Isn't the point of certification to test knowledge or abilities and guarantee to a third party that they exist? Sure, if you're dealing with a job candidate with long experience in the field, you can look at work history, but that's why degree matters less and less as you age.
If you don't want to look at degrees/certifications, what would you look at to establish actual knowledge when hiring young people?
There are way too many people going to college just for the experience.
Granted, I went to a liberal arts college so my perspective may be somewhat different from most here, but I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with this. Going to college to get an education, even one that you won't use in your career (assuming you even decide to have a career) isn't wrong as long as you know that that's why you're going and you're OK with it. I know quite a few folks who got degrees that they've never used to make a dime, but are glad that they go the degrees for the way that that education has enriched their lives.
He's still annoyed by this because all of the fancy features pump up the tuition bill.
Sure, except the colleges are a business like any other (at least to some extent) and they have to attract customers (i.e., students). The prospective students have been enticed into expecting fancy rec centers and cushy dorms. Once a few schools start offering those features, pretty much everyone else has to do so to stay competitive.
It's also worth noting here that the nominal price of tuition typically doesn't pay for the actual cost of sending student to college. At my alma mater (graduated ten years ago, for reference), our tuition -- huge those it was -- paid for about 1/3 of the actual expense.
Also note that most people don't pay full tuition. The high tuitions seem to exist so that those who can (apparently) afford it can be charged for it, while being "nice" and knowing the price down for others.
Exactly. There was an interesting story in Science magazine about a month ago about how political scientists try to quantify media bias. It's not at all easy for a lot of reasons; pretty much any metric you can come up with is flawed. For example, you could count the number of citations to political or conservative commentators or source, but citations aren't always biased. You can see how often stories mention a change in polling numbers for a given candidate, but those types of reports would probably favor the underdog/challenger (regardless of party). And so forth. In the end, the article's report of various studies seemed to find mixed results: some show a conservative bias in the media, others a liberal one. There seemed to be (in the studies quoted) a slight preference to the liberal bias, but I wouldn't say it was definitive. (Also, note that the studies are using data from over a decade ago it appears. Probably trying to reduce the emotional connection by avoiding current events.)
Arising quickly and being able to hibernate (or sporify) for long periods of time are two different things.
You miss the point. If life arises in a few hundred million years, if Enceladus were only active that long, that's enough for there to be a chance. A hundred million years is fast over solar system timescales.
Why would spectrographing mist be better than spectrographing the surface?
You answered your own question: you can sample the mist in-situ and examine it when it's pristine (before radiation and other damage has affect it and before outside contaminants can interfere). Actual in-situ measurements are often better, and certainly helpful, since molecular spectra, especially surface spectra, are seldom unambiguous in the real world. (Seriously, there are huge arguments about what certain features are where both (or all) camps can point to lab measurements that show that their compounds can reproduce the spectra quite well, thank you.)
Tidal heating looks like the better candidate.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The initial heat from formation/short lived radioactive isotopes would provide enough heat to make the ice ductile enough for tidal flexing to go to work and keep it warm. The problem with Enceladus is that once it freezes solid, it's hard to warm it up, even in a resonance. Anyway, that was the gist of what I saw a short while ago, if memory serves.
It depends on how long the warmth lasts. Life on Earth arose fairly quickly after things got habitable. (A few hundred million years is, I believe, now the best figure.) So it's possible for Enceladus to develop life quickly, too, if conditions were suitable.
Also, you're forgetting the issue of accessibility. Europa's liquids are under at least a kilometer of ice, perhaps as much as ten kilometers. Enceladus's liquids are not only probably near the surface (tens to hundreds of meters), they're spewing into space so that no drilling is even required to reach them.
Also-also: the models I've been seeing lately seem to suggest that the heat here may be related to primordial heating. In that case, Enceladus may have been warm for a very long time, longer than Europa even. (The latter requires Ganymede and Io's joint resonance with it to keep its eccentricity high enough to cause the tidal flexing that produces heat. That resonance was likely not primordial, although I've seen suggestions that it could have been.)
I think that the summary (and to a lesser extent, the story) only accurate if you don't think that Cassini is already looking for signs of life on Enceladus. In fact, Enceladus has become (with Titan) one of the most important mission objectives for Cassini. As the story points out, the kind of data that would help address the possibility of life has already been collected (and will no doubt continue to be collected).
In other words, this isn't repurposing, it's a story about what's already being done.
As someone has already noted, determine what is and is not life is already difficult with terrestrial cases (which presumably are all somewhat related, far enough back in time). Trying to guess what will be "life" on a celestial body is even worse. However, another problem arises and that's scope. For a Mars mission, you might get away with such a narrow objective, but for the outer solar system merely getting there is so expensive that to launch a spacecraft with only one objective like that would probably not fly. In the very least, people want to see imaging and other scientific capabilities (and other science objectives) to make it worth the launch cost.
Well, let's think about that, shall we? HST's total cost was about $1.5 billion when it was launched in 1990. (If that figure is 1990 dollars, it's nearly $2.5 billion now.) Being generous, we can figure a shuttle repair mission is around $0.5 billion, so four servicing missions are worth about $2 billion, comparable to the cost of a new Hubble. James Webb ST, by comparison, is estimated to cost $4.5 billion over its lifetime, so you'd get half of a new 'scope for the cost of keeping the old one working.
As with most things, wearing out what you have is more economical than buying a new one (no matter what advertisers want us to think).
On the other hand, if you really want new telescopes, you'd be best-served to not play them off of each other. This isn't a zero sum game and NASA's budget is a trifle compared to other Federal agencies. Rather than denigrated HST, why not seek them money from DoD research projects, for instance?
To be fair, the 90 days wasn't really a planned lifespan, that was the prime mission that they needed to finish to be a "success". I suspect that the reason for this is partly funding: NASA likes to fund projects in increments in case something does go wrong. (They don't write a lot of software until the spacecraft is successfully launched, for example.) Plus, but low-balling the life expectancy, they can amaze everyone with what a great bargain the mission is when it outlives it.
I don't think anyone really expected the Phoenix lander to die at around 90 days in as much as almost all missions that are successful in any reasonable sense (in other words, don't blow up on launch, miss Mars, or whatever) outlive their nominal missions by quite a bit. Look at Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, or Cassini.
Well, they also have to do a test of it before most outfits will try the chip out on a serious mission. NASA isn't about to assume that a given chip really is ready for the radiation environment around the Earth when it comes to a major project like Hubble until it's been demonstrated on a less-expensive satellite. So you have to find someone willing to fly the beast and verify that it's OK for whatever duration people require to feel safe. That adds more time onto the turn-around.
As you note, reputation is just one factor and it really depends on what each student wants to *get* out of their college career. Some students are interested in the education itself. Some are interested in the diploma as a hoop to jump through. Others want to push their careers forward through the reputation of the degree (which may be different from the reputation of the school overall) and through networking. So for some people, reputation is almost irrelevant while for others, it's paramount.
Because almost all regular satellites orbit pretty much in their planets' equatorial planes. Saturn's moons are therefore bad candidates, for example, since Saturn has a high obliquity (26 degrees).
It's not a good conductor compared to, say, metals, which is my point. Coupled with the point I didn't make explicit, but you did (thanks!), that LOTS of rock is just not a good conductor.
Actually, Pluto (at least on the average) is warmer than Triton. Albedo wins in that case. For actual coldest place, the rapidly expanding frontier is making that a moving target, I'm sure.
Sure there will be some conduction, but rock doesn't conduct heat terribly well. So while I'd expect Mercury's polar craters to be warmer than the Moon's polar craters, I would expect them to still be really cold. (Not necessarily the coldest place in the solar system, though. In fact, you can guess that it may be a polar region of a Jovian moon since Jupiter's obliquity is only 3 degrees. Or a Neptunian moon; tilt is a lot higher, but 1/r^2 comes in big time there as does the high albedo of the bodies.)
L2 wouldn't necessarily be that cold for Mercury, by the way. The planet is still a warm surface radiating toward L2.
Enforcing the policy is 100% the solution, providing said policy is adequate (another discussion entirely).
You're right, it does depend on the policy. But whether the policy is right depends on whether the users will follow it. If there's a policy in place that hampers functionality to such an extent that users are circumventing it constantly, you start losing a lot of time (= money) in enforcement. At some point, everyone would spend less time and effort if the policy made more sense.
And to be fair, none of us (except maybe our boss) expects our IT manger to support our laptops, we generally take care of them ourselves. However, he does provide help on a best-effort basis when he can. In the end, we all get more work done since the laptops definitely facilitate work.
I agree completely. Blanket bans on all devices or software beyond the bare minimum ITS wants to support is going to do nothing but create circumventions. A lot of that circumvention will be done as surreptitiously as possible, probably improving the chances of problems down the road.
A better approach is probably to allow employees to request exceptions, with explanation. For example, my personal laptop is currently plugged into my office. I do a lot of work on it and it travels with me when I go to meetings. Our IT manager knows about the laptop (as well as everyone else's) and provides a bit of support for them to make sure that they're secure, etc. It doesn't take a lot of his time to provide minimal support to a few extra machines (a lot of his job doesn't scale that way anyway), and it makes everything work more efficiently.
As has already been noted, NASA's failure rate isn't really that high. If anything, it may be the reverse: NASA has become so risk-adverse (it's argued) that the public has forgotten how *hard* space is and it starts to seem boring. (And like a good idea to raid the NASA budget for other projects because they appear to have more than they need.)
If the ice within the rings is non-renewable, in other words not being replenished from some source outside of the rings what is the upper limit on the time it would take for the clumps to sublimate away? If they are of cometary material origin and are like the comets we see, the ones that are outgassing at a tremendous rate what would be their life expectancy?
Comets outgas almost entirely when they're near the Sun, within Jupiter's orbit or closer. Saturn's rings, being 10 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, are cold. Very cold. Around 100 K or so, probably a bit colder. (They also spend a large fraction of their time with almost *no* solar illumination, both due to ducking into Saturn's shadow and due to equinoxes on Saturn.) So sublimation is a slow actor for them. (Some probably occurs, but I don't know the rate. But at these temperatures, water ice is a rock.)
As for condensing vapor... from where? Almost all of the gas in our primordial system was blown away when the Sun became a full-fledged star. What's left would probably be mostly pushed around by the solar wind (and not enter the Saturnian system anyway, since the one excludes the other). The other option is to for dust (easy at these temperatures), but there still won't be a lot of it.
No, I value intuition quite highly. Like with detectives, scientists get a lot of use from their intuition. It helps us narrow down the places to look for solutions. But, also like detectives, in the end, we can't argue our intuition to each other. It's too personal and subjective. It's true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data, but that doesn't mean that every claim needs overwhelming evidence. The data supporting young rings for Saturn (two separate lines of evidence!) was solid and reasonable, more than enough to overrule opinion.
I don't overestimate previous models. I'm a rings researcher (who actually prefers old rings, thank you) who knows what goes into them. The conclusions are based on solid reasoning. Yes, there are assumptions, but they were the most reasonable assumptions about the physics that anyone could have made at the time. You can't ask for more than that.
You seem to have problems with the idea that science can tell you you're wrong. I'm afraid it's something you'll have to learn to live with: human intuition was evolved for a really quite narrow chunk of our universe and shouldn't even be expected to work very well in astronomical contexts.
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Isn't the point of certification to test knowledge or abilities and guarantee to a third party that they exist? Sure, if you're dealing with a job candidate with long experience in the field, you can look at work history, but that's why degree matters less and less as you age.
If you don't want to look at degrees/certifications, what would you look at to establish actual knowledge when hiring young people?
Granted, I went to a liberal arts college so my perspective may be somewhat different from most here, but I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with this. Going to college to get an education, even one that you won't use in your career (assuming you even decide to have a career) isn't wrong as long as you know that that's why you're going and you're OK with it. I know quite a few folks who got degrees that they've never used to make a dime, but are glad that they go the degrees for the way that that education has enriched their lives.
Sure, except the colleges are a business like any other (at least to some extent) and they have to attract customers (i.e., students). The prospective students have been enticed into expecting fancy rec centers and cushy dorms. Once a few schools start offering those features, pretty much everyone else has to do so to stay competitive.
It's also worth noting here that the nominal price of tuition typically doesn't pay for the actual cost of sending student to college. At my alma mater (graduated ten years ago, for reference), our tuition -- huge those it was -- paid for about 1/3 of the actual expense.
Also note that most people don't pay full tuition. The high tuitions seem to exist so that those who can (apparently) afford it can be charged for it, while being "nice" and knowing the price down for others.
Exactly. There was an interesting story in Science magazine about a month ago about how political scientists try to quantify media bias. It's not at all easy for a lot of reasons; pretty much any metric you can come up with is flawed. For example, you could count the number of citations to political or conservative commentators or source, but citations aren't always biased. You can see how often stories mention a change in polling numbers for a given candidate, but those types of reports would probably favor the underdog/challenger (regardless of party). And so forth. In the end, the article's report of various studies seemed to find mixed results: some show a conservative bias in the media, others a liberal one. There seemed to be (in the studies quoted) a slight preference to the liberal bias, but I wouldn't say it was definitive. (Also, note that the studies are using data from over a decade ago it appears. Probably trying to reduce the emotional connection by avoiding current events.)
Arising quickly and being able to hibernate (or sporify) for long periods of time are two different things.
You miss the point. If life arises in a few hundred million years, if Enceladus were only active that long, that's enough for there to be a chance. A hundred million years is fast over solar system timescales.
Why would spectrographing mist be better than spectrographing the surface?
You answered your own question: you can sample the mist in-situ and examine it when it's pristine (before radiation and other damage has affect it and before outside contaminants can interfere). Actual in-situ measurements are often better, and certainly helpful, since molecular spectra, especially surface spectra, are seldom unambiguous in the real world. (Seriously, there are huge arguments about what certain features are where both (or all) camps can point to lab measurements that show that their compounds can reproduce the spectra quite well, thank you.)
Tidal heating looks like the better candidate.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The initial heat from formation/short lived radioactive isotopes would provide enough heat to make the ice ductile enough for tidal flexing to go to work and keep it warm. The problem with Enceladus is that once it freezes solid, it's hard to warm it up, even in a resonance. Anyway, that was the gist of what I saw a short while ago, if memory serves.
It depends on how long the warmth lasts. Life on Earth arose fairly quickly after things got habitable. (A few hundred million years is, I believe, now the best figure.) So it's possible for Enceladus to develop life quickly, too, if conditions were suitable.
Also, you're forgetting the issue of accessibility. Europa's liquids are under at least a kilometer of ice, perhaps as much as ten kilometers. Enceladus's liquids are not only probably near the surface (tens to hundreds of meters), they're spewing into space so that no drilling is even required to reach them.
Also-also: the models I've been seeing lately seem to suggest that the heat here may be related to primordial heating. In that case, Enceladus may have been warm for a very long time, longer than Europa even. (The latter requires Ganymede and Io's joint resonance with it to keep its eccentricity high enough to cause the tidal flexing that produces heat. That resonance was likely not primordial, although I've seen suggestions that it could have been.)
Thanks and we're happy to do it. (We just like to make sure that they get seen, so I pimp them a bit. :-)
The original story is at CICLOPS. (I spent all day Saturday helping get that stuff together.)
I think that the summary (and to a lesser extent, the story) only accurate if you don't think that Cassini is already looking for signs of life on Enceladus. In fact, Enceladus has become (with Titan) one of the most important mission objectives for Cassini. As the story points out, the kind of data that would help address the possibility of life has already been collected (and will no doubt continue to be collected).
In other words, this isn't repurposing, it's a story about what's already being done.
As someone has already noted, determine what is and is not life is already difficult with terrestrial cases (which presumably are all somewhat related, far enough back in time). Trying to guess what will be "life" on a celestial body is even worse. However, another problem arises and that's scope. For a Mars mission, you might get away with such a narrow objective, but for the outer solar system merely getting there is so expensive that to launch a spacecraft with only one objective like that would probably not fly. In the very least, people want to see imaging and other scientific capabilities (and other science objectives) to make it worth the launch cost.
Well, let's think about that, shall we? HST's total cost was about $1.5 billion when it was launched in 1990. (If that figure is 1990 dollars, it's nearly $2.5 billion now.) Being generous, we can figure a shuttle repair mission is around $0.5 billion, so four servicing missions are worth about $2 billion, comparable to the cost of a new Hubble. James Webb ST, by comparison, is estimated to cost $4.5 billion over its lifetime, so you'd get half of a new 'scope for the cost of keeping the old one working.
As with most things, wearing out what you have is more economical than buying a new one (no matter what advertisers want us to think).
On the other hand, if you really want new telescopes, you'd be best-served to not play them off of each other. This isn't a zero sum game and NASA's budget is a trifle compared to other Federal agencies. Rather than denigrated HST, why not seek them money from DoD research projects, for instance?
To be fair, the 90 days wasn't really a planned lifespan, that was the prime mission that they needed to finish to be a "success". I suspect that the reason for this is partly funding: NASA likes to fund projects in increments in case something does go wrong. (They don't write a lot of software until the spacecraft is successfully launched, for example.) Plus, but low-balling the life expectancy, they can amaze everyone with what a great bargain the mission is when it outlives it.
I don't think anyone really expected the Phoenix lander to die at around 90 days in as much as almost all missions that are successful in any reasonable sense (in other words, don't blow up on launch, miss Mars, or whatever) outlive their nominal missions by quite a bit. Look at Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, or Cassini.
Well, they also have to do a test of it before most outfits will try the chip out on a serious mission. NASA isn't about to assume that a given chip really is ready for the radiation environment around the Earth when it comes to a major project like Hubble until it's been demonstrated on a less-expensive satellite. So you have to find someone willing to fly the beast and verify that it's OK for whatever duration people require to feel safe. That adds more time onto the turn-around.
Original story is at http://ciclops.org/view_event/91/Great_Storm_of_the_South.
That's OK. The ranks of college graduates (a la GREs) are also pretty meaningless, so at least there is symmetry.
As you note, reputation is just one factor and it really depends on what each student wants to *get* out of their college career. Some students are interested in the education itself. Some are interested in the diploma as a hoop to jump through. Others want to push their careers forward through the reputation of the degree (which may be different from the reputation of the school overall) and through networking. So for some people, reputation is almost irrelevant while for others, it's paramount.
Because almost all regular satellites orbit pretty much in their planets' equatorial planes. Saturn's moons are therefore bad candidates, for example, since Saturn has a high obliquity (26 degrees).
It's not a good conductor compared to, say, metals, which is my point. Coupled with the point I didn't make explicit, but you did (thanks!), that LOTS of rock is just not a good conductor.
Actually, Pluto (at least on the average) is warmer than Triton. Albedo wins in that case. For actual coldest place, the rapidly expanding frontier is making that a moving target, I'm sure.
Sure there will be some conduction, but rock doesn't conduct heat terribly well. So while I'd expect Mercury's polar craters to be warmer than the Moon's polar craters, I would expect them to still be really cold. (Not necessarily the coldest place in the solar system, though. In fact, you can guess that it may be a polar region of a Jovian moon since Jupiter's obliquity is only 3 degrees. Or a Neptunian moon; tilt is a lot higher, but 1/r^2 comes in big time there as does the high albedo of the bodies.)
L2 wouldn't necessarily be that cold for Mercury, by the way. The planet is still a warm surface radiating toward L2.
Enforcing the policy is 100% the solution, providing said policy is adequate (another discussion entirely).
You're right, it does depend on the policy. But whether the policy is right depends on whether the users will follow it. If there's a policy in place that hampers functionality to such an extent that users are circumventing it constantly, you start losing a lot of time (= money) in enforcement. At some point, everyone would spend less time and effort if the policy made more sense.
And to be fair, none of us (except maybe our boss) expects our IT manger to support our laptops, we generally take care of them ourselves. However, he does provide help on a best-effort basis when he can. In the end, we all get more work done since the laptops definitely facilitate work.
I agree completely. Blanket bans on all devices or software beyond the bare minimum ITS wants to support is going to do nothing but create circumventions. A lot of that circumvention will be done as surreptitiously as possible, probably improving the chances of problems down the road.
A better approach is probably to allow employees to request exceptions, with explanation. For example, my personal laptop is currently plugged into my office. I do a lot of work on it and it travels with me when I go to meetings. Our IT manager knows about the laptop (as well as everyone else's) and provides a bit of support for them to make sure that they're secure, etc. It doesn't take a lot of his time to provide minimal support to a few extra machines (a lot of his job doesn't scale that way anyway), and it makes everything work more efficiently.
As has already been noted, NASA's failure rate isn't really that high. If anything, it may be the reverse: NASA has become so risk-adverse (it's argued) that the public has forgotten how *hard* space is and it starts to seem boring. (And like a good idea to raid the NASA budget for other projects because they appear to have more than they need.)
If the ice within the rings is non-renewable, in other words not being replenished from some source outside of the rings what is the upper limit on the time it would take for the clumps to sublimate away? If they are of cometary material origin and are like the comets we see, the ones that are outgassing at a tremendous rate what would be their life expectancy?
Comets outgas almost entirely when they're near the Sun, within Jupiter's orbit or closer. Saturn's rings, being 10 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, are cold. Very cold. Around 100 K or so, probably a bit colder. (They also spend a large fraction of their time with almost *no* solar illumination, both due to ducking into Saturn's shadow and due to equinoxes on Saturn.) So sublimation is a slow actor for them. (Some probably occurs, but I don't know the rate. But at these temperatures, water ice is a rock.)
As for condensing vapor... from where? Almost all of the gas in our primordial system was blown away when the Sun became a full-fledged star. What's left would probably be mostly pushed around by the solar wind (and not enter the Saturnian system anyway, since the one excludes the other). The other option is to for dust (easy at these temperatures), but there still won't be a lot of it.
No, I value intuition quite highly. Like with detectives, scientists get a lot of use from their intuition. It helps us narrow down the places to look for solutions. But, also like detectives, in the end, we can't argue our intuition to each other. It's too personal and subjective. It's true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data, but that doesn't mean that every claim needs overwhelming evidence. The data supporting young rings for Saturn (two separate lines of evidence!) was solid and reasonable, more than enough to overrule opinion.
I don't overestimate previous models. I'm a rings researcher (who actually prefers old rings, thank you) who knows what goes into them. The conclusions are based on solid reasoning. Yes, there are assumptions, but they were the most reasonable assumptions about the physics that anyone could have made at the time. You can't ask for more than that.
You seem to have problems with the idea that science can tell you you're wrong. I'm afraid it's something you'll have to learn to live with: human intuition was evolved for a really quite narrow chunk of our universe and shouldn't even be expected to work very well in astronomical contexts.