-first-st-mram-chips-down/)
Eh, even if he had made up realistic-looking data, there were a lot of other red flags: not saving raw data or samples, no one else making measurements, all other groups unable to reproduce results, etc. In retrospect, it sounds like it only went on that long because he was at a private lab, but I see what you mean.
Aren't there some fundamental physical limits on how low your energy usage can be for a given amount of information based on thermodynamics? Is it just the case that they're way, way less than what we're using now?
For any sort of data storage the energy barrier between the two states needs to be large enough that the system doesn't thermodynamically fluctuate between them very often. In practice, this means that the barrier needs to be several times larger than kb*T where kb is the boltzman constant. For computation there's not any hard and fast rule about the energy required, but there's lots of practical ones...
You did say that you believe that education is a business and that the more competition a business receives, the better it is for the customer. I just suggested an alternate option that would be more competitive for low-income families. I'm not implying that you're pro-child labor -- I'm giving a counterexample to show that your blanket statement is silly, and that (assuming education is a business) competition to public education is not always better for the customer.
What *I* said is that parents who send their kids to private school should be exempt from paying school tax for that 1 year.
What I'm saying is that this will do almost nothing to help low and middle-class families.
I am a believer that the more competition a business receives, the better it is for the customer (versus a monopoly or near-monopoly).
Sure, that makes sense for businesses, but since when is primary education a business? A lot of people would agree that a primary education is a human right: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a26 Unfortunately for many families a more economically competitive option would be to send kids to work at age 14 rather than to school. Allowing them to do that wouldn't improve schools either.
I went to a high school where ~60 percent of the students got free/reduced lunch, which meant that their parents made less than 200% of the poverty level. In my county schools are supported primarily through property tax revenues, and most of these families rent and pay property tax only indirectly. It's a moot point though, considering private school tuition runs around 15-20 k$. Families, especially those who are trying to make ends meet, can't spend ~half their net income on a single child's education.
I had a similar case -- also from NC and did Duke's TIP -> IB/AP -> top tier state school for almost free. I think the author of the article is intentionally confusing the testing results which show how the US does on average with how students who actually end up doing science do.
Yet during this period of national "mediocrity," we created Silicon Valley, built multinational biotechnology firms, and continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications and total number of Nobel Prize winners. We also invented and sold more than a few iPads. Obviously, standardized tests aren't everything.
That's all great, but to some extent many students will be good at science even if they go to terrible schools. Similarly, it's worth trying to give most students a basic understanding of science even if they go into another field.
There goes my slight advantage in academia due to a unique last name (a fairly common one in the Ukraine but spelled in an unusual way in English). I always hoped that it would make up for being trivial to cyber-stalk but oh well.
So there's 196 papers retracted since 2001? That's far less than the number of papers published in my subfield (condensed matter physics) each day. It's simply easier to find the tiny fraction that do cheat now that everything is more readily available.
I'm a graduate student in condensed matter experiment, and I'm not at all worried about my future job prospects. Yes, it is very difficult to get one of the ~10 top-ranked tenure track positions that come open every year in a given sub-field, which would require at least one very-intense postdoc (and to some extent a lot of luck). It's somewhat less difficult to get a tenure track position as a second-tier school, and if you're good at teaching there's plenty of opportunities at smaller universities and liberal arts schools. There are however, tons of companies that hire physicists every year, especially ones who specialize in the more applied side of CME (magnetics, semiconductors, devices, etc). That's what I'm interested in, mostly because I would rather not work 60+ hours a week for the next 15 years. Physics is great fun, but it's not the only thing going on in my life.
Outright fraud in physics is astoundingly rare. There's Heinrich Schoen and that's about all I can think of in the last few years. It's not a perfect world -- there are some assholes and also well-meaning people who write papers which are flat-out wrong for one reason or another. However, the vast majority of people who work in the field are honestly trying to do good work. I don't think you have anything in particular to worry about.
Being able to grow well-ordered arrays of bismuth selenide and bismuth telluride nanoplates is a great improvement over the original VLS/Van der Waals growth method developed by Cui's group, in which you could grow similar nanoplates but they were randomly distributed across the surface (it's a pain to work with them since you have to track whichever one you want to use down by hand). However, it's not a huge breakthrough in the field and doesn't put us much closer to any of the proposed devices which would actually use topological insulators. Although they don't show any transport data in the paper the quality of the nanoplates may not be that good based on the ARPES data shown -- the fermi level falls well into the conduction band, and not in the gap as would be required by most interesting applications. Also, a more commonly used technique called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) can also be used to grow continuous films of these materials across whole wafers, and several groups have demonstrated very high quality films this way.
TL;DR: A nice scientific paper, on an exciting topic, but no major breakthrough. Several interesting uses for TIs have been proposed but they are all very far out, everything going on right now is still basic research.
(Full disclosure: I'm not affiliated with either group, but I am sitting in the lab measuring some TI-based devices right now).
I had a similar issue with a company that makes industrial plasma etching equipment. After eight months of trying to get off their mailing list I was able to find the CEO's personal phone extension, and started left him a choice voicemail. I got a phone apology each from their PR and marketing heads within the hour, and haven't heard from them since. This may not work if the whole company is in on it though.
Maintaining and caring for old nuclear weapons and facilities is almost half of the DOE's budget. It's not like we can just lock the doors to all the facilities and abandon them....
General relativity is only one small part of physics, and focusing on it wouldn't help you understand a lot of the physics articles that go through here. I would suggest a more balanced approach -- with your background you should be able to work through Griffith's E&M and Quantum books which many undergraduate physics majors use. All the purists out there may scoff at them, but let's face it, your not actually going to work through Zee's "QFT in a nutshell" or many of the other books suggested above on your own. With a bit more of a background in the field, you would be in a better place to evaluate what you wanted to study next.
I pulled up the IEEE bit since it's written for a very general audience, but Oliver's comment on this paper doesn't sound any more positive that the previous ones: "To be clear, this system was not used to perform any computational algorithm." ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473164a ). The paper is a good first step, but doesn't come anywhere near to proving the claims that the company has made. It is also way less exciting that things that other groups have done, without all the hype, http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5654 being the most recent example. It's a good illustration through (PoV-ray, wut wut).
I went to a public high school with a intense IB program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Baccalaureate). I worked hard and got into several very competitive private schools, and was hella excited until I got the financial aid package from each of them which wanted my family to pay 1/3rd of the income each year to send me there. Factoring in what my family could realistically have paid, I would have had to take out ~100k in loans for four years. I was pretty bummed out, and I ended up going to my state's flagship public university (not particularly well known for what I wanted to study) -- the same one as many of the B students in my class. Nuts.
...
However, it all worked out for the best. I had a small scholarship and because the tuition was so low I was able to graduate with no debt. I was in the honors program and had my pick of the most interesting classes and professors. My department was pretty small, and I was able to join a research group my freshman year and got a lot of valuable experience in microelectronic fabrication. Also because my school had relatively loose course requirements (unlike U Chicago for example) I was able to take whatever I wanted my senior year (Jackson and Sakurai to all you physics buffs). I had my pick of graduate schools, and I ended up with a fellowship to my favorite. While some of my peers are struggling with their loan payments, I can think about a house. Even more importantly, I also have the freedom to take an interesting but low-paying job when I graduate.
At the end of high school I felt pretty jaded about how it all turned out, but now I see it was for the best. YMMV, but worked out well for me.
Slashdot Mirror
...and that's if you want to be a graduate student. In some fields (and some research groups) it's worth it. One physicist's take: http://scientopia.org/blogs/galacticinteractions/2012/01/14/777/
Everspin previously used the crossed-lines writing technique (shown here http://thefutureofthings.com/upload/image/articles/2006/mram/mram-write.jpg), but has now switched to spin-transfer torque based devices. Several other companies are also working on this, so things to improve rapidly. PR release at (http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/14/everspin-throws-first-st-mram-chips-down/)
Eh, even if he had made up realistic-looking data, there were a lot of other red flags: not saving raw data or samples, no one else making measurements, all other groups unable to reproduce results, etc. In retrospect, it sounds like it only went on that long because he was at a private lab, but I see what you mean.
Aren't there some fundamental physical limits on how low your energy usage can be for a given amount of information based on thermodynamics? Is it just the case that they're way, way less than what we're using now?
For any sort of data storage the energy barrier between the two states needs to be large enough that the system doesn't thermodynamically fluctuate between them very often. In practice, this means that the barrier needs to be several times larger than kb*T where kb is the boltzman constant. For computation there's not any hard and fast rule about the energy required, but there's lots of practical ones...
What *I* said is that parents who send their kids to private school should be exempt from paying school tax for that 1 year.
What I'm saying is that this will do almost nothing to help low and middle-class families.
I am a believer that the more competition a business receives, the better it is for the customer (versus a monopoly or near-monopoly).
Sure, that makes sense for businesses, but since when is primary education a business? A lot of people would agree that a primary education is a human right: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a26 Unfortunately for many families a more economically competitive option would be to send kids to work at age 14 rather than to school. Allowing them to do that wouldn't improve schools either.
I went to a high school where ~60 percent of the students got free/reduced lunch, which meant that their parents made less than 200% of the poverty level. In my county schools are supported primarily through property tax revenues, and most of these families rent and pay property tax only indirectly. It's a moot point though, considering private school tuition runs around 15-20 k$. Families, especially those who are trying to make ends meet, can't spend ~half their net income on a single child's education.
Yet during this period of national "mediocrity," we created Silicon Valley, built multinational biotechnology firms, and continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications and total number of Nobel Prize winners. We also invented and sold more than a few iPads. Obviously, standardized tests aren't everything.
That's all great, but to some extent many students will be good at science even if they go to terrible schools. Similarly, it's worth trying to give most students a basic understanding of science even if they go into another field.
There goes my slight advantage in academia due to a unique last name (a fairly common one in the Ukraine but spelled in an unusual way in English). I always hoped that it would make up for being trivial to cyber-stalk but oh well.
Oops- too bad there is not a way to fix typos after the fact.
So there's 196 papers retracted since 2001? That's far less than the number of papers published in my subfield (condensed matter physics) each day. It's simply easier to find the tiny fraction that do cheat now that everything is more readily available.
I'm a graduate student in condensed matter experiment, and I'm not at all worried about my future job prospects. Yes, it is very difficult to get one of the ~10 top-ranked tenure track positions that come open every year in a given sub-field, which would require at least one very-intense postdoc (and to some extent a lot of luck). It's somewhat less difficult to get a tenure track position as a second-tier school, and if you're good at teaching there's plenty of opportunities at smaller universities and liberal arts schools. There are however, tons of companies that hire physicists every year, especially ones who specialize in the more applied side of CME (magnetics, semiconductors, devices, etc). That's what I'm interested in, mostly because I would rather not work 60+ hours a week for the next 15 years. Physics is great fun, but it's not the only thing going on in my life. Outright fraud in physics is astoundingly rare. There's Heinrich Schoen and that's about all I can think of in the last few years. It's not a perfect world -- there are some assholes and also well-meaning people who write papers which are flat-out wrong for one reason or another. However, the vast majority of people who work in the field are honestly trying to do good work. I don't think you have anything in particular to worry about.
Being able to grow well-ordered arrays of bismuth selenide and bismuth telluride nanoplates is a great improvement over the original VLS/Van der Waals growth method developed by Cui's group, in which you could grow similar nanoplates but they were randomly distributed across the surface (it's a pain to work with them since you have to track whichever one you want to use down by hand). However, it's not a huge breakthrough in the field and doesn't put us much closer to any of the proposed devices which would actually use topological insulators. Although they don't show any transport data in the paper the quality of the nanoplates may not be that good based on the ARPES data shown -- the fermi level falls well into the conduction band, and not in the gap as would be required by most interesting applications. Also, a more commonly used technique called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) can also be used to grow continuous films of these materials across whole wafers, and several groups have demonstrated very high quality films this way.
TL;DR: A nice scientific paper, on an exciting topic, but no major breakthrough. Several interesting uses for TIs have been proposed but they are all very far out, everything going on right now is still basic research. (Full disclosure: I'm not affiliated with either group, but I am sitting in the lab measuring some TI-based devices right now).
I have heard several people also end up with a number right around 15%. For example: http://eugenyboger.livejournal.com/4514.html?thread=53410#t53410 Our current number is a lower bound only, we'll try to get a better estimate at some point.
Thanks! I will make sure to give him credit for this find and take a closer look at his work. In the meantime I just recreated the same thing in english at http://samarcandanalytics.com/election_data/Figures/FineHistInset_large.png and will work a discussion of it into the next draft.
I can't believe we missed this! I just turned down the bin size on the histograms and it really sticks out. What post did you first see it on? Thanks!
Yeah, I know. As several people have pointed out so far, the 3.5 million is a gross underestimate. We plan to do a more in-depth analysis soon.
I had a similar issue with a company that makes industrial plasma etching equipment. After eight months of trying to get off their mailing list I was able to find the CEO's personal phone extension, and started left him a choice voicemail. I got a phone apology each from their PR and marketing heads within the hour, and haven't heard from them since. This may not work if the whole company is in on it though.
Maintaining and caring for old nuclear weapons and facilities is almost half of the DOE's budget. It's not like we can just lock the doors to all the facilities and abandon them....
General relativity is only one small part of physics, and focusing on it wouldn't help you understand a lot of the physics articles that go through here. I would suggest a more balanced approach -- with your background you should be able to work through Griffith's E&M and Quantum books which many undergraduate physics majors use. All the purists out there may scoff at them, but let's face it, your not actually going to work through Zee's "QFT in a nutshell" or many of the other books suggested above on your own. With a bit more of a background in the field, you would be in a better place to evaluate what you wanted to study next.
I pulled up the IEEE bit since it's written for a very general audience, but Oliver's comment on this paper doesn't sound any more positive that the previous ones: "To be clear, this system was not used to perform any computational algorithm." ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/473164a ). The paper is a good first step, but doesn't come anywhere near to proving the claims that the company has made. It is also way less exciting that things that other groups have done, without all the hype, http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5654 being the most recent example. It's a good illustration through (PoV-ray, wut wut).
I haven't studied quantum information theory (I dropped Paul Ginsparg's quantum information theory class after a few days because I had too much work this semester), but it's general knowledge among physicists that Dwave has not made anything worth writing home about. Two wide-audience survey articles about this are http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/loser-dwave-does-not-quantum-compute from IEEE and http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/controversial-computer-is-at-lea.html?ref=hp from the magazine Science
It's hard to believe that such low-strength fields could have much of an effect on soft tissue, let alone bone density: http://thevirtuosi.blogspot.com/2010/05/cell-phone-brain-damage-part-deux.html
However, it all worked out for the best. I had a small scholarship and because the tuition was so low I was able to graduate with no debt. I was in the honors program and had my pick of the most interesting classes and professors. My department was pretty small, and I was able to join a research group my freshman year and got a lot of valuable experience in microelectronic fabrication. Also because my school had relatively loose course requirements (unlike U Chicago for example) I was able to take whatever I wanted my senior year (Jackson and Sakurai to all you physics buffs). I had my pick of graduate schools, and I ended up with a fellowship to my favorite. While some of my peers are struggling with their loan payments, I can think about a house. Even more importantly, I also have the freedom to take an interesting but low-paying job when I graduate.
At the end of high school I felt pretty jaded about how it all turned out, but now I see it was for the best. YMMV, but worked out well for me.
I would love to, but the CHDK doesn't yet support a lot of the newer entry-level DLSRs like the XS, XSi, T1i, T2i, etc: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ#Q._What_camera_models_are_supported_by_the_CHDK_program.3F