That's actually not quite correct. The point of the double blind study with placebos is precisely because the placebo does have an effect. People given a placebo which does nothing to improve their condition, will tend to feel better and are more likely to recover. Hence the need for a double blind study to ensure that drugs do actually treat the condition and any improvement is not due to the psychological effect of a patient's positive thinking.
This is also undoubtedly why people believe in homeopathy. If you take something which you think treats your condition you tend to feel better and are even more likely to get better even though what you are taking does nothing for you physically.
That's overkill - just mount a few, small laser guided bombs onto random commercial aircraft and evolution will take care of the problem in a generation or two.
And by saying it is all right to go get it, congress is making rules about stuff it does not own.
...and what's wrong with that? Governments regularly do that since most of the property in a country is owned by the citizens and not the government. If you mean rules about things which are not yet under its jurisdiction then again this is common: all trade and customs laws do this by saying what you are, or are not, allowed to bring in to a country and what happens when you do. As I said this is a perfectly reasonable law and in keeping with what many other countries already do albeit in different contexts.
I think you may have missed my point; by what right should the US get to allocate ownership of stuff it doesn't own?
Actually this bill seems quite reasonable. It is not granting anyone rights to claim asteroids all it says is that if you do go out into space and bring back minerals to earth (and the US) then you own those minerals. As such it only applies to things which you bring back into US jurisdiction which seems perfectly reasonable: as a sovereign nation the US is perfectly within its rights to determine who owns what within its own territory. Of course the moment those minerals leave the US then their ownership may come into question depending on local laws.
That was my point. But we need realtime on demand services via the network not via a cable broadcast box. That way you can either stream the live channel or, if you sit down half way through the news, you can watch it from the beginning only a few minutes delayed. While you can do that with a PVR you have to remember to set it to record in advance and you have to have lots of local storage. With something like iPlayer you don't have to do any of that.
Who cares? Cable TV companies hold on customers is already broken thanks to companies like Netflix. The only thing missing in North America is a service like iPlayer in the UK which lets you watch recently broadcast BBC programs when you want. The broadcast channels should switch over to the internet broadcast and providing services on demand. Having a box which merges broadcast with internet is just providing a crutch for what is rapidly becoming an outdated business model.
Correct but Canada's engineers area also trying to claim areas which are not engineering so they can bring it under their control and prevent anyone without engineering certification from having such jobs - just like the medieval guilds used to do in Europe. So I expect they would be very happy for programmers to be called engineers but shortly after that expect to have laws that prevent anyone without the right engineering certification being allowed to program. They have been trying to restrict what physicists can do for years.
Socially acceptable behaviour changes over time in unpredictable ways. 10-20 years ago a mildly homophobic comment would have drawn no notice today you would get drummed out of office. Go back another decade or two and casual sexism was socially acceptable. People's, and society's, view of what is ok changes with time something become taboo and others become more accepted.
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour.
I don't know where you got that from but it simply isn't true. In my own field of particle physics it is extremely rare that an experiment does not work. It's true that some experiments work better than others and an experiment might not find new and exciting physics but in that case you learn that your existing laws of physics work under conditions where nobody had ever tested them before.
Mind you we also don't go around telling people that our next experiment will find an easy way to convert matter to anti-matter and solve the entire world's energy needs either. It's not impossible that some experiment might find a way to do that if the physics we don't know turns out to allow it but there is no reason to think that's a likely outcome so we don't say it.
That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science.
Are you sure that you read the post I wrote? Not once did I even hint at either of those things. All I ask for is honest and accurate reporting of science and not the usual hyped up "you won't believe how good the new battery technology is" type of crap because I really won't believe it anymore. I'm all for science reporting but stick to the facts, i.e. the science, and not wild speculation about a science-fiction future which is sadly more and more of what we see on Slashdot.
Lithium batteries have more than doubled in energy density over that period, while dropping in price.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more. It's interesting to hear about the advances I just wish that they were not over hyped to the point where they make grossly inaccurate claims about their impact. Perhaps this will improve battery energy densities by a factor of 10 as claimed but, lacking expert understanding of batteries on which to base my own opinion, I tend to put more weight on the previous record of similar claims from battery researchers which suggests that a 10% improvement might be nearer the mark assuming it ever becomes practical to implement outside a research lab.
What they are saying is that the existing laws against harassment should be enforced.
Read the letter again because that is not quite what it says. I wants the existing laws on harassment to be reinterpreted to define speech which people find offensive as harassment and THEN it wants these laws to be enforced. That is a subtle, insidious difference.
Freedom of speech does not oblige the college to provide students with a canvas
True, it's not freedom of speech that requires this it is the very purpose of a University which requires it. Universities are supposed to be a place for the exchange of ideas and yes, some of those ideas will undoubtedly be offensive to some so we need freedom of speech to ensure that any idea can be heard.
The article uses racist speech because it is hard for any reasonable person to want to hear it but let me offer a real world counter example. As a particle physicist I often talk about the Big Bang in presentations. On, fortunately rare, occasions this has really offended extreme, fundamentalist religious people. Were such rules allowed it would just be a matter of time before someone tried to use them to prevent me speaking about science.
So what you are saying is that you find this idea highly offensive and would like to have the people who suggested it censored.;-)
Mind you I think you have hit on by far the most educational response to this request which is to immediately censor the idiots who made it. This would of course trigger a huge backlash from them against the injustice of them being silenced which would be the perfect time to point out that you found their ideas highly offensive and were just giving them exactly what they asked for.
Hopefully that would teach them a valuable lesson on the importance of free speech but sadly I doubt it if they were stupid enough to come up with the request in the first place.
It's not really a word limit such as we are writing for a particular audience, namely other researchers in the field. Arguing that this is exclusionary is just stupid. Indeed if we were to apply this logic then the most exclusionary thing about papers is that they are generally written in English which excludes the entire non-english speaking world from understanding them.
The point of any written work is to communicate effectively with the reader. To do that you have to target it to your audience starting foremost with the choice of language and then with the material you include. Going over things the audience already know is a waste of time and boring so fewer people will read it, writing so that this preamble is not required limits the depth and detail which you can communicate making the entire paper a waste of time for an expert to read. Instead, if you do not want to spend the time to understand papers pick up a popular science magazine, website or even TV channel and read or watch something which is targeted at the general public.
Sounds to me like the unions are very much aligned with what the profession needs. You point out yourself that salaries are too low, but you are advocating not improving the working conditions.
No, the unions at least here regularly and strongly oppose ANY attempt to raise the quality standards required of teachers and, by extension, making it easier to get rid of incompetent teachers. That is in no way at all aligned with the goals of the profession. Worse it is directly responsible for the low salaries: it's hard to argue for higher salaries for a profession which is quite happy to allow someone who does not comprehend grade 3 maths attempt to teach it.
If teachers wanted higher salaries over all else, then why would they buy school supplies out of pocket?
Those are the good teachers who are sadly a vanishing breed. However the unions do not just represent good teachers they represent the bad ones as well. I'd happily support higher salaries for teachers: my mum was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and I'm a professor. Salaries are so low that they are part of the problem at the moment since it is hard to attract excellent teachers to the profession.
My point was not that teachers are not due a raise but that the unions are damaging the profession immensely because their priorities have increasingly little overlap with the priorities of the profession. In the absence of money from government for salaries they negotiate for increased job security (which makes it hard to fire bad teachers) and for a reduced work load (which impacts student learning).
This damage has resulted in a loss of respect for teachers: it's hard to respect your son's teacher when she is telling him that 6/9 is less than 2/3 even when he, and later I, pointed out that they are the same fraction. When a teacher like that cannot be fired for gross incompetence (that was not her only gap in knowledge) you have a serious problem.
The needs of the teacher leads to the needs of the student. Not the other way around.
No, the needs of the profession lead to the needs of the student. The profession needs to attract competent teachers and ensure that incompetent ones are removed. It needs to ensure that academic standards are high and that there are adequate resources.
The needs of teachers are that they remain employed with the highest salary and best benefits they can get. There is some overlap between the two sets of needs but they are not the same. Worse even the needs of the teachers are not the top priority for the unions the needs of the union are./
Now when they don't need a special surface to function, then they can call it a hoverboard.
That's likely to be a while off. Technically a strong enough magnetic field will work but it needs to be a few orders of magnitude higher than what you need for a Lenz' law effect like this. In a high enough magnetic field you can turn any atom into a tiny magnet which will repel the field but the field strength needs to be several tens of Tesla. Still if you can achieve that you can have some fun.
Yes, those are things that nobody would demand in a market situation.
If you don't have a government you don't have a market. Markets can only operate where there are some basic rules which the participants can be trusted to follow. This requires someone with the best/most pointy sticks to enforce the rules which will be the de facto government.
Your link goes on about freedom but the only reason many of us have some guaranteed freedoms is because there is a government which is willing to enforce them with the use of pointy sticks. That's why we created them and why we still have them despite their many flaws.
If you want an idea about what life without government is like look back at history, not the 250 years that the US has been around but several thoused years ago and more. Life in the stone age was free but would you prefer living then rather than now? The big difference is of course technology but look at history: technology is closely tied to the development of governments and the better the government the more rapid the technological progress. It's unlikely Newton would have come up with his laws of motion if he had to spend most of his time worrying about how to protect himself and his property.
And Japan lost the use of a LOT of land with one nuclear incident.
...and how much land will they lose if it turns out that burning all that coal causes the climate to warm and sea levels to rise significantly? Whatever they do there is a risk. Either you go with coal and hope the climatologists are wrong or you go with nuclear and hope the engineers have got their act together. Personally I would take the nuclear option since I would bet on skilled professionals being right rather than wrong but either way there is a risk.
To the parent, x-rays won't penetrate metal, but reflect.
Oh believe me they'll penetrate metal quite easily if they have enough energy - we have a calorimeter to measure photon energies in ATLAS which consists of lead and stainless steel plates. That's at an extreme energy but it's no problem to generate X-rays that will penetrate the thin sheet metal in a car if you wanted to hence the concern. You could certainly imagine building a back scatter device using higher energy photons which could penetrate the sheet metal of a van although I've no idea whether these devices do that.
Those are the key words - it's _your_ field not the journals'. The journals are beholden to us scientists far more than we are to them. We have an advantage in particle physics since we have to self-organize into large groups in order to do our research and these groups had significant bargaining power since one experiment represents a lot of papers and labs like CERN can represent multiple large experiments which can really drive costs down.
However there is nothing to stop that happening in other fields. Get a group of influential researchers to agree to publish in a particular journal if they drop their open access fees and see if you can't get a better deal, especially from some of the lower ranked journals who, if you have enough big names, will see their ranking increase considerably both from the papers and from the publicity.
The way things are going though this might be a short lived. I personally think we will end up with a refereed, online repository along the lines of arXiv eventually. We already provide free reviews for the paid journals and the expense of publishing now online is vastly less than it was in the days of paper so the print journals no longer have a compelling raison d'etre and are currently existing just on cultural inertia.
Speaking as a scientist this activity has a certain whiff of hypocrisy about it though. If we all published our papers in open access journals, which is now almost ubiquitous in particle physics, there would be no need to smuggle copies of papers to anyone and then even those who lack the contacts or are concerned about legal repercussions can read the papers too. It also helps to undermine the increasingly oppressive copyright laws which governments are foisting on all of us.
Actually I'd be less worried about the spying and more worried about the radiation dosage. X-Rays are ionizing radiation and exposure to them increases the risk of cancer. I don't know what the dosage you would get from one of these things is but if it can penetrate the metal bodywork of a car to look inside it will probably be a lot more than a typical medical X-ray.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of a placebo is that it has no benefit.
That's actually not quite correct. The point of the double blind study with placebos is precisely because the placebo does have an effect. People given a placebo which does nothing to improve their condition, will tend to feel better and are more likely to recover. Hence the need for a double blind study to ensure that drugs do actually treat the condition and any improvement is not due to the psychological effect of a patient's positive thinking.
This is also undoubtedly why people believe in homeopathy. If you take something which you think treats your condition you tend to feel better and are even more likely to get better even though what you are taking does nothing for you physically.
That's overkill - just mount a few, small laser guided bombs onto random commercial aircraft and evolution will take care of the problem in a generation or two.
And by saying it is all right to go get it, congress is making rules about stuff it does not own.
I think you may have missed my point; by what right should the US get to allocate ownership of stuff it doesn't own?
Actually this bill seems quite reasonable. It is not granting anyone rights to claim asteroids all it says is that if you do go out into space and bring back minerals to earth (and the US) then you own those minerals. As such it only applies to things which you bring back into US jurisdiction which seems perfectly reasonable: as a sovereign nation the US is perfectly within its rights to determine who owns what within its own territory. Of course the moment those minerals leave the US then their ownership may come into question depending on local laws.
We need more real time services.
That was my point. But we need realtime on demand services via the network not via a cable broadcast box. That way you can either stream the live channel or, if you sit down half way through the news, you can watch it from the beginning only a few minutes delayed. While you can do that with a PVR you have to remember to set it to record in advance and you have to have lots of local storage. With something like iPlayer you don't have to do any of that.
Who cares? Cable TV companies hold on customers is already broken thanks to companies like Netflix. The only thing missing in North America is a service like iPlayer in the UK which lets you watch recently broadcast BBC programs when you want. The broadcast channels should switch over to the internet broadcast and providing services on demand. Having a box which merges broadcast with internet is just providing a crutch for what is rapidly becoming an outdated business model.
Correct but Canada's engineers area also trying to claim areas which are not engineering so they can bring it under their control and prevent anyone without engineering certification from having such jobs - just like the medieval guilds used to do in Europe. So I expect they would be very happy for programmers to be called engineers but shortly after that expect to have laws that prevent anyone without the right engineering certification being allowed to program. They have been trying to restrict what physicists can do for years.
You forgot: (5) Live too long.
Socially acceptable behaviour changes over time in unpredictable ways. 10-20 years ago a mildly homophobic comment would have drawn no notice today you would get drummed out of office. Go back another decade or two and casual sexism was socially acceptable. People's, and society's, view of what is ok changes with time something become taboo and others become more accepted.
Most research doesn't pan out. Not in batteries, or in any other area of scientific endeavour.
I don't know where you got that from but it simply isn't true. In my own field of particle physics it is extremely rare that an experiment does not work. It's true that some experiments work better than others and an experiment might not find new and exciting physics but in that case you learn that your existing laws of physics work under conditions where nobody had ever tested them before.
Mind you we also don't go around telling people that our next experiment will find an easy way to convert matter to anti-matter and solve the entire world's energy needs either. It's not impossible that some experiment might find a way to do that if the physics we don't know turns out to allow it but there is no reason to think that's a likely outcome so we don't say it.
That doesn't mean we should stop doing science. It also doesn't mean that we should stop reporting on science.
Are you sure that you read the post I wrote? Not once did I even hint at either of those things. All I ask for is honest and accurate reporting of science and not the usual hyped up "you won't believe how good the new battery technology is" type of crap because I really won't believe it anymore. I'm all for science reporting but stick to the facts, i.e. the science, and not wild speculation about a science-fiction future which is sadly more and more of what we see on Slashdot.
Lithium batteries have more than doubled in energy density over that period, while dropping in price.
If all the advances which were announced had played out as announced though they would probably have increased by a hundredfold or more. It's interesting to hear about the advances I just wish that they were not over hyped to the point where they make grossly inaccurate claims about their impact. Perhaps this will improve battery energy densities by a factor of 10 as claimed but, lacking expert understanding of batteries on which to base my own opinion, I tend to put more weight on the previous record of similar claims from battery researchers which suggests that a 10% improvement might be nearer the mark assuming it ever becomes practical to implement outside a research lab.
What they are saying is that the existing laws against harassment should be enforced.
Read the letter again because that is not quite what it says. I wants the existing laws on harassment to be reinterpreted to define speech which people find offensive as harassment and THEN it wants these laws to be enforced. That is a subtle, insidious difference.
Freedom of speech does not oblige the college to provide students with a canvas
True, it's not freedom of speech that requires this it is the very purpose of a University which requires it. Universities are supposed to be a place for the exchange of ideas and yes, some of those ideas will undoubtedly be offensive to some so we need freedom of speech to ensure that any idea can be heard.
The article uses racist speech because it is hard for any reasonable person to want to hear it but let me offer a real world counter example. As a particle physicist I often talk about the Big Bang in presentations. On, fortunately rare, occasions this has really offended extreme, fundamentalist religious people. Were such rules allowed it would just be a matter of time before someone tried to use them to prevent me speaking about science.
STFU.
So what you are saying is that you find this idea highly offensive and would like to have the people who suggested it censored. ;-)
Mind you I think you have hit on by far the most educational response to this request which is to immediately censor the idiots who made it. This would of course trigger a huge backlash from them against the injustice of them being silenced which would be the perfect time to point out that you found their ideas highly offensive and were just giving them exactly what they asked for.
Hopefully that would teach them a valuable lesson on the importance of free speech but sadly I doubt it if they were stupid enough to come up with the request in the first place.
It's not really a word limit such as we are writing for a particular audience, namely other researchers in the field. Arguing that this is exclusionary is just stupid. Indeed if we were to apply this logic then the most exclusionary thing about papers is that they are generally written in English which excludes the entire non-english speaking world from understanding them.
The point of any written work is to communicate effectively with the reader. To do that you have to target it to your audience starting foremost with the choice of language and then with the material you include. Going over things the audience already know is a waste of time and boring so fewer people will read it, writing so that this preamble is not required limits the depth and detail which you can communicate making the entire paper a waste of time for an expert to read. Instead, if you do not want to spend the time to understand papers pick up a popular science magazine, website or even TV channel and read or watch something which is targeted at the general public.
Sounds to me like the unions are very much aligned with what the profession needs. You point out yourself that salaries are too low, but you are advocating not improving the working conditions.
No, the unions at least here regularly and strongly oppose ANY attempt to raise the quality standards required of teachers and, by extension, making it easier to get rid of incompetent teachers. That is in no way at all aligned with the goals of the profession. Worse it is directly responsible for the low salaries: it's hard to argue for higher salaries for a profession which is quite happy to allow someone who does not comprehend grade 3 maths attempt to teach it.
If teachers wanted higher salaries over all else, then why would they buy school supplies out of pocket?
Those are the good teachers who are sadly a vanishing breed. However the unions do not just represent good teachers they represent the bad ones as well. I'd happily support higher salaries for teachers: my mum was a teacher, my sister is a teacher and I'm a professor. Salaries are so low that they are part of the problem at the moment since it is hard to attract excellent teachers to the profession.
My point was not that teachers are not due a raise but that the unions are damaging the profession immensely because their priorities have increasingly little overlap with the priorities of the profession. In the absence of money from government for salaries they negotiate for increased job security (which makes it hard to fire bad teachers) and for a reduced work load (which impacts student learning).
This damage has resulted in a loss of respect for teachers: it's hard to respect your son's teacher when she is telling him that 6/9 is less than 2/3 even when he, and later I, pointed out that they are the same fraction. When a teacher like that cannot be fired for gross incompetence (that was not her only gap in knowledge) you have a serious problem.
The needs of the teacher leads to the needs of the student. Not the other way around.
No, the needs of the profession lead to the needs of the student. The profession needs to attract competent teachers and ensure that incompetent ones are removed. It needs to ensure that academic standards are high and that there are adequate resources.
The needs of teachers are that they remain employed with the highest salary and best benefits they can get. There is some overlap between the two sets of needs but they are not the same. Worse even the needs of the teachers are not the top priority for the unions the needs of the union are./
Now when they don't need a special surface to function, then they can call it a hoverboard.
That's likely to be a while off. Technically a strong enough magnetic field will work but it needs to be a few orders of magnitude higher than what you need for a Lenz' law effect like this. In a high enough magnetic field you can turn any atom into a tiny magnet which will repel the field but the field strength needs to be several tens of Tesla. Still if you can achieve that you can have some fun.
Yes, those are things that nobody would demand in a market situation.
If you don't have a government you don't have a market. Markets can only operate where there are some basic rules which the participants can be trusted to follow. This requires someone with the best/most pointy sticks to enforce the rules which will be the de facto government.
Your link goes on about freedom but the only reason many of us have some guaranteed freedoms is because there is a government which is willing to enforce them with the use of pointy sticks. That's why we created them and why we still have them despite their many flaws.
If you want an idea about what life without government is like look back at history, not the 250 years that the US has been around but several thoused years ago and more. Life in the stone age was free but would you prefer living then rather than now? The big difference is of course technology but look at history: technology is closely tied to the development of governments and the better the government the more rapid the technological progress. It's unlikely Newton would have come up with his laws of motion if he had to spend most of his time worrying about how to protect himself and his property.
...and the final quote: "The secret to happiness is low expectations." explains the reason behind most recent changes to school education.
And Japan lost the use of a LOT of land with one nuclear incident.
Read this and learn something new.
To the parent, x-rays won't penetrate metal, but reflect.
Oh believe me they'll penetrate metal quite easily if they have enough energy - we have a calorimeter to measure photon energies in ATLAS which consists of lead and stainless steel plates. That's at an extreme energy but it's no problem to generate X-rays that will penetrate the thin sheet metal in a car if you wanted to hence the concern. You could certainly imagine building a back scatter device using higher energy photons which could penetrate the sheet metal of a van although I've no idea whether these devices do that.
In my field
Those are the key words - it's _your_ field not the journals'. The journals are beholden to us scientists far more than we are to them. We have an advantage in particle physics since we have to self-organize into large groups in order to do our research and these groups had significant bargaining power since one experiment represents a lot of papers and labs like CERN can represent multiple large experiments which can really drive costs down.
However there is nothing to stop that happening in other fields. Get a group of influential researchers to agree to publish in a particular journal if they drop their open access fees and see if you can't get a better deal, especially from some of the lower ranked journals who, if you have enough big names, will see their ranking increase considerably both from the papers and from the publicity.
The way things are going though this might be a short lived. I personally think we will end up with a refereed, online repository along the lines of arXiv eventually. We already provide free reviews for the paid journals and the expense of publishing now online is vastly less than it was in the days of paper so the print journals no longer have a compelling raison d'etre and are currently existing just on cultural inertia.
Speaking as a scientist this activity has a certain whiff of hypocrisy about it though. If we all published our papers in open access journals, which is now almost ubiquitous in particle physics, there would be no need to smuggle copies of papers to anyone and then even those who lack the contacts or are concerned about legal repercussions can read the papers too. It also helps to undermine the increasingly oppressive copyright laws which governments are foisting on all of us.
Actually I'd be less worried about the spying and more worried about the radiation dosage. X-Rays are ionizing radiation and exposure to them increases the risk of cancer. I don't know what the dosage you would get from one of these things is but if it can penetrate the metal bodywork of a car to look inside it will probably be a lot more than a typical medical X-ray.