The top US academic institutions have the most money of any in the world, by far.
This gap has narrowed substantially with the last six years of NSF cuts, and in some areas a researcher is likely to obtain more funds overseas than at home.
The US continues to be attractive because it tends to offer the best facilities (laboratories, datasets, computers, funding) in the world.
Actually with the latest cuts in funding this is no longer the case. Since GWB took office, the NSF funding per researcher has gone down and nowadays there are top notch american based scientists whose last n funding requests have been declined. In the past requests from such researchers had much higher rates of success.
In terms of bang for the buck particle accelerators are one of the worse places in which to invest money. They often goble up the same amount as the entire funding dedicated to biology, engineering, computer science and mathematics combined.
I question the Forbes/Fortune numbers for two reason:
Bill Gates has been taking money out of Microsoft since it went public and investing it very well. The Forbes/Fortune numbers imply a paltry return on those investments. I know of at least one other credible source which has pegged his wealth at $80 billion.
Second, Carlos Slim has long been believed to be the head of an investment syndicate. Earlier on in his career he made statements to that effect. This is called a "name lender" in Mexico. That is someone who is the legal front of a business in actuality belonging to politicians, drug lords or foreigners, or a combination thereof. In the past the standard fee for a name lender was in the 3-5% of paper holdings. However he has also reinvested some of his money so all in all a good guesstimate of Slim's actual personal wealth would be around $10-15 billion.
Depends what you mean by this. It is uncontested that a part time anti-Castro CIA operative (Oswald) assassinated Kennedy. The question is: was he acting on his own or under orders from above? Personally I believe he was either on his own or working with a small set of disgruntled CIA officers. The entire coverup (for which seems to be ample evidence) IMHO had the sole purpose of hiding the embarrasing revelation that the CIA had under its employment thugs capable of assassinating the president in their free time.
If you print the entire paragraph as it is, instead of your misleading selective quoting, it supports my account and disproves yours:
First, it says "be the end of August 1945". Second, since the bomb over Hiroshima was not a plutonium device this tells us that the third bomb was ready by the end of August. Lastly, the sentence just before the one you quote reads: "From April to May alone, plutonium production increased five-fold. June production was even better, as was July." As you can see the entire system had been designed to produce bombs in great quantities, and it was ramping up to that end.
Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.
By the time the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the US had enough capacity to produce about an A-bomb a day. Indeed, one of the reasons it took two bombs before the Japanese surrendered is that they very much doubted America had access to more than one. When the second bomb was dropped in rapid succession the Japanese reckoned (quite correctly) that many more were on the way.
One possible explanation is that we men have similar misguided instincts. To give an example, we have as a natural tendency to resolve things via fistfights, but over hundreds of years of workplace culture we have learned to difuse things before they reach that state (modulo the occasional fight in the Taiwanese parlament or pistol/fencing duels a mere 200 years ago).
Women in contrast, being new to the workplace, have yet to learn the habits of a successful workplace collaborative culture.
Pfft. I was part of an Apple discussion group back then and the fanboys would argue with a straight face that Mac OS 8 was good. They would also claim that the mac line wasn't out of date (this is pre-SJ times) and that the company wasn't in any sort of trouble, really, they were just doing fine.
Reportedly Steve Jobs interviewed all upper management upon coming back to Apple and fired all those who said there was nothing wrong with Apple (ie. fanboys).
IANAL but it is my understanding that in Ontario it is illegal to carry a prybar without a valid legal reason. In particular being a construction worker is a good enough reason. So it seems to me that in Ontario hacking tools (by natural extension of the pry bar rule) are already illegal unless you are network admin or you are taking a course in network security or some other such valid legal reason.
In fact, some reports indicate that peer-to-peer may actually exceed web traffic.
This was already the case in most of the measurements we collected in 2002. In fact by 2003, video traffic was the largest by volume, followed by audio, followed by web traffic. Our numbers came from sophisticated measurement devices that could, among other things, tell apart web pages from audio/video traffic on port 80.
Actually sociologist have discovered that differen societies seem to have different degrees of trust built in by parental education and peer pressure. Those societies with higher overall level of trust tend to do better. This forms a virtous circle: if a society can divert resources away from policing and into production, it makes everybody better off, which makes people less likely to steal hence freeing more resources from policing, making people less likely to steal and so on...
To the best of my knowledge: none. AIDS is always fatal, all these drugs do is try to stave off the inevitable.
Bzzt. Wrong. The current drugs are so effective that we have yet to reach the horizon where they stop working. Currently we know that life expectancy (assuming proper treatment) from moment of first diagnose is at least 15 years and counting (see Magic Johnson). This means that a newly diagnosed HIV positive patient's live can be extended, pesimistically, twenty years with the **currently** available drugs. Given that improved versions are continuously being released (the AIDS riddle has been cracked, if not completely solved), at the end of the current minimum of twenty we would have to add all the progress in between. This means that a good portion of currently HIV positive people are likelier to eventually die of cancer or heart disease or even liver failure from taking so many pills rather than from HIV.
Seems to me like a lot of the geeks here don't want to admit that there might be unintended consequences of saturating the environment with RF, and are jumping to conclusions about Nosema being the cause.
By the same token, too many enviromentalists are far too quick to attribute ill effects to cell phones without any evidence to backup their opinion. My guess is that because cell phone users can be quite obnoxious it befits their sense of justice if the could cause cancer or kill bees.
Actually, though I'm not a professional scientist, I have a Masters in Astronomy,
It figures.
The Myth Busters are special effects guys who set up pyrotechnics and sensationalist pseudo-science
It is clear that what bothers you is that they are not card carrying members of the scientists guild.
You talk about the spirit of experimentation yet call the details about scientific controls a "bore". What kind of mindless hypocritical bullshit is that?
There is no contradiction in this. I *am* a scientist and research is far from 100% unabashed joy. There are times where one has to grind through and run an experiment over and over, or plough through a boring calculation for many days.
Getting the spirit of experimentation right if you look at some history involves being tenacious and meticulous, and hard work, not blowing shit up and exclaiming "close enough".
There you go again, setting up a strawman. They blow stuff at the end for fun. You well know that.
It'd take all of about an hour's extra effort per show to set up proper controls,
First, they set up a lot more controls that they let in the show. You simply assume they aren't there because they don't bore you to tears with them.
Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe are good examples of how to do science on TV well.
Those are good shows at passing you information known by science in interesting ways. They do not teach you how to go about questioning a statement and testing it experimentally.
Meanwhile you'd rather see dickheads like the crocodile hunter harass...
This is called a "strawman" and its typical of people who cannot carry a technical discussion or debate like those required in the process of doing science. I'm going to go on a limb here, but I doubt you are a scientist at all.
Mythbusters get the spirit of experimentation right, which is what matters. I wouldn't bet $10 on the correctness of any of their conclusions, and frankly that is as much as we can expect as the myth themselves are ill posed and badly documented.
Yes it fucking well is a bad thing when they don't teach you how to do it.
They teach it well enough for a TV show directed at the general uneducated public. Pompous asses will always complain about minutiae but people who have actually done science writing and dissemination know that popular science is always a bit off, a bit overly simplified. The objective of a layperson science piece is to plant the curiosity bug so that people then go and learn the true story, with all the gory details, not to train certified PhDs in experimental methods.
Looking at their compression rate for documents the data looks highly suspicious. Experiment after experiment reports text compression in the order of 20-30% of original size using bzip2, yet they only get 60% of original size??? This is half as good as widely reported figures!
It was a REAL problem despite this revisionist attitude that some now have that it was nothing at all.
A friend of mine is a higher up at a central bank. He was in charge of Y2K fixing. The first time they advanced the clocks everything broke. In certain cases the software fix was trivial, in others it took a lot more effort, but if they had done nothing the country would have woken up in January 1st to a non-existent bank system.
I'd say 99% of my communications and work with colleagues and peers is electronic... the only time I have to use paper is when I have to work with senior management.
Exactly, as percentage of exchange of information the "paperless" office is already here. It just so happens that the actual amount of paper we print is still pretty high in absolute terms. In relative terms it rounds down to zero: we moved from a world in which the majority of interoffice communication was on paper to one in which well below 1% is paper-based.
p.s. and no, these are not made up statistics, I actually researched them up.
managed to dive to almost 40,000 feet with the Trieste in *1951*, but haven't been back or deeper since!
How can you be so sure? Many of the deeper dives are classified information. The navy will not tell you what is their current max depth capability for subs nor for divers.
Scrap the triple damages for "willful" infringement. People should be encouraged to look up patents so they can license existing inventions instead of wastefuly duplicating effort.
I agree, at a small company we were specifically instructed not to lookup patents as this would only increase potential damages! This is the only system I know of where you get punished for doing due dilligence.
Slashdot Mirror
The top US academic institutions have the most money of any in the world, by far.
This gap has narrowed substantially with the last six years of NSF cuts, and in some areas a researcher is likely to obtain more funds overseas than at home.
The US continues to be attractive because it tends to offer the best facilities (laboratories, datasets, computers, funding) in the world.
Actually with the latest cuts in funding this is no longer the case. Since GWB took office, the NSF funding per researcher has gone down and nowadays there are top notch american based scientists whose last n funding requests have been declined. In the past requests from such researchers had much higher rates of success.
we're still proud of Oxford and Cambridge being world class universities
Actually Oxford has nearly dropped out of the top ten, courtesy of Lady Thatcher's cuts to education funding.
In terms of bang for the buck particle accelerators are one of the worse places in which to invest money. They often goble up the same amount as the entire funding dedicated to biology, engineering, computer science and mathematics combined.
I question the Forbes/Fortune numbers for two reason:
Bill Gates has been taking money out of Microsoft since it went public and investing it very well. The Forbes/Fortune numbers imply a paltry return on those investments. I know of at least one other credible source which has pegged his wealth at $80 billion.
Second, Carlos Slim has long been believed to be the head of an investment syndicate. Earlier on in his career he made statements to that effect. This is called a "name lender" in Mexico. That is someone who is the legal front of a business in actuality belonging to politicians, drug lords or foreigners, or a combination thereof. In the past the standard fee for a name lender was in the 3-5% of paper holdings. However he has also reinvested some of his money so all in all a good guesstimate of Slim's actual personal wealth would be around $10-15 billion.
How much has Carlos Slim given away to help fight AIDS? How much has he given away for education?
m l
About $4 Billion and has promised another $7 Billion:
http://www.gifthub.org/2007/06/carlos-slims-ph.ht
If I give PhD quality research findings about Topic X
The fact that you would spend so much time studying the issue just proves how much of a fanboi you are.
<g>
Did the CIA assassinate Kennedy?
Depends what you mean by this. It is uncontested that a part time anti-Castro CIA operative (Oswald) assassinated Kennedy. The question is: was he acting on his own or under orders from above? Personally I believe he was either on his own or working with a small set of disgruntled CIA officers. The entire coverup (for which seems to be ample evidence) IMHO had the sole purpose of hiding the embarrasing revelation that the CIA had under its employment thugs capable of assassinating the president in their free time.
If you print the entire paragraph as it is, instead of your misleading selective quoting, it supports my account and disproves yours:
First, it says "be the end of August 1945". Second, since the bomb over Hiroshima was not a plutonium device this tells us that the third bomb was ready by the end of August. Lastly, the sentence just before the one you quote reads: "From April to May alone, plutonium production increased five-fold. June production was even better, as was July." As you can see the entire system had been designed to produce bombs in great quantities, and it was ramping up to that end.
Similarly, considering the cost of the atomic bomb against the conventional weaponry that could have been bought for the same money, it is not difficult to imagine what thousands more B-29s, one-third more tanks or five times more artillery, or some other military output, would have done to Allied fighting power.
By the time the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the US had enough capacity to produce about an A-bomb a day. Indeed, one of the reasons it took two bombs before the Japanese surrendered is that they very much doubted America had access to more than one. When the second bomb was dropped in rapid succession the Japanese reckoned (quite correctly) that many more were on the way.
One possible explanation is that we men have similar misguided instincts. To give an example, we have as a natural tendency to resolve things via fistfights, but over hundreds of years of workplace culture we have learned to difuse things before they reach that state (modulo the occasional fight in the Taiwanese parlament or pistol/fencing duels a mere 200 years ago).
Women in contrast, being new to the workplace, have yet to learn the habits of a successful workplace collaborative culture.
Pfft. I was part of an Apple discussion group back then and the fanboys would argue with a straight face that Mac OS 8 was good. They would also claim that the mac line wasn't out of date (this is pre-SJ times) and that the company wasn't in any sort of trouble, really, they were just doing fine.
Reportedly Steve Jobs interviewed all upper management upon coming back to Apple and fired all those who said there was nothing wrong with Apple (ie. fanboys).
IANAL but it is my understanding that in Ontario it is illegal to carry a prybar without a valid legal reason. In particular being a construction worker is a good enough reason. So it seems to me that in Ontario hacking tools (by natural extension of the pry bar rule) are already illegal unless you are network admin or you are taking a course in network security or some other such valid legal reason.
In fact, some reports indicate that peer-to-peer may actually exceed web traffic.
This was already the case in most of the measurements we collected in 2002. In fact by 2003, video traffic was the largest by volume, followed by audio, followed by web traffic. Our numbers came from sophisticated measurement devices that could, among other things, tell apart web pages from audio/video traffic on port 80.
Actually sociologist have discovered that differen societies seem to have different degrees of trust built in by parental education and peer pressure. Those societies with higher overall level of trust tend to do better. This forms a virtous circle: if a society can divert resources away from policing and into production, it makes everybody better off, which makes people less likely to steal hence freeing more resources from policing, making people less likely to steal and so on...
To the best of my knowledge: none. AIDS is always fatal, all these drugs do is try to stave off the inevitable.
Bzzt. Wrong. The current drugs are so effective that we have yet to reach the horizon where they stop working. Currently we know that life expectancy (assuming proper treatment) from moment of first diagnose is at least 15 years and counting (see Magic Johnson). This means that a newly diagnosed HIV positive patient's live can be extended, pesimistically, twenty years with the **currently** available drugs. Given that improved versions are continuously being released (the AIDS riddle has been cracked, if not completely solved), at the end of the current minimum of twenty we would have to add all the progress in between. This means that a good portion of currently HIV positive people are likelier to eventually die of cancer or heart disease or even liver failure from taking so many pills rather than from HIV.
Seems to me like a lot of the geeks here don't want to admit that there might be unintended consequences of saturating the environment with RF, and are jumping to conclusions about Nosema being the cause.
By the same token, too many enviromentalists are far too quick to attribute ill effects to cell phones without any evidence to backup their opinion. My guess is that because cell phone users can be quite obnoxious it befits their sense of justice if the could cause cancer or kill bees.
Actually, though I'm not a professional scientist, I have a Masters in Astronomy,
It figures.
The Myth Busters are special effects guys who set up pyrotechnics and sensationalist pseudo-science
It is clear that what bothers you is that they are not card carrying members of the scientists guild.
You talk about the spirit of experimentation yet call the details about scientific controls a "bore". What kind of mindless hypocritical bullshit is that?
There is no contradiction in this. I *am* a scientist and research is far from 100% unabashed joy. There are times where one has to grind through and run an experiment over and over, or plough through a boring calculation for many days.
Getting the spirit of experimentation right if you look at some history involves being tenacious and meticulous, and hard work, not blowing shit up and exclaiming "close enough".
There you go again, setting up a strawman. They blow stuff at the end for fun. You well know that.
It'd take all of about an hour's extra effort per show to set up proper controls,
...
First, they set up a lot more controls that they let in the show. You simply assume they aren't there because they don't bore you to tears with them.
Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe are good examples of how to do science on TV well.
Those are good shows at passing you information known by science in interesting ways. They do not teach you how to go about questioning a statement and testing it experimentally.
Meanwhile you'd rather see dickheads like the crocodile hunter harass
This is called a "strawman" and its typical of people who cannot carry a technical discussion or debate like those required in the process of doing science. I'm going to go on a limb here, but I doubt you are a scientist at all.
Mythbusters get the spirit of experimentation right, which is what matters. I wouldn't bet $10 on the correctness of any of their conclusions, and frankly that is as much as we can expect as the myth themselves are ill posed and badly documented.
Yes it fucking well is a bad thing when they don't teach you how to do it.
They teach it well enough for a TV show directed at the general uneducated public. Pompous asses will always complain about minutiae but people who have actually done science writing and dissemination know that popular science is always a bit off, a bit overly simplified. The objective of a layperson science piece is to plant the curiosity bug so that people then go and learn the true story, with all the gory details, not to train certified PhDs in experimental methods.
Looking at their compression rate for documents the data looks highly suspicious. Experiment after experiment reports text compression in the order of 20-30% of original size using bzip2, yet they only get 60% of original size??? This is half as good as widely reported figures!
It was a REAL problem despite this revisionist attitude that some now have that it was nothing at all.
A friend of mine is a higher up at a central bank. He was in charge of Y2K fixing. The first time they advanced the clocks everything broke. In certain cases the software fix was trivial, in others it took a lot more effort, but if they had done nothing the country would have woken up in January 1st to a non-existent bank system.
I'd say 99% of my communications and work with colleagues and peers is electronic... the only time I have to use paper is when I have to work with senior management.
Exactly, as percentage of exchange of information the "paperless" office is already here. It just so happens that the actual amount of paper we print is still pretty high in absolute terms. In relative terms it rounds down to zero: we moved from a world in which the majority of interoffice communication was on paper to one in which well below 1% is paper-based.
p.s. and no, these are not made up statistics, I actually researched them up.
managed to dive to almost 40,000 feet with the Trieste in *1951*, but haven't been back or deeper since!
How can you be so sure? Many of the deeper dives are classified information. The navy will not tell you what is their current max depth capability for subs nor for divers.
Scrap the triple damages for "willful" infringement. People should be encouraged to look up patents so they can license existing inventions instead of wastefuly duplicating effort.
I agree, at a small company we were specifically instructed not to lookup patents as this would only increase potential damages! This is the only system I know of where you get punished for doing due dilligence.