While I have no doubt that TFA describes a fine public service built by those of the highest integrity, I must confess that my first thought was quite the opposite, given recent history.
A little-known example of negative differential resistance is the common electric arc. In an arc, as the current increases the arc gets "fatter" (wider), and so the voltage across the arc decreases. Increasing current with decreasing voltage is negative differential resistance. This enables oscillations, which were first encountered as audio noise in electric arc lighting in the mid-1800s. These led to William Duddell's "Singing Arc", in which Duddell added a tuned circuit to the negative resistance, creating a stable audio tone. The next step was obvious; he wired a keyboard to the arc and made the first electronic music.
Danish physicist Valdemar Poulsen took Duddell's audio oscillator and, by placing the arc in a transverse magnetic field, and in a hydrogen atmosphere (and somehow not getting blown up in the process), moved the frequency of oscillation up into the low radio range, around 500 kHz or so. This was the arc radio transmitter. It differed from the more common spark transmitter in that the arc's output oscillation was continuous, while that of the spark transmitter was a damped (decaying) oscillation.
The arc transmitter caught the attention of Cyril Elwell, of Palo Alto, California, who arranged to obtain the rights to the arc from Poulsen, and started commercial production of it with his company, the Federal Telegraph Company. The arc transmitter became a big success in World War One, when transmitters as large as 1 MW (one million watts) output were installed by 1918.
Much as the Fairchild Semiconductor Company spawned several successful companies in Silicon Valley in the 1960s, Federal did so, too, 50 years earlier; refugees from Federal formed well-known companies like Magnavox and Litton Industries.
You got marmalade at a diner in St. Louis? As in, jam with fruit peel in it? That must be a first. Are you sure it wasn't just jam? While I'm sure it can be done, finding marmalade at a diner in the American Midwest is still quite a feat.
Don't worry about feeling bad for wasting food. It's a common sentiment among those visiting the US. After one spends enough time shopping in a Costco or other bulk food warehouse, the feeling passes.
Having a vaccine that must be injected intravenously (not just intramuscularly), five times, in order to be effective is an interesting scientific advance (as stated in TFA), but isn't what one would call a practical solution to the malaria problem in the underdeveloped world (also as stated in TFA). Also keep in mind that many other proposed vaccines have looked good initially, but failed to pass muster later on, and that this trial was very, very small:
Researchers reported that the six volunteers who received five intravenous doses of the vaccine did not contract malaria when exposed to the microscopic parasite. Of the nine who received four doses, three contracted the disease. Of 12 who received no vaccine, 11 became infected.
It's a big stretch to go from six protected individuals to hundreds of millions, so I suggest that the champagne for the "End of Malaria" party not be put on ice just yet. While it is an interesting result, I think someone describing the status of the malaria vaccine as "nearing reality" isn't a very good judge of distance.
'We're even imagining that in the future cars would be able to ask other cars, "Hey, can I cut into your lane?" Then the other car would let you in,' said Jennifer Healey, a research scientist with Intel.
No cars that I know. The cars I know would speed up to tailgate the car in front of them, and then honk their horn in indignant aggression at the thought of someone trying to merge in front of them.
It's not the bitter taste, it's the sulphurous, garbage dump like stink that some just don't seem to perceive.
Supertasters, approximately a quarter of the world's population, have the ability to taste PROP and PTC, finding them incredibly bitter while the rest of the population cannot taste them at all. (Supertasters have other differences from non-supertasters, too, including a larger number of fungiform papillae on the surface of the tongue.)
Plants of the Brassica family, which includes broccoli (as well as cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts) contain a compound similar to PTC. People who like broccoli are living in a genetic world supertasters can only dream of; even the smell of the Brassica family is immediately repulsive to supertasters. This is believed due to the genotypes they carry of the TAS2R38 gene, which codes for a bitter taste receptor.
Frankly, I don't think Dr. Bjorkman's work will be done unless he gets the PTC-related compounds out of broccoli.
By separate channels I think you mean net frequency and side channels to pass traffic? What do you mean by RTS/CTS in NTS?
Yes, in the NTS the net is controlled by the net control station (NCS), but the actual message-passing is done on a side frequency, without the direct involvement of the NCS. In this way, the NCS does not have to handle all of the traffic handled by the network, so its workload is much less. The workload of message-passing is shared among the other stations in the network (principally by the regional net representatives, a task that can be rotated among stations in the network), and is performed largely in parallel to network control functions, which increases time efficiency.
By RTS/CTS I meant the code symbol(s) sent by those wishing to join the net. While in operation the NCS periodically sends open requests to join the network ("QNI"), then stands by for responses. Stations wishing to join the net then send a short signal (usually a single Morse character, often the first letter of their call sign suffix). The NCS then repeats the signal of the station it authorizes to transmit, and that station then begins its transmission.
This is akin to beacon transmissions in a modern wireless digital network, followed by a contention-access period (CAP); during the CAP the stations send their RTS signal (the single Morse character), and the NCS sends a CTS signal by repeating the character. The station authorized to transmit then does so.
SOS, as an emergency indicator, is a single symbol, not three separate letters -- di-di-di-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit or, in your notation, 10101011101110111010101.
If you're interested in an amateur, as opposed to a commercial, version of a radiotelegraph network, have a look at the National Traffic System. This system, created in the 1940s, has many features that predate modern digital networks, including a Request To Send / Clear To Send (RTS/CTS) system, and separate logical channels for network control and data.
The Fifth Amendment only addresses the competency problem as it applies to one type of evidence, and still leaves courts dealing incompetently with every other type of evidence.
The fact that something is imperfect or incomplete does not mean that it is not useful or valuable -- no machine is 100% efficient. A system with the Fifth Amendment is better than one without, for at least this reason.
If judges are really so incompetent that they don't understand how someone can become flustered and contradict themselves after being questioned for hours on end, then that incompetency is the real problem . . .
One can either solve this problem, or avoid it. It's very difficult to come up with a scheme to ensure that judges (or jurors) will "properly" (whatever that means) evaluate the possibility that the defendant made a false confession. It's considered by most to be better to avoid the problem, by allowing the accused the opportunity to not say anything at all.
Please cite one specific scenario where someone could be convicted of a crime they didn't commit, simply because they talked to police.
The Central Park Jogger case. Note that innocents were convicted of this crime even with the protection of the Fifth Amendment. Imagine how often this scenario would be replayed among the general population, not just disadvantaged youth ignorant of the law, if the protection were not there.
You're not allowed to spit on the ball, but what if it's raining or your fingers are sweaty?
If it's raining, all surfaces of the ball will be equally wet, and its trajectory will be unaffected. Having wet fingers is insufficient to affect the flight path of the ball -- the ball must be really loaded up with sputum, on exactly one side, to affect the flight of the ball.
Everyone gets tested after a game, any single person come sup [sic] positive, then game is considered a loss. Happens twice, they give up 25% of merchandising for a year.
Fine, except that the tests are not perfect, and false positives exist. Think about it -- suppose the test was 99% accurate, but produced 1% false positives. There are 25 people on an MLB team, and the team plays an average of 6.3 games per week. That's an average of 25 * 6.3 = 157.5 tests per team per week, which will produce an average of 1.575 false positives per team per week, or 1.575 * 26 = almost 41 false positives in a 26-week season. Per team.
There are 30 teams in MLB, so under your proposal one is looking at (157.5 tests per team per week) * (30 teams) * (26 weeks per season) = 122,850 drug tests every season. The false positive rate would have to get down into the parts per million range to do anything other than punish random team owners for the finite quality of drug tests. The effect could, in fact, be counterproductive; with so many false positives, the actual drug users could be emboldened to hide among them.
I can think of several people that I would like to volunteer for a one-way ticket to Mars. Were these volunteers self-nominated, or did Mars One accept third-party nominations?
Humph. Don't insult people you don't know. I am a Fellow of the IEEE, and have been an IEEE member for more than thirty years. (In fact, I was a member of the ACM for more than ten years.) I probably have downloaded a thousand articles from IEEExplore since it was created (my books are very well referenced, I like to think), and there's nothing I like better than using the web to research obscure technical topics on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Of course the technology to collate information into an easy-to-read list already exists. That's not the point. The issue is determining which information is collated. By telling the software tool what information you want to see, you are inherently determining what information you will not see. This limits what you can learn. How can you be exposed to new areas of interest if your RSS feeds only present you with news from fields in which you already have an interest?
Searching for something on IEEExplore is qualitatively different from getting an issue of JSSC in the mail. The purpose of the search engine is to exclude everything except what I have requested. The paper copy of JSSC, on the other hand, has its Table of Contents on the cover, and it's harder to find a wider distribution of circuit technologies listed in one spot anywhere else. Suddenly, I find myself reading an article on ferroelectric RAM, or distributed amplification, or biasing of Indium Phosphide mixers -- things I never would have realized that I would find interesting. The effect is even stronger when reading the journals Science and Nature.
When I am on the Web, I prefer to peruse sites with a wide variety of subject matter -- arXiv is fun to browse, as is Eurekalert!, although the latter has a pretty high PR content. The "Random article" link on Wikipedia is also a good source of things one doesn't know. But to stay up-to-date, it's far easier to pick up the latest paper copy of Science News on the coffee table.
to pull content for you . . . and your friends could share articles and feeds with you.
Yeah, thanks for that 21st-Century update -- I'll be sure to check out RSS RSN.
The trouble with such schemes is that they assume that I know a priori what information I either want or need, and that is almost never the case. It's hard to learn new stuff when the information to which you're exposed is pre-filtered to include only the stuff you think you want to hear. (It may harden one's political beliefs, but I wouldn't consider that a good thing.)
One of the benefits of a print journal is that I get exposed to a wide variety of subject matter, including stuff I either didn't know existed, or thought I wouldn't find interesting, giving me a chance to learn new things and change my opinions.
Print publications are literally put into my hand, giving me more incentive to read them upon receipt. Web sites require an active effort on my part to go read them, which is often not done due to my habit of procrastination ("I'll take time to check that tomorrow"). Even email links to my monthly periodicals go unused, for similar reasons.
To me, it's the difference between polling- and interrupt-driven systems. The processor has to be constantly (or at least repetitively) awake to poll, while the processor can be asleep and awoken by an interrupt. The interrupt-based system is usually the lower-energy way to go.
Good idea! We could then get the tourists to eat the pythons!
Or the pythons to eat the tourists; either way, we win!
Maybe we can get VisitFlorida.com to promote braised Burmese Python with African Snail under glass au jus as a local delicacy. I mean, it worked for oysters. . . .
Slashdot Mirror
While I have no doubt that TFA describes a fine public service built by those of the highest integrity, I must confess that my first thought was quite the opposite, given recent history.
populous != polulace
Or, even,
populous != populace
As I write this, I just sent a three man screw...
I don't want to think about it.
A little-known example of negative differential resistance is the common electric arc. In an arc, as the current increases the arc gets "fatter" (wider), and so the voltage across the arc decreases. Increasing current with decreasing voltage is negative differential resistance. This enables oscillations, which were first encountered as audio noise in electric arc lighting in the mid-1800s. These led to William Duddell's "Singing Arc", in which Duddell added a tuned circuit to the negative resistance, creating a stable audio tone. The next step was obvious; he wired a keyboard to the arc and made the first electronic music.
Danish physicist Valdemar Poulsen took Duddell's audio oscillator and, by placing the arc in a transverse magnetic field, and in a hydrogen atmosphere (and somehow not getting blown up in the process), moved the frequency of oscillation up into the low radio range, around 500 kHz or so. This was the arc radio transmitter. It differed from the more common spark transmitter in that the arc's output oscillation was continuous, while that of the spark transmitter was a damped (decaying) oscillation.
The arc transmitter caught the attention of Cyril Elwell, of Palo Alto, California, who arranged to obtain the rights to the arc from Poulsen, and started commercial production of it with his company, the Federal Telegraph Company. The arc transmitter became a big success in World War One, when transmitters as large as 1 MW (one million watts) output were installed by 1918.
Much as the Fairchild Semiconductor Company spawned several successful companies in Silicon Valley in the 1960s, Federal did so, too, 50 years earlier; refugees from Federal formed well-known companies like Magnavox and Litton Industries.
You got marmalade at a diner in St. Louis? As in, jam with fruit peel in it? That must be a first. Are you sure it wasn't just jam? While I'm sure it can be done, finding marmalade at a diner in the American Midwest is still quite a feat.
Don't worry about feeling bad for wasting food. It's a common sentiment among those visiting the US. After one spends enough time shopping in a Costco or other bulk food warehouse, the feeling passes.
Ted Williams would roll over in his freezer if he read this. At least, his head would. . . .
. . . it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California.
Let the record show that TFA correctly states "I-5". Somebody in Michigan needs to watch his typos.
Having a vaccine that must be injected intravenously (not just intramuscularly), five times, in order to be effective is an interesting scientific advance (as stated in TFA), but isn't what one would call a practical solution to the malaria problem in the underdeveloped world (also as stated in TFA). Also keep in mind that many other proposed vaccines have looked good initially, but failed to pass muster later on, and that this trial was very, very small:
Researchers reported that the six volunteers who received five intravenous doses of the vaccine did not contract malaria when exposed to the microscopic parasite. Of the nine who received four doses, three contracted the disease. Of 12 who received no vaccine, 11 became infected.
It's a big stretch to go from six protected individuals to hundreds of millions, so I suggest that the champagne for the "End of Malaria" party not be put on ice just yet. While it is an interesting result, I think someone describing the status of the malaria vaccine as "nearing reality" isn't a very good judge of distance.
'We're even imagining that in the future cars would be able to ask other cars, "Hey, can I cut into your lane?" Then the other car would let you in,' said Jennifer Healey, a research scientist with Intel.
No cars that I know. The cars I know would speed up to tailgate the car in front of them, and then honk their horn in indignant aggression at the thought of someone trying to merge in front of them.
It's not the bitter taste, it's the sulphurous, garbage dump like stink that some just don't seem to perceive.
Supertasters, approximately a quarter of the world's population, have the ability to taste PROP and PTC, finding them incredibly bitter while the rest of the population cannot taste them at all. (Supertasters have other differences from non-supertasters, too, including a larger number of fungiform papillae on the surface of the tongue.)
Plants of the Brassica family, which includes broccoli (as well as cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts) contain a compound similar to PTC. People who like broccoli are living in a genetic world supertasters can only dream of; even the smell of the Brassica family is immediately repulsive to supertasters. This is believed due to the genotypes they carry of the TAS2R38 gene, which codes for a bitter taste receptor.
Frankly, I don't think Dr. Bjorkman's work will be done unless he gets the PTC-related compounds out of broccoli.
By separate channels I think you mean net frequency and side channels to pass traffic? What do you mean by RTS/CTS in NTS?
Yes, in the NTS the net is controlled by the net control station (NCS), but the actual message-passing is done on a side frequency, without the direct involvement of the NCS. In this way, the NCS does not have to handle all of the traffic handled by the network, so its workload is much less. The workload of message-passing is shared among the other stations in the network (principally by the regional net representatives, a task that can be rotated among stations in the network), and is performed largely in parallel to network control functions, which increases time efficiency.
By RTS/CTS I meant the code symbol(s) sent by those wishing to join the net. While in operation the NCS periodically sends open requests to join the network ("QNI"), then stands by for responses. Stations wishing to join the net then send a short signal (usually a single Morse character, often the first letter of their call sign suffix). The NCS then repeats the signal of the station it authorizes to transmit, and that station then begins its transmission.
This is akin to beacon transmissions in a modern wireless digital network, followed by a contention-access period (CAP); during the CAP the stations send their RTS signal (the single Morse character), and the NCS sends a CTS signal by repeating the character. The station authorized to transmit then does so.
SOS, as an emergency indicator, is a single symbol, not three separate letters -- di-di-di-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit or, in your notation, 10101011101110111010101.
If you're interested in an amateur, as opposed to a commercial, version of a radiotelegraph network, have a look at the National Traffic System. This system, created in the 1940s, has many features that predate modern digital networks, including a Request To Send / Clear To Send (RTS/CTS) system, and separate logical channels for network control and data.
I don't know much about telegraphs, but I'm pretty sure they're analog machines.
No, they're a form of digital communication; they use on-off keying (OOK).
The Fifth Amendment only addresses the competency problem as it applies to one type of evidence, and still leaves courts dealing incompetently with every other type of evidence.
The fact that something is imperfect or incomplete does not mean that it is not useful or valuable -- no machine is 100% efficient. A system with the Fifth Amendment is better than one without, for at least this reason.
If judges are really so incompetent that they don't understand how someone can become flustered and contradict themselves after being questioned for hours on end, then that incompetency is the real problem . . .
One can either solve this problem, or avoid it. It's very difficult to come up with a scheme to ensure that judges (or jurors) will "properly" (whatever that means) evaluate the possibility that the defendant made a false confession. It's considered by most to be better to avoid the problem, by allowing the accused the opportunity to not say anything at all.
Please cite one specific scenario where someone could be convicted of a crime they didn't commit, simply because they talked to police.
The Central Park Jogger case. Note that innocents were convicted of this crime even with the protection of the Fifth Amendment. Imagine how often this scenario would be replayed among the general population, not just disadvantaged youth ignorant of the law, if the protection were not there.
You're not allowed to spit on the ball, but what if it's raining or your fingers are sweaty?
If it's raining, all surfaces of the ball will be equally wet, and its trajectory will be unaffected.
Having wet fingers is insufficient to affect the flight path of the ball -- the ball must be really loaded up with sputum, on exactly one side, to affect the flight of the ball.
Everyone gets tested after a game, any single person come sup [sic] positive, then game is considered a loss. Happens twice, they give up 25% of merchandising for a year.
Fine, except that the tests are not perfect, and false positives exist. Think about it -- suppose the test was 99% accurate, but produced 1% false positives. There are 25 people on an MLB team, and the team plays an average of 6.3 games per week. That's an average of 25 * 6.3 = 157.5 tests per team per week, which will produce an average of 1.575 false positives per team per week, or 1.575 * 26 = almost 41 false positives in a 26-week season. Per team.
There are 30 teams in MLB, so under your proposal one is looking at (157.5 tests per team per week) * (30 teams) * (26 weeks per season) = 122,850 drug tests every season. The false positive rate would have to get down into the parts per million range to do anything other than punish random team owners for the finite quality of drug tests. The effect could, in fact, be counterproductive; with so many false positives, the actual drug users could be emboldened to hide among them.
29% of people are just idiots.
Did we get it down to 29%?
I can think of several people that I would like to volunteer for a one-way ticket to Mars. Were these volunteers self-nominated, or did Mars One accept third-party nominations?
Humph. Don't insult people you don't know. I am a Fellow of the IEEE, and have been an IEEE member for more than thirty years. (In fact, I was a member of the ACM for more than ten years.) I probably have downloaded a thousand articles from IEEExplore since it was created (my books are very well referenced, I like to think), and there's nothing I like better than using the web to research obscure technical topics on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Of course the technology to collate information into an easy-to-read list already exists. That's not the point. The issue is determining which information is collated. By telling the software tool what information you want to see, you are inherently determining what information you will not see. This limits what you can learn. How can you be exposed to new areas of interest if your RSS feeds only present you with news from fields in which you already have an interest?
Searching for something on IEEExplore is qualitatively different from getting an issue of JSSC in the mail. The purpose of the search engine is to exclude everything except what I have requested. The paper copy of JSSC, on the other hand, has its Table of Contents on the cover, and it's harder to find a wider distribution of circuit technologies listed in one spot anywhere else. Suddenly, I find myself reading an article on ferroelectric RAM, or distributed amplification, or biasing of Indium Phosphide mixers -- things I never would have realized that I would find interesting. The effect is even stronger when reading the journals Science and Nature.
When I am on the Web, I prefer to peruse sites with a wide variety of subject matter -- arXiv is fun to browse, as is Eurekalert!, although the latter has a pretty high PR content. The "Random article" link on Wikipedia is also a good source of things one doesn't know. But to stay up-to-date, it's far easier to pick up the latest paper copy of Science News on the coffee table.
to pull content for you . . . and your friends could share articles and feeds with you.
Yeah, thanks for that 21st-Century update -- I'll be sure to check out RSS RSN.
The trouble with such schemes is that they assume that I know a priori what information I either want or need, and that is almost never the case. It's hard to learn new stuff when the information to which you're exposed is pre-filtered to include only the stuff you think you want to hear. (It may harden one's political beliefs, but I wouldn't consider that a good thing.)
One of the benefits of a print journal is that I get exposed to a wide variety of subject matter, including stuff I either didn't know existed, or thought I wouldn't find interesting, giving me a chance to learn new things and change my opinions.
Print publications are literally put into my hand, giving me more incentive to read them upon receipt. Web sites require an active effort on my part to go read them, which is often not done due to my habit of procrastination ("I'll take time to check that tomorrow"). Even email links to my monthly periodicals go unused, for similar reasons.
To me, it's the difference between polling- and interrupt-driven systems. The processor has to be constantly (or at least repetitively) awake to poll, while the processor can be asleep and awoken by an interrupt. The interrupt-based system is usually the lower-energy way to go.
Good idea! We could then get the tourists to eat the pythons!
Or the pythons to eat the tourists; either way, we win!
Maybe we can get VisitFlorida.com to promote braised Burmese Python with African Snail under glass au jus as a local delicacy. I mean, it worked for oysters. . . .
I'm hoping we can get the pythons to eat the snails.