Exactly, this is precisely the problem. People spreading lies and getting away with it has been at the heart of the election process in many democracies for far too long. The only change is that now foreign governments are getting involved - including the US government which got involved in the Brexit debate. It's going to be hard to elicit a big response from people about a torrent of lies from foreign agents when they are already used to listening to a torrent of lies from their local politicians.
Calculus continues at A level, and you'd expect someone intending to do physics to do A level maths.
The problem is that you cannot require this though which means that A-level physics can no longer use calculus in problems and so the educational standards of A-level physics has dropped considerably. This is why calculus is far more important at O-level than statistics and probability: you need calculus for A-level subjects.
I don't recall complex numbers being in the maths O level, or AO 30 years ago. Not the Oxford syllabus, anyway.
Try the old JMB syllabus - it was definitely on their syllabus!
The point of education isn't to provide differentiation for employers, though. I'd be pretty miffed if I had worked hard, but was awarded a lower grade than if I had worked as hard but been a year older, just to satisfy a requirement for differentiation.
Your logic escapes me completely here. What on earth has age got to do with anything? Exam grades are intended to provide some differentiation between the performance of students in a subject that's the entire point of having grades otherwise you should just make the course pass/fail. Differentiation with grades is useful for not just employers but for universities as well as students themselves since it helps them make sensible choices about future career and education goals.
There has been a lot of research done in terms of optimising teaching strategies in the last 30 years, so improvement in ability isn't impossible.
True, but many of these new strategies end up covering less material vs older methods over the same period of instruction. In the comparison of the two methods they then only compare the overlapping material and make no comparison of the material that the new method had to drop. So while there has certainly been some innovation and improvements to teaching strategies not all of it has been effective and if I compare the level of knowledge of school leavers today with what used to be required there is a significant decline.
In terms of PISA, there is a requirement to have a lowest common denominator test, it's true, to have a level playing field
How on earth is that a level playing field? It's utterly unfair! If one school manages to teach calculus, complex numbers etc. by the same age that another has only taught basic arithmetic and you then compare the two schools using a test purely on basic arithmetic you would reach the completely wrong conclusion that the two schools were equally good or, worse, that the second school was better because with all that practice on basic arithmetic they may make fewer silly mistakes. Any fair comparison MUST take account of the complexity and depth of material covered. If your test included complex numbers, calculus plus basic arithmetic you would very likely see that while the second school might edge ahead in the arithmetic portion it would crash and burn with the more advanced topics. This lack of accounting for the depth and complexity of topics is where modern teaching comparisons typically (but not always) fail and is leading to a reduction in educational standards.
No, the oldest confirmed rock on Earth at 4.4 billion years old is a nice blue zircon.
However, the oldest "colour" in the Universe though is technically the Cosmic microwave background. Some of those photons used to be in the visible spectrum but are so old, dating from 300k years after the Big Bang, that the expansion of the universe stretched them into the microwave region. So, if anything, the oldest colour is what we now perceive as the black between the stars and galaxies.
I guess the problem was this was seriously groundbreaking, so Kubrick was speaking a totally new language.
That's one possibility. However, I tend to get rather sceptical about these "Emperor's new clothes"-type of arguments that if you don't understand it you are just stupid. My personal interpretation was a lot more pragmatic: they had no clue how to really end the film so they strung together some ambiguous BS and used the old "it's your interpretation that matters, not mine" cop-out to escape having to explain it. I guess that's why I'm a scientist and not an artist.
They test things like reading comprehension in the native language, which does rely on education, and the mathematical elements also. So the idea that they are just "basic intelligence tests" is false.
Fair comment. I probably went too far with that but, nevertheless, they very clearly only test very simple concepts. They do not test the more advanced concepts that, at least in the UK, used to be taught in school for O'levels e.g. simple calculus etc. Hence, if you cut back the curriculum and drop these more advanced topics your standards have clearly declined significantly but the effect on your PISA scores will be minimal to none because they test at a very low standard. The fact that students may know simple, basic material as well as they did 30 years ago does not mean that standards are the same: you need to look at their knowledge of more advanced concepts to find that 16-year olds in the UK now have no understanding of simple calculus or complex numbers whereas 30 years ago they did!
Employers wish to have the best candidates. Many more people go to university. Thus a simple way to sift out weaker candidates
True, but the school system used to do that by providing a wide differentiation between students instead of awarding huge numbers A grades. There are two possible reasons for this: either school standards improved to the point where huge numbers of students are now reaching the A-grade standard of 30 years ago or school standards have plummeted to the point where huge numbers of students are now meeting the lower A-grade standard. The evidence is overwhelming in support of the latter: huge swathes of maths and physics were dropped when O'levels were replaced by GCSEs and this then had a knock-on effect on the A'levels. Just look at questions from papers 30 years ago to those today - the difference in level is astounding.
Your argument about sets of numbers makes no sense without knowing what those numbers are which you forgot to mention. The reason for the longer degree time for physics was because so much material was cut from the A'level syllabus that the gap between school and university became unsurmountable without additional instructional time. Hence, the extra time was needed to teach the material that was no longer being taught at school because of declining school standards. This is clear when you look at the first year textbooks UK universities use, like Halliday and Resnick, which we used as an A-level textbook at school 30 years ago!
Yes, but my point is that languages aimed at niche applications are unlikely to succeed in developing a critical mass of developers. You need a broad-based replacement that everyone finds significantly better than the language it replaces. It's not just that niche languages may not address others' problems there is a psychological effect too: a "games development language" is going to have significant barriers to being adopted by serious businesses. You should have seen the raised eyebrows a colleague of mine got from administrators when he was purchasing several cheap "gamer" GPU cards to run photon tracking algorithms for a large international physics experiment! The fact that each card came with a "free game" did not help!
Google has proven its AI/algorithms just don't work.
Not really, they have just proven that like humans their AI systems have a range of intelligence from smart down to gibbering idiot. What's interesting though is that, like humans, nowadays the ones which are idiots seem to be ending up in charge of important things.
It's not horrible it is just mature. Good languages, like C++, start off with a very clear syntax that greatly simplifies some important programming tasks. As people get more familiar with the language they identify new programming patterns which the language cannot handle well and so new syntax or features are added leading to bloat.
C++ has been around for a while and has had lots of new things added to it making it a mature language. At some point, someone will come up with a new, general purpose language that incorporates many of the advantages of C++ in a coherent syntax and which is useful for lots of people and not aimed at just developing just games, or web, or any other specialized function and then the cycle will repeat.
When it comes to energy storage the usual number to quote is how much energy it stores. The rate you can drain energy from it, while not irrelevant, doesn't tell you much because it provides no idea of how long it can provide that power for: a few seconds to cope with surges, an hour or two while they start up a power station or 12+ hours to smooth out e.g. solar power.
Since the article appears to confuse MW with MWh at one point I suspect that this is yet another example of journalists not understanding the difference between power and energy.
The PISA scores are evidence, at least that strong negative conclusions are not supported.
The PISA scores seem to test intelligence more than knowledge, they do not show statistics and at least one of their example questions is wrong on their website. I'm not convinced that you can draw any useful conclusions from their data.
There seems to be the presumption that school standards are falling, but if you look at PISA results, there isn't any evidence for it, and if anything, standards are gradually rising.
Actually if you look at the PISA website they only provide data for about ten years, there are no error bars and the jitter from year to year seems large suggesting that if they did include error bars they would be so large that they would indicate that there is no way to see any trend. In addition, Canada, the UK and the US all show that they have only been in PISA since 2000 so I have no idea where you get 30 years of PISA data from.
The tests are clearly designed to have minimal reliance on knowledge so that they can be administered across multiple countries with different curricula. They appear to test basic intelligence without much reliance on knowledge and basic intelligence should not change much over time regardless of education. The final nail in their coffin though is that one of their test questions is wrong: it suggests that the size of an impact crater only depends on the size of the object causing it when it actually depends on the mass and velocity.
On the counter side, there is plenty of evidence of declining school standards. Employers are requiring degrees for jobs that never used to require them (if they were not there would not be a demand for these pseudo-universities). The UK has extended some undergrad science degrees, particularly physics, from 3 years to 4 years because of declining school standards and their intake requirements have gone from B's and C's at A-level to A's and A*'s. Over the past few years in Alberta they have removed any mention of any linear algebra from the high school maths curriculum (the word vector does not appear anywhere in the syllabus) and complex numbers have been dropped - and these were not replaced by anything else, the curriculum was just cut.
First, you are clearly only talking about US universities since with a few institutional exceptions, most universities outside the US are not awash with lots of money. Second, your statements are precisely opposed to one another. You want universities to be focussed on the dollar value of the benefit to students and then want them to worry more about education and less about being a business.
The problem with universities today are the plethora of pseudo-universities which have sprung up to fill the void left by declining school standards. These new institutions offer dubious qualifications at great expense to the student and/or the government funding them. They find willing students only because many employers no longer trust school qualifications and now require degrees, diplomas etc. for jobs which never used to require them. Funding them by what is effectively indentured servitude is just going to make things a lot worse.
We need to fix this by raising school standards to the point where employers can use them for a wide range of jobs. While this will cost money it will also save a lot of money by making these pseudo-universities unnecessary.
That depends on how you look at it. If they use a firewall to block your connection from being able to access Facebook, Twitter etc. if you don't pay the tax then it's a free privacy upgrade.
...and that's just the issues you'll have dealing with the company you pay. If they ever get hacked it could be a lot worse since it seems the system is in constant contact via the cell phone network. I expect any hacker would have some fun reprogramming the displays.
With a capacity of 24 GWh, this new battery factory should enable them to significantly increase production with a total battery production capacity of 60 GWh.
Per day? per second? per year? or lifetime total? Is 60 GWh the total production for all the factories the company owns or the final capacity of the completed factory?
I never mentioned sugar and not all fizzy drinks are sugary e.g. bitter lemon, soda water, tonic water...and some lagers. British beers are generally ales which are fermented warm and are traditionally not artificially carbonated. That's not to say that you can't get fizzy beers/lagers in the UK but, with a few exceptions, these are generally "imports" (although I'm sure many are now brewed in the UK). That's why when you go into a UK pub you'll see a row of hand pumps and not taps. So, as originally stated, a lack of CO2 is not really going to affect British draft beer as served in the pubs there.
errrrr no they most definitely do not just pass through the atmosphere it vertically.
Actually, they do because the most important thing initially is to get out of the atmosphere. They only start to gain a large horizontal component once they are high enough that air resistance is much less at which point they will be well above the level of any aircraft which rely on air for lift.
I make my own beer from barley, yeast and hops and when it's done
If you do it right the fermentation provides all the CO2 you need - afterall that's how it used to be done before CO2 cylinders existed. If you want a fizzy drink buy a can of pop. What you are producing sounds more like shandy than beer.
Who said anything about one? If you want to know someone's reputation in a field you will have to get a sample size greater than one.
I think you have an extremely unrealistic view of how willing people are going to be to respond if they are bombarded by the number of requests to review someone that will be required if every single year every faculty member has to have multiple external referees to evaluate them. Additionally, if they are only evaluating the work for that one year it is hard to see how they will manage to come up with anything significantly different from what you would obtain from reviewing that same person's publications for the year. On longer timescales, you might have a point - which is why we use external referees for tenure and promotion - but on an annual basis I think you are being extremely unrealistic.
The airlines need to adjust and adapt, just like everyone else.
Actually, I think the point they are making is that those controlling the airspace need to adjust and adapt. Rockets do not take long to pass through controlled airspace and they pass through it vertically so they should not need a huge area around them to be closed for extended periods of time. It's fine to take insanely large safety margins when you have very few launches but clearly now they need to actually evaluate the risks better and come up with a more efficient way to operate safely.
I think it's not so absurd to think that it could have happened only a very few times in all the universe.
We have literally no idea. After that initial spark of life on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first multi-cellular lifeforms evolved. So while life may be highly probable multi-cellular life might be exceptionally rare but then again perhaps we are an outlier. With a sample of one planet, the only thing we can really say is that the probability of life evolving is not zero but whether that probability is 10^-40 or 10^-1 we have no way of knowing yet the difference is a galaxy teeming with life vs. just us in the entire observable universe.
The universe is only 'old' from our point of view. A much colder planet where its life's metabolism and reproductive rates are low, might evolve much slower than life on Earth.
Assuming that even is possible you then have to explain why we are the only planet in the galaxy and possibly the known universe where evolution occurs at a much, much faster rate. The simplest explanations for the Fermi-paradox are that interstellar travel is extraordinarily hard and takes lots of resources and lots of time or that the evolution of intelligent life is exceptionally rare - after all, it took 3 billion years to evolve multi-cellular life on Earth. Our current understanding of fundamental physics suggests that the former is probably true and we have no reliable data to estimate the other. However, if interstellar travel is exceptionally hard then, even if intelligent life does evolve it might not make it that far from its homeworld so it might not need to be that rare for us to never see it.
The problem is not so much competition it is a complete failure to justify their increasing prices. The existence of high-quality PC laptops has made it less of a jump to leave Macs but the push to do so has been sky-high pricing without bleeding edge technology or useful innovation. When they released their latest macbook pros the top fo the line one was ~$5k with a CPU and GPU that were about a year old - and the CPU had already just been replaced at launch. In addition you only have USB-C ports which required dongles or new devices, no function keys and a dodgy keyboard.
Compare that to a Dell XPS 15 laptop that came out a month later with the latest CPU, far better GPU and a touch screen for $3k. Apple always used to have the latest and greatest hardware and their pricing used to be similar to that of an equivalently spec'd PC. Their high specs meant that they were far more expensive than an average PC but that cost difference was largely because of the much better hardware. Now they have even higher prices and the hardware is mediocre at best.
That's practical for tenure and promotion but for every annual evaluation? Really? You'd suggest getting an external referee (since colleagues in the department may be biased one way or the other) for evaluations? As for getting it wrong how can you be any more certain that this external referee is likely to do a better job than those selected by a reputable journal?
All it tells you is that a few "peers" felt the paper was potentially worthwhile....It doesn't mean they've done a deep dive to corroborate the research.
True, but your suggested method has one peer decide. Having a few peers decide with those peers changing from one paper to the next seems like a much fairer system. As for corroborating the research depending on the field that can take years and be a major research effort itself. This is fine for major research awards but is not typically the standard required for annual evaluations e.g. Higgs had to wait from 1964 to 2012 for our discovery of the Higgs boson before he got his Nobel but you can hardly make him wait that long for an annual evaluation!
Slashdot Mirror
this is about the heart of our election process
Exactly, this is precisely the problem. People spreading lies and getting away with it has been at the heart of the election process in many democracies for far too long. The only change is that now foreign governments are getting involved - including the US government which got involved in the Brexit debate. It's going to be hard to elicit a big response from people about a torrent of lies from foreign agents when they are already used to listening to a torrent of lies from their local politicians.
I was going to post the same thing. I doubt any Canadian who has a cell phone will be surprised by this news.
Even those of us who do not have cell phones are not surprised by this news since the insane expense of cell phones in Canada is why I don't have one.
Calculus continues at A level, and you'd expect someone intending to do physics to do A level maths.
The problem is that you cannot require this though which means that A-level physics can no longer use calculus in problems and so the educational standards of A-level physics has dropped considerably. This is why calculus is far more important at O-level than statistics and probability: you need calculus for A-level subjects.
I don't recall complex numbers being in the maths O level, or AO 30 years ago. Not the Oxford syllabus, anyway.
Try the old JMB syllabus - it was definitely on their syllabus!
The point of education isn't to provide differentiation for employers, though. I'd be pretty miffed if I had worked hard, but was awarded a lower grade than if I had worked as hard but been a year older, just to satisfy a requirement for differentiation.
Your logic escapes me completely here. What on earth has age got to do with anything? Exam grades are intended to provide some differentiation between the performance of students in a subject that's the entire point of having grades otherwise you should just make the course pass/fail. Differentiation with grades is useful for not just employers but for universities as well as students themselves since it helps them make sensible choices about future career and education goals.
There has been a lot of research done in terms of optimising teaching strategies in the last 30 years, so improvement in ability isn't impossible.
True, but many of these new strategies end up covering less material vs older methods over the same period of instruction. In the comparison of the two methods they then only compare the overlapping material and make no comparison of the material that the new method had to drop. So while there has certainly been some innovation and improvements to teaching strategies not all of it has been effective and if I compare the level of knowledge of school leavers today with what used to be required there is a significant decline.
In terms of PISA, there is a requirement to have a lowest common denominator test, it's true, to have a level playing field
How on earth is that a level playing field? It's utterly unfair! If one school manages to teach calculus, complex numbers etc. by the same age that another has only taught basic arithmetic and you then compare the two schools using a test purely on basic arithmetic you would reach the completely wrong conclusion that the two schools were equally good or, worse, that the second school was better because with all that practice on basic arithmetic they may make fewer silly mistakes. Any fair comparison MUST take account of the complexity and depth of material covered. If your test included complex numbers, calculus plus basic arithmetic you would very likely see that while the second school might edge ahead in the arithmetic portion it would crash and burn with the more advanced topics. This lack of accounting for the depth and complexity of topics is where modern teaching comparisons typically (but not always) fail and is leading to a reduction in educational standards.
Probably more correct to say "oldest rock color".
No, the oldest confirmed rock on Earth at 4.4 billion years old is a nice blue zircon.
However, the oldest "colour" in the Universe though is technically the Cosmic microwave background. Some of those photons used to be in the visible spectrum but are so old, dating from 300k years after the Big Bang, that the expansion of the universe stretched them into the microwave region. So, if anything, the oldest colour is what we now perceive as the black between the stars and galaxies.
I guess the problem was this was seriously groundbreaking, so Kubrick was speaking a totally new language.
That's one possibility. However, I tend to get rather sceptical about these "Emperor's new clothes"-type of arguments that if you don't understand it you are just stupid. My personal interpretation was a lot more pragmatic: they had no clue how to really end the film so they strung together some ambiguous BS and used the old "it's your interpretation that matters, not mine" cop-out to escape having to explain it. I guess that's why I'm a scientist and not an artist.
They test things like reading comprehension in the native language, which does rely on education, and the mathematical elements also. So the idea that they are just "basic intelligence tests" is false.
Fair comment. I probably went too far with that but, nevertheless, they very clearly only test very simple concepts. They do not test the more advanced concepts that, at least in the UK, used to be taught in school for O'levels e.g. simple calculus etc. Hence, if you cut back the curriculum and drop these more advanced topics your standards have clearly declined significantly but the effect on your PISA scores will be minimal to none because they test at a very low standard. The fact that students may know simple, basic material as well as they did 30 years ago does not mean that standards are the same: you need to look at their knowledge of more advanced concepts to find that 16-year olds in the UK now have no understanding of simple calculus or complex numbers whereas 30 years ago they did!
Employers wish to have the best candidates. Many more people go to university. Thus a simple way to sift out weaker candidates
True, but the school system used to do that by providing a wide differentiation between students instead of awarding huge numbers A grades. There are two possible reasons for this: either school standards improved to the point where huge numbers of students are now reaching the A-grade standard of 30 years ago or school standards have plummeted to the point where huge numbers of students are now meeting the lower A-grade standard. The evidence is overwhelming in support of the latter: huge swathes of maths and physics were dropped when O'levels were replaced by GCSEs and this then had a knock-on effect on the A'levels. Just look at questions from papers 30 years ago to those today - the difference in level is astounding.
Your argument about sets of numbers makes no sense without knowing what those numbers are which you forgot to mention. The reason for the longer degree time for physics was because so much material was cut from the A'level syllabus that the gap between school and university became unsurmountable without additional instructional time. Hence, the extra time was needed to teach the material that was no longer being taught at school because of declining school standards. This is clear when you look at the first year textbooks UK universities use, like Halliday and Resnick, which we used as an A-level textbook at school 30 years ago!
Yes, but my point is that languages aimed at niche applications are unlikely to succeed in developing a critical mass of developers. You need a broad-based replacement that everyone finds significantly better than the language it replaces. It's not just that niche languages may not address others' problems there is a psychological effect too: a "games development language" is going to have significant barriers to being adopted by serious businesses. You should have seen the raised eyebrows a colleague of mine got from administrators when he was purchasing several cheap "gamer" GPU cards to run photon tracking algorithms for a large international physics experiment! The fact that each card came with a "free game" did not help!
Google has proven its AI/algorithms just don't work.
Not really, they have just proven that like humans their AI systems have a range of intelligence from smart down to gibbering idiot. What's interesting though is that, like humans, nowadays the ones which are idiots seem to be ending up in charge of important things.
C++ is horrible. Just stating the obvious.
It's not horrible it is just mature. Good languages, like C++, start off with a very clear syntax that greatly simplifies some important programming tasks. As people get more familiar with the language they identify new programming patterns which the language cannot handle well and so new syntax or features are added leading to bloat.
C++ has been around for a while and has had lots of new things added to it making it a mature language. At some point, someone will come up with a new, general purpose language that incorporates many of the advantages of C++ in a coherent syntax and which is useful for lots of people and not aimed at just developing just games, or web, or any other specialized function and then the cycle will repeat.
When it comes to energy storage the usual number to quote is how much energy it stores. The rate you can drain energy from it, while not irrelevant, doesn't tell you much because it provides no idea of how long it can provide that power for: a few seconds to cope with surges, an hour or two while they start up a power station or 12+ hours to smooth out e.g. solar power.
Since the article appears to confuse MW with MWh at one point I suspect that this is yet another example of journalists not understanding the difference between power and energy.
The PISA scores are evidence, at least that strong negative conclusions are not supported.
The PISA scores seem to test intelligence more than knowledge, they do not show statistics and at least one of their example questions is wrong on their website. I'm not convinced that you can draw any useful conclusions from their data.
There seems to be the presumption that school standards are falling, but if you look at PISA results, there isn't any evidence for it, and if anything, standards are gradually rising.
Actually if you look at the PISA website they only provide data for about ten years, there are no error bars and the jitter from year to year seems large suggesting that if they did include error bars they would be so large that they would indicate that there is no way to see any trend. In addition, Canada, the UK and the US all show that they have only been in PISA since 2000 so I have no idea where you get 30 years of PISA data from.
The tests are clearly designed to have minimal reliance on knowledge so that they can be administered across multiple countries with different curricula. They appear to test basic intelligence without much reliance on knowledge and basic intelligence should not change much over time regardless of education. The final nail in their coffin though is that one of their test questions is wrong: it suggests that the size of an impact crater only depends on the size of the object causing it when it actually depends on the mass and velocity.
On the counter side, there is plenty of evidence of declining school standards. Employers are requiring degrees for jobs that never used to require them (if they were not there would not be a demand for these pseudo-universities). The UK has extended some undergrad science degrees, particularly physics, from 3 years to 4 years because of declining school standards and their intake requirements have gone from B's and C's at A-level to A's and A*'s. Over the past few years in Alberta they have removed any mention of any linear algebra from the high school maths curriculum (the word vector does not appear anywhere in the syllabus) and complex numbers have been dropped - and these were not replaced by anything else, the curriculum was just cut.
First, you are clearly only talking about US universities since with a few institutional exceptions, most universities outside the US are not awash with lots of money. Second, your statements are precisely opposed to one another. You want universities to be focussed on the dollar value of the benefit to students and then want them to worry more about education and less about being a business.
The problem with universities today are the plethora of pseudo-universities which have sprung up to fill the void left by declining school standards. These new institutions offer dubious qualifications at great expense to the student and/or the government funding them. They find willing students only because many employers no longer trust school qualifications and now require degrees, diplomas etc. for jobs which never used to require them. Funding them by what is effectively indentured servitude is just going to make things a lot worse.
We need to fix this by raising school standards to the point where employers can use them for a wide range of jobs. While this will cost money it will also save a lot of money by making these pseudo-universities unnecessary.
That depends on how you look at it. If they use a firewall to block your connection from being able to access Facebook, Twitter etc. if you don't pay the tax then it's a free privacy upgrade.
...and that's just the issues you'll have dealing with the company you pay. If they ever get hacked it could be a lot worse since it seems the system is in constant contact via the cell phone network. I expect any hacker would have some fun reprogramming the displays.
With a capacity of 24 GWh, this new battery factory should enable them to significantly increase production with a total battery production capacity of 60 GWh.
Per day? per second? per year? or lifetime total? Is 60 GWh the total production for all the factories the company owns or the final capacity of the completed factory?
I never mentioned sugar and not all fizzy drinks are sugary e.g. bitter lemon, soda water, tonic water...and some lagers. British beers are generally ales which are fermented warm and are traditionally not artificially carbonated. That's not to say that you can't get fizzy beers/lagers in the UK but, with a few exceptions, these are generally "imports" (although I'm sure many are now brewed in the UK). That's why when you go into a UK pub you'll see a row of hand pumps and not taps. So, as originally stated, a lack of CO2 is not really going to affect British draft beer as served in the pubs there.
errrrr no they most definitely do not just pass through the atmosphere it vertically.
Actually, they do because the most important thing initially is to get out of the atmosphere. They only start to gain a large horizontal component once they are high enough that air resistance is much less at which point they will be well above the level of any aircraft which rely on air for lift.
I make my own beer from barley, yeast and hops and when it's done
If you do it right the fermentation provides all the CO2 you need - afterall that's how it used to be done before CO2 cylinders existed. If you want a fizzy drink buy a can of pop. What you are producing sounds more like shandy than beer.
Who said anything about one? If you want to know someone's reputation in a field you will have to get a sample size greater than one.
I think you have an extremely unrealistic view of how willing people are going to be to respond if they are bombarded by the number of requests to review someone that will be required if every single year every faculty member has to have multiple external referees to evaluate them. Additionally, if they are only evaluating the work for that one year it is hard to see how they will manage to come up with anything significantly different from what you would obtain from reviewing that same person's publications for the year. On longer timescales, you might have a point - which is why we use external referees for tenure and promotion - but on an annual basis I think you are being extremely unrealistic.
The airlines need to adjust and adapt, just like everyone else.
Actually, I think the point they are making is that those controlling the airspace need to adjust and adapt. Rockets do not take long to pass through controlled airspace and they pass through it vertically so they should not need a huge area around them to be closed for extended periods of time. It's fine to take insanely large safety margins when you have very few launches but clearly now they need to actually evaluate the risks better and come up with a more efficient way to operate safely.
I think it's not so absurd to think that it could have happened only a very few times in all the universe.
We have literally no idea. After that initial spark of life on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first multi-cellular lifeforms evolved. So while life may be highly probable multi-cellular life might be exceptionally rare but then again perhaps we are an outlier. With a sample of one planet, the only thing we can really say is that the probability of life evolving is not zero but whether that probability is 10^-40 or 10^-1 we have no way of knowing yet the difference is a galaxy teeming with life vs. just us in the entire observable universe.
The universe is only 'old' from our point of view. A much colder planet where its life's metabolism and reproductive rates are low, might evolve much slower than life on Earth.
Assuming that even is possible you then have to explain why we are the only planet in the galaxy and possibly the known universe where evolution occurs at a much, much faster rate. The simplest explanations for the Fermi-paradox are that interstellar travel is extraordinarily hard and takes lots of resources and lots of time or that the evolution of intelligent life is exceptionally rare - after all, it took 3 billion years to evolve multi-cellular life on Earth. Our current understanding of fundamental physics suggests that the former is probably true and we have no reliable data to estimate the other. However, if interstellar travel is exceptionally hard then, even if intelligent life does evolve it might not make it that far from its homeworld so it might not need to be that rare for us to never see it.
The problem is not so much competition it is a complete failure to justify their increasing prices. The existence of high-quality PC laptops has made it less of a jump to leave Macs but the push to do so has been sky-high pricing without bleeding edge technology or useful innovation. When they released their latest macbook pros the top fo the line one was ~$5k with a CPU and GPU that were about a year old - and the CPU had already just been replaced at launch. In addition you only have USB-C ports which required dongles or new devices, no function keys and a dodgy keyboard.
Compare that to a Dell XPS 15 laptop that came out a month later with the latest CPU, far better GPU and a touch screen for $3k. Apple always used to have the latest and greatest hardware and their pricing used to be similar to that of an equivalently spec'd PC. Their high specs meant that they were far more expensive than an average PC but that cost difference was largely because of the much better hardware. Now they have even higher prices and the hardware is mediocre at best.
You ask someone who does work in that area.
That's practical for tenure and promotion but for every annual evaluation? Really? You'd suggest getting an external referee (since colleagues in the department may be biased one way or the other) for evaluations? As for getting it wrong how can you be any more certain that this external referee is likely to do a better job than those selected by a reputable journal?
All it tells you is that a few "peers" felt the paper was potentially worthwhile....It doesn't mean they've done a deep dive to corroborate the research.
True, but your suggested method has one peer decide. Having a few peers decide with those peers changing from one paper to the next seems like a much fairer system. As for corroborating the research depending on the field that can take years and be a major research effort itself. This is fine for major research awards but is not typically the standard required for annual evaluations e.g. Higgs had to wait from 1964 to 2012 for our discovery of the Higgs boson before he got his Nobel but you can hardly make him wait that long for an annual evaluation!