But this is the problem -- it's not the same thing:
1. The test is on a general aviation aircraft wing, a Mooney M20, not a commercial jet aircraft, which is much more rugged 2. The speed used was 238 mph, while the Mooney M20c has a do-not-exceed speed of 164 kt (190 mph), and takeoff and climbing is typically at something more like 88-105 KIAS. 238 mph would have to assume that the drone was headed into the plane at 48 mph when the plane was doing its top speed -- and it's unlikely the plane could do that speed at an altitude the drone could reach.
A more realistic test would be the wing of a 737 at its takeoff speed of 130 kt. Has that test ever been done?
Can someone with actual aircraft knowledge explain how drones are a danger to commercial aircraft?
The drones with which I am familiar are lightweight devices largely made of plastic and Styrofoam. It seems to me that the danger is similar to that of a bird strike, meaning substantially zero, unless one is ingested in an engine. In addition, it seems like it would be very, very difficult to actively pilot a drone -- a relatively slow moving object, having limited range and flight duration -- into the path of a commercial jet, even one on takeoff or final approach. (Besides, one can only imagine what the turbulence on or near an active commercial runway would do to the control-ability of a drone.)
The five-paragraph essay is the English language equivalent of "Hello World" and other elementary programs in a programming language. Once a student has proven (to himself and/or his instructor) that he can write basic functional essays/programs, and therefore write statements in the language he is using that are correct in both syntax and grammar, then he is free to write bad grammar in his drafts as much as he likes, because he has shown, at least in the simplest cases, that he knows how the language *should* be used, and can correct as necessary prior to publication/compilation. But if he has never written compile-able code, then what?
When one writes in a high-level programming language, one is writing so that the program is interpreted correctly by a compiler and that the machine does what one wants. When one writes in a human language, one should write so that the reader can interpret what one has written correctly and, hopefully, with as little effort puzzling over it as possible. This will maximize the probability that the reader will do what one wants.
"The Iron Imperative: Treat the reader's time as more valuable than your own." – Josh Bernoff.
The fascinating part is that, at least in the health care facilities with which I am familiar, the explanation given for not using fax machines in the UK is the same reason for not using email in the US: Just change "using fax machines made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people" to "using email made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people."
The privacy of a phone call used for a fax is seen by these institutions as greater than the multi-hop routing of Internet email. (It used to be true that one knew (or could find out) a defined physical location for the ends of a phone call, but that, of course, is no longer true.)
What the article didn't emphasize is that Intel's main market is internal consumption (Intel-branded chips), while companies using the foundry model that TSMC pioneered sell to the industry as a whole. (I note that Intel does have a small, and not successful, attempt at a foundry business.)
Intel must amortize the cost of its IC process development, plus the cost of new fabs every generation, based solely on the revenue it can generate from the sale of its own chips, while TSMC can spread that cost over the manufacture of chips for the entire industry.
As the cost of building a single fab doubles with each process generation, and is now in the $10 billion - $20 billion range, it's fast approaching the point where no single semiconductor company has enough revenue to support such capital expenditures -- Intel included. TSMC has a little more headroom since, as a foundry supplier, the upper bound on its production volumes is the volume of the semiconductor industry as a whole.
Right now, TSMC and Samsung are the only two suppliers of state-of-the-art lithography. It will be interesting to watch the political events that unfold as a result of the discovery by the public that the US no longer has state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. It will be even more interesting to watch what happens when people realize the degree to which the US economy is dependent upon three or four Asian semiconductor fabs.
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
I once knew someone who was an external auditor for a big-eight accounting firm by day, and a jazz saxophonist at night. Sleep always was an optional extra, but the moment of reckoning came when the travel requirements of the accounting firm and jazz band diverged. Accounting, being much more stable and lucrative, won out.
That's the kind of statement I don't understand. It's 25 out of 100,000 people. I mean, if moving the decimal point is such an advanced concept, how is it that the metric system is so successful?
It's not confusing, it's just that many people don't do the conversion in their heads. Further, presenting the natural frequency is more useful for small percentages: e.g. 1 in 4,000 is definitely easier to digest than 0.025%
1. What "conversion"?
2. What makes "1 in 4,000" easier to digest than "0.025%"?
Part of the problem is the counterintuitive way in which such problems are typically presented. Meadows presented his evidence in the so-called "natural frequency format" (for example, 1 in 10 people), rather than in terms of a percentage (10 percent of the population). That was a smart decision, since 1-in-10 a more intuitive, jury-friendly approach. Recent studies have shown that performance rates on many statistical tasks increased from four percent to 24 percent when the problems were presented using the natural frequency format.
I've heard this argument before, and I just don't get it. "Percent" means per hundred, as the word is derived from the Latin "per centum," literally, "per hundred." It's a natural frequency format, just as much as saying "1 in 10 people." It's saying "10 per 100" people. What's so confusing?!?
. . . computer chips with state-of-the-art lithography soon all will be manufactured overseas. Specifically, they will be made by exactly two companies, Samsung and TSMC, with GlobalFoundries' recent announcement that it is stopping development of its 7nm process. GF operated the old IBM facility in Fishkill, NY, and AFAIK was the last company offering state-of-the-art foundry services with a fab in the US.
Intel is still in business, of course, and even has a foundry business, but it cannot seem to successfully operate it -- substantially all of its wafer starts are chips of its own design. With the capital cost of each new-generation fab reaching $20 billion, it's only a matter of time until Intel -- which has only its internal product base of chip designs to fill its fabs, while Samsung and TSMC make chips for the entire industry -- can no longer afford the move to the next generation.
If the rest of the semiconductor industry (or the US DoD) wants high-performance computer chips, there's now nowhere to go except Samsung and TSMC. It will be interesting to see what politicians do when they realize that the best digital chips can no longer be manufactured in the US. The choice seems to be either (1) have our economy -- everything from cell phones to missiles -- dependent on chips manufactured overseas, or (2) subsidize Intel's foundry business and the semiconductor equipment manufacturers to the tune of tens of $billions, just to keep a US source of high-performance semiconductors.
I think I'd be most satisfied with a kind of compromise, in which the home plate umpire had a small wireless device he held in his hand (perhaps in a uniform pocket) that gave him the ball/strike result as determined by the same Pitch f/x video system used now to grade umpire performance.
Like most modern wireless devices, at the umpire's discretion it could be set to a visual display of ball/strike, or some type of haptic or vibration indication -- one buzz for a ball, two for a strike, perhaps. The umpire could, also at his discretion, use the information from the wireless device always, sometimes, or never, with the stipulation that his ball/strike performance would still be graded by MLB against the Pitch f/x system.
With this compromise, the umpire would be free to call the game in much the same way as he does today, except that the information from the Pitch f/x system would be available, should he choose to use it. He would still call swinging strikes, foul tips, hit-by-pitches, catcher's, hitter's and runner's interference, balks, and the myriad of special cases that come up in the course of a baseball game and, if he kept the wireless device in his pocket, all would look as it does today.
Teams could challenge a ball/strike call in much the same way as they do a safe/out call today -- a very limited number of opportunities to appeal per game. The appeals should be much shorter since human evaluation of video would not be required.
Crowe is right; I was writing from memory and forgot the component analysis cul-de-sac -- I should have written 1873 instead of 1865 for the quaternion publication. History is always more complicated than we remember; Maxwell spent more than a decade developing the theory, and it's the quaternions that most recall of that era.
The really amusing thing to me is that historically, James Clerk Maxwell’s mathematical theory of electromagnetism (published in 1865), which for the first time unified electricity and magnetism, was written in the form of quaternions. For this reason, it was viewed by the engineering world as obtuse and impenetrable – 20 equations in 20 unknowns! Little was done with it until Oliver Heaviside re-wrote the theory in 1884 using the curl and divergence concepts of vector calculus, replacing 12 of the 20 equations with four short differential equations. Ironically, these four equations are now taught to undergraduates as “Maxwell’s Equations,” even though Maxwell never saw them (he died in 1879).
I’ve never seen an electromagnetics textbook written after 1900 that uses the original quaternion description of electromagnetics – they all use Heaviside’s vector calculus approach. It would be supremely ironic if a distaste of quaternions set the search for Physics’ Unified Field Theory back 150 years.
Besides reliable operation at room temperature, the biggest issue with atomic-scale memories always has been read and (especially) write speed, since they use an atomic force microscope. It will be interesting to see how the technology develops to overcome these limitations.
They started working more efficiently and they were suddenly able to keep efficiency higher because rest was longer is what I take from this.
Yes, but were they 25% more efficient? If they weren't, the company's competition, which did not make the change, would operate at a competitive advantage.
I think the study misses the point. Most people would expect that a group that was "working four, eight-hour days [per week] but getting paid for five" would have more success balancing work and life than when they worked five, eight-hour days per week. The real news would be if the company was able to have productivity high enough under this arrangement to stay in business. Were the employees 25% more productive?
The sterile insect technique has been used since the 1950s. In Florida, in my living memory, it eliminated the dreadful screwworm (the males were sterilized by X-radiation), and even stopped a re-infestation in the Florida Keys in 2016.
There is nothing new about this technique, except perhaps the method by which the males were made sterile. If you're concerned about ecological implications, the technique has a 60-year history covering many insects around the world for you to study.
Before you dismiss the technique out of hand, however, I suggest that you spend time with patients (quite literally) suffering from Dengue, with mothers having given birth to babies with Microcephaly due to Zika, or those owning dogs, cats, or farm animals agonizing from screwworm infections, and get their viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . a new institute dedicated to using AI to build the best-possible future (Warning: source may be paywalled) . . .
Yeah, the term is actually "contact binary." Another result of poor /. editing.
But this is the problem -- it's not the same thing:
1. The test is on a general aviation aircraft wing, a Mooney M20, not a commercial jet aircraft, which is much more rugged
2. The speed used was 238 mph, while the Mooney M20c has a do-not-exceed speed of 164 kt (190 mph), and takeoff and climbing is typically at something more like 88-105 KIAS. 238 mph would have to assume that the drone was headed into the plane at 48 mph when the plane was doing its top speed -- and it's unlikely the plane could do that speed at an altitude the drone could reach.
A more realistic test would be the wing of a 737 at its takeoff speed of 130 kt. Has that test ever been done?
Can someone with actual aircraft knowledge explain how drones are a danger to commercial aircraft?
The drones with which I am familiar are lightweight devices largely made of plastic and Styrofoam. It seems to me that the danger is similar to that of a bird strike, meaning substantially zero, unless one is ingested in an engine. In addition, it seems like it would be very, very difficult to actively pilot a drone -- a relatively slow moving object, having limited range and flight duration -- into the path of a commercial jet, even one on takeoff or final approach. (Besides, one can only imagine what the turbulence on or near an active commercial runway would do to the control-ability of a drone.)
What is the actual danger? What am I overlooking?
The five-paragraph essay is the English language equivalent of "Hello World" and other elementary programs in a programming language. Once a student has proven (to himself and/or his instructor) that he can write basic functional essays/programs, and therefore write statements in the language he is using that are correct in both syntax and grammar, then he is free to write bad grammar in his drafts as much as he likes, because he has shown, at least in the simplest cases, that he knows how the language *should* be used, and can correct as necessary prior to publication/compilation. But if he has never written compile-able code, then what?
When one writes in a high-level programming language, one is writing so that the program is interpreted correctly by a compiler and that the machine does what one wants. When one writes in a human language, one should write so that the reader can interpret what one has written correctly and, hopefully, with as little effort puzzling over it as possible. This will maximize the probability that the reader will do what one wants.
"The Iron Imperative: Treat the reader's time as more valuable than your own." – Josh Bernoff.
The fascinating part is that, at least in the health care facilities with which I am familiar, the explanation given for not using fax machines in the UK is the same reason for not using email in the US: Just change "using fax machines made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people" to "using email made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people."
The privacy of a phone call used for a fax is seen by these institutions as greater than the multi-hop routing of Internet email. (It used to be true that one knew (or could find out) a defined physical location for the ends of a phone call, but that, of course, is no longer true.)
What the article didn't emphasize is that Intel's main market is internal consumption (Intel-branded chips), while companies using the foundry model that TSMC pioneered sell to the industry as a whole. (I note that Intel does have a small, and not successful, attempt at a foundry business.)
Intel must amortize the cost of its IC process development, plus the cost of new fabs every generation, based solely on the revenue it can generate from the sale of its own chips, while TSMC can spread that cost over the manufacture of chips for the entire industry.
As the cost of building a single fab doubles with each process generation, and is now in the $10 billion - $20 billion range, it's fast approaching the point where no single semiconductor company has enough revenue to support such capital expenditures -- Intel included. TSMC has a little more headroom since, as a foundry supplier, the upper bound on its production volumes is the volume of the semiconductor industry as a whole.
Right now, TSMC and Samsung are the only two suppliers of state-of-the-art lithography. It will be interesting to watch the political events that unfold as a result of the discovery by the public that the US no longer has state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. It will be even more interesting to watch what happens when people realize the degree to which the US economy is dependent upon three or four Asian semiconductor fabs.
The "T" in "TSMC" stands for "Taiwan." We might worry that TSMC might share IP with the government of the Republic of China, for whatever good that would do anybody, but the odds of them knowingly sharing IP with mainland China (the PRC) is substantially zero. Not only for ideological reasons, but also because the PRC has SMIC and other TSMC foundry competitors. TSMC has a substantial lead over them at the moment, and would like to keep it that way.
I once knew someone who was an external auditor for a big-eight accounting firm by day, and a jazz saxophonist at night. Sleep always was an optional extra, but the moment of reckoning came when the travel requirements of the accounting firm and jazz band diverged. Accounting, being much more stable and lucrative, won out.
The surge was only 50%?
0.025% is just meaningless.
That's the kind of statement I don't understand. It's 25 out of 100,000 people. I mean, if moving the decimal point is such an advanced concept, how is it that the metric system is so successful?
So you're saying that the point is, if one replaces the term "10 percent" with "10 per hundred," people would understand the question better?
Yes.
That's just sad.
What happens if you have a preamble to the question that defines "percent," e.g., "'Percent' means 'per hundred'"? Does that help?
But if you put a picture into peoples' heads, you give them an immediate handhold on the problem.
So you're saying that the point is, if one replaces the term "10 percent" with "10 per hundred," people would understand the question better?
It's not confusing, it's just that many people don't do the conversion in their heads. Further, presenting the natural frequency is more useful for small percentages: e.g. 1 in 4,000 is definitely easier to digest than 0.025%
1. What "conversion"?
2. What makes "1 in 4,000" easier to digest than "0.025%"?
Part of the problem is the counterintuitive way in which such problems are typically presented. Meadows presented his evidence in the so-called "natural frequency format" (for example, 1 in 10 people), rather than in terms of a percentage (10 percent of the population). That was a smart decision, since 1-in-10 a more intuitive, jury-friendly approach. Recent studies have shown that performance rates on many statistical tasks increased from four percent to 24 percent when the problems were presented using the natural frequency format.
I've heard this argument before, and I just don't get it. "Percent" means per hundred, as the word is derived from the Latin "per centum," literally, "per hundred." It's a natural frequency format, just as much as saying "1 in 10 people." It's saying "10 per 100" people. What's so confusing?!?
. . . computer chips with state-of-the-art lithography soon all will be manufactured overseas. Specifically, they will be made by exactly two companies, Samsung and TSMC, with GlobalFoundries' recent announcement that it is stopping development of its 7nm process. GF operated the old IBM facility in Fishkill, NY, and AFAIK was the last company offering state-of-the-art foundry services with a fab in the US.
Intel is still in business, of course, and even has a foundry business, but it cannot seem to successfully operate it -- substantially all of its wafer starts are chips of its own design. With the capital cost of each new-generation fab reaching $20 billion, it's only a matter of time until Intel -- which has only its internal product base of chip designs to fill its fabs, while Samsung and TSMC make chips for the entire industry -- can no longer afford the move to the next generation.
If the rest of the semiconductor industry (or the US DoD) wants high-performance computer chips, there's now nowhere to go except Samsung and TSMC. It will be interesting to see what politicians do when they realize that the best digital chips can no longer be manufactured in the US. The choice seems to be either (1) have our economy -- everything from cell phones to missiles -- dependent on chips manufactured overseas, or (2) subsidize Intel's foundry business and the semiconductor equipment manufacturers to the tune of tens of $billions, just to keep a US source of high-performance semiconductors.
I think I'd be most satisfied with a kind of compromise, in which the home plate umpire had a small wireless device he held in his hand (perhaps in a uniform pocket) that gave him the ball/strike result as determined by the same Pitch f/x video system used now to grade umpire performance.
Like most modern wireless devices, at the umpire's discretion it could be set to a visual display of ball/strike, or some type of haptic or vibration indication -- one buzz for a ball, two for a strike, perhaps. The umpire could, also at his discretion, use the information from the wireless device always, sometimes, or never, with the stipulation that his ball/strike performance would still be graded by MLB against the Pitch f/x system.
With this compromise, the umpire would be free to call the game in much the same way as he does today, except that the information from the Pitch f/x system would be available, should he choose to use it. He would still call swinging strikes, foul tips, hit-by-pitches, catcher's, hitter's and runner's interference, balks, and the myriad of special cases that come up in the course of a baseball game and, if he kept the wireless device in his pocket, all would look as it does today.
Teams could challenge a ball/strike call in much the same way as they do a safe/out call today -- a very limited number of opportunities to appeal per game. The appeals should be much shorter since human evaluation of video would not be required.
Mission scrubbed for today. Oh, well.
Crowe is right; I was writing from memory and forgot the component analysis cul-de-sac -- I should have written 1873 instead of 1865 for the quaternion publication. History is always more complicated than we remember; Maxwell spent more than a decade developing the theory, and it's the quaternions that most recall of that era.
Mea culpa.
The really amusing thing to me is that historically, James Clerk Maxwell’s mathematical theory of electromagnetism (published in 1865), which for the first time unified electricity and magnetism, was written in the form of quaternions. For this reason, it was viewed by the engineering world as obtuse and impenetrable – 20 equations in 20 unknowns! Little was done with it until Oliver Heaviside re-wrote the theory in 1884 using the curl and divergence concepts of vector calculus, replacing 12 of the 20 equations with four short differential equations. Ironically, these four equations are now taught to undergraduates as “Maxwell’s Equations,” even though Maxwell never saw them (he died in 1879).
I’ve never seen an electromagnetics textbook written after 1900 that uses the original quaternion description of electromagnetics – they all use Heaviside’s vector calculus approach. It would be supremely ironic if a distaste of quaternions set the search for Physics’ Unified Field Theory back 150 years.
Besides reliable operation at room temperature, the biggest issue with atomic-scale memories always has been read and (especially) write speed, since they use an atomic force microscope. It will be interesting to see how the technology develops to overcome these limitations.
They started working more efficiently and they were suddenly able to keep efficiency higher because rest was longer is what I take from this.
Yes, but were they 25% more efficient? If they weren't, the company's competition, which did not make the change, would operate at a competitive advantage.
I think the study misses the point. Most people would expect that a group that was "working four, eight-hour days [per week] but getting paid for five" would have more success balancing work and life than when they worked five, eight-hour days per week. The real news would be if the company was able to have productivity high enough under this arrangement to stay in business. Were the employees 25% more productive?
The sterile insect technique has been used since the 1950s. In Florida, in my living memory, it eliminated the dreadful screwworm (the males were sterilized by X-radiation), and even stopped a re-infestation in the Florida Keys in 2016.
There is nothing new about this technique, except perhaps the method by which the males were made sterile. If you're concerned about ecological implications, the technique has a 60-year history covering many insects around the world for you to study.
Before you dismiss the technique out of hand, however, I suggest that you spend time with patients (quite literally) suffering from Dengue, with mothers having given birth to babies with Microcephaly due to Zika, or those owning dogs, cats, or farm animals agonizing from screwworm infections, and get their viewpoint.
The UM folk are way ahead of you. While that version has a near-field radio, this version has an optical wake-up receiver.