Really? Prove Newton's Second Law. Oh wait, you can't, because no proof exists, it makes sense and has seemed reasonable for 400 years, but there is no objectivity in physics or any other tech. Based on a set of assumptions (vector arithmetic, Newton's three laws, various other definitions) this is how the world works. Tech is much much more subtle than you think. You seem to be parroting the professor too much
Reputable journals do not offer payment for peer review. Some journals offer incentives including short term subscriptions (1 to 3 months) to the journal you review.
But there are requirements to list books and prices! The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities to make public lists of books and other materials that will be required for each course by the time of students are expected to enroll in those courses. This was supposed to drive down the cost of textbooks because it will give students more time to find online prices. As a professor, I haven't noticed much of a change since this law took effect in July 2010, the prices in the bookstore are still outrageous.
As a physics professor, I must suggest that you test this with a hydrogen spectrum and a diffraction grating. You may remember that each element has its own "spectral fingerprint" of wavelengths of light that it emits when excited. Several of the spectral lines for hydrogen are in the visible spectrum, 656 nm (red), 486 nm (cyan), 434 nm (blue), 410 nm (indigo), 397 nm (UV). I've only ever seen the first three, my eyes aren't sensitive to the 410 nm light (plus it's fairly weak) . If you really have UV-sensitive eyes you should see the 410 nm easily and even the 397 nm light. Good luck!
As a college professor, I must disagree with both of your points.
I would love to use open textbooks and each summer I spend time looking them over, only to be disappointed in the quality of the text, the illustrations, the problem statements, the equations, the photographs, the grammar and the overall organization of the book. Writing an introductory physics text is hard. Most of the texts on the market have been around for twenty or more years and have been substantially revised by large groups of authors. If I could spend my "free-time" and write an intro physics book and publish it using copyleft, I would. I work hard to find textbooks that are inexpensive, I use Dover books or similar when I can if there is not something free. I tell my students about discount sites and that they are under no obligation to buy books from the bookstore. I try to keep the cost of books for each semester per class less than $80.
It's not just me, most of my colleagues would use free books if we could. Remember, college professors are all about freedom of thought and ideas. I can't imagine a professor that would want to lock down your ideas.
The only time I had a class where the professor wrote the textbook, he distributed it to us for free. The college as a whole sees very little money from the college bookstore. In most every case, college bookstores are no longer owned by the college, but run by a for-profit national business (usually Barnes and Nobles). The college gets rent and some money from marketing t-shirts and the like. The profit goes to the national bookstore and the publishers.
As a physicist that studies medical ultrasound, there actually ARE radio waves emitted by a ultrasound scanner. The scanners uses a high frequency electronic signal to excite the transducer that creates the pressure waves. When the electronic signal travels through the wires some of the electrical energy is converted to radio waves, just as in any antenna. In fact, I use this radio signal as a "trigger" for acquiring information about the scanner; using a small coil of wire near the transducer, you can pick up the radio wave quite easily.
I'm really impressed that the TSA knew this. Someone must have been thinking about ways to claim that terahertz radiation is safe for children.
kids can't be the best at operating click-through ads.
Actually by age three my son was clicking through the ads on nickjr.com and my three year old daughter is now doing the same. They both just "look for the arrow to skip this commercial"
So for kicks I flipped the channel to Fox News, here's two things I noticed 1) they consistently report that the raid happened a week ago and the "U.S. has been waiting for DNA evidence that it really is Usama bin Laden" 2) they consistently report that the raid took place "on the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan"
Hearing the President's speech, I find no evidence for either of these, how can a news organization get the time and place of death wrong when the President announced it less than a hour ago?
As a professor in physics at a liberal arts college, you mean "humanities" not liberal arts. Liberal arts ultimately refers to the seven subjects taught at colleges in the Middle Ages and includes literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. Liberal arts is the idea that students should be well-rounded and not prepared for any one vocation. It is the exact opposite of what you mean. Please stop using the wrong term.
As a medical physicists, I must point out that this comment is wrong. The sievert is the unit of "dose equivalence" used in medical and health physics. It is based on the gray which is defined as 1 joule absorbed per kilogram. The sievert and gray have nothing to do with time but with mass.
The human body can repair damage from radiation. In fact, it has to, think about the cosmic rays hitting your body each day. But it takes time to repair damaged DNA or organelles. If the damage happens too fast, the damage can become irreparable.
I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Cook's class. My class was not one of the ones that got to go to the library to see the launch on television. The class troublemaker, Michael, had gone to the library on a hall pass. He ran into the room, yelled, "the space shuttle just blew up" and the teacher calmly said, "Michael, you stop lying this instant or you will get a paddling." Five minutes later, the principal came on the school's PA system. My teacher just started crying.
As a physicist that works with radionuclides, I'm appalled at this article. It is horribly written. "The crystal vibrates in a certain way" made me laugh.
A better summary is provided by OSU public relations dept at http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2010/dec/new-technology-speed-cleanup-nuclear-contaminated-sites-reduce-costs-and-create-jo
Radiation detectors have been digital for a long long time. Some of the electronics has been analog because analog electronics are faster and always will be for filtering and integration.
Actually, as a researcher in the field, controlling cost is one of the motivations behind this method.
Do you have any idea how much open brain surgery costs? It's several days in the hospital, plus a team of surgeons, plus an operating room. All in all, from $50,000 to $200,000. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) doesn't need any of that. There are hopes this could almost be an outpatient type of procedure.
One my childhood friends suffered from epilepsy for many years until as a teenager, he had exploratory brain surgery (in 1988) where they removed a cubic centimeter of diseased tissue. He was in the hospital for a week.
Actually current CT's are designed to use a "cone beam" and measure radiation from as much area as possible at one time. This has allowed the time it takes for a CT scan to go from minutes per slice to tenths of seconds per slice. Unless you had hundreds (or thousands) of pencil beams, the current scanners would take much less time.
I love open content and use MIT OCW and other materials to prepare and teach my courses. But I don't think virtual labs will ever compete with real labs. In reality, your magnetic field measurements are complicated by the NMR coil upstairs and you have to explain why. In reality, data point number 7 does not fit the line. Even with random number generators, virtual labs disconnect measurements from reality and are not a valid substitute.
I've taught physics labs both ways and the students are happier with real labs and the learning outcomes are much better with real labs.
Unfortunately, at most universities, you'd be right, professors do not interact with students and there is no "real" communication. But there is already an alternative. Small colleges (less than 5000 students) with no TA's encourage communication and collaboration between undergraduate students and professors. I'm thrilled to be working at one. By far the best part of my day is office hours, working with individual students to better understand class or the textbook.
Within the past 5 years, I've used modern (less than 10 years old) scopes made by LeCroy, Agilent, and Tektronix. I've also purchased a few and have always purchased LeCroy scopes for a few reasons.
1. Ease of use: every new scope has big bright color LCD screens, not every scope has the buttons you need. I don't want to have to find my way through multiple levels of soft menus using only four buttons so that I can change the trigger source. LeCroy scopes have enough buttons to allow me to work without too many to clog the interface
2. Standard Features; LeCroy generally has at least some math features like FFT built-in, not as a add-on.
3. Ease of downloading data: For research today, you're going to download the data and do other processing with it. I've found it easier to interface with LeCroy scopes than Tektronix. However, this is one area I haven't evaluated Agilent scopes.
Of course, you should realize that most scopes are now Windows computers with a specialty ADC card. You can possibly save money without sacrificing features by going directly to a digitizer card from Gage or NI. Also, note that most scopes are 8-bit resolution analog-to-digital converters, if you need more resolutions, consider a digitizer card.
1. It's the smallest atom/molecule, since hydrogen is diatomic and H2 is a bit bigger than He. This makes it more difficult to store as it can get through any holes in a container
2. It escapes from the atmosphere. So, once it's out of the container it goes into outer space and is gone forever.
Actually, as a researcher in medical ultrasound, this is amazingly important stuff.
I was surprised that the article didn't mention diagnostic ultrasound. When you have an ultrasound performed, the scanner assumes any sound that it receives originates from a single scatterer and that that the location of that scatterer is based on the speed of sound in tissue (about 1540 m/s).
My lab has recently been performing some work on the extent of multiple scattering in tissue, and it's quite larger than what was previously thought. This contributes to the "noise" that you see on an ultrasound image. If work on multiple scattering (whether in beer or tissue) can help with this problem, ultrasound (a cheap, safe imaging modality) could be much more beneficial.
As a scientist funded by the U.S. National Instiutes of Health, the answer has already been chosen. The NIH requires that all data be made freely accessible to the public within one year of generating a published report of the data. And that all manuscripts be made freely available within 6 months of publication.
I completely agree that this is the way things should be. The people of this nation pay my research bills, it should be their data. However, if I innovate something, I am free to file a patent. In fact, the patent office already has a one-year rule between publicly discussing an idea and filing for a patent. Patents are made to protect intellectual property, research should be free and clear.
As a grad student studying the physics of ultrasound, I wish there were more details. It sounds like this company has announced some image processing technique that improves both navy sonar and medical ultrasound. Here's a little background about how ultrasound quality decreases with depth.
There are (at least) two issues when it comes to seeing through layers of fat: attenuation and beam spreading. Both of these are fundamental to the physics of ultrasound.
Attenuation refers to the decrease in amplitude in the ultrasound wave as it passes through a medium. The effect is exponential with depth, so that if at some point the amplitude is 10, at some later point it is 10 e^(-a d), where d is the distance between the two points and a is the attenuation coefficient (a property of the medium). This limits how far ultrasound can penetrate in tissue since the signal can quickly get to be about the same magnitude as electronic noise.
The other problem is beam spreading. You need a narrow "beam" of ultrasound to be able to know where an object is the field of view. The width of the beam is related to how well you know the size of the object. Just like with a flashlight, the further you are from the source, the wider the "beam". With a wider beam, you know the size of an object with less precision, hence you have less image resolution.
Both of these are problems that could be reduced with image processing. But the company's web site is down and there are few details in the article.
The only way I've ever seen to make electricity from fusion would be to have it replace fission/fossil fuels as the source of heat to make the steam. While it's not a direct way of getting electricity, it's fairly efficient. The best part about fusion is that the fuel is water and that most of its waste is in the form of helium, which if released in the atmosphere would just go out into outer space. The reactor itself gets a little radioactive, but not much and it has a short half-life.
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Really? Prove Newton's Second Law. Oh wait, you can't, because no proof exists, it makes sense and has seemed reasonable for 400 years, but there is no objectivity in physics or any other tech. Based on a set of assumptions (vector arithmetic, Newton's three laws, various other definitions) this is how the world works. Tech is much much more subtle than you think. You seem to be parroting the professor too much
Reputable journals do not offer payment for peer review. Some journals offer incentives including short term subscriptions (1 to 3 months) to the journal you review.
But there are requirements to list books and prices! The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities to make public lists of books and other materials that will be required for each course by the time of students are expected to enroll in those courses. This was supposed to drive down the cost of textbooks because it will give students more time to find online prices. As a professor, I haven't noticed much of a change since this law took effect in July 2010, the prices in the bookstore are still outrageous.
As a physics professor, I must suggest that you test this with a hydrogen spectrum and a diffraction grating. You may remember that each element has its own "spectral fingerprint" of wavelengths of light that it emits when excited. Several of the spectral lines for hydrogen are in the visible spectrum, 656 nm (red), 486 nm (cyan), 434 nm (blue), 410 nm (indigo), 397 nm (UV). I've only ever seen the first three, my eyes aren't sensitive to the 410 nm light (plus it's fairly weak) . If you really have UV-sensitive eyes you should see the 410 nm easily and even the 397 nm light. Good luck!
As a college professor, I must disagree with both of your points.
I would love to use open textbooks and each summer I spend time looking them over, only to be disappointed in the quality of the text, the illustrations, the problem statements, the equations, the photographs, the grammar and the overall organization of the book. Writing an introductory physics text is hard. Most of the texts on the market have been around for twenty or more years and have been substantially revised by large groups of authors. If I could spend my "free-time" and write an intro physics book and publish it using copyleft, I would. I work hard to find textbooks that are inexpensive, I use Dover books or similar when I can if there is not something free. I tell my students about discount sites and that they are under no obligation to buy books from the bookstore. I try to keep the cost of books for each semester per class less than $80.
It's not just me, most of my colleagues would use free books if we could. Remember, college professors are all about freedom of thought and ideas. I can't imagine a professor that would want to lock down your ideas.
The only time I had a class where the professor wrote the textbook, he distributed it to us for free. The college as a whole sees very little money from the college bookstore. In most every case, college bookstores are no longer owned by the college, but run by a for-profit national business (usually Barnes and Nobles). The college gets rent and some money from marketing t-shirts and the like. The profit goes to the national bookstore and the publishers.
As a physicist that studies medical ultrasound, there actually ARE radio waves emitted by a ultrasound scanner. The scanners uses a high frequency electronic signal to excite the transducer that creates the pressure waves. When the electronic signal travels through the wires some of the electrical energy is converted to radio waves, just as in any antenna. In fact, I use this radio signal as a "trigger" for acquiring information about the scanner; using a small coil of wire near the transducer, you can pick up the radio wave quite easily.
I'm really impressed that the TSA knew this. Someone must have been thinking about ways to claim that terahertz radiation is safe for children.
kids can't be the best at operating click-through ads.
Actually by age three my son was clicking through the ads on nickjr.com and my three year old daughter is now doing the same. They both just "look for the arrow to skip this commercial"
So for kicks I flipped the channel to Fox News, here's two things I noticed
1) they consistently report that the raid happened a week ago and the "U.S. has been waiting for DNA evidence that it really is Usama bin Laden"
2) they consistently report that the raid took place "on the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan"
Hearing the President's speech, I find no evidence for either of these, how can a news organization get the time and place of death wrong when the President announced it less than a hour ago?
You mean humanities not "liberal arts".
As a professor in physics at a liberal arts college, you mean "humanities" not liberal arts. Liberal arts ultimately refers to the seven subjects taught at colleges in the Middle Ages and includes literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. Liberal arts is the idea that students should be well-rounded and not prepared for any one vocation. It is the exact opposite of what you mean. Please stop using the wrong term.
http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/storage/Defining_Liberal_Education.pdf
As a medical physicists, I must point out that this comment is wrong. The sievert is the unit of "dose equivalence" used in medical and health physics. It is based on the gray which is defined as 1 joule absorbed per kilogram. The sievert and gray have nothing to do with time but with mass.
The human body can repair damage from radiation. In fact, it has to, think about the cosmic rays hitting your body each day. But it takes time to repair damaged DNA or organelles. If the damage happens too fast, the damage can become irreparable.
I was in fourth grade, Mrs. Cook's class. My class was not one of the ones that got to go to the library to see the launch on television. The class troublemaker, Michael, had gone to the library on a hall pass. He ran into the room, yelled, "the space shuttle just blew up" and the teacher calmly said, "Michael, you stop lying this instant or you will get a paddling." Five minutes later, the principal came on the school's PA system. My teacher just started crying.
As a physicist that works with radionuclides, I'm appalled at this article. It is horribly written. "The crystal vibrates in a certain way" made me laugh.
A better summary is provided by OSU public relations dept at
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2010/dec/new-technology-speed-cleanup-nuclear-contaminated-sites-reduce-costs-and-create-jo
Radiation detectors have been digital for a long long time. Some of the electronics has been analog because analog electronics are faster and always will be for filtering and integration.
Actually, as a researcher in the field, controlling cost is one of the motivations behind this method.
Do you have any idea how much open brain surgery costs? It's several days in the hospital, plus a team of surgeons, plus an operating room. All in all, from $50,000 to $200,000. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) doesn't need any of that. There are hopes this could almost be an outpatient type of procedure.
One my childhood friends suffered from epilepsy for many years until as a teenager, he had exploratory brain surgery (in 1988) where they removed a cubic centimeter of diseased tissue. He was in the hospital for a week.
Not every new idea in medicine costs more money.
Actually current CT's are designed to use a "cone beam" and measure radiation from as much area as possible at one time. This has allowed the time it takes for a CT scan to go from minutes per slice to tenths of seconds per slice. Unless you had hundreds (or thousands) of pencil beams, the current scanners would take much less time.
I love open content and use MIT OCW and other materials to prepare and teach my courses. But I don't think virtual labs will ever compete with real labs. In reality, your magnetic field measurements are complicated by the NMR coil upstairs and you have to explain why. In reality, data point number 7 does not fit the line. Even with random number generators, virtual labs disconnect measurements from reality and are not a valid substitute.
I've taught physics labs both ways and the students are happier with real labs and the learning outcomes are much better with real labs.
Unfortunately, at most universities, you'd be right, professors do not interact with students and there is no "real" communication. But there is already an alternative. Small colleges (less than 5000 students) with no TA's encourage communication and collaboration between undergraduate students and professors. I'm thrilled to be working at one. By far the best part of my day is office hours, working with individual students to better understand class or the textbook.
Within the past 5 years, I've used modern (less than 10 years old) scopes made by LeCroy, Agilent, and Tektronix. I've also purchased a few and have always purchased LeCroy scopes for a few reasons.
1. Ease of use: every new scope has big bright color LCD screens, not every scope has the buttons you need. I don't want to have to find my way through multiple levels of soft menus using only four buttons so that I can change the trigger source. LeCroy scopes have enough buttons to allow me to work without too many to clog the interface
2. Standard Features; LeCroy generally has at least some math features like FFT built-in, not as a add-on.
3. Ease of downloading data: For research today, you're going to download the data and do other processing with it. I've found it easier to interface with LeCroy scopes than Tektronix. However, this is one area I haven't evaluated Agilent scopes.
Of course, you should realize that most scopes are now Windows computers with a specialty ADC card. You can possibly save money without sacrificing features by going directly to a digitizer card from Gage or NI. Also, note that most scopes are 8-bit resolution analog-to-digital converters, if you need more resolutions, consider a digitizer card.
Two important points about helium
1. It's the smallest atom/molecule, since hydrogen is diatomic and H2 is a bit bigger than He. This makes it more difficult to store as it can get through any holes in a container
2. It escapes from the atmosphere. So, once it's out of the container it goes into outer space and is gone forever.
Actually, as a researcher in medical ultrasound, this is amazingly important stuff.
I was surprised that the article didn't mention diagnostic ultrasound. When you have an ultrasound performed, the scanner assumes any sound that it receives originates from a single scatterer and that that the location of that scatterer is based on the speed of sound in tissue (about 1540 m/s).
My lab has recently been performing some work on the extent of multiple scattering in tissue, and it's quite larger than what was previously thought. This contributes to the "noise" that you see on an ultrasound image. If work on multiple scattering (whether in beer or tissue) can help with this problem, ultrasound (a cheap, safe imaging modality) could be much more beneficial.
As a scientist funded by the U.S. National Instiutes of Health, the answer has already been chosen. The NIH requires that all data be made freely accessible to the public within one year of generating a published report of the data. And that all manuscripts be made freely available within 6 months of publication.
I completely agree that this is the way things should be. The people of this nation pay my research bills, it should be their data. However, if I innovate something, I am free to file a patent. In fact, the patent office already has a one-year rule between publicly discussing an idea and filing for a patent. Patents are made to protect intellectual property, research should be free and clear.
As a grad student studying the physics of ultrasound, I wish there were more details. It sounds like this company has announced some image processing technique that improves both navy sonar and medical ultrasound. Here's a little background about how ultrasound quality decreases with depth.
There are (at least) two issues when it comes to seeing through layers of fat: attenuation and beam spreading. Both of these are fundamental to the physics of ultrasound.
Attenuation refers to the decrease in amplitude in the ultrasound wave as it passes through a medium. The effect is exponential with depth, so that if at some point the amplitude is 10, at some later point it is 10 e^(-a d), where d is the distance between the two points and a is the attenuation coefficient (a property of the medium). This limits how far ultrasound can penetrate in tissue since the signal can quickly get to be about the same magnitude as electronic noise.
The other problem is beam spreading. You need a narrow "beam" of ultrasound to be able to know where an object is the field of view. The width of the beam is related to how well you know the size of the object. Just like with a flashlight, the further you are from the source, the wider the "beam". With a wider beam, you know the size of an object with less precision, hence you have less image resolution.
Both of these are problems that could be reduced with image processing. But the company's web site is down and there are few details in the article.
The only way I've ever seen to make electricity from fusion would be to have it replace fission/fossil fuels as the source of heat to make the steam. While it's not a direct way of getting electricity, it's fairly efficient. The best part about fusion is that the fuel is water and that most of its waste is in the form of helium, which if released in the atmosphere would just go out into outer space. The reactor itself gets a little radioactive, but not much and it has a short half-life.