Yes, but speaking as a professor, this is not a case of academic freedom and I get _really_ fed up with academic unions claiming "academic freedom" for everything regardless of whether or not it is. Violation of academic freedom would the a university telling me that I had to use material X for teaching or that I could not do research on Y.
This is a simple question about owning the intellectual property rights on material produced. Frankly the way I think this should be is that I own the copyright but the university has a permanent license to use any material I generate for education of its own students. Since academic careers are built on reputation it's my moral rights - to be associated as the author of the material - that I care more about. I put all my material under a CC NC-BY-SA license. If 100k people found it useful enough to study from it and learn some particle physics I'd consider myself to be doing really well at the education part of my job!
The JPARC beam is a quite a bit lower in energy than the ILC and the accuracy tolerance is far, far larger than the ILC will require for collisions. Also the beam line will be packed with accelerator cavities, not bending magnets, and taking out those cavities to add magnets to go around a kink will reduce the beam energy - and not just by the lack of cavities but also by the synchrotron. None of this is really important for a proton accelerator.
Japan is far from the ideal place to construct such a machine but, as usual, it is the politics of funding it that will drive where it is constructed.
The LHC was only ever proposed at CERN using the old LEP tunnel. The US had a proposal for the SSC which had a higher energy but lower luminosity (and so had effectively the same reach at the LHC). These were two entirely different machines. My understanding is that the SSC proposal sank because US politicians moved the location to Texas for political gain. Since Texas had none of the infrastructure that places like Fermilab had this essentially doubled the cost of the project and was partly the reason for it being cancelled...but I was still a grad student in Europe around that time so I had little direct knowledge of the politics.
However one of the fall outs from the cancellation is the reason why the ILC will not get built in the US. Too many physicists around the world got burnt by US political wrangling over which they had no input or control and their grant money quite literally ended up in the hole in the ground in Texas.
The only reason no one worries about this scenario (they used to, see Waterworld)
Sorry but in Waterworld there was no land except for the peak of Mount Everest. This represents a sea level rise of ~8km which is two orders of magnitude more than the effect of melting all the ice on the planet (~80m). This is not a scenario that anyone with even the loosest of ties to reality has ever considered a real possibility.
This case is precisely why you need moral rights. The contract can determine who owns the copyright and/or licenses but the idea of "moral rights" is that the person who wrote the thing is always allowed to remain associated with the work. They may not own the copyright but they are always allowed to associate themselves with the work as its author...or the right to remain anonymous if they so choose. In addition these rights prevent anyone "mutilating" or damaging the work in the way that damages the author's reputation. While you can waive these rights in a contract you cannot reassign them.
If the US had such rights this would be an easy case to resolve: you contact the original company and demand that they leave you listed in the authorship credits. They may have the copyright but you would still have a right to be associated with the code. While they could have you waive this right in their original contract it is unlikely they would want to - if your name is associated with code there is a strong motivation to made it good code!
Physicists do that occasionally. They need to do stuff like that since they haven't got the Theory of Everything yet.
No we don't. When there are two contradictory theories e.g. GR and QFT we say that it is unclear what happens in situations where both apply, scratch our heads and try to come up with some ideas that we can test experimentally. Nobody believes that both theories are correct - indeed a contradiction like that is proof that one or both theories are wrong - but that does not mean that the theories cannot make useful and valid predictions in circumstances where only one applies. Indeed it is much like newtonian mechanics: we still teach and use it because it is simple and easy to use while at the same time realizing that this is just an approximation of the more fundamental theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.
So what you are suggesting is that we make unscientific alarmist claims in order to scare people into believing in the actual, less alarmist science of global warming. Apart from the irony once people get interested in science they will learn that your original claims were unscientifically alarmist and the result will likely be far more scepticism about global warming science than before.
Unit 3 means it is the third reactor in the power plant.
I managed to guess that but what I really don't understand is why building a nuclear power station is really news worthy. We've had nuclear power for quite a while and, as far as I can tell, this isn't even a new type of reactor just a different design using established technology.
According to the article satellites currently are counted as munitions and they end up in orbit so, regardless of how US law deals with it, it must be possible to launch "munitions" into orbit. My guess is that the problem will occur when you try to land after achieving orbit: you will need to land back i the US. However, since Virgin Galactic just gets you to the boundary of space and back without achieving orbit, the only human orbital capability at the moment is russian.
They are also about to release a new one - EV3 - in a few months. Apparently this one will run Linux on the brick so I am finally looking forward to being able to program the thing in python....well technically my son is but I'm sure he will need some "help"!
The current trial cull is going to kill 2% of the national population
If that is correct then a cull is absolutely insane. There is little to no evidence to support the claims that it will reduce bovine TB and if the number of badgers are that low we should the leaving them alone or - if there is overpopulation in one area - trapping and transplanting them elsewhere (assuming that works for badgers).
An "endangered" species is one that is in danger of becoming extinct. If there is a healthy population of them living in the south then Badgers are not endangered. You don't get many moose in Yorkshire either (or at least you didn't when I was growing up there) - that does not make them an endangered species. Indeed badgers are not even on the UK list of endangered species.
Something is wrong somewhere because yesterday in the Guardian there was an article about a UK government badger cull which starts tomorrow to stop the spread of bovine TB due to the large population of badgers. So you can't disturb their setts by digging but it is fine to send out teams of hunters to shoot them?
It is information from the moment I write it down.
Actually it is information the moment the thought pops into your head. It is just not accessible to others until you write it down or say it. I am curious about the fuss with iris scans though. This is nothing more than a detailed photograph and in many ways a lot better than a photo because you can't scan someone's iris to identify them without them being aware of it unlike facial recognition. Also, unlike finger prints, you do not leave iris prints everywhere you go so it cannot be used to track where you have been or what you have done. Frankly iris scans are even better privacy-wise than a photo-ID card.
People don't care about privacy, not until it's the "creepy" guy staring at them instead of the average guy.
Given your description nobody was aware that they were being recorded. They may have thought that your glasses were strange but it is usually not considered polite to question someone on their choice of glasses just like you would not tend to question someone choice of clothes. That being said I would not care about being recorded walking or driving down a street in public. However take those glasses into the gents or a changing room and I'll not be happy: context is the key. The big difference between Google glasses and a camera phone is that there is no way for anyone to know whether you are recording or not. This is the problem GG: you can easily surreptitiously record.
So clearly fluid ounces is always in US Imperial units.
You forget Burma. Also many items are still labelled in old units as well as metric which is particularly confusing for Canadians using the old units because US items use US units while Canadian items use Imperial units. Fortunately I use the metric units so I don't care but for those using the old units you need to know where the thing was made to know what "1 gallon" actually means.
Au contraire it has everything to do with mass because it is defined as a mass.
You are thinking of that bastard unit the pound-mass
Indeed I am: the avoirdupois pound IS the pound-mass. If you as (I assume) an avid imperialist are confused by your own units don't expect to be able to convince anyone that your unit system is a good idea!
And don't forget the metric system's own bastard unit: the kilogram-force. Which, I might add, is far more commonly used than pound-mass, unless all of the metric world's cheap bathroom scales are really sophisticated mass-balances in disguise.
A mass-balance measures mass via its weight just like a bathroom scale. If you know the gravitational field strength then there is no problem whatsoever in measuring a mass using its weight. Indeed you need an inertial balance to measure mass without gravity. As such the "kilogram-force" is almost never used unlike pounds which are used both for mass and force e.g. pressure has units of pounds per square foot/inch/furlong/... but I have never seen kg/m^2 used for pressure you use newtons per square metre (N/m^2).
Unless you're an international traveler or are importing some substance measured by volume, why the heck would you care how they measure in the UK?
We live in a world of global trade and information exchange. If you look up fuel consumption figures online UK cars will appear far more fuel efficient that US cars because the gallon in "mpg" is significantly larger. Nobody lives in isolation from the rest of the planet anymore even if you never leave the US you are likely to use non-US products and look at non-US webpages for information.
There are STRONG arguments why science and engineering people...benefit from metric... However, 99% of Americans don't need to do these things in everyday life, so why should they care?
Any American should care. How much time is wasted in the US converting between metric and imperial units? How much do conversion mistakes cost both tax payers and companies (who will pass those costs on to the consumer)? Having two different unit systems costs time and money and can lead to some very expensive mistakes - remember that multi-million dollar NASA probe?
Switching to metric will certainly be a pain and irritating for those used to the imperial system. However if you start teaching your kids the metric system and start using both when selling things it will make the switchover relatively painless. It will also save money and remove a trade obstacle between the US and the rest of the world - which is not something you want to have given the rapidly eroding dominance of US trade.
You can measure mass using its weight if you know the gravitational field strength. There is nothing wrong with that: it is a perfectly valid way to measure the mass. If we ever get off this planet, you can measure the mass of something on earth using its weight and sell it as "x kg" on e.g. the moon. Of course the weight will be different due to the different gravitational field but the mass is invariant (even under relativity!).
Centigrade is stupid for non-scientific measurements, Fahrenheit is, on the other hand totally awesome.
So you are arguing that having two systems for measuring temperature is better than one simply because you are familiar with one for weather and not the other? Really? It's not that hard to familiarize yourself with celsius and then everyone can use one scale for everything. That being said both scales are completely arbitrary and there is really nothing to choose between them - you could easily imagine reworking kelvin to use fahrenheit spacing instead of celsius. However there is a strong argument to be said for having one, and only one scale and it is clear that far fewer people would have to change (only Liberia, Burma, USA) if fahrenheit were dumped.
That was when I was a young, naive internet user and did not realize that Slashdot wanted a nickname and not a real name. I would love to be able to change the damn thing but Slashdot does not offer anyway to change a username:-(
It would a frivolous waste of money we dont have to fix something thats not broken.
Ah but it is broken. For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit which is then further compounded by the fact that there are 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint and only 16 in a US pint. As such it is a completely broken unit system you not only have to memorize an insane number of relationships between units you even have to remember whose imperial-based unit scheme you are using.
However, what makes it s truly broken unit system is that it uses the unit pound for both mass and weight. Yes there have been "hacks" of the system to bring them inline with physical reality so you have the "avoirdupois pound" meaning a mass and the "pound" meaning force. However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass? If you need to tweak your unit system to make it consistent with physics that's not really a good sign is it?
If that's still not enough to convince you that there is a problem then consider that there are only three countries in the world still using the old imperial-based system: Liberia, Burma and the USA. There are not many things that practically the entire planet agree upon but apparent metric units is one of them and it is not without good reason!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but speaking as a professor, this is not a case of academic freedom and I get _really_ fed up with academic unions claiming "academic freedom" for everything regardless of whether or not it is. Violation of academic freedom would the a university telling me that I had to use material X for teaching or that I could not do research on Y.
This is a simple question about owning the intellectual property rights on material produced. Frankly the way I think this should be is that I own the copyright but the university has a permanent license to use any material I generate for education of its own students. Since academic careers are built on reputation it's my moral rights - to be associated as the author of the material - that I care more about. I put all my material under a CC NC-BY-SA license. If 100k people found it useful enough to study from it and learn some particle physics I'd consider myself to be doing really well at the education part of my job!
The JPARC beam is a quite a bit lower in energy than the ILC and the accuracy tolerance is far, far larger than the ILC will require for collisions. Also the beam line will be packed with accelerator cavities, not bending magnets, and taking out those cavities to add magnets to go around a kink will reduce the beam energy - and not just by the lack of cavities but also by the synchrotron. None of this is really important for a proton accelerator.
Japan is far from the ideal place to construct such a machine but, as usual, it is the politics of funding it that will drive where it is constructed.
The LHC was only ever proposed at CERN using the old LEP tunnel. The US had a proposal for the SSC which had a higher energy but lower luminosity (and so had effectively the same reach at the LHC). These were two entirely different machines. My understanding is that the SSC proposal sank because US politicians moved the location to Texas for political gain. Since Texas had none of the infrastructure that places like Fermilab had this essentially doubled the cost of the project and was partly the reason for it being cancelled...but I was still a grad student in Europe around that time so I had little direct knowledge of the politics.
However one of the fall outs from the cancellation is the reason why the ILC will not get built in the US. Too many physicists around the world got burnt by US political wrangling over which they had no input or control and their grant money quite literally ended up in the hole in the ground in Texas.
The only reason no one worries about this scenario (they used to, see Waterworld)
Sorry but in Waterworld there was no land except for the peak of Mount Everest. This represents a sea level rise of ~8km which is two orders of magnitude more than the effect of melting all the ice on the planet (~80m). This is not a scenario that anyone with even the loosest of ties to reality has ever considered a real possibility.
Really depends on your contract.
This case is precisely why you need moral rights. The contract can determine who owns the copyright and/or licenses but the idea of "moral rights" is that the person who wrote the thing is always allowed to remain associated with the work. They may not own the copyright but they are always allowed to associate themselves with the work as its author...or the right to remain anonymous if they so choose. In addition these rights prevent anyone "mutilating" or damaging the work in the way that damages the author's reputation. While you can waive these rights in a contract you cannot reassign them.
If the US had such rights this would be an easy case to resolve: you contact the original company and demand that they leave you listed in the authorship credits. They may have the copyright but you would still have a right to be associated with the code. While they could have you waive this right in their original contract it is unlikely they would want to - if your name is associated with code there is a strong motivation to made it good code!
Physicists do that occasionally. They need to do stuff like that since they haven't got the Theory of Everything yet.
No we don't. When there are two contradictory theories e.g. GR and QFT we say that it is unclear what happens in situations where both apply, scratch our heads and try to come up with some ideas that we can test experimentally. Nobody believes that both theories are correct - indeed a contradiction like that is proof that one or both theories are wrong - but that does not mean that the theories cannot make useful and valid predictions in circumstances where only one applies. Indeed it is much like newtonian mechanics: we still teach and use it because it is simple and easy to use while at the same time realizing that this is just an approximation of the more fundamental theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.
You will understand why it is news worthy once figure out how long it has been since the last bit of "New" nuclear power was built.
1995 - not that long ago, at least in the UK.
That depends on the tourist.
So what you are suggesting is that we make unscientific alarmist claims in order to scare people into believing in the actual, less alarmist science of global warming. Apart from the irony once people get interested in science they will learn that your original claims were unscientifically alarmist and the result will likely be far more scepticism about global warming science than before.
Unit 3 means it is the third reactor in the power plant.
I managed to guess that but what I really don't understand is why building a nuclear power station is really news worthy. We've had nuclear power for quite a while and, as far as I can tell, this isn't even a new type of reactor just a different design using established technology.
According to the article satellites currently are counted as munitions and they end up in orbit so, regardless of how US law deals with it, it must be possible to launch "munitions" into orbit. My guess is that the problem will occur when you try to land after achieving orbit: you will need to land back i the US. However, since Virgin Galactic just gets you to the boundary of space and back without achieving orbit, the only human orbital capability at the moment is russian.
They are also about to release a new one - EV3 - in a few months. Apparently this one will run Linux on the brick so I am finally looking forward to being able to program the thing in python....well technically my son is but I'm sure he will need some "help"!
The current trial cull is going to kill 2% of the national population
If that is correct then a cull is absolutely insane. There is little to no evidence to support the claims that it will reduce bovine TB and if the number of badgers are that low we should the leaving them alone or - if there is overpopulation in one area - trapping and transplanting them elsewhere (assuming that works for badgers).
An "endangered" species is one that is in danger of becoming extinct. If there is a healthy population of them living in the south then Badgers are not endangered. You don't get many moose in Yorkshire either (or at least you didn't when I was growing up there) - that does not make them an endangered species. Indeed badgers are not even on the UK list of endangered species.
I would have definitely picked a different minor; perhaps in physics...
Something is wrong somewhere because yesterday in the Guardian there was an article about a UK government badger cull which starts tomorrow to stop the spread of bovine TB due to the large population of badgers. So you can't disturb their setts by digging but it is fine to send out teams of hunters to shoot them?
It is information from the moment I write it down.
Actually it is information the moment the thought pops into your head. It is just not accessible to others until you write it down or say it. I am curious about the fuss with iris scans though. This is nothing more than a detailed photograph and in many ways a lot better than a photo because you can't scan someone's iris to identify them without them being aware of it unlike facial recognition. Also, unlike finger prints, you do not leave iris prints everywhere you go so it cannot be used to track where you have been or what you have done. Frankly iris scans are even better privacy-wise than a photo-ID card.
People don't care about privacy, not until it's the "creepy" guy staring at them instead of the average guy.
Given your description nobody was aware that they were being recorded. They may have thought that your glasses were strange but it is usually not considered polite to question someone on their choice of glasses just like you would not tend to question someone choice of clothes. That being said I would not care about being recorded walking or driving down a street in public. However take those glasses into the gents or a changing room and I'll not be happy: context is the key. The big difference between Google glasses and a camera phone is that there is no way for anyone to know whether you are recording or not. This is the problem GG: you can easily surreptitiously record.
So clearly fluid ounces is always in US Imperial units.
You forget Burma. Also many items are still labelled in old units as well as metric which is particularly confusing for Canadians using the old units because US items use US units while Canadian items use Imperial units. Fortunately I use the metric units so I don't care but for those using the old units you need to know where the thing was made to know what "1 gallon" actually means.
'Avoirdupois' has nothing to do with mass...
Au contraire it has everything to do with mass because it is defined as a mass.
You are thinking of that bastard unit the pound-mass
Indeed I am: the avoirdupois pound IS the pound-mass. If you as (I assume) an avid imperialist are confused by your own units don't expect to be able to convince anyone that your unit system is a good idea!
And don't forget the metric system's own bastard unit: the kilogram-force. Which, I might add, is far more commonly used than pound-mass, unless all of the metric world's cheap bathroom scales are really sophisticated mass-balances in disguise.
A mass-balance measures mass via its weight just like a bathroom scale. If you know the gravitational field strength then there is no problem whatsoever in measuring a mass using its weight. Indeed you need an inertial balance to measure mass without gravity. As such the "kilogram-force" is almost never used unlike pounds which are used both for mass and force e.g. pressure has units of pounds per square foot/inch/furlong/... but I have never seen kg/m^2 used for pressure you use newtons per square metre (N/m^2).
Unless you're an international traveler or are importing some substance measured by volume, why the heck would you care how they measure in the UK?
We live in a world of global trade and information exchange. If you look up fuel consumption figures online UK cars will appear far more fuel efficient that US cars because the gallon in "mpg" is significantly larger. Nobody lives in isolation from the rest of the planet anymore even if you never leave the US you are likely to use non-US products and look at non-US webpages for information.
There are STRONG arguments why science and engineering people...benefit from metric... However, 99% of Americans don't need to do these things in everyday life, so why should they care?
Any American should care. How much time is wasted in the US converting between metric and imperial units? How much do conversion mistakes cost both tax payers and companies (who will pass those costs on to the consumer)? Having two different unit systems costs time and money and can lead to some very expensive mistakes - remember that multi-million dollar NASA probe?
Switching to metric will certainly be a pain and irritating for those used to the imperial system. However if you start teaching your kids the metric system and start using both when selling things it will make the switchover relatively painless. It will also save money and remove a trade obstacle between the US and the rest of the world - which is not something you want to have given the rapidly eroding dominance of US trade.
Centigrade is stupid for non-scientific measurements, Fahrenheit is, on the other hand totally awesome.
So you are arguing that having two systems for measuring temperature is better than one simply because you are familiar with one for weather and not the other? Really? It's not that hard to familiarize yourself with celsius and then everyone can use one scale for everything. That being said both scales are completely arbitrary and there is really nothing to choose between them - you could easily imagine reworking kelvin to use fahrenheit spacing instead of celsius. However there is a strong argument to be said for having one, and only one scale and it is clear that far fewer people would have to change (only Liberia, Burma, USA) if fahrenheit were dumped.
That was when I was a young, naive internet user and did not realize that Slashdot wanted a nickname and not a real name. I would love to be able to change the damn thing but Slashdot does not offer anyway to change a username :-(
Yet you also failed to put a probe in Mars orbit due to problems with units. Good thing it was that way around!
It would a frivolous waste of money we dont have to fix something thats not broken.
Ah but it is broken. For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit which is then further compounded by the fact that there are 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint and only 16 in a US pint. As such it is a completely broken unit system you not only have to memorize an insane number of relationships between units you even have to remember whose imperial-based unit scheme you are using.
However, what makes it s truly broken unit system is that it uses the unit pound for both mass and weight. Yes there have been "hacks" of the system to bring them inline with physical reality so you have the "avoirdupois pound" meaning a mass and the "pound" meaning force. However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass? If you need to tweak your unit system to make it consistent with physics that's not really a good sign is it?
If that's still not enough to convince you that there is a problem then consider that there are only three countries in the world still using the old imperial-based system: Liberia, Burma and the USA. There are not many things that practically the entire planet agree upon but apparent metric units is one of them and it is not without good reason!