Except that it really is a bunch of FUD. The problem is that people latch on to the word "radiation," decide that they know everything, and then stop listening. Paranoid visions of Chernobyl have nothing to do with cell phones. If we can reasonably assume that the general public isn't sufficiently educated to understand the difference, then we wouldn't be responsible to start putting radiation labels on things when we know it will be misinterpreted over and over.
This keeps cropping up in a legal context for two reasons.
California is full of fruit bats, giving a chance of generating supporting legislation or legal precedent.
Managing to get any legal recognition would open up a rich new territory for lawsuits.
Since it's inevitable that this will devolve into a bunch of AGW/anti-AGW trolling, let's get our facts straight.
No one with any knowledge about the subject is disputing that climates change. The disputed points are that human-produced carbon dioxide is or is not a significant factor, that Al Gore does or does not have any clue what he's blabbing about, and that the green movement does or does not constitute anything more than lies and snake oil.
Anthropogenic or not, climate change is a serious issue which affects the future of our species. The people who support (or object to) AGW by chanting an entrenched position over and over, and the people selling us snake oil as a "fix" are NOT helping. In fact, they're probably selling the future of humanity off in order to make a quick buck off of people who get their science from Twitter and Fox News.
Slinging around words like "denialist" doesn't help a damn thing either. Have we forgotten Godwin's Law so quickly?
With that said, the "before and after" photo trick is extremely passe. It is good for gulling the public, but little more since you only have two data points and are doing absolutely nothing to control for any of numerous confounding factors. It doesn't tell you crap about local conditions (pollution? construction? traffic? did someone just set off dynamite as an anti-avalanche measure?). It doesn't tell you about shorter-term cycles of climate variation (what's normal? was it unusually heavy in the "before" photo? was there more or less pollution historically? what about solar cycles?). It doesn't tell you about the cause of the climate trend if any exists, and it absolutely does not tell you a single bloody thing about the global situation.
Nor is this "incontrovertible" proof all that clear. The saturation in the 1921 photo is such that it is very hard to compare the two photos directly; you would need to analyze each in detail including examining the depth in a given area, the seasonal and longer-term variations, the characteristics of the camera and film used in either photo...the list goes on. The "experts say" line is a bullshit maneuver pulled by journalists in order to make their craptastic statements of absolute truth seem like they have some authority behind them - in reality, it usually means that the journalist is aware that they don't have the means to back up what they're claiming. Three huzzahs for the terrible state of science journalism, eh? FUD and misinformation and more FUD is all you can expect.
Grade school level math. The most complicated math in the series is this: “if a times b is less than 6, and we measure a to be 2, then b must be less than 3.” If you can follow that, you’ll be fine.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not graduate-level physics.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not college-level physics, unless you want to count the first week or two of the not-for-majors version of the 100-level stuff. Even that requires a fairly decent grasp of algebra and trigonometry.
You can talk about quite a few concepts in college-level physics provided that you do so in relatively broad terms. But reaching graduate level physics in any honest sense requires quite a bit of advanced math. Further, it is not something you can learn in any real sense over a period of two months even if you somehow happen to be the smartest human ever born.
If you want a look at what college-level quantum mechanics actually entails, the book "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths is commonly used. But note that the lecture component of these classes easily covers more material than you can pick up by reading the book alone. Also note that students taking courses using this book have usually already taken at least 2 to 3 courses covering quantum mechanics and other topics in modern physics beyond the 100-level courses which provide a survey of elementary topics in physics, and that they have a fairly good grounding in things like linear algebra and differential equations.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt.
Also, the optical approach means that the concept can be adapted for use while the patient is inside an MRI. Wire-free is often handy when you're building neat toys for medical use.
I'm sad though, everyone seems to have missed the best line. This new device is a power source, right?
... he hopes the micromotor will eventually find uses in cancer imaging.
"It has yet to realize its full potential," said Condit.
Get it? Get it? Oh, c'mon, the pun wasn't THAT bad...
The RIAA wants to give advice about what constitutes bad public policy? Really?
We're going to be getting advice on morals and comportment from Paris Hilton next, I take it.
"Firstly, during the research you're creating human-ish life, and then terminating it."
Um, not so much, no.
"Secondly, if this ever reaches commercialisation (and it will be to recoup the costs), only the rich will have access to these medical advances."
To a certain extent, that goes for pretty much any medical technology if you're in the United States. On the other hand, gene therapy tends to be quite cheap to administer in comparison to other methods. As in, you come several times to get a shot then again to do tests to confirm that it worked, compared to a lifetime of drugs which sort of work and which have all sorts of fun side effects.
Sure, there are legitimate ethical concerns. You just didn't really hit on any of them.
Great, they just outlawed everything from gene therapy to cure cancer using a sequence which was discovered or tested in animals, to using pig valves for heart repair, to wearing leather goods if you wanted to stretch it ad absurdum. Go Ohio.
Keep your redneck laws out of our ethics, please. Hell, keep your politics out of our ethics. Y'all politicians aren't exactly paragons of ethical behavior, to be telling the rest of us what's right and wrong about anything - much less, things you obviously don't understand in the slightest.
The point of patents is that if you come up with something cool, the patent protects your ability to make a living off of having done so both through marketing it yourself and through licensing it to others.
It doesn't often work that way in practice. Patents are used to prevent competition instead of encouraging it, and licensing fees are used to determine who can and who cannot practically work with the technology. It's yet another case where the basic idea was sound but the implementation is lacking. A major issue has been that the scientific and corporate landscape has changed significantly over time, while the patent system has not adapted adequately.
Have these companies found a convenient way to use GPL code, whilst preventing their customers from doing the same?
Yes - it's called "having more lawyers than you."
What are you going to do about it, sue? You can always sue...if you actually have the resources to fight it out. And even if you actually get it to stick, it could be years down the road before you actually get access.
Regarding your specific case, can you reverse-engineer a solution?
Firstly, amateur observation is an awesome hobby. But beyond that, there are areas where professional astronomical research depends on amateur observations. For example, research about variable stars requires numerous observations over time. You can read about this at the American Association of Variable Star Observers website. You may also want to see if there is an amateur observing group near you (there probably is). This is a great contact to establish since they will have considered many of the questions you're going to encounter, and since it's always fun to talk to others who share your interests.
A few more words about astro research since my undergrad degree was in astronomy. A good telescope does a lot to expand the targets you can observe and a good CCD and filter set does wonders for the data you can take...but you can do interesting things ranging from naked eye on up. There is also a lot of publicly-available astronomy data which you could do analysis on, either because the observer chose to publish it or because it came from public sources. More than anyone will ever have time to exhaust. Learn how to work with it and keep good records of your reduction and analysis process. IRAF is one of the main tools here - and it's FOSS, as are a number of other useful tools. For understanding existing data files or for taking your own observations, Steve Howell's "Handbook of CCD Astronomy" is a good read. It helps if you can program at some level, although you can always pick that up.
More broadly, what's the difference between hacking together something interesting and doing scientific research? Mainly, it has to do with what you do afterwords in order to test your results, the rigor with which you approach the capture and analysis of data, and how you go about framing and presenting what you did when sharing it with others. Depending on what you want to do, maybe that requires a bit of extra equipment, and certainly it involves a lot of extra time, thought, and probably training. But the added expense is not always prohibitive, or even usually. Not every research project has to be run on a high-energy supercollider or on a top-tier computing cluster. Academic research projects have to worry about facilities costs, stipends for graduate students, et cetera...you as a hobbyist do not. You can also often gain access to articles in academic and professional journals by visiting your local college campuses - their libraries will usually make these available to anyone who cares to come in and use them. This will be no end of helpful when trying to understand what has already been done and how.
What you will be missing as an amateur is the support network surrounding an academic or industrial researcher, and the experience which you can get by working for and with more experienced researchers. This is the main thing which will limit the contributions you can make, not your access to facilities and equipment. But what is your real goal here? Do you want to explore and have fun, and maybe share some results in a way which inspires your fellow researchers? Is getting credit through publication in a formal journal even important to you since that's not your career? Do cool things, take risks, explore! It's 2010 and a new frontier thanks to the internet - you can publish to a blog or on Youtube. Interesting results will get picked up on sites like Slashdot or Hack a Day, people will see them, "real" researchers will see them. If you do interesting work and present it in "scientific" way, it can be a real contribution to humanity. And it will be fun!
Exactly. They need to be reburied anyway, and putting them back in an unmarked grave seems rather silly. Why not take the opportunity to honor someone whose achievements are still celebrated 500 years later? It's not as if you dug him up just so you could make a fuss over burying him again.
This is a very good choice of format. Astronomers use FITS because it gives you the option for future or task-specific extensibility while maintaining ease of access to historical data, and because it preserves as much detail as possible in the image data. If you want to archive historical documents, these same attributes make FITS extremely suitable to the task. Also, since FITS is in standard use for astronomy, there are already a lot of existing image processing and analysis tools out there - many or most of which are open source.
If you're not sure, and you don't have time to do the tests necessary to make sure, then it's usually best to err on the side of caution. It's very plausible that ash particles and other ejecta could interfere with the normal and safe operation of an aircraft. And you cannot simply pull over and make a pit stop if your aircraft breaks down unexpectedly while you're 10km above sea level - the closest possibility is "pray to god that physics doesn't say you're about to become very, very dead."
This is a barefaced cash grab, nothing more. What were they going to do if it turned out to have a very dangerous effect on the plane anyway, bring the passengers back as zombies and comp them a free flight?
I can see two main arguments for this and one against.
(+) "If it works, then why not?"
(+) "It's capitalism, comrade!"
(-) "But it's against our ideals, people should learn for the sake of learning!"
Frankly, I'm up for anything which improves the effectiveness of our education system at this point as long as it doesn't constitute an outright human rights violation. The system is broken. If you can prove that X provides significant gains, then we should at least look into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it really is a bunch of FUD. The problem is that people latch on to the word "radiation," decide that they know everything, and then stop listening. Paranoid visions of Chernobyl have nothing to do with cell phones. If we can reasonably assume that the general public isn't sufficiently educated to understand the difference, then we wouldn't be responsible to start putting radiation labels on things when we know it will be misinterpreted over and over.
This keeps cropping up in a legal context for two reasons.
infringing torrents :: ambiguous :: legal
porn :: probably porn :: normal content
spam :: probably spam :: real emails
blog posts :: lazily disguised reposts :: real news
fake google results :: crappy sites :: what you were actually searching for
And so forth...within a small margin, this appears to be the standard ratio of the internet.
the fire = needlessly pissing off your customers with poor service
See what I did there?
Didn't you make enough bloody space junk the first time? NEO pollution is becoming a serious issue, and this isn't helping anyone.
Since it's inevitable that this will devolve into a bunch of AGW/anti-AGW trolling, let's get our facts straight.
No one with any knowledge about the subject is disputing that climates change. The disputed points are that human-produced carbon dioxide is or is not a significant factor, that Al Gore does or does not have any clue what he's blabbing about, and that the green movement does or does not constitute anything more than lies and snake oil.
Anthropogenic or not, climate change is a serious issue which affects the future of our species. The people who support (or object to) AGW by chanting an entrenched position over and over, and the people selling us snake oil as a "fix" are NOT helping. In fact, they're probably selling the future of humanity off in order to make a quick buck off of people who get their science from Twitter and Fox News.
Slinging around words like "denialist" doesn't help a damn thing either. Have we forgotten Godwin's Law so quickly?
With that said, the "before and after" photo trick is extremely passe. It is good for gulling the public, but little more since you only have two data points and are doing absolutely nothing to control for any of numerous confounding factors. It doesn't tell you crap about local conditions (pollution? construction? traffic? did someone just set off dynamite as an anti-avalanche measure?). It doesn't tell you about shorter-term cycles of climate variation (what's normal? was it unusually heavy in the "before" photo? was there more or less pollution historically? what about solar cycles?). It doesn't tell you about the cause of the climate trend if any exists, and it absolutely does not tell you a single bloody thing about the global situation.
Nor is this "incontrovertible" proof all that clear. The saturation in the 1921 photo is such that it is very hard to compare the two photos directly; you would need to analyze each in detail including examining the depth in a given area, the seasonal and longer-term variations, the characteristics of the camera and film used in either photo...the list goes on. The "experts say" line is a bullshit maneuver pulled by journalists in order to make their craptastic statements of absolute truth seem like they have some authority behind them - in reality, it usually means that the journalist is aware that they don't have the means to back up what they're claiming. Three huzzahs for the terrible state of science journalism, eh? FUD and misinformation and more FUD is all you can expect.
Grade school level math. The most complicated math in the series is this: “if a times b is less than 6, and we measure a to be 2, then b must be less than 3.” If you can follow that, you’ll be fine.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not graduate-level physics.
Physics that uses no more math than this is not college-level physics, unless you want to count the first week or two of the not-for-majors version of the 100-level stuff. Even that requires a fairly decent grasp of algebra and trigonometry.
You can talk about quite a few concepts in college-level physics provided that you do so in relatively broad terms. But reaching graduate level physics in any honest sense requires quite a bit of advanced math. Further, it is not something you can learn in any real sense over a period of two months even if you somehow happen to be the smartest human ever born.
If you want a look at what college-level quantum mechanics actually entails, the book "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths is commonly used. But note that the lecture component of these classes easily covers more material than you can pick up by reading the book alone. Also note that students taking courses using this book have usually already taken at least 2 to 3 courses covering quantum mechanics and other topics in modern physics beyond the 100-level courses which provide a survey of elementary topics in physics, and that they have a fairly good grounding in things like linear algebra and differential equations.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt.
Also, the optical approach means that the concept can be adapted for use while the patient is inside an MRI. Wire-free is often handy when you're building neat toys for medical use.
I'm sad though, everyone seems to have missed the best line. This new device is a power source, right?
... he hopes the micromotor will eventually find uses in cancer imaging.
"It has yet to realize its full potential," said Condit.
Get it? Get it? Oh, c'mon, the pun wasn't THAT bad...
The RIAA wants to give advice about what constitutes bad public policy? Really?
We're going to be getting advice on morals and comportment from Paris Hilton next, I take it.
Business 101:
Find the cheapest workers possible who can accomplish a given task.
Hire them.
Run spin control to make it look like you're doing it For The Good Of Humanity.
So now they're going to microwave my food before it's even done growing? That's...nice...
Here's a much better one. There's even a video of the project in action.
http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/imaginary_interfaces.html
To be honest, it doesn't look like much if you're already familiar with work in the field, but it's probably still worth a quick watch.
"Firstly, during the research you're creating human-ish life, and then terminating it."
Um, not so much, no.
"Secondly, if this ever reaches commercialisation (and it will be to recoup the costs), only the rich will have access to these medical advances."
To a certain extent, that goes for pretty much any medical technology if you're in the United States. On the other hand, gene therapy tends to be quite cheap to administer in comparison to other methods. As in, you come several times to get a shot then again to do tests to confirm that it worked, compared to a lifetime of drugs which sort of work and which have all sorts of fun side effects.
Sure, there are legitimate ethical concerns. You just didn't really hit on any of them.
Great, they just outlawed everything from gene therapy to cure cancer using a sequence which was discovered or tested in animals, to using pig valves for heart repair, to wearing leather goods if you wanted to stretch it ad absurdum. Go Ohio.
Keep your redneck laws out of our ethics, please. Hell, keep your politics out of our ethics. Y'all politicians aren't exactly paragons of ethical behavior, to be telling the rest of us what's right and wrong about anything - much less, things you obviously don't understand in the slightest.
So what you're telling me is that I should mainline caffeine so that withdrawal never kicks in?
It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...but no one cared.
But not on Slashdot, right? Right?
The point of patents is that if you come up with something cool, the patent protects your ability to make a living off of having done so both through marketing it yourself and through licensing it to others.
It doesn't often work that way in practice. Patents are used to prevent competition instead of encouraging it, and licensing fees are used to determine who can and who cannot practically work with the technology. It's yet another case where the basic idea was sound but the implementation is lacking. A major issue has been that the scientific and corporate landscape has changed significantly over time, while the patent system has not adapted adequately.
Have these companies found a convenient way to use GPL code, whilst preventing their customers from doing the same?
Yes - it's called "having more lawyers than you."
What are you going to do about it, sue? You can always sue...if you actually have the resources to fight it out. And even if you actually get it to stick, it could be years down the road before you actually get access.
Regarding your specific case, can you reverse-engineer a solution?
Astronomy indeed.
Firstly, amateur observation is an awesome hobby. But beyond that, there are areas where professional astronomical research depends on amateur observations. For example, research about variable stars requires numerous observations over time. You can read about this at the American Association of Variable Star Observers website. You may also want to see if there is an amateur observing group near you (there probably is). This is a great contact to establish since they will have considered many of the questions you're going to encounter, and since it's always fun to talk to others who share your interests.
A few more words about astro research since my undergrad degree was in astronomy. A good telescope does a lot to expand the targets you can observe and a good CCD and filter set does wonders for the data you can take...but you can do interesting things ranging from naked eye on up. There is also a lot of publicly-available astronomy data which you could do analysis on, either because the observer chose to publish it or because it came from public sources. More than anyone will ever have time to exhaust. Learn how to work with it and keep good records of your reduction and analysis process. IRAF is one of the main tools here - and it's FOSS, as are a number of other useful tools. For understanding existing data files or for taking your own observations, Steve Howell's "Handbook of CCD Astronomy" is a good read. It helps if you can program at some level, although you can always pick that up.
More broadly, what's the difference between hacking together something interesting and doing scientific research? Mainly, it has to do with what you do afterwords in order to test your results, the rigor with which you approach the capture and analysis of data, and how you go about framing and presenting what you did when sharing it with others. Depending on what you want to do, maybe that requires a bit of extra equipment, and certainly it involves a lot of extra time, thought, and probably training. But the added expense is not always prohibitive, or even usually. Not every research project has to be run on a high-energy supercollider or on a top-tier computing cluster. Academic research projects have to worry about facilities costs, stipends for graduate students, et cetera...you as a hobbyist do not. You can also often gain access to articles in academic and professional journals by visiting your local college campuses - their libraries will usually make these available to anyone who cares to come in and use them. This will be no end of helpful when trying to understand what has already been done and how.
What you will be missing as an amateur is the support network surrounding an academic or industrial researcher, and the experience which you can get by working for and with more experienced researchers. This is the main thing which will limit the contributions you can make, not your access to facilities and equipment. But what is your real goal here? Do you want to explore and have fun, and maybe share some results in a way which inspires your fellow researchers? Is getting credit through publication in a formal journal even important to you since that's not your career? Do cool things, take risks, explore! It's 2010 and a new frontier thanks to the internet - you can publish to a blog or on Youtube. Interesting results will get picked up on sites like Slashdot or Hack a Day, people will see them, "real" researchers will see them. If you do interesting work and present it in "scientific" way, it can be a real contribution to humanity. And it will be fun!
Exactly. They need to be reburied anyway, and putting them back in an unmarked grave seems rather silly. Why not take the opportunity to honor someone whose achievements are still celebrated 500 years later? It's not as if you dug him up just so you could make a fuss over burying him again.
This is actually irony for once, right? Because somehow they forgot to count the 300 million people in the United States who live with bad IP laws.
This is a very good choice of format. Astronomers use FITS because it gives you the option for future or task-specific extensibility while maintaining ease of access to historical data, and because it preserves as much detail as possible in the image data. If you want to archive historical documents, these same attributes make FITS extremely suitable to the task. Also, since FITS is in standard use for astronomy, there are already a lot of existing image processing and analysis tools out there - many or most of which are open source.
If you're not sure, and you don't have time to do the tests necessary to make sure, then it's usually best to err on the side of caution. It's very plausible that ash particles and other ejecta could interfere with the normal and safe operation of an aircraft. And you cannot simply pull over and make a pit stop if your aircraft breaks down unexpectedly while you're 10km above sea level - the closest possibility is "pray to god that physics doesn't say you're about to become very, very dead."
This is a barefaced cash grab, nothing more. What were they going to do if it turned out to have a very dangerous effect on the plane anyway, bring the passengers back as zombies and comp them a free flight?
It's a small thermal exhaust port.
Many Bothans died to bring us the information that farting while wearing an invisibility cloak will give away your location.
I can see two main arguments for this and one against.
(+) "If it works, then why not?"
(+) "It's capitalism, comrade!"
(-) "But it's against our ideals, people should learn for the sake of learning!"
Frankly, I'm up for anything which improves the effectiveness of our education system at this point as long as it doesn't constitute an outright human rights violation. The system is broken. If you can prove that X provides significant gains, then we should at least look into it.