Government subsidizes, but in most countries, no longer pays for the full cost of tuition. Even when it does there is still accommodation and living expenses to pay. However, this just means we have more of duty at university to ensure that the limited places it does subsidize go to the students who are most likely to succeed.
Do not choose for people if they are wasting their time or not. This is their life not yours.
If students were paying for the full cost of their education I would agree. However, they are not. In most countries, the government subsidized university-level education. Hence you, I and everyone else help to pay for that opportunity to be available. As a result, universities have a duty to select the students most likely to be successful in any given program to maximize the return on that investment from society at large. If we admit someone who is not prepared for a program over someone who is we are denying that other person the opportunity to better themselves and society.
If everyone paid their own way this would not be a problem because we would just add places as needed but then only those who could afford the price would get educated which, again, I would argue is bad for society since there are many of us who can do well at university but who would lack the financial resources to fully fund it or to pay back loans. You only have to look at the problems they have recruiting teachers and nurses in the UK to see how increasing university tuition paid for by loans makes people avoid lower paying graduate jobs.
There are always exceptions to military service for health, disability, conscientious objections to killing people etc. So it is possible that this study just shows that brighter individuals are using those exceptions to avoid military service.
Indeed if you look at what wikipedia has to say it seems that while 60,000 are available for conscription every year only 8-10,000 are actually conscripted. The article also suggests that they select "unmotivated" fit people and you can get out of it with a "good reason".
I'd argue that these selection biases mean that you are less likely to conscript smart people since they are more likely to be able to figure out what they need to do to avoid conscription.
Some people can afford to give their kids extra resources. Technology, books, tutors, free time. That all helps pass the SAT test.
You need to look at this from a university's perspective though. When I am teaching a first year physics course if the students in the lecture do not have a sufficient background in maths and physics to understand the material then they are wasting their time and money being there. That is the point of having standardized tests: they ensure all students have a sufficient background to be able to cope with the program they want to enrol in.
If society fails to support those from disadvantaged backgrounds enough so that they too can also reach the standards required for university then there is not a lot the university can do without lowering its academic standards and then you end up with a second rate institute whose qualifications are far less useful and whose value to society is far less than it was. If the university intake is not diverse enough for society then, provided the university is applying its intake requirements in an unbiased fashion, that same society needs to fix the problem at the school level.
I realize that my machine is about 6 years old,... I sure don't want to move to the trash-can or an iMac.
There is no point - the trash can itself is about 4-5 years old now and its GPUs have less than half the power of modern ones yet Apple still charges for them like they were new. After waiting for a viable desktop replacement for years the final straw was the new laptops with one type of port, no function keys, old GPUs and a terrible keyboard. Windows 10 is not as good as MacOS but the better and cheaper hardware more than makes up for the difference.
On the Canadian Apple store the price for a 15 inch MacBook Pro with 2TB storage and a 3.1GHz CPU is $5,379. That's why I switched to PCs. The Windows Linux subsystem means that Windows 10 can approximate a Mac well enough that the huge gap in both price and performance means it was more than worthwhile to switch.
The scary thing is that a year or so ago when they were announcing these new macs with only one type of port and the silly touch bar Microsoft were announcing their new Surface Studio with dial controller and the MS presentation looked far more like the Apple of yesteryear while the Apple roll out looked more like an old-Microsoft one!
It may be calm where you are, but over a region, there tends to be enough generation.
Actually, that has been shown not to be true for continental-sized regions. There was a study done in the UK several years ago that looked at this and discovered that over a region the size of Europe there was a high degree of correlation in wind patterns. So if it were calm over the UK then the chances are that while there might be some wind in other areas of Europe it would not be very much: the amount of wind was correlated over very large areas. The conclusion was that while regional sharing gains you something it is not much and nowhere near enough to provide a stable source of power. You have to have storage.
Wouldn't really hurt us to live a simpler life that didnt demand a gigawatt of power for a family of four.
Apart from the fact that you are about 6 orders of magnitude off I think your concept of a simpler life is not actually any simpler. It's far simpler to buy groceries once a week and store them in a fridge or freezer. It's simpler to use electric lights instead of oil lamps and candles (not to mention safer). It's a lot simpler to have a central water or air based heating system that uses electric pumps/fans to circulate air instead of having to have fires in each room that need regular deliveries of coal or wood. Hot water heaters and electric cookers are far simpler than heating water or cooking using a fire.
Going without electricity is NOT a simpler life - it's far, far harder.
Not really. If you plot the curves of solar and wind, it closely matches the actual power consumption of end users.
Really? So demand for electricity varies according to the wind with more electricity being used on windy days than on calm ones? Not to mention that usage will have to drop to zero on a calm night.
I think there is some averaging going on in whatever comparison you are referring to and to average out fluctuations in power consumption and generation you need storage.
It might be a spectacular fire but, even if you put all the batteries in one place, it would be nothing like Chernobyl if something went wrong because they use a chemical relation, not nuclear, so once the fire burnt out there is no dangerous radiation hanging around for decades afterwards and lithium isn't particularly toxic so while there might be some contamination it should not be that hard to clear up.
However, the more import question is why would you put all these batteries in one place though? A far better design is to spread them out and store the power locally. Then, not only can you gain in efficiency but you also gain in reliability since if a transmission line goes down you have several hours of battery power during which you can repair it.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
I think that the scientists are unworthy of grants.
Hi Donald - glad to see you are diversifying from twitter but sadly, no, that's still not how science works. Scientific grants are paid to fund research to find out what actually happens, you are thinking of "political contributions" which are paid to guarantee a particular result.
It only matters whether the "random" number generated is independent of the identities of the people applying to be admitted.
Indeed, if it was a true random number it would end up discriminating against unlucky people. Something the poor sod having to use an Excel spreadsheet of this magnitude probably understands all too well now.
They want to take away the ONE THING I love about flying?
They might want to but it is very unlikely that they will, or that it will work if they ever get as far as doing it. The London Underground used to have windowless carriages in Victorian times because, as the reasoning went, there was nothing to look at going through a tunnel all the time. Despite this, they were massively unpopular, caused motion sickness etc. and were rapidly replaced with windows. I suspect that this will turn out to be true for aeroplanes as well.
While the Cockpit would need windows, the rest of the plane doesn't.
That's not true. One of the instructions you get in an exit row seat about opening the door in an emergency is that you need to first look through the window to make sure that it is safe to open the door. It's going to be somewhat hard to do that without a window.
An hour still would have been defined as 1/24th of the day.
That was the original definition but this would mean that an hour would be changing on a continuous basis as the Earth's rotation is affected by tidal forces etc. This would make it useless for many things in the modern world e.g. GPS. As a result, now an hour is defined as 3,600 seconds and a second is defined in terms of periods of radiation from a particular transition in a caesium atom.
The paper makes no mention of the tau neutrino which, at these energies, would appear "sterile" because there is not enough energy to produce a tau. Indeed the paper keeps using what it calls the "two neutrino" model when we know there are three neutrinos which oscillate.
Some justification as to why the tau neutrino is excluded would be helpful as would a three-neutrino analysis even if the mixing angles mean that the tau component is negligible. I suspect there are some good justifications for this approximation but it would be nice if they included them in a paper that is making such strong claims.
Higgs interactions do not count, as the Higgs is not a fundamental force.
Higgs interactions do count if you are counting interactions. It is wrong to say that they only interact via gravity if they also interact via the Higgs. It might not be a force but it is an interaction. For example, if Dark Matter interacts via the Higgs we would not say that its only interaction is via gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Government subsidizes, but in most countries, no longer pays for the full cost of tuition. Even when it does there is still accommodation and living expenses to pay. However, this just means we have more of duty at university to ensure that the limited places it does subsidize go to the students who are most likely to succeed.
Do not choose for people if they are wasting their time or not. This is their life not yours.
If students were paying for the full cost of their education I would agree. However, they are not. In most countries, the government subsidized university-level education. Hence you, I and everyone else help to pay for that opportunity to be available. As a result, universities have a duty to select the students most likely to be successful in any given program to maximize the return on that investment from society at large. If we admit someone who is not prepared for a program over someone who is we are denying that other person the opportunity to better themselves and society.
If everyone paid their own way this would not be a problem because we would just add places as needed but then only those who could afford the price would get educated which, again, I would argue is bad for society since there are many of us who can do well at university but who would lack the financial resources to fully fund it or to pay back loans. You only have to look at the problems they have recruiting teachers and nurses in the UK to see how increasing university tuition paid for by loans makes people avoid lower paying graduate jobs.
There are always exceptions to military service for health, disability, conscientious objections to killing people etc. So it is possible that this study just shows that brighter individuals are using those exceptions to avoid military service.
Indeed if you look at what wikipedia has to say it seems that while 60,000 are available for conscription every year only 8-10,000 are actually conscripted. The article also suggests that they select "unmotivated" fit people and you can get out of it with a "good reason".
I'd argue that these selection biases mean that you are less likely to conscript smart people since they are more likely to be able to figure out what they need to do to avoid conscription.
Some people can afford to give their kids extra resources. Technology, books, tutors, free time. That all helps pass the SAT test.
You need to look at this from a university's perspective though. When I am teaching a first year physics course if the students in the lecture do not have a sufficient background in maths and physics to understand the material then they are wasting their time and money being there. That is the point of having standardized tests: they ensure all students have a sufficient background to be able to cope with the program they want to enrol in.
If society fails to support those from disadvantaged backgrounds enough so that they too can also reach the standards required for university then there is not a lot the university can do without lowering its academic standards and then you end up with a second rate institute whose qualifications are far less useful and whose value to society is far less than it was. If the university intake is not diverse enough for society then, provided the university is applying its intake requirements in an unbiased fashion, that same society needs to fix the problem at the school level.
I realize that my machine is about 6 years old, ... I sure don't want to move to the trash-can or an iMac.
There is no point - the trash can itself is about 4-5 years old now and its GPUs have less than half the power of modern ones yet Apple still charges for them like they were new. After waiting for a viable desktop replacement for years the final straw was the new laptops with one type of port, no function keys, old GPUs and a terrible keyboard. Windows 10 is not as good as MacOS but the better and cheaper hardware more than makes up for the difference.
On the Canadian Apple store the price for a 15 inch MacBook Pro with 2TB storage and a 3.1GHz CPU is $5,379. That's why I switched to PCs. The Windows Linux subsystem means that Windows 10 can approximate a Mac well enough that the huge gap in both price and performance means it was more than worthwhile to switch.
The scary thing is that a year or so ago when they were announcing these new macs with only one type of port and the silly touch bar Microsoft were announcing their new Surface Studio with dial controller and the MS presentation looked far more like the Apple of yesteryear while the Apple roll out looked more like an old-Microsoft one!
It may be calm where you are, but over a region, there tends to be enough generation.
Actually, that has been shown not to be true for continental-sized regions. There was a study done in the UK several years ago that looked at this and discovered that over a region the size of Europe there was a high degree of correlation in wind patterns. So if it were calm over the UK then the chances are that while there might be some wind in other areas of Europe it would not be very much: the amount of wind was correlated over very large areas. The conclusion was that while regional sharing gains you something it is not much and nowhere near enough to provide a stable source of power. You have to have storage.
Wouldn't really hurt us to live a simpler life that didnt demand a gigawatt of power for a family of four.
Apart from the fact that you are about 6 orders of magnitude off I think your concept of a simpler life is not actually any simpler. It's far simpler to buy groceries once a week and store them in a fridge or freezer. It's simpler to use electric lights instead of oil lamps and candles (not to mention safer). It's a lot simpler to have a central water or air based heating system that uses electric pumps/fans to circulate air instead of having to have fires in each room that need regular deliveries of coal or wood. Hot water heaters and electric cookers are far simpler than heating water or cooking using a fire.
Going without electricity is NOT a simpler life - it's far, far harder.
Not really. If you plot the curves of solar and wind, it closely matches the actual power consumption of end users.
Really? So demand for electricity varies according to the wind with more electricity being used on windy days than on calm ones? Not to mention that usage will have to drop to zero on a calm night.
I think there is some averaging going on in whatever comparison you are referring to and to average out fluctuations in power consumption and generation you need storage.
What about the past year and a half could possibly make you think Trump cares anything about "American jobs"?
Lots...provided that "American job" is being CEO of a large company.
It might be a spectacular fire but, even if you put all the batteries in one place, it would be nothing like Chernobyl if something went wrong because they use a chemical relation, not nuclear, so once the fire burnt out there is no dangerous radiation hanging around for decades afterwards and lithium isn't particularly toxic so while there might be some contamination it should not be that hard to clear up.
However, the more import question is why would you put all these batteries in one place though? A far better design is to spread them out and store the power locally. Then, not only can you gain in efficiency but you also gain in reliability since if a transmission line goes down you have several hours of battery power during which you can repair it.
Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation.
Partly but the other big reason is that the two major forms of renewable energy - solar and wind - both rely on intermittent power sources which are not always available. If you can store this energy for use at night or on a calm day then there is no need to burn any fuel at all.
However, I am a little concerned about the "pressure water" storage system which replaced reservoirs with high pressure underground storage. This might work but it seems that you are replacing the limitations of reservoirs with the complications of fracking which has been shown to cause severe, localized earthquakes. Batteries seem a far safer way to go if you need to overcome the limitations of pumped storage schemes.
I think that the scientists are unworthy of grants.
Hi Donald - glad to see you are diversifying from twitter but sadly, no, that's still not how science works. Scientific grants are paid to fund research to find out what actually happens, you are thinking of "political contributions" which are paid to guarantee a particular result.
...and if you look at the ones they currently install in the back of airline seats today they haven't got much better!
Generating debt by buying cryptocurrencies is stupid.
More stupid than using your credit card for gambling? Why ban just cryptocurrencies and not all other forms of gambling?
It only matters whether the "random" number generated is independent of the identities of the people applying to be admitted.
Indeed, if it was a true random number it would end up discriminating against unlucky people. Something the poor sod having to use an Excel spreadsheet of this magnitude probably understands all too well now.
They want to take away the ONE THING I love about flying?
They might want to but it is very unlikely that they will, or that it will work if they ever get as far as doing it. The London Underground used to have windowless carriages in Victorian times because, as the reasoning went, there was nothing to look at going through a tunnel all the time. Despite this, they were massively unpopular, caused motion sickness etc. and were rapidly replaced with windows. I suspect that this will turn out to be true for aeroplanes as well.
While the Cockpit would need windows, the rest of the plane doesn't.
That's not true. One of the instructions you get in an exit row seat about opening the door in an emergency is that you need to first look through the window to make sure that it is safe to open the door. It's going to be somewhat hard to do that without a window.
An hour still would have been defined as 1/24th of the day.
That was the original definition but this would mean that an hour would be changing on a continuous basis as the Earth's rotation is affected by tidal forces etc. This would make it useless for many things in the modern world e.g. GPS. As a result, now an hour is defined as 3,600 seconds and a second is defined in terms of periods of radiation from a particular transition in a caesium atom.
Perhaps they ought to check that they have plugged in all their cables properly? ;-)
But its basket structures are clearly vulnerable to bear based attacks where the attacker is mathematically proven to be smarter than average.
That's definitely a major boo-boo.
...and Alaska. See, we are narrowing it down!
Well, it does rule out the four corners region.
The paper makes no mention of the tau neutrino which, at these energies, would appear "sterile" because there is not enough energy to produce a tau. Indeed the paper keeps using what it calls the "two neutrino" model when we know there are three neutrinos which oscillate.
Some justification as to why the tau neutrino is excluded would be helpful as would a three-neutrino analysis even if the mixing angles mean that the tau component is negligible. I suspect there are some good justifications for this approximation but it would be nice if they included them in a paper that is making such strong claims.
Higgs interactions do not count, as the Higgs is not a fundamental force.
Higgs interactions do count if you are counting interactions. It is wrong to say that they only interact via gravity if they also interact via the Higgs. It might not be a force but it is an interaction. For example, if Dark Matter interacts via the Higgs we would not say that its only interaction is via gravity.