It is interesting on their position on this, we will create the method but someone else will have to create the database and maintain it. What I see here is that they see a bag of worms when it comes to privacy issues and do not what to touch that part of it. If an issue results in some aspect of the collection of such information, ORCID’s only involvement will be the DB structure. They had better include some temple or recommended best know practices on how a collection of this data should be handled.
Creating it is one thing, operating such a creation should also be addressed before untended consequences happen.
FWIW, I think privacy and it's evil twin identity theft are probably issues that they shouldn't be solving since they are proposing some sort of cheezy author validated "password" system. They don't seem to have any way to address anything about keeping people from taking credit for publications of others with the same "name" (CV fraud), or publishing crap papers under someone's name to ruin their reputation, or other types of identity theft, so hopefully they aren't trying to do this. Although they are mostly looking at attribution disambiguation, and centralizing the disclosures, conflicts of interest, duplicate works, and author fees and other thing to reduce the cost of administration of journals, but they seem to be very naiive about credential security (sorta how DNS was naiive about resource record security back in the old days when everyone was playing nice)...
The value of the company’s inventory climbed to $1.03 billion last quarter, up from $618 million a year earlier. Back in mid-2008, when the BlackBerry was still a hot seller and RIM’s stock traded at an all-time high of $147.55, the figure was less than $500 million.
Nowhere in that article does it suggest that 100% of the current inventory will have to be written off. A terrible writeup from someone who clearly has reading comprehension problems.
It is probably just a tacit assumption that they will play a common accounting trick. The game basically works like this, write 100% of the value of the inventory off at a loss and take the earnings hit all in 1 quarter. Now, if/when you eventually sell some of that inventory that you wrote off, the effective gross product margin looks great (because you wrote off all the loss in a previous quarter, the cost of goods is near zero) in the quarter you actually do sell them.
It doesn't help that a lot of the left-leaning politicians who are preaching the need for the most draconian anti-global-warming policies also tend to live is mansions, drive SUVs, and fly around in private jets. This is the kind of issue where, if you people to make serious changes to their lifestyles, you have to lead by example.
I remember an email floating around the interwebs that talked about Gore's mansion vs Bush's ranch in terms of environmental impact.
Of course, nobody really cares about people leading by example, most people just listen to the interwebs propaganda, quickly decide if is this person associated with left-right leanings and are finished with their thinking for the most part and follow like sheep... It's not about the leaders, it's about what they are selling...
I guess I have karma to burn, so I guess I won't post this anon...
FWIW Although 50-50 O2 vs CO2 wouldn't work, you could probably still breathe okay with O2 at 100mmHg and CO2 at 40mmHg... A plant would probably like the ratio in reverse, though...
That's the "comic-book" loner anarchist. True anarchists don't love science, nor do they hate science.
True anarchist are simply against the idea of the "state" because the "state" is in the way of people forming voluntary association with others. Take for example Jesus Christ. To some he was the prototypical anarchist: small groups of proto-christians voluntarily associating and making their way in life w/o the artifice of the state and the coercive way the leaders tax the citizenry and enlist their services in wars. If you didn't like his teachings, you were free to ignore it, but you didn't have to emigrate from a state to achieve that end (of course some may argue about what his teachings have morphed into, but I digress).
So contrary to worrying about making people less reliant on each other, it is all about free association (not unassociation with each other)...
On that whole "hippie" thing well, there might be some thing to that, but under the "true" definition of an anarchist, you might have to concede that members of the KKK are anarchists as well and they are probably not what you think about when you conjour up the word "hippie"...
...Polygamy and polyandry also lead to societal disruptions. Polygamous Mormons make a habit of ditching the excess boys on the streets of nearby cities....
I'm not sure that's a really good argument, are you sure the excess boy situation wouldn't be any better/worse than what exists china and india today? (although I'm joking, I'm only 1/2 joking)...
Perhaps what you should be saying is that polygamy and polyandry are just not normal so they should be tossed in with other things that people might find offensive to make your point.
While we're talking about societal disruptions, maybe we should toss in interracial dating, out-of-wedlock births, single parents, and arab spring?
Of course if a company or government agency didn't have all those layers of makework, they would be accused of not contributing to the community by employing local folks. Full local employment to keep the local community happy is an essential mission tasked to the kingdom builders inside of large corporations and government agencies and w/o them, we'd probably have even more local unemployment. Believe it or not, the skills required by these types of jobs are the most transportable between organizations. If you are making widget or writing software or managing government contracts you always need a purchasing person, and IT person and a finance person and you can always find such a person to fill these jobs w/o recruiting them from across the country or an ocean...
That being said sometimes kingdom builders will fill these jobs with brother-in-laws, cousins, neighbors kids, and mistresses and that's when things really go down hill... At least the ones you are describing just sound like over eager bureaucrats...
The article isn't very helpful and the paper is only available for sale.
In the article it states that Bessel beams are unlike laser beams which "diffract or spread out as they propagate". I know laser beams diffract but I didn't think they spread out (and that was the whole point of them).
Diffract is the same as spread out over distance. The main thing about laser beams is that they are monochromatic (mostly), and with the proper construction, the beam that leaves the oscillation chamber is mostly in phase (other than laser "speckle"). The xy profile of the beam is another matter.
Most laser beams are constructed to have a mostly a gaussian profile which is really close to the diffraction-less bessel profile (both of which are unfortunately of infinite extent). The gaussian profile is a solution of the Helmholz harmonic oscillator pde in cylindrical coordinates using a paraxial (ray-tracing) approximation, and the Bessel profile is a solution that is a true plane wave (basically a better approximation). Of course you can't make either an gaussian or a bessel (they have infinite support), so it's only an approximation, and since it's an approximation, it will diverge (but slowly and bessel more slowly as it's a better approximation). Think of it as picking the goldilocks profile for the beam that's not too sharp on the edge (causing it to diffract away), and not too blurry and that the exact shape so that math works out so it has a constant envelope over time and distance.
Can anybody explain exactly what's going on here and why are the Bessel beams imparting force/energy on the objects toward the beam source?
From what I can tell it seems to be a bit complicated, but as I understand it the gist is that the laser beam creates an electromagnetic wave that interacts with the object's dielectric/magnetic permitivity and creates what is called a Poynting vector S = E x H (a cross product) which is a flux energy in a specific direction. By manipulating the relative polarlization of this laser beam (the Transverse Electric vs Transverse Magnetic components), you can create a situation where this cross-product vector is mostly pointing back to the source. So basically you set up a dipole in the object itself to help you. This effect is small, but if the time averaged beam profile is constant over distance so it doesn't have a z-gradient where it diverges so that the electric field is lower at greater distance (because you used a bessel beam profile), this small flux energy effect will have the tendency to drag the object towards the beam. If there was a z-gradient where the field was lower at greater distance because of diffraction, then that will probably counteract this effect and cause the object to be pushed out instead of tractor-ed in.
Even if being socially awkward has been a fairly constant percentation of the population over time, I'll toss out a theory that being socially awkward mattered less in the past. In the past, people led more geographically structured lives and had few choices. Today, people have less structure and as a result more choices. To navigate in the new world requires being able to navigate a less geographically structured existance (more changes in circles of friends due to migration, more in-home entertainment options resulting in fewer opportunities for meeting folks through repeat public casual acquaintance, etc).
It seem to me that in a more geographically structured life, when you got to be about the age where you wanted to pair off, there was generally a sizable set of people that weren't total strangers (e.g., friend of a friend, or someone that you went to school with, but never talked to, etc) that even someone who was socially awkward could reasonably expect to accidentally interact with. Today, that set of people is smaller and smaller and more social skills are required to build that set to a reasonable size to find someone compatible.
Another factor working against everyone (not just the socially awkward), is that it appears that people have many more choices today than they had in the past (e.g., partners, lifestyles, careers, geography). In this environment, some people aren't good at deciding to do anything (I think they call that analysis paralysis) and thus choose to do nothing. This can't be good especially if you are both indecisive and socially awkward... Maybe this is just new evolutionary pressure on these phenotypes.
If this theory is true, perhaps games and porn are just taking the place of the book of the neo-classic socially awkward book-worm personality. The issue isn't the games and porn per-se, but that new home entertainment options are just eroding into the geographically structured existance that helped encourage boys and girls socialize in the past creating a bigger problem for more socially awkward folks...
I remember reading an old theory about adolescent gender segregation (boys playing with boys and girls playing with girls) before puberty assists in the grooming of behaviors to support romantic attachments (e.g., dating) in later adolescence and that this transition was really the time that required the most socialization skills and tended to set behavioral patterns for the next part of your life until you had children yourself. If games and porn are interfering with this transitional development, then maybe they are somewhat to blame (but no more than books for a book-worm stereotype of an earlier era).
Indeed. If Osama bin Laden hid on the Moon you would be there by now... for about the same money and with fewer people killed in the process.
Although I get where you're coming from, if Osama had the ability to hide on the Moon, much more money would be spent and many more people would have probably been killed in the process....
I'm not a Pheaker, but as I understand it, there is a way to reverse the roles of the caller and the callee. It's useful for the 911 and the police as they can maintain the connection long enough to preform a trace.
My information is pretty dated, but as I recall, although theoretically you can do pretty much anything in the exchange (say like reverse roles and perform a trace), in practice, you probably can't do too much at the calling or called side unless it was the same exchange that handled the caller and callee (esp if it is a crufty old 5ESS). Of course with the current telephone network, no phreaking signals are accepted as the voice path and the signalling path is now totally separate... (In the United States, the last exchange that kind of stuff worked on was wawina and that ended in June 15, 2006)
Note that in SS7 (and it's messages, described by the ITU Q.764 standard which is freely available), either side can disconnect. If the calling party disconnects, a release request (REL) is sent to the terminating exchange and it's up to that exchange to release the line and send a release complete (RLC). If the terminating exchange is next to the police dept or 911**, that terminating exchange could theoretically could hold the line for a while for a trace (although intermediate exchanges may time this out, so you can't do this forever). The same is true for the called party disconnecting which initiates a REL going back to the originating exchange. In this case the originating exchange might hold the line for a while after receiving a REL, but even if the caller doesn't hang up, eventually it will release and send the RLC back to the terminating exchange and release the called line. For other than weird billing purposes, there's not much of a reason to switch caller and callee after a call starts as the caller's exchange is the one that usually initiates the billing record (unless you want to bill say both sides). I don't think you can cancel billing once it started on the caller's originating exchange on most systems.
**911 doesn't work by tracing your call through the network, it works by the orignating exchange sending the correct network address information about the caller in a call-origination message to the 911 exchange (similar to callerID).
Of course at first they assumed I had a windows machine so when I claimed to not know how to type in their url, they tried to get me to hit the windows key to bring up the start menu to open a browser. When I told them I didn't have a window key on my keyboard, they immediatly assumed that I had a mac, so then they transfered me to their "mac" guy, and after messing with that guy's head for a while, I let it slip that I think my brother-in-law set me up with a linux machine and they handed me off to their "linux" expert who of course didn't know how to get me to type in their url into a custom opera based browser which had DNS blocking (I don't have anything like that, I just made that configuration up). At that point, the third guy politely told me that they were sorry that couldn't help me and hung up. That was about 30 minutes of me randomly typing and surfing the internet with the telephone on the desk occasionally picking up the phone to tell them that what they asked me to do didn't work... At least they weren't calling anyone else, but I have to admit, they had a pretty good call script they were working from...
From what I could tell, I think the scam was that they hacked a web page to make a pop-up that claimed to scan your hard drive for viruses so they could sell you a virus elimination package, but I didn't actually go to the url they were pitching and of course the domain was registered to some random corp from nowhere...
Although I'm not 100% sure that this is applicable, the Outerspace Treaty (which forms the basis of international space law), seems to say that...
the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty
So if the prize is sponsored by a US based non-govt entity (I think this is the case), it appears that the US Government has international legal authority in this matter. Of course if the prize was sponsored by govt or non-govt entity that was not a signatory to the Outerspace Treaty, then perhaps the US would have no authority in this matter...
or every bit of news about solar arrays is pretty much the same - better efficiency, lower cost. I'm getting tired of reading the same thing every week.
To each his own...
Sometimes I think every bit of news about linux is pretty much the same - new experimental gui that will solve its desktop penetration problem. I'm getting tired of reading the same thing every week.;^);^)
On shares available for shorting after an IPO... You can't short until you can borrow shares (no naked shorting) and since the facebook IPO was just Friday and even in the normal case, standard settlement is 3-day (and this IPO was royally F-up by Nasdaq), unless your brokerage let you borrow their pre-IPO converted shares to short (as opposed to shares purchased from the IPO), you really couldn't short until the first IPO shares settled (meaning right about now)...
So you really can't read anything into the fact that shares available for shorting not being available until today...
I'd have to disagree with you on letting teachers *teach*.
One day in elementary school, I made the relavation that I wasn't in school to let teachers teach me and that made all the difference. It doesn't matter what the teacher is teaching, demonstrating, interacting, or lecturing, it really only mattered what I'm getting out of it and if I think it is important to me.
Of course many things that can be important to a person at various point of time (e.g., listening enough to a teacher to get a good grade in the course you are taking is a good example of something that could be important to someone at a point in time), but the most important thing that a teacher can do is help a student decide what should be important for them to learn.
IMO, the best teachers aren't helping students with the material, but helping them decide what to learn. Not every student can learn all the material in a course, and not every student is challenged with the material in the course, but every student has the ability to learn something about the subject. When you become a student of the subject, the course material is merely secondary. You learn some of the material if you can, you experience some of the material enough to know what is known or knowable (even if you don't learn it), and you file that subject experience in your educational portfolio.
Another way to look at this is to use Steve Job's perspective which he so eloquently expressed in his commencement address to Stanford which I find quite compelling as well. "The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting." Of course I'm not a brave or as successful as Mr Jobs, but if teachers can teach students to find the path that is best for the student (rather than teach the material), that would be the best use of their time.
I haven't read this, but from your description this seems like how a therapist (playing a nurturing Parent in transactional analysis) might think that a sales person might try to sell a television (expecting to educate the customer on what they should want).
A typical experienced sales person probably instead asks question of the customer (playing the role of the adapted Child forcing the customer into the Parent role) so that the salesperson what was important to the customer and then switch to the Adult role to close the sale (or the critical Parent if the customer switches to the free Child mode to attempt to disengage the sales person).
Since Tog's personality seems to play the Parent role, I guess that doesn't surprise me too much...
After watching both this and Copenhagen Suborbital's launch, I noticed that the rockets seem to "pop" at a few Hz. I don't recall hearing this on NASA launches, does anyone know why this is?
I'm not sure, but I've heard antecdotally from some people that are more knowledgable that these frequencies result from some collision/mixing of the hypersonic exhaust with the surrounding still air. If it were actually something in the rocket, say like low frequency combustion instability in the rocket engine itself (aka chugging), I'm guessing that would shake the rocket to bits. AFAIK, chugging tends to be more in the 20-200Hz range, not really low frequency like a few Hz...
Maybe on NASA launches they put down more water under the launch pad (which might tend to dampen these frequencies when the rocket is near the ground and when you can hear them the most).
Nearly all clinical trials from the pilot study, to the Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, and Phase IV are funded by pharma companies (at least in the US).
For example, let's take Lipitor, basically the best selling drug on the planet.
Although research into statins was quite old by then and there was already a statin on the market (pravastatin aka Pravacol), Dr' Bruce Roth working for Parke-Davis was researching a competitive statin, but discovered that other company had already patented the compound. Now he was restricted to work on Plan B which eventually became atorvastatin calcium (called Lipitor by Pfizer) which turned out to be much more effective than the contemporaries (Merck's lovastatin and simvastatin aka Mevacore and Zocor).
To get to atorastatin, Dr Roth led a group to analyze the statin templates of the time and attempt to synthesize a better more effective drug. There were many setbacks. Some template variations they tested had 100-time less potency, and they found a spatial relationship that had the potential to increase potency quite a bit. Playing around with the spatial relationship wasn't easy, though as many molecular substitutions resulted in unacceptable toxicity in pre-clinical trials. They key came when they discovered the penta-subsituted Pyrrole route. Now they had to figure out the mechamism to manufacture this chemical economically. They came up with a multi-fragment approach that yielded over 75% at each step which not only worked at low temperatures, and had simplified equipment requirements (e.g, no chromatography steps).
By then they had spent 8 years developing the drug 2 years developing the manufacturing process. Without major drugs in the pipeline, Parke-Davis merged into Pfizer. In the meantime, some pre-clinical trials with atovastatin showed almost no significant different for the competitors in animal trials. There were also some other potential issues (extra non-reactive sites on the molecule*** relative to other drugs might contribute to unforseen metabolic residuals or long term side effects). But they decided to move forward with human trials anyhow. The potential market for statins was so large, they thought even capturing a fraction of that would be worth it. They initially had 24 Pfizer employee volunteers for an in-house pre-clinical trial the drug and found it worked far better than the competition and decided to move toward the expensive FDA testing.
With 4 other statins on the market, the FDA was out of the statin testing business and did not want to fast-track the application, so Pfizer funded another trial to South Africa where they worked with a local doctor who attempted to treat people with a local genetic mutation that prevented them from clearing cholesterol from their blood. The doctors had already tried Zocor, and were desperate to try anything and it worked and with that data in hand, they went back to the FDA for fast-track approval. Pfizer basically foot the bill for the whole thing to get fast track approval and the rest was history.
***as it turns out, one theory of why it's much better than other similar drugs is that the non-reactive sites might promote the drug to linger in the blood longer resulting in more effacacy
Also repell patents on drugs that were funded in a material way by the public. Because nearly all drugs are funded by the public. Labs almost invariably hook into the process at the very last stage, when the gory details have been worked out already, and reap the benefits for the entire process.
Although that might please the anti-patent croud, I think, you would find pretty much no-takers for funding for FDA trials. Why would any company pay for an FDA trial when the outcome is uncertain and if it turned out okay they would be in competion with every other company to manufacture the drug, but the other companies didn't have to pay so every company takes one step back...
The only solutions to this problem seem to be:
1. Maybe the government would pay for all drug trials as well (hmm, try making that process non-political, like publically funded elections)... 2. Maybe we'd not have FDA trials at all (the libertarian idea, let the market sort it out)... 3. Maybe we'd have the govt subsidize failed drug trials (and have the govt trial all sorts of crap the industry threw at it, a windfall to the drug trial industry) 4. Maybe that we'd give the company that funded the trial a short term monopoly to recoup the risk of the money tendered on the drug trial (gasp, is that a patent?) 5. Maybe we can force companies to fund a certain percentage of trials in order to maintain the ability to legally sell a certain volume of drugs in the US (the pooled risk pool idea, kinda pari-mutual betting or forced insurance)...
Although I personally like #5, I think that companies would tend to gravitate to the least risky drugs that are the cheapest to trial or conversely the most obscure conditions that would probably reduce the quality of break-through drugs available to the general public. Sadly, it seems to me that #4 is currently the best practical option and the other ones are mostly just fantasies (esp #2, I don't think anyone but a die-hard libertarian wants that)... You might argue that the patents are too long, but that is merely a technicality of the current patent regime, not a reason to throw out the idea of patents altogether...
Pre-IPO shareholders can also usually get in on the sale, at the IPO price. Say 5 people get together and start a company, they each own 20% of the shares. Time goes on and they want to raise capital for expansion. "The Company" creates more shares to sell as part of the IPO, but the existing stock holders also can offer they shares they own for sale.
Sure, if they are "big" share holders, they can get in on the IPO sale, but that is usually done to adjust the float (create enough shares and value for a liquid market). Big institutional investors (the kind that soak up most of the subscriptions of IPO shares), don't generally like small floats or share issues where there are too many big insiders that can dump so there's generally some pressure for these insiders to unload enough shares to keep a good float***. For the average employee joe that has a few vested pre-ipo shares, they don't get in on the actual IPO sale (on the other hand some companies let even small insiders in on the IPO-buy side if they want to part with their hard earned money).
Why not? IPO subscriptions are weird beasts. It's kinda like an auction, but everything has to be sold at the same price so there's this weird quantization that has to be done. Let's say they want to sell 9,500,000 shares and could sell 10,000,000 @38, but only 9,000,000 @39, the general strategy is they create an over-allotment and go out at 38, but say if the employees collectively own 501,000 shares, which of the the 1000 shares get stood up or maybe only people holding 400,000 would let it go at 38 and are holding out for 39? That's why they don't let any joe-averages into the IPO subscription sale, they can't negotiate with that many parties at once, only the "big" pre-IPO share holders can participate and generally only to fix float problems. To fix the over-allotment, they just magically create 500,000 over-allotment "treasury" shares and dillute out over all the investors instead and call it a day. The small guys to the wolves with normal trading. Often this just works out as shares sometimes go up after the IPO.
*** For example, institutional investors generally don't want an stock where if you want to buy 5% of the value of the company, you don't have to buy 50% of the liquid shares (because insiders are sitting on 90% of the shares not trading them).
Not if your shares were among the ones being sold as part of the IPO.
AFAIK, In most IPOs, the shares sold are generally "treasury" shares (shares owned by the company) or institutional shares (owned by venture capitalists and pension funds that invested pre-IPO) so that the proceeds go to the company and the early round investors. Of course some early insiders/founders may own significant blocks of preferred shares that become part of the IPO process by being converted to unrestricted shares and sold to increase "float" (the number of outstanding shares), w/o diluting share value, but for most IPOs, you can usually count those employees and directors on your fingers.
For most typcial employees, they might sell your vested shares as soon as normal trading opens and that might be very near the IPO price (or pinned to the IPO price depending on the generosity of the brokers that coordinate inside sales for the company and their ablity to make market and block trade), but they are generally not part of the actual IPO subscription allocation process.
From the comments I've read so far, it doesn't sound like people are understanding this technology...
Not sure if I understand it totally either, but basically, the website seems to talk about a mixutre of 2 colloidal liquids are used to create a semi-transparent membrane where they can use ultrasound to mimic some spatially varying BRDFs (bi-directional reflectance distribution function) effects. If you haven't heard of BRDFs, they are used in 3d computer graphics to simulate realistic lighting of different surface types (light from this angle and observer direction has the surface look a certain color whereas illuminating light from a different angle and observer direction looks a different color typically described as a 4D projected map). This give some images more realistic material look (as opposed to the strange plastic look where no matter how to turn your head or change the lighting angle the same average lambertian lighting model of the object is returned).
If I read the summary correctly, this device could probably also be used like those holographic stickers or lenticular viewers with projected light (instead of reflected light) allowing for more control in time and space and thus better realism. Unfortunatly, just like holographic sticker sand lenticular viewers, it's probably just a toy device, though maybe someday, the concepts could be scaled to do something less toy-ish...
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting on their position on this, we will create the method but someone else will have to create the database and maintain it. What I see here is that they see a bag of worms when it comes to privacy issues and do not what to touch that part of it. If an issue results in some aspect of the collection of such information, ORCID’s only involvement will be the DB structure. They had better include some temple or recommended best know practices on how a collection of this data should be handled.
Creating it is one thing, operating such a creation should also be addressed before untended consequences happen.
FWIW, I think privacy and it's evil twin identity theft are probably issues that they shouldn't be solving since they are proposing some sort of cheezy author validated "password" system. They don't seem to have any way to address anything about keeping people from taking credit for publications of others with the same "name" (CV fraud), or publishing crap papers under someone's name to ruin their reputation, or other types of identity theft, so hopefully they aren't trying to do this. Although they are mostly looking at attribution disambiguation, and centralizing the disclosures, conflicts of interest, duplicate works, and author fees and other thing to reduce the cost of administration of journals, but they seem to be very naiive about credential security (sorta how DNS was naiive about resource record security back in the old days when everyone was playing nice)...
From TFA:
Nowhere in that article does it suggest that 100% of the current inventory will have to be written off. A terrible writeup from someone who clearly has reading comprehension problems.
It is probably just a tacit assumption that they will play a common accounting trick. The game basically works like this, write 100% of the value of the inventory off at a loss and take the earnings hit all in 1 quarter. Now, if/when you eventually sell some of that inventory that you wrote off, the effective gross product margin looks great (because you wrote off all the loss in a previous quarter, the cost of goods is near zero) in the quarter you actually do sell them.
It doesn't help that a lot of the left-leaning politicians who are preaching the need for the most draconian anti-global-warming policies also tend to live is mansions, drive SUVs, and fly around in private jets. This is the kind of issue where, if you people to make serious changes to their lifestyles, you have to lead by example.
I remember an email floating around the interwebs that talked about Gore's mansion vs Bush's ranch in terms of environmental impact.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
Of course, nobody really cares about people leading by example, most people just listen to the interwebs propaganda, quickly decide if is this person associated with left-right leanings and are finished with their thinking for the most part and follow like sheep... It's not about the leaders, it's about what they are selling...
I guess I have karma to burn, so I guess I won't post this anon...
FWIW Although 50-50 O2 vs CO2 wouldn't work, you could probably still breathe okay with O2 at 100mmHg and CO2 at 40mmHg...
A plant would probably like the ratio in reverse, though...
That's the "comic-book" loner anarchist. True anarchists don't love science, nor do they hate science.
True anarchist are simply against the idea of the "state" because the "state" is in the way of people forming voluntary association with others. Take for example Jesus Christ. To some he was the prototypical anarchist: small groups of proto-christians voluntarily associating and making their way in life w/o the artifice of the state and the coercive way the leaders tax the citizenry and enlist their services in wars. If you didn't like his teachings, you were free to ignore it, but you didn't have to emigrate from a state to achieve that end (of course some may argue about what his teachings have morphed into, but I digress).
So contrary to worrying about making people less reliant on each other, it is all about free association (not unassociation with each other)...
On that whole "hippie" thing well, there might be some thing to that, but under the "true" definition of an anarchist, you might have to concede that members of the KKK are anarchists as well and they are probably not what you think about when you conjour up the word "hippie"...
...Polygamy and polyandry also lead to societal disruptions. Polygamous Mormons make a habit of ditching the excess boys on the streets of nearby cities....
I'm not sure that's a really good argument, are you sure the excess boy situation wouldn't be any better/worse than what exists china and india today? (although I'm joking, I'm only 1/2 joking)...
Perhaps what you should be saying is that polygamy and polyandry are just not normal so they should be tossed in with other things that people might find offensive to make your point.
While we're talking about societal disruptions, maybe we should toss in interracial dating, out-of-wedlock births, single parents, and arab spring?
You had be moing there for a little while, but then you tossed in that "wealth/poor" thing.
I doubt wealth has much to do with
1. How big the family is
2. How big the social network is around the family
Just about all the antecdotal experience I have suggests that wealth is negatively correlated with both family size and longevity...
Of course if a company or government agency didn't have all those layers of makework, they would be accused of not contributing to the community by employing local folks. Full local employment to keep the local community happy is an essential mission tasked to the kingdom builders inside of large corporations and government agencies and w/o them, we'd probably have even more local unemployment. Believe it or not, the skills required by these types of jobs are the most transportable between organizations. If you are making widget or writing software or managing government contracts you always need a purchasing person, and IT person and a finance person and you can always find such a person to fill these jobs w/o recruiting them from across the country or an ocean...
That being said sometimes kingdom builders will fill these jobs with brother-in-laws, cousins, neighbors kids, and mistresses and that's when things really go down hill... At least the ones you are describing just sound like over eager bureaucrats...
It's too bad they don't make phone software or something that could help them pick up at least a little market share in that area, amirite?
Maybe google (or facebook) should just suckit in and buy Twitter...
The article isn't very helpful and the paper is only available for sale.
In the article it states that Bessel beams are unlike laser beams which "diffract or spread out as they propagate". I know laser beams diffract but I didn't think they spread out (and that was the whole point of them).
Diffract is the same as spread out over distance. The main thing about laser beams is that they are monochromatic (mostly), and with the proper construction, the beam that leaves the oscillation chamber is mostly in phase (other than laser "speckle"). The xy profile of the beam is another matter.
Most laser beams are constructed to have a mostly a gaussian profile which is really close to the diffraction-less bessel profile (both of which are unfortunately of infinite extent). The gaussian profile is a solution of the Helmholz harmonic oscillator pde in cylindrical coordinates using a paraxial (ray-tracing) approximation, and the Bessel profile is a solution that is a true plane wave (basically a better approximation). Of course you can't make either an gaussian or a bessel (they have infinite support), so it's only an approximation, and since it's an approximation, it will diverge (but slowly and bessel more slowly as it's a better approximation). Think of it as picking the goldilocks profile for the beam that's not too sharp on the edge (causing it to diffract away), and not too blurry and that the exact shape so that math works out so it has a constant envelope over time and distance.
Can anybody explain exactly what's going on here and why are the Bessel beams imparting force/energy on the objects toward the beam source?
From what I can tell it seems to be a bit complicated, but as I understand it the gist is that the laser beam creates an electromagnetic wave that interacts with the object's dielectric/magnetic permitivity and creates what is called a Poynting vector S = E x H (a cross product) which is a flux energy in a specific direction. By manipulating the relative polarlization of this laser beam (the Transverse Electric vs Transverse Magnetic components), you can create a situation where this cross-product vector is mostly pointing back to the source. So basically you set up a dipole in the object itself to help you. This effect is small, but if the time averaged beam profile is constant over distance so it doesn't have a z-gradient where it diverges so that the electric field is lower at greater distance (because you used a bessel beam profile), this small flux energy effect will have the tendency to drag the object towards the beam. If there was a z-gradient where the field was lower at greater distance because of diffraction, then that will probably counteract this effect and cause the object to be pushed out instead of tractor-ed in.
Even if being socially awkward has been a fairly constant percentation of the population over time, I'll toss out a theory that being socially awkward mattered less in the past. In the past, people led more geographically structured lives and had few choices. Today, people have less structure and as a result more choices. To navigate in the new world requires being able to navigate a less geographically structured existance (more changes in circles of friends due to migration, more in-home entertainment options resulting in fewer opportunities for meeting folks through repeat public casual acquaintance, etc).
It seem to me that in a more geographically structured life, when you got to be about the age where you wanted to pair off, there was generally a sizable set of people that weren't total strangers (e.g., friend of a friend, or someone that you went to school with, but never talked to, etc) that even someone who was socially awkward could reasonably expect to accidentally interact with. Today, that set of people is smaller and smaller and more social skills are required to build that set to a reasonable size to find someone compatible.
Another factor working against everyone (not just the socially awkward), is that it appears that people have many more choices today than they had in the past (e.g., partners, lifestyles, careers, geography). In this environment, some people aren't good at deciding to do anything (I think they call that analysis paralysis) and thus choose to do nothing. This can't be good especially if you are both indecisive and socially awkward... Maybe this is just new evolutionary pressure on these phenotypes.
If this theory is true, perhaps games and porn are just taking the place of the book of the neo-classic socially awkward book-worm personality. The issue isn't the games and porn per-se, but that new home entertainment options are just eroding into the geographically structured existance that helped encourage boys and girls socialize in the past creating a bigger problem for more socially awkward folks...
I remember reading an old theory about adolescent gender segregation (boys playing with boys and girls playing with girls) before puberty assists in the grooming of behaviors to support romantic attachments (e.g., dating) in later adolescence and that this transition was really the time that required the most socialization skills and tended to set behavioral patterns for the next part of your life until you had children yourself. If games and porn are interfering with this transitional development, then maybe they are somewhat to blame (but no more than books for a book-worm stereotype of an earlier era).
Indeed. If Osama bin Laden hid on the Moon you would be there by now... for about the same money and with fewer people killed in the process.
Although I get where you're coming from, if Osama had the ability to hide on the Moon, much more money would be spent and many more people would have probably been killed in the process....
I'm not a Pheaker, but as I understand it, there is a way to reverse the roles of the caller and the callee. It's useful for the 911 and the police as they can maintain the connection long enough to preform a trace.
My information is pretty dated, but as I recall, although theoretically you can do pretty much anything in the exchange (say like reverse roles and perform a trace), in practice, you probably can't do too much at the calling or called side unless it was the same exchange that handled the caller and callee (esp if it is a crufty old 5ESS). Of course with the current telephone network, no phreaking signals are accepted as the voice path and the signalling path is now totally separate... (In the United States, the last exchange that kind of stuff worked on was wawina and that ended in June 15, 2006)
Note that in SS7 (and it's messages, described by the ITU Q.764 standard which is freely available), either side can disconnect. If the calling party disconnects, a release request (REL) is sent to the terminating exchange and it's up to that exchange to release the line and send a release complete (RLC). If the terminating exchange is next to the police dept or 911**, that terminating exchange could theoretically could hold the line for a while for a trace (although intermediate exchanges may time this out, so you can't do this forever). The same is true for the called party disconnecting which initiates a REL going back to the originating exchange. In this case the originating exchange might hold the line for a while after receiving a REL, but even if the caller doesn't hang up, eventually it will release and send the RLC back to the terminating exchange and release the called line. For other than weird billing purposes, there's not much of a reason to switch caller and callee after a call starts as the caller's exchange is the one that usually initiates the billing record (unless you want to bill say both sides). I don't think you can cancel billing once it started on the caller's originating exchange on most systems.
**911 doesn't work by tracing your call through the network, it works by the orignating exchange sending the correct network address information about the caller in a call-origination message to the 911 exchange (similar to callerID).
I actually did this.
Of course at first they assumed I had a windows machine so when I claimed to not know how to type in their url, they tried to get me to hit the windows key to bring up the start menu to open a browser. When I told them I didn't have a window key on my keyboard, they immediatly assumed that I had a mac, so then they transfered me to their "mac" guy, and after messing with that guy's head for a while, I let it slip that I think my brother-in-law set me up with a linux machine and they handed me off to their "linux" expert who of course didn't know how to get me to type in their url into a custom opera based browser which had DNS blocking (I don't have anything like that, I just made that configuration up). At that point, the third guy politely told me that they were sorry that couldn't help me and hung up. That was about 30 minutes of me randomly typing and surfing the internet with the telephone on the desk occasionally picking up the phone to tell them that what they asked me to do didn't work... At least they weren't calling anyone else, but I have to admit, they had a pretty good call script they were working from...
From what I could tell, I think the scam was that they hacked a web page to make a pop-up that claimed to scan your hard drive for viruses so they could sell you a virus elimination package, but I didn't actually go to the url they were pitching and of course the domain was registered to some random corp from nowhere...
Although I'm not 100% sure that this is applicable, the Outerspace Treaty (which forms the basis of international space law), seems to say that...
the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty
So if the prize is sponsored by a US based non-govt entity (I think this is the case), it appears that the US Government has international legal authority in this matter. Of course if the prize was sponsored by govt or non-govt entity that was not a signatory to the Outerspace Treaty, then perhaps the US would have no authority in this matter...
or every bit of news about solar arrays is pretty much the same - better efficiency, lower cost. I'm getting tired of reading the same thing every week.
To each his own...
Sometimes I think every bit of news about linux is pretty much the same - new experimental gui that will solve its desktop penetration problem. I'm getting tired of reading the same thing every week. ;^) ;^)
On shares available for shorting after an IPO... You can't short until you can borrow shares (no naked shorting) and since the facebook IPO was just Friday and even in the normal case, standard settlement is 3-day (and this IPO was royally F-up by Nasdaq), unless your brokerage let you borrow their pre-IPO converted shares to short (as opposed to shares purchased from the IPO), you really couldn't short until the first IPO shares settled (meaning right about now)...
So you really can't read anything into the fact that shares available for shorting not being available until today...
I'd have to disagree with you on letting teachers *teach*.
One day in elementary school, I made the relavation that I wasn't in school to let teachers teach me and that made all the difference. It doesn't matter what the teacher is teaching, demonstrating, interacting, or lecturing, it really only mattered what I'm getting out of it and if I think it is important to me.
Of course many things that can be important to a person at various point of time (e.g., listening enough to a teacher to get a good grade in the course you are taking is a good example of something that could be important to someone at a point in time), but the most important thing that a teacher can do is help a student decide what should be important for them to learn.
IMO, the best teachers aren't helping students with the material, but helping them decide what to learn. Not every student can learn all the material in a course, and not every student is challenged with the material in the course, but every student has the ability to learn something about the subject. When you become a student of the subject, the course material is merely secondary. You learn some of the material if you can, you experience some of the material enough to know what is known or knowable (even if you don't learn it), and you file that subject experience in your educational portfolio.
Another way to look at this is to use Steve Job's perspective which he so eloquently expressed in his commencement address to Stanford which I find quite compelling as well. "The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting." Of course I'm not a brave or as successful as Mr Jobs, but if teachers can teach students to find the path that is best for the student (rather than teach the material), that would be the best use of their time.
I haven't read this, but from your description this seems like how a therapist (playing a nurturing Parent in transactional analysis) might think that a sales person might try to sell a television (expecting to educate the customer on what they should want).
A typical experienced sales person probably instead asks question of the customer (playing the role of the adapted Child forcing the customer into the Parent role) so that the salesperson what was important to the customer and then switch to the Adult role to close the sale (or the critical Parent if the customer switches to the free Child mode to attempt to disengage the sales person).
Since Tog's personality seems to play the Parent role, I guess that doesn't surprise me too much...
After watching both this and Copenhagen Suborbital's launch, I noticed that the rockets seem to "pop" at a few Hz. I don't recall hearing this on NASA launches, does anyone know why this is?
I'm not sure, but I've heard antecdotally from some people that are more knowledgable that these frequencies result from some collision/mixing of the hypersonic exhaust with the surrounding still air. If it were actually something in the rocket, say like low frequency combustion instability in the rocket engine itself (aka chugging), I'm guessing that would shake the rocket to bits. AFAIK, chugging tends to be more in the 20-200Hz range, not really low frequency like a few Hz...
Maybe on NASA launches they put down more water under the launch pad (which might tend to dampen these frequencies when the rocket is near the ground and when you can hear them the most).
Er, no...
Nearly all clinical trials from the pilot study, to the Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, and Phase IV are funded by pharma companies (at least in the US).
For example, let's take Lipitor, basically the best selling drug on the planet.
Although research into statins was quite old by then and there was already a statin on the market (pravastatin aka Pravacol), Dr' Bruce Roth working for Parke-Davis was researching a competitive statin, but discovered that other company had already patented the compound. Now he was restricted to work on Plan B which eventually became atorvastatin calcium (called Lipitor by Pfizer) which turned out to be much more effective than the contemporaries (Merck's lovastatin and simvastatin aka Mevacore and Zocor).
To get to atorastatin, Dr Roth led a group to analyze the statin templates of the time and attempt to synthesize a better more effective drug. There were many setbacks. Some template variations they tested had 100-time less potency, and they found a spatial relationship that had the potential to increase potency quite a bit. Playing around with the spatial relationship wasn't easy, though as many molecular substitutions resulted in unacceptable toxicity in pre-clinical trials. They key came when they discovered the penta-subsituted Pyrrole route. Now they had to figure out the mechamism to manufacture this chemical economically. They came up with a multi-fragment approach that yielded over 75% at each step which not only worked at low temperatures, and had simplified equipment requirements (e.g, no chromatography steps).
By then they had spent 8 years developing the drug 2 years developing the manufacturing process. Without major drugs in the pipeline, Parke-Davis merged into Pfizer. In the meantime, some pre-clinical trials with atovastatin showed almost no significant different for the competitors in animal trials. There were also some other potential issues (extra non-reactive sites on the molecule*** relative to other drugs might contribute to unforseen metabolic residuals or long term side effects). But they decided to move forward with human trials anyhow. The potential market for statins was so large, they thought even capturing a fraction of that would be worth it. They initially had 24 Pfizer employee volunteers for an in-house pre-clinical trial the drug and found it worked far better than the competition and decided to move toward the expensive FDA testing.
With 4 other statins on the market, the FDA was out of the statin testing business and did not want to fast-track the application, so Pfizer funded another trial to South Africa where they worked with a local doctor who attempted to treat people with a local genetic mutation that prevented them from clearing cholesterol from their blood. The doctors had already tried Zocor, and were desperate to try anything and it worked and with that data in hand, they went back to the FDA for fast-track approval. Pfizer basically foot the bill for the whole thing to get fast track approval and the rest was history.
***as it turns out, one theory of why it's much better than other similar drugs is that the non-reactive sites might promote the drug to linger in the blood longer resulting in more effacacy
Also repell patents on drugs that were funded in a material way by the public. Because nearly all drugs are funded by the public. Labs almost invariably hook into the process at the very last stage, when the gory details have been worked out already, and reap the benefits for the entire process.
Although that might please the anti-patent croud, I think, you would find pretty much no-takers for funding for FDA trials. Why would any company pay for an FDA trial when the outcome is uncertain and if it turned out okay they would be in competion with every other company to manufacture the drug, but the other companies didn't have to pay so every company takes one step back...
The only solutions to this problem seem to be:
1. Maybe the government would pay for all drug trials as well (hmm, try making that process non-political, like publically funded elections)...
2. Maybe we'd not have FDA trials at all (the libertarian idea, let the market sort it out)...
3. Maybe we'd have the govt subsidize failed drug trials (and have the govt trial all sorts of crap the industry threw at it, a windfall to the drug trial industry)
4. Maybe that we'd give the company that funded the trial a short term monopoly to recoup the risk of the money tendered on the drug trial (gasp, is that a patent?)
5. Maybe we can force companies to fund a certain percentage of trials in order to maintain the ability to legally sell a certain volume of drugs in the US (the pooled risk pool idea, kinda pari-mutual betting or forced insurance)...
Although I personally like #5, I think that companies would tend to gravitate to the least risky drugs that are the cheapest to trial or conversely the most obscure conditions that would probably reduce the quality of break-through drugs available to the general public. Sadly, it seems to me that #4 is currently the best practical option and the other ones are mostly just fantasies (esp #2, I don't think anyone but a die-hard libertarian wants that)... You might argue that the patents are too long, but that is merely a technicality of the current patent regime, not a reason to throw out the idea of patents altogether...
Pre-IPO shareholders can also usually get in on the sale, at the IPO price. Say 5 people get together and start a company, they each own 20% of the shares. Time goes on and they want to raise capital for expansion. "The Company" creates more shares to sell as part of the IPO, but the existing stock holders also can offer they shares they own for sale.
Sure, if they are "big" share holders, they can get in on the IPO sale, but that is usually done to adjust the float (create enough shares and value for a liquid market). Big institutional investors (the kind that soak up most of the subscriptions of IPO shares), don't generally like small floats or share issues where there are too many big insiders that can dump so there's generally some pressure for these insiders to unload enough shares to keep a good float***. For the average employee joe that has a few vested pre-ipo shares, they don't get in on the actual IPO sale (on the other hand some companies let even small insiders in on the IPO-buy side if they want to part with their hard earned money).
Why not? IPO subscriptions are weird beasts. It's kinda like an auction, but everything has to be sold at the same price so there's this weird quantization that has to be done. Let's say they want to sell 9,500,000 shares and could sell 10,000,000 @38, but only 9,000,000 @39, the general strategy is they create an over-allotment and go out at 38, but say if the employees collectively own 501,000 shares, which of the the 1000 shares get stood up or maybe only people holding 400,000 would let it go at 38 and are holding out for 39? That's why they don't let any joe-averages into the IPO subscription sale, they can't negotiate with that many parties at once, only the "big" pre-IPO share holders can participate and generally only to fix float problems. To fix the over-allotment, they just magically create 500,000 over-allotment "treasury" shares and dillute out over all the investors instead and call it a day. The small guys to the wolves with normal trading. Often this just works out as shares sometimes go up after the IPO.
*** For example, institutional investors generally don't want an stock where if you want to buy 5% of the value of the company, you don't have to buy 50% of the liquid shares (because insiders are sitting on 90% of the shares not trading them).
Not if your shares were among the ones being sold as part of the IPO.
AFAIK, In most IPOs, the shares sold are generally "treasury" shares (shares owned by the company) or institutional shares (owned by venture capitalists and pension funds that invested pre-IPO) so that the proceeds go to the company and the early round investors. Of course some early insiders/founders may own significant blocks of preferred shares that become part of the IPO process by being converted to unrestricted shares and sold to increase "float" (the number of outstanding shares), w/o diluting share value, but for most IPOs, you can usually count those employees and directors on your fingers.
For most typcial employees, they might sell your vested shares as soon as normal trading opens and that might be very near the IPO price (or pinned to the IPO price depending on the generosity of the brokers that coordinate inside sales for the company and their ablity to make market and block trade), but they are generally not part of the actual IPO subscription allocation process.
From the comments I've read so far, it doesn't sound like people are understanding this technology...
Not sure if I understand it totally either, but basically, the website seems to talk about a mixutre of 2 colloidal liquids are used to create a semi-transparent membrane where they can use ultrasound to mimic some spatially varying BRDFs (bi-directional reflectance distribution function) effects. If you haven't heard of BRDFs, they are used in 3d computer graphics to simulate realistic lighting of different surface types (light from this angle and observer direction has the surface look a certain color whereas illuminating light from a different angle and observer direction looks a different color typically described as a 4D projected map). This give some images more realistic material look (as opposed to the strange plastic look where no matter how to turn your head or change the lighting angle the same average lambertian lighting model of the object is returned).
If I read the summary correctly, this device could probably also be used like those holographic stickers or lenticular viewers with projected light (instead of reflected light) allowing for more control in time and space and thus better realism. Unfortunatly, just like holographic sticker sand lenticular viewers, it's probably just a toy device, though maybe someday, the concepts could be scaled to do something less toy-ish...