But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet".
Yes, "quiet" is defined as the absence of sound without specification of the reason for its absence. If not we will need a new word to describe the "quiet due to the absence of anything to vibrate"-ness of space.
In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
That's not actually correct - we can measure the temperature of a vacuum from the blackbody radiation spectrum it contains. For example deep space, away from any nearby heat source like a star, has a temperature of 2.7K due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Given all the vacuum chambers on earth I also doubt it is the quietest place on earth. The quietest with air perhaps but not necessarily quietest overall.
But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.
Not really - he is just a little ignorant of the correct academic terminology. For future reference they generally prefer to be called the "Faculty of Pharmacology" rather than the "Drug Lords".
I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to a fledgling little company known as Hertz.
Oh Hertz? You mean the car rental company stuck in the airport about 45 minutes drive away that charges an arm and a leg to rent a minivan (or anything larger than a basic car) if they even have one available? They are good for car rentals from the airport, not so good if you want something bigger than a car for a family trip and you don't live anywhere near the airport or downtown. We used to do this when all we had was a rather old compact car and a growing family. Taking everyone on a 1.5 hour roundtrip to the airport (because someone has to drive our car back unless you want to add expense airport parking to the cost as well) twice is a huge pain. That, and the expense, is why we bought a minivan.
Not if it's range is a few hundred km and the recharge time is 30+ minutes. Many of us may use our cars for in-town trips much of the time but we still want them to be able to go on long distance journeys a few times a year for family holidays. This, plus the current cost, are the only reasons we've not gone electric.
Alpha particles are not cosmic rays this far into the atmosphere - they are too easy to stop and are not produced by showers. You can get heavy ionization from muons just before they range out. Also there is a small chance of catastrophic muon bremstrahlung where the muon essentially hits a nucleus which can cause short range, highly ionizing nuclear debris. You may get some alphas from this but a far more likely source is natural radioactivity.
You would need many metres to have a noticeable effect on the penetrating muons which make up the majority of cosmics at the surface. This should tell you that a few computer boxes is not really likely to have much of a shielding effect. This is reinforced by the fact that many cosmics come at shallow angles so the stack above provides no shielding. I doubt this is a cosmic ray effect.
Then wouldn't you expect a cascading rate of failures from 20% down to the baseline bottom rack in a linear fashion?
The majority of cosmic rays that make it this far are muons. These are relatively penetrating and I highly doubt that a few centimetres of metal and plastic will have anything like a 20% effect. 60m underground with the ATLAS detector at the LHC we still get a reasonable rate of cosmic rays and we use them for calibration when there is no beam. While the rate is reduced 60m of rock is far, far more shielding than a few computers plus many cosmics passing through you come at an angle so the stack above will have no effect on shielding these.
I expect that heat and vibration will be the most likely causes.
So then you wouldn't have too much of a problem when I give you nonsensical answers to your questions on your "required" questionnaire?
If it's "required" then I don't see how you can stop someone doing that - which is a very good reason not to make it required without getting consent first.
The major difference is in traditional class there is oversight (ethics boards) that is non-existent in MOOC and the ability to opt out of it.
I don't understand - why can't you opt out of the MOOC? It's not like you are getting a qualification that is worth anything - all you get is the knowledge you learn from the course. If you don't feel like doing assignment X then just don't do it. So what if your course grade suffers - it's only meaning is to let you know how well you are doing with the material in a course without accreditation.
It's also the same as a face to face course. When I teach a course I use student responses and feedback to improve the course the next time I teach it. While some of the feedback is voluntary, end of course questionnaires some of it is me looking at student responses to e.g. assignments and rewording questions to avoid common misinterpretations or looking at exam answers and adding or changing assignment questions to make students focus on concepts a large number had problems with.
This is how teaching has worked since it first began Each year's students are benefiting from the data provided by the previous years. The only difference with a MOOC is that this is more quantified which is has to be given the size of the enrolment. So long as the data is used to improve the teaching of the course then I don't see an issue because this is what teachers do innately (although you do need special, voluntary permission as well as ethics oversight if you wish to make any results public).
However if the data is going to be used for non-teaching purposes e.g. to make more effective ads, then this needs to be made crystal clear to students before they sign up for the course so they know what is going on and what the price for a "free" course is. While this sort of thing would not be tolerated in a course that you pay for in a "free" course, so long as consent is informed and up front, what's the problem?
I agree that humans can sometimes panic and not make the best choices but I'd argue that this is why you want a combination of human and computer. If the computer knows what is happening and how to fix it then it should communicate it to the pilot (assuming there is time) so the pilot does not panic. For the Hudson river situations where there is either no pre-programmed situation or what there is is clearly not going to work the pilot can use his/her ingenuity and come up with something better.
This way you get the strengths of both human and computer rather than just having one or the other by themselves.
This will still be automated in good time though, as software won't panic.
Nor will it cope with an unexpected situation that it has not been programmed for and given that this describes most serious emergencies nowadays I'm not sure turning the plane over to a computer is the best course of action. Use computers to provide guidance and help to a human pilot to reduce error but leave a pilot in charge in case you get into a situation that the computer has not been programmed for.
Try a few decades in the future. After that the data will be gone - the dye in writable CDs and DVDs does not last beyond that and even then when stored in ideal conditions.
The critical determining factor is the particle mass. The power radiated goes as 1/m^5 (IIRC) so a particle with a mass ten times smaller will radiate energy 100,000 times faster when accelerated. This means that for electrons any higher energy machine will be linear whereas for protons, with 500,000 times the mass, circular machines will be the winner for a long time to come.
Speaking as a particle physicist that's not really right. There is a lot of physics which we need to explain the universe but which we have not yet found. The one looming largest is Dark Matter. While we do not know, and cannot accurately predict, what a VLHC will find it is not true to say that we do not have a shopping list of what it might find - Dark Matter currently being on the top of that list. Even if the LHC solves that mystery first (we turn on in March 2015 with twice the energy so fingers crossed!) one possible solution is something called Supersymmetry. In such a case it is unlikely that the LHC will have enough energy to see all of SUSY and so the VLHC would be one way to find the missing sparticles.
Of course this is jumping the gun considerably since we have not found any new physics yet! If we find something like SUSY then there VLHC will receive a boost and may well get built next. However if there is no new physics found at the LHC my guess is that the next collider will be an electron-positron linear collider. This will do precision studies of the Higgs which is a good way to get hints at the next energy scale for new physics. Indeed it is the results from LEP (the e+/e- collider that predated the LHC) which told us that the Higgs mass was below 1TeV/c2 and so set the energy scale for the LHC.
Muon colliders are a great concept - but they are difficult REALLY difficult.
Indeed - one of the problems is a neutrino beam so intense it is dangerous. This is a problem because there is no way to shield it you just have to let it disperse.
Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it...
Some do. My dad used to do this with obstreperous patients who would not take no for an answer when antibiotics and their ineffectiveness on viruses were explained to them. He was honest though. He did not call them antibiotics but rather he would prescribe a regular dose multi-vitamin with a fancy sounding name and tell them that this was the best treatment for them given their condition (usually just a bad cold).
The patients were not exactly happy with not getting an antibiotic but at the same time at least felt they were getting something to treat their condition. On the flip side my dada felt that he has not lied to the patient and, given that they had a virus, he was still giving them the best treatment option both for themselves and humanity at large. However my dad was a doctor years ago (and is now beyond the reach of any human courts!) and in this increasingly litigious world I can well imagine that doctors think twice about doing this. Even if it is in everyone's best interests they don't want to be dragged into some long lasting, expensive court battle just to prove it which is likely what would happen if a patient ever found out they had been prescribed simple vitamins.
Is it really the employee's responsibility to remember each and every password and keep records of them indefinitely after employment? Should I be required by law to produce network diagrams?
No - if he forgot the passwords then it would be tough luck for the former employer. However what this idiot did was try to extort money before he would divulge the passwords. That's not the same thing.
Kinda sorta. Their existence has been inferred by experimental results.
The existence of every single particle we know of has been inferred from experimental results: neutrinos are no different. So the correct answer is "Yes, neutrinos have been detected" unless you are going to use the same uncertainty for things like the quarks, muons, Higgs boson etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet".
Yes, "quiet" is defined as the absence of sound without specification of the reason for its absence. If not we will need a new word to describe the "quiet due to the absence of anything to vibrate"-ness of space.
In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
That's not actually correct - we can measure the temperature of a vacuum from the blackbody radiation spectrum it contains. For example deep space, away from any nearby heat source like a star, has a temperature of 2.7K due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Given all the vacuum chambers on earth I also doubt it is the quietest place on earth. The quietest with air perhaps but not necessarily quietest overall.
But let's use a really inflammatory example to belittle higher education yet again.
Not really - he is just a little ignorant of the correct academic terminology. For future reference they generally prefer to be called the "Faculty of Pharmacology" rather than the "Drug Lords".
I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to a fledgling little company known as Hertz.
Oh Hertz? You mean the car rental company stuck in the airport about 45 minutes drive away that charges an arm and a leg to rent a minivan (or anything larger than a basic car) if they even have one available? They are good for car rentals from the airport, not so good if you want something bigger than a car for a family trip and you don't live anywhere near the airport or downtown. We used to do this when all we had was a rather old compact car and a growing family. Taking everyone on a 1.5 hour roundtrip to the airport (because someone has to drive our car back unless you want to add expense airport parking to the cost as well) twice is a huge pain. That, and the expense, is why we bought a minivan.
You can still get delta rays and catastrophic muon bremstrahlung which, while rare, is very likely to flip bits.
Not if it's range is a few hundred km and the recharge time is 30+ minutes. Many of us may use our cars for in-town trips much of the time but we still want them to be able to go on long distance journeys a few times a year for family holidays. This, plus the current cost, are the only reasons we've not gone electric.
Alpha particles are not cosmic rays this far into the atmosphere - they are too easy to stop and are not produced by showers. You can get heavy ionization from muons just before they range out. Also there is a small chance of catastrophic muon bremstrahlung where the muon essentially hits a nucleus which can cause short range, highly ionizing nuclear debris. You may get some alphas from this but a far more likely source is natural radioactivity.
Cosmics are mainly muons - 10m of concrete will cause some to range out but even 60m underground you still get quite a few.
You would need many metres to have a noticeable effect on the penetrating muons which make up the majority of cosmics at the surface. This should tell you that a few computer boxes is not really likely to have much of a shielding effect. This is reinforced by the fact that many cosmics come at shallow angles so the stack above provides no shielding. I doubt this is a cosmic ray effect.
Then wouldn't you expect a cascading rate of failures from 20% down to the baseline bottom rack in a linear fashion?
The majority of cosmic rays that make it this far are muons. These are relatively penetrating and I highly doubt that a few centimetres of metal and plastic will have anything like a 20% effect. 60m underground with the ATLAS detector at the LHC we still get a reasonable rate of cosmic rays and we use them for calibration when there is no beam. While the rate is reduced 60m of rock is far, far more shielding than a few computers plus many cosmics passing through you come at an angle so the stack above will have no effect on shielding these.
I expect that heat and vibration will be the most likely causes.
So then you wouldn't have too much of a problem when I give you nonsensical answers to your questions on your "required" questionnaire?
If it's "required" then I don't see how you can stop someone doing that - which is a very good reason not to make it required without getting consent first.
The major difference is in traditional class there is oversight (ethics boards) that is non-existent in MOOC and the ability to opt out of it.
I don't understand - why can't you opt out of the MOOC? It's not like you are getting a qualification that is worth anything - all you get is the knowledge you learn from the course. If you don't feel like doing assignment X then just don't do it. So what if your course grade suffers - it's only meaning is to let you know how well you are doing with the material in a course without accreditation.
It's also the same as a face to face course. When I teach a course I use student responses and feedback to improve the course the next time I teach it. While some of the feedback is voluntary, end of course questionnaires some of it is me looking at student responses to e.g. assignments and rewording questions to avoid common misinterpretations or looking at exam answers and adding or changing assignment questions to make students focus on concepts a large number had problems with.
This is how teaching has worked since it first began Each year's students are benefiting from the data provided by the previous years. The only difference with a MOOC is that this is more quantified which is has to be given the size of the enrolment. So long as the data is used to improve the teaching of the course then I don't see an issue because this is what teachers do innately (although you do need special, voluntary permission as well as ethics oversight if you wish to make any results public).
However if the data is going to be used for non-teaching purposes e.g. to make more effective ads, then this needs to be made crystal clear to students before they sign up for the course so they know what is going on and what the price for a "free" course is. While this sort of thing would not be tolerated in a course that you pay for in a "free" course, so long as consent is informed and up front, what's the problem?
Then why does it use the engineer's 'j' for complex numbers instead of maths' and physics' 'i'?
I agree that humans can sometimes panic and not make the best choices but I'd argue that this is why you want a combination of human and computer. If the computer knows what is happening and how to fix it then it should communicate it to the pilot (assuming there is time) so the pilot does not panic. For the Hudson river situations where there is either no pre-programmed situation or what there is is clearly not going to work the pilot can use his/her ingenuity and come up with something better.
This way you get the strengths of both human and computer rather than just having one or the other by themselves.
Why do programmers start counting at zero?
I expect that this is going to annoy a lot of Fortran "programmers".
This will still be automated in good time though, as software won't panic.
Nor will it cope with an unexpected situation that it has not been programmed for and given that this describes most serious emergencies nowadays I'm not sure turning the plane over to a computer is the best course of action. Use computers to provide guidance and help to a human pilot to reduce error but leave a pilot in charge in case you get into a situation that the computer has not been programmed for.
Of course, a much simpler solution might be a trap door in front of the door...
I believe you were joking but look at the 2013 winner of the Ignobel prize for safety engineering.
Try a few decades in the future. After that the data will be gone - the dye in writable CDs and DVDs does not last beyond that and even then when stored in ideal conditions.
The critical determining factor is the particle mass. The power radiated goes as 1/m^5 (IIRC) so a particle with a mass ten times smaller will radiate energy 100,000 times faster when accelerated. This means that for electrons any higher energy machine will be linear whereas for protons, with 500,000 times the mass, circular machines will be the winner for a long time to come.
We don't yet know. Isn't that terribly exciting?
Speaking as a particle physicist that's not really right. There is a lot of physics which we need to explain the universe but which we have not yet found. The one looming largest is Dark Matter. While we do not know, and cannot accurately predict, what a VLHC will find it is not true to say that we do not have a shopping list of what it might find - Dark Matter currently being on the top of that list. Even if the LHC solves that mystery first (we turn on in March 2015 with twice the energy so fingers crossed!) one possible solution is something called Supersymmetry. In such a case it is unlikely that the LHC will have enough energy to see all of SUSY and so the VLHC would be one way to find the missing sparticles.
Of course this is jumping the gun considerably since we have not found any new physics yet! If we find something like SUSY then there VLHC will receive a boost and may well get built next. However if there is no new physics found at the LHC my guess is that the next collider will be an electron-positron linear collider. This will do precision studies of the Higgs which is a good way to get hints at the next energy scale for new physics. Indeed it is the results from LEP (the e+/e- collider that predated the LHC) which told us that the Higgs mass was below 1TeV/c2 and so set the energy scale for the LHC.
Muon colliders are a great concept - but they are difficult REALLY difficult.
Indeed - one of the problems is a neutrino beam so intense it is dangerous. This is a problem because there is no way to shield it you just have to let it disperse.
Why aren't doctors allowed to give people sugar pills instead of antibiotics? Of if they are allowed, why aren't they actively doing it...
Some do. My dad used to do this with obstreperous patients who would not take no for an answer when antibiotics and their ineffectiveness on viruses were explained to them. He was honest though. He did not call them antibiotics but rather he would prescribe a regular dose multi-vitamin with a fancy sounding name and tell them that this was the best treatment for them given their condition (usually just a bad cold).
The patients were not exactly happy with not getting an antibiotic but at the same time at least felt they were getting something to treat their condition. On the flip side my dada felt that he has not lied to the patient and, given that they had a virus, he was still giving them the best treatment option both for themselves and humanity at large. However my dad was a doctor years ago (and is now beyond the reach of any human courts!) and in this increasingly litigious world I can well imagine that doctors think twice about doing this. Even if it is in everyone's best interests they don't want to be dragged into some long lasting, expensive court battle just to prove it which is likely what would happen if a patient ever found out they had been prescribed simple vitamins.
Is it really the employee's responsibility to remember each and every password and keep records of them indefinitely after employment? Should I be required by law to produce network diagrams?
No - if he forgot the passwords then it would be tough luck for the former employer. However what this idiot did was try to extort money before he would divulge the passwords. That's not the same thing.
Ever tried physics? It's all about applying rules to situations you have never seen before and it is not just restricted to carbon-based molecules.
Kinda sorta. Their existence has been inferred by experimental results.
The existence of every single particle we know of has been inferred from experimental results: neutrinos are no different. So the correct answer is "Yes, neutrinos have been detected" unless you are going to use the same uncertainty for things like the quarks, muons, Higgs boson etc. etc.