Geiger counters are used to detect radiation (usually gamma and beta radiation, but some models can also detect alpha radiation).
Since they detect the ionization of gas in the chamber they are all extremely good at detecting alpha radiation, which is the most highly ionizing form of nuclear radiation. The only issue is that it is so highly ionizing the tube will need a thin window to let the particles in. They are also generally poor at detecting gamma radiation since that is less ionizing that beta.
Their claim is that the beta/gamma ratio (which it detects) is useful. Are you saying it is not?
If all it does is detect the ratio then it is close to useless. Suppose there are three elements A (gamma only), B (beta only) and C (gamma+beta). If all I can do is detect the ratio of betas to gammas then it is impossible to distinguish between material that is 100% C vs. material which is 50% A and 50% B.
Fortunately nature provides a solution and if you measure the energy spectra of gamma rays it will very quickly tell you which elements are present. So, as described in the article, the device seems useless for its intended purpose. However the article is very badly written so I'd reserve judgement until proper information is available.
The other big problem is that gammas are quantized, beta particles are not.
Actually both are quanta of their respective fields and, as free particles, neither have quantized energies. However gammas tend to have discrete energies, whereas betas do not due to the neutrino emission.
Collided protons at over 99.999999% the speed of light to recreate the conditions about 100 femto-seconds after the Big Bang to see if they produce Dark Matter particles which make up about 23% of the Universe. Still that's my job so I still think it is really amazing that an amateur can make such valuable contributions to science...and of course being a Yorkshireman myself its always nice to see another do well!
However I am somewhat surprised that astronomers have not devised automatic algorithms to scan the data and look for signals like this. That's what we do with all our peta-bytes of particle physics data.
Rather than trying to invent a whole load of new effects with psychological explanations I wonder whether anyone has actually looked at things using basic statistics. The only seems to occur when the author has observed a noticeable effect. A noticeable effect is far more likely to be spotted when a statistical fluctuation makes it bigger, rather than smaller. When you then repeat a measurement you will then notice a smaller effect.
The article with the ESP experiment is a dead ringer for this. A student suddenly gets far more correct than they should on average so everyone takes notice and then, over time, the number of correct guesses drops to normal. Would anyone have noticed an exceptionally unlucky streak where a student got more than normal wrong and then suddenly got "better" by approaching normal?
This simple statistical effect has been well known in particle physics for years. Discoveries are typically made on upward fluctuations of data and then you will typically see them decrease with subsequent measurements. However the change is usually within reasonable uncertainty of the previous measurement and is not there for all measurements (although less likely you can still discover something on a downward fluctuation). So how about testing the simplest, statistical hypothesis first before inventing new psychological explanations...unless you think that fundamental particles are somehow subject to the positive, upbeat nature of particle physicists!
I don't think that peak travel is currently driven by the price of oil but rather by the means of alternatives to travel. Only in recent years has video conferencing and mobile communications become ubiquitous. While a face-to-face meeting is still far better this has to be offset against the cost in money and time of travel to and from the meeting plus the currently less than pleasant experience of flying.
Even as little as 10 years ago video conferencing was still relatively novel and not particularly trivial and so travel to meetings was required. Now that communication has become a lot simpler there is an alternative to travel in many cases so is it surprising that the amount of travel has levelled off? As communication technology improves, and airport security moves towards requiring a full body cavity search, I would imagine that it will continue to reduce the volume of travel required.
...to the opinions of trolls in making this judgement.
Are you really claiming that if this paper had been written by a faculty member at a university it would have been accepted in the same condition? Really? This is not trolling - I am trying to make a serious point. The only reason that this paper was published is because of the author. This is just as wrong as publishing a low quality paper from a well-known author simply because of who they are.
They are legally adults, but we tend to treat students as somewhere between adult and child because they are not yet self-supporting.
Aren't they? I would certainly have agreed with you in my day because I was supported by the government and my parents. With the government slashing 80% off the teaching budget (if you believe the Guardian) for higher ed clearly the funding will come almost entirely from the students themselves. Over the summer many get jobs and live with their parents but we don't deny someone unemployment benefit if they lived with their parents over a summer would we?
...but if anything they're likely to make it easier for poorer students to get to university.
Yes I have read the proposals and frankly they are appalling. They do not make it easier for poor students to get to university they make it easier for students from a poor background to get to university. They are not means tested on student wealth but on that of their parents. Students have no legal right to that wealth, unlike children under 18 when parents are legally required to send them to school and provide a certain level of care.
The linking of the fees to increased bursaries for "poor" students effectively means that some fraction of student fees will be redirected to support other students - that is simply insane. Students should not be forced to acquire larger debts to subsidize other students simply because they have parents who earn more. This is a class system in reverse and is just as wrong.
What we should be doing is supporting students by ability: regardless of whether their parents sleep under a bridge or in a stately home. Instead of saddling students with massive debts and travel restrictions (which forcing them to repay the entire loan before leaving the UK effectively amounts to) why not limit the number of university places to what we can afford the tuition for? That system seemed to work exceptionally well in the past, certainly a lot better than the unjust mess they are about to unleash. I voted LibDem partly because of their stance on education, now I'm hoping it will be another 90+ years before they get a chance to mess it up again.
First, tuition fees are not actually a fixed amount - they are scaled back depending on parental income.
This is not an improvement. The obvious question is why should your tuition fee have anything to do with your parent's income once you are legally an adult. No other government benefit is like this (anyone for unemployment benefit taking into account your parent's income?). The clear reason being that as an adult your parents no longer owe you a duty of care and while I am sure most will, suppose for some reason your rich parents oppose you going to university and refuse to pay. Why should you end up with a larger bill than someone with poor parents who also gets no money?
If you claim there is still a duty of care then why should you get help because your parents are divorced? Why shouldn't society expect your father to pay his share too? Afterall society expects child support payments from the parent you are not living with so why not tuition fee payments as well?
The student loans take interest at the rate of inflation and are repayable based on your income.
...and what happens if you leave the UK? I currently live in Canada and the British government has no clue what my income is. Also if you had a £36,000+ student debt I bet it would start to affect your chance of a mortgage. The fees are going up by a factor of 3, not just by a few percent.
The result is that the system the government now seems to be wanting to use is incredibly poorly thought out, damaging and undermines the existing system of higher tax rates for higher earners. Why not put an extra percent of the higher rates of income tax? I'd happily pay an extra 1% of my income if it meant maintaining a open and fair university system.
If not, then why would you want it to be open source?
If I was going to be spending a reasonable amount of time inputting data that I want to access for an extended period of time I would want it to be an open source program. That way you can always get the data out of the program again (possibly with some effort) and you are not stuck with regular upgrade fees for the latest version with the bug fix neeed to make it work with the latest OS version.
Yea because the amount you pay back for your tuition fee loan is based on your parents income.
Yes it is. Those with rich parents will not NEED a tuition fee loan because their parents will pay their tuition for them. Those of use whose parents could not have afforded to do that will get stuck with the bill.
In fact with the new 9k fees it is cheaper to go to places like Canada for a degree - even paying the increased foreign student rate and even with the suppressed value of the pound. Of course there are the cost of flights but the lower cost of living and accommodation probably recoups most of that....and if the pound ever regains some of its lost value on the international exchanges it will become quite a bit cheaper.
Of course you could argue that people should pay for the education they get but in the past that was always counted as part of the higher tax rates that those with greater incomes paid. This also evened out some of the inequities in that teachers get lower salaries than doctors and yet both are just as essential. By charging the same for everyone you will end up with more lawyers, doctors and business-types and fewer teachers, scientists and engineers because the former have higher salaries and can easily afford to pay back the loans. This sort of change is not good for society.
Apologies for the typographical error and I am sorry that this meant you were completely unable to understand what I was trying to say. I had originally written "based on a student's income" but that of course would have been wrong too and in the process of rearranging it I left in the apostrophe. I had clearly better watch it otherwise soon I might be mis-spelling words like colour, centre and tyre as well.
It depends on the cost. I was lucky enough to get a place at Cambridge University in the days when there were no tuition fees for university in the UK so going there cost no more than any other university (you just had to pay or accommodation, food and books....and the odd beer or two!;-). I got a fantastic education which has been exceptionally useful in getting a career in academia. So I'd say it was definitely worth it.
Of course nowadays students at Cambridge will be looking at £9,000/year tuition fees with lower fees of £3-6,000/year elsewhere thanks to the UK government's appalling mismanagement of education. With fees like that I would have had to think long and hard before going. Partly because of the cost but also partly because selecting student's based on parental income rather than academic ability will mean lowering the education standards and a worsening of the student experience as the fraction of those of us who went through the state school system is reduced.
On a side note... do you honestly think the rest of the world is out to get you?
Not really...but then I'm not American.;-) I just thought it interesting that a nation known for it extremely strong nationalistic tendencies had managed to come up with a system which invited foreign meddling in its own research priorities. An area where it is completely reasonable to restrict participation to citizens only.
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
The PTO only really searches though the patent database for prior art.
Isn't there some requirement that the patent be non-obvious as well? Highlighting the matches in the search of a document seems not only obvious but in fact about they only way there is of doing a search. It would be a pretty useless search if all it did was say "yes, this 400 page PDF matches your search criteria" and then let you hunt down where.
If you look at the latest data from Fermilab then, unless they can radically improve their analysis technique and barring an LHC disaster, they are unlikely to get enough data to see the Higgs before the LHC. Their current data agrees well with background with well over half their dataset analyzed. Typically if you start to see signs of a signal this first appears as an excess of background events because you are seeing some signal but not enough to say that it is different from the background. Of course a better analysis technique could change all that so it is not ruled out but, given the data already analyzed, the odds are against them.
it would actually be quite exciting if it isn't found as it means a whole different paradigm for mass is at work
That's correct but if it is not found by the end of 2012 that does not mean that the Higgs is ruled out. The 2012 run is to see the Higgs if it is at the low end of its allowed mass range which is where all the data so far suggest it is. However to rule it out we need to run the machine at its full energy and for longer to cover a Higgs with a mass of up to ~1TeV/c2 which is the maximum possible value. After this the Standard Model sans Higgs predicts probabilities of certain processes occurring in at over 100% (the unitarity bound is exceeded) which is obviously nonsense and so we have to see something (Higgs or otherwise) by then.
Good job on finding one of the Easter Eggs, but there are still two left!
So what? For the vast majority of the world not living in the US we apparently can't win anything. In terms of a marketing campaign it is a really great way to alienate the majority of your customers.
You simple make something very common illegal and then you don't enforce the law.
Apart from the fact that this tactic does not seem to have worked historically in Canada the problem is that this is civil law not criminal. Hence "enforcement" is up to someone with enough money to afford lawyers. I imagine it will stand until the content on a website that the government itself links to is found objectionable. Assuming the website owner does not have deep pockets it will be the government itself getting sued and then watch how fast the law gets changed.
The only questions are: will the supreme court be smart enough to see this (it could affect them too if they link to external websites...assuming that you can actually sue a court?) and, if they aren't, whether the government is smart enough to see the consequences and fix them immediately without waiting to get sued.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the ideal tool...to carry through post apocalyptic waste lands.
Because it is vitally important to know whether you are suffering radiation sickness from beta vs. gamma radiation?
Geiger counters are used to detect radiation (usually gamma and beta radiation, but some models can also detect alpha radiation).
Since they detect the ionization of gas in the chamber they are all extremely good at detecting alpha radiation, which is the most highly ionizing form of nuclear radiation. The only issue is that it is so highly ionizing the tube will need a thin window to let the particles in. They are also generally poor at detecting gamma radiation since that is less ionizing that beta.
Their claim is that the beta/gamma ratio (which it detects) is useful. Are you saying it is not?
If all it does is detect the ratio then it is close to useless. Suppose there are three elements A (gamma only), B (beta only) and C (gamma+beta). If all I can do is detect the ratio of betas to gammas then it is impossible to distinguish between material that is 100% C vs. material which is 50% A and 50% B.
Fortunately nature provides a solution and if you measure the energy spectra of gamma rays it will very quickly tell you which elements are present. So, as described in the article, the device seems useless for its intended purpose. However the article is very badly written so I'd reserve judgement until proper information is available.
The other big problem is that gammas are quantized, beta particles are not.
Actually both are quanta of their respective fields and, as free particles, neither have quantized energies. However gammas tend to have discrete energies, whereas betas do not due to the neutrino emission.
What have you done lately that was as cool?
Collided protons at over 99.999999% the speed of light to recreate the conditions about 100 femto-seconds after the Big Bang to see if they produce Dark Matter particles which make up about 23% of the Universe. Still that's my job so I still think it is really amazing that an amateur can make such valuable contributions to science...and of course being a Yorkshireman myself its always nice to see another do well!
However I am somewhat surprised that astronomers have not devised automatic algorithms to scan the data and look for signals like this. That's what we do with all our peta-bytes of particle physics data.
Actually if you want to see a planet you should really be looking down, not up.
Rather than trying to invent a whole load of new effects with psychological explanations I wonder whether anyone has actually looked at things using basic statistics. The only seems to occur when the author has observed a noticeable effect. A noticeable effect is far more likely to be spotted when a statistical fluctuation makes it bigger, rather than smaller. When you then repeat a measurement you will then notice a smaller effect.
The article with the ESP experiment is a dead ringer for this. A student suddenly gets far more correct than they should on average so everyone takes notice and then, over time, the number of correct guesses drops to normal. Would anyone have noticed an exceptionally unlucky streak where a student got more than normal wrong and then suddenly got "better" by approaching normal?
This simple statistical effect has been well known in particle physics for years. Discoveries are typically made on upward fluctuations of data and then you will typically see them decrease with subsequent measurements. However the change is usually within reasonable uncertainty of the previous measurement and is not there for all measurements (although less likely you can still discover something on a downward fluctuation). So how about testing the simplest, statistical hypothesis first before inventing new psychological explanations...unless you think that fundamental particles are somehow subject to the positive, upbeat nature of particle physicists!
I don't think that peak travel is currently driven by the price of oil but rather by the means of alternatives to travel. Only in recent years has video conferencing and mobile communications become ubiquitous. While a face-to-face meeting is still far better this has to be offset against the cost in money and time of travel to and from the meeting plus the currently less than pleasant experience of flying.
Even as little as 10 years ago video conferencing was still relatively novel and not particularly trivial and so travel to meetings was required. Now that communication has become a lot simpler there is an alternative to travel in many cases so is it surprising that the amount of travel has levelled off? As communication technology improves, and airport security moves towards requiring a full body cavity search, I would imagine that it will continue to reduce the volume of travel required.
...to the opinions of trolls in making this judgement.
Are you really claiming that if this paper had been written by a faculty member at a university it would have been accepted in the same condition? Really? This is not trolling - I am trying to make a serious point. The only reason that this paper was published is because of the author. This is just as wrong as publishing a low quality paper from a well-known author simply because of who they are.
...that's how it is in these publish or perish primary schools.
I think you mean 'and' as in the primary school published and the journal's scientific reputation perished.
Or how about powerful american politicians forming an organisation calling for US global dominion?
They already have: it is called the US government.
They are legally adults, but we tend to treat students as somewhere between adult and child because they are not yet self-supporting.
Aren't they? I would certainly have agreed with you in my day because I was supported by the government and my parents. With the government slashing 80% off the teaching budget (if you believe the Guardian) for higher ed clearly the funding will come almost entirely from the students themselves. Over the summer many get jobs and live with their parents but we don't deny someone unemployment benefit if they lived with their parents over a summer would we?
...but if anything they're likely to make it easier for poorer students to get to university.
Yes I have read the proposals and frankly they are appalling. They do not make it easier for poor students to get to university they make it easier for students from a poor background to get to university. They are not means tested on student wealth but on that of their parents. Students have no legal right to that wealth, unlike children under 18 when parents are legally required to send them to school and provide a certain level of care.
The linking of the fees to increased bursaries for "poor" students effectively means that some fraction of student fees will be redirected to support other students - that is simply insane. Students should not be forced to acquire larger debts to subsidize other students simply because they have parents who earn more. This is a class system in reverse and is just as wrong.
What we should be doing is supporting students by ability: regardless of whether their parents sleep under a bridge or in a stately home. Instead of saddling students with massive debts and travel restrictions (which forcing them to repay the entire loan before leaving the UK effectively amounts to) why not limit the number of university places to what we can afford the tuition for? That system seemed to work exceptionally well in the past, certainly a lot better than the unjust mess they are about to unleash. I voted LibDem partly because of their stance on education, now I'm hoping it will be another 90+ years before they get a chance to mess it up again.
First, tuition fees are not actually a fixed amount - they are scaled back depending on parental income.
This is not an improvement. The obvious question is why should your tuition fee have anything to do with your parent's income once you are legally an adult. No other government benefit is like this (anyone for unemployment benefit taking into account your parent's income?). The clear reason being that as an adult your parents no longer owe you a duty of care and while I am sure most will, suppose for some reason your rich parents oppose you going to university and refuse to pay. Why should you end up with a larger bill than someone with poor parents who also gets no money?
If you claim there is still a duty of care then why should you get help because your parents are divorced? Why shouldn't society expect your father to pay his share too? Afterall society expects child support payments from the parent you are not living with so why not tuition fee payments as well?
The student loans take interest at the rate of inflation and are repayable based on your income.
The result is that the system the government now seems to be wanting to use is incredibly poorly thought out, damaging and undermines the existing system of higher tax rates for higher earners. Why not put an extra percent of the higher rates of income tax? I'd happily pay an extra 1% of my income if it meant maintaining a open and fair university system.
If not, then why would you want it to be open source?
If I was going to be spending a reasonable amount of time inputting data that I want to access for an extended period of time I would want it to be an open source program. That way you can always get the data out of the program again (possibly with some effort) and you are not stuck with regular upgrade fees for the latest version with the bug fix neeed to make it work with the latest OS version.
Yea because the amount you pay back for your tuition fee loan is based on your parents income.
Yes it is. Those with rich parents will not NEED a tuition fee loan because their parents will pay their tuition for them. Those of use whose parents could not have afforded to do that will get stuck with the bill.
In fact with the new 9k fees it is cheaper to go to places like Canada for a degree - even paying the increased foreign student rate and even with the suppressed value of the pound. Of course there are the cost of flights but the lower cost of living and accommodation probably recoups most of that....and if the pound ever regains some of its lost value on the international exchanges it will become quite a bit cheaper.
Of course you could argue that people should pay for the education they get but in the past that was always counted as part of the higher tax rates that those with greater incomes paid. This also evened out some of the inequities in that teachers get lower salaries than doctors and yet both are just as essential. By charging the same for everyone you will end up with more lawyers, doctors and business-types and fewer teachers, scientists and engineers because the former have higher salaries and can easily afford to pay back the loans. This sort of change is not good for society.
Apologies for the typographical error and I am sorry that this meant you were completely unable to understand what I was trying to say. I had originally written "based on a student's income" but that of course would have been wrong too and in the process of rearranging it I left in the apostrophe. I had clearly better watch it otherwise soon I might be mis-spelling words like colour, centre and tyre as well.
It depends on the cost. I was lucky enough to get a place at Cambridge University in the days when there were no tuition fees for university in the UK so going there cost no more than any other university (you just had to pay or accommodation, food and books....and the odd beer or two! ;-). I got a fantastic education which has been exceptionally useful in getting a career in academia. So I'd say it was definitely worth it.
Of course nowadays students at Cambridge will be looking at £9,000/year tuition fees with lower fees of £3-6,000/year elsewhere thanks to the UK government's appalling mismanagement of education. With fees like that I would have had to think long and hard before going. Partly because of the cost but also partly because selecting student's based on parental income rather than academic ability will mean lowering the education standards and a worsening of the student experience as the fraction of those of us who went through the state school system is reduced.
I think Hanlon's razor adequately explains all that: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
On a side note... do you honestly think the rest of the world is out to get you?
Not really...but then I'm not American. ;-) I just thought it interesting that a nation known for it extremely strong nationalistic tendencies had managed to come up with a system which invited foreign meddling in its own research priorities. An area where it is completely reasonable to restrict participation to citizens only.
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
The PTO only really searches though the patent database for prior art.
Isn't there some requirement that the patent be non-obvious as well? Highlighting the matches in the search of a document seems not only obvious but in fact about they only way there is of doing a search. It would be a pretty useless search if all it did was say "yes, this 400 page PDF matches your search criteria" and then let you hunt down where.
If you look at the latest data from Fermilab then, unless they can radically improve their analysis technique and barring an LHC disaster, they are unlikely to get enough data to see the Higgs before the LHC. Their current data agrees well with background with well over half their dataset analyzed. Typically if you start to see signs of a signal this first appears as an excess of background events because you are seeing some signal but not enough to say that it is different from the background. Of course a better analysis technique could change all that so it is not ruled out but, given the data already analyzed, the odds are against them.
it would actually be quite exciting if it isn't found as it means a whole different paradigm for mass is at work
That's correct but if it is not found by the end of 2012 that does not mean that the Higgs is ruled out. The 2012 run is to see the Higgs if it is at the low end of its allowed mass range which is where all the data so far suggest it is. However to rule it out we need to run the machine at its full energy and for longer to cover a Higgs with a mass of up to ~1TeV/c2 which is the maximum possible value. After this the Standard Model sans Higgs predicts probabilities of certain processes occurring in at over 100% (the unitarity bound is exceeded) which is obviously nonsense and so we have to see something (Higgs or otherwise) by then.
Good job on finding one of the Easter Eggs, but there are still two left!
So what? For the vast majority of the world not living in the US we apparently can't win anything. In terms of a marketing campaign it is a really great way to alienate the majority of your customers.
You simple make something very common illegal and then you don't enforce the law.
Apart from the fact that this tactic does not seem to have worked historically in Canada the problem is that this is civil law not criminal. Hence "enforcement" is up to someone with enough money to afford lawyers. I imagine it will stand until the content on a website that the government itself links to is found objectionable. Assuming the website owner does not have deep pockets it will be the government itself getting sued and then watch how fast the law gets changed.
The only questions are: will the supreme court be smart enough to see this (it could affect them too if they link to external websites...assuming that you can actually sue a court?) and, if they aren't, whether the government is smart enough to see the consequences and fix them immediately without waiting to get sued.