It is well to remember that a negative result is as important as a positive result, and in science it is a lot more common - even if no one wins a Nobel for it (or gets many publications). Physicists do for example look for deviations from physical laws every time technical advances permit more sensitive tests, even though they have little expectation that they will find any.
Understanding with increasing the stringency the absence of intelligent life signals tells us important things about the Universe and about the development of intelligent life on Earth.
Well, it turns out that our own radio and TV signals don't actually get out into our own galaxy as much as we once thought. They make it barely beyond the influence of our sun and then fade.
So aliens next system over are not actually watching our old TV shows.
Another galaxy would be much farther away and even less likely to hear any signals. Space is big. Really big.
The Earth signals that reach the farthest are from ballistic missile early warning radars (BMEWS) which are extremely intense narrow band pulses. These could actually be detected by (very) nearby stars.
... but listening at these few KOIs is like like looking under a street lamp for the keys you lost half a block away because the light is better.
I see this analogy a lot, but it is not particularly apt since you KNOW your particular keys aren't under the street lamp and thus the search has a chance of success of zero. It is more like looking under the street lamp for any set of car keys, that anyone might of lost. There may be a set somewhere where the light reaches, although the odds will be low they are not zero.
If you look up this link, and read the comments, and follow those links you will discover that the ShopFloor article is wrong. China has been the largest manufacturer since 2008.
... doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
What you're saying is anathema to the majority of liberals in the U.S.
Which is why the "No Child Left Behind" act that legislates attempting to improve the average was proposed and signed by that well known flaming liberal George W. Bush?
Oh, that's right - it doesn't count if a Republican does it.
Your skepticism shows a good scientific mind, but is unfortunately misplaced. The governmental science budget allocated through the NSF, NIH, and DARPA has just been cut over and over and over again.
You give the OP far too much credit. Skepticism doesn't mark a good scientific mind - it is the practice of actually looking at the evidence.
You hit the nail on the head. My thought was, "Unless we know how much the federal government is spending today on basic research versus how much it spent on basic research in 1980 (adjusted for inflation), percentages don't tell us anything." Additionally, the fact that they chose to present it as percentage of total spending on basic research suggests that in fact federal spending on basic research has increased at well above the inflation rate (just like most of the federal budget)....
Right because logically the Federal R&D budget should, in real terms, remain fixed - despite the increase in the size of population, the economy, and the increases in the population and economy of our competitors. And if it increases just a bit, in real terms, but well behind the growth of population and economy of the U.S. and its competitors - then they should have nothing at all to worry about, because the 1980 funding level in absolute terms was - remarkably - the ideal level for all time.
Oddly I never see right-wingers arguing that the 1980 Defense budget (less than half our current spending in constant dollars) was just perfect.
... Frankly, I see no sign that the federal government is good at funding any sort of research, basic or commercialization....
Personally, I think focused contributions from rich people and businesses is more effective for basic research funding than government funding.
Ah... no sign of any sort of useful research. Do you have any evidence for this belief? Please show us that you aren't, y'know, just makin' stuff up.
Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.
Another way to see this is that candidate who raised the most money also had the most number of supporters...
Only if contributions to, and spending on behalf, of candidates were limited to private donations with a fairly low cap so that it was actually number of supporters that determined revenue.
We do not have that situation. Corporations can now spend unlimited sums to promote a candidate. Wall Street firms with thousands of employees making high 6 figures (and up) have methods of bundling 'voluntary' maximum contributions (far above what 90% of Americans could afford) from their employees into huge packages of money.
So? These are independent organizations that have to generate cash to survive. What would you have them do as an alternative?
That one is easy. Make money by adding value, not by restricting access to the codes. The previous poster cited examples - training, code interpretation, also I can readily think of implementation/compliance worksheets or services, enhanced code texts with informative additional information, on-line lookup services. The IEEE in particular has multiple revenue streams - memberships, hundreds of publications, etc. - and so does not need to also lock up their standards for revenue. If all they do is publish codes then possibly they shouldn't exist as a private pro-profit organization, but as public foundation.
Look at Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL) as a model. They are a non-profit, but also have a for-profit subsidiary that generates revenue for the non-profit part that provides public safety ratings. They also get funding from large businesses and government to support their work, since it is in the interest of all to support their efforts.
That's actually really easy to answer: your assumption that corporatism is a Republican specialty doesn't hold water. The Democrats are just as bad.
Naah. The Democrats are bad, the Republicans are worse. There is no question that all of American politics is in fealty to corporate interests, but the Republicans are leading the charge to enshrine corporate and big money control over all aspects of American life as quickly as they can. The principal decision in the Citizens United case, allowing corporation to spend unlimited funds in influence political campaigns, was passed strictly by Republican appointees and opposed by Democratic ones.
But if we're a net exporter of petroleum products, and coal, then what energy sources are we importing so much of that it changes the balance to make us into a net importer of energy overall?
The U.S. is a net importer of petroleum. The U.S. is a net exporter of refined petroleum products. Why is that? We have a huge refining industry - thus we don't need anyone's refined petroleum, whereas we can import oil, refine it, and reexport the products at a profit. The U.S. import about 4.5 barrels of crude oil for each barrel of refined petroleum exported.
A) Drug companies create drugs, and sell them to the public at a profit.
B) Government programs create drugs, and sell them to the public at cost.
The advantage of option A is that companies have a much better incentive to produce a useful drug than government programs, in the form of profits. This means that they'll generally work more efficiently, come up with drugs that are actually required by a majority of the market, etc.
The disadvantage of option A is that the profit (required as an incentive for the drug companies) are wasted money, as far as providing drugs to the public is concerned. The same applies to money that the companies spend on marketing.
So, the more profit the drug companies are making, the worse option A looks. If, for example, they're charging 3x the production cost of the drugs, but they're only 2x as efficient as a government program, then option B becomes superior. (Alternatively, you can tweak the rules - patent law, regulation of advertising - to reduce their profits, and improve option A.)
You leave out other serious problems with A. It means, for example, that drug companies have a vested interest in developing slightly different clone drugs that are of no additional benefit to the public ("Nexium" vs "Prilosec") but serve only to give them another patent-protected monopoly product in the same category to continue to push aggressively and keep medical costs high.
The AC should be modded way up, and his point taken.
Their are a legion of people here reading from Big Pharma's script - but the fact is it does NOT invest a uniquely large part of its revenue into R&D, though they make sure you believe they do. The reason that their ad budget is twice their R&D budget is not that this is necessary to recoup the R&D, it is necessary to maximize revenue (and thus cost to the public) --- the one purpose a for-profit corporation is allowed under U.S. law.
Not really. Everybody acts like sales and marketing are unimportant details. They are not. Products do not sell themselves, and no amount of disliking sales and marketing people is going to change that. Companies that ditch their highly-paid sales staff (some of whom will outearn the CEO/founder, especially in small companies) quickly find this out.
This response is completely upside-down: taking a serious problem that "free market fundamentalists" have created in the U.S., and treating it as if it is not only normal, but also inevitable and really a GOOD thing!
The fact that the U.S. dropped restrictions on drug companies on marketing prescription drugs directly to the public, thus becoming the only country in the world that allows it, is part of the reason that the cost of medicine in the U.S. has exploded.
The enormous ad expenditures are for direct marketing to the public. Except for the very safe drugs for commonplace ailments that are sold OTC public is not qualified to make judgments about the drugs they should take. Honest. They aren't. Doctors are paid to have that expertise. We don't need direct marketing to the public. No other nation needs it. Big Pharma didn't use to need it. But doctors they aren't immune to the pressure from their patients - nor are they completely immune to the absolutely fact-free, emotion-laden content of ads which they also see constantly (there used to be much stronger restrictions also on how Big Pharma could seek to debase the judgment of doctors directly - through perks that are just dressed-up kick-backs for prescribing costly drugs). None of this is necessary to practice good medicine - it undermines it in fact.
A classic recent example of how the marketing game is the drug Prilosec -- pushed incessantly by its patent holder until the day the patent expired. The next day no comment of this worthy drug could be found, now it was a new patented replacement virtually identical in effects called Nexium. Trying to push the now inexpensive generic Prilosec out of the public's (and doctor's) mind and replacing it with the needlessly costly Nexium did no benefit to the public or medicine. It was an ad campaign solely designed to keep medical costs high.
Marijuana is not unharmuful. It's as harmful as any other smoking drug.
More facts, less wishful thinking, please.
Ironic that you plead for more facts and less wishful thinking - since your assertion that marijuana is "as harmful as any other smoking drug" has been disproven by actual research. Marijuana does not cause lung cancer. Dr. Donald Tashkin made this finding 6 years ago now, and it has been reaffirmed by subsequent follow on investigation, which has also turned up evidence of lower risks for other types of cancer in cannabis users. Cannabinoids are in fact potent anti-cancer agents (shown in lab tests as well).
Gasoline is a useful fuel because you can put it in a gas tank very rapidly, and it has 47 times the energy density of the most advanced batteries. Until we solve that problem, nobody's gonna stop paying OPEC.
Never take an AC's unsourced, claims, unanalyzed at face value.
Gasoline does not have "47 times the energy density of the most advanced batteries", it has 47 times the energy density of current production lithium ion automotive batteries. The most advanced batteries close the gap to a factor of 5, and batteries with several times the current energy density are expected to be in production in 5 years (battery technology has an excellent record of delivering projected improvements - just like so many other areas of electronics).
Further it should noted that electric vehicles use stored energy at least 3 times more efficiently than gasoline engines, to the effective gap shrinks to 9 and 1.67 respectively. And when you take into account that few vehicle types are practically limited by their ability to carry fuel (it is a slack factor in vehicle design), the full difference with gasoline effective energy density does not have to be made up for gas to be completely replaced for most vehicle types.
...This is true on both sides of the liberal-conservative fence, but liberals seem to do it as an opening-move much more frequently than conservatives and I'm not sure why.
Don't forget - Cowen is a representative of Charles Koch (of the Koch family that founded the John Birch Society and more recently he bank-rolled the organization of the Tea Party).
Charles Koch has financially supported Cowen, and given massive funding to the economic department George Mason University and has direct involvement in selecting faculty -- where Cowen got his degree and holds a professorship.
So it is no surprise that all of Cowen's analyses and policy prescriptions fall into line with what the Koch brothers desire.
In particular the "Great Stagnation" does not exist, per se. Over this "stagnant" period U.S. worker productivity has sky-rocketed, and the U.S.economy has grown impressively. What has remained stagnant is the income of those workers - no net gain in 30 years. All that greatly increased wealth flowed exclusively into the pockets of the already rich.
That "brilliant" economist Cowen amazing does not notice these facts (don't look behind that curtain Dorothy...).
I imagine that to make the initial detection they are not going to attempt to resolve it. Instead detecting something with the solar spectrum by a two or three wavelength photometric measurement from a single pixel would be the way to go (it is also a measurement easy to automate) - there being very few natural objects made of polished metallic aluminum.
The truth is that USA is on top of the world in terms of taxation levels
By being 27th or so in the OECD in terms of actual tax burden (percentage of the GDP paid in taxes)?
but it is also at the very top in terms of spending.
Again no, we are well below the median -- except for the Defense spending thing. We are far out in front there.
Class warfare never works for the benefit of the lower classes,
Certainly not the successful one waged by the upper classes against the middle class for 40 years.
because the truly wealthy will always make sure their wealth is untouched, any new taxes that are enacted, will only be a concern to the dwindling middle class.
Ohh.... you are calling any push-back against tax law changes made to favor the rich over the last 40 years "class warfare". Sort of like that "freedom is slavery" stuff from Orwell. Go back to the Ministry of Truth.
Notice all - it does not matter how much taxes are cut, the right-wing will always claim that is at record levels in blatant defiance of the facts. This is "faith based economics".
Slashdot Mirror
It is well to remember that a negative result is as important as a positive result, and in science it is a lot more common - even if no one wins a Nobel for it (or gets many publications). Physicists do for example look for deviations from physical laws every time technical advances permit more sensitive tests, even though they have little expectation that they will find any.
Understanding with increasing the stringency the absence of intelligent life signals tells us important things about the Universe and about the development of intelligent life on Earth.
Well, it turns out that our own radio and TV signals don't actually get out into our own galaxy as much as we once thought. They make it barely beyond the influence of our sun and then fade.
So aliens next system over are not actually watching our old TV shows.
Another galaxy would be much farther away and even less likely to hear any signals. Space is big. Really big.
The Earth signals that reach the farthest are from ballistic missile early warning radars (BMEWS) which are extremely intense narrow band pulses. These could actually be detected by (very) nearby stars.
... but listening at these few KOIs is like like looking under a street lamp for the keys you lost half a block away because the light is better.
I see this analogy a lot, but it is not particularly apt since you KNOW your particular keys aren't under the street lamp and thus the search has a chance of success of zero. It is more like looking under the street lamp for any set of car keys, that anyone might of lost. There may be a set somewhere where the light reaches, although the odds will be low they are not zero.
>U.S. manufacturing has mostly been outsourced overseas
Myth. The US is the largest manufacturing nation in the world.
http://shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756
If you look up this link, and read the comments, and follow those links you will discover that the ShopFloor article is wrong. China has been the largest manufacturer since 2008.
... doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
What you're saying is anathema to the majority of liberals in the U.S.
Which is why the "No Child Left Behind" act that legislates attempting to improve the average was proposed and signed by that well known flaming liberal George W. Bush?
Oh, that's right - it doesn't count if a Republican does it.
Your skepticism shows a good scientific mind, but is unfortunately misplaced. The governmental science budget allocated through the NSF, NIH, and DARPA has just been cut over and over and over again.
You give the OP far too much credit. Skepticism doesn't mark a good scientific mind - it is the practice of actually looking at the evidence.
You hit the nail on the head. My thought was, "Unless we know how much the federal government is spending today on basic research versus how much it spent on basic research in 1980 (adjusted for inflation), percentages don't tell us anything." Additionally, the fact that they chose to present it as percentage of total spending on basic research suggests that in fact federal spending on basic research has increased at well above the inflation rate (just like most of the federal budget)....
Right because logically the Federal R&D budget should, in real terms, remain fixed - despite the increase in the size of population, the economy, and the increases in the population and economy of our competitors. And if it increases just a bit, in real terms, but well behind the growth of population and economy of the U.S. and its competitors - then they should have nothing at all to worry about, because the 1980 funding level in absolute terms was - remarkably - the ideal level for all time.
Oddly I never see right-wingers arguing that the 1980 Defense budget (less than half our current spending in constant dollars) was just perfect.
Ah... no sign of any sort of useful research. Do you have any evidence for this belief? Please show us that you aren't, y'know, just makin' stuff up.
Setting it up as a problem in game theory, the tenet "candidate who spends the most money wins the election" makes the outcome a foregone conclusion: elected government officials will be in the pocket of corporations, in all cases.
Another way to see this is that candidate who raised the most money also had the most number of supporters...
Only if contributions to, and spending on behalf, of candidates were limited to private donations with a fairly low cap so that it was actually number of supporters that determined revenue.
We do not have that situation. Corporations can now spend unlimited sums to promote a candidate. Wall Street firms with thousands of employees making high 6 figures (and up) have methods of bundling 'voluntary' maximum contributions (far above what 90% of Americans could afford) from their employees into huge packages of money.
So? These are independent organizations that have to generate cash to survive. What would you have them do as an alternative?
That one is easy. Make money by adding value, not by restricting access to the codes. The previous poster cited examples - training, code interpretation, also I can readily think of implementation/compliance worksheets or services, enhanced code texts with informative additional information, on-line lookup services. The IEEE in particular has multiple revenue streams - memberships, hundreds of publications, etc. - and so does not need to also lock up their standards for revenue. If all they do is publish codes then possibly they shouldn't exist as a private pro-profit organization, but as public foundation.
Look at Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL) as a model. They are a non-profit, but also have a for-profit subsidiary that generates revenue for the non-profit part that provides public safety ratings. They also get funding from large businesses and government to support their work, since it is in the interest of all to support their efforts.
That's actually really easy to answer: your assumption that corporatism is a Republican specialty doesn't hold water. The Democrats are just as bad.
Naah. The Democrats are bad, the Republicans are worse. There is no question that all of American politics is in fealty to corporate interests, but the Republicans are leading the charge to enshrine corporate and big money control over all aspects of American life as quickly as they can. The principal decision in the Citizens United case, allowing corporation to spend unlimited funds in influence political campaigns, was passed strictly by Republican appointees and opposed by Democratic ones.
most of the private sector NEVER got cola increases. so stfu.
And they are cutting your pay each year because of it. "STFU?" I'd say wise up, and stop being a sucker for corporations.
But if we're a net exporter of petroleum products, and coal, then what energy sources are we importing so much of that it changes the balance to make us into a net importer of energy overall?
The U.S. is a net importer of petroleum. The U.S. is a net exporter of refined petroleum products. Why is that? We have a huge refining industry - thus we don't need anyone's refined petroleum, whereas we can import oil, refine it, and reexport the products at a profit. The U.S. import about 4.5 barrels of crude oil for each barrel of refined petroleum exported.
This is such an obvious appellation - we should run with it.
Our options are these:
A) Drug companies create drugs, and sell them to the public at a profit. B) Government programs create drugs, and sell them to the public at cost.
The advantage of option A is that companies have a much better incentive to produce a useful drug than government programs, in the form of profits. This means that they'll generally work more efficiently, come up with drugs that are actually required by a majority of the market, etc.
The disadvantage of option A is that the profit (required as an incentive for the drug companies) are wasted money, as far as providing drugs to the public is concerned. The same applies to money that the companies spend on marketing.
So, the more profit the drug companies are making, the worse option A looks. If, for example, they're charging 3x the production cost of the drugs, but they're only 2x as efficient as a government program, then option B becomes superior. (Alternatively, you can tweak the rules - patent law, regulation of advertising - to reduce their profits, and improve option A.)
You leave out other serious problems with A. It means, for example, that drug companies have a vested interest in developing slightly different clone drugs that are of no additional benefit to the public ("Nexium" vs "Prilosec") but serve only to give them another patent-protected monopoly product in the same category to continue to push aggressively and keep medical costs high.
The AC should be modded way up, and his point taken.
Their are a legion of people here reading from Big Pharma's script - but the fact is it does NOT invest a uniquely large part of its revenue into R&D, though they make sure you believe they do. The reason that their ad budget is twice their R&D budget is not that this is necessary to recoup the R&D, it is necessary to maximize revenue (and thus cost to the public) --- the one purpose a for-profit corporation is allowed under U.S. law.
Not really. Everybody acts like sales and marketing are unimportant details. They are not. Products do not sell themselves, and no amount of disliking sales and marketing people is going to change that. Companies that ditch their highly-paid sales staff (some of whom will outearn the CEO/founder, especially in small companies) quickly find this out.
This response is completely upside-down: taking a serious problem that "free market fundamentalists" have created in the U.S., and treating it as if it is not only normal, but also inevitable and really a GOOD thing!
The fact that the U.S. dropped restrictions on drug companies on marketing prescription drugs directly to the public, thus becoming the only country in the world that allows it, is part of the reason that the cost of medicine in the U.S. has exploded.
The enormous ad expenditures are for direct marketing to the public. Except for the very safe drugs for commonplace ailments that are sold OTC public is not qualified to make judgments about the drugs they should take. Honest. They aren't. Doctors are paid to have that expertise. We don't need direct marketing to the public. No other nation needs it. Big Pharma didn't use to need it. But doctors they aren't immune to the pressure from their patients - nor are they completely immune to the absolutely fact-free, emotion-laden content of ads which they also see constantly (there used to be much stronger restrictions also on how Big Pharma could seek to debase the judgment of doctors directly - through perks that are just dressed-up kick-backs for prescribing costly drugs). None of this is necessary to practice good medicine - it undermines it in fact.
A classic recent example of how the marketing game is the drug Prilosec -- pushed incessantly by its patent holder until the day the patent expired. The next day no comment of this worthy drug could be found, now it was a new patented replacement virtually identical in effects called Nexium. Trying to push the now inexpensive generic Prilosec out of the public's (and doctor's) mind and replacing it with the needlessly costly Nexium did no benefit to the public or medicine. It was an ad campaign solely designed to keep medical costs high.
Yeah. We need lots more of that.
YOU are being arbitrary.
Marijuana is not unharmuful. It's as harmful as any other smoking drug.
More facts, less wishful thinking, please.
Ironic that you plead for more facts and less wishful thinking - since your assertion that marijuana is "as harmful as any other smoking drug" has been disproven by actual research. Marijuana does not cause lung cancer. Dr. Donald Tashkin made this finding 6 years ago now, and it has been reaffirmed by subsequent follow on investigation, which has also turned up evidence of lower risks for other types of cancer in cannabis users. Cannabinoids are in fact potent anti-cancer agents (shown in lab tests as well).
Check this out: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.htm l. And this: http://cancerpreventionresearch.aacrjournals.org/content/2/8/759.abstract .
Follow your own advice and actually learn the facts.
Gasoline is a useful fuel because you can put it in a gas tank very rapidly, and it has 47 times the energy density of the most advanced batteries. Until we solve that problem, nobody's gonna stop paying OPEC.
Never take an AC's unsourced, claims, unanalyzed at face value.
Gasoline does not have "47 times the energy density of the most advanced batteries", it has 47 times the energy density of current production lithium ion automotive batteries. The most advanced batteries close the gap to a factor of 5, and batteries with several times the current energy density are expected to be in production in 5 years (battery technology has an excellent record of delivering projected improvements - just like so many other areas of electronics).
Further it should noted that electric vehicles use stored energy at least 3 times more efficiently than gasoline engines, to the effective gap shrinks to 9 and 1.67 respectively. And when you take into account that few vehicle types are practically limited by their ability to carry fuel (it is a slack factor in vehicle design), the full difference with gasoline effective energy density does not have to be made up for gas to be completely replaced for most vehicle types.
...This is true on both sides of the liberal-conservative fence, but liberals seem to do it as an opening-move much more frequently than conservatives and I'm not sure why.
You never go to right-wing blogs do you?
Don't forget - Cowen is a representative of Charles Koch (of the Koch family that founded the John Birch Society and more recently he bank-rolled the organization of the Tea Party).
Charles Koch has financially supported Cowen, and given massive funding to the economic department George Mason University and has direct involvement in selecting faculty -- where Cowen got his degree and holds a professorship.
So it is no surprise that all of Cowen's analyses and policy prescriptions fall into line with what the Koch brothers desire.
In particular the "Great Stagnation" does not exist, per se. Over this "stagnant" period U.S. worker productivity has sky-rocketed, and the U.S.economy has grown impressively. What has remained stagnant is the income of those workers - no net gain in 30 years. All that greatly increased wealth flowed exclusively into the pockets of the already rich.
That "brilliant" economist Cowen amazing does not notice these facts (don't look behind that curtain Dorothy...).
...That would logically require us to make all elections a wealth measurement exercise.
That sounds about right for the U.S. Give it ten years, and we will be there.
... To me, Oracle wants to acts like they have that stick when in reality, it's just too small.
You heard here first folks. Larry Ellison's "stick" is too small!
I imagine that to make the initial detection they are not going to attempt to resolve it. Instead detecting something with the solar spectrum by a two or three wavelength photometric measurement from a single pixel would be the way to go (it is also a measurement easy to automate) - there being very few natural objects made of polished metallic aluminum.
...
The truth is that USA is on top of the world in terms of taxation levels
By being 27th or so in the OECD in terms of actual tax burden (percentage of the GDP paid in taxes)?
but it is also at the very top in terms of spending.
Again no, we are well below the median -- except for the Defense spending thing. We are far out in front there.
Class warfare never works for the benefit of the lower classes,
Certainly not the successful one waged by the upper classes against the middle class for 40 years.
because the truly wealthy will always make sure their wealth is untouched, any new taxes that are enacted, will only be a concern to the dwindling middle class.
Ohh.... you are calling any push-back against tax law changes made to favor the rich over the last 40 years "class warfare". Sort of like that "freedom is slavery" stuff from Orwell. Go back to the Ministry of Truth.
Notice all - it does not matter how much taxes are cut, the right-wing will always claim that is at record levels in blatant defiance of the facts. This is "faith based economics".