As much as a ship like the Enterprise is important to the Navy (and it's hard to find one which is more important to the modern Navy), what is truly amazing about modern carriers are the way the people on them work together.
If you ever have a chance to cruise on a carrier, go for it. Watching launch and recovery of planes is amazing, particularly at night. People die if someone makes a small mistake, stands in the wrong place, leaves a tool or spare nut lying around, or sets the pressure on an arresting cable just a little off. So they don't do anything wrong. Several hundred people working together flawlessly is really something to see.
Criticizing the water use of grain crops is sure to get a rise out of midwesterners.
I would never imagine that someone would claim that a professor of water management in the Netherlands needed to learn more about water in earth science. That is highly entertaining, thank you.
If you're good at something, enough that someone will pay you to do it, then go for it.
We need some people with the "hacker" mentality, they're like the blueberries in a blueberry muffin. Sure, you can make a muffin without them, but it's just not going to be as good.
The simple translation of this article is: "We made really bad nanowires."
All that's necessary to demonstrate this effect is to create a system with enough defects and scattering (aka doping) to make scattering based resistance much larger than quantum resistance. This isn't something I thought was still under debate.
It may not be marketable (and may date me a bit), but my HS programming class was in BASIC, and the final was to make a game. I don't know what the equivalent would be today (java?), but it was quite useful learning the basics of good programming first and getting an idea of what was easy and what was hard in writing software.
Definitely don't do this at home. Cadmium Selenide is not something you really want to be around if you're not in a lab environment. I would feel fine having undergraduates working in a lab do this, but I wouldn't demo it at a high school, for example.
If you do want to build a solar cell like this at home, try the raspberry solar cell (google it). Very simple to build, uses more common ingredients and tools, doesn't put out as much power, but still educational and fun.
Is this an article or an ad for this company? I hope Slashdot made some money on this one, because there's nothing to this story other than the company name.
Wait, I just told you the guys writing about graphene oxide are misleading you, and your response is that I should read their article? Think about that for a minute.
I am a graphene researcher. I've published my own papers on these materials. I've done my own measurements. The resistance, carrier mobility, noise power and chemical reactivity of reduced graphene oxide is not the same as graphene. That's what their data says too, the press release text from Nature doesn't matter.
In the Nature blurb, there's a bit of discussion at the end that quantum states might all be linked, entangled or not.
In most physics classes, you learn quantum mechanics by calculating the interactions between isolated states. This thought process is natural and useful for certain areas of physics, but you end up worrying about hidden variables and how particles which are essentially in different universes can possibly communicate. This view does not need the wave function to be real, it can just be a statistical tool.
An alternative way of thinking about things is the idea that there are no isolated states (and no measurement apparatus which can exist outside the quantum system). From that point of view, one wave function is sufficient to describe the entire universe, traced back to the big bang. You don't need to worry about spooky action, everything obeys causality just fine assuming the wave function is real. There are some cosmological issues still, and it's not clear such a unified state is possible in an infinite universe.
At least we're starting to all agree wave functions are real and not just a statistical tool.
I've been on both sides of the peer review process many times.
What is the difference between a modern scientist and a pundit? A modern scientist is trained to put their own spin on their work, and there are great professional and financial incentives to demonstrate "success" regardless of the truth.
Have you ever reviewed a paper? When you find a paper which is not fit for publication (let's say some results are obviously faked), what happens? If you can convince an editor to drop such a paper, it will only be picked up by another journal. Now other (honest) people in the field have to fight against published lies when making their case.
My problem is not the occasional dick reviewer, it's the occasional corrupt scientist. This public discussion has done more to expose a corrupt scientist than a peer review ever could.
The critical review you get by publishing in mass media is more complete and honest than what you get in a peer reviewed scientific publication. Why publish in a scientific journal just to say you did it? The peer review and publishing process has ceased to be intellectually valuable and completely fails to separate lies from truth.
Anyone else in science needs to ask themselves this question: is there some journal somewhere which would publish this, even if it was wrong or falsified? I have no idea whether or not this particular researcher's claims are crazy, but I have complete confidence that they could be published in a scientific paper somewhere.
I'm not sure a transistor which relies on low temperature (as in, liquid nitrogen) effects to achieve an off state is actually a viable technology.
Graphene is a wonderful material, but so far the only thing graphene is useful for is an academic research career. We (meaning nano researchers) really need to start being honest with the general media about applications. It's not ok to produce a device to measure a low temperature self-organization effect, then tell the media it's actually a prototype transistor. It's simply not true.
Cuts happen, it's just the way it is, stupid or not. There are a few things we could do to actually improve the research infrastructure in the country and get more out of the money we do have.
Primarily: stop giving out grants, move everything to industry style contracts. It's time to recognize that industrial research labs and academic research labs are operating on the same level. This does a few things: it allows the government to specify public ownership of research results (right now Universities keep their IP and defense contractors do not... odd, yes?), second, it leads to the normalization of lab pay. If you're on a contract, you should be paid the professional rate. Graduate tuition is simply academic administrators picking the government's pocket, things need to move to the cost plus fee model used in industrial contracts. Under a contract, that money would be moved over toward salary and benefits instead, a very good thing. A school could continue with the myth that their "students" are part time workers who require large amounts of "training", but then a government contracting officer could actually require proof of that statement, and details of the "training" being done.
Another thing that would help would be an acknowledgement that not everyone is cut out to run a lab. Long term research positions for people with PhDs should be viable career options rather than "spouse" prizes. There are many, many people out there who are great researchers and great team leaders, but can't write a grant to save their life. We still want those people to succeed at research.
Ok... long enough... essentially, anyone who tells you there isn't waste/fraud/abuse in scientific funding is full of BS, we can still do a lot better. If we're not willing to try to improve, we're going to keep losing money.
Nice logic, but the military is only the 3rd largest piece of the US budget.
The biggest part of the US budget is health care subsidies currently at $793 billion a year.
The second largest part of the budget is social security currently at $701 billion a year.
The military budget is currently at $689 billion a year.
If we cut the $700 billion, 10 year nuclear program (which I think is a good idea), we would save ~$70 billion a year. Our deficit is on the order of $1 trillion a year. If we cut the entire military budget, we would still be running a yearly deficit. So yeah, we should start with the biggest pieces and start whittling down.
This is not an argument for military spending. I agree that it's too high, we don't need 11 carriers for example, but we have to be honest with ourselves about the cost social programs.
It's fine to judge individuals that way, but the days of being "an individual" in cutting edge science are long gone. These days you're part of a team. When you go looking for funding for big projects, agencies want to know how good your team is.
They can make the first cut at "which teams have published in Science or Nature recently" and still have more proposals than they need. Of course, that's a stupid way to make your first cut, and I think that behavior is the root of the problem.
I loved the first two GTAs (the top down, sprite graphics, cartoonish feel). The humor in those games was definitely noticeable. I have a copy (not pirated) around here somewhere. By far, the absolute best thing about those games was the multiplayer. My brother and I spent a lot of time doing stupid stuff in those games.
It was a mistake to go toward more realism and no multiplayer in GTA 3 (or whatever it ended up being called when it rebooted in 3D).
There are a lot of people doing research (defense or anything) who honestly believe their work is real and practical despite fundamental impossibilities. Some of these results end up with glowing reviews here on Slashdot.
In highly technical fields, it's really easy to push BS past just about anyone, even other specialists in your field. The best con artists in science honestly believe their research is real. They run entire companies or research centers. They push their employees extremely hard for positive results, fire employees who can't deliver and turn a blind eye to the signs that the data is misrepresented, oversold or just plain faked.
The same thing happens on the granting/contracting side. They push for results and ignore warning signs. In extreme cases, almost the entire scientific apparatus gets played.
There is a museum in Langley, at CIA headquarters, that contains several of the robots discussed in the article. It's possible AK's skull resides there too. They have a website, but there's a lot in that museum off limits to non-CIA people, perhaps they're still embarrassed by Acoustic Kitty.
The efficiency of photosynthetic proteins is terrible compared to inorganic photocatalysts. The only advantage biological systems have is that the only reasonable room temperature catalyst for photoconversion of carbon dioxide in air is biological. If you only want to make hydrogen, commercial systems already beat the theoretical highest possible efficiency of biology.
I'm sorry to hear that about geology, I was guessing hopefully.
Pharma... there are crazy people in pharma who think everything is great right now (I'm married to one of them). Well, it's their field, but I agree they need to take a better look at the layoffs, outsourcing, and massive numbers of underemployed PhDs.
I see where you're going with that, but I think the root cause is a little more complicated. There is a significant amount of money spent on research, and well... I think "unnecessary" is a more appropriate word than "esoteric"... but that's all semantics, really.
Back to the root problem, I think those investors and other elites believe they have a right to "free" scientific advances. The government pays for thousands of students and postdocs to work in academic labs. The most cost-effective research effort a company can have these days is for a patent lawyer to trawl through academic research papers. Even those well intentioned companies that still run small labs find it more cost effective to buy/steal IP from federally subsidized academic sources.
Businesses get student research essentially for free. Why hire anyone? So we produce lots of students and stretch the time spent "studying" out to 12 to 15 years with the creation of the modern postdoc system. After that, many researchers are burned out and "retire" to a minor teaching position somewhere, never actually "working" in the field they've been training for. The joke is, the field doesn't actually exist anymore, the training is almost all there is. It's all quite a mess.
As far as ditchdigging, I've done that too. At the time, it paid better than science, and I don't imagine that's changed. It's hard to convince a ditchdigger that class credit or paper authorship is worth a 50% pay cut. In a way, they're much smarter than scientists.
I am a scientist. I can teach a clever kid the math and science he needs when he goes to college. I can not teach a kid who has been through a boring, unrealistic grind to like science!
The biggest hurdle to be a scientist is wanting to be one.
Shop classes, fun labs, creative exploration of whatever areas are locally appropriate... I don't care if a physics major comes in having been excited by agriculture science, I want kids who are excited and creative!
That said, we have a glut of scientists in almost every field right now. The labor market has been getting progressively worse for 30 years. If we're going to use these new scientists, uh, usefully, we need to find a way to stimulate the recovery of corporate basic research labs. They used to employ hundreds of professional scientists, now they employ a handful and the country relies on amateur scientists (students) to do the heavy lifting. It's not the most efficient situation. Maybe pharma and geology are the only exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as a ship like the Enterprise is important to the Navy (and it's hard to find one which is more important to the modern Navy), what is truly amazing about modern carriers are the way the people on them work together.
If you ever have a chance to cruise on a carrier, go for it. Watching launch and recovery of planes is amazing, particularly at night. People die if someone makes a small mistake, stands in the wrong place, leaves a tool or spare nut lying around, or sets the pressure on an arresting cable just a little off. So they don't do anything wrong. Several hundred people working together flawlessly is really something to see.
Criticizing the water use of grain crops is sure to get a rise out of midwesterners.
I would never imagine that someone would claim that a professor of water management in the Netherlands needed to learn more about water in earth science. That is highly entertaining, thank you.
If you're good at something, enough that someone will pay you to do it, then go for it.
We need some people with the "hacker" mentality, they're like the blueberries in a blueberry muffin. Sure, you can make a muffin without them, but it's just not going to be as good.
The simple translation of this article is:
"We made really bad nanowires."
All that's necessary to demonstrate this effect is to create a system with enough defects and scattering (aka doping) to make scattering based resistance much larger than quantum resistance. This isn't something I thought was still under debate.
It may not be marketable (and may date me a bit), but my HS programming class was in BASIC, and the final was to make a game. I don't know what the equivalent would be today (java?), but it was quite useful learning the basics of good programming first and getting an idea of what was easy and what was hard in writing software.
I don't know that a workshop is going to do that.
Definitely don't do this at home. Cadmium Selenide is not something you really want to be around if you're not in a lab environment. I would feel fine having undergraduates working in a lab do this, but I wouldn't demo it at a high school, for example.
If you do want to build a solar cell like this at home, try the raspberry solar cell (google it). Very simple to build, uses more common ingredients and tools, doesn't put out as much power, but still educational and fun.
Is this an article or an ad for this company? I hope Slashdot made some money on this one, because there's nothing to this story other than the company name.
Wait, I just told you the guys writing about graphene oxide are misleading you, and your response is that I should read their article? Think about that for a minute.
I am a graphene researcher. I've published my own papers on these materials. I've done my own measurements. The resistance, carrier mobility, noise power and chemical reactivity of reduced graphene oxide is not the same as graphene. That's what their data says too, the press release text from Nature doesn't matter.
Graphene oxide and graphene are two different materials. As different as iron and rust, particularly in electrical properties.
This deliberate misleading of people outside the field by nanotechnology researchers is a major problem and has been for several years.
If we restrict activities in public spaces only to those we approve of, are they still public spaces?
In the Nature blurb, there's a bit of discussion at the end that quantum states might all be linked, entangled or not.
In most physics classes, you learn quantum mechanics by calculating the interactions between isolated states. This thought process is natural and useful for certain areas of physics, but you end up worrying about hidden variables and how particles which are essentially in different universes can possibly communicate. This view does not need the wave function to be real, it can just be a statistical tool.
An alternative way of thinking about things is the idea that there are no isolated states (and no measurement apparatus which can exist outside the quantum system). From that point of view, one wave function is sufficient to describe the entire universe, traced back to the big bang. You don't need to worry about spooky action, everything obeys causality just fine assuming the wave function is real. There are some cosmological issues still, and it's not clear such a unified state is possible in an infinite universe.
At least we're starting to all agree wave functions are real and not just a statistical tool.
I've been on both sides of the peer review process many times.
What is the difference between a modern scientist and a pundit? A modern scientist is trained to put their own spin on their work, and there are great professional and financial incentives to demonstrate "success" regardless of the truth.
Have you ever reviewed a paper? When you find a paper which is not fit for publication (let's say some results are obviously faked), what happens? If you can convince an editor to drop such a paper, it will only be picked up by another journal. Now other (honest) people in the field have to fight against published lies when making their case.
My problem is not the occasional dick reviewer, it's the occasional corrupt scientist. This public discussion has done more to expose a corrupt scientist than a peer review ever could.
Here's one argument:
The critical review you get by publishing in mass media is more complete and honest than what you get in a peer reviewed scientific publication. Why publish in a scientific journal just to say you did it? The peer review and publishing process has ceased to be intellectually valuable and completely fails to separate lies from truth.
Anyone else in science needs to ask themselves this question: is there some journal somewhere which would publish this, even if it was wrong or falsified? I have no idea whether or not this particular researcher's claims are crazy, but I have complete confidence that they could be published in a scientific paper somewhere.
Why then, do we care?
I'm not sure a transistor which relies on low temperature (as in, liquid nitrogen) effects to achieve an off state is actually a viable technology.
Graphene is a wonderful material, but so far the only thing graphene is useful for is an academic research career. We (meaning nano researchers) really need to start being honest with the general media about applications. It's not ok to produce a device to measure a low temperature self-organization effect, then tell the media it's actually a prototype transistor. It's simply not true.
Cuts happen, it's just the way it is, stupid or not. There are a few things we could do to actually improve the research infrastructure in the country and get more out of the money we do have.
Primarily: stop giving out grants, move everything to industry style contracts. It's time to recognize that industrial research labs and academic research labs are operating on the same level. This does a few things: it allows the government to specify public ownership of research results (right now Universities keep their IP and defense contractors do not... odd, yes?), second, it leads to the normalization of lab pay. If you're on a contract, you should be paid the professional rate. Graduate tuition is simply academic administrators picking the government's pocket, things need to move to the cost plus fee model used in industrial contracts. Under a contract, that money would be moved over toward salary and benefits instead, a very good thing. A school could continue with the myth that their "students" are part time workers who require large amounts of "training", but then a government contracting officer could actually require proof of that statement, and details of the "training" being done.
Another thing that would help would be an acknowledgement that not everyone is cut out to run a lab. Long term research positions for people with PhDs should be viable career options rather than "spouse" prizes. There are many, many people out there who are great researchers and great team leaders, but can't write a grant to save their life. We still want those people to succeed at research.
Ok... long enough... essentially, anyone who tells you there isn't waste/fraud/abuse in scientific funding is full of BS, we can still do a lot better. If we're not willing to try to improve, we're going to keep losing money.
Nice logic, but the military is only the 3rd largest piece of the US budget.
The biggest part of the US budget is health care subsidies currently at $793 billion a year.
The second largest part of the budget is social security currently at $701 billion a year.
The military budget is currently at $689 billion a year.
If we cut the $700 billion, 10 year nuclear program (which I think is a good idea), we would save ~$70 billion a year. Our deficit is on the order of $1 trillion a year. If we cut the entire military budget, we would still be running a yearly deficit. So yeah, we should start with the biggest pieces and start whittling down.
This is not an argument for military spending. I agree that it's too high, we don't need 11 carriers for example, but we have to be honest with ourselves about the cost social programs.
It's fine to judge individuals that way, but the days of being "an individual" in cutting edge science are long gone. These days you're part of a team. When you go looking for funding for big projects, agencies want to know how good your team is.
They can make the first cut at "which teams have published in Science or Nature recently" and still have more proposals than they need. Of course, that's a stupid way to make your first cut, and I think that behavior is the root of the problem.
Yes, and now you know how the national scientific system works. This is exactly how we do things in all fields of physics now.
I loved the first two GTAs (the top down, sprite graphics, cartoonish feel). The humor in those games was definitely noticeable. I have a copy (not pirated) around here somewhere. By far, the absolute best thing about those games was the multiplayer. My brother and I spent a lot of time doing stupid stuff in those games.
It was a mistake to go toward more realism and no multiplayer in GTA 3 (or whatever it ended up being called when it rebooted in 3D).
There are a lot of people doing research (defense or anything) who honestly believe their work is real and practical despite fundamental impossibilities. Some of these results end up with glowing reviews here on Slashdot.
In highly technical fields, it's really easy to push BS past just about anyone, even other specialists in your field. The best con artists in science honestly believe their research is real. They run entire companies or research centers. They push their employees extremely hard for positive results, fire employees who can't deliver and turn a blind eye to the signs that the data is misrepresented, oversold or just plain faked.
The same thing happens on the granting/contracting side. They push for results and ignore warning signs. In extreme cases, almost the entire scientific apparatus gets played.
There is a museum in Langley, at CIA headquarters, that contains several of the robots discussed in the article. It's possible AK's skull resides there too. They have a website, but there's a lot in that museum off limits to non-CIA people, perhaps they're still embarrassed by Acoustic Kitty.
The efficiency of photosynthetic proteins is terrible compared to inorganic photocatalysts. The only advantage biological systems have is that the only reasonable room temperature catalyst for photoconversion of carbon dioxide in air is biological. If you only want to make hydrogen, commercial systems already beat the theoretical highest possible efficiency of biology.
I'm sorry to hear that about geology, I was guessing hopefully.
Pharma... there are crazy people in pharma who think everything is great right now (I'm married to one of them). Well, it's their field, but I agree they need to take a better look at the layoffs, outsourcing, and massive numbers of underemployed PhDs.
I see where you're going with that, but I think the root cause is a little more complicated. There is a significant amount of money spent on research, and well... I think "unnecessary" is a more appropriate word than "esoteric"... but that's all semantics, really.
Back to the root problem, I think those investors and other elites believe they have a right to "free" scientific advances. The government pays for thousands of students and postdocs to work in academic labs. The most cost-effective research effort a company can have these days is for a patent lawyer to trawl through academic research papers. Even those well intentioned companies that still run small labs find it more cost effective to buy/steal IP from federally subsidized academic sources.
Businesses get student research essentially for free. Why hire anyone? So we produce lots of students and stretch the time spent "studying" out to 12 to 15 years with the creation of the modern postdoc system. After that, many researchers are burned out and "retire" to a minor teaching position somewhere, never actually "working" in the field they've been training for. The joke is, the field doesn't actually exist anymore, the training is almost all there is. It's all quite a mess.
As far as ditchdigging, I've done that too. At the time, it paid better than science, and I don't imagine that's changed. It's hard to convince a ditchdigger that class credit or paper authorship is worth a 50% pay cut. In a way, they're much smarter than scientists.
I am a scientist. I can teach a clever kid the math and science he needs when he goes to college. I can not teach a kid who has been through a boring, unrealistic grind to like science!
The biggest hurdle to be a scientist is wanting to be one.
Shop classes, fun labs, creative exploration of whatever areas are locally appropriate... I don't care if a physics major comes in having been excited by agriculture science, I want kids who are excited and creative!
That said, we have a glut of scientists in almost every field right now. The labor market has been getting progressively worse for 30 years. If we're going to use these new scientists, uh, usefully, we need to find a way to stimulate the recovery of corporate basic research labs. They used to employ hundreds of professional scientists, now they employ a handful and the country relies on amateur scientists (students) to do the heavy lifting. It's not the most efficient situation. Maybe pharma and geology are the only exceptions.