Politics (and spying) aside, this is probably not unlike their past effort to create a new Audio Video compression Standard. I'm sure the Chinese look at the Arm ISA situation and see wow, you really do have to get an Arm license if you want to make a smart phone. This seems similar to the BluRay MPEG/H.264 situation and their move with AVS. They've got a lot of smart folks in China and want to spur development. In the process, the want to see if they can give their local companies an economic advantage (reduced licensing fees for manufactured products for domestic consumption).
If this takes off in China (a big market), then instead of chinese companies paying foreign companies a licensing fee for products (net outflow of money), the foreign companies that want to make a product for consumption in the chinese market will probably have to pay the Chinese licensing fees for this. That way money for new development gets to stay in China benefiting their economy more than others. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
Of course if it makes it easier to spy on folks, so much the better (homogenous platforms make that easier), but I don't think that's the main motivation. As with most things in China today, the motivation is national economic self-interest.
If you are the administration and your goal is merge the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and the Department of Electrial and Computer Engineering (ECE) and you know that poltics in both departments will resist your call for a merger you instead try a the football version of the statue of liberty play.
With one hand, the administration fakes a "pass" proposing that both departments cut their CS funding causing the defenders for separate CISE and ECE departments to get out of position as they scramble to cause outrage that their funding for CS will be cut. While everyone is looking at the "passing" hand, then with your back hand you toss the ball to people in the department more sympathetic to merging the departments who have been moving on this proposal all along hoping that they can now outrun the opponents defending the original play who are now caught out of position.
Many mathemeticians studying chaotic behavior would probably disagree with that statement. Even the well-studied 3-body physics problem exhibits chaotic behaviour. It would be foolish to think that the N-dimensional M-input climate dynamical system didn't exhibit chaotic behaviour. In fact it is probably highly likley that any percieved stability in our so-called "climate" is actually a strange attractor/orbit in this chaotic system.
The non-energy uses of hydrocarbons can continue (although fossil-sourced fertilizers should probably be the first to be phased out). Grid power and most cars don't need fossil fuels, switch those off of it and go from there.
Why should fossil-sourced fertilizers be phased out first? Ferilizer use of "fossil" fuels comes in 2 places: first from methane (assuming you are talking about the Haber-Boschprocess which requires some source of hydrogen), and second the energy used in the process. At least according to the wikipedia, this only consume 3-5% of the world's natural gas production to yield 80% of the total world's ammonia production (ammonia is the most common precursor to nitrogen component fertilizers). The bulk of natural gas is used for heating and electrial generation and cooking. The reason a methane based process is used is that it is more energy efficient than other industrial scale techiques (other than just mining bound nitrogen products). Surely there is a bigger hydro-carbon target than fertilizer...
FWIW, the main advance with this announcement is not the omega-3/FAT-1 transgenic aspect, it is the new cloning technique BGI calls handmade cloning which apparently allows lower-tech facilities and higher transgenic clone yield. BGI has already done this transgenic modification with pigs and now they have done it with sheep. With this new cloning technique, however, it might be possible to do this at an industrial scale.
However, If you are interested instead about this specific "fat-1" transgenic idea, it was done with mice way back in 2004.
Although that is possibly true that saturated fats aren't corrolated with increased risk of CHD or CVD, omega-3 fatty acids are required for controlling blood clotting and building cell membranes in the brain and are assumed to be a necessary nutrient. The "healthy populations" you seem to be alluding to likley maintain their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids from seafood and nuts and oils for 6-9 months of the year.
28cycles = (14/1Billion) sec * 2BillionCycles/sec (the paper says 14ns-313ns which is my interpretation) 0.142858rep cycles = (1/14Billion) sec * 2BillionCycles/sec (a possible misinterpretation) 7sec^2/cycles = 14Billion sec * 1sec/2BillionCycles (a very strange interpretation given unit analysis)
So although your statement appears to be mathematically correct, I fail to see how it is applicable to my statement...
Article says! It's on the order of 14billionths of a second.
When you say it like that, it sounds small, but if I did my math right, 14billionths of a second is the same amount of time as 28 clock cycles on a 2GHz processor.
One thing you might consider is that this whole scientific publishing business might go the way of the music business in a few years. Right now musicians can often make more money touring than releasing records (publishing). So many old musicans have gone to treating "publishing" as a side-line publicity mechanisms for their day job (touring). Unfortunatly, newer mucisians don't have the historical publicity to ride on, so they are still forced into the old system. What this has done is create a discontinuity where the influence of older music is growing and sometime overshadowing the newer music making it harder to break into the system increasing the influence of the music cartel on newer artists and creating a sea of overproduced music. Sure, there's the occasional Justin Beiber (not that I find his music very listenable, but he seems to be a popular reference for this) that breaks out, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
If it ever gets to the point where top researchers eventually find they get more impact by visiting, rather than publishing in wide access journals which are dilluted by crap, you may find that libraries become warehouses for un-impactful, un-referenced derivative papers, and all the cutting edge stuff being unpublished work done by visiting researchers at instituitions publishing in in-house journals or side channel (e.g., non-peer reviewd university press releases). Not sure that would be great if the primary interest was in public access to quality information. Finding and evaluating stuff in a bunch of in-house journals will basically be taking ourselves back to the early days of academia (when researchers disseminated primarily by visiting and publication never reached very far and researchers often unknowingly spent careers duplicating work done by others).
There's probably some way to do this that works out for the general good, but this is a problem that the current music industry faces too and I haven't seen anyone come up with a workable long term system yet. However, in the shorter term, are libraries similar to the music store in this analogy? Is there a iTunes or Amazon like competitor/entity in the future for university libraries? Could such an entity destroy the concept of a journal (kind of like Amazon and iTunes destroyed the music album)? Could they eventually flatten the pricing model (any subject: peer reviewed papers 99c, unreviewed 10c)?
If you are a librarian, these seem to be important things to consider.
... As a result, currently, pretty much any article *is* freely available to me. But many are not so fortunate — particularly where universities cannot afford to pay access fees, but more so for those who are not affiliated to universities, and who would have to pay considerable fees for access to even individual articles...
You are paying (at least your university is paying, leaving less money for the university to spend on other things). Often people forget this. So when you are reading through your "free" papers perhaps you might also notice if one of your collegues didn't get a matching grant for their research or that the janitor that doesn't come around to clean your office very much anymore, or there's one less TA for that class... There's always a cost, even if you you aren't paying a cost yourself. The cost may look small when spread out over many folks, but it's isn't zero. On the other hand, dropping a subscription to a journal by a large university to "save" money will cost something on the other side (people employed by the jounal will get fewer raises or lose their jobs). Realistically, journal access is really a fringe benefit to you (not unlike free coffee in a breakroom), but when the cash crunch comes, the fringe benefits are often the first to go.
What we can hope for is a more equitable system for reviewing, publishing and sharing knowledge, but there's bound to be chaos during any transition, however if our economy turns to a knowledge based (rather than manufacturing based), you might actually see more limits, rather than fewer limits on knowledge distribution going forward (as knowledge becomes more valued as a commodity like raw materials in a manufacturing based economy).
Everyone seems to talk about L1 being somehow a "nirvana" of space locations, but L1 (and L2) are unstable points. Sure you've balanced the earth and moon gravity, but any large pertubation (say like a explosion or meteor hit), will knock whatever you put there away from this equilibrium point and probably with more energy than you have to correct for. Of course if the direction happens to be towards the earth (bad juju). Even w/o large pertubations, you probably need continuous adjustments (thrusters) to keep it at L1. So, L1 is great for a small space station which would burn up in the earth's atmosphere anyhow and part of the advantage of being at an unstable equilibrium is that space junk doesn't tend to collect there increasing the safety margin somewhat.
On the other hand, L4 and L5 are stable equilibrium points which are farther away and less likely to have these stability problem (although the problem of junk collecting there is probably a serious issue). As an example, there are the well known Trojan and Greek asteroids (~5,000 or so) located at Sun-Jupiter L4/L5, and the Earth-Moon Trojan 2010-TK-7.
Of course I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that it's *much cheaper* to access the asteroid at L1. Of course most companies usually do what is cheaper and talk down the safety aspects of their choice, so I'm not holding my breath.
Considering that we wouldn't want to create science in a courtroom setting (given the restrictions on rules of evidence and other limitations), it is interesting to note the similarities and the differences.
For example, so-called "experts" are often allowed to offer their opinions into testimony (so-called rule 702) w/o submitting their analysis for rebuttal (only the evidence), and to answer hypothetical questions. Only recently there has been a move to add a requirement that expert witness theories or techniques are peer-reviewed and have known or potential rate-of-error or if the theories or techniques are even testible or falsifiable or even generally accepted by the scientific community. However, these are not currently requirements of expert witness testimony. Of course the opposing side can hire their own expert witnesses, but basically that's a he-said, she-said situation that a jury is supposed to untangle.
In real science, it's supposed to be better than this situation (scientific methods are supposed to be judged by a jury of peers that have the intellectual and financial means to confirm or refute evidence, rather than through surrogate "expert" testimony which has profession and scientific bias), but in the current pseudo-science climate, sadly, it looks alot like the current courtroom situation. So if your argument is that it's no different than the current state of scientific dissertation, well, I guess I can't argue with you.
Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Only if you're at a bad school.
AFAIK, MIT and Berkeley have a joint EECS department and they are consistently in the top 10. I don't think I would consider these bad schools for Computer Science. Caltech doesn't have a computer science department either , they have a Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department (aka CMS). This consists of 3 programmes of study: Applied+Computational Mathemetics, Computer Science, and Control and Dynamical systems. Although they aren't necessaarily the top rank in CS (near the top 10), it's a small school so CS doesn't warrent a whole deparartment.
It might be interesting to think about the ways that increases in scientific fraud parallels the recent financial industry meltdown that resulted from the mortgage industry mess.
In the mortgage industry back in the old-old days, when you wanted to borrow money, you took your information (w2, bank account statements, etc,) down to the local bank which analyzed your finances and issued you a loan based on thier "gut" feeling on your credit worthiness. This was found to be a very non-scaleable, often discriminatory system, however the risk was localized therefore immediate feedback was available (banks that issued too many bad loans failed).
Then the industry evolved. Credit reporting agencies and credit scores were created to reduce discrimination, and automate decision processes and help quantify risk, and packaging was created to securitize loans which effectively aggregated and anonymized both borrowers and banks and attempted to present an abstract risk profile to folks investing in debt. The risk/return profile of this investment created a high demand for more securitized loans, creating a scarcity. What happens when demand exceeds supply? Either the price goes up (the yield of the debt investment goes down when the price goes up), or some risk takers will attempt to increase the supply by substituting marginal quality goods (loans that aren't well vetted). Then when others see their success with marginal quality goods, even the regular suppliers take the plunge and drop their quality to maintain their market share. Large coalitions enter the field and start to game the system. The lack of information available to the investors due to anonymization and aggregation amd increased leverage (firms started using derivatives and CDOs to invest in mortages) set us up for the financial industry fall. Then the cards all fell down.
Historically, scientific publishing when you wanted to get your paper published, you sent a pre-print to a journal and they attemped to referee the paper based on the "gut" feeling of their reviewers. This was fairly unscalable and often discriminatory system, but the risk of a poor quality paper was localized to the journal (basically journals that published too many bad papers would lose credibility).
We are in the midst of an evolution in scientific publishing. Now there are many mroe researchers and many more journals. Many journals don't have the staff to do a good job a vetting the papers, and the specialization, cost and expense of many research fields make peer-review "santity" checking across different research groups difficult. Ironically, as we have more information about science, we have less information about the quality of that information. Since published results attract scarce research dollars, the cost of doing good research that results in published papers go up (reducing the ROI on research dollars), or some risk takers will attempt to attract scarce research dollars with sub-quality work... and so on...
Let's hope that large coalitions don't enter to game the system, nor research grants are anonymized from author and institution as researchers move around and institutions do joint projects, nor that large research projects leverage questionable earlier research w/o information or verification or we may be building a similar house of cards with scientific research literature. Isn't scientific literature supposed to all be about leverage (standing on the shoulders of giants)? Aren't certain publication too-big-to-fail? Aren't large research coalitions monopolizing areas of grant money in certain fields and effectively owning the available peer-review resources? Maybe we've already set the table and just don't know it yet.
From what I understand adjuvants are used so that less viral material is needed. Why not use more viral material and eliminate adjuvants? Is this feasible? How much more cost would it add for the vaccine manufacturer?
Today, there is a significant disagreement on how to improve vaccince safety. One large camp advocates the use of acellular approach (using non-living chemical compounds) that the immune system can learn on to attack the real virus, instead of having dead viral material. The reason for going to the acellular approach is that it is deemed safer, and easier to manage quality control (e.g., effectiveness from batch to batch, odds of residual live active virus contaminatio). Unfortunatly, our immune systems aren't trained as well on this acellular bootstrapping immunity boost technique and the reasnon appears to be that it is "too-clean". This "too-clean" effects was initially found in early standard vaccine production: researching why some batches were more effective than others, they found the batches with fewer contaminants actually produced a weaker immune response. You might think of it as an analogy to the immune system having "book" knowledge or "real-world" knowedge of how to do something (okay, maybe that's a poor analogy). Or having some extra "dirt" helps build the immunity.
To combat this, the adjuvants are added which amp-up the immune response. This allows for more control of effectiveness across batches (rather trying to control the contamination levels to small, but non-zero amounts) and this makes the production costs lower for virus based vaccines and is probably required to make acellular vaccines as effective as dead-virus vaccines.
The WHO (world health organization) and the makers of acellular vaccine technology are the biggest advocates of adjuvants as it allows for cheaper vaccines to be made. So the right question to ask is not how much cost it would add for the vaccine manufacturer, but how much cost it would add to vaccination programs administered by the WHO? and how those economics that affect what is available on the market? (vaccine makers don't want to trial too many variants, so if a big customer wants something one way, the rest of the market pretty much has to live with their choice).
Of course there is still the problem of quick response production (like flu vaccines). Sometimes there isn't enough wall clock time to even mass produce the viral material you need (this happened in the H1N1 epidemic, but in other cases, certain strains of viruses were found to be hard to culture in eggs). So in these situations, you have a choice: Innoculate fewer folks, or spread out the viral material that you do have and augment the immune response with adjuvants. Of course for H1N1, we know now that they did the latter in many cases (and in all the acellular production it was pretty much required anyhow).
Unfortunatly, they didn't select my submission, but the idea is basically unbound electrons have some quantum numbers related to spin and charge, but electrons bound to a nucleus have another quantum property related to the orbital they exist in (as a result of all those pesky electron orbital exclusion properties we get a taste of in chemistry 101). This gives the electron a sort of angular momentum quantum property (that is angular momentum isn't a continuous property, but is quantized to certain discrete values).
You might imagine that in the classical sense, if you bumped an electron out of orbiting one nucleus and it be bound to the next nucleus in a lattice, the idea of what angular momentum all the electrons had would be somehow be conserved as a whole in the system on average. Now you toss in the fact that in a lattice, these otherwize local effects of virtually exchanging angular momentum might become delocalized from their actual particles and still maintain the required system average and also (in certain circumstance) still reveal their orignal quantum nature (instead of continuous approximation), that's the effect you have. It isn't a real particle exhibiting quantum effects, but a quasi-particle, but in some sense we've split-off the angular momentum effect from the actual electron that is bound (w/o unbinding the electron).
If you are familiar with semiconductors, you can often hear of people talking about "holes" conducting electric charge like they are electrons, but they aren't electrons: it's a "hole" in a sea of delocalized electrons doing that charge transport. Usually the effects we are interested in are quite classical (say like average current), but in smaller dimensions and lower energy levels we start exhibiting quantum effects of these quasi-particles (say like in supercondutors).
I don't know how this orbiton angular momentum thing will be useable. The effect that was observed was that excitation to higher orbits (higher angular momentums), can propagate in the lattice which seems less useful (eventually you are in such a high excitation energy, you are beyond most interesting quantum effects or effectively unbound). One speculation that I have is that certain insulator properties will be quantized (if certain orbits are unavailable, and the incoming quantum angular momentum is incompatible with the available orbits), and maybe that can be used for some storage capabiltiy or maybe somehow helping spintronics (which is sort of what these folks were thinking).
Although it sounds like Mr. Price's is the first one with an actual nose from a real 737 (the some of the other ones merely use some fraction of the real cockpit equipment in a shell).
> after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Were they defeated? I do not think so. I guess that depends on your point of view... From the Soviet and Najibullah point of view, it was certainly a withdraw. From the mujahideen point of view, hard to say.... What does it mean when a guerella force outlasts an imperialist power's desire to occupy? Maybe the word withdraw is more to you liking...
In any case, my original point was that from the Afghani's point of view, the chaos that ensued after the Soviets *left* was likely not a missed opportunity for the west to help with aid. At least the US signed away that opportunity when they did the 1988 Geneva Accords and the civil war that ensued was not a situation where anyone could have probably just funneled in some aid (as posited by the OP) w/o getting involved in the civil war (of which the Taliban was party) and mixing it up with Pakistan in the process.
I also made the case that we may have picked the wrong side in that conflict. Don't know, if there was a "right" side, but sometimes you can't help even if you want to.
I think you simplify this too much. It wasn't the "west's" opportunity after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Iran, Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan were the major players in Afghanistan in the post Peshawar Accords. If the British (or the US) would have just gone in there (even to "help"), how do you think things would have gone differently? Would the Afghanis have just completely forgotten the first 3 anglo-afgan wars? Not so sure that was the best course of action.
Perhaps, we should have perhaps been rooting for Ahmad Shah Massoud and the United Islamic Front. They weren't saints, but were still anti-Taliban. Instead, the west was lobbying for them to surrendar to the Taliban to stabilize the region as the west was more aligned with Pakistan at the time (and Pakistan was one of the big supporter of the Taliban).
How did history unfold? Well, Mr Massoud was eventually assasinated and then Sept 11th occured. I don't think it was about the west being too cheap, it was more about picking the wrong side.
Glass is nevertheless a solid, despite urban myths to the contrary.
And at that level of understanding, plasma is probably best considered as just ionized gas. Otherwize, you start getting into a categorization/definition game with stuff like bose-einstein condensates, strange-quark-matter, and other weird shit.
One of the biggest problems with curricula in early education is that it too heavily on teaching definitions and categories. Curricula is basically chopping up knowledge and understanding into small enough chunks to teach to average groups of students in a quarter. Sadly, it's probably really hard to change as this allows folks that are not particularly knowledgable teach in general subjects (more cost effective for schools).
Unfortunatly, definitions and categories often have "soft" boundaries and the more discriminating we try to make tests (to see if a student learned say 100%, 95%, 90% or 80% of the material), the tests tread uncomfortably near the boundaries. This is just silly. In a reasonably short test of a curricula (the kind you could give in say 30-45min), you probably can only tell Pass-Marginal-Fail on a test. People who think more discrimination is possible on a short test like that should probably retake statistics 101. I imagine that some people might think that avoiding the grey area in answers probably makes the tests too easy, but isn't it more important to find out those that fail to learn and remediate, rather than try to discriminate levels of success and accidentaly perpetuate/punish misconceptions in grey areas?
I've found this to be a bit of a philosophical argument with teachers. Can you get an 'A' just by learning all the material in the curricula? If so, shouldn't everyone be capable of an 'A', and then inevitably comes the the argument of a "bell" curve, and somehow it degenerates from there to expectations of parents and students and administrators. Funny how it all comes down to us collectively getting the "education system" we seem to want rather than the "education" that we want. Apparently, the education establishment wants to define what is an 'A' or 'B' or 'C' student, and put students into those categories and the students and parents seem to just go along. Sometimes that's just so depressing it makes we want to give up thinking about the education system we've created for ourselves.
Well yeah, I get that, but it seems to me that the "magical thinking" of the OP was more on the line of "I don't know what causes X, so it must be some sentience that does it."
Actually that was the point I was trying to make with quantum entanglement. To many folks who only have a limited *lay-person* understanding of quantum entanglement, "we don't know what causes [wave function collapse], so it must be some sentience that does it" I think fully captures the thought I had on this. Perhaps you haven't thought about quantum entanglement and observers that way before, but maybe this clarification will get you to think about this strange effect more clearly.
If I gather what this article is speculating on, it's a phenomena similar to peak-oil.
Peak-oil doesn't necessarily mean that you run-out of oil, it just means that the marginal cost of producing more oil reaches a point which causes the rate of oil production to decrease. In the backdrop of increasing demand, and limited supply this implies a sharp downturn in availability of oil at historical prices.
If applied to computing, it would imply a limit to computing resources. I don't think we are there (although computing takes lots of electrical power and there seems to be enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity for the moment), but we may be at a point where demand increases beyond the rate at which technology can keep it on its historical increasing MIP/$ trend. If this MIP/$ trend flattens out, it may be difficult to find funding for new technological advances and fundamentally change the market for computing.
I'm not sure if this qualifies, but some of the consequences of quantum mechanics are pretty much just "magic" if you think about them at the classical level.
Take quantum-entanglement for example, If you "observe" something, a non-newtonian, special-relativity violating consequence occurs somewhere else? But even if it does, it somehow can't violate causality? So if you believe all this stuff happens at the quantum level, but not at the classical level, are you a believer in magic? Especially if (like most of us) you, haven't actually performed any experiments, nor the experimental error of historical experiments, and don't fully understand the mathematics, and are merely trusting of a written account from someone you don't know and probably will never meet?
Of course some may just chalk this up to advanced technology appearing to be magic, but most folks don't currently have any real-world experience with this entangling stuff in technological devices (unlike the equally strange QM-tunnelling effect which many folks depend on daily in flash memory devices embedded in smartphones and ipods). So it seems to me just really a belief in QM-entanglement, not an actual concession about advanced tech like QM-tunnelling. Does that imply a belief in magic (or just simply putting faith in integrity of scientific publishing)?
Perhaps it takes a bit of a belief in magic at some level for a lay-person to really understand some apparent consequences of QM. Or perhaps we just concede like Richard Feynman conceded "that nobody [today] understands quantum mechanics.", but "maybe someday, that after all, it isn't as horrible as it looks"...
Slashdot Mirror
Politics (and spying) aside, this is probably not unlike their past effort to create a new Audio Video compression Standard. I'm sure the Chinese look at the Arm ISA situation and see wow, you really do have to get an Arm license if you want to make a smart phone. This seems similar to the BluRay MPEG/H.264 situation and their move with AVS. They've got a lot of smart folks in China and want to spur development. In the process, the want to see if they can give their local companies an economic advantage (reduced licensing fees for manufactured products for domestic consumption).
If this takes off in China (a big market), then instead of chinese companies paying foreign companies a licensing fee for products (net outflow of money), the foreign companies that want to make a product for consumption in the chinese market will probably have to pay the Chinese licensing fees for this. That way money for new development gets to stay in China benefiting their economy more than others. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
Of course if it makes it easier to spy on folks, so much the better (homogenous platforms make that easier), but I don't think that's the main motivation. As with most things in China today, the motivation is national economic self-interest.
iRestaurant
A nearby (not so good) chinese restaurant just down the street with that name in cupertino closed last year.
Who knows, maybe they got a buyout deal that they couldn't refuse ;^)
If you are the administration and your goal is merge the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and the Department of Electrial and Computer Engineering (ECE) and you know that poltics in both departments will resist your call for a merger you instead try a the football version of the statue of liberty play.
With one hand, the administration fakes a "pass" proposing that both departments cut their CS funding causing the defenders for separate CISE and ECE departments to get out of position as they scramble to cause outrage that their funding for CS will be cut. While everyone is looking at the "passing" hand, then with your back hand you toss the ball to people in the department more sympathetic to merging the departments who have been moving on this proposal all along hoping that they can now outrun the opponents defending the original play who are now caught out of position.
No. Weather is chaotic. Climate isn't.
Many mathemeticians studying chaotic behavior would probably disagree with that statement. Even the well-studied 3-body physics problem exhibits chaotic behaviour. It would be foolish to think that the N-dimensional M-input climate dynamical system didn't exhibit chaotic behaviour. In fact it is probably highly likley that any percieved stability in our so-called "climate" is actually a strange attractor/orbit in this chaotic system.
The non-energy uses of hydrocarbons can continue (although fossil-sourced fertilizers should probably be the first to be phased out). Grid power and most cars don't need fossil fuels, switch those off of it and go from there.
Why should fossil-sourced fertilizers be phased out first? Ferilizer use of "fossil" fuels comes in 2 places: first from methane (assuming you are talking about the Haber-Boschprocess which requires some source of hydrogen), and second the energy used in the process. At least according to the wikipedia, this only consume 3-5% of the world's natural gas production to yield 80% of the total world's ammonia production (ammonia is the most common precursor to nitrogen component fertilizers). The bulk of natural gas is used for heating and electrial generation and cooking. The reason a methane based process is used is that it is more energy efficient than other industrial scale techiques (other than just mining bound nitrogen products). Surely there is a bigger hydro-carbon target than fertilizer...
Worth mentioning that humans evolved to eat animals with standard fat percentages, not margarine or mealworm-sheep. There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD, and there are healthy populations that traditionally go 6-9 months with no fats except animals fats.
FWIW, the main advance with this announcement is not the omega-3/FAT-1 transgenic aspect, it is the new cloning technique BGI calls handmade cloning which apparently allows lower-tech facilities and higher transgenic clone yield. BGI has already done this transgenic modification with pigs and now they have done it with sheep. With this new cloning technique, however, it might be possible to do this at an industrial scale.
However, If you are interested instead about this specific "fat-1" transgenic idea, it was done with mice way back in 2004.
Although that is possibly true that saturated fats aren't corrolated with increased risk of CHD or CVD, omega-3 fatty acids are required for controlling blood clotting and building cell membranes in the brain and are assumed to be a necessary nutrient. The "healthy populations" you seem to be alluding to likley maintain their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids from seafood and nuts and oils for 6-9 months of the year.
14 billion divided by 2 billion would be 7.
Right?
28cycles = (14/1Billion) sec * 2BillionCycles/sec (the paper says 14ns-313ns which is my interpretation)
0.142858rep cycles = (1/14Billion) sec * 2BillionCycles/sec (a possible misinterpretation)
7sec^2/cycles = 14Billion sec * 1sec/2BillionCycles (a very strange interpretation given unit analysis)
So although your statement appears to be mathematically correct, I fail to see how it is applicable to my statement...
Article says! It's on the order of 14billionths of a second.
When you say it like that, it sounds small, but if I did my math right, 14billionths of a second is the same amount of time as 28 clock cycles on a 2GHz processor.
One thing you might consider is that this whole scientific publishing business might go the way of the music business in a few years. Right now musicians can often make more money touring than releasing records (publishing). So many old musicans have gone to treating "publishing" as a side-line publicity mechanisms for their day job (touring). Unfortunatly, newer mucisians don't have the historical publicity to ride on, so they are still forced into the old system. What this has done is create a discontinuity where the influence of older music is growing and sometime overshadowing the newer music making it harder to break into the system increasing the influence of the music cartel on newer artists and creating a sea of overproduced music. Sure, there's the occasional Justin Beiber (not that I find his music very listenable, but he seems to be a popular reference for this) that breaks out, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
If it ever gets to the point where top researchers eventually find they get more impact by visiting, rather than publishing in wide access journals which are dilluted by crap, you may find that libraries become warehouses for un-impactful, un-referenced derivative papers, and all the cutting edge stuff being unpublished work done by visiting researchers at instituitions publishing in in-house journals or side channel (e.g., non-peer reviewd university press releases). Not sure that would be great if the primary interest was in public access to quality information. Finding and evaluating stuff in a bunch of in-house journals will basically be taking ourselves back to the early days of academia (when researchers disseminated primarily by visiting and publication never reached very far and researchers often unknowingly spent careers duplicating work done by others).
There's probably some way to do this that works out for the general good, but this is a problem that the current music industry faces too and I haven't seen anyone come up with a workable long term system yet. However, in the shorter term, are libraries similar to the music store in this analogy? Is there a iTunes or Amazon like competitor/entity in the future for university libraries? Could such an entity destroy the concept of a journal (kind of like Amazon and iTunes destroyed the music album)? Could they eventually flatten the pricing model (any subject: peer reviewed papers 99c, unreviewed 10c)?
If you are a librarian, these seem to be important things to consider.
... As a result, currently, pretty much any article *is* freely available to me. But many are not so fortunate — particularly where universities cannot afford to pay access fees, but more so for those who are not affiliated to universities, and who would have to pay considerable fees for access to even individual articles...
You are paying (at least your university is paying, leaving less money for the university to spend on other things). Often people forget this. So when you are reading through your "free" papers perhaps you might also notice if one of your collegues didn't get a matching grant for their research or that the janitor that doesn't come around to clean your office very much anymore, or there's one less TA for that class... There's always a cost, even if you you aren't paying a cost yourself. The cost may look small when spread out over many folks, but it's isn't zero. On the other hand, dropping a subscription to a journal by a large university to "save" money will cost something on the other side (people employed by the jounal will get fewer raises or lose their jobs). Realistically, journal access is really a fringe benefit to you (not unlike free coffee in a breakroom), but when the cash crunch comes, the fringe benefits are often the first to go.
What we can hope for is a more equitable system for reviewing, publishing and sharing knowledge, but there's bound to be chaos during any transition, however if our economy turns to a knowledge based (rather than manufacturing based), you might actually see more limits, rather than fewer limits on knowledge distribution going forward (as knowledge becomes more valued as a commodity like raw materials in a manufacturing based economy).
Everyone seems to talk about L1 being somehow a "nirvana" of space locations, but L1 (and L2) are unstable points. Sure you've balanced the earth and moon gravity, but any large pertubation (say like a explosion or meteor hit), will knock whatever you put there away from this equilibrium point and probably with more energy than you have to correct for. Of course if the direction happens to be towards the earth (bad juju). Even w/o large pertubations, you probably need continuous adjustments (thrusters) to keep it at L1. So, L1 is great for a small space station which would burn up in the earth's atmosphere anyhow and part of the advantage of being at an unstable equilibrium is that space junk doesn't tend to collect there increasing the safety margin somewhat.
On the other hand, L4 and L5 are stable equilibrium points which are farther away and less likely to have these stability problem (although the problem of junk collecting there is probably a serious issue). As an example, there are the well known Trojan and Greek asteroids (~5,000 or so) located at Sun-Jupiter L4/L5, and the Earth-Moon Trojan 2010-TK-7.
Of course I'm sure someone will bring up the fact that it's *much cheaper* to access the asteroid at L1. Of course most companies usually do what is cheaper and talk down the safety aspects of their choice, so I'm not holding my breath.
Considering that we wouldn't want to create science in a courtroom setting (given the restrictions on rules of evidence and other limitations), it is interesting to note the similarities and the differences.
For example, so-called "experts" are often allowed to offer their opinions into testimony (so-called rule 702) w/o submitting their analysis for rebuttal (only the evidence), and to answer hypothetical questions. Only recently there has been a move to add a requirement that expert witness theories or techniques are peer-reviewed and have known or potential rate-of-error or if the theories or techniques are even testible or falsifiable or even generally accepted by the scientific community. However, these are not currently requirements of expert witness testimony. Of course the opposing side can hire their own expert witnesses, but basically that's a he-said, she-said situation that a jury is supposed to untangle.
In real science, it's supposed to be better than this situation (scientific methods are supposed to be judged by a jury of peers that have the intellectual and financial means to confirm or refute evidence, rather than through surrogate "expert" testimony which has profession and scientific bias), but in the current pseudo-science climate, sadly, it looks alot like the current courtroom situation. So if your argument is that it's no different than the current state of scientific dissertation, well, I guess I can't argue with you.
Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Only if you're at a bad school.
AFAIK, MIT and Berkeley have a joint EECS department and they are consistently in the top 10. I don't think I would consider these bad schools for Computer Science. Caltech doesn't have a computer science department either , they have a Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department (aka CMS). This consists of 3 programmes of study: Applied+Computational Mathemetics, Computer Science, and Control and Dynamical systems. Although they aren't necessaarily the top rank in CS (near the top 10), it's a small school so CS doesn't warrent a whole deparartment.
It might be interesting to think about the ways that increases in scientific fraud parallels the recent financial industry meltdown that resulted from the mortgage industry mess.
In the mortgage industry back in the old-old days, when you wanted to borrow money, you took your information (w2, bank account statements, etc,) down to the local bank which analyzed your finances and issued you a loan based on thier "gut" feeling on your credit worthiness. This was found to be a very non-scaleable, often discriminatory system, however the risk was localized therefore immediate feedback was available (banks that issued too many bad loans failed).
Then the industry evolved. Credit reporting agencies and credit scores were created to reduce discrimination, and automate decision processes and help quantify risk, and packaging was created to securitize loans which effectively aggregated and anonymized both borrowers and banks and attempted to present an abstract risk profile to folks investing in debt. The risk/return profile of this investment created a high demand for more securitized loans, creating a scarcity. What happens when demand exceeds supply? Either the price goes up (the yield of the debt investment goes down when the price goes up), or some risk takers will attempt to increase the supply by substituting marginal quality goods (loans that aren't well vetted). Then when others see their success with marginal quality goods, even the regular suppliers take the plunge and drop their quality to maintain their market share. Large coalitions enter the field and start to game the system. The lack of information available to the investors due to anonymization and aggregation amd increased leverage (firms started using derivatives and CDOs to invest in mortages) set us up for the financial industry fall. Then the cards all fell down.
Historically, scientific publishing when you wanted to get your paper published, you sent a pre-print to a journal and they attemped to referee the paper based on the "gut" feeling of their reviewers. This was fairly unscalable and often discriminatory system, but the risk of a poor quality paper was localized to the journal (basically journals that published too many bad papers would lose credibility).
We are in the midst of an evolution in scientific publishing. Now there are many mroe researchers and many more journals. Many journals don't have the staff to do a good job a vetting the papers, and the specialization, cost and expense of many research fields make peer-review "santity" checking across different research groups difficult. Ironically, as we have more information about science, we have less information about the quality of that information. Since published results attract scarce research dollars, the cost of doing good research that results in published papers go up (reducing the ROI on research dollars), or some risk takers will attempt to attract scarce research dollars with sub-quality work... and so on...
Let's hope that large coalitions don't enter to game the system, nor research grants are anonymized from author and institution as researchers move around and institutions do joint projects, nor that large research projects leverage questionable earlier research w/o information or verification or we may be building a similar house of cards with scientific research literature. Isn't scientific literature supposed to all be about leverage (standing on the shoulders of giants)? Aren't certain publication too-big-to-fail? Aren't large research coalitions monopolizing areas of grant money in certain fields and effectively owning the available peer-review resources? Maybe we've already set the table and just don't know it yet.
Some food for thought...
From what I understand adjuvants are used so that less viral material is needed. Why not use more viral material and eliminate adjuvants? Is this feasible? How much more cost would it add for the vaccine manufacturer?
Today, there is a significant disagreement on how to improve vaccince safety. One large camp advocates the use of acellular approach (using non-living chemical compounds) that the immune system can learn on to attack the real virus, instead of having dead viral material. The reason for going to the acellular approach is that it is deemed safer, and easier to manage quality control (e.g., effectiveness from batch to batch, odds of residual live active virus contaminatio). Unfortunatly, our immune systems aren't trained as well on this acellular bootstrapping immunity boost technique and the reasnon appears to be that it is "too-clean". This "too-clean" effects was initially found in early standard vaccine production: researching why some batches were more effective than others, they found the batches with fewer contaminants actually produced a weaker immune response. You might think of it as an analogy to the immune system having "book" knowledge or "real-world" knowedge of how to do something (okay, maybe that's a poor analogy). Or having some extra "dirt" helps build the immunity.
To combat this, the adjuvants are added which amp-up the immune response. This allows for more control of effectiveness across batches (rather trying to control the contamination levels to small, but non-zero amounts) and this makes the production costs lower for virus based vaccines and is probably required to make acellular vaccines as effective as dead-virus vaccines.
The WHO (world health organization) and the makers of acellular vaccine technology are the biggest advocates of adjuvants as it allows for cheaper vaccines to be made. So the right question to ask is not how much cost it would add for the vaccine manufacturer, but how much cost it would add to vaccination programs administered by the WHO? and how those economics that affect what is available on the market? (vaccine makers don't want to trial too many variants, so if a big customer wants something one way, the rest of the market pretty much has to live with their choice).
Of course there is still the problem of quick response production (like flu vaccines). Sometimes there isn't enough wall clock time to even mass produce the viral material you need (this happened in the H1N1 epidemic, but in other cases, certain strains of viruses were found to be hard to culture in eggs). So in these situations, you have a choice: Innoculate fewer folks, or spread out the viral material that you do have and augment the immune response with adjuvants. Of course for H1N1, we know now that they did the latter in many cases (and in all the acellular production it was pretty much required anyhow).
Unfortunatly, they didn't select my submission, but the idea is basically unbound electrons have some quantum numbers related to spin and charge, but electrons bound to a nucleus have another quantum property related to the orbital they exist in (as a result of all those pesky electron orbital exclusion properties we get a taste of in chemistry 101). This gives the electron a sort of angular momentum quantum property (that is angular momentum isn't a continuous property, but is quantized to certain discrete values).
You might imagine that in the classical sense, if you bumped an electron out of orbiting one nucleus and it be bound to the next nucleus in a lattice, the idea of what angular momentum all the electrons had would be somehow be conserved as a whole in the system on average. Now you toss in the fact that in a lattice, these otherwize local effects of virtually exchanging angular momentum might become delocalized from their actual particles and still maintain the required system average and also (in certain circumstance) still reveal their orignal quantum nature (instead of continuous approximation), that's the effect you have. It isn't a real particle exhibiting quantum effects, but a quasi-particle, but in some sense we've split-off the angular momentum effect from the actual electron that is bound (w/o unbinding the electron).
If you are familiar with semiconductors, you can often hear of people talking about "holes" conducting electric charge like they are electrons, but they aren't electrons: it's a "hole" in a sea of delocalized electrons doing that charge transport. Usually the effects we are interested in are quite classical (say like average current), but in smaller dimensions and lower energy levels we start exhibiting quantum effects of these quasi-particles (say like in supercondutors).
I don't know how this orbiton angular momentum thing will be useable. The effect that was observed was that excitation to higher orbits (higher angular momentums), can propagate in the lattice which seems less useful (eventually you are in such a high excitation energy, you are beyond most interesting quantum effects or effectively unbound). One speculation that I have is that certain insulator properties will be quantized (if certain orbits are unavailable, and the incoming quantum angular momentum is incompatible with the available orbits), and maybe that can be used for some storage capabiltiy or maybe somehow helping spintronics (which is sort of what these folks were thinking).
Hope that helps a bit...
If you haven't read the article, they also point to a few more folks building realistic commercial aircraft simulators around the world...
For example,
this one http://web.me.com/mattford1/Site/Matts_Boeing_737_Flight_Sim.html
or this one http://www.hyway.com.au/747/747.html
Although it sounds like Mr. Price's is the first one with an actual nose from a real 737 (the some of the other ones merely use some fraction of the real cockpit equipment in a shell).
> after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Were they defeated? I do not think so.
I guess that depends on your point of view... From the Soviet and Najibullah point of view, it was certainly a withdraw. From the mujahideen point of view, hard to say.... What does it mean when a guerella force outlasts an imperialist power's desire to occupy? Maybe the word withdraw is more to you liking...
In any case, my original point was that from the Afghani's point of view, the chaos that ensued after the Soviets *left* was likely not a missed opportunity for the west to help with aid. At least the US signed away that opportunity when they did the 1988 Geneva Accords and the civil war that ensued was not a situation where anyone could have probably just funneled in some aid (as posited by the OP) w/o getting involved in the civil war (of which the Taliban was party) and mixing it up with Pakistan in the process.
I also made the case that we may have picked the wrong side in that conflict. Don't know, if there was a "right" side, but sometimes you can't help even if you want to.
I think you simplify this too much. It wasn't the "west's" opportunity after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. Iran, Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan were the major players in Afghanistan in the post Peshawar Accords. If the British (or the US) would have just gone in there (even to "help"), how do you think things would have gone differently? Would the Afghanis have just completely forgotten the first 3 anglo-afgan wars? Not so sure that was the best course of action.
Perhaps, we should have perhaps been rooting for Ahmad Shah Massoud and the United Islamic Front. They weren't saints, but were still anti-Taliban. Instead, the west was lobbying for them to surrendar to the Taliban to stabilize the region as the west was more aligned with Pakistan at the time (and Pakistan was one of the big supporter of the Taliban).
How did history unfold? Well, Mr Massoud was eventually assasinated and then Sept 11th occured. I don't think it was about the west being too cheap, it was more about picking the wrong side.
Glass is nevertheless a solid, despite urban myths to the contrary.
And at that level of understanding, plasma is probably best considered as just ionized gas.
Otherwize, you start getting into a categorization/definition game with stuff like bose-einstein condensates, strange-quark-matter, and other weird shit.
One of the biggest problems with curricula in early education is that it too heavily on teaching definitions and categories. Curricula is basically chopping up knowledge and understanding into small enough chunks to teach to average groups of students in a quarter. Sadly, it's probably really hard to change as this allows folks that are not particularly knowledgable teach in general subjects (more cost effective for schools).
Unfortunatly, definitions and categories often have "soft" boundaries and the more discriminating we try to make tests (to see if a student learned say 100%, 95%, 90% or 80% of the material), the tests tread uncomfortably near the boundaries. This is just silly. In a reasonably short test of a curricula (the kind you could give in say 30-45min), you probably can only tell Pass-Marginal-Fail on a test. People who think more discrimination is possible on a short test like that should probably retake statistics 101. I imagine that some people might think that avoiding the grey area in answers probably makes the tests too easy, but isn't it more important to find out those that fail to learn and remediate, rather than try to discriminate levels of success and accidentaly perpetuate/punish misconceptions in grey areas?
I've found this to be a bit of a philosophical argument with teachers. Can you get an 'A' just by learning all the material in the curricula? If so, shouldn't everyone be capable of an 'A', and then inevitably comes the the argument of a "bell" curve, and somehow it degenerates from there to expectations of parents and students and administrators. Funny how it all comes down to us collectively getting the "education system" we seem to want rather than the "education" that we want. Apparently, the education establishment wants to define what is an 'A' or 'B' or 'C' student, and put students into those categories and the students and parents seem to just go along. Sometimes that's just so depressing it makes we want to give up thinking about the education system we've created for ourselves.
Well yeah, I get that, but it seems to me that the "magical thinking" of the OP was more on the line of "I don't know what causes X, so it must be some sentience that does it."
Actually that was the point I was trying to make with quantum entanglement. To many folks who only have a limited *lay-person* understanding of quantum entanglement, "we don't know what causes [wave function collapse], so it must be some sentience that does it" I think fully captures the thought I had on this. Perhaps you haven't thought about quantum entanglement and observers that way before, but maybe this clarification will get you to think about this strange effect more clearly.
Jesus was the first to die once Christianity became a persecuted cult.
Some might think that title would have gone to John the Baptist...
But of course that's only if you believe the bible. Matthew 14:10-12
If I gather what this article is speculating on, it's a phenomena similar to peak-oil.
Peak-oil doesn't necessarily mean that you run-out of oil, it just means that the marginal cost of producing more oil reaches a point which causes the rate of oil production to decrease. In the backdrop of increasing demand, and limited supply this implies a sharp downturn in availability of oil at historical prices.
If applied to computing, it would imply a limit to computing resources. I don't think we are there (although computing takes lots of electrical power and there seems to be enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity for the moment), but we may be at a point where demand increases beyond the rate at which technology can keep it on its historical increasing MIP/$ trend. If this MIP/$ trend flattens out, it may be difficult to find funding for new technological advances and fundamentally change the market for computing.
I'm not sure if this qualifies, but some of the consequences of quantum mechanics are pretty much just "magic" if you think about them at the classical level.
Take quantum-entanglement for example, If you "observe" something, a non-newtonian, special-relativity violating consequence occurs somewhere else? But even if it does, it somehow can't violate causality? So if you believe all this stuff happens at the quantum level, but not at the classical level, are you a believer in magic? Especially if (like most of us) you, haven't actually performed any experiments, nor the experimental error of historical experiments, and don't fully understand the mathematics, and are merely trusting of a written account from someone you don't know and probably will never meet?
Of course some may just chalk this up to advanced technology appearing to be magic, but most folks don't currently have any real-world experience with this entangling stuff in technological devices (unlike the equally strange QM-tunnelling effect which many folks depend on daily in flash memory devices embedded in smartphones and ipods). So it seems to me just really a belief in QM-entanglement, not an actual concession about advanced tech like QM-tunnelling. Does that imply a belief in magic (or just simply putting faith in integrity of scientific publishing)?
Perhaps it takes a bit of a belief in magic at some level for a lay-person to really understand some apparent consequences of QM. Or perhaps we just concede like Richard Feynman conceded "that nobody [today] understands quantum mechanics.", but "maybe someday, that after all, it isn't as horrible as it looks"...