As it happens, my son went to Clifton Elementary, and the fix was definitely in on its closures. The pretty solid feeling against closure on the part of the Clifton Community was ignored, and a lot of people in the town feel railroaded. (The presumption is that some real estate developer wants the prime real estate the school sits on, and spread enough money around to make it happen.)
How do we reconcile this view with stories that cybercrime rivals the global drug trade in size? One recent estimate placed annual direct consumer losses at $114 billion worldwide. It turns out, however, that such widely circulated cybercrime estimates are generated using absurdly bad statistical methods, making them wholly unreliable.
Having dug into some of the statistics publicized for the drug war, I would say that merely having "absurdly bad statistical methods" could be an improvement. In the drug war, statistics are frequently more or less made up. Remember, the people funding this research have a vested interest and a strong desire to have the numbers come out the way they want them to and, no surprise, they generally do. There are whole institutes, such as the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, whose statistics I regard as consistently untrustworthy.
I would not be too surprised to see the same dynamic, and even the same people, involved in the cybercrime statistics game.
The only time a corporation can be trusted is when you have a contract (and, sometimes, not even then). Otherwise, no.
A man or woman can give you their word, and may (or may not) be believed. A corporation cannot, as whatever is said can be changed totally, not least when the people at the top change.
The MER are resolutely geological. That is not even an issue. Ask Steve Squyers what MER is doing, and he will say "geological traverses on Mars." He said exactly those words in plenary at the last LPSC2012. That's what they were intended to do, and that is what Opportunity is still doing.
There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe in calling things are they are. MER were (and are) a great pair of rovers, and Mars science is vastly better for them being there. If it was up to me I would have sent 4 or 6 more to Mars, 2 in each launch window, and it is a weakness of the present system that no PI could possibly propose such a repeat mission and expect to get it funded. Our knowledge of Mars's geology is very scanty, and there are plenty of places, i.e., perhaps half the planet, that have sufficient surface pressure to land one on and could use a look see.
But, as I said, there has been no surface biological investigation of Mars since Viking. The questions raised by the LR experiment could have been answered, by the use of samples of two chiralities, but haven't been. That could have been sold to the public, but wasn't. Call it what you will, but to me it represents a pretty spectacular failure of imagination.
The biological experimental protocols did not mention the mass spectrometer at all.
That's pretty much unsurprising. I bet if you go back and look you'll find they didn't mention the weather instruments or the cameras either. Each set of instruments is going to have it's own protocols.
Totally irrelevant to my argument.
To this day, I feel this was a violation of the pre-launch protocols for the biological experiments. If the mass spectrometer trumped all, why fly the biologicals?
Because NASA was following basic scientific procedures and guarding against false positives.
By not following the prelaunch scientific procedures, and making it up as they went along. I don't have very much trouble with doing that, by the way, where I have trouble is assuming (and broadcasting) a certainty where in reality none exists.
Because of the way this was handled, this problem has never been investigated further on Mars. We have had successful 4 lander / rovers since then, but no biological tests whatsoever.
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
None of the subsequent NASA landers have had the slightest biological component. MER was so resolutely geological it didn't even have any meteorological instruments. Mars Science Laboratory (currently on the way) will (skycrane willing) finally deliver a mass spectrometer and gas chromatograph which might begin to answer the questions raised by Viking. Pardon me for pointing out what a frakking long time 30 years has been.
(And seriously, have you been living in a cave the three plus decades? This is all pretty much common knowledge if you've been following Mars exploration for the last fifteen odd years rather than nursing a thirty year old grudge.)
Oh, I follow it. I was just at the LPSC2012, for example. With all due respect, I don't think this is common knowledge among readers of slashdot, which is where I happen to be posting at this instant.
Look, IMHO the planetary science community shot itself in the foot by being overly cautious after Viking. And for what? Do you, for example, look down on cosmologists because they are much more inclined to extrapolate from incomplete and confusing data? Part of life is to learn from your mistakes, and I regard this as a big one I wish someone would learn something from.
Toxic to you, maybe. But, you probably aren't Martian. Who knows with "them."
I believe that the argument is that the perchlorates are right at the surface (due to UV) and life could be safely residing a mm or so below, in the soil or rocks.
This was done using radioactive decay to generate random numbers (i.e., something like counting geiger counter clicks), I believe first in the 1950's.
I also seem to remember that the first units weren't entirely random, due to dead times in the counters or something similar. Random in theory does not mean random in practice, and I am not sure I would trust a billion dollar deal relying on a one-time-pad generated by the ANU quantum random number generator, at least until it had been through a lot of testing.
Been done (many times, in fact), and the results are inconclusive. We don't really know what's in the soil, so it's hard to be certain that results which mimic (or not) the Viking results are actually due to chemistry on Mars, or wishful thinking on Earth.
By the way, perchlorates may have destroyed any organics in the soil in the heating required to analyze it in the Viking mass spectrometer, so some think that the perchlorates are a reason to rethink the earlier negative conclusions.
Not to argue the science involved, but wouldn't the act of heating the soil to sterilize it effectively change the chemistry, too? For instance, if the soil contained frozen gases or water, those could have reacted in the "biological tests" but, once heated, they would not be present in the control tests. In the 70s it was thought that there wasn't water on mars, so would the tests have been designed to account for water?
It was indeed the argument, after the fact, that the unknown surface chemistry was changed by heat.
It is a mistake to think that in the '70s it was thought that there was no water on Mars. By the time of Viking, with Valles Marineris and other channels, it seemed likely that there was a substantial amount, at least in the past. Also, there was even overnight "snow" (frost, really) at the Viking 2 site, and IIRC they concluded that that was likely water. The biological tests included "wet" and "dry" experiments, as some thought that water might be poisonous to any surface life used to its absence.
On Mars, the air is very thin, so the surface can be at +20 C, while 1 meter up a thermometer registers -20 C. The Viking met data always recorded very cold temperatures, but orbiter IR data indicated that the surface at the landers actually did get above freezing during the day. The Viking 1 and 2 surface pressure was above the triple point of water, at least some of the time, so liquid water would be stable on the surface, at least on a warm afternoon in the right time of year.
Each Viking Lander had 3 biological experiments, for a total of 6.
I worked on Viking (but not on the biological experiments), and before the mission landed I received a bunch of NASA PR type hype, including the protocols for the biological experiments. These were each (at a very high level) of the same form -
- collect a soil sample - add something to it (such as water or nutrients) - see what happens
and, as a control, repeat this with another sample after "sterilizing" it (by heating it).
At the one bit level, a successful biological result would be something positive happens to the active sample, the same something doesn't happen to the control.
The biological experimental protocols did not mention the mass spectrometer at all.
In the actual case, each biological experiment (all 6) returned a positive result for biology "at the one bit level." The Labeled Release (LR) experiment was more or less what they were expecting, the other 2 experiments (in each case) did something, just not what was expected. In every case, the control runs had a much smaller or no reaction.
I, following this, actually expected the Viking project to announce that life had probably been found, with positive (if not fully understood) results from the 6 biological trials. Instead, they announced a negative result, based on not finding organic matter with the mass spectrometer. The conclusion was that the positive results were due to some (unknown, and still unknown) inorganic chemistry of the surface, which went over like a wet balloon.
To this day, I feel this was a violation of the pre-launch protocols for the biological experiments. If the mass spectrometer trumped all, why fly the biologicals? If the biological experiments were worth doing, why were they not worth investigating further? Gilbert Levin (the Labeled Release experiment PI), for example, has always felt that the LR experiment detected biology. Is that not worthy of a followup ?
Instead, this was announced in such a fashion as to make it as uninteresting as possible and the Mars science budget was cut to the point that, in the early 1980's, it was almost impossible for a student to get a job in the field. The JPL Mars crew was broken up, let go or reassigned (I was at JPL at the time, I saw it happen). Basically, a generation was lost (Viking Lander 1 died, from a lack of funding, in 1982; the next successful US mission to Mars was 1997).
Because of the way this was handled, this problem has never been investigated further on Mars. We have had successful 4 lander / rovers since then, but no biological tests whatsoever. I must say that, since then, I have not had a lot of respect for the "conventional wisdom" of the Mars science community. In my book, this was blown, and blown badly, with serious damage to the course of science.
> What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a > single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made:
On NPR it was pointed out that when Einstein published his work on relativity, similar "Statement by X number of scientists" statements came out. His reply, which I think is an absolutely appropriate and correct application of "the stink test" was simply to point out that in the scientific realm, it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something. Science is not an exercise in consensus.
Actually, those statements came out later, during the Nazi period, and the 100 scientists were all Germans (i.e., either Nazi or subject to Nazi "persuasion").
"With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled." Funny how the chicken little's so easily dismiss all the climate scientists that disagree with the claim that the sky is falling and demonize anyone who attempts to point them out.
Largely because they don't exist. Hundred's of well-known climate scientists? Bullshit. Tens of thousands of other scientists? More Bullshit. And, even if they had them, science is not driven by voting.
Oh, and in the climate community, this is regarded as settled.
It is sad that respectable scientists and engineers would debase themselves in this fashion. I frankly suspect that they are being used by someone, but it doesn't excuse it.
They have a launch pad in Kwajalein, and I have talked to Elon Musk about it. It is too far from the US (or anywhere else) and has too many security restrictions to be a good commercial spaceport.
These scanners were intended to provide Michael Chertoff with job security. Any security gain for the traveling public is incidental at best and probably negligable in practice. But, from Chertoff's standpoint, I think they are working just fine.
Spaceport America is for air launched (and fairly small) sub-orbital space planes. They would never get approval to launch a multistage missile from there, when a downrange accident might take out, say, a good chunk of Houston or Dallas.
If you look at the map (actually, a globe is easier for this), the minimum energy trajectory from Brownsville takes you through the Straits of Florida, and directly over the Bahamas, which would be a natural location to recover the first stage. (Anyone with the slightest knowledge of spacecraft dynamics knows that their video, which shows the first stage returning to Cape Canaveral, is disinformation. The first stage will be recovered downrange.)
That trajectory would avoid any inhabited land before the Bahamas, passing South of Miami and North of Havana, and could probably get FAA approval.
Another poster suggested Puerto Rico, which is unlikely as it would require both more energy and (worse) an overflight of Cuba. Soon after the revolution, an errant Atlas missile (launched from Cape Canaveral) landed in Cuba and killed a few cows. The Cuban government was, shall we say, unappreciative, and since then no missile trajectories have been permitted over Cuba. I don't see the FAA / Department of State making an exception for Space X, and I don't think ITAR regulations make it necessary.
This is not too different from what other academics do - it's quite common for academics to leave with a USB stick full of the stuff they were working on, which they use in their next gig.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about bribes? I would assume everything is at least nominally legal; that's how it is generally done.
As it happens, my son went to Clifton Elementary, and the fix was definitely in on its closures. The pretty solid feeling against closure on the part of the Clifton Community was ignored, and a lot of people in the town feel railroaded. (The presumption is that some real estate developer wants the prime real estate the school sits on, and spread enough money around to make it happen.)
Having dug into some of the statistics publicized for the drug war, I would say that merely having "absurdly bad statistical methods" could be an improvement. In the drug war, statistics are frequently more or less made up. Remember, the people funding this research have a vested interest and a strong desire to have the numbers come out the way they want them to and, no surprise, they generally do. There are whole institutes, such as the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, whose statistics I regard as consistently untrustworthy.
I would not be too surprised to see the same dynamic, and even the same people, involved in the cybercrime statistics game.
The only time a corporation can be trusted is when you have a contract (and, sometimes, not even then). Otherwise, no.
A man or woman can give you their word, and may (or may not) be believed. A corporation cannot, as whatever is said can be changed totally, not least when the people at the top change.
The MER are resolutely geological. That is not even an issue. Ask Steve Squyers what MER is doing, and he will say "geological traverses on Mars." He said exactly those words in plenary at the last LPSC2012. That's what they were intended to do, and that is what Opportunity is still doing.
There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe in calling things are they are. MER were (and are) a great pair of rovers, and Mars science is vastly better for them being there. If it was up to me I would have sent 4 or 6 more to Mars, 2 in each launch window, and it is a weakness of the present system that no PI could possibly propose such a repeat mission and expect to get it funded. Our knowledge of Mars's geology is very scanty, and there are plenty of places, i.e., perhaps half the planet, that have sufficient surface pressure to land one on and could use a look see.
But, as I said, there has been no surface biological investigation of Mars since Viking. The questions raised by the LR experiment could have been answered, by the use of samples of two chiralities, but haven't been. That could have been sold to the public, but wasn't. Call it what you will, but to me it represents a pretty spectacular failure of imagination.
That's pretty much unsurprising. I bet if you go back and look you'll find they didn't mention the weather instruments or the cameras either. Each set of instruments is going to have it's own protocols.
Totally irrelevant to my argument.
Because NASA was following basic scientific procedures and guarding against false positives.
By not following the prelaunch scientific procedures, and making it up as they went along. I don't have very much trouble with doing that, by the way, where I have trouble is assuming (and broadcasting) a certainty where in reality none exists.
That's because they've changed the strategy for looking for life - away from "pin the tail on the donkey" (blind stabs in the dark like Viking) and towards more basic chemical research. Biological experiments are sexy, but they're meaningless without the proper foundation of knowledge to design them and to interpret their results.
None of the subsequent NASA landers have had the slightest biological component. MER was so resolutely geological it didn't even have any meteorological instruments. Mars Science Laboratory (currently on the way) will (skycrane willing) finally deliver a mass spectrometer and gas chromatograph which might begin to answer the questions raised by Viking. Pardon me for pointing out what a frakking long time 30 years has been.
Oh, I follow it. I was just at the LPSC2012, for example. With all due respect, I don't think this is common knowledge among readers of slashdot, which is where I happen to be posting at this instant.
Look, IMHO the planetary science community shot itself in the foot by being overly cautious after Viking. And for what? Do you, for example, look down on cosmologists because they are much more inclined to extrapolate from incomplete and confusing data? Part of life is to learn from your mistakes, and I regard this as a big one I wish someone would learn something from.
Toxic to you, maybe. But, you probably aren't Martian. Who knows with "them."
I believe that the argument is that the perchlorates are right at the surface (due to UV) and life could be safely residing a mm or so below, in the soil or rocks.
This was done using radioactive decay to generate random numbers (i.e., something like counting geiger counter clicks), I believe first in the 1950's.
I also seem to remember that the first units weren't entirely random, due to dead times in the counters or something similar. Random in theory does not mean random in practice, and I am not sure I would trust a billion dollar deal relying on a one-time-pad generated by the ANU quantum random number generator, at least until it had been through a lot of testing.
Been done (many times, in fact), and the results are inconclusive. We don't really know what's in the soil, so it's hard to be certain that results which mimic (or not) the Viking results are actually due to chemistry on Mars, or wishful thinking on Earth.
By the way, perchlorates may have destroyed any organics in the soil in the heating required to analyze it in the Viking mass spectrometer, so some think that the perchlorates are a reason to rethink the earlier negative conclusions.
Not to argue the science involved, but wouldn't the act of heating the soil to sterilize it effectively change the chemistry, too? For instance, if the soil contained frozen gases or water, those could have reacted in the "biological tests" but, once heated, they would not be present in the control tests. In the 70s it was thought that there wasn't water on mars, so would the tests have been designed to account for water?
It was indeed the argument, after the fact, that the unknown surface chemistry was changed by heat.
It is a mistake to think that in the '70s it was thought that there was no water on Mars. By the time of Viking, with Valles Marineris and other channels, it seemed likely that there was a substantial amount, at least in the past. Also, there was even overnight "snow" (frost, really) at the Viking 2 site, and IIRC they concluded that that was likely water. The biological tests included "wet" and "dry" experiments, as some thought that water might be poisonous to any surface life used to its absence.
On Mars, the air is very thin, so the surface can be at +20 C, while 1 meter up a thermometer registers -20 C. The Viking met data always recorded very cold temperatures, but orbiter IR data indicated that the surface at the landers actually did get above freezing during the day. The Viking 1 and 2 surface pressure was above the triple point of water, at least some of the time, so liquid water would be stable on the surface, at least on a warm afternoon in the right time of year.
Each Viking Lander had 3 biological experiments, for a total of 6.
I worked on Viking (but not on the biological experiments), and before the mission landed I received a bunch of NASA PR type hype, including the protocols for the biological experiments. These were each (at a very high level) of the same form -
- collect a soil sample
- add something to it (such as water or nutrients)
- see what happens
and, as a control, repeat this with another sample after "sterilizing" it (by heating it).
At the one bit level, a successful biological result would be something positive happens to the active sample, the same something doesn't happen to the control.
The biological experimental protocols did not mention the mass spectrometer at all.
In the actual case, each biological experiment (all 6) returned a positive result for biology "at the one bit level." The Labeled Release (LR) experiment was more or less what they were expecting, the other 2 experiments (in each case) did something, just not what was expected. In every case, the control runs had a much smaller or no reaction.
I, following this, actually expected the Viking project to announce that life had probably been found, with positive (if not fully understood) results from the 6 biological trials. Instead, they announced a negative result, based on not finding organic matter with the mass spectrometer. The conclusion was that the positive results were due to some (unknown, and still unknown) inorganic chemistry of the surface, which went over like a wet balloon.
To this day, I feel this was a violation of the pre-launch protocols for the biological experiments. If the mass spectrometer trumped all, why fly the biologicals? If the biological experiments were worth doing, why were they not worth investigating further? Gilbert Levin (the Labeled Release experiment PI), for example, has always felt that the LR experiment detected biology. Is that not worthy of a followup ?
Instead, this was announced in such a fashion as to make it as uninteresting as possible and the Mars science budget was cut to the point that, in the early 1980's, it was almost impossible for a student to get a job in the field. The JPL Mars crew was broken up, let go or reassigned (I was at JPL at the time, I saw it happen). Basically, a generation was lost (Viking Lander 1 died, from a lack of funding, in 1982; the next successful US mission to Mars was 1997).
Because of the way this was handled, this problem has never been investigated further on Mars. We have had successful 4 lander / rovers since then, but no biological tests whatsoever. I must say that, since then, I have not had a lot of respect for the "conventional wisdom" of the Mars science community. In my book, this was blown, and blown badly, with serious damage to the course of science.
> What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a
> single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made:
On NPR it was pointed out that when Einstein published his work on relativity, similar "Statement by X number of scientists" statements came out. His reply, which I think is an absolutely appropriate and correct application of "the stink test" was simply to point out that in the scientific realm, it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something. Science is not an exercise in consensus.
Actually, those statements came out later, during the Nazi period, and the 100 scientists were all Germans (i.e., either Nazi or subject to Nazi "persuasion").
"With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled."
Funny how the chicken little's so easily dismiss all the climate scientists that disagree with the claim that the sky is falling and demonize anyone who attempts to point them out.
Largely because they don't exist. Hundred's of well-known climate scientists? Bullshit. Tens of thousands of other scientists? More Bullshit. And, even if they had them, science is not driven by voting.
Oh, and in the climate community, this is regarded as settled.
It is sad that respectable scientists and engineers would debase themselves in this fashion. I frankly suspect that they are being used by someone, but it doesn't excuse it.
My advice is, don't lie. Try out the app and, if you like it, promote it, but don't lie about it.
They had a whopping 20 neurons (nodes).
Wouldn't this be more like a model of insect intelligence, say from about 250 million years ago ? Maybe it could explain the evolution of bees.
And what do you think would be a better use of $ 80 billion - fusion power, or so many more months of spending on our bloated Department of Defense ?
No, it's because land is cheaper there, and people (i.e., people elsewhere) are less likely to notice if things get blown up.
They have a launch pad in Kwajalein, and I have talked to Elon Musk about it. It is too far from the US (or anywhere else) and has too many security restrictions to be a good commercial spaceport.
These scanners were intended to provide Michael Chertoff with job security. Any security gain for the traveling public is incidental at best and probably negligable in practice. But, from Chertoff's standpoint, I think they are working just fine.
Spaceport America is for air launched (and fairly small) sub-orbital space planes. They would never get approval to launch a multistage missile from there, when a downrange accident might take out, say, a good chunk of Houston or Dallas.
No, "From the Earth to the Moon" had a launch facility in Florida, not too far from the Cape.
If you look at the map (actually, a globe is easier for this), the minimum energy trajectory from Brownsville takes you through the Straits of Florida, and directly over the Bahamas, which would be a natural location to recover the first stage. (Anyone with the slightest knowledge of spacecraft dynamics knows that their video, which shows the first stage returning to Cape Canaveral, is disinformation. The first stage will be recovered downrange.)
That trajectory would avoid any inhabited land before the Bahamas, passing South of Miami and North of Havana, and could probably get FAA approval.
The Bahamas are not on the list of ITAR restricted countries and there are ~ 58 airstrips there, including 3 closed ones, so SpaceX could presumably find somewhere suitable to land the first stage.
Another poster suggested Puerto Rico, which is unlikely as it would require both more energy and (worse) an overflight of Cuba. Soon after the revolution, an errant Atlas missile (launched from Cape Canaveral) landed in Cuba and killed a few cows. The Cuban government was, shall we say, unappreciative, and since then no missile trajectories have been permitted over Cuba. I don't see the FAA / Department of State making an exception for Space X, and I don't think ITAR regulations make it necessary.
This is not too different from what other academics do - it's quite common for academics to leave with a USB stick full of the stuff they were working on, which they use in their next gig.
Yeah, because they wrote it.
I think that you are talking about Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), which are by means restricted to DARPA, but are pretty ubiquitous in aerospace.