I do remember quite a while ago NASA developing some statistical method of getting extremely accurate GPS positional data from taking masses of GPS data over many weeks (IIRC it was accurate to something like centimeters). Unfortunately it was just a newspaper article, so the details were lacking. Could this be how they plan on getting the accurate positional data? Anyone know more about this?
This goes back to the days when the military was still limiting the accuracy of civilian GPS units. They did this by adding noise to the signal. Some bright guy realized that the noise had zero mean, so that if you averaged long enough, you would be able to pull out the true position (limited only by systematic errors in the GPS network).
The military probably new that averaging would be possible when the designed the GPS system, but they also probably figured that if the integration time was long enough (days) then cm accuracy wouldn't be of much tactical use either, which is what they really cared about.
Kinda like "alternative medicine" - First they say your regular doctor doesn't know as much as they do and conventional medicine is a failure. Then they claim their products are 'clinically tested' and 'scientifically proven' to work.
Actually, the will say anything except that the products are "clinically tested" and "scientifically proven". Say either of those two phrases, and you fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA. Avoid making those two specific claims, and you can market without any regulation. Suggestions, hints, obfuscation, etc are all fine, as long as you don't make any explicit scientific claims.
Spam is another form of Speech. Yes, it is grossly abused and outright annoying, but it is still protected here in the U.S. (except for pending anti-spam legislation).
Commercial speech is not entitled to the same level of protection as other forms of speech. This has been repeatedly upheld by the supreme court et al. I do not have the right to make others (consumers and ISP's) pay for my advertising.
Maybe flying it in a missile test range wasn't such a good idea...
Joking aside, it actually is a good idea. No commercial air flights, non-commercial flights tightly controlled, all other "interesting" flights scheduled well in advance. It's about the best place I can think of to get 4 days of uninterupted flying, guarenteed.
So, the US Government gets a fleet of nuclear subs, and the scientist gets a lollipop?
Pretty much. Of course, the idea came from a (then) government employee, using government resources, on government time, and the government paid all the patent application/legal fees. Sounds the same as pretty much any other large corporation.
Something about that struck me. If the natural state of affairs is for a wide genetic diversity even in a small group - such as the chimps, then why wasn't there a similar diversity in the 2000 people who went on to sire the rest of us.
You need diversity to preserve the diversity. If you have a small population and they start inter-breeding, you'll wipe out most of your diversity in fairly short order because, before long, everyone will have the same common set of ancestors (and thus, a relative lack of genetic diversity). In short, past history is everything in genetics.
No, it isn't. A strike is a work stoppage, with the full intention to go back to work for the company as soon as the worker's demands are met.
This is a damn the torpedoes, burn the bridges, no looking back, mass exodus. Completely different beast in terms of intent, goals, and legal protections.
Just curious (in a serious way), is anybody actually using a beowolf cluster for anything important? Anything that couldn't be done with a super-powerful single machine?
Yes. I do Monte Carlo simulations of photon transport. Because Monte Carlo simulations are naturally parallel, running on 12 computers (1GHz CPU each) means I finish in 1/12th the time. Simulations like these (where each CPU runs independant of all its neighbors) are pretty much a textbook problem for Beowulf clusters.
Why four points? Why do we see them even when the star itself is not in the picture (look on the top border for examples, like the one almost directly in the middle)?
No quantum mechanics, just plain ol' classical optics. Those are diffraction patterns. Crosses are the Fourier transform of a square, so I assume their aperature stop is a square.
The real problem I see here is that we are creating a methods by which a government member can know absolutely anything about anyone at any particular point. Now what if we (meaning the US) mistakenly elect government officials with very bad intentions? It HAS happened before in democratic countries, and I will neglect specific examples in order to avoid Godwin's Law.
How soon we forget. It has happened before and it happend right here in the good ol' USofA. Ignoring the obvious Watergate references, there was also the little matter of the 1960's
COINTELPRO.
This is why we have most of our (scant) existing privacy rules in the first place (the ones that Ashcroft and Co. are working so hard to get overturned).
The theories of finite element analysis, a complex mathematical analysis technique which can be applies to countless physical problems was developed by engineers; not mathematitians.
Umm... neither Rayleigh, Ritz, nor Galerkin were engineers. FEM was was applied by engineers to engineering problems certainly and much of the refinement was done by engineers, but the basic concept (approximating an unknown function as a linear combination of orthogonal basis functions, with or without local support and then solving for the coefficients instead of the function) came from mathematics and physics.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to say "No".
Completely different mind-sets, completely different ways to approach a problem.
For example, let's say your product has a problem. The programming solution is to do a marathon programming session and then send a patch the next morning (upgrade, service pack, whatevery you want to call it, it's still a patch) that detects the problem and handles it in some appropriate fashion. The engineering approach is to schedule a series of meetings to find the flaw in the design and fix the underlying problem (or at least understand it well enough that you know the exact implications of leaving it unfixed). A week later, the changes are implemented in hardware.
Part of the difference is pure economics (fixing a motherboard costs a lot more than burning a CD's and the human cost a bridge that crashes is far higher than Windows crashing [again]), but training and the professional cultures play a very definite role too.
-JS
P.S. For the record, I am neither an engineer nor a programmer by trade although I've had to do some of both along the way (I'm a physicist).
Can always replace the NT 4.0 box with Samba, if it's in a fileserver or network authentication role. Most of the time, it's pretty painless to replace one with the other.
<SARCASM>
Really? Does Samba come with a device driver for our XY open frame scan head?
</SARCASM>
When the vendor does not supply drivers for Win2K to go with your mission critical hardware (and no, the WinNT driver does not work under Win2K--that was the first thing I tried), then you stick with WinNT.
I'm not sure how you can consider the article complete bunk if you've had a sufficient college physics class that covered the particle-wave duality of electromagnetic waves.
Overall the article has a lot of merit in providing a different and, in my mind, compelling metaphor of bandwidth as colors as opposed to the classical bandwidth as land.
I think a PhD counts as "sufficient college physics classes". Particle-wave mumbo-jumbo won't save you here, my friend. The original poster is right--the article is complete bunk. A communications channel has a finite bit-rate for a given error-rate and no amount of inventing fancy metaphors will make good ol' Dr. Shannon go away.
* [The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.]
Like a lot of particle physics or astrophysics these days.
You don't know much about particle physics.
In particle physics, a result is not trusted unless it is 3 standard deviations above background (i.e. there's a 1/1000 chance of it being a fluke). That's hardly at the lmit of detectablilty.
* [The discoverer has worked in isolation.]
Einstein worked in isolation--does that make relativity "junk science"?
His day job was at a patent office, but Einstein did not work in isolation. He was quite familiar with the existing body of scientific literature (e.g. Lorentz's paper on unifying Newtonean mechanics and Maxwell mechanics where he proposed what is now called the Lorentz transform). Further, the scientific community was quite familiar with Einstein through his publications in the scientific literature.
about the implications that this could have for other applications. As an example, consider IBM's Deep Blue chess playing program that defeated Kasparov in 1997. It used a massively parallel grid for evaluating positions using custom-built hardware costing millions. Now imagine if the same thing could be achieved over a grid on top of the internet. You have a world champion beating chessplayer right on your desktop!
What's the bandwidth of your network? What's the latency of your network?
What's the bandwidth of Deep Blue's internal bus? What's the latency of Deep Blue's internal bus?
IBM is the most prolific patent generator, topping the list of corporate patent awards for the last 10 years. Big Blue landed 3,288 patents in 2002, bringing its total over the past 10 years to more than 22,000. Lately, the company has been focusing on patenting technology related to its computing-on-demand initiative.
But at least IBM still makes hardware.
These patents are for real inventions, not some
warmed-over software interface with years of prior art.
-JS
Re:Oldest working code...
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No doubt there are the zillions of line of code still kicking and screaming within industry, but I'm more interested with code that is out in the wild, and still being used somewhat actively.
Any other contenders?
Try www.netlib.org.
It's all mathematical libraries, the old stuff is all in Fortran, and it does still get used even though some of it goes back to the late 60's and early 70's. Completely debugged code is hard to find, and when you get your hands on it, you hang on to it forever.
Carbohydrates, and lots of them. This is the body's main source of fuel during aerobic exercise.
Electrolytes, to maintain the proper chemical balances in your body. This helps muscles perform at peak efficiency and staves off cramps.
Water, because buckets of it are lost from sweating. Dehydration is perhaps the easiest way to ensure a poor performance.
I cycle too. The ideal mixture is water, salt, and pure glucose. Even the salt is optional unless you're doing this on a daily basis. Forget the carbohydrates; unless it's glucose the body has to break them down (to glucose) before they can be metabolized. May as well save body a step.
Look in the book Bicycling Science for the recipe used by the Gossamer Albatross team (human-powered aircraft). This is also the main ingredients in the "Goop" packets you buy in cycling shops.
I think a big reason for the lack of scientists and engineers is the lack of advancement and prestige at companies.
Usually you have: Junior Engineer, Senior Engineer, Princple Engineer, and Distinguished Engineer (roughly speaking). Whereas there is a multitude of levels for those in the management track.
This depends dramatically on the company and whether you have a PhD or not. Many companies (for example, IBM) have, or at least had, a separate technical track, parallel to the management track, that would take you just shy of the vice-president level if you had a PhD and enough years experience. Other places I know of (e.g. Raytheon) don't seem to have a formal track, but the research heads (PhD's) were still reporting directly to one of the company vice-presidents.
People without the PhD though definitely seem to plateau much sooner.
I know this is a dumb question. I remember hearing the answer back in high school but I have since forgotten it. I want to know the total energy in sunlight.
In round numbers, it's 1000 W/m^2 during the middle of the day.
The fact is, browsers are *still* not all behaving the same way, and the only safe way to have a site appear correctly is to use absolute pixels. Stylesheets are nice for simple text styling, but can't even be depended on for font sizes!
The fact is (and you should go re-read the HTML specification if you don't understand why it is), that browsers aren't supposed to behave the same way. The HTML describes the contents, not the layout. The browser can decide to display the markup (or not) as best fits its current presentation medium. One of those things that the browser is completely free to select (or better yet, let the user select) is...drum roll... font size! Yes, not only can the browser not be depended on to deliver a specific font size that's the way the web is supposed to work!
Slashdot Mirror
This goes back to the days when the military was still limiting the accuracy of civilian GPS units. They did this by adding noise to the signal. Some bright guy realized that the noise had zero mean, so that if you averaged long enough, you would be able to pull out the true position (limited only by systematic errors in the GPS network).
The military probably new that averaging would be possible when the designed the GPS system, but they also probably figured that if the integration time was long enough (days) then cm accuracy wouldn't be of much tactical use either, which is what they really cared about.
-JS
Actually, the will say anything except that the products are "clinically tested" and "scientifically proven". Say either of those two phrases, and you fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA. Avoid making those two specific claims, and you can market without any regulation. Suggestions, hints, obfuscation, etc are all fine, as long as you don't make any explicit scientific claims.
-JS
No. Voltage is the [electrostatic] potential energy difference between two points. The number of electrons involved is irrelevant.
-JS
Commercial speech is not entitled to the same level of protection as other forms of speech. This has been repeatedly upheld by the supreme court et al. I do not have the right to make others (consumers and ISP's) pay for my advertising.
Spam is not protected speech.
-JS
Joking aside, it actually is a good idea. No commercial air flights, non-commercial flights tightly controlled, all other "interesting" flights scheduled well in advance. It's about the best place I can think of to get 4 days of uninterupted flying, guarenteed.
-JS
Pretty much. Of course, the idea came from a (then) government employee, using government resources, on government time, and the government paid all the patent application/legal fees. Sounds the same as pretty much any other large corporation.
-JS
You need diversity to preserve the diversity. If you have a small population and they start inter-breeding, you'll wipe out most of your diversity in fairly short order because, before long, everyone will have the same common set of ancestors (and thus, a relative lack of genetic diversity). In short, past history is everything in genetics.
No, it isn't. A strike is a work stoppage, with the full intention to go back to work for the company as soon as the worker's demands are met.
This is a damn the torpedoes, burn the bridges, no looking back, mass exodus. Completely different beast in terms of intent, goals, and legal protections.
-JS
Yes. I do Monte Carlo simulations of photon transport. Because Monte Carlo simulations are naturally parallel, running on 12 computers (1GHz CPU each) means I finish in 1/12th the time. Simulations like these (where each CPU runs independant of all its neighbors) are pretty much a textbook problem for Beowulf clusters.
-JS
No quantum mechanics, just plain ol' classical optics. Those are diffraction patterns. Crosses are the Fourier transform of a square, so I assume their aperature stop is a square.
-JS
How soon we forget. It has happened before and it happend right here in the good ol' USofA. Ignoring the obvious Watergate references, there was also the little matter of the 1960's COINTELPRO. This is why we have most of our (scant) existing privacy rules in the first place (the ones that Ashcroft and Co. are working so hard to get overturned).
-JS
Reminds me of the old joke, "If you lose your job, it's a recession. If I lose my job, it's a depression."
-JS
Umm... neither Rayleigh, Ritz, nor Galerkin were engineers. FEM was was applied by engineers to engineering problems certainly and much of the refinement was done by engineers, but the basic concept (approximating an unknown function as a linear combination of orthogonal basis functions, with or without local support and then solving for the coefficients instead of the function) came from mathematics and physics.
-JS
Sorry, but I'm going to have to say "No". Completely different mind-sets, completely different ways to approach a problem.
For example, let's say your product has a problem. The programming solution is to do a marathon programming session and then send a patch the next morning (upgrade, service pack, whatevery you want to call it, it's still a patch) that detects the problem and handles it in some appropriate fashion. The engineering approach is to schedule a series of meetings to find the flaw in the design and fix the underlying problem (or at least understand it well enough that you know the exact implications of leaving it unfixed). A week later, the changes are implemented in hardware.
Part of the difference is pure economics (fixing a motherboard costs a lot more than burning a CD's and the human cost a bridge that crashes is far higher than Windows crashing [again]), but training and the professional cultures play a very definite role too.
-JS
P.S. For the record, I am neither an engineer nor a programmer by trade although I've had to do some of both along the way (I'm a physicist).
<SARCASM>
Really? Does Samba come with a device driver for our XY open frame scan head?
</SARCASM>
When the vendor does not supply drivers for Win2K to go with your mission critical hardware (and no, the WinNT driver does not work under Win2K--that was the first thing I tried), then you stick with WinNT.
-JS
I think a PhD counts as "sufficient college physics classes". Particle-wave mumbo-jumbo won't save you here, my friend. The original poster is right--the article is complete bunk. A communications channel has a finite bit-rate for a given error-rate and no amount of inventing fancy metaphors will make good ol' Dr. Shannon go away.
-JS
You don't know much about particle physics.
In particle physics, a result is not trusted unless it is 3 standard deviations above background (i.e. there's a 1/1000 chance of it being a fluke). That's hardly at the lmit of detectablilty.
His day job was at a patent office, but Einstein did not work in isolation. He was quite familiar with the existing body of scientific literature (e.g. Lorentz's paper on unifying Newtonean mechanics and Maxwell mechanics where he proposed what is now called the Lorentz transform). Further, the scientific community was quite familiar with Einstein through his publications in the scientific literature.
-JS
We already did. The game is called nethack.
-JS
What's the bandwidth of your network? What's the latency of your network?
What's the bandwidth of Deep Blue's internal bus? What's the latency of Deep Blue's internal bus?
That's why Deep Blue cost millions.
-JS
But at least IBM still makes hardware. These patents are for real inventions, not some warmed-over software interface with years of prior art.
-JS
Try www.netlib.org. It's all mathematical libraries, the old stuff is all in Fortran, and it does still get used even though some of it goes back to the late 60's and early 70's. Completely debugged code is hard to find, and when you get your hands on it, you hang on to it forever.
-JS
I cycle too. The ideal mixture is water, salt, and pure glucose. Even the salt is optional unless you're doing this on a daily basis. Forget the carbohydrates; unless it's glucose the body has to break them down (to glucose) before they can be metabolized. May as well save body a step.
Look in the book Bicycling Science for the recipe used by the Gossamer Albatross team (human-powered aircraft). This is also the main ingredients in the "Goop" packets you buy in cycling shops.
-JS
This depends dramatically on the company and whether you have a PhD or not. Many companies (for example, IBM) have, or at least had, a separate technical track, parallel to the management track, that would take you just shy of the vice-president level if you had a PhD and enough years experience. Other places I know of (e.g. Raytheon) don't seem to have a formal track, but the research heads (PhD's) were still reporting directly to one of the company vice-presidents.
People without the PhD though definitely seem to plateau much sooner.
-JS
In round numbers, it's 1000 W/m^2 during the middle of the day.
-JS
The fact is (and you should go re-read the HTML specification if you don't understand why it is), that browsers aren't supposed to behave the same way. The HTML describes the contents, not the layout. The browser can decide to display the markup (or not) as best fits its current presentation medium. One of those things that the browser is completely free to select (or better yet, let the user select) is...drum roll... font size! Yes, not only can the browser not be depended on to deliver a specific font size that's the way the web is supposed to work!
-JS