>So you can fairly easy detect it and have enough time to calculate when and if it will hit
Actually, no. Most detections occur after the fact, not in near-real time. So we're not predicting them, we're backtracking after we notice one.
You can't see a CME head on, only from the sides (it's "optically thin"). So you can't see the ones that hit Earth if you're viewing from Earth (that's why there's the STEREO mission, to look off the earth-sun line).
And, they don't travel at a uniform velocity. Current predictions are only good to +- 12 hours. So for an event that takes 1-4 days to arrive, you have a +- half day window. That's pretty big. Current modeling with STEREO might be able to get that down to +- 4 hours, soon.
And it turns out it matters which magnetic field orientation it has-- a small CME with field aligned opposite the Earth's is far worse then a big CME with the field aligned. Fortunately there's a lot of work to use magnetogram images to predict the orientation.
All that combines to define the 'geoeffectiveness' of a given CME/solar storm.
Hard to detect the earth-incident ones, and hard to predict. Fun to study, though!
The summary is: we've already seen a bit in an earlier roll so we know there's stuff there, we lose use of the in-situ to explore L4/L5 so we have to balance that with our core science, there's a higher risk to the detectors due to dust, but what the heck, we have to pass through it anyway. We may find any of: dust, the moon's progenitor, and earth-killer, more dust.
> The checkout policy is the price you pay for having specialty knowledge behind the register at minimum wage prices.
I rather expect the local GameStop employees to have played as many store copies as possible. I like my local shop-- there's the guy that knows RPGs, the girl that is up on DS titles, and the fat guy everyone ignores. It's like having 3 free reviewers who remember what kind of stuff I like. They've saved me from crap games (i.e. impulse buys I later find got lousy reviews) many a time. The store should comp them titles so they can answer my questions.
Really, more businesses need to take a drug dealer approach-- know your product, know your customers, assume your customer needs _something_ and just make sure you sell them something that gets them to come back.
Good points. On SOHO-- as you note, SOHO has been camped out at L1 and provides about the same advance notice as WIND. So their statement that WIND gives earliest notice is a little... off.
That said, STEREO-B (and A) aren't on the Earth-Sun line, so you can argue the in-situ measurements aren't quite the same. But I'll go with your argument, since STEREO-B does give advanced notice.
Not to put down WIND-- it does its job well. But there's no need for the article to put down existing missions, let it stand on its own merits.
It's not just women... whichever parent 'takes the hit' to raise the kids runs into this. It's the "kid track" (formerly 'mommy track'). Kids into schoolbus means I'm off to work, rush back before they get home, so less face time and less 'being seen'. It's never about the work.
I've been advised (wisely) to never mention the kids... the other scientists with kids, it's like a secret club where you only talk to other parents least word get out you're soft. In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career' (meaning put them into aftercare so I can work 60+ hours). I have no regrets-- we make a choice, you can't have it all, etc. But it is real-- if you're kid-track, you're not career-track.
Given the salaries in academia/science (medium-low) and that more women (statistically) achieving in the business workplace, more science guys (I predict) will be 'going domestic', so more guys will run into this too.
And while I'm at it, what's with the lame acronomy for Stay At Home Dads, it makes us all sound sahd. Besides, if you work 3/4 time or a rushed 8 hours, you're not staying, you're just at home when K12 is not in session.
Signed, an At-Home Dad (AHD, similarily to ADHD probably intentional)
Don't worry-- the NASA MMO deal is that the developer has to spend their own money. All NASA provides is basically licensing rights to use NASA images, the name, etc (in return for some oversight on the project). In fact, that was the big controversy last year during the NASA MMO pitches, that NASA wasn't pitching in money but expected the developers to fund it under NASA term's but with the developer's dime. That's why they ended up getting far fewer pitches then originally attended their big meeting.
So for good or bad, it's the developer's dime and the developer's dough. The developer, by playing by NASA's rules, gets access to neat NASA images and docs, but that's the only cost to you, the taxpayer. If it works, the developer gets lots of revenue and NASA gets good PR. If it fails, the taxpayer doesn't lose anything. I hope the game works out!
Oh, sure, it sounds good, but what if the hoses rupture while you're being towed over the ocean-- that's straight water pouring out, at tens of gallons per second! It'll get all over everything! And what are the people running it going to do then, when there's suddenly water all around them? Float? Didn't anyone think this through?
This does sound seriously fun... and smart too. Shades of Armadillo's EPA visit for their earlier hydrogen peroxide rocket, paraphased "what do you do if there's a fuel spill" 'We run away!' "That's not acceptable containment of contaminents!!" 'Sure it is, it'll turn to water and air' "Oh, cool!"
> Xmas '09 will redefine what people think of a laptop/netbook. Just don't look for it in Best Buy.
I just bought my EEE900A netbook from Best Buy last month, $199. It rocks. Selling cheap stuff is what Best Buy does best, so I hope the redefined netbooks end up there:)
What most impresses me, ignoring all the Ayers stuff, is that Mr. Gates was willing to admit publically that parts of his initiative failed, and retool it. There's a little whining (some schools 'did not take radical steps', etc), but overall it was pretty frank at saying "we need to change some of our approach". I wish more school districts would take that approach, rather than requiring you remove the school board before they'll change off a destined-for-doom plan.
I looked up my SSN. Google told me it equaled -1958, and also said look up "More about calculator." Either the web knows I'm in the sciences, or I need to remove the dashes when googling it.
"GATTACA always bothered me since you don't see Vincent's success, only that he was lucky enough to trick the system."
Actually, you see his success constantly-- he scores highest in the various orbital/piloting tests, impresses them with his work ethic, and so on. It's only the purely physical criteria that was a problem-- and note he does perform the physical tests at a high level (even though he's a wreck afterwards). He's even able to outswim his more 'perfect' brother-- and save his brother from drowning in the process.
So put it this way. Your ship is in trouble. Do you want a pilot who has never had to struggle a minute in his life nor faced a real challenge, or do you want a pilot with the tenacity to achieve even with the deck stacked against him?
Yep, players suffer from Hero Syndrome, or PC-itis. If they are outnumbered the enemy 3 to 1, they will of course always win because they have superior numbers and any enemy victory is clearly impossible with those odds. But if they are outnumbered 1 to 3, they still expect to win because, hey, they're the hero.
Put another way, all victories by me are due to my superior skill and tactics. All wins by the opponent were due to luck and cheating.
This also applies to casino betting, and thus Vegas thrives.
> That explains why Spaceship One exploded on launch.
Actually, it explains why Falcon I failed to launch, and Armadillo's lunar lander exploded on the runway. No, wait, it doesn't explain it. Even SpaceShipOne had a roll problem (it didn't blow up because, IMHO, Rutan is a rare daVinci-level design genius, but that's another tale). These things happen not because it's NASA or the Soviets or Private Industry, but because rocket science is hard.
Rockets blow up. A 1/100 change of failure over 100 launch = failure is likely. You can out-design some risk, but not all-- and so you have to do a cost/benefit against risk. With conventional (unmanned) satellite loses, they have it down to actuarial figures: they insure for $X, the policy costs $Y, so a risk reducation that costs more than $Y is unnecessary.
For manned stuff, the US is very risk-adverse and litigious, so I don't think private industry has much of a market advantage for risk management there. I do hope there will be legal and insurance reform to improve that situation. Put simply, people should be allowed to give informed consent to do dangerous stuff.
I'm all for commercial space ventures in addition to NASA. But arguing private industry will either a) cut corners and blow up more or b) be safer and more reliable than NASA ignores NASA's track record, reality, and how rocket science works.
> So why do they look worse than private schools, in terms of test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc.? > [...] Answer: because they get better students.
I'll agree they _have_ better students, but that's because they can choose them. They get to cherrypick. They get to interview and accept only those they wish. They can throw out students. They don't have to accept anyone. It's not first come, first serve, or open to all comers.
> The voucher system would lower the barrier to entry
The barrier to entry is set by the private schools, not economically, but in their acceptance policies.
What vouchers would do, I suspect, is what NCLB is already doing in my area-- swamp the good public schools. If a public school underperforms, under NCLB parents can move their kid to a better-performing school. Good in theory.
However, that school doesn't have infinite class space, nor do they get more teachers-- they just have to fit in more students. So we get a few good schools that are overcrowded, which makes their quality go down. Meanwhile, the underperforming schools are now underfilled, so they get merged or closed. The result is a net loss for the system as a whole.
The 'secret' to education is not simple, but the biggest single determinant is 'class size'-- another issue where private schools excel. Smaller class size = better education. But that requires more classrooms and more teachers, which is more expensive compared with the latest quick-fix fad.
Set up a mandated public school class size of 15 students/teacher and education will improve-- heck, I'll even vote for vouchers then. As it stands, though, vouchers currently are tax relief for people who put their kids into private school already. Not necessarily a bad idea, but not what they represent themselves as.
So, Craigslist is in San Francisco, yes? And the court case was in Los Angelos. Sure, it's the same state, but California is big, that's a full day's drive apart (8-12 hours depending on route). So, as usual, the people suing chose a venue that's not where the supposably offending business is located.
That's the real problem here. To expect someone to have to take 3 days off to fly or drive a long distance to attend each and every spurious lawsuit just means you can do a Denial of Service Real World... file lots of lawsuits until the airfare bankrupts the given target.
Defining things has always been a problem: The king's three scholars had accused Nazrudin of heresy, and so he was brought into the king's court for trial.
In his defense, Nazrudin asked the scholars, "Oh wise men, what is bread?"
The first scholar said, "Bread is sustenance; a food."
The second scholar said, "Bread is a combination of flour and water exposed to the heat of a fire."
The third scholar said, "Bread is a gift from God."
Nazrudin spoke to the king, "Your Majesty, how can you trust these men? Is it not strange they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?"
> won't all the bikes end up at the southernmost depot?
Yes, they will. In Paris, they have trucks that regularly returns the bikes uphill. It's like a brilliant fusion of cycling and mass transport. Riders go downhill, and bikes get batch-shipped back up.
Read 'Code Complete', by Steve Mcconnell. Then tell your advisor that you just found this great new book (that's been in print for 15 years and happens to be part of most good undergraduate CS programs.) And yes, you should have read it already-- part of getting a PhD is problem solving, and part of that is actually looking up the relevant works in the field _before_ asking your neighbors "hey, how do I do this?" There'a fancy place called a 'library' at most schools that also can come in handy.
And if you answer that "Oh, I've already read it", remember that part of writing a good research question is mentioning the research you've done before, so you lose points for not citing it in your query. So either way, you're one point down. Why are you still reading this, instead of 'Code Complete'? I'm not your advisor, you don't have to listen to my rants! Get back to work! Geeze, students today, they expect everything handed to them. Why, in my day... (voice trails as sleep descends...)
This question isn't even asking the right questions, just (I'm guessing) pushing an anti-journal agenda. One inaccuracy:
> Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
Any journal that takes that long in the hard sciences wouldn't stay in print. Their own requirements are that the work be timely. I've had papers pulled because our team took too long (3 months) to submit a rewrite.
Now, an article _might_ take 2 years from 'first blog post announcing a discovery' to 'peer-accepted academic paper', but that's because the _research_, not the paper process, takes time to be both complete and thorough. I can blog "I discovered X", but any paper needs to explain why I know it's X and not Y, what the confidence levels are, and how it compares with competing explanations. In short, you have to analyze, write and edit.
The actual submission process for, say, Astrophysics Journal can go by in 3 months from submission to publication if the writing team is keeping up with the requested edits.
I will also point out ADS (at ads.harvard.edu) has provided free searchable access to astronomy journals since 1992. Further, most (if not all) astronomy journals require electronic submission (and review rounds are electronic too). So for that area of science, journals are ideal: timely, thorough, and vetted.
Getting games into schools is hard... kinda like the difference between coding a game, and selling it as a bonafide product.
To 'sell' it to schools, you need to a) make them aware of it, usually by presenting at state teacher's fairs and putting notices in periodicals, b) indicate how it supports curricula standards by providing support material and metrics, c) get it into existing channels so the (usual sole) IT person at the school (typically a resource/library person) is allowed to install it, d) support Q&A and teacher queries (customer support), and e) provide a follow-up reporting on its status so schools can continue using it.
Which takes time, and time takes money. Hence the need for funding, and why lack of funding makes distribution slow and random.
Most public libraries carry the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" videos & DVDs, my kids liked them through ages 5-9. Under a half hour each, wacky but with real science, built in experiments, and a rock video parody at the end of each. Oh, and from the library, free!
> But if there had been sufficient funding and an established demand for something that did the same kind of thing, it could have been developed without space.
The point of basic research is to do work on areas that do not yet have a market, aka an 'established demand'.
It's pretty easy to 'build a better mousetrap' when people are buying mousetraps. It's much harder to come up with a new concept in an unproven area. Ever wonder why so many great discoveries (penicillin, microwave oven tech) come about by serendipity? You have to do a lot of basic research before you find those big changes.
Real life isn't like Civilization tech trees (A always leads to B to C), you don't know the endpoints in life.
Taking comp sci, Beowulf Clusters were invented at NASA. They're rather handy now. They weren't invented because someone said "there is a market for a cheap supercomputer"-- all the supercomputer companies were quite happy to continue making expensive Big Iron. But transformative technology, that requires basic research.
That said, companies like Bell, Raytheon, etc used to do a lot more basic research, because it paid long-term dividends even if there wasn't a clear short-term path. The change in focus to purely short-term now means, outside of gov't, there really isn't much pure research.
Slashdot Mirror
> I am currently going through a Neil deGrasse Tyson phase.
I became a fan of his after his "Astrophysicists Killed the Dinosaurs" talk:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/astrophysicists_killed_dinosaurs_neil_degrasse_tyson_science_communication
Hi,
>So you can fairly easy detect it and have enough time to calculate when and if it will hit
Actually, no. Most detections occur after the fact, not in near-real time. So we're not predicting them, we're backtracking after we notice one.
You can't see a CME head on, only from the sides (it's "optically thin"). So you can't see the ones that hit Earth if you're viewing from Earth (that's why there's the STEREO mission, to look off the earth-sun line).
And, they don't travel at a uniform velocity. Current predictions are only good to +- 12 hours. So for an event that takes 1-4 days to arrive, you have a +- half day window. That's pretty big. Current modeling with STEREO might be able to get that down to +- 4 hours, soon.
And it turns out it matters which magnetic field orientation it has-- a small CME with field aligned opposite the Earth's is far worse then a big CME with the field aligned. Fortunately there's a lot of work to use magnetogram images to predict the orientation.
All that combines to define the 'geoeffectiveness' of a given CME/solar storm.
Hard to detect the earth-incident ones, and hard to predict. Fun to study, though!
me
http://scientificblogging.com/sky_day/
As a researching using STEREO data, I wrote a piece on some of the logistics of this, and what we may find.
http://scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/secrets_l4l5_gravity_wells
The summary is: we've already seen a bit in an earlier roll so we know there's stuff there, we lose use of the in-situ to explore L4/L5 so we have to balance that with our core science, there's a higher risk to the detectors due to dust, but what the heck, we have to pass through it anyway. We may find any of: dust, the moon's progenitor, and earth-killer, more dust.
> The checkout policy is the price you pay for having specialty knowledge behind the register at minimum wage prices.
I rather expect the local GameStop employees to have played as many store copies as possible. I like my local shop-- there's the guy that knows RPGs, the girl that is up on DS titles, and the fat guy everyone ignores. It's like having 3 free reviewers who remember what kind of stuff I like. They've saved me from crap games (i.e. impulse buys I later find got lousy reviews) many a time. The store should comp them titles so they can answer my questions.
Really, more businesses need to take a drug dealer approach-- know your product, know your customers, assume your customer needs _something_ and just make sure you sell them something that gets them to come back.
Good points. On SOHO-- as you note, SOHO has been camped out at L1 and provides about the same advance notice as WIND. So their statement that WIND gives earliest notice is a little... off.
That said, STEREO-B (and A) aren't on the Earth-Sun line, so you can argue the in-situ measurements aren't quite the same. But I'll go with your argument, since STEREO-B does give advanced notice.
Not to put down WIND-- it does its job well. But there's no need for the article to put down existing missions, let it stand on its own merits.
me
Daily life as a STEREO post-doc at http://scientificblogging.com/sky_day
It's not just women... whichever parent 'takes the hit' to raise the kids runs into this. It's the "kid track" (formerly 'mommy track'). Kids into schoolbus means I'm off to work, rush back before they get home, so less face time and less 'being seen'. It's never about the work.
I've been advised (wisely) to never mention the kids... the other scientists with kids, it's like a secret club where you only talk to other parents least word get out you're soft. In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career' (meaning put them into aftercare so I can work 60+ hours). I have no regrets-- we make a choice, you can't have it all, etc. But it is real-- if you're kid-track, you're not career-track.
Given the salaries in academia/science (medium-low) and that more women (statistically) achieving in the business workplace, more science guys (I predict) will be 'going domestic', so more guys will run into this too.
And while I'm at it, what's with the lame acronomy for Stay At Home Dads, it makes us all sound sahd. Besides, if you work 3/4 time or a rushed 8 hours, you're not staying, you're just at home when K12 is not in session.
Signed,
an At-Home Dad (AHD, similarily to ADHD probably intentional)
Don't worry-- the NASA MMO deal is that the developer has to spend their own money. All NASA provides is basically licensing rights to use NASA images, the name, etc (in return for some oversight on the project). In fact, that was the big controversy last year during the NASA MMO pitches, that NASA wasn't pitching in money but expected the developers to fund it under NASA term's but with the developer's dime. That's why they ended up getting far fewer pitches then originally attended their big meeting.
So for good or bad, it's the developer's dime and the developer's dough. The developer, by playing by NASA's rules, gets access to neat NASA images and docs, but that's the only cost to you, the taxpayer. If it works, the developer gets lots of revenue and NASA gets good PR. If it fails, the taxpayer doesn't lose anything. I hope the game works out!
Oh, sure, it sounds good, but what if the hoses rupture while you're being towed over the ocean-- that's straight water pouring out, at tens of gallons per second! It'll get all over everything! And what are the people running it going to do then, when there's suddenly water all around them? Float? Didn't anyone think this through?
This does sound seriously fun... and smart too. Shades of Armadillo's EPA visit for their earlier hydrogen peroxide rocket, paraphased "what do you do if there's a fuel spill" 'We run away!' "That's not acceptable containment of contaminents!!" 'Sure it is, it'll turn to water and air' "Oh, cool!"
***
want some astronomy? http://scientificblogging.com/sky_day/
> Xmas '09 will redefine what people think of a laptop/netbook. Just don't look for it in Best Buy.
I just bought my EEE900A netbook from Best Buy last month, $199. It rocks. Selling cheap stuff is what Best Buy does best, so I hope the redefined netbooks end up there :)
What most impresses me, ignoring all the Ayers stuff, is that Mr. Gates was willing to admit publically that parts of his initiative failed, and retool it. There's a little whining (some schools 'did not take radical steps', etc), but overall it was pretty frank at saying "we need to change some of our approach". I wish more school districts would take that approach, rather than requiring you remove the school board before they'll change off a destined-for-doom plan.
I looked up my SSN. Google told me it equaled -1958, and also said look up "More about calculator." Either the web knows I'm in the sciences, or I need to remove the dashes when googling it.
"GATTACA always bothered me since you don't see Vincent's success, only that he was lucky enough to trick the system."
Actually, you see his success constantly-- he scores highest in the various orbital/piloting tests, impresses them with his work ethic, and so on. It's only the purely physical criteria that was a problem-- and note he does perform the physical tests at a high level (even though he's a wreck afterwards). He's even able to outswim his more 'perfect' brother-- and save his brother from drowning in the process.
So put it this way. Your ship is in trouble. Do you want a pilot who has never had to struggle a minute in his life nor faced a real challenge, or do you want a pilot with the tenacity to achieve even with the deck stacked against him?
Yep, players suffer from Hero Syndrome, or PC-itis. If they are outnumbered the enemy 3 to 1, they will of course always win because they have superior numbers and any enemy victory is clearly impossible with those odds. But if they are outnumbered 1 to 3, they still expect to win because, hey, they're the hero.
Put another way, all victories by me are due to my superior skill and tactics. All wins by the opponent were due to luck and cheating.
This also applies to casino betting, and thus Vegas thrives.
> It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one.
Yes, and people say "he hit me" when someone hits their car. No, they hit your car. You are not your car. Do not break the "driver's fourth wall".
TFA doesn't seem to really understand the difference between immersion and investiture into a role.
> That explains why Spaceship One exploded on launch.
Actually, it explains why Falcon I failed to launch, and Armadillo's lunar lander exploded on the runway. No, wait, it doesn't explain it. Even SpaceShipOne had a roll problem (it didn't blow up because, IMHO, Rutan is a rare daVinci-level design genius, but that's another tale). These things happen not because it's NASA or the Soviets or Private Industry, but because rocket science is hard.
Rockets blow up. A 1/100 change of failure over 100 launch = failure is likely. You can out-design some risk, but not all-- and so you have to do a cost/benefit against risk. With conventional (unmanned) satellite loses, they have it down to actuarial figures: they insure for $X, the policy costs $Y, so a risk reducation that costs more than $Y is unnecessary.
For manned stuff, the US is very risk-adverse and litigious, so I don't think private industry has much of a market advantage for risk management there. I do hope there will be legal and insurance reform to improve that situation. Put simply, people should be allowed to give informed consent to do dangerous stuff.
I'm all for commercial space ventures in addition to NASA. But arguing private industry will either a) cut corners and blow up more or b) be safer and more reliable than NASA ignores NASA's track record, reality, and how rocket science works.
> So why do they look worse than private schools, in terms of test scores, graduation rate, college admission rate, etc.?
> [...] Answer: because they get better students.
I'll agree they _have_ better students, but that's because they can choose them. They get to cherrypick. They get to interview and accept only those they wish. They can throw out students. They don't have to accept anyone. It's not first come, first serve, or open to all comers.
> The voucher system would lower the barrier to entry
The barrier to entry is set by the private schools, not economically, but in their acceptance policies.
What vouchers would do, I suspect, is what NCLB is already doing in my area-- swamp the good public schools. If a public school underperforms, under NCLB parents can move their kid to a better-performing school. Good in theory.
However, that school doesn't have infinite class space, nor do they get more teachers-- they just have to fit in more students. So we get a few good schools that are overcrowded, which makes their quality go down. Meanwhile, the underperforming schools are now underfilled, so they get merged or closed. The result is a net loss for the system as a whole.
The 'secret' to education is not simple, but the biggest single determinant is 'class size'-- another issue where private schools excel. Smaller class size = better education. But that requires more classrooms and more teachers, which is more expensive compared with the latest quick-fix fad.
Set up a mandated public school class size of 15 students/teacher and education will improve-- heck, I'll even vote for vouchers then. As it stands, though, vouchers currently are tax relief for people who put their kids into private school already. Not necessarily a bad idea, but not what they represent themselves as.
So, Craigslist is in San Francisco, yes? And the court case was in Los Angelos. Sure, it's the same state, but California is big, that's a full day's drive apart (8-12 hours depending on route). So, as usual, the people suing chose a venue that's not where the supposably offending business is located.
That's the real problem here. To expect someone to have to take 3 days off to fly or drive a long distance to attend each and every spurious lawsuit just means you can do a Denial of Service Real World... file lots of lawsuits until the airfare bankrupts the given target.
Defining things has always been a problem:
The king's three scholars had accused Nazrudin of heresy, and so he was brought into the king's court for trial.
In his defense, Nazrudin asked the scholars, "Oh wise men, what is bread?"
The first scholar said, "Bread is sustenance; a food."
The second scholar said, "Bread is a combination of flour and water exposed to the heat of a fire."
The third scholar said, "Bread is a gift from God."
Nazrudin spoke to the king, "Your Majesty, how can you trust these men? Is it not strange they cannot agree on the nature of something they eat every day, yet are unanimous that I am a heretic?"
(From The Trial of Nasrudin
> won't all the bikes end up at the southernmost depot?
Yes, they will. In Paris, they have trucks that regularly returns the bikes uphill. It's like a brilliant fusion of cycling and mass transport. Riders go downhill, and bikes get batch-shipped back up.
Read 'Code Complete', by Steve Mcconnell. Then tell your advisor that you just found this great new book (that's been in print for 15 years and happens to be part of most good undergraduate CS programs.) And yes, you should have read it already-- part of getting a PhD is problem solving, and part of that is actually looking up the relevant works in the field _before_ asking your neighbors "hey, how do I do this?" There'a fancy place called a 'library' at most schools that also can come in handy.
And if you answer that "Oh, I've already read it", remember that part of writing a good research question is mentioning the research you've done before, so you lose points for not citing it in your query. So either way, you're one point down. Why are you still reading this, instead of 'Code Complete'? I'm not your advisor, you don't have to listen to my rants! Get back to work! Geeze, students today, they expect everything handed to them. Why, in my day... (voice trails as sleep descends...)
This question isn't even asking the right questions, just (I'm guessing) pushing an anti-journal agenda. One inaccuracy:
> Many of these journals take two or more years to print an article after it has been submitted,
Any journal that takes that long in the hard sciences wouldn't stay in print. Their own requirements are that the work be timely. I've had papers pulled because our team took too long (3 months) to submit a rewrite.
Now, an article _might_ take 2 years from 'first blog post announcing a discovery' to 'peer-accepted academic paper', but that's because the _research_, not the paper process, takes time to be both complete and thorough. I can blog "I discovered X", but any paper needs to explain why I know it's X and not Y, what the confidence levels are, and how it compares with competing explanations. In short, you have to analyze, write and edit.
The actual submission process for, say, Astrophysics Journal can go by in 3 months from submission to publication if the writing team is keeping up with the requested edits.
I will also point out ADS (at ads.harvard.edu) has provided free searchable access to astronomy journals since 1992. Further, most (if not all) astronomy journals require electronic submission (and review rounds are electronic too). So for that area of science, journals are ideal: timely, thorough, and vetted.
Getting games into schools is hard... kinda like the difference between coding a game, and selling it as a bonafide product.
To 'sell' it to schools, you need to a) make them aware of it, usually by presenting at state teacher's fairs and putting notices in periodicals, b) indicate how it supports curricula standards by providing support material and metrics, c) get it into existing channels so the (usual sole) IT person at the school (typically a resource/library person) is allowed to install it, d) support Q&A and teacher queries (customer support), and e) provide a follow-up reporting on its status so schools can continue using it.
Which takes time, and time takes money. Hence the need for funding, and why lack of funding makes distribution slow and random.
Most public libraries carry the "Bill Nye the Science Guy" videos & DVDs, my kids liked them through ages 5-9. Under a half hour each, wacky but with real science, built in experiments, and a rock video parody at the end of each. Oh, and from the library, free!
> Watch This. I challenge you to watch the whole thing without skipping.
It was actually pretty entertaining. I had no problem with the dialog, either.
Of course, I was watching it with the sound off. Maybe I should watch his movies that way, with the sound off.
It was oddly like watching someone play a videogame, poorly.
> But if there had been sufficient funding and an established demand for something that did the same kind of thing, it could have been developed without space.
The point of basic research is to do work on areas that do not yet have a market, aka an 'established demand'.
It's pretty easy to 'build a better mousetrap' when people are buying mousetraps. It's much harder to come up with a new concept in an unproven area. Ever wonder why so many great discoveries (penicillin, microwave oven tech) come about by serendipity? You have to do a lot of basic research before you find those big changes.
Real life isn't like Civilization tech trees (A always leads to B to C), you don't know the endpoints in life.
Taking comp sci, Beowulf Clusters were invented at NASA. They're rather handy now. They weren't invented because someone said "there is a market for a cheap supercomputer"-- all the supercomputer companies were quite happy to continue making expensive Big Iron. But transformative technology, that requires basic research.
That said, companies like Bell, Raytheon, etc used to do a lot more basic research, because it paid long-term dividends even if there wasn't a clear short-term path. The change in focus to purely short-term now means, outside of gov't, there really isn't much pure research.