Frankly I wish the government would just stay out of these matters and let the free market decide what's a fair wage, what's fair hours, etc., but maybe I'm naive:)
If you think that corporations exist in a free market you're naive. Remember, corporations exist solely due to interference by the Nanny State in the free market. This interference comes in the form of the Company's Act and its various descendents around the world. These various Acts restrict the operation of free markets in various ways, particularly around things like liability limitation.
Anyone who is a genuine advocate of truly free markets is anti-corporation. Anything else is hypocrisy or naivete'.
Areas here in Vancouver close to our Skytrain have seen property prices jump and a hell of a lot of development around the stations.
Sure, but Vancouver has always had pretty good public transport, and the Skytrain is awesome. Even back in the '70's you could get from UBC to Horseshoe Bay in about 45 minutes for about 45 cents. Canadian cities in general are pretty good in this respect (Winnipeg is kind of an exception, or was when I lived there, but Calgary, Toronto and Montreal are all not bad, and the GO system in the Toronto region is pretty good too.)
In the US there's some weird American Puritan moralism going on that says using public transport is a virtue, not a convenience, and as such users are basically martyrs and should be made to suffer for their goodness. On top of that class/race stuff comes into play, as it does so frequently down there: I used to on occasion take the bus in LA, and I was the only white Anglo to be seen.
The problem is that you have a compressible fluid in a compliant envelope.
One approach to this issue is to add lockable hard sliders. They act as idlers when unlocked but when engaged provide the required stiffness. For many applications they can be plastic and won't add huge amounts of weight, and the locking mechanism could itself be pneumatically controlled, so it's a relatively small number of additional valves.
Yup. Ten years after you graduate your specific subject is irrelevant, unless you're trapped in academia. My PhD is in pure physics, and I've worked in pure physics, applied physics, imaging, robotics and pathology (genetic data analysis) and run my own software and scientific consulting company. Any good PhD in a hard subject from a decent school is an adequate stepping stone to a diversity of futures, so it doesn't pay to be too focused on the details. Do what you love, work hard, always keep learning, and be willing to do what it takes to learn what you need to do the job you want to do (this last part trips a lot of academics, who only want to learn certain kinds of thing, not all that messy practical stuff.)
Why? I'm German, and we live just fine with higher taxes (and free healthcare, truly public education, etc.)
The difference is that the US government is spectacularly dysfunctional. When Americans rail against government inefficiency they are doing so out of direct experience with government that is corrupt and incompetent at all levels.
The reason why the US has nothing remotely resembling a functioning social democracy despite spending more public money on things like health care and education per capita than countries like Germany is that the specifically AMERICAN government is incapable of doing things that the German, or French, or even Canadian government do without batting an eye.
The population is growing, so one would expect that total spending would increase. Better measures are % of GDP or spending per capita.
No, absolutely not, at least if you're interested in empirical facts.
Empirically, our experience in Canada in the '90's was that after almost a decade of "cuts in the rate of spending" under the Conservatives the only way to get the beast under control was to actually cut the amount the government spent year-over-year. A year or two of that under the Liberals ushered in a decade of surpluses, only recently squandered by the "low tax big government" idiots we currently have in power.
Real conservatives have one big primary fiscal concern: balanced budgets. Anyone who tells you they are for "low taxes" or "smaller government" isn't a conservative, they are a liar. Every real conservative knows that FIRST you balance the budget, THEN you worry about tax and service levels. But if the budget isn't balanced you are taxing future generations and ensuring today's children grow up into a world of poverty and debt, which no real conservative anywhere wants.
An Inalienable right is one which can only be taken away by the government, not given.
I'm not sure if I should be sad I had to scroll down this far to find someone who knows what "inalienable" means or happy that anyone at all bothered to post this after the uncritical, unreflective responses above.
One quibble about language: a right is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being. A right can be violated--a condition can fail to be met--but it cannot be removed: for example freedom of speech will always be necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being. It is no more possible to take away the necessity of that condition than it is possible to take away the necessity of air. You can take away the air (or the freedom) but not the need for it.
I'll also say that I think humans are more than just rights-bearing beings, and any social theory that attempts to found itself solely on notions of rights is going to leave out a vast amount of really important stuff, which is why libertarians and tend to end up in such strange places, as they attempt to shoe-horn the entire rich panoply of humanity into the straightjacket of rights theory.
Thanks... that clears up my basic confusion. I didn't see how it could be done with linear optics either, but not being in the field wasn't sure if there wasn't something I was missing.
Having read the paper in more detail I'm not overwhelmed by their argument.: "That is, 'Preparing a photon in the same quantum state will sometimes result in photons in different physical states' does not imply 'Preparing a photon in different quantum states will sometimes result in photons that are in the same physical state'. The former proposition is the statistical interpretation. The latter is the assumption that the author’s argument depends on."
An instance of considering an abstract concept -- which is what the collection of molecule is -- and the concept itself are different.
"Basic philosophy" is nothing but an ongoing argument between ignorant people over things they know nothing about. For the past three hundred years those people haven't just been ignorant, they've been willfully ignorant. For the past thirty years they haven't just been willfully ignorant, they've been more-or-less criminally ignorant.
Starting from a stone-age conception of the way the world ought to be and armed with nothing but the known-to-be-inadequate-to-comprehend-reality set of "common sense" impressions they have of the world around them, they fail to distinguish between different things, ignore facts that don't conform to their beliefs and then insist that the rest of us are ignorant when our thinking doesn't conform to their ridiculous presumptions.
The very claim you make is a highly contentious one that any genuine student of "basic philosophy" knows has multiple answers depending on which more-or-less criminally ignorant person you ask. Some more-or-less criminally ignorant people will tell you that there are no "abstract concepts" at all. Others--like Plato and Descartes--will tell you some gibberish about "abstract concepts" having a kind of existence that transcends the physical. Of course, asking their opinion on such a question would be like asking, say, an extremely bright high-school student brought up in a deeply religious family and educated by monks who taught only things known before 1600. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but such a student would have precisely as much epistemic authority as Descartes or Plato.
There have been several scientifically plausible interpretations. One thinks of MWI for instance.
MWI assumes what it purports to prove. Why are we not able to observe the other worlds? Why is it that classical physics--including the physics our consciousness presumably depends on and is constituted by--isn't affected by them? MWI has no explanation for this, any more than Copenhagen does, but MWI advocates appear to think they have an explanation, which looks pretty nonsensical.
Why am I not aware of those parts of the wavefunction I happen not to be correlated with? Coherence is not required for me to interact with the rest of the classical world, so why should it be required for me to interact with other universes? MWI fails to answer Max Born's famous question: "WHY must I treat the apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't?"
What it proves is that if you assume that there is something like a real state of the quantum system at all (and assuming quantum mechanics is actually right) then that real state must include the full wave function.
I've not dug deeply into the paper yet, but I don't understand their measurement apparatus (I'm an experimentalist but not in this field.) Their various states look to me like perfectly ordinary linear polarization states, so their "00/0+/+0/++" apparatus ought to be some kind of linear polarimeter, like a sequence of polarizing beam-splitters with ones at 45 degrees on the arms of one is vertical/horizontal, probably, ultimately, I guess with a recombining of the beams as in a Mach-Zedner interferometer...
But since there is no (apparent) interaction between the two photons I don't see what they mean by a "joint measurement" in this context. Can you give some insight into what kind of measurement apparatus they are actually talking about in the ideal case that would allow them to make the kind of "joint measurement" their argument depends on?
Submarines and surface vessels might benefit greatly from it, but as much from preventing barnacles and crap from sticking.
That was my thought as well, although I'm afraid the guy who pointed out that nothing touted on/. as the next great thing ever comes to market is correct. It would in fact be worth going through the/. archives to precisely quantify just how few "on the market in the next three-to-five years" predictions come true. My bet is fewer than 1%, possibly as low as 0.
I read the title as "Ho-bot" and was thinking you were making an argument that, err... "household" robots were going to be more important to our near future than farming robots...
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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If you're the one magic "non idiot" on this planet who can always get projects approved and completed on time and under budget, then I suggest you start a management consulting firm.
I'm neither magical nor alone: project scheduling and estimation are amongst the most straight-forward and simple things an engineer or project manager can do, and completing projects on schedule is not that hard given accurate estimates, including contingencies for the surprises.
The problem is that for some reason many people believe that most projects being over time and budget is a reason to never do anything to improve the situation. It's like people were saying, "All buildings burn down! You're wrong to say we should stop using blow-torches and gasoline at the same time! No one can possibly do ANYTHING about it!"
In the projects where I've been able to stick-handle accurate estimates past senior management, there has been no problem bringing them in on time and on budget. On the projects there senior management has said, "Your estimates are too long and high! The world will end if you don't bring the project in at $COST and $TIME" the project has gone "mysteriously" over time and budget, and the idiots have said, "OF course it has! Who could possibly expect anything different!" And equally mysteriously, the world has never ended.
I've thought about management consulting: I ran my own successful software and scientific consultancy for many years, carefully selecting clients who weren't idiots. But I don't think management consultancy is likely to be all that lucrative for me, because organizations that are not run by idiots are already doing the very simple things required to bring projects in on time and under budget, whereas those that are run by idiots aren't about the listen to the likes of me, because they believe that every single project has to use gasoline and blowtorches, and as such unavoidably goes up down in flames.
Re:Has there ever been a plane on time on budget?
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If not, why highlight the expected?
The real question is: why highlight the expected only after the fact?
Since when programs like this hit massive over-runs we are always reminded that programs like this always hit massive over-runs, why aren't those entirely predictable over-runs built in to the original budget? It is well-known how to do this, and since these over-runs--we are repeatedly told--are 100% sure predictable things on every single project of this type--it is just utter incompetence on the part of everyone involved that they are not built in from the start.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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Part of the game that everyone plays is they pitch it to the public under budget, and but then pay cost overruns anyway, everyone involved knowing full well that there will be cost overruns, but once you're 66 billion dollars invested, another few billion to get you out isn't that much.
There are perfectly well-known processes to to deal with this kind of nonsense, so bringing it up as an "excuse" is like saying, "Of course the building burned down! It's made of unprotected wood and the workers are using blow-torches!" If anyone gave that as an "excuse" for an industrial accident they would quite rightly be looked at like the incompetent wanker they were, but somehow no one ever calls people on it when they use exactly the same "logic" in equally predictable financial disasters that no one made even the tiniest bit of effort to avoid.
Second-lowest-bid contracts are one common and well-understood way of motivating people to bid their best estimate of cost, for example. This is not rocket science (well, OK, it's game theory, but still... it's game theory that's decades old.)
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Figher aircraft have traditionally run over budget.
I read this thread just to find an idiot saying this so I could respond to it.
Every time a large project goes over budget some idiot always says, "OF COURSE it went over budget. Projects of type X ALWAYS go over budget."
This is nothing but an indictment of the idiots in charge of the project, since if projects of that type ALWAYS go over budget, it was as predictable before the project started as it was in hindsight, and therefore should have been accounted for in the budget projections. If it was not, then the project planners and the people who hired them are completely incompetent and should be discharged, preferably from a cannon.
Evaluating candidates is a really, really hard thing to do.
I find this a frankly incredible statement, and one that is often repeated. I see no evidence for it. I've been interviewed (and hired) by any number of top-end software shops (I've done a lot of contracting and consulting.) I've also run my own company and worked for other companies managing software developers. It's been my universal experience that FINDING good people is really, really hard, but IDENTIFYING them is really, really easy.
If I sit down with a peer (the kind of person I'm looking for in most cases) it's easy to establish rapport. Can I talk about C++ standards, new language features, pros and cons and trade-offs? Can I bring up a tricky design problem and hash it over with them? And so on.
People who find candidate evaluation hard are probably suffering from either poor management skills (I've interviewed at places like this and thankfully never worked for one) or (more likely) are suffering from far too many marginal-to-crap candidates and are desperately trying to find the one or two who might be a diamond in the rough. At that point the job really is very hard, and I'm sure people at Google face it a lot.
But identifying the locus of the problem is critical to improving the solution, and this belief that its hard to identify good technical people is a myth that needs to be put behind us.
Often people who have a profound lack of self-awareness believe things like this because they aren't aware of--or even able to wrap their head around--the idea that they don't remember what they forget.
A successful nuclear reactor would have something similar where you have to apply energy to keep the coolant at bay.
To take the train analogy properly, imagine you replaced your typical coal-fired or diesel-electric train with one that moved 100 times faster. Any reasonable braking technology could be overwhelmed by this, and this is the problem with nuclear power: the energy density in the core is phenomenally high, resulting in it being able to overwhelm any reasonable level of passive cooling.
A 2 MWth coal-fired power plant burns a box-car of coal every fifteen minutes. A comparable nuclear power plant is refueled once every few years. Relative small glitches can result in uncontrolled reactions that pose no significant danger to the public, but which write-off the core in fairly short order.
This is the problem with nuclear power: cost, not danger to life and limb. And I don't really see any way of getting around it because a certain mass of uranium is required for criticality... although this is one of the things that makes the thorium cycle so interesting: the extra steps in the reaction make it far more inherently stable, which makes turning your multi-billion dollar investment in to a middling-sized pile of slightly radioactive slag much less likely.
Please call me when they look at the same spot with two different telescopes, and different spots with the same telescope. Using the same spectral lines.
They've done that. There are a handful of objects that are common across the two datasets. Unfortunately there is a certain amount of hand-waving in their analysis, pointing out that in one case they were able to show mis-calibration between the two datasets, and naively including this "miscalibrated" point in the overall analysis reduced the significance of the final result a lot (2 sigma or so).
Their Figure 2 shows the "dipole" distribution but they have relatively few objects at high angles, so the result really depends on perhaps 10% of their data, and they don't show the individual objects, only lumped deltaAlpha/Alpha values for 20 - 25 objects per angular bin. This is entirely unsatisfactory, and if I'd been a reviewer I'd have insisted on the individual points being plotted, as it would have made clearer just how marginal the significance of their result is.
This stuff is about on par with the FTL neutrino results: very low probability of being new physics, huge implications if it is. Therefore it's good that it's getting published, but it would be bad if anyone took it very seriously.
I think you're glossing the inefficiencies involved in distributing anything to "the whole of Africa" - the administrative costs alone in distributing something as simple as a "LiveStrong" armband to every person in Africa (or even just those who are at risk of malaria from mosquito bites) would exceed $1M.
Which is to day, eliminating malaria is not a technical problem at all. Malaria used to be common where I live now, back in the 1800's. But improved sanitation fixed that over a century ago. An engineering student I know recently commented, "We have a design project on clean water for the developing world, but if you look at it for a few minutes you realize it isn't an engineering problem. You don't need any technology the Romans didn't have."
What the developing world is lacking is not technology or tech-savvy people, but the rule of law.
The free market effects happen, and people eventually stop coming to me for treatment. I go out of business. The free market in action
Why on Earth do you think people would stop coming to you for treatment?
Because they can what, do statistics? Because they have some mechanism for knowing how many of your patients survive?
"Alternative medicine" is billion-dollar industry that is characterized by the use of techniques that cannot be clinically proven to work.
What you are talking about is not the free market: it's a fantasy, trivially falsifiable if you would just get out of your head and look around you at the world as it actually exists.
And you would be wrong. There was a very good article in Slate or the NYT or the like a few months ago that detailed the decision making process, and basically the guys on the spot some of whom actually died in the explosion were the ones who marked the most important test as a "pass" when to an outside observer it looked clearly like a "fail".
What seems pretty likely to you is not a replacement for empiricism. I used to think like you did, then I looked at the facts and realized what an idiot I was being. There's nothing to stop you from doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly I wish the government would just stay out of these matters and let the free market decide what's a fair wage, what's fair hours, etc., but maybe I'm naive :)
If you think that corporations exist in a free market you're naive. Remember, corporations exist solely due to interference by the Nanny State in the free market. This interference comes in the form of the Company's Act and its various descendents around the world. These various Acts restrict the operation of free markets in various ways, particularly around things like liability limitation.
Anyone who is a genuine advocate of truly free markets is anti-corporation. Anything else is hypocrisy or naivete'.
Areas here in Vancouver close to our Skytrain have seen property prices jump and a hell of a lot of development around the stations.
Sure, but Vancouver has always had pretty good public transport, and the Skytrain is awesome. Even back in the '70's you could get from UBC to Horseshoe Bay in about 45 minutes for about 45 cents. Canadian cities in general are pretty good in this respect (Winnipeg is kind of an exception, or was when I lived there, but Calgary, Toronto and Montreal are all not bad, and the GO system in the Toronto region is pretty good too.)
In the US there's some weird American Puritan moralism going on that says using public transport is a virtue, not a convenience, and as such users are basically martyrs and should be made to suffer for their goodness. On top of that class/race stuff comes into play, as it does so frequently down there: I used to on occasion take the bus in LA, and I was the only white Anglo to be seen.
The problem is that you have a compressible fluid in a compliant envelope.
One approach to this issue is to add lockable hard sliders. They act as idlers when unlocked but when engaged provide the required stiffness. For many applications they can be plastic and won't add huge amounts of weight, and the locking mechanism could itself be pneumatically controlled, so it's a relatively small number of additional valves.
so it's clear you can move around easily enough
Yup. Ten years after you graduate your specific subject is irrelevant, unless you're trapped in academia. My PhD is in pure physics, and I've worked in pure physics, applied physics, imaging, robotics and pathology (genetic data analysis) and run my own software and scientific consulting company. Any good PhD in a hard subject from a decent school is an adequate stepping stone to a diversity of futures, so it doesn't pay to be too focused on the details. Do what you love, work hard, always keep learning, and be willing to do what it takes to learn what you need to do the job you want to do (this last part trips a lot of academics, who only want to learn certain kinds of thing, not all that messy practical stuff.)
Why? I'm German, and we live just fine with higher taxes (and free healthcare, truly public education, etc.)
The difference is that the US government is spectacularly dysfunctional. When Americans rail against government inefficiency they are doing so out of direct experience with government that is corrupt and incompetent at all levels.
The reason why the US has nothing remotely resembling a functioning social democracy despite spending more public money on things like health care and education per capita than countries like Germany is that the specifically AMERICAN government is incapable of doing things that the German, or French, or even Canadian government do without batting an eye.
The population is growing, so one would expect that total spending would increase. Better measures are % of GDP or spending per capita.
No, absolutely not, at least if you're interested in empirical facts.
Empirically, our experience in Canada in the '90's was that after almost a decade of "cuts in the rate of spending" under the Conservatives the only way to get the beast under control was to actually cut the amount the government spent year-over-year. A year or two of that under the Liberals ushered in a decade of surpluses, only recently squandered by the "low tax big government" idiots we currently have in power.
Real conservatives have one big primary fiscal concern: balanced budgets. Anyone who tells you they are for "low taxes" or "smaller government" isn't a conservative, they are a liar. Every real conservative knows that FIRST you balance the budget, THEN you worry about tax and service levels. But if the budget isn't balanced you are taxing future generations and ensuring today's children grow up into a world of poverty and debt, which no real conservative anywhere wants.
An Inalienable right is one which can only be taken away by the government, not given.
I'm not sure if I should be sad I had to scroll down this far to find someone who knows what "inalienable" means or happy that anyone at all bothered to post this after the uncritical, unreflective responses above.
One quibble about language: a right is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being. A right can be violated--a condition can fail to be met--but it cannot be removed: for example freedom of speech will always be necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being. It is no more possible to take away the necessity of that condition than it is possible to take away the necessity of air. You can take away the air (or the freedom) but not the need for it.
I'll also say that I think humans are more than just rights-bearing beings, and any social theory that attempts to found itself solely on notions of rights is going to leave out a vast amount of really important stuff, which is why libertarians and tend to end up in such strange places, as they attempt to shoe-horn the entire rich panoply of humanity into the straightjacket of rights theory.
Thanks... that clears up my basic confusion. I didn't see how it could be done with linear optics either, but not being in the field wasn't sure if there wasn't something I was missing.
Having read the paper in more detail I'm not overwhelmed by their argument.: "That is, 'Preparing a photon in the same quantum state will sometimes result in photons in different physical states' does not imply 'Preparing a photon in different quantum states will sometimes result in photons that are in the same physical state'. The former proposition is the statistical interpretation. The latter is the assumption that the author’s argument depends on."
An instance of considering an abstract concept -- which is what the collection of molecule is -- and the concept itself are different.
"Basic philosophy" is nothing but an ongoing argument between ignorant people over things they know nothing about. For the past three hundred years those people haven't just been ignorant, they've been willfully ignorant. For the past thirty years they haven't just been willfully ignorant, they've been more-or-less criminally ignorant.
Starting from a stone-age conception of the way the world ought to be and armed with nothing but the known-to-be-inadequate-to-comprehend-reality set of "common sense" impressions they have of the world around them, they fail to distinguish between different things, ignore facts that don't conform to their beliefs and then insist that the rest of us are ignorant when our thinking doesn't conform to their ridiculous presumptions.
The very claim you make is a highly contentious one that any genuine student of "basic philosophy" knows has multiple answers depending on which more-or-less criminally ignorant person you ask. Some more-or-less criminally ignorant people will tell you that there are no "abstract concepts" at all. Others--like Plato and Descartes--will tell you some gibberish about "abstract concepts" having a kind of existence that transcends the physical. Of course, asking their opinion on such a question would be like asking, say, an extremely bright high-school student brought up in a deeply religious family and educated by monks who taught only things known before 1600. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but such a student would have precisely as much epistemic authority as Descartes or Plato.
There have been several scientifically plausible interpretations. One thinks of MWI for instance.
MWI assumes what it purports to prove. Why are we not able to observe the other worlds? Why is it that classical physics--including the physics our consciousness presumably depends on and is constituted by--isn't affected by them? MWI has no explanation for this, any more than Copenhagen does, but MWI advocates appear to think they have an explanation, which looks pretty nonsensical.
Why am I not aware of those parts of the wavefunction I happen not to be correlated with? Coherence is not required for me to interact with the rest of the classical world, so why should it be required for me to interact with other universes? MWI fails to answer Max Born's famous question: "WHY must I treat the apparatus as classical? What will happen to me if I don't?"
What it proves is that if you assume that there is something like a real state of the quantum system at all (and assuming quantum mechanics is actually right) then that real state must include the full wave function.
I've not dug deeply into the paper yet, but I don't understand their measurement apparatus (I'm an experimentalist but not in this field.) Their various states look to me like perfectly ordinary linear polarization states, so their "00/0+/+0/++" apparatus ought to be some kind of linear polarimeter, like a sequence of polarizing beam-splitters with ones at 45 degrees on the arms of one is vertical/horizontal, probably, ultimately, I guess with a recombining of the beams as in a Mach-Zedner interferometer...
But since there is no (apparent) interaction between the two photons I don't see what they mean by a "joint measurement" in this context. Can you give some insight into what kind of measurement apparatus they are actually talking about in the ideal case that would allow them to make the kind of "joint measurement" their argument depends on?
Very much like oilite bearings.
But that wasn't inspired by the single most common source of engineering inspiration (nature) so it doesn't count as newsworthy.
In other news, "Inspired by pursuit of profit, company creates innovative product!"
Submarines and surface vessels might benefit greatly from it, but as much from preventing barnacles and crap from sticking.
That was my thought as well, although I'm afraid the guy who pointed out that nothing touted on /. as the next great thing ever comes to market is correct. It would in fact be worth going through the /. archives to precisely quantify just how few "on the market in the next three-to-five years" predictions come true. My bet is fewer than 1%, possibly as low as 0.
I read the title as "Ho-bot" and was thinking you were making an argument that, err... "household" robots were going to be more important to our near future than farming robots...
If you're the one magic "non idiot" on this planet who can always get projects approved and completed on time and under budget, then I suggest you start a management consulting firm.
I'm neither magical nor alone: project scheduling and estimation are amongst the most straight-forward and simple things an engineer or project manager can do, and completing projects on schedule is not that hard given accurate estimates, including contingencies for the surprises.
The problem is that for some reason many people believe that most projects being over time and budget is a reason to never do anything to improve the situation. It's like people were saying, "All buildings burn down! You're wrong to say we should stop using blow-torches and gasoline at the same time! No one can possibly do ANYTHING about it!"
In the projects where I've been able to stick-handle accurate estimates past senior management, there has been no problem bringing them in on time and on budget. On the projects there senior management has said, "Your estimates are too long and high! The world will end if you don't bring the project in at $COST and $TIME" the project has gone "mysteriously" over time and budget, and the idiots have said, "OF course it has! Who could possibly expect anything different!" And equally mysteriously, the world has never ended.
I've thought about management consulting: I ran my own successful software and scientific consultancy for many years, carefully selecting clients who weren't idiots. But I don't think management consultancy is likely to be all that lucrative for me, because organizations that are not run by idiots are already doing the very simple things required to bring projects in on time and under budget, whereas those that are run by idiots aren't about the listen to the likes of me, because they believe that every single project has to use gasoline and blowtorches, and as such unavoidably goes up down in flames.
If not, why highlight the expected?
The real question is: why highlight the expected only after the fact?
Since when programs like this hit massive over-runs we are always reminded that programs like this always hit massive over-runs, why aren't those entirely predictable over-runs built in to the original budget? It is well-known how to do this, and since these over-runs--we are repeatedly told--are 100% sure predictable things on every single project of this type--it is just utter incompetence on the part of everyone involved that they are not built in from the start.
Part of the game that everyone plays is they pitch it to the public under budget, and but then pay cost overruns anyway, everyone involved knowing full well that there will be cost overruns, but once you're 66 billion dollars invested, another few billion to get you out isn't that much.
There are perfectly well-known processes to to deal with this kind of nonsense, so bringing it up as an "excuse" is like saying, "Of course the building burned down! It's made of unprotected wood and the workers are using blow-torches!" If anyone gave that as an "excuse" for an industrial accident they would quite rightly be looked at like the incompetent wanker they were, but somehow no one ever calls people on it when they use exactly the same "logic" in equally predictable financial disasters that no one made even the tiniest bit of effort to avoid.
Second-lowest-bid contracts are one common and well-understood way of motivating people to bid their best estimate of cost, for example. This is not rocket science (well, OK, it's game theory, but still... it's game theory that's decades old.)
Figher aircraft have traditionally run over budget.
I read this thread just to find an idiot saying this so I could respond to it.
Every time a large project goes over budget some idiot always says, "OF COURSE it went over budget. Projects of type X ALWAYS go over budget."
This is nothing but an indictment of the idiots in charge of the project, since if projects of that type ALWAYS go over budget, it was as predictable before the project started as it was in hindsight, and therefore should have been accounted for in the budget projections. If it was not, then the project planners and the people who hired them are completely incompetent and should be discharged, preferably from a cannon.
Evaluating candidates is a really, really hard thing to do.
I find this a frankly incredible statement, and one that is often repeated. I see no evidence for it. I've been interviewed (and hired) by any number of top-end software shops (I've done a lot of contracting and consulting.) I've also run my own company and worked for other companies managing software developers. It's been my universal experience that FINDING good people is really, really hard, but IDENTIFYING them is really, really easy.
If I sit down with a peer (the kind of person I'm looking for in most cases) it's easy to establish rapport. Can I talk about C++ standards, new language features, pros and cons and trade-offs? Can I bring up a tricky design problem and hash it over with them? And so on.
People who find candidate evaluation hard are probably suffering from either poor management skills (I've interviewed at places like this and thankfully never worked for one) or (more likely) are suffering from far too many marginal-to-crap candidates and are desperately trying to find the one or two who might be a diamond in the rough. At that point the job really is very hard, and I'm sure people at Google face it a lot.
But identifying the locus of the problem is critical to improving the solution, and this belief that its hard to identify good technical people is a myth that needs to be put behind us.
What can I say? I don't forget things
Often people who have a profound lack of self-awareness believe things like this because they aren't aware of--or even able to wrap their head around--the idea that they don't remember what they forget.
A successful nuclear reactor would have something similar where you have to apply energy to keep the coolant at bay.
To take the train analogy properly, imagine you replaced your typical coal-fired or diesel-electric train with one that moved 100 times faster. Any reasonable braking technology could be overwhelmed by this, and this is the problem with nuclear power: the energy density in the core is phenomenally high, resulting in it being able to overwhelm any reasonable level of passive cooling.
A 2 MWth coal-fired power plant burns a box-car of coal every fifteen minutes. A comparable nuclear power plant is refueled once every few years. Relative small glitches can result in uncontrolled reactions that pose no significant danger to the public, but which write-off the core in fairly short order.
This is the problem with nuclear power: cost, not danger to life and limb. And I don't really see any way of getting around it because a certain mass of uranium is required for criticality... although this is one of the things that makes the thorium cycle so interesting: the extra steps in the reaction make it far more inherently stable, which makes turning your multi-billion dollar investment in to a middling-sized pile of slightly radioactive slag much less likely.
Please call me when they look at the same spot with two different telescopes, and different spots with the same telescope. Using the same spectral lines.
They've done that. There are a handful of objects that are common across the two datasets. Unfortunately there is a certain amount of hand-waving in their analysis, pointing out that in one case they were able to show mis-calibration between the two datasets, and naively including this "miscalibrated" point in the overall analysis reduced the significance of the final result a lot (2 sigma or so).
Their Figure 2 shows the "dipole" distribution but they have relatively few objects at high angles, so the result really depends on perhaps 10% of their data, and they don't show the individual objects, only lumped deltaAlpha/Alpha values for 20 - 25 objects per angular bin. This is entirely unsatisfactory, and if I'd been a reviewer I'd have insisted on the individual points being plotted, as it would have made clearer just how marginal the significance of their result is.
This stuff is about on par with the FTL neutrino results: very low probability of being new physics, huge implications if it is. Therefore it's good that it's getting published, but it would be bad if anyone took it very seriously.
I think you're glossing the inefficiencies involved in distributing anything to "the whole of Africa" - the administrative costs alone in distributing something as simple as a "LiveStrong" armband to every person in Africa (or even just those who are at risk of malaria from mosquito bites) would exceed $1M.
Which is to day, eliminating malaria is not a technical problem at all. Malaria used to be common where I live now, back in the 1800's. But improved sanitation fixed that over a century ago. An engineering student I know recently commented, "We have a design project on clean water for the developing world, but if you look at it for a few minutes you realize it isn't an engineering problem. You don't need any technology the Romans didn't have."
What the developing world is lacking is not technology or tech-savvy people, but the rule of law.
The free market effects happen, and people eventually stop coming to me for treatment. I go out of business. The free market in action
Why on Earth do you think people would stop coming to you for treatment?
Because they can what, do statistics? Because they have some mechanism for knowing how many of your patients survive?
"Alternative medicine" is billion-dollar industry that is characterized by the use of techniques that cannot be clinically proven to work.
What you are talking about is not the free market: it's a fantasy, trivially falsifiable if you would just get out of your head and look around you at the world as it actually exists.
I think it's pretty likely...
And you would be wrong. There was a very good article in Slate or the NYT or the like a few months ago that detailed the decision making process, and basically the guys on the spot some of whom actually died in the explosion were the ones who marked the most important test as a "pass" when to an outside observer it looked clearly like a "fail".
What seems pretty likely to you is not a replacement for empiricism. I used to think like you did, then I looked at the facts and realized what an idiot I was being. There's nothing to stop you from doing the same thing.