I've said before that the ultimate goal of space exploration is to provide more habitable space in our solar system, off of the earth, so that a single cataclysmic event cannot end the human race. NASA's missions and goals do not seem to mesh with that ultimate goal.
Because it would cost trillions of dollars, even with massive technological advances that may or may not happen. What NASA is doing is necessary basic research to identify a) the environments available to us, b) the hazards involved, c) technology required to get there cheaply and repeatedly, and d) technology to keep us alive there. Given their current budget and what can realistically be done with current technology, crowd-pleasing manned missions accomplish nothing towards the goal of sustainable extraterrestrial habitation. I hope that someday this will be possible, but am I willing to see my taxes rise dramatically and my standard of living decrease to realize it in my lifetime? No, not in the slightest. If Elon Musk or Richard Branson (or Bill Gates) want to try, on the other hand, more power to them. But it takes either a very sick or very deluded mind to elevate his sci-fi fantasies above Gates's goal of wiping out infectious disease.
And don't tell me that we could spend the money we waste on defense on space exploration instead. It's only $700 billion per year or so ($1 trillion is the uppermost estimate, but cutting that entirely is unrealistic), and if we slashed that out of the budget it would still take 20 years to pay off the current debt, which is likely to keep increasing without drastic cuts, higher taxes, or a sudden economic growth spurt.
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most journals currently don't publish the reviewer comments at all.
They don't publish them, but they are almost always provided to the manuscript authors upon editorial decision - with any identifying information redacted, of course. I've definitely read some papers where I wished the reviewer comments were public (usually because the papers had massive, gaping flaws), but I understand (and largely agree with) the reasons why this isn't done.
On the other hand, I really would like to see comments enabled for all online journals - even if it's anonymous, it's still an improvement over no comments at all.
I said 48-core systems, not 48-core processors. For our purposes the difference is negligible. I'm not sure if we have 8x6core or 4x12core, probably the former. Anyway, without a RAID array the price of one of these boxes is less than $15,000, which is what we paid for a 16-core system less than 3 years ago.
I'll be interested to see if any/.ers can propose genuinely significant problems that would be solvable by a 100fold or even 1000fold increase in processing power.
I guess it depends on how you define "significant." My guess is that there are a lot of areas of science that could benefit from massive computing resources, not because it would magically solve problems, but because it would enable researchers to explore more hypotheses and be more efficient while doing so. The reason they're not using existing resources like DOE supercomputers is because many of these applications are (not unreasonably) perceived as wasteful and inefficient, but if petaflop-class distributed systems became widely accessible, this argument would vanish.
I personally find some of the hype about Folding@Home to be overblown (it's not going to cure cancer or replace crystallography, folks), but it's actually an excellent example of the kind of problem that's ill-suited towards traditional HPC but a perfect fit for distributed systems. The molecular dynamics simulations that it runs are not hugely time consuming on their own, but there is a huge sampling problem: only a tiny fraction of the simulations have the desired result. So they run tens or hundreds of thousands of simulations on their network, and get the answer they want. There are other examples like this, also in protein structure; it turns out that you can solve some X-ray crystal structures by brute-force computing instead of often laborious experimental methods involving heavy atoms. This isn't common practice because it requires 1000s of processors to happen in a reasonable amount of time - and it still may not work. But if every biology department had a petaflop cluster available, it would be much more popular.
More generally, if we suddenly gained 100- or 1000-fold increase in processing power, habits would change. My lab recently bought several 48-core systems (which are insanely cheap), and we're starting to do things with them that we would have considered extravagant before. Nothing world-changing, and nothing that would have been outright impossible on older systems, but the boost in efficiency is very noticeable - time that would have been spent waiting for the computers to finish crunching numbers is spent analyzing results and generating new datasets instead.
America is not "giving up" superpower status to anyone. China is merely rapidly catching up.
I don't disagree with this, but there are many posters on Slashdot that do. I don't think of this as a zero-sum game; China getting richer and more powerful does not have to mean everyone else (or just the USA) getting poorer and weaker. I also think some aspects of China's rise are being overstated, as are some aspects of America's (supposed) decline. But that's not my point: it's clear that a large number of people think that the US is turning into a third world nation, and the Chinese can do no wrong. And every time there's an article about China doing something bad, at least half of the comments are bashing the US instead.
I'm not convinced that China's military ambitions are nothing to worry about, either. They'd be lunatics to start a fight with us or the Russians, but there are plenty of other small and relatively helpless nations to bully around, Taiwan being top of the list, and they appear to have even less conscience than the US when it comes to propping up dictatorships and looting third-world nations. But this shouldn't have anything to do with America either; I'd be perfectly content letting them make fools of themselves and become the arrogant assholes that everyone else hates. If the Chinese government continues to apply the same tone-deaf diplomacy and intolerance of criticism that they have recently, they'll be seeing their flag burned in capital cities around the world in just a few decades.
Why are you trying so desperately to turn any discussion about China into a political one?
Well, why not? Every discussion about the US turns into a long list of complaints about how either a) America sucks and has always sucked, or b) America is giving up its superpower status to the Chinese.
The last two climate satellites were lost due to "Launch Failures". One which was supposed to measure global carbon emissions at the highest resolution to date. I guess this one was not much of a threat to those who deny climate change.
You know there are medications that can help people like you, right?
every regime can only exist thanks to the support of a significant number of local residents.
It doesn't actually need to be that large a number, if they're sufficiently well paid and they control all of the weapons. In the absence of widespread satisfaction with a regime, widespread terror will do just as well, as long as there's no limit to how many people you're willing to murder (deliberately or through sheer incompetence).
Some people would rather suffer extreme hardship than live in a country dominated by a few colonial landowners. Similarly, some people would rather live isolated under a military or religious dictatorship than under a US puppet government.
You speak as if they actually have a choice. Mugabe only respects election results when he wins them; for the last decade, the opposition in Zimbabwe has been constantly brutalized, their leaders arrested, beaten, or even murdered. The Kims never even won an election in the first place - they were installed by Stalin and never left. No one actually knows what the North Koreans really think (except for the defectors, who obviously hated it there), because they're not allowed to talk about it. To whatever extent they prefer their condition to that of South Korea, it's only because the government has been telling them how awful South Korea is in comparison for their entire lives - which hasn't been true for at least 30 years. I'm sure if you ask the South Koreans whether they'd prefer Kim Jong Il to their "US puppet government", they'll stare at you like you're crazy.
why is it that conditions were so bad in Zimbabwe that Mugabe ended up in power?
Mugabe ended up in power because he led the resistance to apartheid rule, and he stayed in power because he actually followed a reasonable course for the first two decades or so. Conditions were actually relatively good compared to the rest of Africa until he started the land grabs and became more overtly tyrannical. Most of the citizens still don't have land of their own; the redistribution has mostly enriched Mugabe's supporters. There was never a binary choice between poverty and continued white domination of agriculture; it could have been much different. It's only impoverished now because Mugabe deliberately chose the most destructive course of action, solely to ensure his continued rule.
The government-funded scientists are welfare queens. They use facilities paid for by taxpayers. How much money is spent on those facilities?
The budget of the entire US Department of Energy is approximately $25 billion, and it's by far the largest chunk spent on publicly-funded energy research. $10 billion of this is actually "nuclear security", i.e. keeping our nukes functional, which has nothing to do with global warming. The most expensive energy-research project currently in progress is the fusion reactor ITER in southern France, which is estimated to cost 16 billion Euros, split between the EU and most of the other industrial superpowers, and will take 10 years to build. The most expensive US-only project that I'm aware of is the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, which I think was around $3.5 billion, and was partly driven by its potential applicability to nuclear weapons research (as well as fusion energy).
Oil and gas companies have some of the largest revenues in the world, including 13 of the top 50 companies (I got bored after counting that far), with a combined revenue of $2.7 trillion, which is more than the GDPs of all but a handful of nations. (They're all multinational and mostly headquartered in other countries, of course - the US-based companies account for $770 billion.) So the amount of money invested in government-funded research is orders of magnitude less than the fossil-fuels companies.
But you're responding with the equally hyperbolic fallacy of assuming that the sum total of fossil fuel consumption and carbon output is people driving cars, and that just getting SUVs off the road would fix everything.
I was cherry-picking an example; it wasn't intended to suggest a simple remedy. There are many more equally egregious wastes of energy in first-world countries; massive floodlights illuminating empty athletic fields at night are my favorite. Some of the culprits are seemingly trivial: I live in a relatively temperate climate (Northern California) where it almost never freezes, and a properly insulated residence needs minimal heating during winter. But I've ended up in several apartments or houses that were so poorly insulated that I had to choose between doubling my gas bill, or eating breakfast at 10 C. Gas is cheap, of course; insulating or rebuilding costs much more. But it isn't going to send us back to the Bronze Age; I just might have to wait another year to buy the Macbook Air. Heavily air-conditioned big-box stores are another example of extravagant waste and luxury - not that I have any moral objection to big-box stores or vapid consumerism (I also partake from time to time), but from the perspective of energy efficiency, we might as well just set gasoline on fire for fun. (Actually, we already do that: it's called NASCAR.)
More generally, we could make much better use of renewable and/or carbon-neutral energy sources (and I do include nuclear* in this category). Yes, most of these are more expensive, but none so much that we're going to suddenly find ourselves burning garbage to stay warm. The targets proposed for carbon emissions are exceedingly modest, and more than affordable for a country with huge amounts of surplus wealth. (And I don't mean that in a tax-the-rich way: even as a grad student living on a research stipend in one of the most expensive areas in the nation, I was still able to afford a car, Internet service, plane flights home on Christmas, occasional gadgets, etc., without going into debt.) I like money too, the more of it the better, but frankly, I can afford to pay more for energy if necessary, and most of the rest of the country can as well. Unless you have an absurd sense of entitlement, this is not an apocalyptic scenario.
I don't know what to suggest for the rapidly industrializing nations; it's much easier for us to adapt. However, it seems like the argument that "China won't cut back, so why should we?" is gaining increasing popularity. I don't think we should be using the Chinese government as a moral example for anything, let alone energy policy.
(* including fusion, if it ever works. It's appalling that we're spending a total of more than $300 billion on the F-35 when the industrial superpowers combined can barely get their act together to build ITER for less than €20 billion.)
If you send the nation into poverty to clean the air
I think this is the aspect of the debate that annoys me the most - the hyberbolic exaggeration of the economic effects of reduced consumption of fossil fuels. There are of course real costs involved, but nothing that scientists or mainstream policy-makers have proposed is going to cause us to sink to Third World levels of deprivation, or revert to a pre-industrial economy. Citizens of Western Europe have been living with drastically higher gasoline prices than us for decades, and they don't seem impoverished to me. Downgrading to a smaller and more fuel-efficient car is not a huge decrease in living standards relative to what the rest of the world has to endure.
it's important to understand how it works, but it's not important to be able to actually do it efficiently once you've got that understanding.
How else do you test whether a student really understands how math works, if not by a proctored test free of computational aids?
I owned multiple graphing calculators in high school and college, and always had simple programs for some of the most common tasks (e.g. quadratic formula), which were immensely useful for checking my work (and occasionally a useful shortcut around actually doing anything, since the teachers didn't always look very closely). They're terrific tools, and I certainly wouldn't ever want to do quadratic equations in my head again. But what we're testing isn't the ability to do computation quickly, it's the ability to apply mathematical knowledge to solve a problem. If the tests are too computational, the solution is to make them more applied, not to dumb down the schooling even more. Besides, any student smart enough to program formulas into a calculator should have no problem doing them manually in a test setting; I certainly didn't.
Plasma [adastrarocket.com] thrusters are great for moving cargo where you don't care too much about how long it takes (especially in the beginning of the mission).
Actually, magnetoplasma engines may be one of the better choices for interplanetary travel - they're a good combination of thrust and efficiency and can reach much higher speeds than chemical rockets. The obstacles to their use are more practical than technological: they're useless in atmosphere, so you still need chemical rockets to get them into orbit, and to really speed up the mission, you need a conventional nuclear reactor powering the engine. It's non-trivial (none of this has been tried, obviously), but if you wanted to make a re-usable interplanetary shuttle, this might be a good option.
If I lived in Berkeley, I think I'd have strong reservations about living next door to nukes.
Fortunately, the voters of Berkeley passed a law back in 1986 declaring the city a "nuclear-free zone", which guarantees that we will continue to get our electricity from hippie-friendly sources such as wind and solar. . . and gas and oil, of course (don't know about coal - I hope not). They even have signs announcing their moral purity at various roads into the city. True story: a couple of years ago, the public library's book scanners needed servicing, but the company that made them had recently been bought by 3M, which does nuclear power work elsewhere. As a result, the library was semi-crippled until the city council could pass an emergency waiver allowing 3M to fix the scanners.
(That said, of course I agree with you - I live and work almost on top of the Hayward Fault. The two reactors used for consumer electricity are far to the south, however, where AFAIK there isn't a history of catastrophic earthquakes. There are actually a couple of smaller reactors near the Bay Area, at least one of which is in Livermore, but these are relatively tiny and used for research purposes.)
Our system of private healthcare has the highest cost per patient of any in the world and slightly poorer outcome than countries with socialized medicine.
It isn't even a binary choice between private healthcare and socialized medicine, of course. The other first-world nations generally have superior outcomes regardless of the exact type - many with have private hospitals and private insurance - but they all have more heavily regulated health insurance markets, and some degree of subsidies. This too is anathema to conservatives, but it isn't the Orwellian nightmare of government micromanagement that the rhetoric suggests. (Much as the right likes to bash the Canadian or European health-care systems, I have yet to meet anyone from those countries who has lived in the US for a significant amount of time and actually prefers our system.)
Getting back to the original subject, there is a risk that governments will regulate personal genomics as a "diagnostic test", and require authorization from a doctor. (You can imagine who will be lobbying for this.) However, perhaps a greater risk is that the huge number of gene patents - obtained in an era where DNA synthesis and sequencing were prohibitively expensive for individuals - will either stop the industry in its tracks, or drive the cost up by thousands of dollars. If we take some of these patents at face value, simply by sequencing your genome and running annotation programs on it, you are already violating them. Most of these are effectively unenforced, otherwise the academic researchers would have been screwed years ago, but once personal genome sequencing becomes widespread (and profitable), I'm sure we'll see the patent holders creeping out from under rocks to file lawsuits.
In private sector you have to make sure that what you do is not going to be all waste, that it will provide some return.
Yes, and it needs to provide some return in a relatively short amount of time. Almost all research done by private companies is aimed at product development; only a handful of corporations have enough resources (i.e. spare cash) to fund undirected basic research. Non-commercial basic research, regardless of funding source, has no such constraints, and can afford to take a much longer-term view.
Some understanding of history is useful here: 1972: first viral genome sequenced 1975: Sanger method of DNA sequencing invented 1980: Sanger wins Nobel prize mid-1980s: first public discussion of Human Genome Project 1990: Human Genome Project officially founded 1994: First bacterial genome sequenced 1998: First multicellular organism sequenced 2001: "drafts" of human genome published 2006: Final human chromosome sequence officially complete
Good luck getting VCs to fund your company based on that timeline - and if a publicly traded corporation decided to bet the farm on technology that wouldn't pay off for 30-plus years, they'd be at risk of a shareholder suit. I know you're going to mention Celera, but they only became involved after the sequencing technology (and computers) had improved immensely, and much of the basic groundwork had already been done. (Also, it was never clear to me what their business model was anyway.)
One of the important (but seldom-mentioned) essential ingredients for low-cost personal genomics is the availability of multiple high-quality, complete human genome sequences. Most of the next-generation technologies that have driven down the cost of genomics are not designed for de novo assembly; they depend on having a reference sequence to align the fragments. The fact that the reference sequences are deposited in a public database makes it much easier for everyone to pursue these technologies, whether for profit or for science.
This is a charter school here in Gainesville, FL (where we also try burning Qurans every once in a while).
In defense of Gainesville (which I have family connections to, although I haven't been there in nearly a decade), they also just elected an openly gay mayor, so it's hardly a bastion of fundamentalism. The University of Florida is there, and I'm guessing that exerts a large influence on the political climate.
last time i checked, Egypt invented no wars, or has scary "world police" agencies, nor secret prisons, or laws. Nor permits torture, or sham elections.
Check again. They haven't started any wars recently, but their police services are well-known torturers, and every election they've held for the last three decades has been a sham. You must not have been looking very hard.
The ISS, with a weight of nearly 400 tons, and measuring 50x100 meters shows how much is possible for a relatively small-scale human project.
The ISS cost $157 billion, according to Wikipedia. The scientists who came up with Daedalus estimated the total cost at $100 trillion (not sure if that's in 1970s dollars, I read it on Tau Zero's website). The total GNP of the entire planet is currently only about $65 trillion (US alone is $15 trillion). Aside from much of the technology being purely theoretical at this point, it would take centuries for Daedalus to become economically feasible, let alone practical.
Okay, that makes more sense. So, basically, the argument over whether NPG's use of "non-commercial" licenses is truly "open-access" or not is indeed one of those Stallman-esque battles over purity, and not something that affects the vast majority of users (i.e. scientists). I'm not sure this contributes anything to the debate over scientific publishing models; the real problem with the current system is extortionate subscription (or per-article) costs, which put much of the literature essentially off-limits to anyone outside a major research university that can afford a site license.
I do find it amusing that NPG thinks that the "Nature" brand name will let them charge the same amount as PLoS ONE for a more restricted form of open-access. However, I suspect that most of the people who really care about open-access aren't very favorably inclined towards NPG at this point anyway.
Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using.
Whoa, I just read through the license terms - what do these actually mean? It is unclear to me whether the license only covers the text itself, or the scientific results described in the text. In other words, if I work at a private biotech company, and someone publishes a new and interesting technique relevant to my current research, am I not allowed to download the paper and apply it to my work? Or am I simply not allowed to redistribute the paper? The phrases "commercial exploitation" and "commercial use is not permitted" do not make this clear. I honestly do not care whether the license terms prohibit (for instance) making derivative works from the paper text, or re-publishing it in a book, etc.; I have zero patience for FSF-style ideological crusades. As a (government-funded) scientist, I simply want everyone to be able to read the paper and use the results in their own work (for-profit or not) without paying an extortionate per-article fee to Nature.
If someone with more of a clue could clarify, please chime in.
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing.
But the funding has gone up substantially in the last few decades - it was only in the last five or so years that it really started to stagnate, and given the amount of time it takes to advance up the academic ladder, I don't think it's been long enough for us to really see the effects. Besides, if you're an intelligent young person with a BS and an interest in science, going to grad school and doing basic research for five to ten years sounds like a great idea. You have to accept a low salary during that time ($25,000 or so is a typical stipend in the best programs - yes, we actually get paid to go to school!), and unless you're supernaturally efficient you'll frequently be working overtime, but you also get a flexible schedule, and more intellectual freedom than most people dream of. And you can postpone adulthood for another five to ten years.
(By the way, I'm sure at least one person will respond that the private sector will drive innovation, and public funding doesn't matter - gee, who exactly do you think is training the people who end up working in the private sector?)
The problem, as so many others have pointed out, is that the job market simply sucks compared to many other career tracks. There is also, believe it or not, an oversupply of PhDs relative to private sector demand. Look at any website devoted to science jobs - Nature Jobs is a good one. There will be several postdoc positions for every real job available. What are all of those postdocs going to do once they reach their mid-30s and aren't making enough to support a family? I'm in my early 30s, I have a PhD from a prestigious department, a long list of research publications, experience both in wet lab and doing software development, and I'm virtually unemployable outside a narrow range of (mostly public sector) jobs that all pay less than what I'd be making if I'd skipped grad school and gone into, I don't know, *any* other field straight from college. I'm lucky enough to have found a decent job at a government lab that pays enough to support my current lifestyle, but I'm terrified of what my long-term career options will be.
And as much as I hate to agree with the ideologically inflexible libertarians on this board, there is some truth to the claim that the public sector breeds laziness and apathy. I've seen grad students slack off and coast through their PhD because of shitty supervision - one guy got fired twice after he stopped showing up to lab for months at a time, but not after he'd collected probably $50,000 in unearned stipend. Postdocs flail around and are unproductive for similar reasons, and because when you spent all of young adulthood in school in order to make the same amount as an administrative assistant, who gives a fuck if anything gets done? The majority of these people are actually very smart and capable, and not habitually lazy, but they have no motivation to work harder and many simply hate their jobs but don't know what else to do. (Most would kill for a private-sector job that pays better and isn't quite as dysfunctional, if any existed.) The amount of money spent here is actually negligible compared to our national budget and GNP - the real tragedy is the waste of talent.
I don't have any easy answers. What I do know is that shitheads like the owners of Forbes can't be trusted. When you see an editorial by some science/engineering CEO lamenting the lack of American PhDs, don't believe a single word of it. The reason they're complaining is that they still think they're paying scientists and engineers too much (versus, say, outsourcing the jobs to China or India, which is often a pain in the ass), and they want the labor market to become even more crowded. (10 years ago, it was tech CEOs complaining about the low numbers of H1B visas.) Seriously, the CEO of Eli Lilly complained in
I'm not familiar with the last two, but a scientist is the star of at least the first three series.
Most medical doctors (including the kind you see on "Grey's Anatomy") aren't really "scientists", any more than the repair technician who replaces the motherboard in your PC is an "engineer". Both fill essential roles in modern society, but neither drives innovation.
As in any other profession, some percentage of scientists are the kind of whiny, arrogant assholes that would attempt to embarrass their colleagues in a mass-market publication rather than put the critique where it belongs: The letters section of Science.
First of all, the article in Slate was written by a science journalist (Carl Zimmer), not a professional research scientist. (Not to bash Zimmer, I think he's a good writer, but he has no personal motivation to sling mud here.)
Secondly, if you'll think way back to. . . last week, there was a breathless NASA announcement of an imminent press conference about a game-changing discovery, which received widespread coverage in mass-market publications. We call this "science by press release". At least they actually had a paper, unlike the cold fusion debacle, but they're still guilty of shameless self-promotion.
Lastly, most of the real debate is happening on blogs, and probably a lot of internal email chatter that we aren't aware of. I don't see anything wrong with this, for quite a few reasons. One is that it's simply an electronic, real-time version of what used to happen only at conferences and faculty meetings; people say far more savage things about each other offline. We could wait around for formal responses to get published, but there's a great deal of scientific value in this real-time analysis and dissection of flaws. I'm learning a lot, and I think we'll arrive at a conclusive answer much faster than if we had to read through several months of stilted exchanges in Science.
The editors of major journals are often reluctant to air controversies about the papers they publish. There was a case several years ago where several scientists wrote a letter to a journal pointing out possible evidence of fabricated data in a paper; the journal made them water down the letter, and allowed the author of the original article to get away with a half-assed, evasive reply. What the editors should have done instead was demand raw data and a reasonable explanation, and thoroughly investigated the paper, but they seemed content to let the matter slide. So, what we ended up with was mob justice, and the accused scientist's reputation was quickly destroyed on mailing lists and at meetings. It turned out that he was a serial fabricator, and he may face federal charges for defrauding the NIH.
That's a much more serious example than this one - there's no evidence that the NASA researchers did anything unethical, but there are some serious holes in the paper, and in general the evidence does not meet the standards one would hope for one of the pre-eminent scientific journals. I really hope that there's some truth in their claims, because it would be a fascinating organism to study, but the paper shouldn't have made it past peer review in this state.
And this doesn't help the people trying to fight the stigma that biology isn't a 'hard science'.
The problem isn't that biology isn't a "hard science" (although some branches are pretty soft), the problem is that most MDs aren't real scientists. Ask any biology grad student what it's like to teach pre-meds and you'll get an earful. It's difficult for me to take the profession seriously any more; my employer and I combined are paying $700 per month in case I get sick and need to be treated by some overpaid asshole who slept through calculus and cheated through biochemistry.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said before that the ultimate goal of space exploration is to provide more habitable space in our solar system, off of the earth, so that a single cataclysmic event cannot end the human race. NASA's missions and goals do not seem to mesh with that ultimate goal.
Because it would cost trillions of dollars, even with massive technological advances that may or may not happen. What NASA is doing is necessary basic research to identify a) the environments available to us, b) the hazards involved, c) technology required to get there cheaply and repeatedly, and d) technology to keep us alive there. Given their current budget and what can realistically be done with current technology, crowd-pleasing manned missions accomplish nothing towards the goal of sustainable extraterrestrial habitation. I hope that someday this will be possible, but am I willing to see my taxes rise dramatically and my standard of living decrease to realize it in my lifetime? No, not in the slightest. If Elon Musk or Richard Branson (or Bill Gates) want to try, on the other hand, more power to them. But it takes either a very sick or very deluded mind to elevate his sci-fi fantasies above Gates's goal of wiping out infectious disease.
And don't tell me that we could spend the money we waste on defense on space exploration instead. It's only $700 billion per year or so ($1 trillion is the uppermost estimate, but cutting that entirely is unrealistic), and if we slashed that out of the budget it would still take 20 years to pay off the current debt, which is likely to keep increasing without drastic cuts, higher taxes, or a sudden economic growth spurt.
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that most journals currently don't publish the reviewer comments at all.
They don't publish them, but they are almost always provided to the manuscript authors upon editorial decision - with any identifying information redacted, of course. I've definitely read some papers where I wished the reviewer comments were public (usually because the papers had massive, gaping flaws), but I understand (and largely agree with) the reasons why this isn't done.
On the other hand, I really would like to see comments enabled for all online journals - even if it's anonymous, it's still an improvement over no comments at all.
I said 48-core systems, not 48-core processors. For our purposes the difference is negligible. I'm not sure if we have 8x6core or 4x12core, probably the former. Anyway, without a RAID array the price of one of these boxes is less than $15,000, which is what we paid for a 16-core system less than 3 years ago.
I'll be interested to see if any /.ers can propose genuinely significant problems that would be solvable by a 100fold or even 1000fold increase in processing power.
I guess it depends on how you define "significant." My guess is that there are a lot of areas of science that could benefit from massive computing resources, not because it would magically solve problems, but because it would enable researchers to explore more hypotheses and be more efficient while doing so. The reason they're not using existing resources like DOE supercomputers is because many of these applications are (not unreasonably) perceived as wasteful and inefficient, but if petaflop-class distributed systems became widely accessible, this argument would vanish.
I personally find some of the hype about Folding@Home to be overblown (it's not going to cure cancer or replace crystallography, folks), but it's actually an excellent example of the kind of problem that's ill-suited towards traditional HPC but a perfect fit for distributed systems. The molecular dynamics simulations that it runs are not hugely time consuming on their own, but there is a huge sampling problem: only a tiny fraction of the simulations have the desired result. So they run tens or hundreds of thousands of simulations on their network, and get the answer they want. There are other examples like this, also in protein structure; it turns out that you can solve some X-ray crystal structures by brute-force computing instead of often laborious experimental methods involving heavy atoms. This isn't common practice because it requires 1000s of processors to happen in a reasonable amount of time - and it still may not work. But if every biology department had a petaflop cluster available, it would be much more popular.
More generally, if we suddenly gained 100- or 1000-fold increase in processing power, habits would change. My lab recently bought several 48-core systems (which are insanely cheap), and we're starting to do things with them that we would have considered extravagant before. Nothing world-changing, and nothing that would have been outright impossible on older systems, but the boost in efficiency is very noticeable - time that would have been spent waiting for the computers to finish crunching numbers is spent analyzing results and generating new datasets instead.
America is not "giving up" superpower status to anyone. China is merely rapidly catching up.
I don't disagree with this, but there are many posters on Slashdot that do. I don't think of this as a zero-sum game; China getting richer and more powerful does not have to mean everyone else (or just the USA) getting poorer and weaker. I also think some aspects of China's rise are being overstated, as are some aspects of America's (supposed) decline. But that's not my point: it's clear that a large number of people think that the US is turning into a third world nation, and the Chinese can do no wrong. And every time there's an article about China doing something bad, at least half of the comments are bashing the US instead.
I'm not convinced that China's military ambitions are nothing to worry about, either. They'd be lunatics to start a fight with us or the Russians, but there are plenty of other small and relatively helpless nations to bully around, Taiwan being top of the list, and they appear to have even less conscience than the US when it comes to propping up dictatorships and looting third-world nations. But this shouldn't have anything to do with America either; I'd be perfectly content letting them make fools of themselves and become the arrogant assholes that everyone else hates. If the Chinese government continues to apply the same tone-deaf diplomacy and intolerance of criticism that they have recently, they'll be seeing their flag burned in capital cities around the world in just a few decades.
Why are you trying so desperately to turn any discussion about China into a political one?
Well, why not? Every discussion about the US turns into a long list of complaints about how either a) America sucks and has always sucked, or b) America is giving up its superpower status to the Chinese.
The last two climate satellites were lost due to "Launch Failures". One which was supposed to measure global carbon emissions at the highest resolution to date. I guess this one was not much of a threat to those who deny climate change.
You know there are medications that can help people like you, right?
every regime can only exist thanks to the support of a significant number of local residents.
It doesn't actually need to be that large a number, if they're sufficiently well paid and they control all of the weapons. In the absence of widespread satisfaction with a regime, widespread terror will do just as well, as long as there's no limit to how many people you're willing to murder (deliberately or through sheer incompetence).
Some people would rather suffer extreme hardship than live in a country dominated by a few colonial landowners. Similarly, some people would rather live isolated under a military or religious dictatorship than under a US puppet government.
You speak as if they actually have a choice. Mugabe only respects election results when he wins them; for the last decade, the opposition in Zimbabwe has been constantly brutalized, their leaders arrested, beaten, or even murdered. The Kims never even won an election in the first place - they were installed by Stalin and never left. No one actually knows what the North Koreans really think (except for the defectors, who obviously hated it there), because they're not allowed to talk about it. To whatever extent they prefer their condition to that of South Korea, it's only because the government has been telling them how awful South Korea is in comparison for their entire lives - which hasn't been true for at least 30 years. I'm sure if you ask the South Koreans whether they'd prefer Kim Jong Il to their "US puppet government", they'll stare at you like you're crazy.
why is it that conditions were so bad in Zimbabwe that Mugabe ended up in power?
Mugabe ended up in power because he led the resistance to apartheid rule, and he stayed in power because he actually followed a reasonable course for the first two decades or so. Conditions were actually relatively good compared to the rest of Africa until he started the land grabs and became more overtly tyrannical. Most of the citizens still don't have land of their own; the redistribution has mostly enriched Mugabe's supporters. There was never a binary choice between poverty and continued white domination of agriculture; it could have been much different. It's only impoverished now because Mugabe deliberately chose the most destructive course of action, solely to ensure his continued rule.
The government-funded scientists are welfare queens. They use facilities paid for by taxpayers. How much money is spent on those facilities?
The budget of the entire US Department of Energy is approximately $25 billion, and it's by far the largest chunk spent on publicly-funded energy research. $10 billion of this is actually "nuclear security", i.e. keeping our nukes functional, which has nothing to do with global warming. The most expensive energy-research project currently in progress is the fusion reactor ITER in southern France, which is estimated to cost 16 billion Euros, split between the EU and most of the other industrial superpowers, and will take 10 years to build. The most expensive US-only project that I'm aware of is the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, which I think was around $3.5 billion, and was partly driven by its potential applicability to nuclear weapons research (as well as fusion energy).
Oil and gas companies have some of the largest revenues in the world, including 13 of the top 50 companies (I got bored after counting that far), with a combined revenue of $2.7 trillion, which is more than the GDPs of all but a handful of nations. (They're all multinational and mostly headquartered in other countries, of course - the US-based companies account for $770 billion.) So the amount of money invested in government-funded research is orders of magnitude less than the fossil-fuels companies.
But you're responding with the equally hyperbolic fallacy of assuming that the sum total of fossil fuel consumption and carbon output is people driving cars, and that just getting SUVs off the road would fix everything.
I was cherry-picking an example; it wasn't intended to suggest a simple remedy. There are many more equally egregious wastes of energy in first-world countries; massive floodlights illuminating empty athletic fields at night are my favorite. Some of the culprits are seemingly trivial: I live in a relatively temperate climate (Northern California) where it almost never freezes, and a properly insulated residence needs minimal heating during winter. But I've ended up in several apartments or houses that were so poorly insulated that I had to choose between doubling my gas bill, or eating breakfast at 10 C. Gas is cheap, of course; insulating or rebuilding costs much more. But it isn't going to send us back to the Bronze Age; I just might have to wait another year to buy the Macbook Air. Heavily air-conditioned big-box stores are another example of extravagant waste and luxury - not that I have any moral objection to big-box stores or vapid consumerism (I also partake from time to time), but from the perspective of energy efficiency, we might as well just set gasoline on fire for fun. (Actually, we already do that: it's called NASCAR.)
More generally, we could make much better use of renewable and/or carbon-neutral energy sources (and I do include nuclear* in this category). Yes, most of these are more expensive, but none so much that we're going to suddenly find ourselves burning garbage to stay warm. The targets proposed for carbon emissions are exceedingly modest, and more than affordable for a country with huge amounts of surplus wealth. (And I don't mean that in a tax-the-rich way: even as a grad student living on a research stipend in one of the most expensive areas in the nation, I was still able to afford a car, Internet service, plane flights home on Christmas, occasional gadgets, etc., without going into debt.) I like money too, the more of it the better, but frankly, I can afford to pay more for energy if necessary, and most of the rest of the country can as well. Unless you have an absurd sense of entitlement, this is not an apocalyptic scenario.
I don't know what to suggest for the rapidly industrializing nations; it's much easier for us to adapt. However, it seems like the argument that "China won't cut back, so why should we?" is gaining increasing popularity. I don't think we should be using the Chinese government as a moral example for anything, let alone energy policy.
(* including fusion, if it ever works. It's appalling that we're spending a total of more than $300 billion on the F-35 when the industrial superpowers combined can barely get their act together to build ITER for less than €20 billion.)
If you send the nation into poverty to clean the air
I think this is the aspect of the debate that annoys me the most - the hyberbolic exaggeration of the economic effects of reduced consumption of fossil fuels. There are of course real costs involved, but nothing that scientists or mainstream policy-makers have proposed is going to cause us to sink to Third World levels of deprivation, or revert to a pre-industrial economy. Citizens of Western Europe have been living with drastically higher gasoline prices than us for decades, and they don't seem impoverished to me. Downgrading to a smaller and more fuel-efficient car is not a huge decrease in living standards relative to what the rest of the world has to endure.
it's important to understand how it works, but it's not important to be able to actually do it efficiently once you've got that understanding.
How else do you test whether a student really understands how math works, if not by a proctored test free of computational aids?
I owned multiple graphing calculators in high school and college, and always had simple programs for some of the most common tasks (e.g. quadratic formula), which were immensely useful for checking my work (and occasionally a useful shortcut around actually doing anything, since the teachers didn't always look very closely). They're terrific tools, and I certainly wouldn't ever want to do quadratic equations in my head again. But what we're testing isn't the ability to do computation quickly, it's the ability to apply mathematical knowledge to solve a problem. If the tests are too computational, the solution is to make them more applied, not to dumb down the schooling even more. Besides, any student smart enough to program formulas into a calculator should have no problem doing them manually in a test setting; I certainly didn't.
Plasma [adastrarocket.com] thrusters are great for moving cargo where you don't care too much about how long it takes (especially in the beginning of the mission).
Actually, magnetoplasma engines may be one of the better choices for interplanetary travel - they're a good combination of thrust and efficiency and can reach much higher speeds than chemical rockets. The obstacles to their use are more practical than technological: they're useless in atmosphere, so you still need chemical rockets to get them into orbit, and to really speed up the mission, you need a conventional nuclear reactor powering the engine. It's non-trivial (none of this has been tried, obviously), but if you wanted to make a re-usable interplanetary shuttle, this might be a good option.
If I lived in Berkeley, I think I'd have strong reservations about living next door to nukes.
Fortunately, the voters of Berkeley passed a law back in 1986 declaring the city a "nuclear-free zone", which guarantees that we will continue to get our electricity from hippie-friendly sources such as wind and solar. . . and gas and oil, of course (don't know about coal - I hope not). They even have signs announcing their moral purity at various roads into the city. True story: a couple of years ago, the public library's book scanners needed servicing, but the company that made them had recently been bought by 3M, which does nuclear power work elsewhere. As a result, the library was semi-crippled until the city council could pass an emergency waiver allowing 3M to fix the scanners.
(That said, of course I agree with you - I live and work almost on top of the Hayward Fault. The two reactors used for consumer electricity are far to the south, however, where AFAIK there isn't a history of catastrophic earthquakes. There are actually a couple of smaller reactors near the Bay Area, at least one of which is in Livermore, but these are relatively tiny and used for research purposes.)
Our system of private healthcare has the highest cost per patient of any in the world and slightly poorer outcome than countries with socialized medicine.
It isn't even a binary choice between private healthcare and socialized medicine, of course. The other first-world nations generally have superior outcomes regardless of the exact type - many with have private hospitals and private insurance - but they all have more heavily regulated health insurance markets, and some degree of subsidies. This too is anathema to conservatives, but it isn't the Orwellian nightmare of government micromanagement that the rhetoric suggests. (Much as the right likes to bash the Canadian or European health-care systems, I have yet to meet anyone from those countries who has lived in the US for a significant amount of time and actually prefers our system.)
Getting back to the original subject, there is a risk that governments will regulate personal genomics as a "diagnostic test", and require authorization from a doctor. (You can imagine who will be lobbying for this.) However, perhaps a greater risk is that the huge number of gene patents - obtained in an era where DNA synthesis and sequencing were prohibitively expensive for individuals - will either stop the industry in its tracks, or drive the cost up by thousands of dollars. If we take some of these patents at face value, simply by sequencing your genome and running annotation programs on it, you are already violating them. Most of these are effectively unenforced, otherwise the academic researchers would have been screwed years ago, but once personal genome sequencing becomes widespread (and profitable), I'm sure we'll see the patent holders creeping out from under rocks to file lawsuits.
In private sector you have to make sure that what you do is not going to be all waste, that it will provide some return.
Yes, and it needs to provide some return in a relatively short amount of time. Almost all research done by private companies is aimed at product development; only a handful of corporations have enough resources (i.e. spare cash) to fund undirected basic research. Non-commercial basic research, regardless of funding source, has no such constraints, and can afford to take a much longer-term view.
Some understanding of history is useful here:
1972: first viral genome sequenced
1975: Sanger method of DNA sequencing invented
1980: Sanger wins Nobel prize
mid-1980s: first public discussion of Human Genome Project
1990: Human Genome Project officially founded
1994: First bacterial genome sequenced
1998: First multicellular organism sequenced
2001: "drafts" of human genome published
2006: Final human chromosome sequence officially complete
Good luck getting VCs to fund your company based on that timeline - and if a publicly traded corporation decided to bet the farm on technology that wouldn't pay off for 30-plus years, they'd be at risk of a shareholder suit. I know you're going to mention Celera, but they only became involved after the sequencing technology (and computers) had improved immensely, and much of the basic groundwork had already been done. (Also, it was never clear to me what their business model was anyway.)
One of the important (but seldom-mentioned) essential ingredients for low-cost personal genomics is the availability of multiple high-quality, complete human genome sequences. Most of the next-generation technologies that have driven down the cost of genomics are not designed for de novo assembly; they depend on having a reference sequence to align the fragments. The fact that the reference sequences are deposited in a public database makes it much easier for everyone to pursue these technologies, whether for profit or for science.
This is a charter school here in Gainesville, FL (where we also try burning Qurans every once in a while).
In defense of Gainesville (which I have family connections to, although I haven't been there in nearly a decade), they also just elected an openly gay mayor, so it's hardly a bastion of fundamentalism. The University of Florida is there, and I'm guessing that exerts a large influence on the political climate.
last time i checked, Egypt invented no wars, or has scary "world police" agencies, nor secret prisons, or laws. Nor permits torture, or sham elections.
Check again. They haven't started any wars recently, but their police services are well-known torturers, and every election they've held for the last three decades has been a sham. You must not have been looking very hard.
The ISS, with a weight of nearly 400 tons, and measuring 50x100 meters shows how much is possible for a relatively small-scale human project.
The ISS cost $157 billion, according to Wikipedia. The scientists who came up with Daedalus estimated the total cost at $100 trillion (not sure if that's in 1970s dollars, I read it on Tau Zero's website). The total GNP of the entire planet is currently only about $65 trillion (US alone is $15 trillion). Aside from much of the technology being purely theoretical at this point, it would take centuries for Daedalus to become economically feasible, let alone practical.
Okay, that makes more sense. So, basically, the argument over whether NPG's use of "non-commercial" licenses is truly "open-access" or not is indeed one of those Stallman-esque battles over purity, and not something that affects the vast majority of users (i.e. scientists). I'm not sure this contributes anything to the debate over scientific publishing models; the real problem with the current system is extortionate subscription (or per-article) costs, which put much of the literature essentially off-limits to anyone outside a major research university that can afford a site license.
I do find it amusing that NPG thinks that the "Nature" brand name will let them charge the same amount as PLoS ONE for a more restricted form of open-access. However, I suspect that most of the people who really care about open-access aren't very favorably inclined towards NPG at this point anyway.
Another problem that lots of people have brought up is the CC non commercial license that Nature is using.
Whoa, I just read through the license terms - what do these actually mean? It is unclear to me whether the license only covers the text itself, or the scientific results described in the text. In other words, if I work at a private biotech company, and someone publishes a new and interesting technique relevant to my current research, am I not allowed to download the paper and apply it to my work? Or am I simply not allowed to redistribute the paper? The phrases "commercial exploitation" and "commercial use is not permitted" do not make this clear. I honestly do not care whether the license terms prohibit (for instance) making derivative works from the paper text, or re-publishing it in a book, etc.; I have zero patience for FSF-style ideological crusades. As a (government-funded) scientist, I simply want everyone to be able to read the paper and use the results in their own work (for-profit or not) without paying an extortionate per-article fee to Nature.
If someone with more of a clue could clarify, please chime in.
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing.
But the funding has gone up substantially in the last few decades - it was only in the last five or so years that it really started to stagnate, and given the amount of time it takes to advance up the academic ladder, I don't think it's been long enough for us to really see the effects. Besides, if you're an intelligent young person with a BS and an interest in science, going to grad school and doing basic research for five to ten years sounds like a great idea. You have to accept a low salary during that time ($25,000 or so is a typical stipend in the best programs - yes, we actually get paid to go to school!), and unless you're supernaturally efficient you'll frequently be working overtime, but you also get a flexible schedule, and more intellectual freedom than most people dream of. And you can postpone adulthood for another five to ten years.
(By the way, I'm sure at least one person will respond that the private sector will drive innovation, and public funding doesn't matter - gee, who exactly do you think is training the people who end up working in the private sector?)
The problem, as so many others have pointed out, is that the job market simply sucks compared to many other career tracks. There is also, believe it or not, an oversupply of PhDs relative to private sector demand. Look at any website devoted to science jobs - Nature Jobs is a good one. There will be several postdoc positions for every real job available. What are all of those postdocs going to do once they reach their mid-30s and aren't making enough to support a family? I'm in my early 30s, I have a PhD from a prestigious department, a long list of research publications, experience both in wet lab and doing software development, and I'm virtually unemployable outside a narrow range of (mostly public sector) jobs that all pay less than what I'd be making if I'd skipped grad school and gone into, I don't know, *any* other field straight from college. I'm lucky enough to have found a decent job at a government lab that pays enough to support my current lifestyle, but I'm terrified of what my long-term career options will be.
And as much as I hate to agree with the ideologically inflexible libertarians on this board, there is some truth to the claim that the public sector breeds laziness and apathy. I've seen grad students slack off and coast through their PhD because of shitty supervision - one guy got fired twice after he stopped showing up to lab for months at a time, but not after he'd collected probably $50,000 in unearned stipend. Postdocs flail around and are unproductive for similar reasons, and because when you spent all of young adulthood in school in order to make the same amount as an administrative assistant, who gives a fuck if anything gets done? The majority of these people are actually very smart and capable, and not habitually lazy, but they have no motivation to work harder and many simply hate their jobs but don't know what else to do. (Most would kill for a private-sector job that pays better and isn't quite as dysfunctional, if any existed.) The amount of money spent here is actually negligible compared to our national budget and GNP - the real tragedy is the waste of talent.
I don't have any easy answers. What I do know is that shitheads like the owners of Forbes can't be trusted. When you see an editorial by some science/engineering CEO lamenting the lack of American PhDs, don't believe a single word of it. The reason they're complaining is that they still think they're paying scientists and engineers too much (versus, say, outsourcing the jobs to China or India, which is often a pain in the ass), and they want the labor market to become even more crowded. (10 years ago, it was tech CEOs complaining about the low numbers of H1B visas.) Seriously, the CEO of Eli Lilly complained in
I'm not familiar with the last two, but a scientist is the star of at least the first three series.
Most medical doctors (including the kind you see on "Grey's Anatomy") aren't really "scientists", any more than the repair technician who replaces the motherboard in your PC is an "engineer". Both fill essential roles in modern society, but neither drives innovation.
As in any other profession, some percentage of scientists are the kind of whiny, arrogant assholes that would attempt to embarrass their colleagues in a mass-market publication rather than put the critique where it belongs: The letters section of Science.
First of all, the article in Slate was written by a science journalist (Carl Zimmer), not a professional research scientist. (Not to bash Zimmer, I think he's a good writer, but he has no personal motivation to sling mud here.)
Secondly, if you'll think way back to. . . last week, there was a breathless NASA announcement of an imminent press conference about a game-changing discovery, which received widespread coverage in mass-market publications. We call this "science by press release". At least they actually had a paper, unlike the cold fusion debacle, but they're still guilty of shameless self-promotion.
Lastly, most of the real debate is happening on blogs, and probably a lot of internal email chatter that we aren't aware of. I don't see anything wrong with this, for quite a few reasons. One is that it's simply an electronic, real-time version of what used to happen only at conferences and faculty meetings; people say far more savage things about each other offline. We could wait around for formal responses to get published, but there's a great deal of scientific value in this real-time analysis and dissection of flaws. I'm learning a lot, and I think we'll arrive at a conclusive answer much faster than if we had to read through several months of stilted exchanges in Science.
The editors of major journals are often reluctant to air controversies about the papers they publish. There was a case several years ago where several scientists wrote a letter to a journal pointing out possible evidence of fabricated data in a paper; the journal made them water down the letter, and allowed the author of the original article to get away with a half-assed, evasive reply. What the editors should have done instead was demand raw data and a reasonable explanation, and thoroughly investigated the paper, but they seemed content to let the matter slide. So, what we ended up with was mob justice, and the accused scientist's reputation was quickly destroyed on mailing lists and at meetings. It turned out that he was a serial fabricator, and he may face federal charges for defrauding the NIH.
That's a much more serious example than this one - there's no evidence that the NASA researchers did anything unethical, but there are some serious holes in the paper, and in general the evidence does not meet the standards one would hope for one of the pre-eminent scientific journals. I really hope that there's some truth in their claims, because it would be a fascinating organism to study, but the paper shouldn't have made it past peer review in this state.
And this doesn't help the people trying to fight the stigma that biology isn't a 'hard science'.
The problem isn't that biology isn't a "hard science" (although some branches are pretty soft), the problem is that most MDs aren't real scientists. Ask any biology grad student what it's like to teach pre-meds and you'll get an earful. It's difficult for me to take the profession seriously any more; my employer and I combined are paying $700 per month in case I get sick and need to be treated by some overpaid asshole who slept through calculus and cheated through biochemistry.