Ok, not that I'm disagreeing with the conclusions in that study, but I can't understand how the Pharma companies are blowing $57B on advertising. That seems absurdly large to me, but maybe I'm just not calibrated to costs of advertising.
They also mention that 13.4% of sales revenue is being used for R&D. Is there any way that they're using non-sales revenue for this? I'm thinking investment returns, patent royalties, and maybe government grants could be used to support the R&D, and they're using sales money to pay for more marketing. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but I'm wondering if that's a possibility.
By that definition, I'm detained every time I come up to a red traffic light or a stop sign. I'm detained by every wall around me. That's not the "detain" to which they're referring. The common legal definition (which is the 1st of m-w's definitions) is "to hold or keep in or as if in custody". Point is that he just re-booked on another flight, and went through later anyway. There wasn't any time when Paul was held in custody.
He just refused a pat-down, so they turned him back from the checkpoint. The TSA has explicitly said that at no point was Paul detained. According to CNN he rebooked on another flight and went back through security without a problem. That makes the story a lot less interesting...
I've seen lots of video (here, for example) where it looks like the "pilots" have multiple control sticks and many-paneled displays showing video feed from a UAV. So these "pilots" may have more feedback from the aircraft than an in-plane pilot would.
Also, people were commenting about the bandwidth - Reaper drones have Raytheon multispectral targeting systems that must require a good bit of bandwidth (multiple video feeds at different wavelengths). Also I would imagine that the drone is sending back tons of information that is critical to the aircraft but not to the mission, such as fuel levels, engine operation details, and feedback from thousands of sensors (each one may not contribute much, but there are probably a lot of them, plus redundancies). I still think 500 Mb/sec seems high, though...
In these sorts of situations, I wonder if there's the same level of adrenaline rush that in-plane pilots get, since that adrenaline provides a pilot with heightened awareness of his surroundings and the ability to make quicker decisions. I suppose current UAV missions don't involve "dog-fighting" or things that would require quick thinking, but that's got to be an eventual goal.
I'd like to see them try to replicate the "myth" that a cannonball that is initially fired at a bunch of water can wind up skipping off a hill, go through a house 700 yards away, go through 6 lanes of traffic and come to rest in a car.
They probably won't be able to do it again and declare it busted.
I agree that too many assumptions can ruin a theory, but what's more important is that the assumptions you use aren't arbitrary. That the orbital planes are randomly distributed isn't an arbitrary assumption. Planetary orbital planes typically follow their parent stars' spin axis, and that spin axis is arbitrarily oriented (Here's a bad astronomy link where they discuss it. That's the best reference I could find right now). Thus, the orbital planes of the planets are very very very likely randomly oriented.
Just for kicks, if that's true then we can calculate the transit probability. If we observe a star that is approximately the size of our sun, and the orbital radius of one of its planets is the same as Earth's, the chances of the planet's orbit crossing in front of the star as viewed from a point very far away is ~0.005. That's pretty rare, although if one assumes that there are ~5 planets in the system (which is an arbitrary assumption), we now have a ~2.5% chance of seeing one of the planets transit the star if we look for long enough. And there are a lot of stars out there.
About 8 seconds into the video that they show, in the 4th lane from the bottom, am I seeing a cell split into two? It looks like it splits, then the daughters go in opposite directions more quickly than their parent cell moved...
Ok then in that case, is there a reference for single-celled organisms that can completely turn themselves off at ~0 K temperatures and in a vacuum, then turn themselves back on? Now I'm really curious about this. I'm also thinking that after 30,000 years, the organism will have an enormous amount of UV, X-ray, and solar wind exposure that would break down most chemical bonds. That kind of exposure may not be immediately deadly to a larger organism that has a skin or outer shell, but for a single cell, that spells some bad news.
I've previously heard this quote of organisms surviving for up to 30,000 years in space, but does anyone happen to have a real scientific reference for it? I'm really wondering what can survive that long with no fuel at all, unless the argument is that the whatever rock the organism sits on during its travels through space happens to have some nutrients on it. Even the waterbear still needs some energy after it goes into a cryptobiotic state, right?
Hardly news? This experiment (mostly the LCLS, but hopefully the SSRL soon) is working on a picosecond (SSRL) and femtosecond (LCLS) timescale. The paper to which you refer is looking at nanosecond timescale information. Three to six orders of magnitude in time resolution. This means they can begin to look at motions of atoms and small chemical groups rather than only seeing motions of large (i.e. slow-moving) molecular subunits. Lots of interesting stuff happens on a ns timescale. A lot more stuff happens on a ps and fs timescale.
What was I thinking, you're totally right, my mistake (I should have known this, I work with lasers every day). It's really the fact that the lighthouse beam occupies a smaller solid angle than the possible full 4(pi) steradian.
I think the largest gain would be from the fact that communication radio signals can occupy an absurdly small frequency window, so even though a 100kW emission might fall off to a very small amount, it's all in a spectral range, so spectral power density is large.
Wow, what a great idea. In fact I did search for it, and found nothing for it in regards to RF atmospheric absorption during solar transits, hence the query for a reference.
As far as the inverse square law goes, while it is applicable for all forms of emission, the noise base on RF telescopes is incredibly low, meaning that we're really good at detecting it, especially with monster dishes. Hence SETI and the whole SETI@home project. The 1/r^2 law also implies that the radio source is emitting isotropically (i.e. like a blackbody), when RF trasmitters are not isotropic. So one might view the planet a bit like an RF lighthouse that is emitting beams, some of which might be kind enough to be pointed toward us. At which point the 1/r^2 law doesn't apply whatsoever. Thanks for the snarky attempt at being clever.
Do you happen to have a reference for this? I have never heard of radio astronomy being used to detect molecular signatures (frequently microwave and mm-wave, but not radio). The molecular signatures during solar transit to which you are referring have typically been studied using optical and infrared telescopes, since the 200-20000 nm range is the region in which vibrational and electronic transitions occur.
I figured they were looking for classic radio-frequency patterns, much like the ones we're constantly emitting from our broadcast stations.
The problem there is that the Red Cross should never have slogans along the lines of "we're helping our boys over there!" One of the central principles of the IFRCRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent) is that they are neutral, even if there is a clear moral right and wrong. This is more of a means to an end in the sense that it allows them to help as many people as possible. Because they don't support any specific side of a conflict, they can go into very dangerous areas and help civilians or the wounded without fear of being attacked. That said, I'm not saying the IFRCRC has always stuck to this principle, and I wouldn't be surprised if WWII was an exception to their rule.
As far as charging for services goes, the IFRCRC is non-profit, but that doesn't mean that they don't have expenses. A modern case in point is that the American RC actually charges hospitals for the blood that they get during blood drives. However, they charge just enough to cover the costs of the blood drive + nurses, as opposed to many other blood drive companies that charge for blood in order to make a profit.
I agree. People who work with the atomic weights are aware that they are averages of multiple isotopes. Mass spec folks never use the average values. The 35.453 of Chlorine may change from region to region on Earth by a fraction of a percent, but the problem is that if you're doing something that needs the rough average value (e.g. calculating the mass of HCl in a lecture bottle), you now can't just look at the periodic table and get the atomic weight. You have to look up the local ratio and then calculate the average based upon that.
Also, for England in the mid-to-late 1600's, early modern English was the commoner's language. The King James Bible was written in it, and Shakespeare as well as Milton wrote in it. At this point in England, if you wanted to reach the common man, you could have written in early modern English. If you wanted to reach the scholar across Europe, Latin was the way to go. Newton, as most scientists at the time, had no interest in reaching the common man. Galileo wrote for the common Italian because he knew his message was sacrilege, so unless his ideas reached outside of the church, they would be suppressed.
I understand that Newton wasn't writing for the common man (as I said), and that he was writing for the educated man (as I said) and that the diagrams are geometrical (as I also said), but do you have a reference for Newton's original view of calculus? To what other papers are you referring? Even the equals sign was something that people were still getting used to at the time, so calculus in geometric terms which relied on ratios was much more rational and easy to understand. I really am interested in how he originally thought about infinitesimals and the notion of limits. Thanks!
Do you have a reference for that? His calculus in the Principia is certainly geometrical, with abundant figures (for me as a reader, at least) and makes sense as calculus, but it's just in geometric terms. I mean, he invokes the notion of infinitesimal and limits as delta -> 0. Do you mean that in his head (or notes) he understood it differently than how it is written in the Principia? As I read it I recognize it as calculus...
And for what its worth, Galileo had already written in colloquial Italian, so Newton could have as well (written colloquially). Newton just didn't write in a style that a commoner could understand, whereas Galileo had to reach the masses if his ideas were going to catch on, so he wrote in the form of dialogues.
If I recall, according to his assistant's writings, the night that Newton gave his final edition of The Principia to the messenger to go out for printing, he immediately went back into his lab and fired up his alchemy furnace. Alchemy was one of his passions, and he was sincerely attempting to discover the philosopher's stone, and even an "elixir of life". Sounds silly now, but chemistry was so young at that time, nobody knew its potential. He was also passionate about biblical passages. He thought that one could extract important scientific information from the bible, ancient texts and architecture, allowing him to predict the apocalypse and other "insights". Supposedly he wrote more about this than science (in fact I remember hearing 90% was on the occult, 10% "scientific. No reference for that, though).
If you ever have a chance to read even a chapter or two of The Principia, you should. It's an amazingly different perspective on what we now know as "Newtonian Mechanics". Geometry was clearly the tool of scientists as the time...
90 percent of medications approved for human use after animal testing later proved ineffective or harmful to humans in clinical trials. It is humbling to realize that the flipping of a coin would have proved five times more accurate and much cheaper.
Your logic there is way off. For every medication that has passed the lab animal testing phase, hundreds, if not thousands, have failed. Say you have 100 possible substances to treat diabetes. These 100 may be the result of a theoretical study of 10000 possible chemicals, most of which have been deemed harmful to humans on computer before ever even being created. Of the 100, maybe 3 of them will make their way through animal testing, and of those 3, one will become a viable drug. So if you had flipped a coin at the beginning of the lab testing, you would have 50 substances, of which none or at best one would be a viable drug, with the rest being either ineffective or harmful.
All but a very few diseases are species-unique, and the only efficient and effective way to discover cures and create vaccines is through the use of the same species cells, tissues and organs."
Many diseases are species-unique, which is why we always have to do human testing. However, mouse, monkey, and pig physiology shares many similarities with human physiology, enough that if a drug kills a mouse, we can be pretty sure it'll be harmful to humans.
It's time to insist that they stop harming defenseless animals and wasting our precious health care dollars so they can get busy saving our lives by embracing technologies that work.
I hear this from animal rights protesters all the time. Do you really think that the grad students and people making the drugs are just killing animals because they can? They're not heartless people who like seeing animals die - quite the contrary, they're typically really compassionate folks who realize that their research may save human lives. Keep in mind that animal testing costs money, and researchers pay for that testing using either private or public money which they have fought very hard to get. So they are not going to waste money on testing that they don't think will get them closer to a human-safe and effective drug.
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Ok, not that I'm disagreeing with the conclusions in that study, but I can't understand how the Pharma companies are blowing $57B on advertising. That seems absurdly large to me, but maybe I'm just not calibrated to costs of advertising.
They also mention that 13.4% of sales revenue is being used for R&D. Is there any way that they're using non-sales revenue for this? I'm thinking investment returns, patent royalties, and maybe government grants could be used to support the R&D, and they're using sales money to pay for more marketing. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but I'm wondering if that's a possibility.
By that definition, I'm detained every time I come up to a red traffic light or a stop sign. I'm detained by every wall around me. That's not the "detain" to which they're referring. The common legal definition (which is the 1st of m-w's definitions) is "to hold or keep in or as if in custody". Point is that he just re-booked on another flight, and went through later anyway. There wasn't any time when Paul was held in custody.
He just refused a pat-down, so they turned him back from the checkpoint. The TSA has explicitly said that at no point was Paul detained. According to CNN he rebooked on another flight and went back through security without a problem. That makes the story a lot less interesting...
I've seen lots of video (here, for example) where it looks like the "pilots" have multiple control sticks and many-paneled displays showing video feed from a UAV. So these "pilots" may have more feedback from the aircraft than an in-plane pilot would.
Also, people were commenting about the bandwidth - Reaper drones have Raytheon multispectral targeting systems that must require a good bit of bandwidth (multiple video feeds at different wavelengths). Also I would imagine that the drone is sending back tons of information that is critical to the aircraft but not to the mission, such as fuel levels, engine operation details, and feedback from thousands of sensors (each one may not contribute much, but there are probably a lot of them, plus redundancies). I still think 500 Mb/sec seems high, though...
In these sorts of situations, I wonder if there's the same level of adrenaline rush that in-plane pilots get, since that adrenaline provides a pilot with heightened awareness of his surroundings and the ability to make quicker decisions. I suppose current UAV missions don't involve "dog-fighting" or things that would require quick thinking, but that's got to be an eventual goal.
I'd like to see them try to replicate the "myth" that a cannonball that is initially fired at a bunch of water can wind up skipping off a hill, go through a house 700 yards away, go through 6 lanes of traffic and come to rest in a car.
They probably won't be able to do it again and declare it busted.
I agree that too many assumptions can ruin a theory, but what's more important is that the assumptions you use aren't arbitrary. That the orbital planes are randomly distributed isn't an arbitrary assumption. Planetary orbital planes typically follow their parent stars' spin axis, and that spin axis is arbitrarily oriented (Here's a bad astronomy link where they discuss it. That's the best reference I could find right now). Thus, the orbital planes of the planets are very very very likely randomly oriented.
Just for kicks, if that's true then we can calculate the transit probability. If we observe a star that is approximately the size of our sun, and the orbital radius of one of its planets is the same as Earth's, the chances of the planet's orbit crossing in front of the star as viewed from a point very far away is ~0.005. That's pretty rare, although if one assumes that there are ~5 planets in the system (which is an arbitrary assumption), we now have a ~2.5% chance of seeing one of the planets transit the star if we look for long enough. And there are a lot of stars out there.
About 8 seconds into the video that they show, in the 4th lane from the bottom, am I seeing a cell split into two? It looks like it splits, then the daughters go in opposite directions more quickly than their parent cell moved...
Yep, I thought the same thing when I saw the article.
"The Drumhead" from season 4. A Klingon encodes 1701-D engine specs in protein sequences for the Romulans.
Ok then in that case, is there a reference for single-celled organisms that can completely turn themselves off at ~0 K temperatures and in a vacuum, then turn themselves back on? Now I'm really curious about this. I'm also thinking that after 30,000 years, the organism will have an enormous amount of UV, X-ray, and solar wind exposure that would break down most chemical bonds. That kind of exposure may not be immediately deadly to a larger organism that has a skin or outer shell, but for a single cell, that spells some bad news.
I've previously heard this quote of organisms surviving for up to 30,000 years in space, but does anyone happen to have a real scientific reference for it? I'm really wondering what can survive that long with no fuel at all, unless the argument is that the whatever rock the organism sits on during its travels through space happens to have some nutrients on it. Even the waterbear still needs some energy after it goes into a cryptobiotic state, right?
Hardly news? This experiment (mostly the LCLS, but hopefully the SSRL soon) is working on a picosecond (SSRL) and femtosecond (LCLS) timescale. The paper to which you refer is looking at nanosecond timescale information. Three to six orders of magnitude in time resolution. This means they can begin to look at motions of atoms and small chemical groups rather than only seeing motions of large (i.e. slow-moving) molecular subunits. Lots of interesting stuff happens on a ns timescale. A lot more stuff happens on a ps and fs timescale.
What was I thinking, you're totally right, my mistake (I should have known this, I work with lasers every day). It's really the fact that the lighthouse beam occupies a smaller solid angle than the possible full 4(pi) steradian.
I think the largest gain would be from the fact that communication radio signals can occupy an absurdly small frequency window, so even though a 100kW emission might fall off to a very small amount, it's all in a spectral range, so spectral power density is large.
Google is your friend.
Wow, what a great idea. In fact I did search for it, and found nothing for it in regards to RF atmospheric absorption during solar transits, hence the query for a reference.
As far as the inverse square law goes, while it is applicable for all forms of emission, the noise base on RF telescopes is incredibly low, meaning that we're really good at detecting it, especially with monster dishes. Hence SETI and the whole SETI@home project. The 1/r^2 law also implies that the radio source is emitting isotropically (i.e. like a blackbody), when RF trasmitters are not isotropic. So one might view the planet a bit like an RF lighthouse that is emitting beams, some of which might be kind enough to be pointed toward us. At which point the 1/r^2 law doesn't apply whatsoever. Thanks for the snarky attempt at being clever.
Do you happen to have a reference for this? I have never heard of radio astronomy being used to detect molecular signatures (frequently microwave and mm-wave, but not radio). The molecular signatures during solar transit to which you are referring have typically been studied using optical and infrared telescopes, since the 200-20000 nm range is the region in which vibrational and electronic transitions occur.
I figured they were looking for classic radio-frequency patterns, much like the ones we're constantly emitting from our broadcast stations.
Or maybe it should be Penny...
The problem there is that the Red Cross should never have slogans along the lines of "we're helping our boys over there!" One of the central principles of the IFRCRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent) is that they are neutral, even if there is a clear moral right and wrong. This is more of a means to an end in the sense that it allows them to help as many people as possible. Because they don't support any specific side of a conflict, they can go into very dangerous areas and help civilians or the wounded without fear of being attacked. That said, I'm not saying the IFRCRC has always stuck to this principle, and I wouldn't be surprised if WWII was an exception to their rule.
As far as charging for services goes, the IFRCRC is non-profit, but that doesn't mean that they don't have expenses. A modern case in point is that the American RC actually charges hospitals for the blood that they get during blood drives. However, they charge just enough to cover the costs of the blood drive + nurses, as opposed to many other blood drive companies that charge for blood in order to make a profit.
Actually, the degree of parabolic-ness is called parabolicity.
I agree. People who work with the atomic weights are aware that they are averages of multiple isotopes. Mass spec folks never use the average values. The 35.453 of Chlorine may change from region to region on Earth by a fraction of a percent, but the problem is that if you're doing something that needs the rough average value (e.g. calculating the mass of HCl in a lecture bottle), you now can't just look at the periodic table and get the atomic weight. You have to look up the local ratio and then calculate the average based upon that.
I don't have access to the full text, but some of the titles of the replies look amusing:
TAI FORMULA IS THE TRAPEZOIDAL-RULE, MONACO JH, ANDERSON RL, Diabetes Care, 17, 1224
DETERMINATION OF THE AREA UNDER A CURVE, BENDER R, Diabetes Care, 17, 1223
COMMENTS OF TAI MATHEMATIC MODEL, SHANNON AG, OWENS DR, Diabetes Care, 17, 1223
Anybody have text from these?
I thought they meant that the car had a 3D printer built into it. I was wondering why anybody would want that...
This makes much more sense...
Also, for England in the mid-to-late 1600's, early modern English was the commoner's language. The King James Bible was written in it, and Shakespeare as well as Milton wrote in it. At this point in England, if you wanted to reach the common man, you could have written in early modern English. If you wanted to reach the scholar across Europe, Latin was the way to go. Newton, as most scientists at the time, had no interest in reaching the common man. Galileo wrote for the common Italian because he knew his message was sacrilege, so unless his ideas reached outside of the church, they would be suppressed.
I understand that Newton wasn't writing for the common man (as I said), and that he was writing for the educated man (as I said) and that the diagrams are geometrical (as I also said), but do you have a reference for Newton's original view of calculus? To what other papers are you referring? Even the equals sign was something that people were still getting used to at the time, so calculus in geometric terms which relied on ratios was much more rational and easy to understand. I really am interested in how he originally thought about infinitesimals and the notion of limits. Thanks!
Do you have a reference for that? His calculus in the Principia is certainly geometrical, with abundant figures (for me as a reader, at least) and makes sense as calculus, but it's just in geometric terms. I mean, he invokes the notion of infinitesimal and limits as delta -> 0. Do you mean that in his head (or notes) he understood it differently than how it is written in the Principia? As I read it I recognize it as calculus...
And for what its worth, Galileo had already written in colloquial Italian, so Newton could have as well (written colloquially). Newton just didn't write in a style that a commoner could understand, whereas Galileo had to reach the masses if his ideas were going to catch on, so he wrote in the form of dialogues.
If I recall, according to his assistant's writings, the night that Newton gave his final edition of The Principia to the messenger to go out for printing, he immediately went back into his lab and fired up his alchemy furnace. Alchemy was one of his passions, and he was sincerely attempting to discover the philosopher's stone, and even an "elixir of life". Sounds silly now, but chemistry was so young at that time, nobody knew its potential. He was also passionate about biblical passages. He thought that one could extract important scientific information from the bible, ancient texts and architecture, allowing him to predict the apocalypse and other "insights". Supposedly he wrote more about this than science (in fact I remember hearing 90% was on the occult, 10% "scientific. No reference for that, though).
The wikipedia page is actually pretty insightful.
If you ever have a chance to read even a chapter or two of The Principia, you should. It's an amazingly different perspective on what we now know as "Newtonian Mechanics". Geometry was clearly the tool of scientists as the time...
90 percent of medications approved for human use after animal testing later proved ineffective or harmful to humans in clinical trials. It is humbling to realize that the flipping of a coin would have proved five times more accurate and much cheaper.
Your logic there is way off. For every medication that has passed the lab animal testing phase, hundreds, if not thousands, have failed. Say you have 100 possible substances to treat diabetes. These 100 may be the result of a theoretical study of 10000 possible chemicals, most of which have been deemed harmful to humans on computer before ever even being created. Of the 100, maybe 3 of them will make their way through animal testing, and of those 3, one will become a viable drug. So if you had flipped a coin at the beginning of the lab testing, you would have 50 substances, of which none or at best one would be a viable drug, with the rest being either ineffective or harmful.
All but a very few diseases are species-unique, and the only efficient and effective way to discover cures and create vaccines is through the use of the same species cells, tissues and organs."
Many diseases are species-unique, which is why we always have to do human testing. However, mouse, monkey, and pig physiology shares many similarities with human physiology, enough that if a drug kills a mouse, we can be pretty sure it'll be harmful to humans.
It's time to insist that they stop harming defenseless animals and wasting our precious health care dollars so they can get busy saving our lives by embracing technologies that work.
I hear this from animal rights protesters all the time. Do you really think that the grad students and people making the drugs are just killing animals because they can? They're not heartless people who like seeing animals die - quite the contrary, they're typically really compassionate folks who realize that their research may save human lives. Keep in mind that animal testing costs money, and researchers pay for that testing using either private or public money which they have fought very hard to get. So they are not going to waste money on testing that they don't think will get them closer to a human-safe and effective drug.