There is no reason for a company to put up with people like that, but there is also no reason that smart people have to be like that. In many cases, the destructive employees don't realize the effect they're having on other people. If someone is belligerent, the proper solution is for their boss to take them aside and say, "You have a communication style that often offends people. Let me give you some tips about how to interact better." If someone is a flake, the proper solution is for their boss to make it very clear that they are expected to fulfill their commitments, and unreliableness will not be tolerated. If the employee refuses to improve, they should be fired. But in many cases, they want to improve and just need guidance on how to do it. If their boss doesn't provide that guidance, it's the boss who is failing, not the employee.
When my phone is turned off doing nothing, I find that cellular standby (i.e. keeping the radio turned on so I can still receive calls) uses far more power than everything else put together. That is the time when the issues discussed in the article (compositing on the CPU, using Java instead of native code, etc.) are least important. The CPU is doing almost nothing at all. Its power usage is negligible, so if you could cut that power usage in half, all you'd save would be half of almost nothing.
There's a myth going around that battery life is strongly affected by how efficient your code is. On most phone, it's simply not true. By far the biggest power drains are the screen and the radios (cellular, wifi, bluetooth). On Android, there's even a handy battery monitor built in that you can use to confirm this (Settings->About phone->Battery use). I can spend half an hour playing a high end, graphics intensive game (Hero of Sparta) on my Nexus One, and when I then check the battery use, I find that even while I was playing the screen and the cellular radio standby were still the dominant uses of power.
Exactly. Any tests are better than no tests, and this takes essentially no extra time on your part. Every time you fix a bug, you need to verify that it's really fixed in any case. So verify it by writing a test case that can then become part of your small but steadily growing test suite.
That doesn't match my experience. The currency by which scientists are measured is not publications, but citations of your publications. You can publish a hundred worthless articles in obscure journals that no one ever cites, and you'll get very little credit for them. A handful of good quality, widely cited articles will do more to advance your career.
The younger the target audience, the more important it is to have a simple, well designed language. If you're claiming that line numbers make a language easier for kids to learn, you clearly have something you're trying to sell me. Which, curiously enough, you do.
Wow, this "story" is a really blatant advertisement for a commercial website.
No, BASIC is not a good language for much of any purpose, including education. Especially not the archaic type of BASIC they're using. Computer science really has progressed in the last four decades. Personally, I'd recommend Python as a starting language - it's easy to learn enough to do simple things, it's a well designed language that teaches good habits, and it's a "real" language that you won't outgrow as soon as you start writing anything beyond toy programs. But if you want a language designed specifically as a learning tool, there are lots of those that are a lot more modern and let you do a lot more than this company's offering: Processing, Alice, etc.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, why snowball fights never go out of fashion? I mean, they've probably been going on for thousands of years, and haven't changed a bit in all that time. If Tron looks dated after just 27 years, then snowball fights ought to seem downright prehistoric. Surely they need a bit of modern technology to bring them up to date?
Whoa. That is so completely, totally wrong, I hardly know where to start.
The greenhouse effect is very well understood. It's the sort of thing you derive as an exercise in an undergrad electromagnetism class. You can find a discussion of it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect, but the basic idea is very simple. When light hits any material (solid, liquid, or gas), some energy is transmitted, some is reflected, and some is absorbed. The details depend strongly on both the material and the frequency of the incoming light. That's why different objects are different colors: because they vary in how much light of each color they reflect.
The energy from the sun is primarily in the ultraviolet and visible frequencies. When it hits the earth, much of the energy is absorbed, then re-emitted as lower frequency infrared light. Many materials (including glass, which is how greenhouses work, and carbon dioxide, which is how the earth's greenhouse effect works) are more reflective of infrared light than of ultraviolet or visible light. That's how they hold in energy: a larger fraction of the energy coming in gets through than of the energy trying to get out.
All of the above is easily testable, and every time you get into a car that's gotten hot by sitting in the sun, you are witnessing the greenhouse effect in action.
If I may offer a suggestion (and I mean this sincerely, not as an attempt to be insulting), one of the most important things you can know is what you don't know. You clearly know almost nothing about the science of climate change and the evidence supporting it, yet you seem to believe that you know a lot about it. You don't. Making false claims and throwing out insults about "wooly-minded AGW believers" who actually know far more than you does nothing useful: not for you, not for them, not for society. You owe it to yourself to be better than that.
So, there's no immediacy to global warming, we have time to get it right
Isn't that convenient? The planet is steadily getting warmer, we have enormous evidence that it's caused by greenhouse gases, sea levels are rising, polar ice is shrinking, glaciers around the world are melting, the ocean is getting more acidic... but hey, someone has predicted (based on a method that is only one step removed from astrology) that we're actually starting an ice age, so there's no hurry to actually do anything!
Let me quote from the preamble to the GNU General Public License:
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights.
That principle applies to so many different situations. People often discuss freedom under the false assumption that you have freedom unless the government takes it away from you. That view is way too simplistic. There are many threats to freedom from many sources. The fact is, lots of people will try to restrict your freedom unless they are prevented from doing so. That is what government regulation is about (when it's done properly, which certainly is not always the case): protecting your freedom by denying others the right to restrict it.
Every major invention I can think of came from a private company doing research for a specific need
You do realize, don't you (that's sarcasm - you obviously don't realize) that many of those private companies are getting government grants to support their research projects? The startup I used to work for got a lot of its early income from an NIH grant, before it grew to be self supporting. Furthermore, many of those private companies collaborate with academic or government researchers and rely on them for important parts of their product development. I once heard of an executive at a pharmaceutical company declaring, "We don't do target identification. That's what academia is for."
The Register article is really misleading, and presents a very political spin on the NASA paper. It starts out, "A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy," which is a severe exaggeration of what they actually say. It concludes that, "It now appears, however, that the previous/current state of climate science may simply have been wrong and that there's really no need to get in an immediate flap. If Bounoua and her colleagues are right, and CO2 levels keep on rising the way they have been lately (about 2 ppm each year), we can go a couple of centuries without any dangerous warming." That is simply false, and has no connection to what's actually in that paper.
Here's what the paper actually says:
These effects slow but do not alleviate the projected atmospheric warming by accelerating the recycling of water between the land and atmosphere, reducing the warming by about 0.3C globally and 0.6C over land.
That's what we're talking about: reducing the warming estimates by 0.3 C globally, or 0.6 C over land. That's a significant correction, but hardly means "there's really no need to get in an immediate flap," or that "we can go a couple of centuries without any dangerous warming."
Actually, even that is an overstatement. The authors of the paper include an important caveat that the Register article completely fails to mention:
"Secondly and most importantly, there is recognition that even if CO2 concentration could be stabilized, much of the warming is yet to be realized. In transient simulations [e.g., Betts et al., 2007], as CO2 rises stomata respond almost instantaneously but LAI takes a long time to grow, so the warming effect of stomatal closure can take a long time to be offset by the cooling effect of increased LAI.... This suggests that while increased LAI may not slow global warming significantly in the near term, its long term negative feedback could potentially reduce temperatures following a stabilization of CO2 concentration."
So this is a long term effect that won't help us significantly until after we stabilize CO2 levels. And that's not going to happen for a very long time, unless we dramatically reduce our current CO2 emissions.
Before moving to the iChat team, Jens Alfke worked on Apple's Java VM. He was incredibly active on their Java development mailing list, and spent more time helping people to solve their programming problems and generally going beyond the call of duty than almost anyone else I've ever seen. He's a smart, creative guy, and I'm not at all surprised to learn he was doing innovative work in this area man years before Facebook.
The important thing to understand is that the "collapse" of the wavefunction is a purely phenomenological description. It tells us, "If you go into your lab and perform an experiment, this is what you should expect to observe." It doesn't tell you why that happens.
The question of "Why?" is what various interpretations of quantum mechanics try to answer. And people have come up with dozens of possible answers, involving everything from parallel universes, to information traveling backward in time, to a hypothetical "God" throwing dice. The problem is that most of them don't offer any way to test them experimentally, which makes the whole field more philosophy than science. Quantum mechanics may be a phenomenological theory, but it's a hugely successful one. As long as it continues to accurately predict the outcomes of experiments, we have no way to test whether one "interpretation" of those predictions is better than any other interpretation that makes the same predictions.
This actually sounds a lot like an idea I've had for a different way the film industry could work: moving to a model where screenwriters publish their screenplays, much as playwrights publish their plays, and then anyone who wants to is free to making movies from them (paying appropriate royalties, of course), just as anyone who wants to is free to put on a production of a play. This seems to me like a better match for the internet age, where the equipment needed to make professional quality movies is inexpensive and widely available, and distribution is no longer a major obstacle.
Yay! I've been wanting my very own telescreen for a long time. Because let's face it: the biggest problem with TV is that it doesn't watch you while you're watching it. But now that problem has been fixed, and I'm glad to see Microsoft has recognized the opportunities from letting other people monitor you without disclosure, oversight, or consent. But they sure kept us waiting: 26 years behind schedule.
No, it is per lily. See the picture in the article that shows the different levels of grouping. A "cell" houses 10,000-50,000 people. Several of those are joined into a "city" housing 100,000, and several of those form a "country" with a million people.
The majority of the inhabitants would live in 1km high “City in the Sky” towers located at the center of the circular cells, while additional “Waterside” residential zones comprising low-rise townhouses would be located on the outer edge of the structure’s outer circumference
So these are really vertical cities. The 1 km readius doesn't reflect the true "area" that's available for people to live in.
Figuring out how to build a 1 km tower on a floating platform is left as an exercise to the reader.
No doubt that HTML 5 ads would consume some more resources but they would still be an order of magnitude less power hungry.
What makes you believe that? I'm sure advertisers will have no trouble finding ways to suck up power with HTML5. WebGL alone is likely to accelerate global warming by a couple of years...
Personally, I love Flash. I just install FlashBlock, and all those annoying ads go away, yet I still have easy access to Flash content when I actually want it. Once advertisers start moving to HTML5, it will become a lot harder to block only the irritating animations without also blocking the useful ones.
It's actually rather remarkable: $2 million per day adds up to over $700 million per year, from something as simple as foam insulation. I wonder how many other ways they could save similar amounts of money through equally easy means, if only they weren't given a blank check and felt a little more pressure to cut costs? Why did it take something as extreme as attacks on their supply convoys to make them stop wasting our money in this case? You know how the saying goes: a billion here, a billion there, and soon you're talking about real money.
This is actually the latest in a series of recent discoveries that have correlated particular aspects of biology with political positions. For example, conservatives tend to have a stronger startle reflex and a stronger emotional reaction to "disgusting" things. In this case, here's what the article says about the nature of the connection:
Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that "it is the crucial interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal."
So this isn't actually a "liberal" gene. It's a "wanting to learn about other people's points of view" gene, and people who have the interest and opportunity to learn about other points of view tend, as a consequence, to become more liberal.
Actually, Folding@Home can also simulate these time scales by means of Markov state models. The trajectory is pieced together out of data collected from many short simulations, whereas the Anton trajectory is generated from a single MD run, but in practice that distinction is usually irrelevant. Protein dynamics are stochastic, so for any time scale longer than about 1 ns, both approaches given equally "realistic" or "valid" trajectories.
That's not to criticize Anton. It's an amazing piece of hardware and they're doing amazing work with it. But of the two approaches, Markov state models are probably going to prove more valuable in the end. They make more efficient use of whatever computational resources you have available, they give more insight into the structure of the folding pathway, and they can be run on commodity hardware that many more people have access to. David Shaw has even admitted they'll eventually have to start using them. By the third generation of Anton, he expects to have hit limits on how far they can parallelize a single MD run, so Markov state models will be the only way they can keep adding processing power.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason for a company to put up with people like that, but there is also no reason that smart people have to be like that. In many cases, the destructive employees don't realize the effect they're having on other people. If someone is belligerent, the proper solution is for their boss to take them aside and say, "You have a communication style that often offends people. Let me give you some tips about how to interact better." If someone is a flake, the proper solution is for their boss to make it very clear that they are expected to fulfill their commitments, and unreliableness will not be tolerated. If the employee refuses to improve, they should be fired. But in many cases, they want to improve and just need guidance on how to do it. If their boss doesn't provide that guidance, it's the boss who is failing, not the employee.
When my phone is turned off doing nothing, I find that cellular standby (i.e. keeping the radio turned on so I can still receive calls) uses far more power than everything else put together. That is the time when the issues discussed in the article (compositing on the CPU, using Java instead of native code, etc.) are least important. The CPU is doing almost nothing at all. Its power usage is negligible, so if you could cut that power usage in half, all you'd save would be half of almost nothing.
There's a myth going around that battery life is strongly affected by how efficient your code is. On most phone, it's simply not true. By far the biggest power drains are the screen and the radios (cellular, wifi, bluetooth). On Android, there's even a handy battery monitor built in that you can use to confirm this (Settings->About phone->Battery use). I can spend half an hour playing a high end, graphics intensive game (Hero of Sparta) on my Nexus One, and when I then check the battery use, I find that even while I was playing the screen and the cellular radio standby were still the dominant uses of power.
Exactly. Any tests are better than no tests, and this takes essentially no extra time on your part. Every time you fix a bug, you need to verify that it's really fixed in any case. So verify it by writing a test case that can then become part of your small but steadily growing test suite.
Discovery is more prestigious than replication. I don't see how to fix that.
Discovery is prestigious. Having your results discredit is not. And people do remember.
That doesn't match my experience. The currency by which scientists are measured is not publications, but citations of your publications. You can publish a hundred worthless articles in obscure journals that no one ever cites, and you'll get very little credit for them. A handful of good quality, widely cited articles will do more to advance your career.
Processing is also available in a version that runs directly in the browser: http://processingjs.org/
The younger the target audience, the more important it is to have a simple, well designed language. If you're claiming that line numbers make a language easier for kids to learn, you clearly have something you're trying to sell me. Which, curiously enough, you do.
Wow, this "story" is a really blatant advertisement for a commercial website.
No, BASIC is not a good language for much of any purpose, including education. Especially not the archaic type of BASIC they're using. Computer science really has progressed in the last four decades. Personally, I'd recommend Python as a starting language - it's easy to learn enough to do simple things, it's a well designed language that teaches good habits, and it's a "real" language that you won't outgrow as soon as you start writing anything beyond toy programs. But if you want a language designed specifically as a learning tool, there are lots of those that are a lot more modern and let you do a lot more than this company's offering: Processing, Alice, etc.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, why snowball fights never go out of fashion? I mean, they've probably been going on for thousands of years, and haven't changed a bit in all that time. If Tron looks dated after just 27 years, then snowball fights ought to seem downright prehistoric. Surely they need a bit of modern technology to bring them up to date?
Whoa. That is so completely, totally wrong, I hardly know where to start.
The greenhouse effect is very well understood. It's the sort of thing you derive as an exercise in an undergrad electromagnetism class. You can find a discussion of it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect, but the basic idea is very simple. When light hits any material (solid, liquid, or gas), some energy is transmitted, some is reflected, and some is absorbed. The details depend strongly on both the material and the frequency of the incoming light. That's why different objects are different colors: because they vary in how much light of each color they reflect.
The energy from the sun is primarily in the ultraviolet and visible frequencies. When it hits the earth, much of the energy is absorbed, then re-emitted as lower frequency infrared light. Many materials (including glass, which is how greenhouses work, and carbon dioxide, which is how the earth's greenhouse effect works) are more reflective of infrared light than of ultraviolet or visible light. That's how they hold in energy: a larger fraction of the energy coming in gets through than of the energy trying to get out.
All of the above is easily testable, and every time you get into a car that's gotten hot by sitting in the sun, you are witnessing the greenhouse effect in action.
If I may offer a suggestion (and I mean this sincerely, not as an attempt to be insulting), one of the most important things you can know is what you don't know. You clearly know almost nothing about the science of climate change and the evidence supporting it, yet you seem to believe that you know a lot about it. You don't. Making false claims and throwing out insults about "wooly-minded AGW believers" who actually know far more than you does nothing useful: not for you, not for them, not for society. You owe it to yourself to be better than that.
So, there's no immediacy to global warming, we have time to get it right
Isn't that convenient? The planet is steadily getting warmer, we have enormous evidence that it's caused by greenhouse gases, sea levels are rising, polar ice is shrinking, glaciers around the world are melting, the ocean is getting more acidic... but hey, someone has predicted (based on a method that is only one step removed from astrology) that we're actually starting an ice age, so there's no hurry to actually do anything!
Let me quote from the preamble to the GNU General Public License:
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights.
That principle applies to so many different situations. People often discuss freedom under the false assumption that you have freedom unless the government takes it away from you. That view is way too simplistic. There are many threats to freedom from many sources. The fact is, lots of people will try to restrict your freedom unless they are prevented from doing so. That is what government regulation is about (when it's done properly, which certainly is not always the case): protecting your freedom by denying others the right to restrict it.
Every major invention I can think of came from a private company doing research for a specific need
You do realize, don't you (that's sarcasm - you obviously don't realize) that many of those private companies are getting government grants to support their research projects? The startup I used to work for got a lot of its early income from an NIH grant, before it grew to be self supporting. Furthermore, many of those private companies collaborate with academic or government researchers and rely on them for important parts of their product development. I once heard of an executive at a pharmaceutical company declaring, "We don't do target identification. That's what academia is for."
The Register article is really misleading, and presents a very political spin on the NASA paper. It starts out, "A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy," which is a severe exaggeration of what they actually say. It concludes that, "It now appears, however, that the previous/current state of climate science may simply have been wrong and that there's really no need to get in an immediate flap. If Bounoua and her colleagues are right, and CO2 levels keep on rising the way they have been lately (about 2 ppm each year), we can go a couple of centuries without any dangerous warming." That is simply false, and has no connection to what's actually in that paper.
Here's what the paper actually says:
These effects slow but do not alleviate the projected atmospheric warming by accelerating the recycling of water between the land and atmosphere, reducing the warming by about 0.3C globally and 0.6C over land.
That's what we're talking about: reducing the warming estimates by 0.3 C globally, or 0.6 C over land. That's a significant correction, but hardly means "there's really no need to get in an immediate flap," or that "we can go a couple of centuries without any dangerous warming."
Actually, even that is an overstatement. The authors of the paper include an important caveat that the Register article completely fails to mention:
"Secondly and most importantly, there is recognition that even if CO2 concentration could be stabilized, much of the warming is yet to be realized. In transient simulations [e.g., Betts et al., 2007], as CO2 rises stomata respond almost instantaneously but LAI takes a long time to grow, so the warming effect of stomatal closure can take a long time to be offset by the cooling effect of increased LAI.... This suggests that while increased LAI may not slow global warming significantly in the near term, its long term negative feedback could potentially reduce temperatures following a stabilization of CO2 concentration."
So this is a long term effect that won't help us significantly until after we stabilize CO2 levels. And that's not going to happen for a very long time, unless we dramatically reduce our current CO2 emissions.
Before moving to the iChat team, Jens Alfke worked on Apple's Java VM. He was incredibly active on their Java development mailing list, and spent more time helping people to solve their programming problems and generally going beyond the call of duty than almost anyone else I've ever seen. He's a smart, creative guy, and I'm not at all surprised to learn he was doing innovative work in this area man years before Facebook.
The important thing to understand is that the "collapse" of the wavefunction is a purely phenomenological description. It tells us, "If you go into your lab and perform an experiment, this is what you should expect to observe." It doesn't tell you why that happens.
The question of "Why?" is what various interpretations of quantum mechanics try to answer. And people have come up with dozens of possible answers, involving everything from parallel universes, to information traveling backward in time, to a hypothetical "God" throwing dice. The problem is that most of them don't offer any way to test them experimentally, which makes the whole field more philosophy than science. Quantum mechanics may be a phenomenological theory, but it's a hugely successful one. As long as it continues to accurately predict the outcomes of experiments, we have no way to test whether one "interpretation" of those predictions is better than any other interpretation that makes the same predictions.
This actually sounds a lot like an idea I've had for a different way the film industry could work: moving to a model where screenwriters publish their screenplays, much as playwrights publish their plays, and then anyone who wants to is free to making movies from them (paying appropriate royalties, of course), just as anyone who wants to is free to put on a production of a play. This seems to me like a better match for the internet age, where the equipment needed to make professional quality movies is inexpensive and widely available, and distribution is no longer a major obstacle.
Yay! I've been wanting my very own telescreen for a long time. Because let's face it: the biggest problem with TV is that it doesn't watch you while you're watching it. But now that problem has been fixed, and I'm glad to see Microsoft has recognized the opportunities from letting other people monitor you without disclosure, oversight, or consent. But they sure kept us waiting: 26 years behind schedule.
No, it is per lily. See the picture in the article that shows the different levels of grouping. A "cell" houses 10,000-50,000 people. Several of those are joined into a "city" housing 100,000, and several of those form a "country" with a million people.
From the article
The majority of the inhabitants would live in 1km high “City in the Sky” towers located at the center of the circular cells, while additional “Waterside” residential zones comprising low-rise townhouses would be located on the outer edge of the structure’s outer circumference
So these are really vertical cities. The 1 km readius doesn't reflect the true "area" that's available for people to live in.
Figuring out how to build a 1 km tower on a floating platform is left as an exercise to the reader.
No doubt that HTML 5 ads would consume some more resources but they would still be an order of magnitude less power hungry.
What makes you believe that? I'm sure advertisers will have no trouble finding ways to suck up power with HTML5. WebGL alone is likely to accelerate global warming by a couple of years...
Personally, I love Flash. I just install FlashBlock, and all those annoying ads go away, yet I still have easy access to Flash content when I actually want it. Once advertisers start moving to HTML5, it will become a lot harder to block only the irritating animations without also blocking the useful ones.
It's actually rather remarkable: $2 million per day adds up to over $700 million per year, from something as simple as foam insulation. I wonder how many other ways they could save similar amounts of money through equally easy means, if only they weren't given a blank check and felt a little more pressure to cut costs? Why did it take something as extreme as attacks on their supply convoys to make them stop wasting our money in this case? You know how the saying goes: a billion here, a billion there, and soon you're talking about real money.
Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that "it is the crucial interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal."
So this isn't actually a "liberal" gene. It's a "wanting to learn about other people's points of view" gene, and people who have the interest and opportunity to learn about other points of view tend, as a consequence, to become more liberal.
Actually, Folding@Home can also simulate these time scales by means of Markov state models. The trajectory is pieced together out of data collected from many short simulations, whereas the Anton trajectory is generated from a single MD run, but in practice that distinction is usually irrelevant. Protein dynamics are stochastic, so for any time scale longer than about 1 ns, both approaches given equally "realistic" or "valid" trajectories.
That's not to criticize Anton. It's an amazing piece of hardware and they're doing amazing work with it. But of the two approaches, Markov state models are probably going to prove more valuable in the end. They make more efficient use of whatever computational resources you have available, they give more insight into the structure of the folding pathway, and they can be run on commodity hardware that many more people have access to. David Shaw has even admitted they'll eventually have to start using them. By the third generation of Anton, he expects to have hit limits on how far they can parallelize a single MD run, so Markov state models will be the only way they can keep adding processing power.