It's not the first model that doesn't have a big bang. It's not even the first that uses de Broglie-Bohm theory. For example, there are the bouncing cosmologies (where the universe shrinks down to almost zero but not quite --essentially stopped by quantum effects-- and then starts to re-expand) proposed by Pinto-Neto, Peter, et al. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2790 for a review and references therein, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/02...).
Now while this paper is old news in that it was posted on arxiv almost a year ago, well done to the slashdot editors for waiting for it to be peer-reviewed (independently of how messed up you think the peer-review process is) and not taking every new model that gets posted on arxiv as some new profound discovery that must be true (slashdot would never do that, honest).
"I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics,..."
1. I would love to convert sunlight into liquid fuel too. 2. Developing new technology is great. But it seems odd that the main purpose of developing it should be the jobs it creates and not the fact itself that we have liquid sunlight and cyborgs, which can improve our lives independently of any new jobs. 3. Hey, it's not even primarily about the jobs, but it's a nationalist race for America to win (and everyone else to lose?). And no, the technology is not for the rest of mankind, just for Americans.
And in any case, throughout the whole discovery they were all really careful to repeatedly emphasise that they found a particle with Higgs-like properties, rather than outright stating that they found the Higgs.
So it's not really news that it could be something else with similar properties. Okay, someone came up with a model. Great. But why do those headlines make it sound like "in you face, CERN, you got it all wrong"?
In principle I might agree with having the possibility of harsher punishment for online actions such as threats of murder, rape or other forms of violence. However, this is not what most people would call "trolling". Trolling has a less serious but rather simply obnoxious connotation. I wouldn't call someone who threatens murder a "troll".
Of course, if the wording is general enough ("venom" used figuratively here isn't exactly precise) you can justify the legislation by the former (i.e. genuine threats) and later use it to persecute the latter (or rather, against anything the tories don't like to see online). It really seems like a variant of the "but-think-of-the-children" justification for oppression of unwanted opinions or facts.
... Robot Wars (as in the British television series back in the late 90s), except with people inside? I thought that was a pretty good show, but then, I was a teenager at the time, so of course I would think that.
Well, with Windows 8.1 however, there is a start button. You now just have to right-click it to actually get any functionality out of it and not get sent to an obnoxious picture-book page. If they don't count right-clicks, then I would not at all be surprised if the start-button usage has indeed gone to zero.
Anyone who seems to think that applying for grants is a good way to make money, or even to guarantee to get rich quick, clearly has never actually gone through a grant application. "Quick" certainly does not apply, "rich" even less so and "guarantee" is more like a 5% chance that the grant review committee just came back from a good lunch and are in a good mood when they skim your application. And if you by chance do end up being lucky, then your institution decides to take its cut in order to pay for another football stadium.
The number of extremely viable suggestions to solve the OP's problem made here is significant, but in my experience another limiting factor will be the teachers' IT competence. The lack of basic understanding among some school instructors for anything IT related can be rather shocking. So I do hope they train their teaching staff well enough, so that they are indeed able to reset a student's account if the password is lost/stolen. Sounds simple, but you'd be surprised.
But seriously, why do primary school children (or 'elementary') need computers in class? I'm not saying that everything was better in the olden days (hey, I'm far too young to say anything like that), but some things of the modern day and age seem rather unnecessary. I get that not having to carry books is a good thing, but primary school books are usually pretty small and light anyway and there aren't that many of them, so it's not that much of an issue. And students forget them at home? Sure, then they'll get told off (and get penalty assignments, or whatever) and have to learn basic organisation skills.
I lived in Canada for a year and kept my netflix subscription at the time. The content there was definitely different, and somewhere near the top of lists of suggestions has always been the category of Canadian shows (of all genres bunched together). So they are promoting Canadian content in Canada, as far as their model of allowing the viewer to freely pick what they want to watch allows. In fact, that's no different from having a certain amount of Canadian shows on a cable channel, where the viewer can just turn off the TV at the right times to avoid all the Canadian content, except it's much more convenient.
I think there is a difference between what scientists mean by a consensus in the scientific community and how it is understood by the wider public.
If a climatologist says "there is a consensus" (s)he hardly means that a bunch of people came together to have a popular vote on the issue. Rather, it suggests that the majority of fellow climatologists have examined some evidence each and found the collection of all that evidence (and their respective analysis) to be conclusive (as far as statistically possible). However, no individual alone can "convince themselves by looking at the evidence" because the evidence consists of more data than anybody could study in a life time. So we have to put a certain degree of trust into our colleagues. An individual only has partial evidence, which by itself is insufficient to come to far-reaching conclusions about global climate developments. These conclusions can only be reached collaboratively -- in this sense it requires a consensus. Fortunately though I don't even have to trust any individual climate scientist or their data, just that there is no conspiracy by the majority. Furthermore, I know that I could examine any evidence if I wanted to, I just can't examine it all because there is simply too much of it. This applies similarly to other large-scale observational endeavours.
However, to a non-scientificially minded person "consensus" might indeed suggest something weaker (people sharing an opinion) and therefore mistrust the conclusions. And then they can't look at the evidence themselves because there is too much data and that data comes from exactly the people whom they mistrust in the first place. So instead they look at the evidence they can see and understand, which explains why acceptance of climate change drops on snowy days.
You're new here, aren't you? Slashdot frequently has articles on internationally significant news, often with much less tech relevance than this.
The site banner is "News for nerds, stuff that matters". This story easily meets both criteria.
Point taken. It definitely falls under the slogan if read literally -- it's news for nerds (since it's news for everybody) and matters.
It does raise the question though which pieces of general news without any particular technology/science/IT relevance (note the 'particular') is important enough to be featured here (and who selects them, though I do trust that the Slashdots powers-in-charge are pretty sensible about that), given that such news are generally covered by most other news services we might frequent.
While the (possibly intentional) destruction of the aircraft is tragic, with potential political consequences, loss of human lives, and so on, and is undoubtedly news we all should be aware of, how does this fit into Slashdot's focus on news related to technology and science topics?
While I have little sympathy, given the expenses involved with the activity, and given that far too often a golf club seems really more like a get-together of the wealthy, frolicking in their wealth together, this is a terrible idea. Why do beginning golfers need to have it easier? They just don't score as well. Isn't that what that handicap system is about in the first place?
What's next? "Chess too difficult -- FIDE considering switching to a 6x6 board to encourage more beginners."
Though I agree with that Curtis fellow, who says that it's all just talk and nothing will come of it.
I went on a wonderful cruise recently to USB. I spent a lot of time on the motherboard, watching the schools of blu-rays frolicking in the sea. I spent all day wearing my software, it was fantastic! Sadly though I got stung by gigabyte -- I though they only existed in South America? And now to make things worse, I think the captain might have given me HTML...... all that aside. The respondents were asked to pick from three possible definitions and 77% got SEO wrong. There must have been some impressive alternatives.
So we physicists have Arxiv.org, where pretty much every recently published paper is available for free, often months before a journal has finally got round to actually publishing the article. Does medical research not have anything comparable?
Slashdot seems to frequently report on some ground-breaking new discovery in quantum mechanics that is presented along the lines of "physics had it all wrong for the last hundred years, but now we have finally found the truth, at least until next week when another big truth comes out".
Someone publishes a paper with a fancy title or abstract on arxiv, although most claims in it are actually subtle, include certain assumptions and are firmly based on a line of research that has been going on for some time. Then a couple of days or weeks later some popular articles announce the great revolution in physics, loosely based on aforementioned paper, that is subsequently forgotten again and it turns out physics has not been revolutionised.
Meanwhile ten million internet users each come up with their own interpretation of what it all means and why they're right and everybody else is wrong. Inevitably, the words "god" and "consciousness" come up. I know it is the internet, but this doesn't happen in other areas of scientific enquiry in nearly the same way.
... who thought, after reading the title, that they were going to put mirrors into space? Giant mirrors in geostationary orbit focussing the light onto a small Norwegian town? Now that would be a tourist attraction.
The article mentioned South Carolina as one of the states where public universities are affected. I have taught physics courses at a large SC school and at the end of the semester there is the usual rush of emails from your students telling you that they deserve a higher grade than they got, contrary to all the evidence of their lack of ability and effort. Well, maybe they should have thought about that earlier and actually cared about doing work for the class.
Among them there are also always some who say "If I don't get a B in this class, then I lose my scholarship" (sorry guys, grades are not given out according to personal need). Several such students every semester. And I wonder, how did these students ever get a scholarship in the first place given their highly mediocre academic ability?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the first model that doesn't have a big bang. It's not even the first that uses de Broglie-Bohm theory. For example, there are the bouncing cosmologies (where the universe shrinks down to almost zero but not quite --essentially stopped by quantum effects-- and then starts to re-expand) proposed by Pinto-Neto, Peter, et al. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2790 for a review and references therein, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/02...).
Now while this paper is old news in that it was posted on arxiv almost a year ago, well done to the slashdot editors for waiting for it to be peer-reviewed (independently of how messed up you think the peer-review process is) and not taking every new model that gets posted on arxiv as some new profound discovery that must be true (slashdot would never do that, honest).
"I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics,..."
1. I would love to convert sunlight into liquid fuel too.
2. Developing new technology is great. But it seems odd that the main purpose of developing it should be the jobs it creates and not the fact itself that we have liquid sunlight and cyborgs, which can improve our lives independently of any new jobs.
3. Hey, it's not even primarily about the jobs, but it's a nationalist race for America to win (and everyone else to lose?). And no, the technology is not for the rest of mankind, just for Americans.
--- I wish I could buy items falling under that description.
And in any case, throughout the whole discovery they were all really careful to repeatedly emphasise that they found a particle with Higgs-like properties, rather than outright stating that they found the Higgs.
So it's not really news that it could be something else with similar properties. Okay, someone came up with a model. Great. But why do those headlines make it sound like "in you face, CERN, you got it all wrong"?
Or via really short gestation periods and reproduction at a young age.
In principle I might agree with having the possibility of harsher punishment for online actions such as threats of murder, rape or other forms of violence. However, this is not what most people would call "trolling". Trolling has a less serious but rather simply obnoxious connotation. I wouldn't call someone who threatens murder a "troll".
Of course, if the wording is general enough ("venom" used figuratively here isn't exactly precise) you can justify the legislation by the former (i.e. genuine threats) and later use it to persecute the latter (or rather, against anything the tories don't like to see online). It really seems like a variant of the "but-think-of-the-children" justification for oppression of unwanted opinions or facts.
... Robot Wars (as in the British television series back in the late 90s), except with people inside? I thought that was a pretty good show, but then, I was a teenager at the time, so of course I would think that.
Or even be allowed to live together in the same country, if you're not lucky enough to fall in love with someone of the same nationality.
... because, you know, it might get confused with Windows 3.11 ?
Well, with Windows 8.1 however, there is a start button. You now just have to right-click it to actually get any functionality out of it and not get sent to an obnoxious picture-book page. If they don't count right-clicks, then I would not at all be surprised if the start-button usage has indeed gone to zero.
Anyone who seems to think that applying for grants is a good way to make money, or even to guarantee to get rich quick, clearly has never actually gone through a grant application. "Quick" certainly does not apply, "rich" even less so and "guarantee" is more like a 5% chance that the grant review committee just came back from a good lunch and are in a good mood when they skim your application. And if you by chance do end up being lucky, then your institution decides to take its cut in order to pay for another football stadium.
The number of extremely viable suggestions to solve the OP's problem made here is significant, but in my experience another limiting factor will be the teachers' IT competence. The lack of basic understanding among some school instructors for anything IT related can be rather shocking. So I do hope they train their teaching staff well enough, so that they are indeed able to reset a student's account if the password is lost/stolen. Sounds simple, but you'd be surprised.
But seriously, why do primary school children (or 'elementary') need computers in class? I'm not saying that everything was better in the olden days (hey, I'm far too young to say anything like that), but some things of the modern day and age seem rather unnecessary. I get that not having to carry books is a good thing, but primary school books are usually pretty small and light anyway and there aren't that many of them, so it's not that much of an issue. And students forget them at home? Sure, then they'll get told off (and get penalty assignments, or whatever) and have to learn basic organisation skills.
They call it, "replicator".
I lived in Canada for a year and kept my netflix subscription at the time. The content there was definitely different, and somewhere near the top of lists of suggestions has always been the category of Canadian shows (of all genres bunched together). So they are promoting Canadian content in Canada, as far as their model of allowing the viewer to freely pick what they want to watch allows. In fact, that's no different from having a certain amount of Canadian shows on a cable channel, where the viewer can just turn off the TV at the right times to avoid all the Canadian content, except it's much more convenient.
I wish there were a would-be-funny-if-only-it-weren't-true mod option.
I think there is a difference between what scientists mean by a consensus in the scientific community and how it is understood by the wider public.
If a climatologist says "there is a consensus" (s)he hardly means that a bunch of people came together to have a popular vote on the issue. Rather, it suggests that the majority of fellow climatologists have examined some evidence each and found the collection of all that evidence (and their respective analysis) to be conclusive (as far as statistically possible). However, no individual alone can "convince themselves by looking at the evidence" because the evidence consists of more data than anybody could study in a life time. So we have to put a certain degree of trust into our colleagues. An individual only has partial evidence, which by itself is insufficient to come to far-reaching conclusions about global climate developments. These conclusions can only be reached collaboratively -- in this sense it requires a consensus. Fortunately though I don't even have to trust any individual climate scientist or their data, just that there is no conspiracy by the majority. Furthermore, I know that I could examine any evidence if I wanted to, I just can't examine it all because there is simply too much of it. This applies similarly to other large-scale observational endeavours.
However, to a non-scientificially minded person "consensus" might indeed suggest something weaker (people sharing an opinion) and therefore mistrust the conclusions. And then they can't look at the evidence themselves because there is too much data and that data comes from exactly the people whom they mistrust in the first place. So instead they look at the evidence they can see and understand, which explains why acceptance of climate change drops on snowy days.
You're new here, aren't you? Slashdot frequently has articles on internationally significant news, often with much less tech relevance than this.
The site banner is "News for nerds, stuff that matters". This story easily meets both criteria.
Point taken. It definitely falls under the slogan if read literally -- it's news for nerds (since it's news for everybody) and matters.
It does raise the question though which pieces of general news without any particular technology/science/IT relevance (note the 'particular') is important enough to be featured here (and who selects them, though I do trust that the Slashdots powers-in-charge are pretty sensible about that), given that such news are generally covered by most other news services we might frequent.
While the (possibly intentional) destruction of the aircraft is tragic, with potential political consequences, loss of human lives, and so on, and is undoubtedly news we all should be aware of, how does this fit into Slashdot's focus on news related to technology and science topics?
While I have little sympathy, given the expenses involved with the activity, and given that far too often a golf club seems really more like a get-together of the wealthy, frolicking in their wealth together, this is a terrible idea. Why do beginning golfers need to have it easier? They just don't score as well. Isn't that what that handicap system is about in the first place?
What's next? "Chess too difficult -- FIDE considering switching to a 6x6 board to encourage more beginners."
Though I agree with that Curtis fellow, who says that it's all just talk and nothing will come of it.
I went on a wonderful cruise recently to USB. I spent a lot of time on the motherboard, watching the schools of blu-rays frolicking in the sea. I spent all day wearing my software, it was fantastic! Sadly though I got stung by gigabyte -- I though they only existed in South America? And now to make things worse, I think the captain might have given me HTML ... ... all that aside. The respondents were asked to pick from three possible definitions and 77% got SEO wrong. There must have been some impressive alternatives.
So we physicists have Arxiv.org, where pretty much every recently published paper is available for free, often months before a journal has finally got round to actually publishing the article. Does medical research not have anything comparable?
Slashdot seems to frequently report on some ground-breaking new discovery in quantum mechanics that is presented along the lines of "physics had it all wrong for the last hundred years, but now we have finally found the truth, at least until next week when another big truth comes out".
Someone publishes a paper with a fancy title or abstract on arxiv, although most claims in it are actually subtle, include certain assumptions and are firmly based on a line of research that has been going on for some time. Then a couple of days or weeks later some popular articles announce the great revolution in physics, loosely based on aforementioned paper, that is subsequently forgotten again and it turns out physics has not been revolutionised.
Meanwhile ten million internet users each come up with their own interpretation of what it all means and why they're right and everybody else is wrong. Inevitably, the words "god" and "consciousness" come up. I know it is the internet, but this doesn't happen in other areas of scientific enquiry in nearly the same way.
... who thought, after reading the title, that they were going to put mirrors into space? Giant mirrors in geostationary orbit focussing the light onto a small Norwegian town? Now that would be a tourist attraction.
Even that would get hijacked by advertising:
"The following two minutes of silence are brought to you by Sky Deutschland."
The article mentioned South Carolina as one of the states where public universities are affected. I have taught physics courses at a large SC school and at the end of the semester there is the usual rush of emails from your students telling you that they deserve a higher grade than they got, contrary to all the evidence of their lack of ability and effort. Well, maybe they should have thought about that earlier and actually cared about doing work for the class.
Among them there are also always some who say "If I don't get a B in this class, then I lose my scholarship" (sorry guys, grades are not given out according to personal need). Several such students every semester. And I wonder, how did these students ever get a scholarship in the first place given their highly mediocre academic ability?
Now it all makes sense.