As someone who is on the editorial board for 3 journals, reviews about 3-4 papers a week, and is not a faculty member (I'm a contract researcher) with over 50 peer reviewed publications to his name, let me tell you about some costs you're missing in your assumptions. 1) You're correct that the peer review process is provided free by scientists like myself, and it is our duty to provide this review. However, I'll spend 1-3 hours on a paper reviewing for content. What I'm not doing is copyediting. You're assuming that the papers submitted are in good shape when they arrive, and I would say out of the hundreds of papers I've reviewed over the years, only rarely have I found one polished and ready to go. Almost all of them have formatting errors, typos, and grammatical errors. The worst ones sometimes are those where the author is not a native English speaker. They could have absolutely fantastic results, but the spelling and grammar is so bad you can't exactly figure out if they've discovered something novel or if their results are totally bogus. You need to pay for someone (or multiple someones) to clean up, copyedit, and format each paper. 2) Electronic review system. I'm not seeing how your model pays for this. Someone has to pay to host, maintain, and power those servers - they don't set up themselves. That is a cost that can be divided per paper submitted to the journal - but then onto #3. 3) Many of the open-access journals make the author pay to submit the article upon acceptance to the journal, thus paying for items #1 and #2, but with budgets being cut you're asking the author to sacrifice even more of his small budget (which in my case pays some of my salary). So who pays in the end is always going to be a sticking point. 4) Not all peer review is fast. You're assuming all scientists are ideal and get right on the paper as soon as they get it. I've had papers that came back in a week, and others that took 9 months (reviewer #3 sat on it and the editor couldn't get them to follow up after they had accepted the invitation to review). So you need to pay for some infrastructure to either pull the paper back from the offending reviewer, or pay for automatic reminders and follow-up.
I personally like the existing system as is - it works well for me and I can usually rest assured that the content which does finally get published is polished and ready to use. But I'll agree that the journal costs are not sustainable. What I'd rather see is that after 5-10 years, any federally funded research automatically becomes public domain. That way the journal publishers make their funds to sustain the quality of the journals (and I'm talking print quality here only) and the system continues to run smoothly, plus the public domain gets to build off of the results that we as taxpayers paid for.
I actually am a composites engineer - we work with the materials made out of fiberglass and epoxy all the time, and more exotic materials as well like aerospace grade carbon fiber and high temperature resins. These materials can be safely cut if you have the right tools, which I'll go through and then suggest what you may be able to do as a "do-it-yourself" option. 1) For any fiber reinforced polymer, to cut through it you will have to have a high speed saw (which you have) but it will kick up two types of particles - tiny pieces of broken epoxy (micron sized dust) and tiny fiberglass strands, which many others have listed here as problematic for your health. A HEPA grade half-face respirator (one that fully seals around the mouth and nose) will address the inhalation, and goggles will address anything else kicked up by the cutting, but, these are secondary protection to the main protection, which is a wet saw. You have to cut these things while they are covered with a steady thin flow of water. The water effectively washes away the particles as you cut through them. Or at least it captures about 90% of the particles as we found during a NIOSH study done in our labs. This is why we wear the filters and gloves and goggles to catch the rest. If you don't have a wet saw you may be able to engineer one, crudely, as I'll describe below. 2) Other secondary protective gear you should have would include something to cover your arms and chest depending upon how much dust you kick up. Just because you haven't inhaled it doesn't mean you haven't landed the particles on your skin somewhere. You can buy disposable Tyvek fabric "suits" which will protect you from any dust the wet saw misses. They're a bit hot to work in for a long time, but they do the job and after you sweat/stink them up - out they go in the trash. 3) With circuit boards, you also have the fun of dealing with the components, some of which cut through fine, and others you should never cut through (capacitors for example). I would recommend removing all components from your cut line before you start cutting through it. It may mess up the ascetics of what you're making, but you'll be much better off if they are removed and you put them back later via super glue or some other adhesive. 4) So let's address the make-shift wet saw. Obviously you can't immerse your saw in water (unless you want to electrocute yourself) so either you have to isolate the power supply to the motor (fully insulated and waterproof), or engineer a small hose to direct water onto the cut line while you very slowly cut into the board. You want the water flow to be enough to keep the surface fully wet while cutting, but not a river. If you're creating a water-fountain when you cut, the flow is too much. You also want a platform to lay the board upon so you can make your straight cuts - you're feeding the water-covered cut line into the blade, not running the blade into the board. So the platform should be metal or something else water-proof, but if metal, make sure it's something that doesn't rust or you can remove to clean and dry.
I will admit that the make-shift wet saw can work, but, you'd probably be better off investing in a proper wet saw for your work from a ease of use and safety perspective. You can probably even get one at a machine shop or factory auction when a company goes out of business.
You're quite right, many chemicals aren't that flammable, and then there are many which are. Most photographic chemicals are water based so no issue there. It's all the organic chemistry solvents and chemicals it sounds like this chemist was using if he was trying to come up with replacements to bisphenols. So we don't know what he really had there since we're not the investigator. But - there are still better ways of practicing science in the home that wouldn't have got him in trouble.
Depends on what caught fire. If it was the wiring that shorted, then yes, I agree with you. If it was a fire in the AC vent, then I'm probably right. Note I say probably. I'm basing my conclusion on arson analysis reports I've seen. The levels of heat required to ignite metals are above and beyond what a failed AC unit can generate, so that's why I think it came from the chemicals.
Fair enough, but he didn't have all his chemicals properly stored - which was obvious when he invited the fire fighters in to solve the AC fire. Had he put all the chemicals in proper storage cabinets, fume hoods, etc., I doubt his house would have been raided after the Firemen saw what was in the house. But you're right that the code enforcement officer was abrasive on what someone can and can't do in their home. If you really want a home lab though - do it out in the country where you can be left alone according to code.
Define large quantities of petrol. 20L, 50L, 1000L? The size of the fuel load determines the risk. A propane tank or a couple gallon tanks in a home isn't that big a fire risk. The levels of chemicals in this guy's house - much higher.
Compressor fires are a funny thing. In the US where we still have a bunch of chlorofluorocarbons grandfathered in, when the compressor fails and the gas escapes, the gas will usually put out the fire since its a flame retardant. In the EU though, to comply with Kyoto protocol, they switched to an even better refrigerant, butane/pentane mixes, which are highly flammable, so when they fail the gas that escapes can get ignited by the fan motor. I've personally never had a AC compressor go out, and I've got a 25 year old AC unit. I've seen the arson reports thought that point to organic vapors condensing in the AC system and the fire getting started there though, hence my reason for suggesting that's how the fire started.
It's one of those things about risk. Some risks you can live with, others not. Fuel tanks, if they're maintained, at least have flame arrestors on them, but yes - you make a good point. As much chemicals as were described in the article, that's a fuel load larger than a 200 gallon fuel tank.
Still - as a chemist I'm not happy how he was treated, but there are better ways to practice the profession without conforming. This is why you buy a house in the country so you can do whatever you want when you completely own the land. In a residential area - not a good idea.
It's not the bricks or all the concrete, it's the shingles, wooden window frames, and other stuff that burns through. Make everything in your house completely of concrete and then you have no fire risk, otherwise all carbon can burn with enough fuel around (i.e. - organic chemicals). Plus, a large hydrocarbon fire will actually cause the water in concrete to explode, leading to structural failure of the wall and allowing fire to come in.
Not all zoning is dumb. In this case, with as large as chemical fuel load he had in the home, if his house went up it would likely take out the other houses nearby. Zoning helps ensure that when you work on work that is potentially flammable/explosive you minimize the risk to nearby objects. I AM a fire safety researcher, and I know just how flammable most chemicals can be, especially since it looks like he was doing organic chemistry, which is what I have my doctorate in. I assure you his house (and no one's is) is rated to address the fire risk that would have eventually happened. The fact that he had a fire in his AC tells me that all the fumes from his operation were starting to condense in there and then got activated by a spark in the fan motor. Since I'm a chemist I'm not happy with how he got treated, but still, he should have known better. While I greatly admire the older chemists for their ability to just tinker, research and work non-stop in the lab, there's a reason why the death rate among chemists has dropped, and its because we don't work like this guy does.
Guess I can't play Metroid any more or I'll be a degenerate. Guess I had better not accept Princess Peach as a randomly generated character in Mario Kart either. Better not accept any randomly generated Wii characters either. What a load of crap. It's fantasy - a game for goodness sake. My guess is really some loser who runs the service just wants to look at pictures of the people playing women characters.
Maybe this ruling will force people to think about what they say before they go ahead and say it? It may slow down the ability to answer the fly (which makes one look slow) and those occasional curse words that slip out and show what we really may be feeling, but by getting those on the air to think about what they are saying, especially on political talk shows, might not be a bad thing.
But this is a potential good result. Likely instead it will just have people clam up instead of coming up with new more creative ways of saying the epithet without actually using the actual curse word.
What field of science you want to enter determines what level of math prowess you must have. If you're going to be a physicist, then you need to be strong in math. Chemist or biochemist - that depends upon what type of chemistry you're going to do. Simple algebra could be enough if you're thinking about organic chemistry or molecular biology.
I'm an organic chemist who practices material science and fire safety engineering - and I haven't had to use calculus since I took it for grade in undergrad. Algebra is about as difficult as I encounter in my field, and to some extent (and I know this will cause howls of disbelief and screams of being a lame scientist), there are many programs that do the complex math for you. It is more important to understand the concepts and design good experiments in many of the physical sciences than to be actually good at the underlying math in the equation behind measurements in that experiment. The exception to this is if you're actually measuring the measurements or determining new ways of measuring physical phenomena...but now you're moving back into the realm of physics which does require good math skills.
I would look at what you want to do and then figure out if you've got the math chops to do it before worrying about this too much.
I am a publishing scientist, and have published data funded by public dollars (US government) in scientific journals, and so I have a ethical opinion to share, as well as a practical one which slightly contradicts the ethical one.
Ethical opinion: Absolutely - data created with public money should be free and available to the public that paid for it. So in the case of a US government grant (say from National Science Foundation or even Office of Naval Research) US citizens should be allowed to access the data for free, they paid for it didn't they? But if a non-US citizen, who has not paid taxes to fund the research wants to access the paper for free - this shouldn't be as easy, but ideally as one scientist to another, it should be given provided the other scientist shares something freely in return.
Practical opinion: The reason why access isn't free is that ultimately someone has to pay for creating the article, getting it cleaned up, reviewed, and into a publishable format for others to read. To quote my favorite SciFi author (Heinlein), There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It costs money for the journals to clean up the formatting on a paper and put it into a publishable format, even to convert it to.html for online access. Maintaining those servers, running a peer-review process in a timely manner (which includes the editor running herd over many potential reviewers, all of which are of varying quality and speed), and handling problems all takes time and money to accomplish. While I do think some journals charge way too much for subscriptions of journals that are so-so in quality, ultimately I appreciate the hard work and cost that goes into doing this work. What most people don't realize is that peer-review is on a whole a free process; scientists donate their time to review other scientist's work to make sure its correct and not bogus. I review at least 2 papers a month, and since I can't find time to get it done at work, I take these home and work on them in the evening, even cleaning up grammar from non-US authors. Sometimes one paper can take 4 hours to review properly. So nothing is truly free, and therefore, someone has to pay for it, even if the original data was paid for by a taxpayer somewhere.
So there is the other practical solution in place already, but its slow, and that is requesting reprints and/or interlibrary loan. Right now one can access the titles and abstracts for just about every major scientific journal for free, just not the paper. So if you really want a copy and can't afford it, you can send an email to the author and ask them for a "reprint" of the paper. If the author feels generous and has enough print copies left over, you'll get one in the mail. If not, maybe a.pdf. At worst you'll get ignored but then if you work for a university you can get access to the paper through interlibrary loan...and maybe even through a good public library if you are willing to work with the librarian. In both cases you don't have to pay to get a copy of the paper, but it can take a very long time to receive your free copy either way.
Ideally it would be nice to make the data and results free to all, but in practice someone has to pay. Either more tax dollars go to support all the publishing services to make the data free, or we stick with the existing system and if you really want the data, you have to put forth the effort to go and get it. Not a perfect system, but it works better than a lot of people think it does.
I'm not surprised by this - I'm seeing it more often with supposedly fire safe parts with the "UL" tag on them. Since so many electronic parts/appliances now have such very tight profit margins, the following happens:
Primary original equipment manufacturer (OEM) subcontracts out to a cheaper source to make some profit on the part. Secondary part supplier, also hit with tight margins, subcontracts to local supplier/small business to make the part. Tertiary part manufacturer, also hit with tight margins but glad to have the business uses off-spec parts, or in the case of flame retardant rated plastics, dilutes the specified plastic with non-flame retarded plastic to get the parts made on time, and cheaply.
There has been an increase in the parts that have UL tags "failing" random pulled fire tests that UL makes by going into stores and randomly pulling consumer goods off the shelves. So I'm not surprised that this is happening in other areas as well when all sorts of quality control go out the window since the OEM can't directly supervise the secondary and tertiary suppliers, and they won't know the part is off-spec until they get the failed test. Once the tertiary vendor has made the part once, they usually have all the molds and other expensive equipment to start making knock-offs, especially in areas with poor law enforcement.
I read the article as well - and the "compensation" wasn't clear of course. Some of the people in the room, especially if they were US government researchers, are prevented by law of accepting any type of compensation, and so their ideas would be "free", if they were foolish enough to give them, and I'm betting that they were snookered into it.
I agree that typically when you file a patent you do have to give prior art that you're improving upon, but the word "typically" comes into play here. This assumes that the patent reviewer actually understands the prior art and actually goes to look up that information and other information, which I can assure you DOES NOT happen regularly. To be fair, there is so much information out there that without better data mining tools, its almost impossible for a patent examiner to find all the prior art, let alone interpret the legalese (patentish dialect) found within those documents in a consistent manner all the time. Finally, and this is the key part, you don't necessarily have to provide proof that your invention will work - you may provide some documentation (an example case) but it may not support the claims at all. For example, I work in the polymer additives area, and I often come across patents stating that addtive X (composed of elements A and B) is an improvement over the existing art when used in a weight % range of y to z. They give 1 example in the patent (for example, lets say element A is aluminum (Al) and b is oxygen (O)) where this works, but in the claims they state that the composition can consist of element A being a member of the periodic table from group I to VII, and element B a member of the periodic table from periods 1 to 7. Basically they can patent the entire periodic table for this composition, whether they have any proof or not. This patent was granted, as was many others just like it, and its because the patent examiners don't catch this sort of crap.
Finally, I worked at a chemical company where the intellectual property was handled in the exact way you describe - I hand it over as part of my daily job in return for my wages. I'm not saying that such a practice is wrong - but - this practice does make it much easier to milk people for ideas and not always return said wealth back to the original true inventor.
I read the article and I can tell you right now that this guy has the patent system figured out exactly, and, he just got several more patents for free.
The patent system in its current form gives the patent holder the right to prevent others from using the patent - not protect your invention. It's a subtle legal argument that makes the patent system the broken form it is today. By preventing others from using your invention, you have the ability to make others either pay you to use your idea legally, or, give you the right to practice something that the other patent holder is preventing you from doing.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be.
What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference". Notice how all of it was getting recorded? This will be his "proof" of when the idea was come up with, giving whoever owns this the right to the patent. Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference.
This person knows exactly what he's doing and is playing the patent game perfectly. At this rate, he will win, or his antics will slow down the ability for new ideas to actually be produced, and heaven forbid, laws may have to be written to stop this type of behavior. I doubt the latter will come to pass.
I wonder how much the upswing in sales is due to serious gamers spending their tax refunds on more games? While taxes weren't due until mid-April, those who got their taxes done early in Febuary would be getting their refunds in early April, and, those who went to H&R block got their refunds instantly.
Actually, RoHS does allow for some flame retardants deemed safe under those use guidelines. While not knowing exactly what Philips uses for its plastic, since I am a fire safety researcher, I'm betting that they used a polycarbonate + RoHS allowed flame retardant system, or something similar. Not all flame retardants are banned under RoHS. Many are eliminated under a related code (waste electronic and electical enclosures or WEEE) but not all are banned.
Why Nintendo Isn't Just for Kids
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35% Of Parents Game
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I fully agree with the article comment about knitting families together. While we certainly do play board games together, there is a lot of fun brought by multi-player kid-friendly games for the whole family. The simplistic fun of Mario Kart, and even the entire Mario Party Series, has been a great hit in my household. My 9-year old can hold his own very well, and my 6-year old has even won games...without us going easy on the younger child. We all have fun and look forward to doing it again. I have not seen the type of game where the whole family can play together, in simple good fun where as a parent you won't feel bad if the kid sees what is on screen, except on Nintendo. People can make fun of Mario and gang all they want - but they are kid friendly, and damn fun to play with even as an adult. That being said - I like FPS games as much as the next serious gamer. I'm still playing Doom3 quite abit, but I wait until the kids go to bed. I can get my gaming fix during the day, if necessary, by challenging my kids and wife to a race on Mario Kart. Especially now that my kids and wife are really good at it, it's a decent challenge.
Absolutely right! If the phone companies start saying that this is a common support infrastructure that the public or other companies use without paying for - then it's in the public interest to have it regulated so that its stable and available for all to use.
This entire process could backfire on BellSouth and they could find that their network is very regulated and they can only charge a specific limited amount per customer that uses the network - they'll become a utility company rather than a telecommunications company - and the rest of the industry will be affected as well.
Maybe the technological breakthroughs will occur in the predicted timelines, but if you tack on all the regulatory issues, one should really add an additional 25 years to the timelines. The great deal of uncertainty on how these nanoscale devices really affect health, as well as regulatory approval of such devices means just as much research to determine that nanobiotech is really ready for safe use. And let's face it - nanobiotech is basically a new term for molecular biology, and we continue to learn a great deal every day in that field, especially how hard it is to get things to work right at that level if we come up with it.
That being said - some countries may see this tech before others. I'm betting Singapore comes up with this type of technology first. If the regs are such that its more open to widespread use in that country or others, then maybe the timelines will only be 10-15 years off.
I knew I had just seen this! One would think you could come up with some simple search engine in code for slashdot to look for duplicate articles prior to submission by the editor. Hey I know! Have a Google search of the topic before the editors submit it. Somehow this seems appropriate given the subject of the dupe article.
Culture/Civilization Choices
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Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
Mr. Meier,
How did you choose which cultures and civilizations made it into your games? Certainly historical impact plays a role, but one can argue with lots of historical data that you left several out. I've always enjoyed playing all of them at least once, but I have wondered why you picked the Aztecs and not the Cherokee or why the French and not the Dutch (both of whom had sizable world empires). In expansion packs certainly you've added extras, and again, why the choices there? Smaller never-defeated empires such as Thailand or Ethiopia would be interesting to play. I'm not complaining, I'm just curious what led you to pick one over the other. Certainly you can't put all of them in so what allows a culture/civilization to make the cut or be relagated to the expansion pack of future Civilization mods?
Thank you for your time, and for many years of great games. I've been playing since the first Civ, and some of your non-Civ games (Colonization, Pirates!, Alpha Centauri) are among my favorites.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who is on the editorial board for 3 journals, reviews about 3-4 papers a week, and is not a faculty member (I'm a contract researcher) with over 50 peer reviewed publications to his name, let me tell you about some costs you're missing in your assumptions.
1) You're correct that the peer review process is provided free by scientists like myself, and it is our duty to provide this review. However, I'll spend 1-3 hours on a paper reviewing for content. What I'm not doing is copyediting. You're assuming that the papers submitted are in good shape when they arrive, and I would say out of the hundreds of papers I've reviewed over the years, only rarely have I found one polished and ready to go. Almost all of them have formatting errors, typos, and grammatical errors. The worst ones sometimes are those where the author is not a native English speaker. They could have absolutely fantastic results, but the spelling and grammar is so bad you can't exactly figure out if they've discovered something novel or if their results are totally bogus. You need to pay for someone (or multiple someones) to clean up, copyedit, and format each paper.
2) Electronic review system. I'm not seeing how your model pays for this. Someone has to pay to host, maintain, and power those servers - they don't set up themselves. That is a cost that can be divided per paper submitted to the journal - but then onto #3.
3) Many of the open-access journals make the author pay to submit the article upon acceptance to the journal, thus paying for items #1 and #2, but with budgets being cut you're asking the author to sacrifice even more of his small budget (which in my case pays some of my salary). So who pays in the end is always going to be a sticking point.
4) Not all peer review is fast. You're assuming all scientists are ideal and get right on the paper as soon as they get it. I've had papers that came back in a week, and others that took 9 months (reviewer #3 sat on it and the editor couldn't get them to follow up after they had accepted the invitation to review). So you need to pay for some infrastructure to either pull the paper back from the offending reviewer, or pay for automatic reminders and follow-up.
I personally like the existing system as is - it works well for me and I can usually rest assured that the content which does finally get published is polished and ready to use. But I'll agree that the journal costs are not sustainable. What I'd rather see is that after 5-10 years, any federally funded research automatically becomes public domain. That way the journal publishers make their funds to sustain the quality of the journals (and I'm talking print quality here only) and the system continues to run smoothly, plus the public domain gets to build off of the results that we as taxpayers paid for.
I actually am a composites engineer - we work with the materials made out of fiberglass and epoxy all the time, and more exotic materials as well like aerospace grade carbon fiber and high temperature resins. These materials can be safely cut if you have the right tools, which I'll go through and then suggest what you may be able to do as a "do-it-yourself" option.
1) For any fiber reinforced polymer, to cut through it you will have to have a high speed saw (which you have) but it will kick up two types of particles - tiny pieces of broken epoxy (micron sized dust) and tiny fiberglass strands, which many others have listed here as problematic for your health. A HEPA grade half-face respirator (one that fully seals around the mouth and nose) will address the inhalation, and goggles will address anything else kicked up by the cutting, but, these are secondary protection to the main protection, which is a wet saw. You have to cut these things while they are covered with a steady thin flow of water. The water effectively washes away the particles as you cut through them. Or at least it captures about 90% of the particles as we found during a NIOSH study done in our labs. This is why we wear the filters and gloves and goggles to catch the rest. If you don't have a wet saw you may be able to engineer one, crudely, as I'll describe below.
2) Other secondary protective gear you should have would include something to cover your arms and chest depending upon how much dust you kick up. Just because you haven't inhaled it doesn't mean you haven't landed the particles on your skin somewhere. You can buy disposable Tyvek fabric "suits" which will protect you from any dust the wet saw misses. They're a bit hot to work in for a long time, but they do the job and after you sweat/stink them up - out they go in the trash.
3) With circuit boards, you also have the fun of dealing with the components, some of which cut through fine, and others you should never cut through (capacitors for example). I would recommend removing all components from your cut line before you start cutting through it. It may mess up the ascetics of what you're making, but you'll be much better off if they are removed and you put them back later via super glue or some other adhesive.
4) So let's address the make-shift wet saw. Obviously you can't immerse your saw in water (unless you want to electrocute yourself) so either you have to isolate the power supply to the motor (fully insulated and waterproof), or engineer a small hose to direct water onto the cut line while you very slowly cut into the board. You want the water flow to be enough to keep the surface fully wet while cutting, but not a river. If you're creating a water-fountain when you cut, the flow is too much. You also want a platform to lay the board upon so you can make your straight cuts - you're feeding the water-covered cut line into the blade, not running the blade into the board. So the platform should be metal or something else water-proof, but if metal, make sure it's something that doesn't rust or you can remove to clean and dry.
I will admit that the make-shift wet saw can work, but, you'd probably be better off investing in a proper wet saw for your work from a ease of use and safety perspective. You can probably even get one at a machine shop or factory auction when a company goes out of business.
Best of luck.
You would think in a UK competition there would be at least one of those remote control Daleks running around hollering "EXTERMINATE!!!"
You're quite right, many chemicals aren't that flammable, and then there are many which are. Most photographic chemicals are water based so no issue there. It's all the organic chemistry solvents and chemicals it sounds like this chemist was using if he was trying to come up with replacements to bisphenols.
So we don't know what he really had there since we're not the investigator. But - there are still better ways of practicing science in the home that wouldn't have got him in trouble.
Depends on what caught fire. If it was the wiring that shorted, then yes, I agree with you. If it was a fire in the AC vent, then I'm probably right. Note I say probably. I'm basing my conclusion on arson analysis reports I've seen. The levels of heat required to ignite metals are above and beyond what a failed AC unit can generate, so that's why I think it came from the chemicals.
Fair enough, but he didn't have all his chemicals properly stored - which was obvious when he invited the fire fighters in to solve the AC fire. Had he put all the chemicals in proper storage cabinets, fume hoods, etc., I doubt his house would have been raided after the Firemen saw what was in the house. But you're right that the code enforcement officer was abrasive on what someone can and can't do in their home.
If you really want a home lab though - do it out in the country where you can be left alone according to code.
Define large quantities of petrol. 20L, 50L, 1000L? The size of the fuel load determines the risk. A propane tank or a couple gallon tanks in a home isn't that big a fire risk. The levels of chemicals in this guy's house - much higher.
Compressor fires are a funny thing. In the US where we still have a bunch of chlorofluorocarbons grandfathered in, when the compressor fails and the gas escapes, the gas will usually put out the fire since its a flame retardant. In the EU though, to comply with Kyoto protocol, they switched to an even better refrigerant, butane/pentane mixes, which are highly flammable, so when they fail the gas that escapes can get ignited by the fan motor. I've personally never had a AC compressor go out, and I've got a 25 year old AC unit. I've seen the arson reports thought that point to organic vapors condensing in the AC system and the fire getting started there though, hence my reason for suggesting that's how the fire started.
It's one of those things about risk. Some risks you can live with, others not. Fuel tanks, if they're maintained, at least have flame arrestors on them, but yes - you make a good point. As much chemicals as were described in the article, that's a fuel load larger than a 200 gallon fuel tank.
Still - as a chemist I'm not happy how he was treated, but there are better ways to practice the profession without conforming. This is why you buy a house in the country so you can do whatever you want when you completely own the land. In a residential area - not a good idea.
It's not the bricks or all the concrete, it's the shingles, wooden window frames, and other stuff that burns through.
Make everything in your house completely of concrete and then you have no fire risk, otherwise all carbon can burn with enough fuel around (i.e. - organic chemicals). Plus, a large hydrocarbon fire will actually cause the water in concrete to explode, leading to structural failure of the wall and allowing fire to come in.
Not all zoning is dumb. In this case, with as large as chemical fuel load he had in the home, if his house went up it would likely take out the other houses nearby. Zoning helps ensure that when you work on work that is potentially flammable/explosive you minimize the risk to nearby objects.
I AM a fire safety researcher, and I know just how flammable most chemicals can be, especially since it looks like he was doing organic chemistry, which is what I have my doctorate in. I assure you his house (and no one's is) is rated to address the fire risk that would have eventually happened. The fact that he had a fire in his AC tells me that all the fumes from his operation were starting to condense in there and then got activated by a spark in the fan motor.
Since I'm a chemist I'm not happy with how he got treated, but still, he should have known better. While I greatly admire the older chemists for their ability to just tinker, research and work non-stop in the lab, there's a reason why the death rate among chemists has dropped, and its because we don't work like this guy does.
Guess I can't play Metroid any more or I'll be a degenerate. Guess I had better not accept Princess Peach as a randomly generated character in Mario Kart either. Better not accept any randomly generated Wii characters either.
What a load of crap. It's fantasy - a game for goodness sake. My guess is really some loser who runs the service just wants to look at pictures of the people playing women characters.
Maybe this ruling will force people to think about what they say before they go ahead and say it? It may slow down the ability to answer the fly (which makes one look slow) and those occasional curse words that slip out and show what we really may be feeling, but by getting those on the air to think about what they are saying, especially on political talk shows, might not be a bad thing.
But this is a potential good result. Likely instead it will just have people clam up instead of coming up with new more creative ways of saying the epithet without actually using the actual curse word.
What field of science you want to enter determines what level of math prowess you must have. If you're going to be a physicist, then you need to be strong in math. Chemist or biochemist - that depends upon what type of chemistry you're going to do. Simple algebra could be enough if you're thinking about organic chemistry or molecular biology.
I'm an organic chemist who practices material science and fire safety engineering - and I haven't had to use calculus since I took it for grade in undergrad. Algebra is about as difficult as I encounter in my field, and to some extent (and I know this will cause howls of disbelief and screams of being a lame scientist), there are many programs that do the complex math for you. It is more important to understand the concepts and design good experiments in many of the physical sciences than to be actually good at the underlying math in the equation behind measurements in that experiment. The exception to this is if you're actually measuring the measurements or determining new ways of measuring physical phenomena...but now you're moving back into the realm of physics which does require good math skills.
I would look at what you want to do and then figure out if you've got the math chops to do it before worrying about this too much.
I am a publishing scientist, and have published data funded by public dollars (US government) in scientific journals, and so I have a ethical opinion to share, as well as a practical one which slightly contradicts the ethical one.
.html for online access. Maintaining those servers, running a peer-review process in a timely manner (which includes the editor running herd over many potential reviewers, all of which are of varying quality and speed), and handling problems all takes time and money to accomplish. While I do think some journals charge way too much for subscriptions of journals that are so-so in quality, ultimately I appreciate the hard work and cost that goes into doing this work. What most people don't realize is that peer-review is on a whole a free process; scientists donate their time to review other scientist's work to make sure its correct and not bogus. I review at least 2 papers a month, and since I can't find time to get it done at work, I take these home and work on them in the evening, even cleaning up grammar from non-US authors. Sometimes one paper can take 4 hours to review properly. So nothing is truly free, and therefore, someone has to pay for it, even if the original data was paid for by a taxpayer somewhere.
.pdf. At worst you'll get ignored but then if you work for a university you can get access to the paper through interlibrary loan...and maybe even through a good public library if you are willing to work with the librarian. In both cases you don't have to pay to get a copy of the paper, but it can take a very long time to receive your free copy either way.
Ethical opinion: Absolutely - data created with public money should be free and available to the public that paid for it. So in the case of a US government grant (say from National Science Foundation or even Office of Naval Research) US citizens should be allowed to access the data for free, they paid for it didn't they? But if a non-US citizen, who has not paid taxes to fund the research wants to access the paper for free - this shouldn't be as easy, but ideally as one scientist to another, it should be given provided the other scientist shares something freely in return.
Practical opinion: The reason why access isn't free is that ultimately someone has to pay for creating the article, getting it cleaned up, reviewed, and into a publishable format for others to read. To quote my favorite SciFi author (Heinlein), There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It costs money for the journals to clean up the formatting on a paper and put it into a publishable format, even to convert it to
So there is the other practical solution in place already, but its slow, and that is requesting reprints and/or interlibrary loan. Right now one can access the titles and abstracts for just about every major scientific journal for free, just not the paper. So if you really want a copy and can't afford it, you can send an email to the author and ask them for a "reprint" of the paper. If the author feels generous and has enough print copies left over, you'll get one in the mail. If not, maybe a
Ideally it would be nice to make the data and results free to all, but in practice someone has to pay. Either more tax dollars go to support all the publishing services to make the data free, or we stick with the existing system and if you really want the data, you have to put forth the effort to go and get it. Not a perfect system, but it works better than a lot of people think it does.
I'm not surprised by this - I'm seeing it more often with supposedly fire safe parts with the "UL" tag on them. Since so many electronic parts/appliances now have such very tight profit margins, the following happens:
Primary original equipment manufacturer (OEM) subcontracts out to a cheaper source to make some profit on the part.
Secondary part supplier, also hit with tight margins, subcontracts to local supplier/small business to make the part.
Tertiary part manufacturer, also hit with tight margins but glad to have the business uses off-spec parts, or in the case of flame retardant rated plastics, dilutes the specified plastic with non-flame retarded plastic to get the parts made on time, and cheaply.
There has been an increase in the parts that have UL tags "failing" random pulled fire tests that UL makes by going into stores and randomly pulling consumer goods off the shelves. So I'm not surprised that this is happening in other areas as well when all sorts of quality control go out the window since the OEM can't directly supervise the secondary and tertiary suppliers, and they won't know the part is off-spec until they get the failed test. Once the tertiary vendor has made the part once, they usually have all the molds and other expensive equipment to start making knock-offs, especially in areas with poor law enforcement.
I read the article as well - and the "compensation" wasn't clear of course. Some of the people in the room, especially if they were US government researchers, are prevented by law of accepting any type of compensation, and so their ideas would be "free", if they were foolish enough to give them, and I'm betting that they were snookered into it.
I agree that typically when you file a patent you do have to give prior art that you're improving upon, but the word "typically" comes into play here. This assumes that the patent reviewer actually understands the prior art and actually goes to look up that information and other information, which I can assure you DOES NOT happen regularly. To be fair, there is so much information out there that without better data mining tools, its almost impossible for a patent examiner to find all the prior art, let alone interpret the legalese (patentish dialect) found within those documents in a consistent manner all the time. Finally, and this is the key part, you don't necessarily have to provide proof that your invention will work - you may provide some documentation (an example case) but it may not support the claims at all. For example, I work in the polymer additives area, and I often come across patents stating that addtive X (composed of elements A and B) is an improvement over the existing art when used in a weight % range of y to z. They give 1 example in the patent (for example, lets say element A is aluminum (Al) and b is oxygen (O)) where this works, but in the claims they state that the composition can consist of element A being a member of the periodic table from group I to VII, and element B a member of the periodic table from periods 1 to 7. Basically they can patent the entire periodic table for this composition, whether they have any proof or not. This patent was granted, as was many others just like it, and its because the patent examiners don't catch this sort of crap.
Finally, I worked at a chemical company where the intellectual property was handled in the exact way you describe - I hand it over as part of my daily job in return for my wages. I'm not saying that such a practice is wrong - but - this practice does make it much easier to milk people for ideas and not always return said wealth back to the original true inventor.
I read the article and I can tell you right now that this guy has the patent system figured out exactly, and, he just got several more patents for free.
The patent system in its current form gives the patent holder the right to prevent others from using the patent - not protect your invention. It's a subtle legal argument that makes the patent system the broken form it is today. By preventing others from using your invention, you have the ability to make others either pay you to use your idea legally, or, give you the right to practice something that the other patent holder is preventing you from doing.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be.
What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference". Notice how all of it was getting recorded? This will be his "proof" of when the idea was come up with, giving whoever owns this the right to the patent. Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference.
This person knows exactly what he's doing and is playing the patent game perfectly. At this rate, he will win, or his antics will slow down the ability for new ideas to actually be produced, and heaven forbid, laws may have to be written to stop this type of behavior. I doubt the latter will come to pass.
I wonder how much the upswing in sales is due to serious gamers spending their tax refunds on more games? While taxes weren't due until mid-April, those who got their taxes done early in Febuary would be getting their refunds in early April, and, those who went to H&R block got their refunds instantly.
Actually, RoHS does allow for some flame retardants deemed safe under those use guidelines. While not knowing exactly what Philips uses for its plastic, since I am a fire safety researcher, I'm betting that they used a polycarbonate + RoHS allowed flame retardant system, or something similar.
Not all flame retardants are banned under RoHS. Many are eliminated under a related code (waste electronic and electical enclosures or WEEE) but not all are banned.
I fully agree with the article comment about knitting families together. While we certainly do play board games together, there is a lot of fun brought by multi-player kid-friendly games for the whole family.
The simplistic fun of Mario Kart, and even the entire Mario Party Series, has been a great hit in my household. My 9-year old can hold his own very well, and my 6-year old has even won games...without us going easy on the younger child. We all have fun and look forward to doing it again.
I have not seen the type of game where the whole family can play together, in simple good fun where as a parent you won't feel bad if the kid sees what is on screen, except on Nintendo. People can make fun of Mario and gang all they want - but they are kid friendly, and damn fun to play with even as an adult.
That being said - I like FPS games as much as the next serious gamer. I'm still playing Doom3 quite abit, but I wait until the kids go to bed. I can get my gaming fix during the day, if necessary, by challenging my kids and wife to a race on Mario Kart. Especially now that my kids and wife are really good at it, it's a decent challenge.
Absolutely right! If the phone companies start saying that this is a common support infrastructure that the public or other companies use without paying for - then it's in the public interest to have it regulated so that its stable and available for all to use.
This entire process could backfire on BellSouth and they could find that their network is very regulated and they can only charge a specific limited amount per customer that uses the network - they'll become a utility company rather than a telecommunications company - and the rest of the industry will be affected as well.
Maybe the technological breakthroughs will occur in the predicted timelines, but if you tack on all the regulatory issues, one should really add an additional 25 years to the timelines. The great deal of uncertainty on how these nanoscale devices really affect health, as well as regulatory approval of such devices means just as much research to determine that nanobiotech is really ready for safe use. And let's face it - nanobiotech is basically a new term for molecular biology, and we continue to learn a great deal every day in that field, especially how hard it is to get things to work right at that level if we come up with it.
That being said - some countries may see this tech before others. I'm betting Singapore comes up with this type of technology first. If the regs are such that its more open to widespread use in that country or others, then maybe the timelines will only be 10-15 years off.
I knew I had just seen this!
One would think you could come up with some simple search engine in code for slashdot to look for duplicate articles prior to submission by the editor.
Hey I know! Have a Google search of the topic before the editors submit it.
Somehow this seems appropriate given the subject of the dupe article.
Mr. Meier,
How did you choose which cultures and civilizations made it into your games? Certainly historical impact plays a role, but one can argue with lots of historical data that you left several out. I've always enjoyed playing all of them at least once, but I have wondered why you picked the Aztecs and not the Cherokee or why the French and not the Dutch (both of whom had sizable world empires). In expansion packs certainly you've added extras, and again, why the choices there? Smaller never-defeated empires such as Thailand or Ethiopia would be interesting to play.
I'm not complaining, I'm just curious what led you to pick one over the other. Certainly you can't put all of them in so what allows a culture/civilization to make the cut or be relagated to the expansion pack of future Civilization mods?
Thank you for your time, and for many years of great games. I've been playing since the first Civ, and some of your non-Civ games (Colonization, Pirates!, Alpha Centauri) are among my favorites.
I'm not even going to flush! Come and see the wrath of the Monarch!
Thanks for the laugh - that last quote still makes me howl.