Your initial point was incorrect. Corporations do not have a moral or legal obligation to minimize tax payments. Corporations can be governed with many goals: growth, efficiency, and even social good. How you measure "shareholder value" is up to a company to decide; it's a company policy, not a law or universally accepted moral code. Most companies measure value with the stock price.
Apple is a great example of how this works, their tax avoidance did not maximize shareholder value, and was the incorrect business decision.
Apple stock is tanking right now. People did not invest in Apple because of their great tax avoidance, but because of growth opportunities. Holding that money overseas simply to avoid taxes was the worst thing to do.
You can save 40% by avoiding taxes, but your opportunity cost is a potential 1000% by failing to invest enough in growth when you have an opportunity to get a 10X return (I don't know what Apple's prior internal return on investment is, but it's probably been much higher than 10X).
The responsibility Apple had to it's shareholders was to maximize growth. By keeping international profits overseas and maintaining a very large pile of locked away cash, Apple harmed shareholders, as that money was not useful for what investors wanted Apple to do. At the least, they could have spent it on development internationally (and lose out on the US tax credit for R&D...).
Apple may have saved 40% on a fraction of their profits in tax avoidance, but the company overall has lost 20% value as investors have realized that Apple has failed to continue growing. This is an astounding loss of value during a time when their competitors' stocks are up sharply. Shareholders feel Apple has made very bad decisions and expressed that in the traditional way: selling stock (not lawsuits).
If Apple had invested that money in R&D, would their watch be more marketable, or could they have sent it through FDA trials (like many people thought they would), or maybe they would have beat Microsoft to the "Surface" market, or not be playing catch-up in the automated car market...
It's really hard to guess at the time what the right answer is. That's why guys like Jobs are so valued. In retrospect, we know with certainty that Apple's decisions were bad. With a falling stock price and stalled growth, tax avoidance by sequestering money is a negative thing.
You're making a lot of statements that are simply not true, much as we wish they were. Simply wanting this all to be true isn't enough. This is not a political fight or an argument to be won, the physics and economics actually has to be worked out properly, or this will just be another alternative engine fad that comes and goes.
More than half the cost of fueling a gas car is tax. We're still pretty far away from parity, never mind electric cars being cheaper. Right now electric cars are financially supported by the state, while gas cars pay for the roads (more than $1billion/year just in state gas tax in California goes to road maintenance, and that's not enough). When electric cars are robust enough to start paying for road maintenance at the same rate/mile as gas, then we'll be able to make fair comparisons.
The way MPGe is calculated is also not helpful for encouraging real progress. Upstream energy costs are not accounted for, and there is massive dependence on the price of oil, gas and coal in the cost/kWh of electricity. If we're just going to shove the problem of fossil fuel burning off on someone else (i.e. a power plant), we're not actually solving any environmental, economic, or political problems, we're just sticking our head in the ground and imagining that everything is better.
Ok, this is very simple, and something all the developers here need to know.
If you're reporting medical information in the US, you need all of the processes you use to generate that health information to go through the FDA before you ADVERTISE you can do it (yes, your website is an advertisement). Fitness is fine any time, go crazy with that. Medical information, only after FDA approval. If you think you may be doing something health related, go find a regulatory consultant and find out what you need to do before you get a shut down letter from the FDA!
For Enlis to write up a document essentially kicking 23andme for adhering to the law, after witnessing what happened to 23andme (and now Theranos) is the height of stupidity. 23andme was shut down, and it's executives were headed toward fraud indictments when the heroic efforts of their regulatory team saved them. That's what's coming for Enlis after this article.
It may be a year or two before the FDA gets to them, but this will be a black mark that will be extraordinarily hard for them to escape. They have just screwed themselves and their investors. The FDA-23andme saga has provided the biotech space with crystal clear instructions on what is necessary to report medical info from genetic data, and Enlis just danced right over those regulations. Very, very, stupid for them to post this article.
Yeah, ok, see that one's pretty hard for me to believe. I don't even believe they've tested for that yet.
They're getting a bunch of non-linear mixing and don't know what's coming out or where, or they're getting heating somewhere unusual,l or something like that. One way or another, there are photons coming off that thing as a result of powering up that magnetron.
Second, why is this controversial? Light (including microwaves) has momentum, and we absolutely use it to move things around. We have been using optical tweezers in labs for a long time. Without including pressure from photons, we wouldn't understand stars.
If you told me that a magnetron and horn antenna produced absolutely no impulse at all, I wouldn't believe you.
This is VERY interesting. How do you maximize thrust? But it's not shaking the foundations of physics.
I'm a scientist, I've benefited greatly from government grants for basic research. I've also worked in the government administering basic and applied research grants. There's a lot of truth to what he's saying.
The economic return of much (not all!) of basic research is near zero.
For those of you who keep pointing out the internet, you need to read this guy's thesis and look at the timeline of internet commercialization. Basic research investment did not lead directly to internet profitability. It took decades of further tinkering with business models before that happened.
Again, a lot of what we do in science does not result in anything resembling a return on investment. Nor should return on investment be the justification for basic research. Defending this idea that science = economic progress is absurd. This is not what science is.
Why do we do science? For commercial gain alone? As a scientist, I find that idea insulting. We "do" science not to invent profitable gadgets, but to advance human knowledge and understanding of the universe. It's the job of economists to study the optimum distribution of resources, and they are scientifically correct to point out the "waste" of basic science. Also, fuck the economists.
IF science has resulted in a lower than expected return on investment in the last couple decades (it has), it is not because we're funding too much science. Scientific advances have failed to lead to expected commercialization because we have not sufficiently supported development and commercialization efforts. There's nothing sinister here. It's just that certain fields have sucked up dominating amounts of tech investment over the last several decades (ahem, internet), and left not quite enough attention for everyone else. Now that the folks who profited from that are turning to other fields, we can all expect to see many more scientifically advanced products.
The top 15 pharmaceutical companies and the top 10 medical device companies all spend significantly more than $1b per year on R&D. Google is high profile because it's NOT in pharma or medical devices, but adding $1b per year to the overall industrial expenditure on R&D in these areas is not disruptive. It makes an interesting story to imagine that Google is coming in and stealing all the academics away, but that's not reality.
Currently, you have to prove that your target user can actually use your product without making mistakes. Make things too complicated in any way, and you're required to have a specialist on hand to turn the thing on. You don't decide what "too complicated" is, the FDA does.
The current solutions for maximum usability (hard coded passwords, no changing of passwords) are likely the result of existing regulation, not laziness on the part of medical device makers.
Medical device clinical trials already cost millions of dollars and take years to get through. Add bad actors to this, and you're further raising the bar for introduction of new technology.
Medical device makers should focus on medical utility. Requiring via trials (FDA) that the device makers take responsibility for physical security (i.e. passwords for local access) or cybersecurity will kill off any progress toward electronic integration of medical data.
Raise money for a startup company for a while, and you'll see that wealthy people are very often asking each other for money. Many wealthy people are "deal" obsessed. They want access to the hottest investment opportunities, the most impactful philanthropy, they want to be insiders at the newest, trendiest companies... and they want their connections to co-invest with them.
Look at those long wood beams... perfect, very pretty, and also expensive! Is there a house behind it? Very little on the porch is covered on their website, and it doesn't show up on any of their "sustainability" materials. Meanwhile, it features in half of the pictures on the competition website.
If they want to point out how they're using local materials and these new techniques, maybe get rid of that massive redwood "porch" that is neither local, inexpensive, nor innovative.
As the author of TFA points out, there are other academic disciplines that study the role of humans in economics and finance. Economics itself is not the study of the human world, it is a study of markets and distributions of resources. It's the assumption that economics has anything to say about REAL markets and resources that is hubris.
This is like a physicist trying to tell you how to drive your car using vector diagrams and inertia calculations. Just because someone may understand the underlying rules governing a system doesn't mean they understand the system.
We need economics to be approached as a hard science. We also need to keep economists away from policy and management roles unless they've shown a talent for good policy and management.
Not everything is as easy as we'd like, or works out the way it logically "should."
The bottom line is that with all of these "revolutionary" technologies, what should be possible and what can actually get done right now are often very, very different things. When an expert says it's going to take "centuries" to solve a scientific problem, it's because it might take many generations to do the necessary re-formations of the approach, the culture, the interface with other scientific disciplines, and the expectations of the public.
Neuroscientists may not know how to frame their problems, and they may not know how to accept help with that from people outside of medicine. It may be 20 years before mainstream neuroscience gets that far. I'm a nanotechnologist. It took us 10 years to figure out we weren't doing mechanical engineering, another 20 years to figure out how to talk with chemists, and another 10 to start talking effectively again with engineers. Some of this stuff is just slow.
If you're at Berkeley, your students are not the main product of academic life. Direct research funding provides more university administrative funds than student fees at just about every UC, and the schools are structured around that economic reality. The guy we're talking about here is an astronomer; there hasn't been growth in professional astronomy jobs in 40 years. Overproduction of astronomers is not a legacy anyone is shooting for here.
At high levels, there are serious dollars involved. UCSD and USC are in a legal battle over a single professor who controls over $100 million in research funds. He employs somewhere around 30 full time staff in his lab, and funds collaborations around the country. Professors like that don't teach classes on the same schedule as others, they pay their departments to have someone else do it when convenient. School sue each other to determine who has the right to employ these guys.
Just like in the business world, it's these high flying folks who are the most difficult. It's not being brilliant that enables inappropriate behavior, it's being powerful. No one is going to worry about dismissing an assistant professor who crosses a line.
Does a school give up millions in overhead income and fire staff because a star faculty member gets anonymous complaints? Which causes a greater loss in prestige: losing an internationally recognized research program or the articles being written about this guy at Berkeley?
That's nice, but which of those are actually commercial? Most of the "products" featured in that article are one-off research or demonstration tools.
I've made something just like that. A few years back I made a "commercial" hazardous gas sensing system using CNT transistors, and installed it in an industrial chemical facility. This was based on technology I'd worked on as a postdoc which had been picked up by a Silicon Valley company and further invested in by DARPA. That's how things are supposed to work, right? It was a great technology demonstration, but too expensive to actually compete in the market. The project died as soon as we installed that first system.
The problem is not quality of the nanotubes, or material inhomogeneity (crystallographicly pure CNTs have been available for many years now), nor is it the price of CNTs. The limiting cost comes from the manufacturing processes that must be altered from exiting standards to accommodate CNTs. So... demo devices and prototypes are really not interesting anymore, we've had 20 years of those. We need to be seeing investment in foundries and factories designed to handle this material as an input. That's not going to happen at a university, and it's not likely to come from IBM or any of the other companies that have turned the nanotech PR-granting cycle into a cottage industry. If you're a commercial scientist being funded with grants, you have to be very careful not to get caught up in that death-spiral. The particular paper that this Slashdot summary is about is simply a slight alteration of science and techniques first developed (by IBM!) more than 10 years ago (they switched out titanium for molybdenum while keeping the same device geometry and non-scalable fabrication techniques). It's nice to see CNTs get attention again in a top tier journal, but this is not yet commercially relevant work.
We should be interested when IBM says they're setting up a production line to test manufacture, package, and integrate into assembly some thousands of these chips.
Medical devices are highly regulated. Clinical trials are extremely expensive to run, and the FDA can demand new clinical trials every time you push through a software update. At the very least, you have to file with the FDA (for every single software update) a document demonstrating that nothing substantial was changed in the operating of the device.
This is exactly the kind of threat analysis I would expect from someone who worked as an undergraduate researcher for 13 months in a biolab focused on renewable energy. Go ahead and parse that thought a bit.
How about this: Make sure that when we train someone with all the skills necessary to weaponize biology, we actually have something productive for them to do. It's much better to try to encourage positive behavior from our scientists through incentives (i.e. encourage good jobs, not just endless training grants) rather than plan on them becoming bitter, crazy terrorists.
It's very difficult to have a self sustaining station without a water source. Air and waste recycling, atmospheric seals, etc are not perfect. Like the ISS, you become dependent on deliveries of raw material from somewhere else. It's difficult, but MUCH easier to create a long term habitation somewhere where you can get even just a little water.
As many other posters have said, the moon (which has a little water in some places) would be a much better starting point.
The real way to do this is to follow the actual idea behind the much-derided galaxy program. It would be much more scalable to create a self-sustaining system of small stations at lagrange points (points of local gravitational stability) in the Earth-Moon system. Figuring out how to do that allows us to more practically live in different parts of the solar system.
Department of Labor required international staffing agencies to pay a minimum of $61k for developers in Dayton. These guys (also in Dayton) paid $40k. Do the students know this was going on? Did the academic senate know this was going on? The staffing company paid the university to make this contract happen. Wow...
Why do universities have an exemption for these rules at all?
What a terrible problem: your organization dedicated to furthering human knowledge was too successful and now has to train a new crop of employees.
Just to be really clear, places like Carnegie Mellon are not education focused institutions, they're research focused. We are absolutely not talking about people with a passion for classroom work. In the early 1990s, the federal government removed the requirements and incentives for contractors to dedicate significant budget to basic research. In many cases, new funding for research would only be available to universities. The idea was to shift all basic research to the univerisities. The people we're talking about are the folks who would have been employed at a large company doing government funded R&D in the 1980s. Now, they're doing government funded R&D at universities. For about 5-6 years in the late 90s, that worked well. Since the dot com bust, it has not...
The amount of spending on academic basic research in the US exceeded the total amount spent on startup companies in the US every year from 2000 to 2013. That's a horrible inversion of capital that implied the university-first research system was failing. It's about time we saw some of this work turn the corner into commercialization, along with a restoration of economic sanity to R&D.
Examples like this show that our new system may be viable long term.
Science IS creative. This idea that we're all logic and consensus is silly. You make the most progress by looking for overlooked issues and un-thought thoughts. Being good at public speaking doesn't hurt either. (Being able to do arithmetic in your head, or rattle off facts like a living encyclopedia... not so useful in science.)
Every scientist I know would like to indulge in a crafty hobby. The key word is indulge. Whether you have time or not, you usually feel like you don't.
I've taken my Surface Pro 1 places I would have never thought to take a laptop. It's my primary business computer as well as my electronic notebook in the cleanroom and the lab (no case other than the occasional clean ziplock style bag - it's very useful for me to be able to seal my work laptop in a plastic bag for a few hours). It's also my vacation gaming machine... and I have a toddler who sometimes manages to get his hands on it. I've gone through 3 broken smart phones in the time I've had my Surface. I'm starting to see some connection issues with the display port and the power connector. It has occasional bluetooth and networking issues. The onboard SSHD is annoyingly small. The speakers are really terrible which is a problem for video conferencing. I think many of these issues were solved in later versions, but I haven't (yet) felt the need to replace it.
I've had business grade laptops break a hinge, crack a screen, burn out a video card, or a completely fail to charge at the same age as this computer.
The Surface was initially marketed as a gimmicky consumer device, but it's surprisingly robust.
Slashdot Mirror
Your initial point was incorrect. Corporations do not have a moral or legal obligation to minimize tax payments. Corporations can be governed with many goals: growth, efficiency, and even social good. How you measure "shareholder value" is up to a company to decide; it's a company policy, not a law or universally accepted moral code. Most companies measure value with the stock price.
Apple is a great example of how this works, their tax avoidance did not maximize shareholder value, and was the incorrect business decision.
Apple stock is tanking right now. People did not invest in Apple because of their great tax avoidance, but because of growth opportunities. Holding that money overseas simply to avoid taxes was the worst thing to do.
You can save 40% by avoiding taxes, but your opportunity cost is a potential 1000% by failing to invest enough in growth when you have an opportunity to get a 10X return (I don't know what Apple's prior internal return on investment is, but it's probably been much higher than 10X).
The responsibility Apple had to it's shareholders was to maximize growth. By keeping international profits overseas and maintaining a very large pile of locked away cash, Apple harmed shareholders, as that money was not useful for what investors wanted Apple to do. At the least, they could have spent it on development internationally (and lose out on the US tax credit for R&D...).
Apple may have saved 40% on a fraction of their profits in tax avoidance, but the company overall has lost 20% value as investors have realized that Apple has failed to continue growing. This is an astounding loss of value during a time when their competitors' stocks are up sharply. Shareholders feel Apple has made very bad decisions and expressed that in the traditional way: selling stock (not lawsuits).
If Apple had invested that money in R&D, would their watch be more marketable, or could they have sent it through FDA trials (like many people thought they would), or maybe they would have beat Microsoft to the "Surface" market, or not be playing catch-up in the automated car market...
It's really hard to guess at the time what the right answer is. That's why guys like Jobs are so valued. In retrospect, we know with certainty that Apple's decisions were bad. With a falling stock price and stalled growth, tax avoidance by sequestering money is a negative thing.
Really? Grant review committees I've been on handed out a couple million dollars worth of bets... I mean, grants.
We already have institutionalized team based gambling to help decide which science to pursue. It's called "grant review committees."
You're making a lot of statements that are simply not true, much as we wish they were. Simply wanting this all to be true isn't enough. This is not a political fight or an argument to be won, the physics and economics actually has to be worked out properly, or this will just be another alternative engine fad that comes and goes.
More than half the cost of fueling a gas car is tax. We're still pretty far away from parity, never mind electric cars being cheaper. Right now electric cars are financially supported by the state, while gas cars pay for the roads (more than $1billion/year just in state gas tax in California goes to road maintenance, and that's not enough). When electric cars are robust enough to start paying for road maintenance at the same rate/mile as gas, then we'll be able to make fair comparisons.
The way MPGe is calculated is also not helpful for encouraging real progress. Upstream energy costs are not accounted for, and there is massive dependence on the price of oil, gas and coal in the cost/kWh of electricity. If we're just going to shove the problem of fossil fuel burning off on someone else (i.e. a power plant), we're not actually solving any environmental, economic, or political problems, we're just sticking our head in the ground and imagining that everything is better.
Ok, this is very simple, and something all the developers here need to know.
If you're reporting medical information in the US, you need all of the processes you use to generate that health information to go through the FDA before you ADVERTISE you can do it (yes, your website is an advertisement). Fitness is fine any time, go crazy with that. Medical information, only after FDA approval. If you think you may be doing something health related, go find a regulatory consultant and find out what you need to do before you get a shut down letter from the FDA!
For Enlis to write up a document essentially kicking 23andme for adhering to the law, after witnessing what happened to 23andme (and now Theranos) is the height of stupidity. 23andme was shut down, and it's executives were headed toward fraud indictments when the heroic efforts of their regulatory team saved them. That's what's coming for Enlis after this article.
It may be a year or two before the FDA gets to them, but this will be a black mark that will be extraordinarily hard for them to escape. They have just screwed themselves and their investors. The FDA-23andme saga has provided the biotech space with crystal clear instructions on what is necessary to report medical info from genetic data, and Enlis just danced right over those regulations. Very, very, stupid for them to post this article.
Yeah, ok, see that one's pretty hard for me to believe. I don't even believe they've tested for that yet.
They're getting a bunch of non-linear mixing and don't know what's coming out or where, or they're getting heating somewhere unusual,l or something like that. One way or another, there are photons coming off that thing as a result of powering up that magnetron.
First, I am a physicist.
Second, why is this controversial? Light (including microwaves) has momentum, and we absolutely use it to move things around. We have been using optical tweezers in labs for a long time. Without including pressure from photons, we wouldn't understand stars.
If you told me that a magnetron and horn antenna produced absolutely no impulse at all, I wouldn't believe you.
This is VERY interesting. How do you maximize thrust? But it's not shaking the foundations of physics.
This is just a (solid) insulator with some unusually ordered electrons.
Oh, and a lot of marketing.
I'm a scientist, I've benefited greatly from government grants for basic research. I've also worked in the government administering basic and applied research grants. There's a lot of truth to what he's saying.
The economic return of much (not all!) of basic research is near zero.
For those of you who keep pointing out the internet, you need to read this guy's thesis and look at the timeline of internet commercialization. Basic research investment did not lead directly to internet profitability. It took decades of further tinkering with business models before that happened.
Again, a lot of what we do in science does not result in anything resembling a return on investment. Nor should return on investment be the justification for basic research. Defending this idea that science = economic progress is absurd. This is not what science is.
Why do we do science? For commercial gain alone? As a scientist, I find that idea insulting. We "do" science not to invent profitable gadgets, but to advance human knowledge and understanding of the universe. It's the job of economists to study the optimum distribution of resources, and they are scientifically correct to point out the "waste" of basic science. Also, fuck the economists.
IF science has resulted in a lower than expected return on investment in the last couple decades (it has), it is not because we're funding too much science. Scientific advances have failed to lead to expected commercialization because we have not sufficiently supported development and commercialization efforts. There's nothing sinister here. It's just that certain fields have sucked up dominating amounts of tech investment over the last several decades (ahem, internet), and left not quite enough attention for everyone else. Now that the folks who profited from that are turning to other fields, we can all expect to see many more scientifically advanced products.
The top 15 pharmaceutical companies and the top 10 medical device companies all spend significantly more than $1b per year on R&D. Google is high profile because it's NOT in pharma or medical devices, but adding $1b per year to the overall industrial expenditure on R&D in these areas is not disruptive. It makes an interesting story to imagine that Google is coming in and stealing all the academics away, but that's not reality.
What's the goal of medical device software?
Currently, you have to prove that your target user can actually use your product without making mistakes. Make things too complicated in any way, and you're required to have a specialist on hand to turn the thing on. You don't decide what "too complicated" is, the FDA does.
The current solutions for maximum usability (hard coded passwords, no changing of passwords) are likely the result of existing regulation, not laziness on the part of medical device makers.
Medical device clinical trials already cost millions of dollars and take years to get through. Add bad actors to this, and you're further raising the bar for introduction of new technology.
Medical device makers should focus on medical utility. Requiring via trials (FDA) that the device makers take responsibility for physical security (i.e. passwords for local access) or cybersecurity will kill off any progress toward electronic integration of medical data.
Hey guys, you're being trolled.
Raise money for a startup company for a while, and you'll see that wealthy people are very often asking each other for money. Many wealthy people are "deal" obsessed. They want access to the hottest investment opportunities, the most impactful philanthropy, they want to be insiders at the newest, trendiest companies... and they want their connections to co-invest with them.
Look at those long wood beams... perfect, very pretty, and also expensive! Is there a house behind it? Very little on the porch is covered on their website, and it doesn't show up on any of their "sustainability" materials. Meanwhile, it features in half of the pictures on the competition website.
If they want to point out how they're using local materials and these new techniques, maybe get rid of that massive redwood "porch" that is neither local, inexpensive, nor innovative.
As the author of TFA points out, there are other academic disciplines that study the role of humans in economics and finance. Economics itself is not the study of the human world, it is a study of markets and distributions of resources. It's the assumption that economics has anything to say about REAL markets and resources that is hubris.
This is like a physicist trying to tell you how to drive your car using vector diagrams and inertia calculations. Just because someone may understand the underlying rules governing a system doesn't mean they understand the system.
We need economics to be approached as a hard science. We also need to keep economists away from policy and management roles unless they've shown a talent for good policy and management.
Not everything is as easy as we'd like, or works out the way it logically "should."
The bottom line is that with all of these "revolutionary" technologies, what should be possible and what can actually get done right now are often very, very different things. When an expert says it's going to take "centuries" to solve a scientific problem, it's because it might take many generations to do the necessary re-formations of the approach, the culture, the interface with other scientific disciplines, and the expectations of the public.
Neuroscientists may not know how to frame their problems, and they may not know how to accept help with that from people outside of medicine. It may be 20 years before mainstream neuroscience gets that far. I'm a nanotechnologist. It took us 10 years to figure out we weren't doing mechanical engineering, another 20 years to figure out how to talk with chemists, and another 10 to start talking effectively again with engineers. Some of this stuff is just slow.
If you're at Berkeley, your students are not the main product of academic life. Direct research funding provides more university administrative funds than student fees at just about every UC, and the schools are structured around that economic reality. The guy we're talking about here is an astronomer; there hasn't been growth in professional astronomy jobs in 40 years. Overproduction of astronomers is not a legacy anyone is shooting for here.
At high levels, there are serious dollars involved. UCSD and USC are in a legal battle over a single professor who controls over $100 million in research funds. He employs somewhere around 30 full time staff in his lab, and funds collaborations around the country. Professors like that don't teach classes on the same schedule as others, they pay their departments to have someone else do it when convenient. School sue each other to determine who has the right to employ these guys.
Just like in the business world, it's these high flying folks who are the most difficult. It's not being brilliant that enables inappropriate behavior, it's being powerful. No one is going to worry about dismissing an assistant professor who crosses a line.
Does a school give up millions in overhead income and fire staff because a star faculty member gets anonymous complaints? Which causes a greater loss in prestige: losing an internationally recognized research program or the articles being written about this guy at Berkeley?
That's nice, but which of those are actually commercial? Most of the "products" featured in that article are one-off research or demonstration tools.
I've made something just like that. A few years back I made a "commercial" hazardous gas sensing system using CNT transistors, and installed it in an industrial chemical facility. This was based on technology I'd worked on as a postdoc which had been picked up by a Silicon Valley company and further invested in by DARPA. That's how things are supposed to work, right? It was a great technology demonstration, but too expensive to actually compete in the market. The project died as soon as we installed that first system.
The problem is not quality of the nanotubes, or material inhomogeneity (crystallographicly pure CNTs have been available for many years now), nor is it the price of CNTs. The limiting cost comes from the manufacturing processes that must be altered from exiting standards to accommodate CNTs. So... demo devices and prototypes are really not interesting anymore, we've had 20 years of those. We need to be seeing investment in foundries and factories designed to handle this material as an input. That's not going to happen at a university, and it's not likely to come from IBM or any of the other companies that have turned the nanotech PR-granting cycle into a cottage industry. If you're a commercial scientist being funded with grants, you have to be very careful not to get caught up in that death-spiral. The particular paper that this Slashdot summary is about is simply a slight alteration of science and techniques first developed (by IBM!) more than 10 years ago (they switched out titanium for molybdenum while keeping the same device geometry and non-scalable fabrication techniques). It's nice to see CNTs get attention again in a top tier journal, but this is not yet commercially relevant work.
We should be interested when IBM says they're setting up a production line to test manufacture, package, and integrate into assembly some thousands of these chips.
Medical devices are highly regulated. Clinical trials are extremely expensive to run, and the FDA can demand new clinical trials every time you push through a software update. At the very least, you have to file with the FDA (for every single software update) a document demonstrating that nothing substantial was changed in the operating of the device.
This is exactly the kind of threat analysis I would expect from someone who worked as an undergraduate researcher for 13 months in a biolab focused on renewable energy. Go ahead and parse that thought a bit.
How about this: Make sure that when we train someone with all the skills necessary to weaponize biology, we actually have something productive for them to do. It's much better to try to encourage positive behavior from our scientists through incentives (i.e. encourage good jobs, not just endless training grants) rather than plan on them becoming bitter, crazy terrorists.
It's very difficult to have a self sustaining station without a water source. Air and waste recycling, atmospheric seals, etc are not perfect. Like the ISS, you become dependent on deliveries of raw material from somewhere else. It's difficult, but MUCH easier to create a long term habitation somewhere where you can get even just a little water.
As many other posters have said, the moon (which has a little water in some places) would be a much better starting point.
The real way to do this is to follow the actual idea behind the much-derided galaxy program. It would be much more scalable to create a self-sustaining system of small stations at lagrange points (points of local gravitational stability) in the Earth-Moon system. Figuring out how to do that allows us to more practically live in different parts of the solar system.
Department of Labor required international staffing agencies to pay a minimum of $61k for developers in Dayton. These guys (also in Dayton) paid $40k. Do the students know this was going on? Did the academic senate know this was going on? The staffing company paid the university to make this contract happen. Wow...
Why do universities have an exemption for these rules at all?
What a terrible problem: your organization dedicated to furthering human knowledge was too successful and now has to train a new crop of employees.
Just to be really clear, places like Carnegie Mellon are not education focused institutions, they're research focused. We are absolutely not talking about people with a passion for classroom work. In the early 1990s, the federal government removed the requirements and incentives for contractors to dedicate significant budget to basic research. In many cases, new funding for research would only be available to universities. The idea was to shift all basic research to the univerisities. The people we're talking about are the folks who would have been employed at a large company doing government funded R&D in the 1980s. Now, they're doing government funded R&D at universities. For about 5-6 years in the late 90s, that worked well. Since the dot com bust, it has not...
The amount of spending on academic basic research in the US exceeded the total amount spent on startup companies in the US every year from 2000 to 2013. That's a horrible inversion of capital that implied the university-first research system was failing. It's about time we saw some of this work turn the corner into commercialization, along with a restoration of economic sanity to R&D.
Examples like this show that our new system may be viable long term.
Science IS creative. This idea that we're all logic and consensus is silly. You make the most progress by looking for overlooked issues and un-thought thoughts. Being good at public speaking doesn't hurt either. (Being able to do arithmetic in your head, or rattle off facts like a living encyclopedia... not so useful in science.)
Every scientist I know would like to indulge in a crafty hobby. The key word is indulge. Whether you have time or not, you usually feel like you don't.
I've taken my Surface Pro 1 places I would have never thought to take a laptop. It's my primary business computer as well as my electronic notebook in the cleanroom and the lab (no case other than the occasional clean ziplock style bag - it's very useful for me to be able to seal my work laptop in a plastic bag for a few hours). It's also my vacation gaming machine... and I have a toddler who sometimes manages to get his hands on it. I've gone through 3 broken smart phones in the time I've had my Surface. I'm starting to see some connection issues with the display port and the power connector. It has occasional bluetooth and networking issues. The onboard SSHD is annoyingly small. The speakers are really terrible which is a problem for video conferencing. I think many of these issues were solved in later versions, but I haven't (yet) felt the need to replace it.
I've had business grade laptops break a hinge, crack a screen, burn out a video card, or a completely fail to charge at the same age as this computer.
The Surface was initially marketed as a gimmicky consumer device, but it's surprisingly robust.