It really depends on where you send your money, as someone here points out, awareness is not research. Some groups do sponsor research, but it's hard to really do trials without major, major funding.
One thing you can assume that any money you spend on a research oriented charity is only half as effective as you would expect. Most research organizations (universities, national labs - medical research is popular at national labs now) charge ~50% overhead on all grants. That's 50% hopefully going toward facility maintenance, but possibly going to retain administrative "talent." That's after whatever non-profit you donate to takes its operating expenses out.
Ok, so how much do human trials cost? If you raise $100k, that probably won't pay for one trial patient once it's been chopped into little pieces.
This is also why you can get a PhD in microbiology, be an excellent cancer researcher and make less than $30k/year (NIH "minimum" is supposed to be ~$45k at this point by the original law, but they don't even have the resources to support that level themselves and fund the people they want to fund). Once you're allowed to spend money on in-lab expenses, you really try and stretch those dollars. Sometimes you take less money to work on the research you care about (and hope some company, university or non-profit makes it up to you later).
I think it's amazing someone got up to human trials with this drug. It's a marvel of fund raising and organization. Really, very nice.
Maybe Chris could demonstrate a working logic device that doesn't rely on expensive optical components to provide the input and output (he's making optical devices, not electrical - because DNA doesn't conduct). His speed, scalability, cost... everything is dependent on the optics system he uses. It's borderline dishonest for him to sell this as a silicon replacement right now.
His waffles look nice though. Very tasty. I've seen that image many times now...
Now is when we discover that the scientific withdrawal from politics over the past century means no one cares what we say.
Scientists are incredibly behind in understanding how to use the media and influence the opinions of the general public. These letters are an anachronism, but we keep putting them out there.
We're stuck arguing over papers published more than 15 years ago instead of building support for the kind of work we should be doing because we allow ourselves to be totally subsumed into whatever political cause generates funding for us.
This climate change argument with politicians isn't worth having. Politics isn't about getting the absolute right answer. We'd never pass bills on things like health care reform or anti-terrorism if that was the case. The right thing to do for our country and economy is to figure out how to become energy self-sufficient. That's where the "clean coal" push came from politically, but we were too manipulated at that point to take advantage of it. The kicker is that before it was proposed by the political faction which didn't "believe in" global warming, coal related research was one of the main ideas put out by the (very small) fraction of the scientific community which was actually looking for solutions to the climate problem.
Read that paper you linked about the 76-90% accuracy.
The authors put that figure out and then immediately state that the quoted accuracy should not be "a focus of debate on whether the upper limits of this range is sufficient for court evidence."
They have good reasons for this! As they explain, the *technical* accuracy of fMRI is really good, but this is not the same as practical accuracy. The variations between individuals are huge and not understood. Thus, in a laboratory setting, where you can use cooperative, "good" test subjects with calibrated responses, a higher practical accuracy is expected.
In other parts of that paper, they detail the specific fMRI measurements common in the literature and then also detail the confirmed mistakes and overlooked opportunities in the research. There are now-discredited papers from only a few years ago, that's a big sign that the technology has not been figured out yet. It's a good review and makes a good case that further research is warranted, not that it's ready for court.
Welcome to the world of lawyers, where it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong, but who is in a position to be a bigger pain in the neck. This is a discovery document for the defense of USPS, not a response to an inquiry. They probably won't be issuing a response.
The USPS lawyers (in the odd world of legal ethics) probably concluded that the "right" thing to do is to pressure Gamefly to settle and admit no wrongdoing by USPS. I'm sure there are good reasons for USPS to not actually put out a public report detailing what their definition of acceptable mail handling is or how poor mail handling happens, but those are good reasons only for people who work for USPS.
The news out there is slightly misleading, in any case, I don't think it matters here. One of the other responses to my post mentioned that Mann has really brought this upon himself by clumsily inserting himself into political discussions and issuing legal threats of his own. He's the one who has abandoned the scientific process, and he doesn't deserve the kind of protections I'm arguing for. With that information, this suit is justified!
Accused and exonerated. Don't forget that little bit.
IF the NSF review (it was their money) had shown that he had even simply violated ethical principles, then I could see a justification for a criminal investigation. This research has been through several reviews (and the reviews are now under review), and he's not been found guilty of anything.
If AGs are out there bringing charges against scientists when scientific review boards claim nothing has been done wrong, then the system is broken. There's no purpose to having scientific review boards if politicians bring criminal charges against scientists doing research they don't like. In retrospect, it was nice that Bush just forbid funding for stem cell research. That was the correct way to use political tools to prevent research the politicians didn't want done. This current action is setting a precedent which is absolutely terrifying for a scientist. How do we know whether the research the government is paying us to do will piss someone off, or make the wrong person look bad and get us in court?
Oh, and if you want a specific political reason for why he's doing this: He wants press.
It is really interesting that these guys were doing something that was crazy enough to actually warrant an arrest. A group of drunken guys hitting a lone guy with a ball (even on accident), then sticking around (in a group!) to heckle him should be a slam dunk arrest. People get arrested and instantly convicted for less at Eagles games in Philly. How routine must civil rights violations in Seattle be for the police to casually mess this one up?
The police involved should be fired for violating this guy's rights, then fired again for being such bad police that they couldn't remember how to properly arrest drunken, rowdy people.
In China, the government grants are almost entirely political, and you're not fighting for tenure; tenure doesn't exist. Likely, you get your grants through your department head (who goes on all your papers). Essentially, your job is like a western stock trader. You have a job at the University, and maybe it pays well, maybe it doesn't. You get paid a bonus based on papers you publish. The higher the index of the journal you publish in, the higher your bonus. Those bonuses make up the majority of the salary for many scientists.
Unlike in the west, if you're caught cheating, there are no automatic, immediate consequences. It's very much like stock trading here, with similar ethics and results.
There are potential, non-political-control-through-fear uses for this. Just about every environmental scientist would be thrilled to see the kind of fine grained data such a huge network could produce. Of course, the potential for political abuse is huge. I think a project like this could really benefit from open development.
The principle is the same. Using the presumed homogeneity of astronomical bodies (actually adsorption of quasar x-rays through gas clouds in your link) to show changes in a physical constant, to explain the inhomogeneity of astronomical data is still silly.
There are many reasons that alpha changing work has not resulted in physicists accepting that c is changing. Primarily, there's no physical basis for it. I don't think it's accepted that alpha changes (in a post rapid-inflation, galaxy forming universe), let alone that the factor in alpha which is changing is c. Generally, when you have to use assumptions to analyze data, and your data analysis yields results that make no physical sense, the assumptions are probably wrong.
Whoa there! Look at the science you're talking about before you start throwing "crackpot" around.
The measurements which claimed to show that the speed of light was changing were *based* on looking at slight changes in pulsar frequencies. Measurements using atomic clocks have failed to reproduce this effect despite being many orders of magnitude more precise.
You really can't claim that pulsar frequencies change, meaning that the speed of light is changing, meaning you expect pulsar frequencies to change!
At the time of my posting this, the comment immediately above yours is asking whether the best clock is simply the one in your frame of reference.
As a physicist, I find the combination of these two posts very entertaining.
When it comes to time, precision and accuracy are the same thing in the "normal" 3D world we live in due to relativity. That is, accuracy is a function of a set of measurements different from your measurement of time.
On their website FAQ, go look for "How do you come up with your invention ideas?"
The answer is: "IV's invention efforts center on "invention sessions" which are multidisciplinary brainstorming events focused on a particular set of issues and possible solutions. IV typically hosts several 1-2 day invention sessions per month."
This process is described in more detail in the many breathless articles about IV. Their ideas come from reading papers written by people outside the company and figuring out if there's some poor academic out there who failed to patent his stuff. They only hire senior scientists. They don't hire lab technicians, junior staff... the kind of people necessary to do research.
They claim to have a lab and be a scientific research company, even though their "inventions" don't come from the lab.
They have 30 total scientists on lab staff, covering "computer software and hardware, user interface design, semiconductors, biomedical devices, advanced medical procedures, digital imaging, nanotechnology, nuclear energy and advanced particle physics." Having 30 people cover all that is a joke.
They believe so much in actual research that "Almost all of the lab's equipment was purchased used or at auction; one core competency of its team is recycling secondhand equipment to extend service life."
As a scientist, looking at the extremely broad fields, the number of scientists and the B-level equipment, I don't see how they're actually doing any meaningful original research. I don't believe there's any way their research staff could be generating original, experimental research commensurate with the (huge) number of patents they produce.
My apologies, Lord Vader, but that's not making a class "harder," that's just making a class more annoying.
As far as hard classes, I'm thinking specifically of an upper level quantum mechanics class I took. There were two textbooks and all the lecture notes were online before the first lecture (cross-linked in HTML, no less) . Everyone still went to the lectures so we could hear the professor's commentary on the material and ask questions as he went through it. The tests were all take-home. It was still very, very hard, because we went through as much difficult material as we could take and we were constantly tested on it.
I think the real problem is that most students don't actually want to take classes (or more fairly, universities aren't requiring classes students want to take). A good class seems incoherent, obscure and fast to someone who isn't actually interested in taking it.
Eventually, even the government will discover that labor is cheap in an economic downturn. They're smart to lock desperate people into cheap 5 year contracts right now.
It's fine to say "there are plenty of devices that work off 3.3V," the real problem comes when you have specific systems that require more voltage than that.
For example, I run a research lab that uses some gas flow controllers using RS485, which will not work with such low voltages. Is it bad design? Yeah, I would never buying anything from the company that made them, but I inherited this system. Building a new system will cost at least $5000 just for hardware, and would not do anything to improve my lab's capabilities. I can't justify spending that simply so that I don't have to deal with serial ports. They do, after all, work.
Really. That state has major, major problems. Another few years of this kind of governing will lead to California being the "Greece" of the US. We need to take a hard look at what's happening to the EU when one of their member states has serious financial problems. Then look at California's tanking credit rating (lowest of any US state) and historic inability to balance even a basic operating budget, even during good years!
It's been standard in nanotechnology since 2004, when the carbon nanotube community used it to create intrinsic nanotube (junctionless) transistors. I really doubt we were the first ones to come up with it either. Nanotubes aren't compatible with CMOS? Well, neither are electron beam lithography defined channels and gates.
No it's not. The new article is also about graphene on SiC, they just stuck the silicon carbide to a silicon wafer. This does not make the process cheaper or easier.
The alarm the NYT is trying to raise (I think) is that we're paying China to manufacture the few big "clean energy" installations we're making. It's not that they won't buy from us in the future, it's that we're not even buying from us right now. Just like computer parts *could* be built anywhere, but we end up buying from Taiwan, Korea and Japan, we end up buying energy equipment (right now) from China, Spain and Germany.
When we spend $100 million on a new wind farm, why does $80 million of that go overseas for high-tech design and manufacturing? It's stupid.
Oh hey, 2006 called, and they want their science back.
This field moves *fast* and the epitaxial technique is already being commercialized by IBM (perhaps others too, but IBM isn't hiding it). It's already moving out of science and into manufacturing (for what purpose, I'm not sure anyone knows). Meanwhile, cheaper and larger scale methods to grow graphene have been invented, and are nearly perfected.
Slashdot Mirror
It really depends on where you send your money, as someone here points out, awareness is not research. Some groups do sponsor research, but it's hard to really do trials without major, major funding.
One thing you can assume that any money you spend on a research oriented charity is only half as effective as you would expect. Most research organizations (universities, national labs - medical research is popular at national labs now) charge ~50% overhead on all grants. That's 50% hopefully going toward facility maintenance, but possibly going to retain administrative "talent." That's after whatever non-profit you donate to takes its operating expenses out.
Ok, so how much do human trials cost? If you raise $100k, that probably won't pay for one trial patient once it's been chopped into little pieces.
This is also why you can get a PhD in microbiology, be an excellent cancer researcher and make less than $30k/year (NIH "minimum" is supposed to be ~$45k at this point by the original law, but they don't even have the resources to support that level themselves and fund the people they want to fund). Once you're allowed to spend money on in-lab expenses, you really try and stretch those dollars. Sometimes you take less money to work on the research you care about (and hope some company, university or non-profit makes it up to you later).
I think it's amazing someone got up to human trials with this drug. It's a marvel of fund raising and organization. Really, very nice.
Maybe Chris could demonstrate a working logic device that doesn't rely on expensive optical components to provide the input and output (he's making optical devices, not electrical - because DNA doesn't conduct). His speed, scalability, cost... everything is dependent on the optics system he uses. It's borderline dishonest for him to sell this as a silicon replacement right now.
His waffles look nice though. Very tasty. I've seen that image many times now...
Now is when we discover that the scientific withdrawal from politics over the past century means no one cares what we say.
Scientists are incredibly behind in understanding how to use the media and influence the opinions of the general public. These letters are an anachronism, but we keep putting them out there.
We're stuck arguing over papers published more than 15 years ago instead of building support for the kind of work we should be doing because we allow ourselves to be totally subsumed into whatever political cause generates funding for us.
This climate change argument with politicians isn't worth having. Politics isn't about getting the absolute right answer. We'd never pass bills on things like health care reform or anti-terrorism if that was the case. The right thing to do for our country and economy is to figure out how to become energy self-sufficient. That's where the "clean coal" push came from politically, but we were too manipulated at that point to take advantage of it. The kicker is that before it was proposed by the political faction which didn't "believe in" global warming, coal related research was one of the main ideas put out by the (very small) fraction of the scientific community which was actually looking for solutions to the climate problem.
Read that paper you linked about the 76-90% accuracy.
The authors put that figure out and then immediately state that the quoted accuracy should not be "a focus of debate on whether the upper limits of this range is sufficient for court evidence."
They have good reasons for this! As they explain, the *technical* accuracy of fMRI is really good, but this is not the same as practical accuracy. The variations between individuals are huge and not understood. Thus, in a laboratory setting, where you can use cooperative, "good" test subjects with calibrated responses, a higher practical accuracy is expected.
In other parts of that paper, they detail the specific fMRI measurements common in the literature and then also detail the confirmed mistakes and overlooked opportunities in the research. There are now-discredited papers from only a few years ago, that's a big sign that the technology has not been figured out yet. It's a good review and makes a good case that further research is warranted, not that it's ready for court.
Welcome to the world of lawyers, where it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong, but who is in a position to be a bigger pain in the neck. This is a discovery document for the defense of USPS, not a response to an inquiry. They probably won't be issuing a response.
The USPS lawyers (in the odd world of legal ethics) probably concluded that the "right" thing to do is to pressure Gamefly to settle and admit no wrongdoing by USPS. I'm sure there are good reasons for USPS to not actually put out a public report detailing what their definition of acceptable mail handling is or how poor mail handling happens, but those are good reasons only for people who work for USPS.
The news out there is slightly misleading, in any case, I don't think it matters here. One of the other responses to my post mentioned that Mann has really brought this upon himself by clumsily inserting himself into political discussions and issuing legal threats of his own. He's the one who has abandoned the scientific process, and he doesn't deserve the kind of protections I'm arguing for. With that information, this suit is justified!
Accused and exonerated. Don't forget that little bit.
IF the NSF review (it was their money) had shown that he had even simply violated ethical principles, then I could see a justification for a criminal investigation. This research has been through several reviews (and the reviews are now under review), and he's not been found guilty of anything.
If AGs are out there bringing charges against scientists when scientific review boards claim nothing has been done wrong, then the system is broken. There's no purpose to having scientific review boards if politicians bring criminal charges against scientists doing research they don't like. In retrospect, it was nice that Bush just forbid funding for stem cell research. That was the correct way to use political tools to prevent research the politicians didn't want done. This current action is setting a precedent which is absolutely terrifying for a scientist. How do we know whether the research the government is paying us to do will piss someone off, or make the wrong person look bad and get us in court?
Oh, and if you want a specific political reason for why he's doing this:
He wants press.
It is really interesting that these guys were doing something that was crazy enough to actually warrant an arrest. A group of drunken guys hitting a lone guy with a ball (even on accident), then sticking around (in a group!) to heckle him should be a slam dunk arrest. People get arrested and instantly convicted for less at Eagles games in Philly. How routine must civil rights violations in Seattle be for the police to casually mess this one up?
The police involved should be fired for violating this guy's rights, then fired again for being such bad police that they couldn't remember how to properly arrest drunken, rowdy people.
Let's clear this up...
In China, the government grants are almost entirely political, and you're not fighting for tenure; tenure doesn't exist. Likely, you get your grants through your department head (who goes on all your papers). Essentially, your job is like a western stock trader. You have a job at the University, and maybe it pays well, maybe it doesn't. You get paid a bonus based on papers you publish. The higher the index of the journal you publish in, the higher your bonus. Those bonuses make up the majority of the salary for many scientists.
Unlike in the west, if you're caught cheating, there are no automatic, immediate consequences. It's very much like stock trading here, with similar ethics and results.
There are potential, non-political-control-through-fear uses for this. Just about every environmental scientist would be thrilled to see the kind of fine grained data such a huge network could produce. Of course, the potential for political abuse is huge. I think a project like this could really benefit from open development.
The principle is the same. Using the presumed homogeneity of astronomical bodies (actually adsorption of quasar x-rays through gas clouds in your link) to show changes in a physical constant, to explain the inhomogeneity of astronomical data is still silly.
There are many reasons that alpha changing work has not resulted in physicists accepting that c is changing. Primarily, there's no physical basis for it. I don't think it's accepted that alpha changes (in a post rapid-inflation, galaxy forming universe), let alone that the factor in alpha which is changing is c. Generally, when you have to use assumptions to analyze data, and your data analysis yields results that make no physical sense, the assumptions are probably wrong.
Whoa there! Look at the science you're talking about before you start throwing "crackpot" around.
The measurements which claimed to show that the speed of light was changing were *based* on looking at slight changes in pulsar frequencies. Measurements using atomic clocks have failed to reproduce this effect despite being many orders of magnitude more precise.
You really can't claim that pulsar frequencies change, meaning that the speed of light is changing, meaning you expect pulsar frequencies to change!
At the time of my posting this, the comment immediately above yours is asking whether the best clock is simply the one in your frame of reference.
As a physicist, I find the combination of these two posts very entertaining.
When it comes to time, precision and accuracy are the same thing in the "normal" 3D world we live in due to relativity. That is, accuracy is a function of a set of measurements different from your measurement of time.
Yeah, that's a nice story they have going there.
On their website FAQ, go look for "How do you come up with your invention ideas?"
The answer is:
"IV's invention efforts center on "invention sessions" which are multidisciplinary brainstorming events focused on a particular set of issues and possible solutions. IV typically hosts several 1-2 day invention sessions per month."
This process is described in more detail in the many breathless articles about IV. Their ideas come from reading papers written by people outside the company and figuring out if there's some poor academic out there who failed to patent his stuff. They only hire senior scientists. They don't hire lab technicians, junior staff... the kind of people necessary to do research.
They claim to have a lab and be a scientific research company, even though their "inventions" don't come from the lab.
They have 30 total scientists on lab staff, covering "computer software and hardware, user interface design, semiconductors, biomedical devices, advanced medical procedures, digital imaging, nanotechnology, nuclear energy and advanced particle physics." Having 30 people cover all that is a joke.
They believe so much in actual research that "Almost all of the lab's equipment was purchased used or at auction; one core competency of its team is recycling secondhand equipment to extend service life."
As a scientist, looking at the extremely broad fields, the number of scientists and the B-level equipment, I don't see how they're actually doing any meaningful original research. I don't believe there's any way their research staff could be generating original, experimental research commensurate with the (huge) number of patents they produce.
My apologies, Lord Vader, but that's not making a class "harder," that's just making a class more annoying.
As far as hard classes, I'm thinking specifically of an upper level quantum mechanics class I took. There were two textbooks and all the lecture notes were online before the first lecture (cross-linked in HTML, no less) . Everyone still went to the lectures so we could hear the professor's commentary on the material and ask questions as he went through it. The tests were all take-home. It was still very, very hard, because we went through as much difficult material as we could take and we were constantly tested on it.
I think the real problem is that most students don't actually want to take classes (or more fairly, universities aren't requiring classes students want to take). A good class seems incoherent, obscure and fast to someone who isn't actually interested in taking it.
Eventually, even the government will discover that labor is cheap in an economic downturn. They're smart to lock desperate people into cheap 5 year contracts right now.
If students are able to not pay attention, and still do well (enough) in classes, then make the classes more difficult.
It's fine to say "there are plenty of devices that work off 3.3V," the real problem comes when you have specific systems that require more voltage than that.
For example, I run a research lab that uses some gas flow controllers using RS485, which will not work with such low voltages. Is it bad design? Yeah, I would never buying anything from the company that made them, but I inherited this system. Building a new system will cost at least $5000 just for hardware, and would not do anything to improve my lab's capabilities. I can't justify spending that simply so that I don't have to deal with serial ports. They do, after all, work.
Really. That state has major, major problems. Another few years of this kind of governing will lead to California being the "Greece" of the US. We need to take a hard look at what's happening to the EU when one of their member states has serious financial problems. Then look at California's tanking credit rating (lowest of any US state) and historic inability to balance even a basic operating budget, even during good years!
Where have I seen that design before?
It's been standard in nanotechnology since 2004, when the carbon nanotube community used it to create intrinsic nanotube (junctionless) transistors. I really doubt we were the first ones to come up with it either. Nanotubes aren't compatible with CMOS? Well, neither are electron beam lithography defined channels and gates.
While I applaud the efforts of GQ to get into scientific publishing, I believe they need to be more selective in their choice of reviewers.
(What? That's an editorial and shouldn't be presented as science? Someone should tell that to the... um, media.)
No it's not. The new article is also about graphene on SiC, they just stuck the silicon carbide to a silicon wafer. This does not make the process cheaper or easier.
first thing I thought of too... these guys are going to have a fun time with European regulators.
That's not exactly the whole story.
The alarm the NYT is trying to raise (I think) is that we're paying China to manufacture the few big "clean energy" installations we're making. It's not that they won't buy from us in the future, it's that we're not even buying from us right now. Just like computer parts *could* be built anywhere, but we end up buying from Taiwan, Korea and Japan, we end up buying energy equipment (right now) from China, Spain and Germany.
When we spend $100 million on a new wind farm, why does $80 million of that go overseas for high-tech design and manufacturing? It's stupid.
Oh hey, 2006 called, and they want their science back.
This field moves *fast* and the epitaxial technique is already being commercialized by IBM (perhaps others too, but IBM isn't hiding it). It's already moving out of science and into manufacturing (for what purpose, I'm not sure anyone knows). Meanwhile, cheaper and larger scale methods to grow graphene have been invented, and are nearly perfected.