How many scientists do you know run around claiming how insignificant we are? I think you're missing the point. While humanity is important, it is even more important to see how we fit into the grand scheme of things. I don't think any scientists are trying to de-value humanity, rather I believe that we are putting our existance into the proper context.
If you get the idea that science is destroying human esteem, then perhaps you aren't taking the time to understand the science itself. Science isn't about ethics and having a purpose for things, it is only an exploration into our reality. So if one feels overwhelmed by the results, it is only a personal fear of being insignificant. If you look at most of the popular scientists of the last half century (Einstein, Sagan, Feynman) they all embrace the value of humanity, don't try to white-wash science as un-human - in the end science is only what you make of it.
Excellent Paper - A must read if you're interested
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QuickBird1 Is A Loss
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I just finished looking over the following paper , it was written by an officer of the USAF. It goes into all the considerations with imaging satellites as well as US policy and whatnot. It seems as though the US government would actually prefer to have these commercial satellites exist, as long as they are controlled from the US with governmental influence.
From the paper: President Bill Clinton made history as the first US president to use the line-item veto, targeting three ASAT programs with his pen, including the Army's Kinetic Energy Antisatellite Program. According to Robert Bell, special assistant to the president and senior director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council (NSC), although the administration recognizes the need for space
control, it "doesn't necessarily believe at this time that the Army program is the appropriate solution." The White House would rather forgo attacking the satellites themselves, and instead find ways to destroy or disrupt the information downlinked by the satellites.
I think that pretty much sums up the conspiracy. It makes sense though - why waste time and money making anti-satellite weapons when you can shut down their control centres here on the ground through some veil of 'national defence interests' by employing a handful of federal agents or whatever.
I don't believe that these so-called "web bugs" are cookies though. From what I have read on the page they are implemented simply by having the html read by your mail reader. Or that is what I got from the article anyways.
Web bugs can also be used in email. For example, companies can send a bulk HTML email newsletter that has Web bugs, which will determine how many people read the letter, how often they read it, and whether they forward it to anyone. The email "would include your email address in the URL or include a coded ID or encrypted email address to track when you opened it," Smith said. - From a previous article on the site.
Now I don't know about you, but with regards to spamming and whatnot these 'web bugs' seem like a pretty blatent violation of privacy. Granted with cookies you do have the option of not using them, but this stuff takes it to the next level. Just another reason to use an email program that doesn't read HTML.
I get what you're saying, however I wouldn't claim it to be lost effort in any sense.
While nature does not provide the perfect solution, it does provide the one best one that it has tailored up to that point (natural selection). The point to make here however is that humans (and life on Earth for that matter) are the solution to what? All we are is the end result of an evolutionary chain - there are lots of other animals on this planet, and if you like we can say that all they (and us) have really done is promoted the spread of life, adapting to our environment. Now, I know that human progress is very good at designing things and whatnot, but evolution has had one thing that we haven't - billions of years of trial and error!
I agree that natures solutions are often limited to their respective environments, this is the key of evolution (being able to adapt to your particular environment), so it is quite obvious that trying to make a bird fly on a 10 g planet would be rather interesting. The point to make here however is that evolution has created some very interesting devices on the cellular, tissue and organ levels. I believe they are simply using the flagella of the bacteria here - there is nothing advanced about a tail that can wiggle - but can we make anything like that yet? Our sensory perception organs are yet to be matched by anything man-made and as for computing power, well, we still can't even understand our own minds.
I really liked your last line, however I think it would be more coherent if it was presented as the following:
While early effort will get an immense head start by apdapting existing systems, I believe that in the future superior systems will be designed that bear little resemblance to our present biological ones.
I guess the concept of completely artificial doesn't make any sense to me. If we make something, it was 'in the end' crafted by the evolution of our biology. Ah well, just my 2 cents...
In the end this boils down to the concept of human progression. Humanity has never remained in a static situation - we constantly look for new and better ways of accomplishing our goals.
This book is part of the conservative outlook that has accompanied human progression since the dawn of time. While many people like to look forward, others believe that things are better the way they are or even believe that things were better 'back in the day'. The point of the matter is that while some people prefer to live in a technological stasis, history has proven that the majority of mankind will embrace the changes if they are deemed beneficial to the society.
And in that respect, I believe that the digital age (or whatever you would like to call it) has succeeded to entrench itself in modern society and will continue to grow. Change is inevitable, the only thing that matters is that we make the right changes.
He wants to create a new type of astronomer, the astronomer that is a data miner
Give me a break! Does this guy know anything about the field of astronomy from a professional point of view?
Most astronomers/astrophysicists don't spend the time looking through the telescopes themselves - the majority use data that someone else has already gathered. I agree that this would greatily increase their ability find pertinent data, however, it would hardly bring about a new 'type' of astronomer, the majority are already data miners.
TV is so full of cops, lawyers, business people that they overlook the fact that scientific researchers can be very passionate about their lines of work, too
I think that saying researchers can be very passionate is an understatement as well!
I don't know too many people doing serious academic research in any field who don't devote their lives to it. When you spend that much time working on the same thing it pretty much influences your every thought. I think the reason why the general public (and the media in particular) don't view researchers as passionate is because they don't approach the work of the researcher from the same perspective - most people just see it as a bunch of math/experimenting with little relevance to their lives in particular, while to the people doing the work it is a source of extreme fascination and unbounded possibilities.
Then again I'm sure the same thing can be said about any profession if the person is serious enough about it, but it just seems that people have always viewed scientists/mathematicians as shallow, robot-like people - a view that couldn't be any farther from the truth!
Amtrak officials and rail enthusiasts hope favorable publicity will increase the demand for similar high-speed lines elsewhere in the country... A one-way coach ticket between Washington and New York will be $143, up from
$122 on Metroliner. Travel between New York and Boston will cost $120,compared to $57 on conventional Amtrak trains, which will continue to run in the Northeast Corridor.
Hmmm... I don't know how well the demand will be with prices like that (they're only one way!). I would imagine that the general public would rather spend the extra time on the slower trains or just drive. Anyone travel in the Northeast often? Any opinions on what the best way to go would be?
As I grew up I was constantly getting the next console (Atari 2600 -> Super NES) and playing tons of games. I never even had my own computer until I was in grade 12 (P120), although I enjoyed playing games and whatnot on the ones at school and at some of my friends houses.
The way I see it is that if I would have had a computer of my own while growing up I wouldn't have wasted as much of my time with the console machines (I never even had a C-64 for crying out loud!).
Kids will be kids, and although there are the exceptional few who will inquire as to how the thing really works, most are just there for the bells and whistles. At least if they use a computer then they will get some exposure, even if it's just being familiar with the thing. If they are inclined to actually get into computers at a deeper level then that will come on it's own - if the boy you are talking about doesn't like installation now, he'll figure it out when he realizes that it's something he'll have to learn to keep playing new games, and if he doesn't want to learn, then maybe computers just aren't his thing *gasp*! The only one who will lose in that case are the parents who bought him the $3000 gaming machine that he lost interest in.
So in the end, I'd have to say that the exposure is the main thing, even if they don't pick up on it for whatever reasons, at least they're still having fun and the opportunity exists for them to go further into computing.
The idea of allowing an application to change the network topology of the processors to optimize for its own data representation is extremely powerful - it's the next "big thing" in both MIMD supercomputing and networks for cluster supercomputing, IMNSHO.
Isn't this inherent in MPI? Is there something more to this that I'm missing? I'm not too well versed in super computing but I thought that with MPI you could write your programs to change the topologies to optimize things. Just wondering...
I don't know how many of you spend your free time in chat rooms, but 3 or 4 years from now, you'll need 3D glasses, and one of these electronic gloves so that you can pick up objects or punch out your opponent.
I can just see it now, sadist troll cults that enjoy taking brutal beatings, bitter kung-fu flame wars and noble/. vigilante enforcers!
Imagine being a newbie in that type of system? "Why is everyone punching me?"
This is very true in a fundamental sense. Seeing as genes are simply sequences of 4 different bases and computer code is simply sequences of 1s and 0s there is no inherent difference between the two.
Once again this falls into the grey area since the judgement of it is beyond our system. It's very interesting to see how we apply our capitalist ideology to research (most scientists must also find it very sad). The point of the matter is that we live in a system where everything is run by money, not by the concept of the greater good. Sure it would be nice if everyone worked together and there was no reason to hide away information from the 'competitors', but we live in a system that utilizes this mechanism to push forward. I don't think that we could maintain capitalism without having these patents in research - perhaps it's topics like these that will further display the moral and ethical weaknesses of the capitalistic system.
I think this is perhaps the only question that is posed that has any real importance. All of the other questions are just extrapolations of this question to different isolated situations or subjective points of view.
If you view technology as simply being human progression into the ability to facilitate our needs and desires then obviously any progression is going to result in a consequence that hasn't been considered to it's full extent. This arises from the fact that as we construct new and better ways of doing things we also change ourselves!
Humanity is not an isolated entity and it is not static in time. We constantly interact with our environment and with ourselves to bring about development on every scale from the individual to the global community. So in the end I believe we will never realize the full extent to which our actions (in the form of technology) play out and as such I believe that 'technology ethics' should not be a static value, they are something that we must constantly bring into question. The biggest problem with the current state of affairs is that people try to apply outdated ethics to technological problems. What most people don't realize is that these ethics are being used in contexts that they were never initially intended for.
Another key problem is that for our technology to be evaluated properly we must also have a society that can appreciate the things that truly matter like the environment and true freedom instead of short term economic gains and power struggles. It will be interesting to see if we can manage to evolve as a society quick enough to keep up with the pace of our technology - otherwise you won't have to watch movies about the Matrix and whatnot... you'll be living it.
Nothing is as indisputable as a completely real process
Perhaps you mean a 'completely observable process', however I get your point and I totally agree with it. The only problem is that for the most part none of our elections are like this. The concept of having anonymous voting coupled with the sheer number of voters prompted people to design new systems with which to perform votes.
In moving from a system where everyone yells a 'yea' or a 'nay' to the ballot method we left out the ability for the community as a whole to observe what the actual vote was first hand - our current system leaves it up to someone else to count the votes and as such you automatically lose the sense of personal security in knowing that your vote was properly included.
By using a computer controlled method to register votes we are not losing or gaining any functionality over the ballot system from a voters point of view. If you can write an X and not click a button then you definately must have an interesting situation. What we are gaining however is the ability to open up the counting method so that there is no single point where it can break down. With people counting votes you have to ensure that the vote counters are sincere and you depend on their ability to perform their jobs perfectly. Now I don't know about most people, but I would think that the more people counting the better, since independant errors will decrease. By implementing a purely digital system, we would have exactly that in that the developers of the system would be able to see where the others made flaws - we have programs that can calculate launch trajectories to Pluto, I'm sure we can make vote counting systems properly. Also, since many places use automated counters now, what would the difference be? If many people work on the digital voting system there will be no opportunity for it to become flawed from a design point of view.
As for hacking, etc. one must be aware that the opportunities exist to maliciously affect ballot systems as well. 'Rigging the vote' immediately comes to mind. The security of a digital system would probably be easier to monitor than the ballot system anyways - it's a lot easier to determine that you have altered results from a digital source than from a bag of ballots. And as for punishment, well, you can just imagine what would happen if you were involved in a federal vote scandel of any sort.
I guess in the end I'm advocating the use of technology to make things easier for everyone and more stable. A punchcard never lies, true enough, but a computer only does what you tell it to.
Up until this point I figured that the zeta function was just another one of those 'rarely used' functions in the back of my math tables!
In essence, the point of the second half of the article shows how current research in quantum mechanics can be applied to give a sound reasoning to the fact that the zeta function produces these 'zeros' in the complex plane.
Connes has proposed that if one could construct a particular quantum system it may very well have energies (remember that in quantum mechanics energy levels are discrete - not continuous!) that correspond to these zeros produced by the zeta function. For this to be truly groundbreaking however the quantum system would have to display all of the energy levels corresponding to the zeros but it would have to not have extra energy levels. I don't know how to go much further into the development of a quantum state space based on prime numbers, however. Perhaps someone more well versed in QM could explain that.
The true beauty of this proof is that it would give prime numbers an actual physical significance. Like it says in the article this could result in greatly expanding our ability to deal with many complex phenomena on the quantum scale and give us insights into many other phenomena. I for one am going to be following this one as close as possible!
A coalition of cryptography and watermarking researchers from Princeton University, Xerox PARC and Rice University claims to have successfully defeated a music protection system proposed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). - From Salon
The only consideration is that this group hasn't submitted their technical information (which automatically excludes their attempt from being considered). Now I don't know about most skeptics, but when a group of this stature claims to have done something, I would guess that they were being sincere - how many universities would allow research groups to do work on something like this and then make false claims?
What really bugs me is the way we are unable to see our former oppressors as fellow human beings
Well put. It makes me sad to see so many people who are stuck in the fight to gain power - regardless of what it is they are trying to gain power over.
I guess my personal experience made me realize that it isn't how others view you that matters, it's how you view yourself!
I grew up in a low-class area and went to an G1-8 elementry school where only 3 of the 30 odd people in our grade 8 class ended up going to post secondary institutions. Most of my friends in elementary school were poor and due to their environment (upbringing, role models, availability of good learning opportunities) they all ended up as cogs in the machine, one way or another. Suffice to say when we all went to high-school (G9-13) most of my old friends dropped out. It's not that they weren't intelligent, but I know there was a good fraction that got picked on like hell, whether they were the geeks or not, and this helped them on their decision to drop out and just get a job. I was at the bottom of the heap - it took me most of grades 1-8 to make my peers realize that I was just like them (being a nerd and all) and then when we got to high school it was like starting all over again. At first I floundered, trying to fade into the background via anonymity, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to be happy and appreciate myself I had to make a stance on being assimilated.
I think the best thing that happened to me in high school was that I continued doing something that I enjoyed a great deal - skateboarding. I also started high school right when skateboarding started to come back into popularity. My lucky break was that there were quite a few other kids who enjoyed skateboarding as well and we ended up hanging out together at school all the time. I never stopped hanging out with my geeky friends and still promoted my individuality though. Anyways, due to my allegience with the 'skater' crew I drew even more fire from the conformists (besides being low-income and nerdy) but at least I had friends that wouldn't ever back down from sticking up for what we believed in . The funny thing is that by the end of high school most of our previous aggressors came to the conclusion that we weren't that bad after all and eventually just left us be. I even like to think that my skater friends benifited academically from having me around as well, there's nothing like going over to your buddies house and his mom has a pic from the paper of you in it winning a math contest!
So in the end, I guess my recommendations are to never give up living for what you enjoy, no matter what. I enjoyed lots of different things and made friends right accross the board, and I think I've benifitted a great deal from it - all the while I've never forgotten to actively promote my individuality and to appreciate my sense of self. To restrict yourself to one particular type of group, whether it be jocks, preps, geeks, etc is closeminded and only helps to promote the conformists point of view.
As stated in the article, the group that reviewed the EUVE missions main reason for bringing it down was the 'scientific bang for the buck' aspect. While it may be that the EUVE does not examine portions of the EM spectrum that lend well to important science (from the review committies point of view), it still works properly - regardless of how old it is, not to mention the fact that it is still transmitting data that some astronomers find useful.
While HST and FUSE do examine portions of the UV region of the EM spectrum, they do not go to as small of a wavelength and in this respect NASA is accepting to have a sizable gap in our observable spectra (Fuse goes down to 900 A and I don't think any X-Ray telescopes would go above 10 A). Now I'm not an astronomer/astrophysicist (yet) but from what I can understand it is always nice to be able to study things in as many different wavelengths as possible since different phenomenon appear at different energies. Wouldn't this leave us in the dark? I wonder if NASA has any plans to send up a new satellite that will incorporate a detector for this 'extreme' UV region of the spectrum?
I got a kick out of how you described the situation (very familiar - I'm usually the one on the other side of the desk during the interview).
I go to a fairly well known computing school (U of Waterloo) and this is something that always rears it's head during interviews. Our CS program is considered top-notch in the country (Canada) and as such we have quite a co-operative program that draws employers from all over N.A.
One of the things I find is that people in the CS program are generally taught the 'problem solving method' and these people are grabbed up by the handfulls. The department also has 'coding' classes for the general university public, and it is these people doing the CS minors that end up going into the interviews figuring if they can cram as many languages on their resume that they will get the job. One thing that I've found however is that while showing a knowledge of various languages helps in showing employers how flexible you are, they are much more likely to appreciate previous work and concrete examples of being able to apply problem solving to different tasks. I figure if you can get the person you are interviewing to give you a concrete example of how they used some sort of innovation to solve a problem then you might have someone worth persuing.
As other people have mentioned, it might help to ask an algorithmic question - it doesn't have to be that hard, and just leave the language up to the person being interviewed. It's pretty surprising what kind of responses you'll get. For my current co-op job my employer simply asked each person to write down a quick 10 liner that would write out the fibonacci sequence. Of course I just wrote it out in good ol' fortran - no questions asked. I got the job and after talking with many of the other people that had the interview they said that that question really threw them off - not that they didn't think it was a monumental task, just that they were not expecting to have to actually think about something instead of regurgitating their qualifications.
I guess in the end though it really depends on where you go to look for employees. As many other people have said the quality of the graduates is highly dependant on the program that they have been through - and I would have to agree.
You took Q1 last summer - 2000? If you took it in 99 you were probably in my class;)
I think that having the administrators definately helps out. We generally have to go talk to people in other faculties(eng,math) since they are the ones making the decisions. I think the main reason for this is that in science they are desperate for more students while in eng and math they are constantly over-cramming their classes. I know for a fact that most of the electives in physics are made to attract students from other departments - just so we can get more funding based on enrolement. I wonder if it's like this in most comprehensive schools?
I know that the math faculty definately looks down on letting people into their 'priviledged' classes - most of the cs courses offered to non-mathies are watered down versions of the honours classes and don't really get into the real interesting stuff. I know they offer a CS minor for us but it seems like a complete waste of time as far as I'm concerned - I know lots of people in physics are doing it, but it doesn't go into the real interesting theoretical aspects of computing, just the typical database management/buisness aspects of computing that will let you get an IT job or something like that more easily (kind of like general level high school classes). They used to allow people to do a double math/physics major, but now that's pretty much gone down the tubes, I only know one person who's doing a minor in applied math in our class and it definately has disrupted his schedule.
As for the summer terms it's pretty sad. We have 2 in a row in physics co-op and last summer I ended up pretty much wasting 2 classes on mundane subjects since I'd allready taken anything else that was relatively interesting. Getting into eng classes is pretty hard - the task of equating pre-requisites is very difficult, but the scheduling problem is the worst. Since they only offer 1 of each core physics class a term we don't have any option of juggling our table around, so often the only engineering courses that would be of use are inaccessible. One of the problems with our physics program is that it is engineered to just push us down the path to getting our BSc - our department is so streamlined now that it doesn't offer too many electives that go into inter-disciplinary topics - probably the only one that I have found interesting is the 3rd year computational physics class (P339), and unfortunately they don't offer anything higher, so I probably won't be taking any computational courses for the rest of my undergraduate degree.
Re:Great education opportunity....
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Quantum Security
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Too bad it's not the other way around. I'm doing physics at UW and unfortunately our options are limited. For the most part I've accepted taking almost every physics course offered up to third year and I find that if I want to study the extras (math, cs and engineering concepts) I more or less have to do it on my own time since the faculties seem to look down on letting outsiders into their classes (something that physics doesn't mind, however). It's fairly restrictive. Have you found there to be much of a problem with co-op? The summer school terms are horrible, there is nothing offered. I just figure that if I nail down enough physics then I shouldn't have much of a problem moving into other areas.
Here is something that should spin a few of your heads:
Here in Canada we have a tax applied uniformly to all purchases which are deemed as being 'Goods' or 'Services'. It's called the GST and since almost everything you buy is a good or service you automatically have to pay 7% in tax, on every purchase, to the federal government. This tax was initiated to fight our national debt.
Needless to say, I was quite infuriated the other day when one of my friends brought it to my attention that one of the stipulations to this tax is that organizations of faith do not have to pay it!!! Now if that isn't one of the most assinine policies in a modern democracy I don't know what is.
Anyways, I had the same brief flash of insight that many of you have had in this thread: Atheists should band together to make their own organization based on the consensus of 'no faith'. They way I see it is that if we live in a flawed system that openly promotes faith based organizations then we should also allow this to be extended to any collective assembly of like-minded thinkers. - then again if this sounds kind of rediculous to you then maybe the best solution would be to remove special interest organizations right to 'exemptions' all together.
Anyways, just thought I would add that as it seemed relevent to this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
How many scientists do you know run around claiming how insignificant we are? I think you're missing the point. While humanity is important, it is even more important to see how we fit into the grand scheme of things. I don't think any scientists are trying to de-value humanity, rather I believe that we are putting our existance into the proper context.
If you get the idea that science is destroying human esteem, then perhaps you aren't taking the time to understand the science itself. Science isn't about ethics and having a purpose for things, it is only an exploration into our reality. So if one feels overwhelmed by the results, it is only a personal fear of being insignificant. If you look at most of the popular scientists of the last half century (Einstein, Sagan, Feynman) they all embrace the value of humanity, don't try to white-wash science as un-human - in the end science is only what you make of it.
From the paper: President Bill Clinton made history as the first US president to use the line-item veto, targeting three ASAT programs with his pen, including the Army's Kinetic Energy Antisatellite Program. According to Robert Bell, special assistant to the president and senior director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council (NSC), although the administration recognizes the need for space control, it "doesn't necessarily believe at this time that the Army program is the appropriate solution." The White House would rather forgo attacking the satellites themselves, and instead find ways to destroy or disrupt the information downlinked by the satellites.
I think that pretty much sums up the conspiracy. It makes sense though - why waste time and money making anti-satellite weapons when you can shut down their control centres here on the ground through some veil of 'national defence interests' by employing a handful of federal agents or whatever.
Now I don't know about you, but with regards to spamming and whatnot these 'web bugs' seem like a pretty blatent violation of privacy. Granted with cookies you do have the option of not using them, but this stuff takes it to the next level. Just another reason to use an email program that doesn't read HTML.
While nature does not provide the perfect solution, it does provide the one best one that it has tailored up to that point (natural selection). The point to make here however is that humans (and life on Earth for that matter) are the solution to what? All we are is the end result of an evolutionary chain - there are lots of other animals on this planet, and if you like we can say that all they (and us) have really done is promoted the spread of life, adapting to our environment. Now, I know that human progress is very good at designing things and whatnot, but evolution has had one thing that we haven't - billions of years of trial and error!
I agree that natures solutions are often limited to their respective environments, this is the key of evolution (being able to adapt to your particular environment), so it is quite obvious that trying to make a bird fly on a 10 g planet would be rather interesting. The point to make here however is that evolution has created some very interesting devices on the cellular, tissue and organ levels. I believe they are simply using the flagella of the bacteria here - there is nothing advanced about a tail that can wiggle - but can we make anything like that yet? Our sensory perception organs are yet to be matched by anything man-made and as for computing power, well, we still can't even understand our own minds.
I really liked your last line, however I think it would be more coherent if it was presented as the following:
While early effort will get an immense head start by apdapting existing systems, I believe that in the future superior systems will be designed that bear little resemblance to our present biological ones.
I guess the concept of completely artificial doesn't make any sense to me. If we make something, it was 'in the end' crafted by the evolution of our biology. Ah well, just my 2 cents...
This book is part of the conservative outlook that has accompanied human progression since the dawn of time. While many people like to look forward, others believe that things are better the way they are or even believe that things were better 'back in the day'. The point of the matter is that while some people prefer to live in a technological stasis, history has proven that the majority of mankind will embrace the changes if they are deemed beneficial to the society.
And in that respect, I believe that the digital age (or whatever you would like to call it) has succeeded to entrench itself in modern society and will continue to grow. Change is inevitable, the only thing that matters is that we make the right changes.
Give me a break! Does this guy know anything about the field of astronomy from a professional point of view?
Most astronomers/astrophysicists don't spend the time looking through the telescopes themselves - the majority use data that someone else has already gathered. I agree that this would greatily increase their ability find pertinent data, however, it would hardly bring about a new 'type' of astronomer, the majority are already data miners.
I think that saying researchers can be very passionate is an understatement as well!
I don't know too many people doing serious academic research in any field who don't devote their lives to it. When you spend that much time working on the same thing it pretty much influences your every thought. I think the reason why the general public (and the media in particular) don't view researchers as passionate is because they don't approach the work of the researcher from the same perspective - most people just see it as a bunch of math/experimenting with little relevance to their lives in particular, while to the people doing the work it is a source of extreme fascination and unbounded possibilities.
Then again I'm sure the same thing can be said about any profession if the person is serious enough about it, but it just seems that people have always viewed scientists/mathematicians as shallow, robot-like people - a view that couldn't be any farther from the truth!
Hmmm... I don't know how well the demand will be with prices like that (they're only one way!). I would imagine that the general public would rather spend the extra time on the slower trains or just drive. Anyone travel in the Northeast often? Any opinions on what the best way to go would be?
The way I see it is that if I would have had a computer of my own while growing up I wouldn't have wasted as much of my time with the console machines (I never even had a C-64 for crying out loud!).
Kids will be kids, and although there are the exceptional few who will inquire as to how the thing really works, most are just there for the bells and whistles. At least if they use a computer then they will get some exposure, even if it's just being familiar with the thing. If they are inclined to actually get into computers at a deeper level then that will come on it's own - if the boy you are talking about doesn't like installation now, he'll figure it out when he realizes that it's something he'll have to learn to keep playing new games, and if he doesn't want to learn, then maybe computers just aren't his thing *gasp*! The only one who will lose in that case are the parents who bought him the $3000 gaming machine that he lost interest in.
So in the end, I'd have to say that the exposure is the main thing, even if they don't pick up on it for whatever reasons, at least they're still having fun and the opportunity exists for them to go further into computing.
Isn't this inherent in MPI? Is there something more to this that I'm missing? I'm not too well versed in super computing but I thought that with MPI you could write your programs to change the topologies to optimize things. Just wondering...
I can just see it now, sadist troll cults that enjoy taking brutal beatings, bitter kung-fu flame wars and noble /. vigilante enforcers!
Imagine being a newbie in that type of system? "Why is everyone punching me?"
Once again this falls into the grey area since the judgement of it is beyond our system. It's very interesting to see how we apply our capitalist ideology to research (most scientists must also find it very sad). The point of the matter is that we live in a system where everything is run by money, not by the concept of the greater good. Sure it would be nice if everyone worked together and there was no reason to hide away information from the 'competitors', but we live in a system that utilizes this mechanism to push forward. I don't think that we could maintain capitalism without having these patents in research - perhaps it's topics like these that will further display the moral and ethical weaknesses of the capitalistic system.
I think this is perhaps the only question that is posed that has any real importance. All of the other questions are just extrapolations of this question to different isolated situations or subjective points of view.
If you view technology as simply being human progression into the ability to facilitate our needs and desires then obviously any progression is going to result in a consequence that hasn't been considered to it's full extent. This arises from the fact that as we construct new and better ways of doing things we also change ourselves!
Humanity is not an isolated entity and it is not static in time. We constantly interact with our environment and with ourselves to bring about development on every scale from the individual to the global community. So in the end I believe we will never realize the full extent to which our actions (in the form of technology) play out and as such I believe that 'technology ethics' should not be a static value, they are something that we must constantly bring into question. The biggest problem with the current state of affairs is that people try to apply outdated ethics to technological problems. What most people don't realize is that these ethics are being used in contexts that they were never initially intended for.
Another key problem is that for our technology to be evaluated properly we must also have a society that can appreciate the things that truly matter like the environment and true freedom instead of short term economic gains and power struggles. It will be interesting to see if we can manage to evolve as a society quick enough to keep up with the pace of our technology - otherwise you won't have to watch movies about the Matrix and whatnot... you'll be living it.
Perhaps you mean a 'completely observable process', however I get your point and I totally agree with it. The only problem is that for the most part none of our elections are like this. The concept of having anonymous voting coupled with the sheer number of voters prompted people to design new systems with which to perform votes.
In moving from a system where everyone yells a 'yea' or a 'nay' to the ballot method we left out the ability for the community as a whole to observe what the actual vote was first hand - our current system leaves it up to someone else to count the votes and as such you automatically lose the sense of personal security in knowing that your vote was properly included.
By using a computer controlled method to register votes we are not losing or gaining any functionality over the ballot system from a voters point of view. If you can write an X and not click a button then you definately must have an interesting situation. What we are gaining however is the ability to open up the counting method so that there is no single point where it can break down. With people counting votes you have to ensure that the vote counters are sincere and you depend on their ability to perform their jobs perfectly. Now I don't know about most people, but I would think that the more people counting the better, since independant errors will decrease. By implementing a purely digital system, we would have exactly that in that the developers of the system would be able to see where the others made flaws - we have programs that can calculate launch trajectories to Pluto, I'm sure we can make vote counting systems properly. Also, since many places use automated counters now, what would the difference be? If many people work on the digital voting system there will be no opportunity for it to become flawed from a design point of view.
As for hacking, etc. one must be aware that the opportunities exist to maliciously affect ballot systems as well. 'Rigging the vote' immediately comes to mind. The security of a digital system would probably be easier to monitor than the ballot system anyways - it's a lot easier to determine that you have altered results from a digital source than from a bag of ballots. And as for punishment, well, you can just imagine what would happen if you were involved in a federal vote scandel of any sort.
I guess in the end I'm advocating the use of technology to make things easier for everyone and more stable. A punchcard never lies, true enough, but a computer only does what you tell it to.
In essence, the point of the second half of the article shows how current research in quantum mechanics can be applied to give a sound reasoning to the fact that the zeta function produces these 'zeros' in the complex plane.
Connes has proposed that if one could construct a particular quantum system it may very well have energies (remember that in quantum mechanics energy levels are discrete - not continuous!) that correspond to these zeros produced by the zeta function. For this to be truly groundbreaking however the quantum system would have to display all of the energy levels corresponding to the zeros but it would have to not have extra energy levels. I don't know how to go much further into the development of a quantum state space based on prime numbers, however. Perhaps someone more well versed in QM could explain that.
The true beauty of this proof is that it would give prime numbers an actual physical significance. Like it says in the article this could result in greatly expanding our ability to deal with many complex phenomena on the quantum scale and give us insights into many other phenomena. I for one am going to be following this one as close as possible!
The only consideration is that this group hasn't submitted their technical information (which automatically excludes their attempt from being considered). Now I don't know about most skeptics, but when a group of this stature claims to have done something, I would guess that they were being sincere - how many universities would allow research groups to do work on something like this and then make false claims?
Well put. It makes me sad to see so many people who are stuck in the fight to gain power - regardless of what it is they are trying to gain power over.
I guess my personal experience made me realize that it isn't how others view you that matters, it's how you view yourself!
I grew up in a low-class area and went to an G1-8 elementry school where only 3 of the 30 odd people in our grade 8 class ended up going to post secondary institutions. Most of my friends in elementary school were poor and due to their environment (upbringing, role models, availability of good learning opportunities) they all ended up as cogs in the machine, one way or another. Suffice to say when we all went to high-school (G9-13) most of my old friends dropped out. It's not that they weren't intelligent, but I know there was a good fraction that got picked on like hell, whether they were the geeks or not, and this helped them on their decision to drop out and just get a job. I was at the bottom of the heap - it took me most of grades 1-8 to make my peers realize that I was just like them (being a nerd and all) and then when we got to high school it was like starting all over again. At first I floundered, trying to fade into the background via anonymity, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to be happy and appreciate myself I had to make a stance on being assimilated.
I think the best thing that happened to me in high school was that I continued doing something that I enjoyed a great deal - skateboarding. I also started high school right when skateboarding started to come back into popularity. My lucky break was that there were quite a few other kids who enjoyed skateboarding as well and we ended up hanging out together at school all the time. I never stopped hanging out with my geeky friends and still promoted my individuality though. Anyways, due to my allegience with the 'skater' crew I drew even more fire from the conformists (besides being low-income and nerdy) but at least I had friends that wouldn't ever back down from sticking up for what we believed in . The funny thing is that by the end of high school most of our previous aggressors came to the conclusion that we weren't that bad after all and eventually just left us be. I even like to think that my skater friends benifited academically from having me around as well, there's nothing like going over to your buddies house and his mom has a pic from the paper of you in it winning a math contest!
So in the end, I guess my recommendations are to never give up living for what you enjoy, no matter what. I enjoyed lots of different things and made friends right accross the board, and I think I've benifitted a great deal from it - all the while I've never forgotten to actively promote my individuality and to appreciate my sense of self. To restrict yourself to one particular type of group, whether it be jocks, preps, geeks, etc is closeminded and only helps to promote the conformists point of view.
While HST and FUSE do examine portions of the UV region of the EM spectrum, they do not go to as small of a wavelength and in this respect NASA is accepting to have a sizable gap in our observable spectra (Fuse goes down to 900 A and I don't think any X-Ray telescopes would go above 10 A). Now I'm not an astronomer/astrophysicist (yet) but from what I can understand it is always nice to be able to study things in as many different wavelengths as possible since different phenomenon appear at different energies. Wouldn't this leave us in the dark? I wonder if NASA has any plans to send up a new satellite that will incorporate a detector for this 'extreme' UV region of the spectrum?
I go to a fairly well known computing school (U of Waterloo) and this is something that always rears it's head during interviews. Our CS program is considered top-notch in the country (Canada) and as such we have quite a co-operative program that draws employers from all over N.A.
One of the things I find is that people in the CS program are generally taught the 'problem solving method' and these people are grabbed up by the handfulls. The department also has 'coding' classes for the general university public, and it is these people doing the CS minors that end up going into the interviews figuring if they can cram as many languages on their resume that they will get the job. One thing that I've found however is that while showing a knowledge of various languages helps in showing employers how flexible you are, they are much more likely to appreciate previous work and concrete examples of being able to apply problem solving to different tasks. I figure if you can get the person you are interviewing to give you a concrete example of how they used some sort of innovation to solve a problem then you might have someone worth persuing.
As other people have mentioned, it might help to ask an algorithmic question - it doesn't have to be that hard, and just leave the language up to the person being interviewed. It's pretty surprising what kind of responses you'll get. For my current co-op job my employer simply asked each person to write down a quick 10 liner that would write out the fibonacci sequence. Of course I just wrote it out in good ol' fortran - no questions asked. I got the job and after talking with many of the other people that had the interview they said that that question really threw them off - not that they didn't think it was a monumental task, just that they were not expecting to have to actually think about something instead of regurgitating their qualifications.
I guess in the end though it really depends on where you go to look for employees. As many other people have said the quality of the graduates is highly dependant on the program that they have been through - and I would have to agree.
I think that having the administrators definately helps out. We generally have to go talk to people in other faculties(eng,math) since they are the ones making the decisions. I think the main reason for this is that in science they are desperate for more students while in eng and math they are constantly over-cramming their classes. I know for a fact that most of the electives in physics are made to attract students from other departments - just so we can get more funding based on enrolement. I wonder if it's like this in most comprehensive schools?
I know that the math faculty definately looks down on letting people into their 'priviledged' classes - most of the cs courses offered to non-mathies are watered down versions of the honours classes and don't really get into the real interesting stuff. I know they offer a CS minor for us but it seems like a complete waste of time as far as I'm concerned - I know lots of people in physics are doing it, but it doesn't go into the real interesting theoretical aspects of computing, just the typical database management/buisness aspects of computing that will let you get an IT job or something like that more easily (kind of like general level high school classes). They used to allow people to do a double math/physics major, but now that's pretty much gone down the tubes, I only know one person who's doing a minor in applied math in our class and it definately has disrupted his schedule.
As for the summer terms it's pretty sad. We have 2 in a row in physics co-op and last summer I ended up pretty much wasting 2 classes on mundane subjects since I'd allready taken anything else that was relatively interesting. Getting into eng classes is pretty hard - the task of equating pre-requisites is very difficult, but the scheduling problem is the worst. Since they only offer 1 of each core physics class a term we don't have any option of juggling our table around, so often the only engineering courses that would be of use are inaccessible. One of the problems with our physics program is that it is engineered to just push us down the path to getting our BSc - our department is so streamlined now that it doesn't offer too many electives that go into inter-disciplinary topics - probably the only one that I have found interesting is the 3rd year computational physics class (P339), and unfortunately they don't offer anything higher, so I probably won't be taking any computational courses for the rest of my undergraduate degree.
Here in Canada we have a tax applied uniformly to all purchases which are deemed as being 'Goods' or 'Services'. It's called the GST and since almost everything you buy is a good or service you automatically have to pay 7% in tax, on every purchase, to the federal government. This tax was initiated to fight our national debt.
Needless to say, I was quite infuriated the other day when one of my friends brought it to my attention that one of the stipulations to this tax is that organizations of faith do not have to pay it!!! Now if that isn't one of the most assinine policies in a modern democracy I don't know what is.
Anyways, I had the same brief flash of insight that many of you have had in this thread: Atheists should band together to make their own organization based on the consensus of 'no faith'. They way I see it is that if we live in a flawed system that openly promotes faith based organizations then we should also allow this to be extended to any collective assembly of like-minded thinkers. - then again if this sounds kind of rediculous to you then maybe the best solution would be to remove special interest organizations right to 'exemptions' all together.
Anyways, just thought I would add that as it seemed relevent to this thread.