Curiosity is just confirming the results of the Viking entry science neutral atmospheric composition experiment (different from the mass spectrometer operated on the surface). It's very nice to have this nailed down, but I don't think it changes anything.
The metric used in the original article is not public outrage, but press outrage. The press is fickle, their attention wanders, and they are easily distracted by trivia. What counts is the public outrage, and I think there is plenty of that. It builds slow, and can simmer a long time, but there is plenty of it out there.
Most of the westerns I have seen have no trouble getting the science right. Nor, for that matter, do romantic comedies or crime dramas.
The difference, of course, is that everyone is fairly familiar with the physics of bullets and the fluid dynamics of smoke in the wind. Once space travel reaches that level of penetration, the movies will have no trouble getting it right too.
I have done a number of meetings remotely, and it is just not the same (nor is it better).
Of course, it is cheaper, and if it is a question of attending remotely, or not at all, I go remotely.
It is a much better experience with immersive full room telepresence, but part of the reason for that is that you actually have to go to a telepresence unit so that, even if you are just down the hall, you are much more focused on the meeting.
I thought that Ms Clinton was being fatuous, but after reading the 229 comments (so far) on this thread (almost entirely about irrelevant political BS, Obama, McCain, Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi!!!, etc.), I now see she was correct, so here goes.
There is always a tension between safety and security, but in the cold war (and before) spying was mostly a matter of spying on the Russian (or Chinese, or Nazi, or...) military / government, and there is a pretty clean distinction between most US citizens, and the military / government of foreign powers. In 1973 or 1983, there was an expectation that, if you didn't mess with such things, you wouldn't be of any interest. (Yes, I know about chaos and cointelpro, etc., but those were seen as clear abuses.) The line was clear, and seemed to be fairly well supported on all sides.
Now, the safety / security tension is much worse, as the perceived threat is not governmental, but some vague amorphous Islamic menace, and no one is inherently safe, so the system has gone into a "snarf down everything and sort it out later" mode which is incredibly dangerous and has to be stopped. How to do that, and still maintain adequate security is the issue, and yes, indeed, we do need an adult conversation about it.
Ah, yes, you're probably right about the silicon mems.
I would also worry about how much variation is random, and how much is due to manufacturing peculiarities - i.e., are all phones with senors from factory X correlated? All phones made on the same day? Such correlations are likely to reduce sensitivity over all (as the actual random error would be smaller).
Note that this analysis applies to the "inverse problem" (identifying all phones in a given area). This ID could still help in the "forward problem" (the classic private detective one, where I want to find individual X in a crowded city). Even if the error rate was one in a million, in a city of (say) 5 million phones, it might be very useful to be able to say "X is right now probably near one of these 5 cell towers, and is probably not near any of the others." It would be like the police knowing a bank robber is driving a blue Chevy Volt with out-of-state plates. There could be several of those around, but it does narrow the search parameter space a lot.
If you look at the graph in the article (which talks about flipping the phone, but seems to actually be measurements of flat vs standing vertical), the variations are constrained to be (in the Sz axis) from 0.994 to 1.004, or a variation of 0.008, and the Sz repeatability is worse than 0.00025. So, this would work if the number of phones was ~ 30, but would be "confusion limited" for a larger number. Likewise, in the Oz axis the (different ?!?) units run from -0.2 to 0.4, a variation of 0.6, and the uncertainty is > 0.02, so the number of phones that could be distinguished is ~ 30. Combine these two axes, and no more than ~ 30^2 or 900 phones could be distinguished. There are obviously more than 900 phones in the world.
Even if all 3 sensors are independent and equally sensitive, that only gets you the ability to track 900^3 or ~ 700 million devices, which is a lot, but still likely not enough, as the distribution of errors is not likely to be uniform, but gaussian or some other distribution, and that will lower the effective sensitivity, as would any correlation between the sensor errors.
Note also that quartz crystals (I believe that these are piezoelectric sensors) are notorious not only for being individually imperfect, but also for drifting with time and (especially) temperature, which might also substantially reduce repeatability.
So, I suspect this is not likely to work well in practice.
What this could do is make the rare phone (one with by chance a particularly bad sensor) easily identifiable...
The W3C used to be a member (i.e., company) driven organization, but in 2012 they took a large donation from the Internet Society and were basically brought under ISOCs umbrella (they were running out of money):
“The Internet Society’s generous donation has fueled deep organizational change at W3C,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. “We have strengthened our business model and broadened participation to accelerate the development of the Open Web Platform technology that is transforming industry.”
In 2011, one of the ways in which W3C reached out to new stakeholders was through new Community Groups and Business Groups. A W3C Community Group is an open forum, without fees, where Web developers and other stakeholders develop specifications, hold discussions, develop test suites, and connect with W3C's international community of Web experts. A W3C Business Group gives innovators that want to have an impact on the development of the Web in the near-term, a vendor-neutral forum for collaborating with like-minded stakeholders, including W3C Members and non-Members. In just four months, more than fifty groups have been created or proposed.
This does not sound like "deep organizational change at W3C," or particularly open in nature. I think that interested parties should comment / complain to the ISOC Board of Trustees.
On top of that, the search results were clearly delineated from the ads, so you could trust the results.
If you believe that that is sufficient to trust the results, I guess you haven't been searching much recently. Google makes (AFAICT) no attempt to weed out click-farm type fake vendors. (They have to know who they are, as they sell ads to them, and have enough data to figure out who is just shuffling customers off to another site.) That makes searching for something almost hopeless unless the big vendors carry it, and, if Amazon carries it, you don't need Google to find it.
I don't normally use google for search, but I fired it up and entered "fur lined leather gloves" (see above) as a trial.
On the first page, "above the fold" (i.e., what I can see without scrolling), there are
11 ads 1 dialog box for some new feature I don't care about and 1 actual search result, for Amazon.
As I am aware that Amazon is a company that sells many different things, and as ads are not search, Google search actually returned nothing interesting to me at all. As always, YMMV, but this seems entirely typical to me in the new world of search.
I don't use Google search, so Watson isn't going to overthrow it for me, but it does come to mind that there is more to running a search engine than being able to do a good job answering one person's questions. In other words, does it scale?
Isn't a "brief event of that magnitude" also known as a lightening strike ? In other words, the reporter is actually comparing a Kindle with a lightening strike. (Surprise! The lightening strike wins!) I bet a Kindle is also less likely to explode than a hand-grenade, which has about the same level of relevance.
"Clueless" is an inadequate word to describe this level of misinformation.
Even if you know perfectly well what "airplane mode" is, if the plane is about to take off and you remember that your phone is in your briefcase, in the overheard storage compartment 5 rows from your seat*, do you ask to abort the takeoff so you can get up and turn it off? I didn't think so.
I bet every commercial airline flight takes off with at least one fully activated phone.
* Has happened to me, when I am in a rush and stick my phone in the briefcase going through security.
I don't think you understand how Congress actually works. Many, many, pieces of legislation are due to one or two Representatives or Senators (as I believe is the case here); they author the text, and it goes through in some larger piece of legislation unchanged. Now, the President and both Houses do have some shared responsibility, as they did sign off on it, but that is in the same way that Linus Torvalds is responsible for errors in (say) Linux wireless card device drivers. Ultimately he signs off on the upgrade, but if you want to fix a problem in such low-level code you go to the guy who actually wrote the code in question.
Apparently, this was part of the 2013 Appropriations bill and has be be renewed to stay in force, so anyone has a chance to contact their representative and try and get it changed.
From the article
A portion of a new 2014 spending bill, authored by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), would require IT vendors to certify their independence from the Chinese government before they can sell to select U.S. federal agencies. It’s the second time Wolf has backed such language over the objections of critics who say it could have harmful political and economic side effects.
Also, if I did live in his district, I would certainly contact him and tell him what I think, regardless of what I thought about what he thinks; that's how representative democracy works.
This is the responsibility of Frank Wolf, R-VA, of the Virginia 10th District. If you should live in the 10th District (in N. Virginia), contact him and let him know what you think about this.
I have met him several times, but have no idea what he really thinks he is accomplishing here.
I am puzzled. MIT is acting like most corporations: when in trouble, bury your opposition in paper. Has anyone resigned, or been fired? That's how you know a large entity wants to make sure higher-ups understand what's expected of them*; anything less is just window dressing.
BTW, it would be simply courtesy to give family members a chance to look at such a report before it goes public, which is what I presume that MIT did here. I at least would give both MIT and John Schwartz that much respect.
*Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.
The willful stupidity here is incredibly massive, and I have no sympathy at all for those propagating it.
What part of "shutdown" do the tea party types not understand? The Government operates at the pleasure of the Congress, as expressed in the yearly budget. If the Government has no budget, it cannot operate (except for a few pieces that run on fees or other direct income). Whether it makes financial sense to close any particular part in the absence of a budget is irrelevant.
There is this fiction, that everyone agrees to accept, that there are "essential" parts that have to keep going, such as much of the DOD, but, really, those should be shut too. What is essential is set by each agency well in advance of any shutdown; if the Congress does not like any particular agency's policy, in this or any other matter, they can and should hold hearings about it. What is of course really going on here is a fairly pathetic attempt to deflect the proper blame by bleating about parking lots being closed and other irrelevancies, when a simple open vote in the House would fix this within a single afternoon.
Nope, no room for that, even in the "science" community.
Conform or be squelched.
Scientists, in my experience, typically respect dissident thought. (I am not going to say that good dissident ideas are always embraced, but they are generally listened to if there is serious thought behind them.) Dissident speech devoid of thought, on the other hand, is generally ignored in science. (It is, after all, not a democracy.)
Slashdot Mirror
Curiosity is just confirming the results of the Viking entry science neutral atmospheric composition experiment (different from the mass spectrometer operated on the surface). It's very nice to have this nailed down, but I don't think it changes anything.
As opposed to TEPCO / Fukushima, which is apparently run by Homer Simpson, and appears to have no enforcement at all.
The metric used in the original article is not public outrage, but press outrage. The press is fickle, their attention wanders, and they are easily distracted by trivia. What counts is the public outrage, and I think there is plenty of that. It builds slow, and can simmer a long time, but there is plenty of it out there.
Most of the westerns I have seen have no trouble getting the science right. Nor, for that matter, do romantic comedies or crime dramas.
The difference, of course, is that everyone is fairly familiar with the physics of bullets and the fluid dynamics of smoke in the wind. Once space travel reaches that level of penetration, the movies will have no trouble getting it right too.
I have done a number of meetings remotely, and it is just not the same (nor is it better).
Of course, it is cheaper, and if it is a question of attending remotely, or not at all, I go remotely.
It is a much better experience with immersive full room telepresence, but part of the reason for that is that you actually have to go to a telepresence unit so that, even if you are just down the hall, you are much more focused on the meeting.
I thought that Ms Clinton was being fatuous, but after reading the 229 comments (so far) on this thread (almost entirely about irrelevant political BS, Obama, McCain, Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi!!!, etc.), I now see she was correct, so here goes.
There is always a tension between safety and security, but in the cold war (and before) spying was mostly a matter of spying on the Russian (or Chinese, or Nazi, or...) military / government, and there is a pretty clean distinction between most US citizens, and the military / government of foreign powers. In 1973 or 1983, there was an expectation that, if you didn't mess with such things, you wouldn't be of any interest. (Yes, I know about chaos and cointelpro, etc., but those were seen as clear abuses.) The line was clear, and seemed to be fairly well supported on all sides.
Now, the safety / security tension is much worse, as the perceived threat is not governmental, but some vague amorphous Islamic menace, and no one is inherently safe, so the system has gone into a "snarf down everything and sort it out later" mode which is incredibly dangerous and has to be stopped. How to do that, and still maintain adequate security is the issue, and yes, indeed, we do need an adult conversation about it.
Ah, yes, you're probably right about the silicon mems.
I would also worry about how much variation is random, and how much is due to manufacturing peculiarities - i.e., are all phones with senors from factory X correlated? All phones made on the same day? Such correlations are likely to reduce sensitivity over all (as the actual random error would be smaller).
Note that this analysis applies to the "inverse problem" (identifying all phones in a given area). This ID could still help in the "forward problem" (the classic private detective one, where I want to find individual X in a crowded city). Even if the error rate was one in a million, in a city of (say) 5 million phones, it might be very useful to be able to say "X is right now probably near one of these 5 cell towers, and is probably not near any of the others." It would be like the police knowing a bank robber is driving a blue Chevy Volt with out-of-state plates. There could be several of those around, but it does narrow the search parameter space a lot.
If you look at the graph in the article (which talks about flipping the phone, but seems to actually be measurements of flat vs standing vertical), the variations are constrained to be (in the Sz axis) from 0.994 to 1.004, or a variation of 0.008, and the Sz repeatability is worse than 0.00025. So, this would work if the number of phones was ~ 30, but would be "confusion limited" for a larger number. Likewise, in the Oz axis the (different ?!?) units run from -0.2 to 0.4, a variation of 0.6, and the uncertainty is > 0.02, so the number of phones that could be distinguished is ~ 30. Combine these two axes, and no more than ~ 30^2 or 900 phones could be distinguished. There are obviously more than 900 phones in the world.
Even if all 3 sensors are independent and equally sensitive, that only gets you the ability to track 900^3 or ~ 700 million devices, which is a lot, but still likely not enough, as the distribution of errors is not likely to be uniform, but gaussian or some other distribution, and that will lower the effective sensitivity, as would any correlation between the sensor errors.
Note also that quartz crystals (I believe that these are piezoelectric sensors) are notorious not only for being individually imperfect, but also for drifting with time and (especially) temperature, which might also substantially reduce repeatability.
So, I suspect this is not likely to work well in practice.
What this could do is make the rare phone (one with by chance a particularly bad sensor) easily identifiable...
The W3C used to be a member (i.e., company) driven organization, but in 2012 they took a large donation from the Internet Society and were basically brought under ISOCs umbrella (they were running out of money) :
This does not sound like "deep organizational change at W3C," or particularly open in nature. I think that interested parties should comment / complain to the ISOC Board of Trustees.
That's my "revised Turing test" for AI : We will know that AI is successful when an AI is placed in charge of a major corporation.
I think that that is much better than a test based on whether a machine can replicate human social interaction protocols.
On top of that, the search results were clearly delineated from the ads, so you could trust the results.
If you believe that that is sufficient to trust the results, I guess you haven't been searching much recently. Google makes (AFAICT) no attempt to weed out click-farm type fake vendors. (They have to know who they are, as they sell ads to them, and have enough data to figure out who is just shuffling customers off to another site.) That makes searching for something almost hopeless unless the big vendors carry it, and, if Amazon carries it, you don't need Google to find it.
You do realize that those days are long gone?
I don't normally use google for search, but I fired it up and entered "fur lined leather gloves" (see above) as a trial.
On the first page, "above the fold" (i.e., what I can see without scrolling), there are
11 ads
1 dialog box for some new feature I don't care about and
1 actual search result, for Amazon.
As I am aware that Amazon is a company that sells many different things, and as ads are not search,
Google search actually returned nothing interesting to me at all. As always, YMMV, but this seems entirely typical to me in the new world of search.
And, if you malform a search string, you will get an error along the lines of
AEKJ6952 : Illegal Register Overflow
I don't use Google search, so Watson isn't going to overthrow it for me, but it does come to mind that there is more to running a search engine than being able to do a good job answering one person's questions. In other words, does it scale?
Isn't a "brief event of that magnitude" also known as a lightening strike ? In other words, the reporter is actually comparing a Kindle with a lightening strike. (Surprise! The lightening strike wins!) I bet a Kindle is also less likely to explode than a hand-grenade, which has about the same level of relevance.
"Clueless" is an inadequate word to describe this level of misinformation.
Even if you know perfectly well what "airplane mode" is, if the plane is about to take off and you remember that your phone is in your briefcase, in the overheard storage compartment 5 rows from your seat*, do you ask to abort the takeoff so you can get up and turn it off? I didn't think so.
I bet every commercial airline flight takes off with at least one fully activated phone.
* Has happened to me, when I am in a rush and stick my phone in the briefcase going through security.
I don't think you understand how Congress actually works. Many, many, pieces of legislation are due to one or two Representatives or Senators (as I believe is the case here); they author the text, and it goes through in some larger piece of legislation unchanged. Now, the President and both Houses do have some shared responsibility, as they did sign off on it, but that is in the same way that Linus Torvalds is responsible for errors in (say) Linux wireless card device drivers. Ultimately he signs off on the upgrade, but if you want to fix a problem in such low-level code you go to the guy who actually wrote the code in question.
Apparently, this was part of the 2013 Appropriations bill and has be be renewed to stay in force, so anyone has a chance to contact their representative and try and get it changed.
From the article
Also, if I did live in his district, I would certainly contact him and tell him what I think, regardless of what I thought about what he thinks; that's how representative democracy works.
I don't live in his district.
This is the responsibility of Frank Wolf, R-VA, of the Virginia 10th District. If you should live in the 10th District (in N. Virginia), contact him and let him know what you think about this.
I have met him several times, but have no idea what he really thinks he is accomplishing here.
I am puzzled. MIT is acting like most corporations: when in trouble, bury your opposition in paper. Has anyone resigned, or been fired? That's how you know a large entity wants to make sure higher-ups understand what's expected of them*; anything less is just window dressing.
BTW, it would be simply courtesy to give family members a chance to look at such a report before it goes public, which is what I presume that MIT did here. I at least would give both MIT and John Schwartz that much respect.
*Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.
The willful stupidity here is incredibly massive, and I have no sympathy at all for those propagating it.
What part of "shutdown" do the tea party types not understand? The Government operates at the pleasure of the Congress, as expressed in the yearly budget. If the Government has no budget, it cannot operate (except for a few pieces that run on fees or other direct income). Whether it makes financial sense to close any particular part in the absence of a budget is irrelevant.
There is this fiction, that everyone agrees to accept, that there are "essential" parts that have to keep going, such as much of the DOD, but, really, those should be shut too. What is essential is set by each agency well in advance of any shutdown; if the Congress does not like any particular agency's policy, in this or any other matter, they can and should hold hearings about it. What is of course really going on here is a fairly pathetic attempt to deflect the proper blame by bleating about parking lots being closed and other irrelevancies, when a simple open vote in the House would fix this within a single afternoon.
If these conversations occur on mailing lists (I am aware of a number), they are typically either not open lists, or under strong moderation.
Nope, no room for that, even in the "science" community.
Conform or be squelched.
Scientists, in my experience, typically respect dissident thought. (I am not going to say that good dissident ideas are always embraced, but they are generally listened to if there is serious thought behind them.) Dissident speech devoid of thought, on the other hand, is generally ignored in science. (It is, after all, not a democracy.)