The AC is right. In grad school, my wife studied population genetics of coast live oak (quercus agrifolia), and she saw the same boom-and-bust cycles of acorn production. The boom years are known as "mast" years--not sure what the bust years are called.
This is just a normal cycle, and, as usual, the media's reporting of science is atrocious.
No. You and I absorb the costs of fraud because the retailer pays a penalty and loses the income from the fraudulent activity.
That depends on the price elasticity of demand. Furthermore, retailers usually only pay a penalty if fraud exceeds a certain threshold. Since retailers have a choice (for now, at least) about installing contactless readers, they presumably won't do it unless it makes financial sense. If fraud is a major problem, retailers won't adopt the system.
It's obvious that contactless payments are vulnerable to at least one type of attack--a real-time relay. This usually would require two "attackers" working in tandem. The first carries a modified "contactless reader" in his pocket, and stands near somebody who is carrying a contactless card (perhaps on a bus or another crowded place where it won't be too obvious. The second attacker carries a device that can act as a contactless card "repeater", with a real-time data link to the first attacker's "reader". The second attacker walks up to the reader in a store, and waves his repeater at it (perhaps hidden in his wallet, in the same hand as a dummy card so as not to arouse suspicion). The store's reader sends a signal, which is picked up by the second attacker's repeater, transmitted to the first attacker's modified reader, then broadcast to the victim's card. It responds appropriately, and its response is relayed back to the reader in the store. It's not necessary to break any encryption to do this, and there's no real way to prevent such attacks except perhaps very tight timing tolerances.
I thought about all this when the bank sent me a contactless VISA, and I initially considered refusing the card. Then I realized that the bank will take the hit on any losses, and has presumably done the math to determine that the increase in risk of fraud is acceptable, at least for small purchases. In other words, it's secure enough.
You stood in line to get her papers, so it is/was not for nothing. We Americans have a right to say who we want in or not, and which hoops they have to jump (or not jump) through.
Actually, Congress has a say in it--the American populace in general does not directly have any control over it. If you look at the rather large gap between what the population wants regarding immigration (as measured by polls) versus what Congress tried to do, it's clear that the opinions of the American public matter relatively little to many members of Congress. The good news is that overwhelming public opposition to this bill did ultimately kill it.
It is NOT against you or anybody if we want to let other people in; in fact, we let Cubans in with very little fuss, why should it be different if we decide to do the same with any other group of people ?
Cubans are quasi-refugees from a communist-governed country. There are both humanitarian and national-interest reasons for giving them an easier time. Mexico (and many other Latin American countries) are democracies, so the same considerations don't apply there.
Also, illegals DO pay many taxes, the only ones they *may* avoid is FICA (of which they don't get the benefits) and income taxes (which, usually would be very low or zero if they were legal due to their levels of income). If they use a fake SSN, they usually pay all the taxes, and if they work under the table for a business, then the business pays income tax on that money since they can't deduct it; they only avoid taxes if they work under the table for another person, but many other people do to (including computer geeks who get a little money or food for fixing somebody else's computer)
Many illegals in the food industry would benefit from not reporting tips, for instance. Many day laborers likely work under the table, and their employers probably fudge the numbers to hide the fact, avoiding tax on their end (after all, if you're already breaking one law by hiring illegals, why not break another?).
Getting back to your earlier point, it actually does hurt legal immigrants to let in illegals. The most obvious reason is that the USCIS bureaucracy is already strained to the breaking point, and dumping another 12 million cases (e.g. Z visas) on them would utterly ruin their capacity to process claims from people who did everything by the book. This is not going to change overnight.
I'm obviously not opposed to immigration. I'm not even opposed in principle to some form of amnesty for many illegals. I do think we shouldn't start thinking about that until we fix the other aspects of the immigration system. Here's what I propose: (1) Fix the border. If we don't do this, this problem will never go away. (2) Use existing laws to go after employers who are egregious offenders in terms of abusing illegals or hiring illegals for sub-market wages. (3) Fix the legal immigration system. (4) Once the border is secure, and the current backlog of legal immigrants is through the system, start letting illegals apply for immigration.
Some might say that this is more or less what the Immigration Bill did; this is partially true, but the devil is in the details. It is absolutely essential that we don't try step (4) -- not even temporary Z visas -- until the other steps are done.
This is perhaps the most insightful post I've ever seen from an Anonymous Coward, and I have a 5-digit user ID...
Not worth it, it's a slap in the face to the lawful immigrants who follow thew rules,
I completely agree. My wife is a legal immigrant, and it's crazy that Congress would even think of saying that we stood in those USCIS (aka INS) lines for nothing. The idea that a $5000 fine makes it OK is crazy--legal immigration for my wife ended up costing us about a grand, and we did all the paperwork ourselves; a lawyer would have been much more. Throw in the fact that we actually had to pay taxes (whereas illegals can get away with only paying a few years of back taxes, if that), and it's not clear we "saved" any money by my wife immigrating legally.
Make the illegals go home and sort their own mistakes out in their own nations,
Yes! We are not doing the poor of Mexico a favor by supplying a "pressure relief valve" that delays social reform. Also, our own un- and under-employed poor would do a lot better if they didn't have to compete against illegal immigrants for jobs.
I'm not rejecting free will, or capacity to make choices based on motivation. I'm rejecting willpower, or capacity to follow through on arbitrary decisions with insufficient motivation.
So we have a capacity to make decisions, but no independent capacity to follow through on them? That seems like a rather trivial form of free will. It sounds like you're saying some part of our brain gets to make decisions, but has no power to "enforce" them; the question of whether we stick with our decision is determined solely by environmental factors and how (in ways beyond our conscious control) we respond to them.
I view willpower as a series of decisions. Every time we are tempted to veer off-course, we must make a new decision as to whether to stick to our original decision. If we had "free will" in the original decision, surely we may have it in these subsequent decisions. It's of course true that sometimes environmental factors will overwhelm our "willpower", but that doesn't mean they always do.
To put it slightly more clinically, "willpower" may be the ability of the "higher" brain to resist "lower" brain impulses. This is why people say "impulsiveness" is more or less the opposite of "willpower". Part of your brain tells you you really want a cigarette, but your "higher" brain tells you that cigarettes will kill you.
Throwing gamers in jail wouldn't "solve" the "problem" because the problem is people failing to live productive lives, not people going out and robbing banks. I don't feel particularly motivated to make a choice like that, do you?
I'm not advocating throwing gamers in jail. I mentioned that merely as an example of how, if we have no free will, it doesn't matter whether we adopt stupid "solutions" to things. Forget about that--it was intended as a stupid example.
Those with "strong willpower" are simply able to distract themselves from present temptations by thinking about the rewards for not pleasing themselves now. It's not a matter of strength of will -- it's a matter of attention and memory, or stronger motivating factors, like need to feed yourself, love of children, fear of consequences, and so on.
While it's certainly clear that environment influences choices, and in fact sometimes the environmental influence is so strong we have no choice, are you completely rejecting free will? If you're not, then it seems reasonable that some people would be better than others at resisting environmental influence in their decision-making, and in sticking with their decisions. You can make up new names for that, but most people call that characteristic willpower.
If you are rejecting free will, then we are all just meat robots--automatons living pre-determined (or, at best, senselessly random) lives. In that case, nothing matters. No choices have moral significance because there are no choices. We might as well just throw all the gamers in jail and thus "solve" the gaming "problem".
A 'bit' is simply shorthand for "binary digit". Quantum digits, however, aren't binary, since they can represent much more than a simple 0 or 1. By adding the 'Qu-' to the term, we are essentially calling them "Quantum Binary Digits," which is in itself an oxymoron.
Qubits are quantum bits in the sense that there are two basis states (often | 0 > and | 1 >). In some systems, qutrits (quantum trinary digits) are more natural, and occasionally, you'll hear "qudit", which is a d-level quantum digit, for some arbitrary d.
Given how often I have to say or hear the word "qubit", I guarantee it wouldn't be more fun if it had an extra syllable.
I'm not an expert on Quantum computers, but I think the math/computer science is WAY ahead of the physics on this one. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a Quantum computer is to a normal computer as a NFA is to an DFA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_fin ite_state_machine). In this case it's really not a new idea at a fundamental logical level.
I am an expert, and I don't think CS is ahead here; rather, I'd say CS and physics are moving forward in a partnership. As best as we understand the relevant complexity classes, quantum computer are not equivalent to an NFA. To put it another way, as far as we know, quantum computers cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems. I say "as far as we know" because we don't even know for sure whether classical computers can efficiently solve such problems. Quantum information is a fundamentally new concept to CS, however.
Similarly, conventional computers can solve the same set of problems that quantum computers can solve, they just require an expansion of the problem which in the real world requires much more time and/or space to complete.
If you look simply at the domain of solvable computational problems, and don't care about efficiency, then yes, there's no difference. There are, however, communication problems and quantum "games" that cannot be solved with classical information but can be with quantum information.
I guess it's mostly historical, and that XOR is usually associated with a two-input/one-output gate. Controlled-NOT looks pretty intuitive (the target is negated only if the control
Quantum mechanics being unitary and thus reversible, it's important that your gates be reversible, too*. CNOT is two-input, two-output, and is reversible. XOR is two input, one output, and is clearly not reversible (given the output you can't reconstruct the inputs). This is why people use CNOT for quantum computing--XOR wouldn't work.
*I'm skipping things like cluster state (aka one-way) quantum computation because that just confuses the issue.
Qubits represent a probability of being a 0 or 1. Observing a qubit destroys that probability, and you "read" only a zero or a one.
This is at best an incomplete description of what happens. Qubits are quantum states, not probabilities. Quantum states are sometimes called "probability amplitudes", in that taking the square of the magnitude of the coefficient for a particular basis state gives you the probability of getting that state if you measure in that basis. There are a few very important points: (1) we're dealing with complex numbers, and things work in such a way as to give us the possibility of "interference" of probability amplitudes; (2) quantum states are real states, not just probabilities representing our ignorance of which classical state you'll find when you measure.
A brief intro to the math:
Let's take some qubit in some arbitrary state, which we'll call | psi > (I'm using Dirac notation). We can completely describe the state as follows: | psi > = a | 0 > + b | 1 >, where a and b are complex numbers, and have the property that |a|^2+ |b|^2 = 1. We see that we have an uncountably infinite number of possible states for just a single qubit. If psi were a classical bit instead of a quantum bit, we could use essentially the same description, except that the requirement on a and b would then be that exactly one of them is 1, while the other is 0 (only two possible states). If psi were a "classical" analog "bit" or a probabilistic bit, the requirement would be that a, b in [0,1], and a+b=1.
What happens if we measure psi? It depends on the basis we choose to measure in, but if we go to measure psi in the {| 0 >, | 1 >} basis, we'll get | 0 > with probability |a|^2, and | 1 > with probability |b|^2. Figuring out probabilities for other bases requires only a basis transformation (simple linear algebra).
Now, this qubit business seems horribly messy--we have an infinite number of states for a single qubit--how can we possibly describe the action of a two-qubit gate like controlled-NOT (CNOT)? Fortunately, quantum mechanics is linear, which means that if we describe how a gate operates on each of the possible input basis states, we've completely specified the gate. For two qubits, we can use the following basis: {| 00 >, | 01 >, | 10 >, | 11 >}. Labeling the rows and columns in that order, we get the following truth table for the CNOT gate:
1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0
In other words, if the first bit is 0, do nothing to the second bit. If the first bit is 1, flip the second bit.
It turns out that CNOT plus a bunch of different single qubit gates is universal, meaning you can use that set of gates to implement any "quantum circuit".
If you re-read the article, you'll see that the gate is a controlled-NOT (aka CNOT) gate, rather than a simple NOT gate. CNOT is a two-bit (or, in this case, two-qubit) gate. Simply being able to make and maintain single qubits is challenging (at least, for superconducting systems), manipulating single qubits is more challenging, and performing two-qubit operations is extremely hard. It's worth noting that this result is not the first example of a two-qubit gate in a superconducting system; rather, it appears to be the most complete so far.
It's also worth noting that quantum CNOT gates were achieved years ago in other physical systems (NMR, ion traps, etc.). Part of the reason people are so excited about this is that, by virtue of it being on a chip, we may be able to apply the enormous amounts of chip-fab technology we already posses to scaling up the system.
"Mexifornia" as you said, is the first time i've ever heard that word. Unlike any canadian territory where french nor english was the native language, "Spanish" - the american variation of Spain's official language, was already present in California and many other "western states" long before the US moved west.
There's a book on immigration by Victor Davis Hanson of that name. Hanson is a brilliant military historian, and also a California farmer (small family farm) who has had a lot of personal contact with illegal immigrants. His book is a sympathetic but worried look at the phenomenon.
The Spanish were no more the original inhabitants of California than the French were of Quebec. The difference is that Quebec became part of Canada as a French-speaking province, whereas even in the early days of the territory of California, it was primarily English-speaking. Latin Americans whose ancestors were in California in the early days have long since assimilated.
What are people so afraid of? Surely no one on/. is going to be out of work mowing lawns... [ snip ] If anything, we should be trying to give these peoples more jobs because they'll do it, try to do it well and hopefully "motivate" locals who don't do the jobs back because they can't get hired for anything more skilled and aren't willing to take less pay now.
Nobody on/. is going to be out of work, sure, but that's not what this is about. It's not good to have lower class citizens put out of work by illegal immigration--unemployment can lead to poverty, violence, and social breakdown.
They want to be able to come here, and live like they "imagine" they can. So when everyone who thinks "they MUST assimilate but don't..." they are wrong. No one who comes here sets up show like vietnam, thailan, japan, russia, pakistan or any other place. They can try to "live like they did at home" but that doesn't mean buying a property, tearing it down, and the building the same crappy structure they had back home.
First of all, sometimes people do come here from all sorts of places and try to "live like they did at home"; ever heard of Chinatown, Little Korea, Little Italy? With those examples, people usually do assimilate after a generation or so, but there are signs that's not happening with some Latin American sub-populations. Another big difference with many of the illegal immigrants from Latin America--they don't plan on staying or integrating, and are just here to make money to send home. They often do end up staying, but they keep a romanticized image of their home country and never really cut ties. This hinders the assimilation process.
You know, i've personally never have heard of an illegal alien getting welfare, foodstamps or some other sort of non-humane benefit.
You've heard of ESL classes, right? Those are expensive.
I've never heard of one apply for a tax refund either. I'm sure they've gotten emergency room treatment for free at the expense of legal aliens, but standing in line to get money? They must have paid a lot of $ to get a good SSN and ID.
I doubt they go around talking about their fraudulent IDs too much. A lot probably get paid under the table tax free in the first place, with the ones who do have good fake IDs are perfectly free to file for a tax refund. You know that if you somehow don't qualify for an SSN (i.e., you're here illegally), the IRS is happy to let your pay your taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number?
You don't see Los Angeles being a copy of Mexico. And besides, like i've told everyone after having worked in TJ for a little bit, "the only difference i saw between TJ and California is that California has Cal Trans."
So it's not a copy, but the only difference is Cal Trans? I don't get it.
Anyhow, it's time for leftovers from "Beto's." Man those dudes can make some mean fajitas. I
I agree with you 100%. The US is a nation of immigrants, and it's insanely hypocritical to keep the immigration caps as low as they are, especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
I agree with you to some degree, but certainly not 100%. The US is a nation of people who immigrated (largely from European countries) and assimilated. They learned the language, the culture, and were fiercely proud of their new homes. One of the concerns about the current illegal immigration phenomenon is that, for a variety of reasons, the new immigrants aren't assimilating in the same way as previous immigrants did.
Now, I'm American (born to two American parents), but I was born in Canada and am thus also Canadian (I grew up there and lived there until a few years ago). From my time in Canada, I know of the perils of a bi-cultural society. The politics of such a society becomes perennially focused on the clash between the two cultures. You have separatist movements, even terrorism, and no common culture. In a very important sense, bi-culturalism is different than both uni-culturalism and multi-culturalism, and worse than either. Many Canadians might disagree with me, but they lack the experience of living in a country with a real common culture; if you asked those same Canadians to identify what is special or different about Canadian culture, all you would get is hockey, Tim Horton's, better beer, and not being American. Throw in a few "ehs" and stick an extra "u" in a few words, and that's unfortunately all that's left of the common Canadian culture in much of the country.
I would hate to see "Mexifornia" turn into the Quebec of the US, but there are already signs of that, such as the separatism of some of the more extreme branches of MEChA.
Getting back to your point of the cost of domestic labor--is it really going through the roof? Sure, nominal wages are up a fair bit in some sectors, but when you adjust for inflation using official inflation statistics, it's a much smaller rise. If you attempt to make a true accounting of increases in cost of housing, health care, etc., and include that in a cost of living adjustment, I'm not sure wages are up at all in most sectors (in other words, I think the official inflation stats are underestimates). You're right that the best way to control the cost of labor is to control the supply--if we want cheaper labor, allow more immigration, and conversely, if we want people at the low end of the income scale to get paid more, we should restrict the flow of illegal immigrants instead of legislating a minimum wage increase. This is just basic economics, but Congress doesn't seem to get it (why they both legislating a higher minimum wage and creating a guest worker program?).
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane.
Most people don't view immigration to be a right. Genuine refugees are an exception, and are generally accepted to have rights to asylum, but such refugees compromise a miniscule portion of total immigration. Most people do view it to be a right of sovereign nations to control their borders. If you're one of the small number of true open borders believers who think everyone has a right to go anywhere, then we disagree on first principles and this discussion isn't going anywhere. Furthermore, most people do believe that we should have legal immigration, but that there must be limits and rules. The general purpose of these rules is to serve the interests of the country, not t
In the same manner, if the US per capita output of carbon were higher than the Chinese, then (On the basis of carbon output to maintain a population) the Chinese would be more efficient.
Efficiency is a ratio, sometimes of one quantity to another, sometimes of a single quantity to its theoretical maximum or minimum. Implicit in your statement is the assumption that the "efficiency" we care about is people / CO2. But why should that be? China produces less CO2 per capita right now in large part because their economy is nowhere near as advanced as the US or Europe (hence their status as a "developing nation"). This doesn't make them more virtuous, just less capable on an individual basis of wrecking the planet (for now). Unfortunately (from an ecological perspective), China has allowed itself to become very heavily populated, and thus will soon overtake the US in greenhouse gas emissions.
Put another way, should we applaud Canada, which has a very low rate of greenhouse gas emissions compared to its physical size (but a very high rate per capita), or China, which has a high rate compared to physical size (but low per capita)?
I'd be much more interested in seeing "efficiency" in terms of CO2 / GDP, or perhaps CO2 / habitable land area.
50% is higher than anything I've heard, even for research-grade stuff under lab conditions. It will be a long time before solar panels are there. Let's say 25% is a more reasonable efficiency rating for something you might be able to buy in a few years that can withstand the conditions it would be exposed to on top of a car, and is not insanely expensive.
Now, let's say you cover 2 square meters with panels (about the roof of a large car, or maybe roof + part of hood on a small car). Peak solar irradiance is just under 1 kW per square meter, but you lose quite a bit to the atmosphere, especially at latitudes typical of North American and European population centers. Take off a bit more for the fact that the sun isn't directly overhead all eight hours of your work day, and let's say you get 0.5 kW per square meter on average. That means your car will get 8 h * (0.5 kW / m^2 ) * 2 m^2 * 25% = 2 kWh of energy, or about 7.2 megajoules. For comparison, one liter of gasoline contains 34.8 megajoules of energy (or 131 MJ per US gallon). In other words, you'll get an amount of energy equivalent to less than half a pint of gasoline, and that's under sunny conditions. That might be enough to get your hybrid a few miles.
Not worthless, but probably not cost-effective, especially in climates that aren't sunny all the time. I wouldn't be surprised to see it as an option, but it will be more of an eco-fashion statement than anything else.
One of these arguments often seen in the mainstream media is the idea of the lone inventor who gets a patent to protect his investment in the research and development he has done, so he will not be ripped off by large corporations. But in reality the lone inventor is usually ripped off anyway. The reason for this is the cost of a patent infringement case. Only rarely such a case costs less than a few million US$. How many lone inventors have a war-chest of a few million US$ to take a patent infringement case to court?
I'm not quite a lone inventor--I have one co-inventor, but I think that's more or less the same thing. We've filed patent applications, and are in the process of licensing talks with a few companies. I don't expect we'll get ripped off, because we partnered with a reputable technology transfer company to do the patenting and licensing. That company puts up all the money up front for lawyers and such, and has also done a great deal of the legwork with marketing. In return, they get a cut of any profits. I think everyone is quite happy with the arrangement. I also expect the companies we're licensing to to be happy, as our technology will allow them to dramatically improve the capabilities of their products and sell many more units.
I know there are lots of stupid patents out there, but the system does work as intended sometimes. It's not all bad.
Sorry, didn't impress me during the debates. He doesn't seem to me to know what he's talking about. "Inflation is caused by printing too much money"
I'm not a Ron Paul defender, and I didn't see the debate. I'm just curious--did he literally mean paper money, or was he using "printing too much money" as a euphemism for creating too much money (i.e. M3 or whatever other broad measure of money you wish to use). If that's the case, he's essentially correct; as Milton Friedman says, inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. Otherwise, it's a gross oversimplification.
Good reply. Tenure reform seems to make sense based on what I read above. But not tenure abolition. Perhaps something like a peer-reviewed performance evaluation, whose results could be used to revoke tenure (in addition to the usual rules like - don't snog a student:P)?
We're now getting into the realm of semantic differences, but I'd prefer ten-year renewable contracts.
What I am REALLY afraid of is academia turning into a microcosm of industry when each have their uses and each must exist, independently to some extent. The potential for short-sightedness is just too dangerous.
Industry is short-sighted, but that doesn't mean we can't take their pay/salary model and tweak it to have a longer characteristic timescale.
I do take your point about young researchers not being allowed to take risks. That, fortunately, is a problem that can be solved at the department level since the hiring committee, comprised of professors, can easily reward a young non-tenured researcher who dares to take (well-thought out) risks.
A good idea in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. Given a choice between a semi-decent candidate with a proven record, and a brilliant high-risk candidate, they'll take the semi-decent candidate. This is certainly what I saw when I was on a faculty search committee. String theory isn't as high-risk as you make out when you consider that the "payoff" that counts for hiring isn't experimental validation but rather high profile publications.
Also, I must admit that I have NOT thought that far ahead - marriage, family, etc. The two-body problem may be soluble, with the right super-partner, but you do know that no one has yet solved the three-body problem?:D But seriously, you make some excellent points in that regard. For a single guy, a GSR's salary (for me at least) is like living in the lap of luxury (no jokes). Of course, this will change at some point. It is ironic that one's wants increase with increasing salary
Some people do get carried away with increasing salary, always wanting more (a boat, another car, a fourth bathroom) than they can afford. A lot more people just want a good marriage, good health, a house, two kids, and a decent education for their kids. These things go a long way towards happiness, but they're unfortunately becoming harder and harder to get.
Please, for your own sake, take an afternoon and do these calculations. Look up the cost of an average house (around here, a typical starter home is half a million, and it's almost impossible to get anything for under $400k in a neighborhood that won't get you shot). Look up interest rates, mortgages, tax rates, etc. Look up typical salaries. Figure out how much time you'd spend at work, how much time commuting, and whether you'd have any time for your family and your health. This is your future, and you shouldn't just let it happen to you without planning. I see a lot of people who just "follow the path" in front of them, and end up unhappy because they didn't figure out what was really important to them.
I certain that we're at the same school, same department. Small world! Good ol' Anne:D. What would we do without her?
I don't know. Anne does wonders to help grad students, and the department wouldn't be the same without her. BTW, I'm guessing you're in your second or third year. Am I right?
thrawn_al, I'm starting to wonder if we're at the same university. You mentioned you were a grad student--is your physics department's grad student services person named Anne?
Shoring up salaries to match industry and removing job security is IMO not a viable solution in this case. For one thing, a physicist (I would say a scientist in general, but I have no personal knowledge of that) works for lower pay even as a postdoc or non-tenured researcher because he/she actually enjoys his/her work and going further, would consider doing it on their own time.
This is true of lots of professions, not just physics (or science). What's different is that, if you look at all professions requiring similar amounts of training, the sciences are at the bottom in terms of pay, and it's become a crisis. Look up the average salary a physics PhD makes, ten years after graduation (if you're in the same department as me, these stats are posted on the wall in the physics building). If you're a typical grad student, you'll be about 38 ten years out. Ask yourself if, based on that salary, you would have been able to save up enough money for a downpayment on a modest home in your area, plus pay a mortgage, plus start saving for your own kids (if you have any) to go to university. Oh, and don't forget taxes. If you have a spouse at that point, is he or she also an academic? How do you manage the two-body problem? Will your combined incomes be enough? If your spouse does work, factor in daycare, second car, etc., and don't forget that your marginal tax rate will be really high.
I was recently on a faculty search committee, and, to paraphrase the committee chair, we're looking for someone who is so good at physics he or she can "walk on water", but isn't smart enough to realize we don't pay enough to buy a house in the area.
I am not spouting fairy tales here, few people get into academia because of the lucrative nature of the realm:P. One may sneer at tenured professors but the fact is that they've had to work their arse off for said position.
I know that very well. In fact, I'd argue that people have to sacrifice too much to get tenure, and then are often burnt out. A more sustainable career pace would be better, and much more family-friendly.
LESSER risk-taking. Bet on a surety. If you fail, you could lose your job...
So, at the very least, young scientists (those still trying to get tenure) can't afford to take risks and blow their one shot. Young scientists are usually the ones with the energy, the new outlook, and the drive to make breakthroughs. Look at the history of physics, and the great physicists of the past; how many did their best work when they were over 50?
Also, the idea that older scientists are free to take risks and do controversial things isn't really true, either. Science now requires so much money that dependence on grants has eliminated the freedom tenure was supposed to ensure. Most of the benefits of tenure have been lost, but we're stuck with all the problems.
I don't claim to understand this problem in the slightest, it mystifies me utterly!
I don't really understand the minority issue, either. Low female enrollment in science in general makes a little more sense--women have to make tough choices concerning family versus career, and the tenure clock makes that even tougher. If more women dated guys that were younger and/or "less successful" than them, they'd probably find their husbands more willing to stay home and raise the kids. That doesn't happen much, though, so simple economics dictates that the women are often the ones making the career sacrifice. That doesn't explain the disparity between physics, and, say, biology, though.
I just wish the incidence of race/gender biased admittance/hiring practices were lower than what they are today (which is much lower than a couple generations ago).
Agreed. The way Asians are treated is particularly unfair. They seem to be the new Jews of ac
Um, isn't that practically the case now, given that it is harder and harder to get?
To actually have the effect I'm talking about, you'd need to fire a lot of professors who already have tenure, which probably would involve breaking contracts. Individual universities don't have the power to do this.
Do you actually see tenured profs slacking off? Because I have to say, that hasn't been my experience
It's true that outright slackers are rare, but there are a lot of professors who are busy doing nothing very useful. They do a bad job teaching, do mediocre research, and generally don't make much of a contribution. You can tell their hearts aren't in it anymore, and it would be better for everyone if they retired or got a new career.
You can always do forced retirement, and then you don't have to worry about it.
Isn't that illegal age discrimination, under US law? IANAL, etc.
Then someone like you finally focuses on some decent facts and does so from a reputable perspective and you don't get modded up. I guess if you don't aimlessly bash the President or government but focus on the topic at hand you don't get modded. What the heck is wrong with moderation today?
Don't worry about it; I've been on slashdot long enough to know how the moderation system works. My post probably will get modded up to +5 Insightful or +5 Informative, and if it doesn't, it's not a big deal because I don't need the karma. To slashdot's credit, any time an expert posts on their topic of expertise (and the story isn't old and their post isn't buried at the bottom of the comments page), they're usually modded up. Given all the other parameters, all it takes is one moderator to bump it up to 3. Then, enough other moderators (most of whom are just casually reading at a fairly high threshold) will see it and it will quickly get to +5. There's a very small chance somebody who is affiliated with NAS or who really loves the tenure system might mod me down, but such people are probably not moderating on slashdot. Nothing else in my post is going to really piss people off enough to mod me down, so downmods are unlikely unless somebody is just being perverse. If, on the other hand, I had so much as mentioned Bush, I would probably get at least one downmod, and perhaps some angry replies.
Unfortunately, the moderation system on slashdot is fairly predictable. That's not to say it's useless; well-written and informative or insightful posts usually do well. The problem is that certain tricks dramatically increase your chance of positive moderation. I'm not going to describe those tricks, because I don't want to see them abused.
Disclaimer: I'm a young physicist at a top-five research university in the US. I'm not a condensed matter physicist, but I work in a "neighboring" field.
The problem isn't funding--it's what we do with it. Oh, sure, we could use lots more money, but it's not the real problem. Before I get into the details, let's briefly pick apart some of the nonsense in the National Academy of Science's Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics report, such as their supposed "grand challenges":
How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?
When you increase the size of your system, your state space generally grows exponentially. Of course it gets complex. Figuring out the specific complex behaviors of various systems isn't a single grand challenge, it's a whole lot of little challenges (unless you're talking about superconductivity, which I'll revisit).
How will the energy demands of future generations be met?
Long-term? It's probably fusion, which isn't a condensed matter problem; try nuclear and plasma physics.
What is the physics of life?
This is bio-physics, not condensed matter. Condensed matter is only one of many fields contributing to bio-physics.
What happens far from equilibrium and why?
This one seems legitimate, although it would be more interesting if they framed it in terms of some of the big problems in non-equilibrium physics.
What new discoveries await us in the nanoworld?
This doesn't even make sense as a research challenge. It could at least have been framed as a question involving nanotechnology.
How will the information technology revolution be extended?
Here it seems like private industry is doing a very good job with the short-to-medium term. Long term, the answer may well be quantum information, which is my own field. Some of the approaches to building quantum computers are condensed matter-based, but many aren't.
The big thing I'm surprised not to see on the list is superconductivity. One estimate I heard was that something like 40% of all physicists have worked on it at some point in their careers (for me, it was as an undergrad, albeit peripherally). Despite the enormous research effort, we still don't have a really solid handle on how it works.
I'm really unimpressed by the "grand challenges" the NAS was able to come up with; it reeks of committee work. For comparison, I could write a much better list for my own field. Just off the top of my head:
How can we use quantum key distribution to make a secure replacement for public key cryptography?
How do we engineer quantum systems with both the high degree of control and excellent isolation from noise needed for quantum computing?
Can "quantum weirdness" really exist at the mesoscopic or macroscopic scale (i.e., what Tony Leggett has been talking about recently)
Are quantum computers fundamentally more powerful than classical computers (i.e., is BP a proper subset of BQP)?
Aside from the quantum fourier transform, are there any classes of quantum algorithms that are exponentially faster than their classical counterparts?
How do we actually build a quantum computer?
Similarly, the NAS suggestions also seem to be the product of a shy and timid committee. There's the usual--more outreach, more women/minorities, more education, more money. There's also a pining for the old days of Bell labs and such, but no realistic consideration of how to bring it back (which would of course start with figuring out why it left), beyond a call for more discussions.
The countries that do the most to meet [the challenges] will benefit the most economically.
(Playing devil's advocate) Why is that so? Basic research is available to everyone. The country that benef
We were too concerned about major-league threats like active man-in-the-middle attacks and not concerned enough about simple, transparent and totally automatic encryption that would still be 100% effective against passive eavesdropping.
As soon as that happens, Cisco et al will start selling specialized boxes that do MITM attacks, can handle OC3 bandwidth, and provide the unencrypted traffic for inspection, filtering, and recording. There would certainly be a lot of demand, as there are lots of network administrators with more-or-less legitimate reasons to want to filter their traffic (university network admins, for instance).
Slashdot Mirror
The AC is right. In grad school, my wife studied population genetics of coast live oak (quercus agrifolia), and she saw the same boom-and-bust cycles of acorn production. The boom years are known as "mast" years--not sure what the bust years are called.
This is just a normal cycle, and, as usual, the media's reporting of science is atrocious.
No. You and I absorb the costs of fraud because the retailer pays a penalty and loses the income from the fraudulent activity.
That depends on the price elasticity of demand. Furthermore, retailers usually only pay a penalty if fraud exceeds a certain threshold. Since retailers have a choice (for now, at least) about installing contactless readers, they presumably won't do it unless it makes financial sense. If fraud is a major problem, retailers won't adopt the system.
It's obvious that contactless payments are vulnerable to at least one type of attack--a real-time relay. This usually would require two "attackers" working in tandem. The first carries a modified "contactless reader" in his pocket, and stands near somebody who is carrying a contactless card (perhaps on a bus or another crowded place where it won't be too obvious. The second attacker carries a device that can act as a contactless card "repeater", with a real-time data link to the first attacker's "reader". The second attacker walks up to the reader in a store, and waves his repeater at it (perhaps hidden in his wallet, in the same hand as a dummy card so as not to arouse suspicion). The store's reader sends a signal, which is picked up by the second attacker's repeater, transmitted to the first attacker's modified reader, then broadcast to the victim's card. It responds appropriately, and its response is relayed back to the reader in the store. It's not necessary to break any encryption to do this, and there's no real way to prevent such attacks except perhaps very tight timing tolerances.
I thought about all this when the bank sent me a contactless VISA, and I initially considered refusing the card. Then I realized that the bank will take the hit on any losses, and has presumably done the math to determine that the increase in risk of fraud is acceptable, at least for small purchases. In other words, it's secure enough.
What if their APC gets a crate that gives it stealth?
Seriously--I had this happen once, and it was so awesome. Stealth APC of engineers FTW!
You stood in line to get her papers, so it is/was not for nothing. We Americans have a right to say who we want in or not, and which hoops they have to jump (or not jump) through.
Actually, Congress has a say in it--the American populace in general does not directly have any control over it. If you look at the rather large gap between what the population wants regarding immigration (as measured by polls) versus what Congress tried to do, it's clear that the opinions of the American public matter relatively little to many members of Congress. The good news is that overwhelming public opposition to this bill did ultimately kill it.
It is NOT against you or anybody if we want to let other people in; in fact, we let Cubans in with very little fuss, why should it be different if we decide to do the same with any other group of people ?
Cubans are quasi-refugees from a communist-governed country. There are both humanitarian and national-interest reasons for giving them an easier time. Mexico (and many other Latin American countries) are democracies, so the same considerations don't apply there.
Also, illegals DO pay many taxes, the only ones they *may* avoid is FICA (of which they don't get the benefits) and income taxes (which, usually would be very low or zero if they were legal due to their levels of income). If they use a fake SSN, they usually pay all the taxes, and if they work under the table for a business, then the business pays income tax on that money since they can't deduct it; they only avoid taxes if they work under the table for another person, but many other people do to (including computer geeks who get a little money or food for fixing somebody else's computer)
Many illegals in the food industry would benefit from not reporting tips, for instance. Many day laborers likely work under the table, and their employers probably fudge the numbers to hide the fact, avoiding tax on their end (after all, if you're already breaking one law by hiring illegals, why not break another?).
Getting back to your earlier point, it actually does hurt legal immigrants to let in illegals. The most obvious reason is that the USCIS bureaucracy is already strained to the breaking point, and dumping another 12 million cases (e.g. Z visas) on them would utterly ruin their capacity to process claims from people who did everything by the book. This is not going to change overnight.
I'm obviously not opposed to immigration. I'm not even opposed in principle to some form of amnesty for many illegals. I do think we shouldn't start thinking about that until we fix the other aspects of the immigration system. Here's what I propose:
(1) Fix the border. If we don't do this, this problem will never go away.
(2) Use existing laws to go after employers who are egregious offenders in terms of abusing illegals or hiring illegals for sub-market wages.
(3) Fix the legal immigration system.
(4) Once the border is secure, and the current backlog of legal immigrants is through the system, start letting illegals apply for immigration.
Some might say that this is more or less what the Immigration Bill did; this is partially true, but the devil is in the details. It is absolutely essential that we don't try step (4) -- not even temporary Z visas -- until the other steps are done.
This is perhaps the most insightful post I've ever seen from an Anonymous Coward, and I have a 5-digit user ID...
Not worth it, it's a slap in the face to the lawful immigrants who follow thew rules,
I completely agree. My wife is a legal immigrant, and it's crazy that Congress would even think of saying that we stood in those USCIS (aka INS) lines for nothing. The idea that a $5000 fine makes it OK is crazy--legal immigration for my wife ended up costing us about a grand, and we did all the paperwork ourselves; a lawyer would have been much more. Throw in the fact that we actually had to pay taxes (whereas illegals can get away with only paying a few years of back taxes, if that), and it's not clear we "saved" any money by my wife immigrating legally.
Make the illegals go home and sort their own mistakes out in their own nations,
Yes! We are not doing the poor of Mexico a favor by supplying a "pressure relief valve" that delays social reform. Also, our own un- and under-employed poor would do a lot better if they didn't have to compete against illegal immigrants for jobs.
I'm not rejecting free will, or capacity to make choices based on motivation. I'm rejecting willpower, or capacity to follow through on arbitrary decisions with insufficient motivation.
So we have a capacity to make decisions, but no independent capacity to follow through on them? That seems like a rather trivial form of free will. It sounds like you're saying some part of our brain gets to make decisions, but has no power to "enforce" them; the question of whether we stick with our decision is determined solely by environmental factors and how (in ways beyond our conscious control) we respond to them.
I view willpower as a series of decisions. Every time we are tempted to veer off-course, we must make a new decision as to whether to stick to our original decision. If we had "free will" in the original decision, surely we may have it in these subsequent decisions. It's of course true that sometimes environmental factors will overwhelm our "willpower", but that doesn't mean they always do.
To put it slightly more clinically, "willpower" may be the ability of the "higher" brain to resist "lower" brain impulses. This is why people say "impulsiveness" is more or less the opposite of "willpower". Part of your brain tells you you really want a cigarette, but your "higher" brain tells you that cigarettes will kill you.
Throwing gamers in jail wouldn't "solve" the "problem" because the problem is people failing to live productive lives, not people going out and robbing banks. I don't feel particularly motivated to make a choice like that, do you?
I'm not advocating throwing gamers in jail. I mentioned that merely as an example of how, if we have no free will, it doesn't matter whether we adopt stupid "solutions" to things. Forget about that--it was intended as a stupid example.
While it's certainly clear that environment influences choices, and in fact sometimes the environmental influence is so strong we have no choice, are you completely rejecting free will? If you're not, then it seems reasonable that some people would be better than others at resisting environmental influence in their decision-making, and in sticking with their decisions. You can make up new names for that, but most people call that characteristic willpower.
If you are rejecting free will, then we are all just meat robots--automatons living pre-determined (or, at best, senselessly random) lives. In that case, nothing matters. No choices have moral significance because there are no choices. We might as well just throw all the gamers in jail and thus "solve" the gaming "problem".
A 'bit' is simply shorthand for "binary digit". Quantum digits, however, aren't binary, since they can represent much more than a simple 0 or 1. By adding the 'Qu-' to the term, we are essentially calling them "Quantum Binary Digits," which is in itself an oxymoron.
Qubits are quantum bits in the sense that there are two basis states (often | 0 > and | 1 >). In some systems, qutrits (quantum trinary digits) are more natural, and occasionally, you'll hear "qudit", which is a d-level quantum digit, for some arbitrary d.
Given how often I have to say or hear the word "qubit", I guarantee it wouldn't be more fun if it had an extra syllable.
I'm not an expert on Quantum computers, but I think the math/computer science is WAY ahead of the physics on this one. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a Quantum computer is to a normal computer as a NFA is to an DFA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_fin ite_state_machine). In this case it's really not a new idea at a fundamental logical level.
I am an expert, and I don't think CS is ahead here; rather, I'd say CS and physics are moving forward in a partnership. As best as we understand the relevant complexity classes, quantum computer are not equivalent to an NFA. To put it another way, as far as we know, quantum computers cannot efficiently solve NP-complete problems. I say "as far as we know" because we don't even know for sure whether classical computers can efficiently solve such problems. Quantum information is a fundamentally new concept to CS, however.
Similarly, conventional computers can solve the same set of problems that quantum computers can solve, they just require an expansion of the problem which in the real world requires much more time and/or space to complete.
If you look simply at the domain of solvable computational problems, and don't care about efficiency, then yes, there's no difference. There are, however, communication problems and quantum "games" that cannot be solved with classical information but can be with quantum information.
I guess it's mostly historical, and that XOR is usually associated with a two-input/one-output gate. Controlled-NOT looks pretty intuitive (the target is negated only if the control
Quantum mechanics being unitary and thus reversible, it's important that your gates be reversible, too*. CNOT is two-input, two-output, and is reversible. XOR is two input, one output, and is clearly not reversible (given the output you can't reconstruct the inputs). This is why people use CNOT for quantum computing--XOR wouldn't work.
*I'm skipping things like cluster state (aka one-way) quantum computation because that just confuses the issue.
Disclaimer: I am a quantum information scientist
Qubits represent a probability of being a 0 or 1. Observing a qubit destroys that probability, and you "read" only a zero or a one.
This is at best an incomplete description of what happens. Qubits are quantum states, not probabilities. Quantum states are sometimes called "probability amplitudes", in that taking the square of the magnitude of the coefficient for a particular basis state gives you the probability of getting that state if you measure in that basis. There are a few very important points: (1) we're dealing with complex numbers, and things work in such a way as to give us the possibility of "interference" of probability amplitudes; (2) quantum states are real states, not just probabilities representing our ignorance of which classical state you'll find when you measure.
A brief intro to the math:
Let's take some qubit in some arbitrary state, which we'll call | psi > (I'm using Dirac notation). We can completely describe the state as follows:
| psi > = a | 0 > + b | 1 >,
where a and b are complex numbers, and have the property that |a|^2+ |b|^2 = 1. We see that we have an uncountably infinite number of possible states for just a single qubit. If psi were a classical bit instead of a quantum bit, we could use essentially the same description, except that the requirement on a and b would then be that exactly one of them is 1, while the other is 0 (only two possible states). If psi were a "classical" analog "bit" or a probabilistic bit, the requirement would be that a, b in [0,1], and a+b=1.
What happens if we measure psi? It depends on the basis we choose to measure in, but if we go to measure psi in the {| 0 >, | 1 >} basis, we'll get | 0 > with probability |a|^2, and | 1 > with probability |b|^2. Figuring out probabilities for other bases requires only a basis transformation (simple linear algebra).
Now, this qubit business seems horribly messy--we have an infinite number of states for a single qubit--how can we possibly describe the action of a two-qubit gate like controlled-NOT (CNOT)? Fortunately, quantum mechanics is linear, which means that if we describe how a gate operates on each of the possible input basis states, we've completely specified the gate. For two qubits, we can use the following basis: {| 00 >, | 01 >, | 10 >, | 11 >}. Labeling the rows and columns in that order, we get the following truth table for the CNOT gate:
1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 0 1
0 0 1 0
In other words, if the first bit is 0, do nothing to the second bit. If the first bit is 1, flip the second bit.
It turns out that CNOT plus a bunch of different single qubit gates is universal, meaning you can use that set of gates to implement any "quantum circuit".
Disclaimer: I am a quantum information scientist.
If you re-read the article, you'll see that the gate is a controlled-NOT (aka CNOT) gate, rather than a simple NOT gate. CNOT is a two-bit (or, in this case, two-qubit) gate. Simply being able to make and maintain single qubits is challenging (at least, for superconducting systems), manipulating single qubits is more challenging, and performing two-qubit operations is extremely hard. It's worth noting that this result is not the first example of a two-qubit gate in a superconducting system; rather, it appears to be the most complete so far.
It's also worth noting that quantum CNOT gates were achieved years ago in other physical systems (NMR, ion traps, etc.). Part of the reason people are so excited about this is that, by virtue of it being on a chip, we may be able to apply the enormous amounts of chip-fab technology we already posses to scaling up the system.
"Mexifornia" as you said, is the first time i've ever heard that word. Unlike any canadian territory where french nor english was the native language, "Spanish" - the american variation of Spain's official language, was already present in California and many other "western states" long before the US moved west.
/. is going to be out of work mowing lawns... [ snip ] If anything, we should be trying to give these peoples more jobs because they'll do it, try to do it well and hopefully "motivate" locals who don't do the jobs back because they can't get hired for anything more skilled and aren't willing to take less pay now.
/. is going to be out of work, sure, but that's not what this is about. It's not good to have lower class citizens put out of work by illegal immigration--unemployment can lead to poverty, violence, and social breakdown.
There's a book on immigration by Victor Davis Hanson of that name. Hanson is a brilliant military historian, and also a California farmer (small family farm) who has had a lot of personal contact with illegal immigrants. His book is a sympathetic but worried look at the phenomenon.
The Spanish were no more the original inhabitants of California than the French were of Quebec. The difference is that Quebec became part of Canada as a French-speaking province, whereas even in the early days of the territory of California, it was primarily English-speaking. Latin Americans whose ancestors were in California in the early days have long since assimilated.
What are people so afraid of? Surely no one on
Nobody on
They want to be able to come here, and live like they "imagine" they can. So when everyone who thinks "they MUST assimilate but don't..." they are wrong. No one who comes here sets up show like vietnam, thailan, japan, russia, pakistan or any other place. They can try to "live like they did at home" but that doesn't mean buying a property, tearing it down, and the building the same crappy structure they had back home.
First of all, sometimes people do come here from all sorts of places and try to "live like they did at home"; ever heard of Chinatown, Little Korea, Little Italy? With those examples, people usually do assimilate after a generation or so, but there are signs that's not happening with some Latin American sub-populations. Another big difference with many of the illegal immigrants from Latin America--they don't plan on staying or integrating, and are just here to make money to send home. They often do end up staying, but they keep a romanticized image of their home country and never really cut ties. This hinders the assimilation process.
You know, i've personally never have heard of an illegal alien getting welfare, foodstamps or some other sort of non-humane benefit.
You've heard of ESL classes, right? Those are expensive.
I've never heard of one apply for a tax refund either. I'm sure they've gotten emergency room treatment for free at the expense of legal aliens, but standing in line to get money? They must have paid a lot of $ to get a good SSN and ID.
I doubt they go around talking about their fraudulent IDs too much. A lot probably get paid under the table tax free in the first place, with the ones who do have good fake IDs are perfectly free to file for a tax refund. You know that if you somehow don't qualify for an SSN (i.e., you're here illegally), the IRS is happy to let your pay your taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number?
You don't see Los Angeles being a copy of Mexico. And besides, like i've told everyone after having worked in TJ for a little bit, "the only difference i saw between TJ and California is that California has Cal Trans."
So it's not a copy, but the only difference is Cal Trans? I don't get it.
Anyhow, it's time for leftovers from "Beto's." Man those dudes can make some mean fajitas. I
I agree with you 100%. The US is a nation of immigrants, and it's insanely hypocritical to keep the immigration caps as low as they are, especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
I agree with you to some degree, but certainly not 100%. The US is a nation of people who immigrated (largely from European countries) and assimilated. They learned the language, the culture, and were fiercely proud of their new homes. One of the concerns about the current illegal immigration phenomenon is that, for a variety of reasons, the new immigrants aren't assimilating in the same way as previous immigrants did.
Now, I'm American (born to two American parents), but I was born in Canada and am thus also Canadian (I grew up there and lived there until a few years ago). From my time in Canada, I know of the perils of a bi-cultural society. The politics of such a society becomes perennially focused on the clash between the two cultures. You have separatist movements, even terrorism, and no common culture. In a very important sense, bi-culturalism is different than both uni-culturalism and multi-culturalism, and worse than either. Many Canadians might disagree with me, but they lack the experience of living in a country with a real common culture; if you asked those same Canadians to identify what is special or different about Canadian culture, all you would get is hockey, Tim Horton's, better beer, and not being American. Throw in a few "ehs" and stick an extra "u" in a few words, and that's unfortunately all that's left of the common Canadian culture in much of the country.
I would hate to see "Mexifornia" turn into the Quebec of the US, but there are already signs of that, such as the separatism of some of the more extreme branches of MEChA.
Getting back to your point of the cost of domestic labor--is it really going through the roof? Sure, nominal wages are up a fair bit in some sectors, but when you adjust for inflation using official inflation statistics, it's a much smaller rise. If you attempt to make a true accounting of increases in cost of housing, health care, etc., and include that in a cost of living adjustment, I'm not sure wages are up at all in most sectors (in other words, I think the official inflation stats are underestimates). You're right that the best way to control the cost of labor is to control the supply--if we want cheaper labor, allow more immigration, and conversely, if we want people at the low end of the income scale to get paid more, we should restrict the flow of illegal immigrants instead of legislating a minimum wage increase. This is just basic economics, but Congress doesn't seem to get it (why they both legislating a higher minimum wage and creating a guest worker program?).
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane.
Most people don't view immigration to be a right. Genuine refugees are an exception, and are generally accepted to have rights to asylum, but such refugees compromise a miniscule portion of total immigration. Most people do view it to be a right of sovereign nations to control their borders. If you're one of the small number of true open borders believers who think everyone has a right to go anywhere, then we disagree on first principles and this discussion isn't going anywhere. Furthermore, most people do believe that we should have legal immigration, but that there must be limits and rules. The general purpose of these rules is to serve the interests of the country, not t
In the same manner, if the US per capita output of carbon were higher than the Chinese, then (On the basis of carbon output to maintain a population) the Chinese would be more efficient.
Efficiency is a ratio, sometimes of one quantity to another, sometimes of a single quantity to its theoretical maximum or minimum. Implicit in your statement is the assumption that the "efficiency" we care about is people / CO2. But why should that be? China produces less CO2 per capita right now in large part because their economy is nowhere near as advanced as the US or Europe (hence their status as a "developing nation"). This doesn't make them more virtuous, just less capable on an individual basis of wrecking the planet (for now). Unfortunately (from an ecological perspective), China has allowed itself to become very heavily populated, and thus will soon overtake the US in greenhouse gas emissions.
Put another way, should we applaud Canada, which has a very low rate of greenhouse gas emissions compared to its physical size (but a very high rate per capita), or China, which has a high rate compared to physical size (but low per capita)?
I'd be much more interested in seeing "efficiency" in terms of CO2 / GDP, or perhaps CO2 / habitable land area.
50% is higher than anything I've heard, even for research-grade stuff under lab conditions. It will be a long time before solar panels are there. Let's say 25% is a more reasonable efficiency rating for something you might be able to buy in a few years that can withstand the conditions it would be exposed to on top of a car, and is not insanely expensive.
Now, let's say you cover 2 square meters with panels (about the roof of a large car, or maybe roof + part of hood on a small car). Peak solar irradiance is just under 1 kW per square meter, but you lose quite a bit to the atmosphere, especially at latitudes typical of North American and European population centers. Take off a bit more for the fact that the sun isn't directly overhead all eight hours of your work day, and let's say you get 0.5 kW per square meter on average. That means your car will get 8 h * (0.5 kW / m^2 ) * 2 m^2 * 25% = 2 kWh of energy, or about 7.2 megajoules. For comparison, one liter of gasoline contains 34.8 megajoules of energy (or 131 MJ per US gallon). In other words, you'll get an amount of energy equivalent to less than half a pint of gasoline, and that's under sunny conditions. That might be enough to get your hybrid a few miles.
Not worthless, but probably not cost-effective, especially in climates that aren't sunny all the time. I wouldn't be surprised to see it as an option, but it will be more of an eco-fashion statement than anything else.
One of these arguments often seen in the mainstream media is the idea of the lone inventor who gets a patent to protect his investment in the research and development he has done, so he will not be ripped off by large corporations. But in reality the lone inventor is usually ripped off anyway. The reason for this is the cost of a patent infringement case. Only rarely such a case costs less than a few million US$. How many lone inventors have a war-chest of a few million US$ to take a patent infringement case to court?
I'm not quite a lone inventor--I have one co-inventor, but I think that's more or less the same thing. We've filed patent applications, and are in the process of licensing talks with a few companies. I don't expect we'll get ripped off, because we partnered with a reputable technology transfer company to do the patenting and licensing. That company puts up all the money up front for lawyers and such, and has also done a great deal of the legwork with marketing. In return, they get a cut of any profits. I think everyone is quite happy with the arrangement. I also expect the companies we're licensing to to be happy, as our technology will allow them to dramatically improve the capabilities of their products and sell many more units.
I know there are lots of stupid patents out there, but the system does work as intended sometimes. It's not all bad.
Sorry, didn't impress me during the debates. He doesn't seem to me to know what he's talking about.
"Inflation is caused by printing too much money"
I'm not a Ron Paul defender, and I didn't see the debate. I'm just curious--did he literally mean paper money, or was he using "printing too much money" as a euphemism for creating too much money (i.e. M3 or whatever other broad measure of money you wish to use). If that's the case, he's essentially correct; as Milton Friedman says, inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. Otherwise, it's a gross oversimplification.
Good reply. Tenure reform seems to make sense based on what I read above. But not tenure abolition. Perhaps something like a peer-reviewed performance evaluation, whose results could be used to revoke tenure (in addition to the usual rules like - don't snog a student :P)?
:D But seriously, you make some excellent points in that regard. For a single guy, a GSR's salary (for me at least) is like living in the lap of luxury (no jokes). Of course, this will change at some point. It is ironic that one's wants increase with increasing salary
:D. What would we do without her?
We're now getting into the realm of semantic differences, but I'd prefer ten-year renewable contracts.
What I am REALLY afraid of is academia turning into a microcosm of industry when each have their uses and each must exist, independently to some extent. The potential for short-sightedness is just too dangerous.
Industry is short-sighted, but that doesn't mean we can't take their pay/salary model and tweak it to have a longer characteristic timescale.
I do take your point about young researchers not being allowed to take risks. That, fortunately, is a problem that can be solved at the department level since the hiring committee, comprised of professors, can easily reward a young non-tenured researcher who dares to take (well-thought out) risks.
A good idea in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. Given a choice between a semi-decent candidate with a proven record, and a brilliant high-risk candidate, they'll take the semi-decent candidate. This is certainly what I saw when I was on a faculty search committee. String theory isn't as high-risk as you make out when you consider that the "payoff" that counts for hiring isn't experimental validation but rather high profile publications.
Also, I must admit that I have NOT thought that far ahead - marriage, family, etc. The two-body problem may be soluble, with the right super-partner, but you do know that no one has yet solved the three-body problem?
Some people do get carried away with increasing salary, always wanting more (a boat, another car, a fourth bathroom) than they can afford. A lot more people just want a good marriage, good health, a house, two kids, and a decent education for their kids. These things go a long way towards happiness, but they're unfortunately becoming harder and harder to get.
Please, for your own sake, take an afternoon and do these calculations. Look up the cost of an average house (around here, a typical starter home is half a million, and it's almost impossible to get anything for under $400k in a neighborhood that won't get you shot). Look up interest rates, mortgages, tax rates, etc. Look up typical salaries. Figure out how much time you'd spend at work, how much time commuting, and whether you'd have any time for your family and your health. This is your future, and you shouldn't just let it happen to you without planning. I see a lot of people who just "follow the path" in front of them, and end up unhappy because they didn't figure out what was really important to them.
I certain that we're at the same school, same department. Small world! Good ol' Anne
I don't know. Anne does wonders to help grad students, and the department wouldn't be the same without her. BTW, I'm guessing you're in your second or third year. Am I right?
thrawn_al, I'm starting to wonder if we're at the same university. You mentioned you were a grad student--is your physics department's grad student services person named Anne?
:P. One may sneer at tenured professors but the fact is that they've had to work their arse off for said position.
Shoring up salaries to match industry and removing job security is IMO not a viable solution in this case. For one thing, a physicist (I would say a scientist in general, but I have no personal knowledge of that) works for lower pay even as a postdoc or non-tenured researcher because he/she actually enjoys his/her work and going further, would consider doing it on their own time.
This is true of lots of professions, not just physics (or science). What's different is that, if you look at all professions requiring similar amounts of training, the sciences are at the bottom in terms of pay, and it's become a crisis. Look up the average salary a physics PhD makes, ten years after graduation (if you're in the same department as me, these stats are posted on the wall in the physics building). If you're a typical grad student, you'll be about 38 ten years out. Ask yourself if, based on that salary, you would have been able to save up enough money for a downpayment on a modest home in your area, plus pay a mortgage, plus start saving for your own kids (if you have any) to go to university. Oh, and don't forget taxes. If you have a spouse at that point, is he or she also an academic? How do you manage the two-body problem? Will your combined incomes be enough? If your spouse does work, factor in daycare, second car, etc., and don't forget that your marginal tax rate will be really high.
I was recently on a faculty search committee, and, to paraphrase the committee chair, we're looking for someone who is so good at physics he or she can "walk on water", but isn't smart enough to realize we don't pay enough to buy a house in the area.
I am not spouting fairy tales here, few people get into academia because of the lucrative nature of the realm
I know that very well. In fact, I'd argue that people have to sacrifice too much to get tenure, and then are often burnt out. A more sustainable career pace would be better, and much more family-friendly.
LESSER risk-taking. Bet on a surety. If you fail, you could lose your job...
So, at the very least, young scientists (those still trying to get tenure) can't afford to take risks and blow their one shot. Young scientists are usually the ones with the energy, the new outlook, and the drive to make breakthroughs. Look at the history of physics, and the great physicists of the past; how many did their best work when they were over 50?
Also, the idea that older scientists are free to take risks and do controversial things isn't really true, either. Science now requires so much money that dependence on grants has eliminated the freedom tenure was supposed to ensure. Most of the benefits of tenure have been lost, but we're stuck with all the problems.
I don't claim to understand this problem in the slightest, it mystifies me utterly!
I don't really understand the minority issue, either. Low female enrollment in science in general makes a little more sense--women have to make tough choices concerning family versus career, and the tenure clock makes that even tougher. If more women dated guys that were younger and/or "less successful" than them, they'd probably find their husbands more willing to stay home and raise the kids. That doesn't happen much, though, so simple economics dictates that the women are often the ones making the career sacrifice. That doesn't explain the disparity between physics, and, say, biology, though.
I just wish the incidence of race/gender biased admittance/hiring practices were lower than what they are today (which is much lower than a couple generations ago).
Agreed. The way Asians are treated is particularly unfair. They seem to be the new Jews of ac
Um, isn't that practically the case now, given that it is harder and harder to get?
To actually have the effect I'm talking about, you'd need to fire a lot of professors who already have tenure, which probably would involve breaking contracts. Individual universities don't have the power to do this.
Do you actually see tenured profs slacking off? Because I have to say, that hasn't been my experience
It's true that outright slackers are rare, but there are a lot of professors who are busy doing nothing very useful. They do a bad job teaching, do mediocre research, and generally don't make much of a contribution. You can tell their hearts aren't in it anymore, and it would be better for everyone if they retired or got a new career.
You can always do forced retirement, and then you don't have to worry about it.
Isn't that illegal age discrimination, under US law? IANAL, etc.
Then someone like you finally focuses on some decent facts and does so from a reputable perspective and you don't get modded up. I guess if you don't aimlessly bash the President or government but focus on the topic at hand you don't get modded. What the heck is wrong with moderation today?
Don't worry about it; I've been on slashdot long enough to know how the moderation system works. My post probably will get modded up to +5 Insightful or +5 Informative, and if it doesn't, it's not a big deal because I don't need the karma. To slashdot's credit, any time an expert posts on their topic of expertise (and the story isn't old and their post isn't buried at the bottom of the comments page), they're usually modded up. Given all the other parameters, all it takes is one moderator to bump it up to 3. Then, enough other moderators (most of whom are just casually reading at a fairly high threshold) will see it and it will quickly get to +5. There's a very small chance somebody who is affiliated with NAS or who really loves the tenure system might mod me down, but such people are probably not moderating on slashdot. Nothing else in my post is going to really piss people off enough to mod me down, so downmods are unlikely unless somebody is just being perverse. If, on the other hand, I had so much as mentioned Bush, I would probably get at least one downmod, and perhaps some angry replies.
Unfortunately, the moderation system on slashdot is fairly predictable. That's not to say it's useless; well-written and informative or insightful posts usually do well. The problem is that certain tricks dramatically increase your chance of positive moderation. I'm not going to describe those tricks, because I don't want to see them abused.
The problem isn't funding--it's what we do with it. Oh, sure, we could use lots more money, but it's not the real problem. Before I get into the details, let's briefly pick apart some of the nonsense in the National Academy of Science's Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics report, such as their supposed "grand challenges":
When you increase the size of your system, your state space generally grows exponentially. Of course it gets complex. Figuring out the specific complex behaviors of various systems isn't a single grand challenge, it's a whole lot of little challenges (unless you're talking about superconductivity, which I'll revisit).
Long-term? It's probably fusion, which isn't a condensed matter problem; try nuclear and plasma physics.
This is bio-physics, not condensed matter. Condensed matter is only one of many fields contributing to bio-physics.
This one seems legitimate, although it would be more interesting if they framed it in terms of some of the big problems in non-equilibrium physics.
This doesn't even make sense as a research challenge. It could at least have been framed as a question involving nanotechnology.
Here it seems like private industry is doing a very good job with the short-to-medium term. Long term, the answer may well be quantum information, which is my own field. Some of the approaches to building quantum computers are condensed matter-based, but many aren't.
The big thing I'm surprised not to see on the list is superconductivity. One estimate I heard was that something like 40% of all physicists have worked on it at some point in their careers (for me, it was as an undergrad, albeit peripherally). Despite the enormous research effort, we still don't have a really solid handle on how it works.
I'm really unimpressed by the "grand challenges" the NAS was able to come up with; it reeks of committee work. For comparison, I could write a much better list for my own field. Just off the top of my head:
Similarly, the NAS suggestions also seem to be the product of a shy and timid committee. There's the usual--more outreach, more women/minorities, more education, more money. There's also a pining for the old days of Bell labs and such, but no realistic consideration of how to bring it back (which would of course start with figuring out why it left), beyond a call for more discussions.
The countries that do the most to meet [the challenges] will benefit the most economically.
(Playing devil's advocate) Why is that so? Basic research is available to everyone. The country that benef
We were too concerned about major-league threats like active man-in-the-middle attacks and not concerned enough about simple, transparent and totally automatic encryption that would still be 100% effective against passive eavesdropping.
As soon as that happens, Cisco et al will start selling specialized boxes that do MITM attacks, can handle OC3 bandwidth, and provide the unencrypted traffic for inspection, filtering, and recording. There would certainly be a lot of demand, as there are lots of network administrators with more-or-less legitimate reasons to want to filter their traffic (university network admins, for instance).
90% of a solution is not a solution.