This isn't hard. If you accept everyone into "your" network, it's no surprise that all the messages you get are marketing.
It's worth spending a few minutes to think about how the platform works. People connected to people you allow in your network can send you messages for free. People outside that network effectively have to pay to be able to send you messages.
If your network is limited to people you actually know, you'll get many fewer nonsense messages.
I did not know about the "semi-infinite" supply of REE in the Sea of Japan (characterization from Science News); that is interesting.
I did not mean to imply that I thought nationalization was a good idea, just that China's role as the supplier of rare earths is a function of politics and investment rather than capability.
Mines in California used to provide most of the world's rare earth metals. The ore is still there, the mine still works, and we have tons of the stuff. The mines have struggled with bankruptcy after being undercut by mines from China in the early 2000s.
Fundamentally, the problem is the subsidy of rare earth mining and use of environmentally irresponsible processing in China artificially lowering the price of the metals in China. The export ban was an effort to focus the advantage of those policies on down-stream manufacturing in China after crippling their biggest competition (mines in the US). In the article you linked, there's reference to recent US industry proposals that we do the exact same thing here, nationalizing and re-opening the California rare earth mines.
This is a crazy article. At the end, it meekly points out that the US has a 13% market share in chip production. Given that the US started this industry, leads in design in this space, leads in capital available for high tech industry, and that the US accounts for 15% to 18% of global GDP, a 13% market share in chip production is very poor performance. This is below what you might expect for a simple commodity that depends only on domestic market size and way below what you'd expect for this industry.
Now all we need is for the granting agencies to ban the use of student labor outside of training grants. Let's clean up that accounting sinkhole and maybe we can start creating some career paths for professional scientists that don't assume a cold-war economy.
Your points are generally true of science, not just psychology. Prestige publishing, short term grants, and review by insider committees cause many problems.
Science should have metrics such as number of papers published, impact factor of the journals you publish in, number of citations, and phds graduated. There's something missing in those metrics, though. None of them relate to anything outside of science. Applied fields such as psychology or (my field) physics should be able to show quantitatively how work over the course of years or decades impacts regular people. We need more professional working scientists and fewer professional grant writers.
The marginal cost of manufacturing physical goods has dropped steadily for centuries. The cost to develop a new physical product has risen.
Pharmaceuticals and electronics are good examples of this. The cost to manufacture one pill or one microchip is tiny once the tooling has been bought and validated. The cost to design, build, and validate that tooling is very high.
This isn't new, at all.There are several ways to account for high up-front costs and low marginal cost.
I'm a physicist who knows a bit of programming. When starting a project, I can create functional code to drive some widget I've built, along with a terrible UI, and a data structure that apparently only I can understand.
Then, I hire a professional programmer on a project contract to make the second version of the code. (MVP version- usually also requires an EE and/or ME).
Then, I hire a team of full time programmers, led by a systems engineer or architect to make the "real" version.
If you're hiring a physicist to code, understand that you're getting a person who either couldn't really cut it in physics or made a bone headed career move that required a serious pivot somewhere along the way (physics is not for everyone, and there are some extremely smart and successful ex-physicists out there). I think some people are overly enamored with people who can explain quantum mechanics and black holes. Yes, that stuff is really cool, hard to understand, and it's impressive we can talk about it intelligently. Unfortunately, writing good code has little to do with those subjects. Good physicists work on physics projects, and get paid well to do that.
The Colorado River has many dams. Not very far down the river from Hoover Dam is Davis Dam and Lake Mohave. By pumping water from Lake Mohave to Lake Mead (behind Hoover Dam), they would be releasing the same amount of water while storing excess solar power.
This is a very unusual situation. You have two large reservoir forming dams next to each other on a large river cutting through a desert with great solar power generating potential.
The "camera" smart phone to compare against isn't one of the new ones, but the Nokia Lumia 1020. It actually had a good camera: good lens, 41 megapixel sensor, good light/shadow sensitivity, real flash, good camera software. Downside was it was a Window's Phone (anyone who actually used a Windows Phone probably liked the operating system and hated the lack of a good app store), and it was oddly shaped. My 1020 stopped working as a phone a while ago, but it's still the best camera I own.
Hartungs database analysis also reveals the inconsistency of animal tests: repeated testing of the same chemical can give different results, because not all animals react the same way. For some types of toxicity, the software therefore provides more-reliable predictions than any individual animal test, he says.
That's not how life science works. When biological or environmental differences lead to variations in test results, those variations are not "errors," they are data. Averaging them out, or presenting a number that implies that variation is not there is incorrect and misleading. Stating that your prediction of animal toxicity (that's what the study is predicting) is more reliable than an animal test because animal tests show wider variance than your prediction model does is pretty dumb.
The/. crowd is not the people you're looking for. Sure, there may be a few Trump supporters here, but this is not the demographic that is his base.
There are a few leaders in the Democratic party who seem to understand this, but negatives regarding Trump will not move his base. Positive alternatives will. As long as Trump continues to successfully bait most of the Democratic leadership into complaining about him more often than offering positive alternatives, his base will remain. There is a LOT of marketing theory wrapped up into that. Word choice is very, very important. "Abolish ICE" is a great example. That's a negative phrase that energizes the Democratic base and hardens Trump's base. It's an amazing gift to Trump that solved his political problem of immoral immigration policies potentially fracturing the evangelical portion of his base. That could easily have been pitched using positive language such as "Simplify Immigration" or maybe more bluntly "Let Good Immigrants In." Obviously, I'm not a slogan writer.
The core problem is not Trump's base, it's actually people like me. I look at the Democratic party leadership (I gave up on the Republicans when they let Trump's ugly populism grow) and am flabbergasted at how bad they are at understanding the current political landscape and effectively countering Trump. I'm left thinking that there has to be some group of politicians left that doesn't have their heads up their ass! This is paving the way for either a significant 3rd party spoiler or (more likely) a populist challenge to Democratic leadership from the left. You can already see the excitement in the media over that second possibility. Neither situation results in Trump and the (corrupted) Republican leadership losing in the short term, and I'm pretty certain replacing one group of inexperienced populists with another is not going to result in demonstrably good government. What a disaster.
When you accept credit cards for payment, you pay the credit card company a few % of the transaction. The exact amount depends on your contract. You (or someone) likely paid at least $50k for the convenience of taking that credit card order. What a waste.
I wish I'd known this was publishable. I wrote up a report on this years ago while working for the Navy... they actually funded someone to try this out, I think.
Short version: it's expensive. Slightly longer version: chlorine is a problem. If you think you're electrochemically evolving hydrogen gas strait from sea water, you're probably just going to kill a lot of people instead. Catalysts are the answer. Bonus detail: the ocean (for a few reasons) concentrates carbon. There's a lot of carbon in there, and the core of this idea is very good.
The tilt that GDPR applies against startups has to do with sharing your company information with potential customers, not sharing customer information.
If you're an existing company with an existing customer base, you have more people intersecting with your "legitimate business interest," allowing you to ignore most of the effects of GDPR when it comes to lead generation (non-customer communications). Essentially, larger companies ignore much of GDPR for outbound communications.
When you're a new company, without an established business track record, it's much harder to prove the "legitimate business interest" that's required to actually go out and tell new people what your product is (or will be). Your outbound communications are much more limited.
The government employs thousands of scientists. I was once one of them. There are high level scientists who have access to white house staff at agencies like NSF, NIH, DOE, CDC, NASA, and DOD. The government still operates government labs through those organizations. There are openings at all of these agencies, but that is nothing new. There are ignored reports coming out of these agencies, but that is nothing new.
The major office that is going unfilled is in OSTP. Perhaps once this office had a great scientific purpose, but it is a political office now. The job of staff at OSTP is to make the president and administration look good. It's a very useful science marketing department, but it is frequently at odds with the people who actually perform science inside the government. This is because organizations like DOE and DOD have a responsibility to get nuclear testing right while OSTP has recently had a responsibility to make it look good. At times, making the test look good is more important than it being done right. However, this function should not be confused with "science." You will generally find great scientists at OSTP, you will also find press briefings given by precocious interns.
Building and maintaining a system like this is very hard! Astronauts are often good scientists, but these laser cryogenic system require some deep specialization to keep running day to day. The impressive part of this to me is that in a few decades we went from 4-5 people in the world being able to build such systems and get them to work (once a month, maybe) to being able to strap a system to a rocket and have someone from a completely different field operate it in an environment where spare parts are at a premium.
There's a common misunderstanding that published science is always done by well trained professionals in well outfitted labs. That's not the case.
Most authors on scientific papers are graduate students. These are by definition untrained people new to scientific research. Most paper authors don't have a PhD. Most science labs are stocked with decades out of date equipment. It's pretty trivial to build better equipment on your own with a bit of engineering knowledge and some searching of scientific surplus stores for specialty parts.
The most difficult thing in science is to get paid to do the research. That's what academia is good for. If you don't need to get paid, don't worry about it.
Publishing isn't hard. Just keep submitting to journals until you find one that will take your paper, look for double-blind review systems. The editor will know who you are, but the reviewers will not.
I'm not sure you know what "documented" means. When a scientist goes out and does a study, get's it reviewed, and publishes it, that's documentation. The article we're talking about here is the current best documentation and explanation we have of why some people can hold their breath longer than others.
Opinion: That's another area where there's been enough university research (just do a Google scholar search for "graphene water filter" and see how far back the papers go). It may be a real opportunity (I don't know the water filtration business), but someone needs to actually work on commercializing it.
You would think that's how it would work, but we've had an oversupply of graphene material in the market for many years now, and the price is still significantly higher than the cost to make it yourself.
I've tried talking with business and marketing people about this, and they say something about "perceived value" and "setting customer expectations." I expect you're right though, if they stopped selling at $10/mm^2 and sold at $0.1/mm^2, we'd see more applications being worked on.
I'm a nanotechnologist. Actually, I founded a graphene chip company that actually has a product and customers (Nanomedical Diagnostics).
There are two companies that already produce graphene roll to roll like this (Samsung and Grolltex). Not surprisingly, there's not much of a market for it. There are far fewer people working on graphene applications than on developing the raw material.
There are a few reasons for this. First, investment in commercialization of graphene applications is not popular (because market research is a necessary skill to pitch a product - not so much with a commodity). Second, devices and applications are just harder to make. Most people in my field don't want to work on the kinds of problems that are common in manufacturing (or if they do, they go work for Intel).
The result of all this is that it's actually very easy for someone like me to grow my own graphene (growth tech and know-how is cheap), and it's very hard for a graphene growth company to demonstrate applicability (meeting real industrial cost or QA targets).
In short, a third source of graphene of this type is not needed.
I'm also a scientist, and like several others here, have serious problems with the prestige publishing culture of science, but the paper itself is not the problem. Could we present material better? Sure. Those are very field specific pedagogy issues though, we're not nearly all doing the same things wrong.
The problem with the premise of the article is the presumption that the paper IS the science. A scientific publication is not a scientific achievement, it is the scientific version of a press release (with peer review... but if anything could benefit from some modernization and interactivity, it's peer review). Reading a paper is only the very first part of seriously evaluating a new piece of science.
It's blind to imagine that all of science is wrapped up in a software focused world. Take electronics, for example. Researchers who have access to commercial fabs far outpace researchers who only have access to academic clean rooms.
This is not a case of university researchers being priced out of competition. Academics in many cases are more well funded than industry goups, and they generally spend more money on building and maintaining their clean rooms than it would cost to simply outsource to a fab. The trick is that they are very appropriately focused on education. Educating your students requires running material through training facilities, which is simply very expensive. (It's a digression, but one of the reasons industry is popular is the focus on pure technical achievement without the need to support training, win grants, or give up hands on work to get paid.)
There's no equivalent to free software in most of science; rather, software is unique in being able to provide industry standard performance in a training environment.
It's clear from their discussion and their list of internet architects that what they really mean is not just "internet" but "social media" or perhaps, "redefinition of 'internet' as an entertainment and advertising platform."
There's no need to smear (or overlook) the guys working in the 60s and 70s designing the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't hard. If you accept everyone into "your" network, it's no surprise that all the messages you get are marketing.
It's worth spending a few minutes to think about how the platform works. People connected to people you allow in your network can send you messages for free. People outside that network effectively have to pay to be able to send you messages.
If your network is limited to people you actually know, you'll get many fewer nonsense messages.
I did not know about the "semi-infinite" supply of REE in the Sea of Japan (characterization from Science News); that is interesting.
I did not mean to imply that I thought nationalization was a good idea, just that China's role as the supplier of rare earths is a function of politics and investment rather than capability.
Mines in California used to provide most of the world's rare earth metals. The ore is still there, the mine still works, and we have tons of the stuff. The mines have struggled with bankruptcy after being undercut by mines from China in the early 2000s.
Fundamentally, the problem is the subsidy of rare earth mining and use of environmentally irresponsible processing in China artificially lowering the price of the metals in China. The export ban was an effort to focus the advantage of those policies on down-stream manufacturing in China after crippling their biggest competition (mines in the US). In the article you linked, there's reference to recent US industry proposals that we do the exact same thing here, nationalizing and re-opening the California rare earth mines.
This is a crazy article. At the end, it meekly points out that the US has a 13% market share in chip production. Given that the US started this industry, leads in design in this space, leads in capital available for high tech industry, and that the US accounts for 15% to 18% of global GDP, a 13% market share in chip production is very poor performance. This is below what you might expect for a simple commodity that depends only on domestic market size and way below what you'd expect for this industry.
Now all we need is for the granting agencies to ban the use of student labor outside of training grants. Let's clean up that accounting sinkhole and maybe we can start creating some career paths for professional scientists that don't assume a cold-war economy.
Your points are generally true of science, not just psychology. Prestige publishing, short term grants, and review by insider committees cause many problems.
Science should have metrics such as number of papers published, impact factor of the journals you publish in, number of citations, and phds graduated. There's something missing in those metrics, though. None of them relate to anything outside of science. Applied fields such as psychology or (my field) physics should be able to show quantitatively how work over the course of years or decades impacts regular people. We need more professional working scientists and fewer professional grant writers.
The marginal cost of manufacturing physical goods has dropped steadily for centuries. The cost to develop a new physical product has risen.
Pharmaceuticals and electronics are good examples of this. The cost to manufacture one pill or one microchip is tiny once the tooling has been bought and validated. The cost to design, build, and validate that tooling is very high.
This isn't new, at all.There are several ways to account for high up-front costs and low marginal cost.
The commercial application of "humanities" is called "marketing," and yes, it is very relevant to the modern world.
I'm a physicist who knows a bit of programming. When starting a project, I can create functional code to drive some widget I've built, along with a terrible UI, and a data structure that apparently only I can understand.
Then, I hire a professional programmer on a project contract to make the second version of the code. (MVP version- usually also requires an EE and/or ME).
Then, I hire a team of full time programmers, led by a systems engineer or architect to make the "real" version.
If you're hiring a physicist to code, understand that you're getting a person who either couldn't really cut it in physics or made a bone headed career move that required a serious pivot somewhere along the way (physics is not for everyone, and there are some extremely smart and successful ex-physicists out there). I think some people are overly enamored with people who can explain quantum mechanics and black holes. Yes, that stuff is really cool, hard to understand, and it's impressive we can talk about it intelligently. Unfortunately, writing good code has little to do with those subjects. Good physicists work on physics projects, and get paid well to do that.
The Colorado River has many dams. Not very far down the river from Hoover Dam is Davis Dam and Lake Mohave. By pumping water from Lake Mohave to Lake Mead (behind Hoover Dam), they would be releasing the same amount of water while storing excess solar power.
This is a very unusual situation. You have two large reservoir forming dams next to each other on a large river cutting through a desert with great solar power generating potential.
The "camera" smart phone to compare against isn't one of the new ones, but the Nokia Lumia 1020. It actually had a good camera: good lens, 41 megapixel sensor, good light/shadow sensitivity, real flash, good camera software. Downside was it was a Window's Phone (anyone who actually used a Windows Phone probably liked the operating system and hated the lack of a good app store), and it was oddly shaped. My 1020 stopped working as a phone a while ago, but it's still the best camera I own.
That's not how life science works. When biological or environmental differences lead to variations in test results, those variations are not "errors," they are data. Averaging them out, or presenting a number that implies that variation is not there is incorrect and misleading. Stating that your prediction of animal toxicity (that's what the study is predicting) is more reliable than an animal test because animal tests show wider variance than your prediction model does is pretty dumb.
The /. crowd is not the people you're looking for. Sure, there may be a few Trump supporters here, but this is not the demographic that is his base.
There are a few leaders in the Democratic party who seem to understand this, but negatives regarding Trump will not move his base. Positive alternatives will. As long as Trump continues to successfully bait most of the Democratic leadership into complaining about him more often than offering positive alternatives, his base will remain. There is a LOT of marketing theory wrapped up into that. Word choice is very, very important. "Abolish ICE" is a great example. That's a negative phrase that energizes the Democratic base and hardens Trump's base. It's an amazing gift to Trump that solved his political problem of immoral immigration policies potentially fracturing the evangelical portion of his base. That could easily have been pitched using positive language such as "Simplify Immigration" or maybe more bluntly "Let Good Immigrants In." Obviously, I'm not a slogan writer.
The core problem is not Trump's base, it's actually people like me. I look at the Democratic party leadership (I gave up on the Republicans when they let Trump's ugly populism grow) and am flabbergasted at how bad they are at understanding the current political landscape and effectively countering Trump. I'm left thinking that there has to be some group of politicians left that doesn't have their heads up their ass! This is paving the way for either a significant 3rd party spoiler or (more likely) a populist challenge to Democratic leadership from the left. You can already see the excitement in the media over that second possibility. Neither situation results in Trump and the (corrupted) Republican leadership losing in the short term, and I'm pretty certain replacing one group of inexperienced populists with another is not going to result in demonstrably good government. What a disaster.
When you accept credit cards for payment, you pay the credit card company a few % of the transaction. The exact amount depends on your contract. You (or someone) likely paid at least $50k for the convenience of taking that credit card order. What a waste.
I wish I'd known this was publishable. I wrote up a report on this years ago while working for the Navy... they actually funded someone to try this out, I think.
Short version: it's expensive. Slightly longer version: chlorine is a problem. If you think you're electrochemically evolving hydrogen gas strait from sea water, you're probably just going to kill a lot of people instead. Catalysts are the answer. Bonus detail: the ocean (for a few reasons) concentrates carbon. There's a lot of carbon in there, and the core of this idea is very good.
The tilt that GDPR applies against startups has to do with sharing your company information with potential customers, not sharing customer information.
If you're an existing company with an existing customer base, you have more people intersecting with your "legitimate business interest," allowing you to ignore most of the effects of GDPR when it comes to lead generation (non-customer communications). Essentially, larger companies ignore much of GDPR for outbound communications.
When you're a new company, without an established business track record, it's much harder to prove the "legitimate business interest" that's required to actually go out and tell new people what your product is (or will be). Your outbound communications are much more limited.
The government employs thousands of scientists. I was once one of them. There are high level scientists who have access to white house staff at agencies like NSF, NIH, DOE, CDC, NASA, and DOD. The government still operates government labs through those organizations. There are openings at all of these agencies, but that is nothing new. There are ignored reports coming out of these agencies, but that is nothing new.
The major office that is going unfilled is in OSTP. Perhaps once this office had a great scientific purpose, but it is a political office now. The job of staff at OSTP is to make the president and administration look good. It's a very useful science marketing department, but it is frequently at odds with the people who actually perform science inside the government. This is because organizations like DOE and DOD have a responsibility to get nuclear testing right while OSTP has recently had a responsibility to make it look good. At times, making the test look good is more important than it being done right. However, this function should not be confused with "science." You will generally find great scientists at OSTP, you will also find press briefings given by precocious interns.
Building and maintaining a system like this is very hard! Astronauts are often good scientists, but these laser cryogenic system require some deep specialization to keep running day to day. The impressive part of this to me is that in a few decades we went from 4-5 people in the world being able to build such systems and get them to work (once a month, maybe) to being able to strap a system to a rocket and have someone from a completely different field operate it in an environment where spare parts are at a premium.
There's a common misunderstanding that published science is always done by well trained professionals in well outfitted labs. That's not the case.
Most authors on scientific papers are graduate students. These are by definition untrained people new to scientific research. Most paper authors don't have a PhD. Most science labs are stocked with decades out of date equipment. It's pretty trivial to build better equipment on your own with a bit of engineering knowledge and some searching of scientific surplus stores for specialty parts.
The most difficult thing in science is to get paid to do the research. That's what academia is good for. If you don't need to get paid, don't worry about it.
Publishing isn't hard. Just keep submitting to journals until you find one that will take your paper, look for double-blind review systems. The editor will know who you are, but the reviewers will not.
I'm not sure you know what "documented" means. When a scientist goes out and does a study, get's it reviewed, and publishes it, that's documentation. The article we're talking about here is the current best documentation and explanation we have of why some people can hold their breath longer than others.
Opinion: That's another area where there's been enough university research (just do a Google scholar search for "graphene water filter" and see how far back the papers go). It may be a real opportunity (I don't know the water filtration business), but someone needs to actually work on commercializing it.
You would think that's how it would work, but we've had an oversupply of graphene material in the market for many years now, and the price is still significantly higher than the cost to make it yourself.
I've tried talking with business and marketing people about this, and they say something about "perceived value" and "setting customer expectations." I expect you're right though, if they stopped selling at $10/mm^2 and sold at $0.1/mm^2, we'd see more applications being worked on.
I'm a nanotechnologist. Actually, I founded a graphene chip company that actually has a product and customers (Nanomedical Diagnostics).
There are two companies that already produce graphene roll to roll like this (Samsung and Grolltex). Not surprisingly, there's not much of a market for it. There are far fewer people working on graphene applications than on developing the raw material.
There are a few reasons for this. First, investment in commercialization of graphene applications is not popular (because market research is a necessary skill to pitch a product - not so much with a commodity). Second, devices and applications are just harder to make. Most people in my field don't want to work on the kinds of problems that are common in manufacturing (or if they do, they go work for Intel).
The result of all this is that it's actually very easy for someone like me to grow my own graphene (growth tech and know-how is cheap), and it's very hard for a graphene growth company to demonstrate applicability (meeting real industrial cost or QA targets).
In short, a third source of graphene of this type is not needed.
I'm also a scientist, and like several others here, have serious problems with the prestige publishing culture of science, but the paper itself is not the problem. Could we present material better? Sure. Those are very field specific pedagogy issues though, we're not nearly all doing the same things wrong.
The problem with the premise of the article is the presumption that the paper IS the science. A scientific publication is not a scientific achievement, it is the scientific version of a press release (with peer review... but if anything could benefit from some modernization and interactivity, it's peer review). Reading a paper is only the very first part of seriously evaluating a new piece of science.
It's blind to imagine that all of science is wrapped up in a software focused world. Take electronics, for example. Researchers who have access to commercial fabs far outpace researchers who only have access to academic clean rooms.
This is not a case of university researchers being priced out of competition. Academics in many cases are more well funded than industry goups, and they generally spend more money on building and maintaining their clean rooms than it would cost to simply outsource to a fab. The trick is that they are very appropriately focused on education. Educating your students requires running material through training facilities, which is simply very expensive. (It's a digression, but one of the reasons industry is popular is the focus on pure technical achievement without the need to support training, win grants, or give up hands on work to get paid.)
There's no equivalent to free software in most of science; rather, software is unique in being able to provide industry standard performance in a training environment.
It's clear from their discussion and their list of internet architects that what they really mean is not just "internet" but "social media" or perhaps, "redefinition of 'internet' as an entertainment and advertising platform."
There's no need to smear (or overlook) the guys working in the 60s and 70s designing the internet.