You seem to be forgetting the physics part of the degree. An astrophysics degree is in many ways a physics degree where the student has opted to take the astronomy related options. You can pretty much do with it anything you can do with a physics degree.
Sheldon suffers from the same ailment as Greg House MD. Insufferable Tool Syndrome.
True but the difference is that Greg House is portrayed as a highly intelligent bastard whereas, in the one episode of BBT I managed to watch, Sheldon was played as an unintelligent idiot who would not last 10 seconds as a grad student.
You seem to assume that all Chinese censorship is purely politically motivated. The Big Bang Theory probably just fails basic quality control standards.
An institution's tendency to select a candidate based on something other than merit (age, race, gender, etc).
Technically that is a bias as well - you are biasing your selection based on ability. In fact a bias is doing anything other than making a random selection. The question you need to ask is what do we think an acceptable bias is. In that regard clearly academic ability is one selection criteria which is acceptable for a university.
The next question to ask is whether if a university accepts a lower percentage of group X it means that there is an inherent bias against group X. In some cases this is probably true but in many cases it may not be true at all. All you can really say is that it is a cause for more investigation to determine whether this is a selection bias or something else. For example there was only one boy in my daughter's ballet class. It is hard to believe that this is due to sexist selection criteria on the part of the ballet school and is most likely a reflection of the fact that most boys are not interested in ballet which may reflect sexist attitudes in society as a whole but you cannot fix that by imposing quotas on the ballet school.
I gave my daughter a earfull having my granddaughter use the ipad at 2 to keep her entertained. No you play with her using physical objects, and interaction.
There is a simple, less confrontational solution to this which solves both problems at once and provides an important, although expensive, lesson about not giving toddlers unsupervised access to delicate electronics. Introduce your granddaughter to the joys of a toy wooden hammer - the sort that comes with the hammer through peg sets. Then stand back and watch the fun although of course once the screen cracks you'll need to remove the iPad for safety. Even if the hammer is removed I was always amazed at how much our kids liked to hammer using any available implement once they got the hang of it.
Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine.
No so easily nowadays. Lego comes with huge numbers of very specialized pieces which are taylor made for that particular model. You can get the basic bricks but most Lego today is aimed at building one model and then playing with it rather than getting a pile of bricks and letting your imagination run wild.
There is one exception though: Mindstorms! This is simply brilliant and the new EV3 version even runs Linux! It's one of the few toys that are around today that I really wish I had been available when I was a kid.
"But what about my 15% long term capital gains rate?" I hear you ask?
No need to ask - the highest tax bracket in Canada is 29% and only half our capital gain counts as income so the top rate is 14.5% for all capital gains and less if you are not in the top tax bracket.
Well given that this is from statistics based on a gaussian distribution and Gauss was born 50 years after Newton died clearly the answer is no. Something for which Newton ought to be extremely thankful since I doubt he would have survived 1,000 apples falling on his head to get the necessary statistics!;-)
However there is also a more serious reason for this: Newton's experiments were simple and easy to reproduce. Rather than rely on one or two experiments done be large collaborations with massive resources Newton's experiments could be performed by anyone with enough interest, moderate wealth and a few hours of time on their hands. Newton himself could repeat them multiple times to convince himself that they were right.
Unfortunately we cannot afford to build 30 LHCs with 60 experiments and measure the Higgs boson mass 60 different times and so we have to get very particular with statistics. In the same way we do not have 100 different, independent global temperature datasets for the past century or more nor 100 different international teams to analyze them. When you only have one or two experiments which cannot be easily repeated multiple times you HAVE to get very careful with statistics.
We should probably raise capital gains tax on unbacked securities (i.e. the stock market).... Investment in start-ups and other venture behavior is useful
Simplified tax code and reduced capital gains for investors in startups? I think you've been at the maple syrup again...
Ah but there is something amusing about someone taking the successor of the BBC Model B and then using it to reproduce one of its main competitors from the period. However it's good to see that the 1980s 8-bit home computer religious wars finally ended in mutual cooperation!;-)
Actually, as a physicist, rather than trying to make simplistic arguments as to why experts in the field might be wrong you should just look at the statistics that the experts quote in the first line of the summary:
On the heels of a study that concluded there was less than a 1% chance that current global warming could be simple fluctuations...
Now "less that 1%" sounds low but is less than a 3-standard deviation (or 3 sigma) signal. In physics 3 sigma is generally the level at which you can claim "evidence for" a given effect and to prove it to others you need a 5-sigma signal which is less than a 1 in ~1.7 million chance.
The reason that we use these levels is because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment. Hence you have to accept that there will always be some and it has been found from experience that these levels of proof tend to be ones which, once reached, are rarely found to be wrong. Although 3 sigma is just at the level where you can say "this is something likely to be true".
While I think it likely that humans have caused some degree of global warming it is a little worrying that the evidence for it is still so flimsy. If we then ask say whether more than 50% of global warming is due to humans I expect that the probability becomes even less certain. So to start motivating a major change in direction from fossil to nuclear (which has its own but different problems) we need a 3-sigma signal (less than 0.27%) that mankind is responsible for at least 50% of the current warming.
The wavefunction doesn't represent the "size" of a particle in any meaningful way.
Yes it does. In fact it is the only meaningful way to define the size of the particle.
Analogously, if I describe your location as somewhere within the 1200 block of Broad St, it doesn't make sense to interpret that statement as saying you are actually the size of a city block.
No but I am not a quantum wave. If I were it would mean that the universe literally does not define my position better than a city block. It is like trying to say "at which point does a wave hit the beach": it is a meaningless question because the wave hits the beach over a range of points because the wave has a finite size.
Any actual interaction between particles requires decoherence and a collapse of the wavefunction to a more classical-like particle.
No it doesn't we do this all the time in particle physics with quantum field theory. You calculate and sum the amplitudes for different interactions to find total cross-sections which would not be possible if they have to be incoherent. An electron behaves like a particle when you are observing it on a scale much larger than its wavelength. This is how wave-particle duality works: pass an electron through an atomic grid and it diffracts, pass it through a 1 mm slit and it acts like a particle because the slit width is massive compared to the wavelength.
The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically required in the first decade or two of a new civilization
Not true. Many of the oldest trades no longer exist so you need someone to develop the techniques and skills again. As a physicist I've never made a steam engine or a large scale electrical generator but I know the basic principles behind them and given time could get one working or figure out how to repair one which breaks. Put that together with a chemist who can figure out how to extract copper and steel from ores and a biologist who can figure out the best crop rotations and dietary requirements and you have the skills needed to greatly increase your survival odds in the first few years.
The advantage of scientists and engineers is not that we are trained for some task but that we have the training to figure out how to do many, many different tasks. We routinely build and do things that nobody knows how to build or do because they have never been built or done before. In modern society it is more efficient to have individuals trained for each special task but without that scientists and engineers will be the ones who will need to reinvent everything which is missing and in the longer term teach the next generation.
Nice try but actually the bound standing waves for hydrogen (~0.1nm) are quite a bit smaller than a free electron at room temperature (~7nm). A lead atom is only about twice the radius of hydrogen because although it has a lot more electrons it also has a far larger nuclear charge. So however you look at it, under the same conditions a free electron is always bigger than an atom.
What you're describing here are pedantic objections, though, of which there will always be some to any question that isn't qualified to absurdity.
No, you just have to ask it in an appropriate way. There are professional survey writers who will take the questions you want to ask and then write them in a way that is very hard to misinterpret, not qualified to absurdity and not suggestive of an approved response.
For your example, the rest mass of an electron is smaller than the mass of any atom, so the wavefunction of any electron will be smaller than that of any atom at the same velocity (de Broglie wavelength) and in the same environment
Ok, lets try doing the calculation. The de Broglie wavelength is lambda=h/p where lambda is the wavelength and p is the momentum which is 'mv' for non-relativistc quantum. So for an atom with the same velocity as the electron the atom's momentum will be larger which means the wavelength of the atom will be SMALLER than the electron i.e. the free electron is bigger than the atom it would form.
However your argument is actually flawed because in the same environment thermodynamics requires the free electron to have the same kinetic energy as the atom. If you are capable of doing the calculation you'll find this means that the wavelength goes as 1/sqrt(mass) so even then the electron wavelength is larger than that of the atom.
So the correct, scientific conclusion is that a free electron is bigger than an atom if both are in thermodynamic equilibrium. Thinking of the electron as smaller than an atom means that you do not understand the implications of quantum mechanics or are letting your gut instincts override your rational reasoning. Quantum mechanics is often counter-intuitive and your instincts will often be wrong.
Or simply, since an electron is a component of an atom, any constituent electron will be smaller than the atom it inhabits.
You are thinking of Newtonian physics. What you say is just not true for quantum mechanics. The electrostatic potential well of the nucleus traps the electron wave and effectively compresses it over what a free electron would have in the same environment. To be more technical the addition of a potential term in the Schrodinger equation means that you end up with 3D spherical harmonic standing waves (at least for hydrogen) which have a shorter wavelength in the ground state than the free electron wave under the same thermal conditions. Still not convinced? The go read "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths which will go through the details provided you have enough maths to be able to cope with simple partial differential equations (since you have to solve the Schrodinger equation in spherical polar coordinates).
It also only works if there isn't pseudo-science in the survey. One of the questions was "Is an electron smaller than an atom" to which it appears they assumed the answer was yes. This is fine if you thin of the atom as a mini-solar system (the Bohr model) but this is wrong. The size of the atom is determined by the size of the electrons' 3D standing waves that are bound to the nucleus. So actually the size of an atom is literally the size of the electrons in it.
The problem is that the "size" of an electron depends on its state as anyone with an understanding of undergrad quantum mechanics should know. So did students answering 'no' to this question do so because they had no clue about atoms and electrons or because they actually understood the quantum wave description of the atom?
Apart from that the survey is very poorly worded for example the statement: "There are phenomena that physical science and the laws of nature cannot explain.". I could easily say "strongly agree" to that and think "dark matter" which is something that physical science cannot explain at the moment but which I'd hope we will eventually explain. So does the statement mean "cannot ever explain" or "cannot at the moment explain"?
So perhaps the survey authors ought to worry a bit more about pseudo-scientific surveys and a little less about pseudo-scientific beliefs among undergrads.
Isn't there a line that protects both free speech and human dignity?
There is. If the pictures were taken without the consent of the person in the picture when they had a reasonable expectation of privacy or are released without the consent of the person who took them e.g. they were stolen by hacking a computer, website, phone etc. then their release should be illegal. However I would be surprised if that is not already the case in which case the person releasing them should be held accountable not the website.
However if the pictures were taken openly and with the consent of the person in them the photographer owns the copyright and can release them as they see fit. If you want to preserve your dignity don't agree to pose for such a photograph. Of course it would also help a lot if the response of society to having a lapse of judgment taken cruel advantage of by an ex was one of compassion and understanding and not firing the victim from their job. Perhaps if we had a society like that people would be less inclined to run to pass new laws every time some idiot comes up with a new way to be antisocial.
I agree that field of vision is not an issue (or at least one that can be easily fixed). However depth of vision is a problem. Mirrors preserve depth perception 2D screens do not. Not being able to tell how close a car is in a wing mirror when overtaking is dangerous and will lead to accidents. You can't even judge from image size since camera's fields of view and screen sizes will vary between car models.
The free market created innovation, so the established players want to shut it down. They go whining to legislators, who will put in a reglation because their donors tell them to.
True but completely free market gives the same results. Without regulation the established players will shutdown competition by selling services at below cost until competitors go out of business, paying for exclusive rights, using vendor lock-in or any one of a handful of nasty tactics to kill competition. So the problem is not that they go to governments asking for legislation - after all that is what the small, innovative companies have done too. The problem is that the politicians rarely seem to make decisions based on what they think will give the best outcome for society.
In a civil society privacy is expected even when we are walking down the street.
Not necessarily. Pre-industrial revolution most people lived in small enough communities that they would be recognised by many of the people they would meet in the street. The difference was that you would recognize the observers so it was a symmetric loss of privacy. With modern surveillance it is a one-way privacy loss: you have no idea who is doing the observing and yet they can look up all your details and track your every move which is a bit different from having the village gossip noticing your comings and goings.
That would actually make perfect sense, insurance companies tend to give benefits to people exhibiting responsible behavior.
People exhibiting responsible behaviour have no need of a system to watch them and enforce rules. They would not drive when they felt very tired because it would be dangerous to do so. The only reason for the insurance companies to want this is because they are not sure that you are a responsible person.
The problem is with a system like this is that it has to never give a false positive. Even if one time in a million it gives a false positive there will be thousands of people every year who will suddenly be unable to use their car for no good reason. It seems unlikely that the system is that accurate unless its threshold is set so high it triggers on the drivers snoring.
You may be a great researcher but can you teach worth a damn? One doesn't automatically imply the other.
True but in most institutes unless you are an absolutely incredible researcher you have to have a reasonable level of teaching ability or you don't get tenure.
Where you have professors who have been in school for years and have next to no real experience.
Experience of which industry? I'm a physics prof. Our grads work in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, IT, natural resources, academic and industrial research etc. in a diverse range of positions. University is supposed to give you deep understanding of a subject and a broad range of skills that are useful for a wide variety of positions both in academia and industry it is not a training scheme for job X. Being involved in research means that I can take the latest research results and bring them into lectures so the students learn about them and perhaps find ways to apply that knowledge wherever they end up. This is not only good for the student but good for society as a whole and someone from industry is unlikely to be able to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be forgetting the physics part of the degree. An astrophysics degree is in many ways a physics degree where the student has opted to take the astronomy related options. You can pretty much do with it anything you can do with a physics degree.
Sheldon suffers from the same ailment as Greg House MD. Insufferable Tool Syndrome.
True but the difference is that Greg House is portrayed as a highly intelligent bastard whereas, in the one episode of BBT I managed to watch, Sheldon was played as an unintelligent idiot who would not last 10 seconds as a grad student.
You seem to assume that all Chinese censorship is purely politically motivated. The Big Bang Theory probably just fails basic quality control standards.
Can you explain what exactly you think is "bias"?
An institution's tendency to select a candidate based on something other than merit (age, race, gender, etc).
Technically that is a bias as well - you are biasing your selection based on ability. In fact a bias is doing anything other than making a random selection. The question you need to ask is what do we think an acceptable bias is. In that regard clearly academic ability is one selection criteria which is acceptable for a university.
The next question to ask is whether if a university accepts a lower percentage of group X it means that there is an inherent bias against group X. In some cases this is probably true but in many cases it may not be true at all. All you can really say is that it is a cause for more investigation to determine whether this is a selection bias or something else. For example there was only one boy in my daughter's ballet class. It is hard to believe that this is due to sexist selection criteria on the part of the ballet school and is most likely a reflection of the fact that most boys are not interested in ballet which may reflect sexist attitudes in society as a whole but you cannot fix that by imposing quotas on the ballet school.
I gave my daughter a earfull having my granddaughter use the ipad at 2 to keep her entertained. No you play with her using physical objects, and interaction.
There is a simple, less confrontational solution to this which solves both problems at once and provides an important, although expensive, lesson about not giving toddlers unsupervised access to delicate electronics. Introduce your granddaughter to the joys of a toy wooden hammer - the sort that comes with the hammer through peg sets. Then stand back and watch the fun although of course once the screen cracks you'll need to remove the iPad for safety. Even if the hammer is removed I was always amazed at how much our kids liked to hammer using any available implement once they got the hang of it.
Those same pieces can be used to build what ever you can imagine.
No so easily nowadays. Lego comes with huge numbers of very specialized pieces which are taylor made for that particular model. You can get the basic bricks but most Lego today is aimed at building one model and then playing with it rather than getting a pile of bricks and letting your imagination run wild.
There is one exception though: Mindstorms! This is simply brilliant and the new EV3 version even runs Linux! It's one of the few toys that are around today that I really wish I had been available when I was a kid.
"But what about my 15% long term capital gains rate?" I hear you ask?
No need to ask - the highest tax bracket in Canada is 29% and only half our capital gain counts as income so the top rate is 14.5% for all capital gains and less if you are not in the top tax bracket.
Well given that this is from statistics based on a gaussian distribution and Gauss was born 50 years after Newton died clearly the answer is no. Something for which Newton ought to be extremely thankful since I doubt he would have survived 1,000 apples falling on his head to get the necessary statistics! ;-)
However there is also a more serious reason for this: Newton's experiments were simple and easy to reproduce. Rather than rely on one or two experiments done be large collaborations with massive resources Newton's experiments could be performed by anyone with enough interest, moderate wealth and a few hours of time on their hands. Newton himself could repeat them multiple times to convince himself that they were right.
Unfortunately we cannot afford to build 30 LHCs with 60 experiments and measure the Higgs boson mass 60 different times and so we have to get very particular with statistics. In the same way we do not have 100 different, independent global temperature datasets for the past century or more nor 100 different international teams to analyze them. When you only have one or two experiments which cannot be easily repeated multiple times you HAVE to get very careful with statistics.
We should probably raise capital gains tax on unbacked securities (i.e. the stock market). ... Investment in start-ups and other venture behavior is useful
Simplified tax code and reduced capital gains for investors in startups? I think you've been at the maple syrup again...
Ah but there is something amusing about someone taking the successor of the BBC Model B and then using it to reproduce one of its main competitors from the period. However it's good to see that the 1980s 8-bit home computer religious wars finally ended in mutual cooperation! ;-)
On the heels of a study that concluded there was less than a 1% chance that current global warming could be simple fluctuations...
Now "less that 1%" sounds low but is less than a 3-standard deviation (or 3 sigma) signal. In physics 3 sigma is generally the level at which you can claim "evidence for" a given effect and to prove it to others you need a 5-sigma signal which is less than a 1 in ~1.7 million chance.
The reason that we use these levels is because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment. Hence you have to accept that there will always be some and it has been found from experience that these levels of proof tend to be ones which, once reached, are rarely found to be wrong. Although 3 sigma is just at the level where you can say "this is something likely to be true".
While I think it likely that humans have caused some degree of global warming it is a little worrying that the evidence for it is still so flimsy. If we then ask say whether more than 50% of global warming is due to humans I expect that the probability becomes even less certain. So to start motivating a major change in direction from fossil to nuclear (which has its own but different problems) we need a 3-sigma signal (less than 0.27%) that mankind is responsible for at least 50% of the current warming.
The wavefunction doesn't represent the "size" of a particle in any meaningful way.
Yes it does. In fact it is the only meaningful way to define the size of the particle.
Analogously, if I describe your location as somewhere within the 1200 block of Broad St, it doesn't make sense to interpret that statement as saying you are actually the size of a city block.
No but I am not a quantum wave. If I were it would mean that the universe literally does not define my position better than a city block. It is like trying to say "at which point does a wave hit the beach": it is a meaningless question because the wave hits the beach over a range of points because the wave has a finite size.
Any actual interaction between particles requires decoherence and a collapse of the wavefunction to a more classical-like particle.
No it doesn't we do this all the time in particle physics with quantum field theory. You calculate and sum the amplitudes for different interactions to find total cross-sections which would not be possible if they have to be incoherent. An electron behaves like a particle when you are observing it on a scale much larger than its wavelength. This is how wave-particle duality works: pass an electron through an atomic grid and it diffracts, pass it through a 1 mm slit and it acts like a particle because the slit width is massive compared to the wavelength.
The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically required in the first decade or two of a new civilization
Not true. Many of the oldest trades no longer exist so you need someone to develop the techniques and skills again. As a physicist I've never made a steam engine or a large scale electrical generator but I know the basic principles behind them and given time could get one working or figure out how to repair one which breaks. Put that together with a chemist who can figure out how to extract copper and steel from ores and a biologist who can figure out the best crop rotations and dietary requirements and you have the skills needed to greatly increase your survival odds in the first few years.
The advantage of scientists and engineers is not that we are trained for some task but that we have the training to figure out how to do many, many different tasks. We routinely build and do things that nobody knows how to build or do because they have never been built or done before. In modern society it is more efficient to have individuals trained for each special task but without that scientists and engineers will be the ones who will need to reinvent everything which is missing and in the longer term teach the next generation.
Nice try but actually the bound standing waves for hydrogen (~0.1nm) are quite a bit smaller than a free electron at room temperature (~7nm). A lead atom is only about twice the radius of hydrogen because although it has a lot more electrons it also has a far larger nuclear charge. So however you look at it, under the same conditions a free electron is always bigger than an atom.
What you're describing here are pedantic objections, though, of which there will always be some to any question that isn't qualified to absurdity.
No, you just have to ask it in an appropriate way. There are professional survey writers who will take the questions you want to ask and then write them in a way that is very hard to misinterpret, not qualified to absurdity and not suggestive of an approved response.
For your example, the rest mass of an electron is smaller than the mass of any atom, so the wavefunction of any electron will be smaller than that of any atom at the same velocity (de Broglie wavelength) and in the same environment
Ok, lets try doing the calculation. The de Broglie wavelength is lambda=h/p where lambda is the wavelength and p is the momentum which is 'mv' for non-relativistc quantum. So for an atom with the same velocity as the electron the atom's momentum will be larger which means the wavelength of the atom will be SMALLER than the electron i.e. the free electron is bigger than the atom it would form.
However your argument is actually flawed because in the same environment thermodynamics requires the free electron to have the same kinetic energy as the atom. If you are capable of doing the calculation you'll find this means that the wavelength goes as 1/sqrt(mass) so even then the electron wavelength is larger than that of the atom.
So the correct, scientific conclusion is that a free electron is bigger than an atom if both are in thermodynamic equilibrium. Thinking of the electron as smaller than an atom means that you do not understand the implications of quantum mechanics or are letting your gut instincts override your rational reasoning. Quantum mechanics is often counter-intuitive and your instincts will often be wrong.
Or simply, since an electron is a component of an atom, any constituent electron will be smaller than the atom it inhabits.
You are thinking of Newtonian physics. What you say is just not true for quantum mechanics. The electrostatic potential well of the nucleus traps the electron wave and effectively compresses it over what a free electron would have in the same environment. To be more technical the addition of a potential term in the Schrodinger equation means that you end up with 3D spherical harmonic standing waves (at least for hydrogen) which have a shorter wavelength in the ground state than the free electron wave under the same thermal conditions. Still not convinced? The go read "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths which will go through the details provided you have enough maths to be able to cope with simple partial differential equations (since you have to solve the Schrodinger equation in spherical polar coordinates).
It also only works if there isn't pseudo-science in the survey. One of the questions was "Is an electron smaller than an atom" to which it appears they assumed the answer was yes. This is fine if you thin of the atom as a mini-solar system (the Bohr model) but this is wrong. The size of the atom is determined by the size of the electrons' 3D standing waves that are bound to the nucleus. So actually the size of an atom is literally the size of the electrons in it.
The problem is that the "size" of an electron depends on its state as anyone with an understanding of undergrad quantum mechanics should know. So did students answering 'no' to this question do so because they had no clue about atoms and electrons or because they actually understood the quantum wave description of the atom?
Apart from that the survey is very poorly worded for example the statement: "There are phenomena that physical science and the laws of nature cannot explain.". I could easily say "strongly agree" to that and think "dark matter" which is something that physical science cannot explain at the moment but which I'd hope we will eventually explain. So does the statement mean "cannot ever explain" or "cannot at the moment explain"?
So perhaps the survey authors ought to worry a bit more about pseudo-scientific surveys and a little less about pseudo-scientific beliefs among undergrads.
Isn't there a line that protects both free speech and human dignity?
There is. If the pictures were taken without the consent of the person in the picture when they had a reasonable expectation of privacy or are released without the consent of the person who took them e.g. they were stolen by hacking a computer, website, phone etc. then their release should be illegal. However I would be surprised if that is not already the case in which case the person releasing them should be held accountable not the website.
However if the pictures were taken openly and with the consent of the person in them the photographer owns the copyright and can release them as they see fit. If you want to preserve your dignity don't agree to pose for such a photograph. Of course it would also help a lot if the response of society to having a lapse of judgment taken cruel advantage of by an ex was one of compassion and understanding and not firing the victim from their job. Perhaps if we had a society like that people would be less inclined to run to pass new laws every time some idiot comes up with a new way to be antisocial.
With polarizing sunglasses, it could be a 3D screen.
That will work well while driving at night!
I agree that field of vision is not an issue (or at least one that can be easily fixed). However depth of vision is a problem. Mirrors preserve depth perception 2D screens do not. Not being able to tell how close a car is in a wing mirror when overtaking is dangerous and will lead to accidents. You can't even judge from image size since camera's fields of view and screen sizes will vary between car models.
The free market created innovation, so the established players want to shut it down. They go whining to legislators, who will put in a reglation because their donors tell them to.
True but completely free market gives the same results. Without regulation the established players will shutdown competition by selling services at below cost until competitors go out of business, paying for exclusive rights, using vendor lock-in or any one of a handful of nasty tactics to kill competition. So the problem is not that they go to governments asking for legislation - after all that is what the small, innovative companies have done too. The problem is that the politicians rarely seem to make decisions based on what they think will give the best outcome for society.
We have a KIA...
In a civil society privacy is expected even when we are walking down the street.
Not necessarily. Pre-industrial revolution most people lived in small enough communities that they would be recognised by many of the people they would meet in the street. The difference was that you would recognize the observers so it was a symmetric loss of privacy. With modern surveillance it is a one-way privacy loss: you have no idea who is doing the observing and yet they can look up all your details and track your every move which is a bit different from having the village gossip noticing your comings and goings.
That would actually make perfect sense, insurance companies tend to give benefits to people exhibiting responsible behavior.
People exhibiting responsible behaviour have no need of a system to watch them and enforce rules. They would not drive when they felt very tired because it would be dangerous to do so. The only reason for the insurance companies to want this is because they are not sure that you are a responsible person.
The problem is with a system like this is that it has to never give a false positive. Even if one time in a million it gives a false positive there will be thousands of people every year who will suddenly be unable to use their car for no good reason. It seems unlikely that the system is that accurate unless its threshold is set so high it triggers on the drivers snoring.
You may be a great researcher but can you teach worth a damn? One doesn't automatically imply the other.
True but in most institutes unless you are an absolutely incredible researcher you have to have a reasonable level of teaching ability or you don't get tenure.
Where you have professors who have been in school for years and have next to no real experience.
Experience of which industry? I'm a physics prof. Our grads work in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, IT, natural resources, academic and industrial research etc. in a diverse range of positions. University is supposed to give you deep understanding of a subject and a broad range of skills that are useful for a wide variety of positions both in academia and industry it is not a training scheme for job X. Being involved in research means that I can take the latest research results and bring them into lectures so the students learn about them and perhaps find ways to apply that knowledge wherever they end up. This is not only good for the student but good for society as a whole and someone from industry is unlikely to be able to do that.