The actual numbers that go to make up these images are needed to do any science with them - only a fool would try to do science with a JPEG image, but this does happen. The 'scientific rights' refer to the use of the raw numbers for these images in scientific papers. These rights apply for about 1 year after the observations are taken so that the team that has spent years building the instrument and sorting out its science can benefit. This data then becomes completely public.
In these images you're largely seeing thermal emission from dust at temperatures of about 20-50K. The wavebands chosen cover the peak of the black body spectrum at these temperatures so we can get an accurate measure of how warm of cold the dust is.
The poles of the scan are actually the ecliptic poles, perpendicular to the plane of the planets within the solar system. This is set by the fact that Planck rotates with it's bottom pointing towards the line that joins the earth and the sun from it's position at the second Lagrange point. This ensures that earth and sunlight never impinge on it's sensitive detectors and helps to keep the whole instrument as cold as possible. The scan geometry is thus quite tightly restricted by these requirements and, as you say, the deepest fields will be at the ecliptic poles.
We actually don't want to study the centre of the galaxy with Planck as the galaxy is the major foreground contaminant to the CMB data. Fortunately the eclptic poles aren't aligned wiht the centre of the galaxy.
There's a lot more to do beyond Planck on polarization, but you're right that primary intensity anisotropies in the CMB will essentially be done by Planck. There are lots of secondary anisotropies, such as the SZ-Effect, on smaller scales to be done at higher resolution, though, and instruments like the SPT are doing exactly that.
Planck is actually an ESA mission, not NASA. Though our US colleagues have made significant contributions the bulk of the funding, the launch etc. has come from Europe.
Hubble works in the optical at wavelengths more than 100 times smaller than those Herschel is using, so it's not surprising you can see more detail. However, the Herschel images aren't showing stars at all, they're showing cool dust, just 50 or so degrees above absolute zero, material that Hubble just cannot see at all (and to be fair, Herschel can't see the stars that Hubble can see).
Trying to compare Hubble with Herschel is like comparing a fire with a bucket of liquid nitrogen.
Bias settings for the detectors, calibration, temperatures for the various cooling elements... There's a whole lot of things that need to be sorted out in the commissioning and 'performance verification' phases, and this is what we're spending the time between now and the first full-scale science observations in mid-October.
This issue has been running for a long time. In particular the different attitudes to the privacy of individuals' data in the US and the EU has blocked a lot of data being transferred from the EU to the US. This isn't the Patriot Act - the linked article dates back to before that was enacted. As an EU citizen I like it that my personal data can't just be bundled up and sold on from one company to another without my permission.
However, there are provisions under the Safe Harbour rules that allow data to be transferred to the US, so this shouldn't be a complete block to development or outsourcing. As long as companies, and government agencies, agree to abide by the rules. If they don't want to, that's their choice.
Even if this worked, which it won't since it has all the same problems as polygraphs and probably a few more (want someone to read guilty? put them in a warm cell for a few hours), the countermeasures are easily available - antiperspirant.
Not necessarily... Radiation isn't a single monolithic thing. A massive dirty bomb made out of an alpha emitted wrapped in lead to stop secondaries will be almost undetectable by a device buried inside the nice plastic case of a mobile phone.
If you have a system like this running, the hypothetical bad guys will know about it and will take action to prevent detection. The innocent, who know less about radiation will, in contrast, be setting off false positives all the time. After all, someone walking around the city after radiotherapy or a PET scan will look a lit like a terrorist who's slightly contaminated with radioactivity after setting up his bomb. Queue large men with guns and another innocent gets the DHS interrogation treatment while the more knowledgeable terrorists remain undetected.
Fill the country with radiation detectors like this and you'll get so many false alarms that the system will become a joke. The man walking down the street who had radiotherapy yesterday, the woman who keeps her grandfather's WW2 glowing radium watch in her handbag, the building made from that particular granite that's rich in radioactives. And let's not forget all the smoke detectors that use radioisotopes, or all the hospitals and labs with sources.
It's a radioactive world out there, and that is the only thing such a system would tell us.
We'd also learn the usual responses of the security forces when they get something wrong is brutality, coverup and smearing.
The answer to finding hypothetical terrorist nukes is proper human intelligence on the ground, not mass surveillance where false positives outnumber the real thing by orders of magnitude. That's just hiding the needle you're looking for in a much much bigger needle stack.
I suspect that the gas giant missions will need significant international collaboration, like Cassini, anbd the climate in the US may be bad for that.
My own horse in the race, SPICA, has the advantage of building on existing European technology, since the ESA contribution woulkd be a mirror similar to Herschel's. The instrument, that I'm associated with and that your friend is working on, would be finded separately by national funding agencies, as is always the way with ESA missions. It's already been defined as a 'core SPICA instrument' by JAXA which puts us in a good position.
The other key feature of SPICA against the rest is that, from the ESA point of view, it's very cheap.
Science fiction in general is good, but there are some very good non-fiction books out there as well. Suggestions, possibly for a somewhat older age group, would be:
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?
Actually there's a fair bit of evidence that elliptical galaxies are in fact 'tri-axial' - they have different sizes in all three dimensions, like a rugby ball or an american football that's been squashed slightly. They would thus appear elliptical from any viewing angle.
The zodiacal dust is actually dust in our own solar system - you can see it at dawn and dusk as the zodiacal light. However, one suggestion in Brian May's thesis is that there may be a component of the zodiacal dust that is interstellar. It's something that future observations he's proposing could test.
It's interesting to note that very little has been done on the zodiacal light since he started his PhD work in the early 70s. However, the next generation of cosmic microwave background satellites like Planck will need improved knowledge of foreground dust so that its contaminating emission can be removed. This has added new interest and impetus to the kind of studies that Brian May is resurrecting.
Judging from LJ's response to the Nipplegate controversy (a troll started complaining about images of breastfeeding mothers and LJ/6Apart started deleting these accounts on the basis that they were sexually explicit) I think its very unlikely that they'll respond to users' complaints. LJ/6Apart has demonstrated itself incapable of responding to user complaints once a 'policy' has been set in spite of evidence and argument to the contrary. If you want to set up a support group for the victims of rape, incest or other abuse, LJ is not the place any longer because they can't (don't want to?) tell the difference between opposition and advocacy.
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level
No - the obvious solution is that the demand will be met outside the US by recruitiung people who do have CS qualifications, and who demand lower wages.
Seeing as how I'm British, and Blair will not be holding an election before January, and how I said 'Bush/Blair', then the Blair part of that should be obvious.
As to the Bush side, things would be much more difficult for him internationally (if that was possible!) if he's seen to be behind an electoral disaster in Iraq. Politics is not just an issue of being able to win re-election, its also about being able to do what you want once you've been elected.
I'm sure there will be some kind of election in Iraq in January - there's too much at stake politically for Blair and Bush for it not to happen.
However, what happens if they don't like the result? I see one of two outcomes being more likely than the interim government being re-elcted and legitimised:
(1) They are re-elected, but international monitors (the UN etc.) do not agree that the election was free and fair. To some extent this is what Kofi Anan is already worrying about.
(2) Ignoring whether (1) is the case or not, what happens if the result of the elections is not what Bush/Blair want? What if an Iran-style shia religious party is elected? This is the problem with democracy - it doesn't always give you the answer you want. The US was quite happy with democracy in South American until socialists like Allende started being elected in Chile and elsewhere. Then they sent in the CIA and regimes like Pinochet's were the result. Is this the future that the middle east has to look forward to?
Slashdot Mirror
The actual numbers that go to make up these images are needed to do any science with them - only a fool would try to do science with a JPEG image, but this does happen. The 'scientific rights' refer to the use of the raw numbers for these images in scientific papers. These rights apply for about 1 year after the observations are taken so that the team that has spent years building the instrument and sorting out its science can benefit. This data then becomes completely public.
In these images you're largely seeing thermal emission from dust at temperatures of about 20-50K. The wavebands chosen cover the peak of the black body spectrum at these temperatures so we can get an accurate measure of how warm of cold the dust is.
The poles of the scan are actually the ecliptic poles, perpendicular to the plane of the planets within the solar system. This is set by the fact that Planck rotates with it's bottom pointing towards the line that joins the earth and the sun from it's position at the second Lagrange point. This ensures that earth and sunlight never impinge on it's sensitive detectors and helps to keep the whole instrument as cold as possible. The scan geometry is thus quite tightly restricted by these requirements and, as you say, the deepest fields will be at the ecliptic poles.
We actually don't want to study the centre of the galaxy with Planck as the galaxy is the major foreground contaminant to the CMB data. Fortunately the eclptic poles aren't aligned wiht the centre of the galaxy.
There's a lot more to do beyond Planck on polarization, but you're right that primary intensity anisotropies in the CMB will essentially be done by Planck. There are lots of secondary anisotropies, such as the SZ-Effect, on smaller scales to be done at higher resolution, though, and instruments like the SPT are doing exactly that.
Planck is actually an ESA mission, not NASA. Though our US colleagues have made significant contributions the bulk of the funding, the launch etc. has come from Europe.
Hubble works in the optical at wavelengths more than 100 times smaller than those Herschel is using, so it's not surprising you can see more detail. However, the Herschel images aren't showing stars at all, they're showing cool dust, just 50 or so degrees above absolute zero, material that Hubble just cannot see at all (and to be fair, Herschel can't see the stars that Hubble can see).
Trying to compare Hubble with Herschel is like comparing a fire with a bucket of liquid nitrogen.
For more information you can catch up with Planck on the mission blog on Planck's twitter, and on the Planck outreach website.
I help maintain the blog and work on both the Planck and Herschel missions.
Bias settings for the detectors, calibration, temperatures for the various cooling elements... There's a whole lot of things that need to be sorted out in the commissioning and 'performance verification' phases, and this is what we're spending the time between now and the first full-scale science observations in mid-October.
This issue has been running for a long time. In particular the different attitudes to the privacy of individuals' data in the US and the EU has blocked a lot of data being transferred from the EU to the US. This isn't the Patriot Act - the linked article dates back to before that was enacted. As an EU citizen I like it that my personal data can't just be bundled up and sold on from one company to another without my permission.
However, there are provisions under the Safe Harbour rules that allow data to be transferred to the US, so this shouldn't be a complete block to development or outsourcing. As long as companies, and government agencies, agree to abide by the rules. If they don't want to, that's their choice.
Even if this worked, which it won't since it has all the same problems as polygraphs and probably a few more (want someone to read guilty? put them in a warm cell for a few hours), the countermeasures are easily available - antiperspirant.
Nothing happening here, move along.
Not necessarily... Radiation isn't a single monolithic thing. A massive dirty bomb made out of an alpha emitted wrapped in lead to stop secondaries will be almost undetectable by a device buried inside the nice plastic case of a mobile phone.
If you have a system like this running, the hypothetical bad guys will know about it and will take action to prevent detection. The innocent, who know less about radiation will, in contrast, be setting off false positives all the time. After all, someone walking around the city after radiotherapy or a PET scan will look a lit like a terrorist who's slightly contaminated with radioactivity after setting up his bomb. Queue large men with guns and another innocent gets the DHS interrogation treatment while the more knowledgeable terrorists remain undetected.
Fill the country with radiation detectors like this and you'll get so many false alarms that the system will become a joke. The man walking down the street who had radiotherapy yesterday, the woman who keeps her grandfather's WW2 glowing radium watch in her handbag, the building made from that particular granite that's rich in radioactives. And let's not forget all the smoke detectors that use radioisotopes, or all the hospitals and labs with sources.
It's a radioactive world out there, and that is the only thing such a system would tell us.
We'd also learn the usual responses of the security forces when they get something wrong is brutality, coverup and smearing.
The answer to finding hypothetical terrorist nukes is proper human intelligence on the ground, not mass surveillance where false positives outnumber the real thing by orders of magnitude. That's just hiding the needle you're looking for in a much much bigger needle stack.
Screwdrivers and printing press also tools of terrorists. Must be combatted as well...
I suspect that the gas giant missions will need significant international collaboration, like Cassini, anbd the climate in the US may be bad for that.
My own horse in the race, SPICA, has the advantage of building on existing European technology, since the ESA contribution woulkd be a mirror similar to Herschel's. The instrument, that I'm associated with and that your friend is working on, would be finded separately by national funding agencies, as is always the way with ESA missions. It's already been defined as a 'core SPICA instrument' by JAXA which puts us in a good position.
The other key feature of SPICA against the rest is that, from the ESA point of view, it's very cheap.
Science fiction in general is good, but there are some very good non-fiction books out there as well. Suggestions, possibly for a somewhat older age group, would be:
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
The Dancing Wu Li Masters - Gary Zukav
The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Kapra
The First Three Minutes - Steve Weinburg
> First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular.
All ellipses have a point of view where they project as a circle. Are you saying that his elliptical galaxies aren't elliptical? Even if they weren't, how would that create a selection bias?
Actually there's a fair bit of evidence that elliptical galaxies are in fact 'tri-axial' - they have different sizes in all three dimensions, like a rugby ball or an american football that's been squashed slightly. They would thus appear elliptical from any viewing angle.
(And yes, IAAA).
Ooops.... no it's here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2889
can be found here:
http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/hep-th/0501117
Maybe 'it's a well-understood skill that can be taught and learned', but so is astrology. Does that stop it from being a pseudoscience?
Perhaps that's the key - from now on the TSA can do natal charts for all passengers and use horoscopes to work out which ones are terrorists!
The zodiacal dust is actually dust in our own solar system - you can see it at dawn and dusk as the zodiacal light. However, one suggestion in Brian May's thesis is that there may be a component of the zodiacal dust that is interstellar. It's something that future observations he's proposing could test.
It's interesting to note that very little has been done on the zodiacal light since he started his PhD work in the early 70s. However, the next generation of cosmic microwave background satellites like Planck will need improved knowledge of foreground dust so that its contaminating emission can be removed. This has added new interest and impetus to the kind of studies that Brian May is resurrecting.
Judging from LJ's response to the Nipplegate controversy (a troll started complaining about images of breastfeeding mothers and LJ/6Apart started deleting these accounts on the basis that they were sexually explicit) I think its very unlikely that they'll respond to users' complaints. LJ/6Apart has demonstrated itself incapable of responding to user complaints once a 'policy' has been set in spite of evidence and argument to the contrary. If you want to set up a support group for the victims of rape, incest or other abuse, LJ is not the place any longer because they can't (don't want to?) tell the difference between opposition and advocacy.
Latest news suggests that support for the proposed ID card and database system is rapidly dropping:
0 ,,1505880,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/
It seems that, like Australia, the more people learn about the true costs and problems in the system the less they like it...
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level
No - the obvious solution is that the demand will be met outside the US by recruitiung people who do have CS qualifications, and who demand lower wages.
Seeing as how I'm British, and Blair will not be holding an election before January, and how I said 'Bush/Blair', then the Blair part of that should be obvious.
As to the Bush side, things would be much more difficult for him internationally (if that was possible!) if he's seen to be behind an electoral disaster in Iraq. Politics is not just an issue of being able to win re-election, its also about being able to do what you want once you've been elected.
I'm sure there will be some kind of election in Iraq in January - there's too much at stake politically for Blair and Bush for it not to happen.
However, what happens if they don't like the result? I see one of two outcomes being more likely than the interim government being re-elcted and legitimised:
(1) They are re-elected, but international monitors (the UN etc.) do not agree that the election was free and fair. To some extent this is what Kofi Anan is already worrying about.
(2) Ignoring whether (1) is the case or not, what happens if the result of the elections is not what Bush/Blair want? What if an Iran-style shia religious party is elected? This is the problem with democracy - it doesn't always give you the answer you want. The US was quite happy with democracy in South American until socialists like Allende started being elected in Chile and elsewhere. Then they sent in the CIA and regimes like Pinochet's were the result. Is this the future that the middle east has to look forward to?