Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.
It was just erroneous methodology at ORANGE and EPOS (and EPOS II). After the APEX results were in, most of the people involved (as good scientists should) accepted the results and moved on.
This is not a recommendation from "the SIDS organization", but from the National Institutes of Health as well as the American Association of Pediatrics. Here are the facts:
Between 1992 to 1998, the number of babies put to sleep on their stomachs went from 70% to 17%. The SIDS rate declined in that same time period by 40%.
Babies at risk for SIDS (generally 0-4 months) are already utterly powerless, no matter which position they're lying in. They're not moving very much -- or at least not in any sort of coordinated way, and can interact just fine with their environment. Finally, there is absolutely no data to support the concern that the child is at any bigger risk for choking on their back than on their stomach.
The side effects tend to be a longer developmental delay for crawling and a temporary flattening of the head. Those seem quite minor compared to SIDS.
Re:Quark Matter is Not New
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the idea of 'quark stars' goes back even further than 20 years ago: earliest reference I was able to find dates back to 1969 [1] and cites references from 1965 [2]. (Keep in mind that Gell-mann's paper came out in early '64).
- B
[1] Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento 2, 13 (1969) [2] Nuovo Cimento 45 A, 513 (1965)
The news coverage seems to be based on the talks that the four LEP experiments gave earlier this week at CERN. If you're interested in the physics behind the press reports, here's a link to the summary talk. You can also hunt around the CERN Experiments web site; click on Aleph, Delphi, L3, and Opal.
I read through the summary presentation -- I think the evidence for a Higgs is not very compelling. The signal (albeit a ~ 4 sigma signal) comes solely from the 4-jet channel in the Aleph experiment. I'd be much more interested in seeing the result in a refereed journal, however. At any rate, you can read the talk and judge for yourself.
Disclaimer: while I am a physics grad student (well, for another month, anyway), Higgs searches are not my realm of expertise.
FreeXDSL? Er, no. According to their draconian service agreement, you agree to switch to their cable or phone service if the price is right, and to pay $500 if you terminate in less than 5 years. No thanks.
Excerpts:
12.0 - AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE LOCAL OR LONG DISTANCE PHONE SERVICE, "CABLE" TV SERVICE
If, at any time during the term of this Agreement, SMART is authorized, with Federal or State authority approval if necessary, to offer and provide local telephone service as a Local Exchange Carrier, long distance or "cable" TV service as a long distance telephone or "cable" TV service provider in the location in which MEMBER desires to receive freeXDSL(TM) SERVICE, and SMART is able to offer and provide such service to MEMBER, MEMBER hereby agrees to allow SMART to provide MEMBER with such service at the applicable tariff or published rate for such service if the rate is no more than the rate currently being paid by MEMBER to the existing Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier or other provider currently furnishing any such service to MEMBER. In any such case, MEMBER'S existing incumbent local exchange carrier will continue to maintain the lines between MEMBER'S location and the telephone company's central switching office as they do currently as prescribed by law.
and
22.0 - TERMINATION
MEMBER may terminate this Agreement at any time within seven (7) days after entering into this Agreement with no liability to SMART. MEMBER may terminate this Agreement at any time after the first seven days following the date MEMBER entered into this Agreement by closing MEMBER'S account for freeXDSLTM SERVICE. SMART may suspend or terminate MEMBER'S account for freeXDSLTM SERVICE at any time for any reason including but not limited to failure to comply with the terms of this Agreement or any SMART policy. If terminated by SMART for a violation by MEMBER of SMART'S AUP or MEMBER'S failure to comply with this Agreement, or if terminated by MEMBER for any reason after the seventh day following MEMBER'S execution of this Agreement, such execution by MEMBER completing registration for freeXDSL(TM) SERVICE, but before the fifth anniversary of the implementation of MEMBER'S freeXDSLTM SERVICE, MEMBER agrees to pay to SMART as liquidated damages Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00) to offset SMART'S expense of allocating service, bandwidth, hardware, or human resources to process the order, arrange for service, or to provide freeXDSLTM service to MEMBER, excluding any termination by MEMBER if SMART were to cease providing freeXDSLTM SERVICE with no monthly fees, in which case MEMBER would have the right to cancel service with no liability to SMART for termination. Upon termination of this Agreement, the provisions of Paragraphs 4.0, 12.0, 14.0, 15.0, 16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 20.0, 21.0 and 23.0 shall survive.
Well, let's not start a penis-envy match with "my physics degree is more advanced than yours". While I haven't had time to review the literature, it is true that Guenther Nimitz at the University of Cologne has claimed to transmit information superluminally.
Look him up in your local library if you're interested. Here's a few citations to get you started:
NIMTZ G, ENDERS A, SPIEKER H: PHOTONIC TUNNELING TIMES. JOURNAL DE PHYSIQUE I 4: (4) 565-570 APR 1994
Nimtz G, Heitmann W: Superluminal photonic tunneling and quantum electronics. PROGRESS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS 21: (2) 81-108 1997
Nimtz G: Evanescent modes are not necessarily Einstein causal. EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL B 7: (4) 523-525 FEB 1999
Well, the Wankel, as most people in the U.S. know it, was introduced in mass-production for Mazda's RX-7. Unfortunately, it suffered from two serious problems in the first-generation car: low fuel economy (with relatively high prices at the pumps), and a mechanical problem with sealing the rotor tips, roughly equivalent to leaky piston seals, which led to many repeated trips to the shop.
Despite the fact that Mazda engineering managed to eventually sovle both of these problems, the bad PR about rotary engines has persisted.
Well, I read through the preprint (linked somewhere above); and the INFN guys attempted to isolate their NaI and phototubes by sealing it in a box and flushing with N^2. Later in the 'print, they mention that when they look at the temporal variance in their 'background' (defined as counts above 90 keV), it is consistent with zero.
I'd rather see the paper after the referees have hacked it up, but they seem to understand their apparatus quite well.
I very seriously question the idea that science should be done by issuing statements to the press. If the experimenters at CERN wanted to state their case for the production of Quark-gluon Plasma, it would be taken much more seriously as a series of peer-review articles. I suspect most physicists don't take "science by press release" very seriously, after the lessons taught by the Pons & Fleischman fiasco.
I suspect that there is enormous political and financial pressure on CERN to make some sort of public announcement to pacify European funding agencies; at least I hope that's the case. Otherwise, why bother with science? Just call a press conference and spin the evidence to the journalists that show.
According to the rep on the phone said she walked over to the broker section, they have not allocated the affinity shares yet, but will be doing so within the next 24 hours.
Note: I don't work for the laboratory, although since I'm on one of the RHIC experiments, technically I am an employee.
- Burt ------------------------------
The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National Laboratory in response to an article on RHIC published in yesterday's Sunday Times of London. Please share it with others in your area who do not have access to e-mail.
***
Statement by John Marburger, Brookhaven Lab Director, On Consequences of RHIC Operations July 19, 1999
Yesterday, the Sunday Times of London published a story under the headline "Big Bang Machine could destroy the Earth," with an accompanying editorial. The story has its origins in a letter in the July 1999 issue of Scientific American magazine, in which a prominent physicist describes a possible scenario in which an exotic elementary particle transforms its surroundings.
I am familiar with the issue of possible dire consequences of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which Brookhaven Lab is now commissioning. These issues have been raised and examined by responsible scientists who have concluded that there is no chance that any phenomenon produced by RHIC will lead to disaster.
The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small - only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision. Our universe would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes.
RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC.
I have asked experts in the relevant fields of physics to reduce to a single comprehensive report the arguments that address the safety of each of the speculative "disaster scenarios." I expect the report to be completed well before RHIC produces the high-energy collisions necessary for any of these scenarios. When the report is completed, it will be broadly published and placed on the Laboratory's web site.
************************************** BNL Media & Communications pubaf@bnl.gov 516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368 Brookhaven National Laboratory Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000 Upton NY 11973 www.bnl.gov ************************************
Slashdot Mirror
Fraudulent, or just the product of wishful thinking, and cuts on the data engineered so that they would make the peaks appear? I knew some of the people involved (Greenberg, Rhein, Kaloskamis, Lister, Betts), and I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was outright fraud.
It was just erroneous methodology at ORANGE and EPOS (and EPOS II). After the APEX results were in, most of the people involved (as good scientists should) accepted the results and moved on.
This is the experiment that led Rutherford to propose the nuclear model of the atom: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=u31 8373867x2v351
This is not a recommendation from "the SIDS organization", but from the National Institutes of Health as well as the American Association of Pediatrics. Here are the facts:
Between 1992 to 1998, the number of babies put to sleep on their stomachs went from 70% to 17%. The SIDS rate declined in that same time period by 40%.
Babies at risk for SIDS (generally 0-4 months) are already utterly powerless, no matter which position they're lying in. They're not moving very much -- or at least not in any sort of coordinated way, and can interact just fine with their environment. Finally, there is absolutely no data to support the concern that the child is at any bigger risk for choking on their back than on their stomach.
The side effects tend to be a longer developmental delay for crawling and a temporary flattening of the head. Those seem quite minor compared to SIDS.
PHOBOS paper
STAR paper
PHENIX paper
Already exists: http://catalog.loc.gov
Actually, the idea of 'quark stars' goes back even further than 20 years ago: earliest reference I was able to find dates back to 1969 [1] and cites references from 1965 [2]. (Keep in mind that Gell-mann's paper came out in early '64).
- B
[1] Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento 2, 13 (1969)
[2] Nuovo Cimento 45 A, 513 (1965)
The news coverage seems to be based on the talks that the four LEP experiments gave earlier this week at CERN. If you're interested in the physics behind the press reports, here's a link to the summary talk. You can also hunt around the CERN Experiments web site; click on Aleph, Delphi, L3, and Opal.
I read through the summary presentation -- I think the evidence for a Higgs is not very compelling. The signal (albeit a ~ 4 sigma signal) comes solely from the 4-jet channel in the Aleph experiment. I'd be much more interested in seeing the result in a refereed journal, however. At any rate, you can read the talk and judge for yourself.
Disclaimer: while I am a physics grad student (well, for another month, anyway), Higgs searches are not my realm of expertise.
FreeXDSL? Er, no. According to their draconian service agreement, you agree to switch to their cable or phone service if the price is right, and to pay $500 if you terminate in less than 5 years. No thanks.
Excerpts:
12.0 - AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE LOCAL OR LONG DISTANCE PHONE SERVICE, "CABLE" TV SERVICE
If, at any time during the term of this Agreement, SMART is authorized, with Federal or State authority approval if necessary, to offer and provide local telephone service as a Local Exchange Carrier, long distance or "cable" TV service as a long distance telephone or "cable" TV service provider in the location in which MEMBER desires to receive freeXDSL(TM) SERVICE, and SMART is able to offer and provide such service to MEMBER, MEMBER hereby agrees to allow SMART to provide MEMBER with such service at the applicable tariff or published rate for such service if the rate is no more than the rate currently being paid by MEMBER to the existing Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier or other provider currently furnishing any such service to MEMBER. In any such case, MEMBER'S existing incumbent local exchange carrier will continue to maintain the lines between MEMBER'S location and the telephone company's central switching office as they do currently as prescribed by law.
and
22.0 - TERMINATION
MEMBER may terminate this Agreement at any time within seven (7) days after entering into this Agreement with no liability to SMART. MEMBER may terminate this Agreement at any time after the first seven days following the date MEMBER entered into this Agreement by closing MEMBER'S account for freeXDSLTM SERVICE. SMART may suspend or terminate MEMBER'S account for freeXDSLTM SERVICE at any time for any reason including but not limited to failure to comply with the terms of this Agreement or any SMART policy. If terminated by SMART for a violation by MEMBER of SMART'S AUP or MEMBER'S failure to comply with this Agreement, or if terminated by MEMBER for any reason after the seventh day following MEMBER'S execution of this Agreement, such execution by MEMBER completing registration for freeXDSL(TM) SERVICE, but before the fifth anniversary of the implementation of MEMBER'S freeXDSLTM SERVICE, MEMBER agrees to pay to SMART as liquidated damages Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00) to offset SMART'S expense of allocating service, bandwidth, hardware, or human resources to process the order, arrange for service, or to provide freeXDSLTM service to MEMBER, excluding any termination by MEMBER if SMART were to cease providing freeXDSLTM SERVICE with no monthly fees, in which case MEMBER would have the right to cancel service with no liability to SMART for termination. Upon termination of this Agreement, the provisions of Paragraphs 4.0, 12.0, 14.0, 15.0, 16.0, 17.0, 18.0, 20.0, 21.0 and 23.0 shall survive.
Well, let's not start a penis-envy match with "my physics degree is more advanced than yours". While I haven't had time to review the literature, it is true that Guenther Nimitz at the University of Cologne has claimed to transmit information superluminally.
Look him up in your local library if you're interested. Here's a few citations to get you started:
NIMTZ G, ENDERS A, SPIEKER H: PHOTONIC TUNNELING TIMES. JOURNAL DE PHYSIQUE I 4: (4) 565-570 APR 1994
Nimtz G, Heitmann W: Superluminal photonic tunneling and quantum electronics. PROGRESS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS 21: (2) 81-108 1997
Nimtz G: Evanescent modes are not necessarily Einstein causal. EUROPEAN PHYSICAL JOURNAL B 7: (4) 523-525 FEB 1999
www.arxiv.org should work if you are filtered out from xxx.lanl.gov or its mirrors.
And why was it xxx.lanl.gov in the first place? No real reason, apparently.
Well, the Wankel, as most people in the U.S. know it, was introduced in mass-production for Mazda's RX-7. Unfortunately, it suffered from two serious problems in the first-generation car: low fuel economy (with relatively high prices at the pumps), and a mechanical problem with sealing the rotor tips, roughly equivalent to leaky piston seals, which led to many repeated trips to the shop.
Despite the fact that Mazda engineering managed to eventually sovle both of these problems, the bad PR about rotary engines has persisted.
- B
Well, I read through the preprint (linked somewhere above); and the INFN guys attempted
to isolate their NaI and phototubes by sealing
it in a box and flushing with N^2. Later in the 'print, they mention that when they look at the temporal variance in their 'background' (defined as counts above 90 keV), it is consistent with zero.
I'd rather see the paper after the referees have hacked it up, but they seem to understand their apparatus quite well.
- B
I very seriously question the idea that science should be done by issuing statements to the press. If the experimenters at CERN wanted to state their case for the production of Quark-gluon Plasma, it would be taken much more seriously as a series of peer-review articles. I suspect most physicists don't take "science by press release" very seriously, after the lessons taught by the Pons & Fleischman fiasco.
I suspect that there is enormous political and financial pressure on CERN to make some sort of public announcement to pacify European funding agencies; at least I hope that's the case. Otherwise, why bother with science? Just call a press conference and spin the evidence to the journalists that show.
For you lazy bastards who install ssh RPMS, ssh-1.2.27-7us on www.zedz.net already has been fixed.
From the ChangeLog:
* Mon Dec 06 1999 Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak
- RSAref buffer overrun patch (rsa.c) as described in Core SDI advisory from December 1, 1999. Thanks to Oystein Viggen for sending me this patch.
Design goal is to achieve 100 AGeV Au+Au.
...)
I'm pretty sure more informative documents can
be found at www.rhic.bnl.gov, or check the
last few Quark Matter proceedings (Nucl Phys A
610, 638,
- B
Here's the preprint in ps from LANL, instead; only institutional subscribers have access to the PRL online article.
According to the rep on the phone said she walked over to the broker section, they have not allocated the affinity shares yet, but will be doing so within the next 24 hours.
Note: I don't work for the laboratory, although since I'm on one of the RHIC experiments, technically I am an employee.
- Burt
------------------------------
The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National Laboratory in response to an article on RHIC published in yesterday's Sunday Times of London. Please share it with others in your area who do not have access to e-mail.
***
Statement by John Marburger, Brookhaven Lab Director, On Consequences of RHIC Operations
July 19, 1999
Yesterday, the Sunday Times of London published a story under the headline "Big Bang Machine could destroy the Earth," with an accompanying editorial. The story has its origins in a letter in the July 1999 issue of Scientific American magazine, in which a prominent physicist describes a possible scenario in which an exotic elementary particle transforms its surroundings.
I am familiar with the issue of possible dire consequences of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which Brookhaven Lab is now commissioning. These issues have been raised and examined by responsible scientists who have concluded that there is no chance that any phenomenon produced by RHIC will lead to disaster.
The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small - only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision. Our universe would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes.
RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC.
I have asked experts in the relevant fields of physics to reduce to a single comprehensive report the arguments that address the safety of each of the speculative "disaster scenarios." I expect the report to be completed well before RHIC produces the high-energy collisions necessary for any of these scenarios. When the report is completed, it will be broadly published and placed on the Laboratory's web site.
**************************************
BNL Media & Communications
pubaf@bnl.gov
516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000
Upton NY 11973
www.bnl.gov
************************************