I had a boss who named servers after seemingly random geography: Akansas, Merced, Trinity...
Thanks to google, we were able to figure out what he did before he was in charge of a lab, though he was a bit disappointed it was that easy for us to figure out. Visitors to the lab were always a bit confused as to our naming scheme until we started adding names like Hudson and Colorado.
I do hope they send their paper out for review. The risks and rewards of physics research are very interesting, and worth a complete look rather than just a rough draft posted to arxiv.
Coming from a more traditional programming background (I was a computational physicist before I was an experimental physicist), I had many of the same problems you have with Labview. There are very few people in academia (and no classes) which I feel properly use labview, but I was lucky to have someone recently back from industry to show me examples of what Labview should do. Everyone is caught up in hooking up hardware and learning the basic program design that most academics learn horrible, horrible programming habits for Labview.
The "deterministic data flow path" is a mistake and should never be taught. You should have quickly learned that labview is multithreaded, even if your program is linear, so why not use it? It excels at parallel tasks with a minimum amount of work on your part, and works best as a lab tool when using multiple asynchronous loops. Buffers and queues should be some of the first things taught. That National Instruments makes both labview and some of the best scientific DAQ cards available means it's far to convenient to use anything but Labview and an NI card.
As to why Labview and all these other programs aren't open source? I would love that. If the NSF or DOE had half the guts the NIH did, we would have open source tools. There's no reason for there not to be an open source version of labview when there's an open source tool for calculating protein structure. Physics started the internet, data sharing and public online journal articles, but we've been left behind the last 5 years or so by medicine. There's no leadership at the top (where is the top?) to push through the kinds of laws the NIH has used to make biology research transparent and more cost effective.
The authors of this paper neglected to include errors working against their desired outcome (oddly, one of the main points of their paper). This really comes up in their argument that inconsequential actions with no "plausible" mechanism of catastrophe should not be treated by their theory. The example they give is dropping a pencil: there's no way to know whether dropping or not dropping a pencil could destroy the planet. Plausibility is a tricky thing, and there are certainly situations where knowledge of advanced physics could help save life as we know it. What if we *need* to do this experiment to prevent the destruction of the planet? I have no idea what the probability on that is, but by their arguments, it is nearly the same as the probability that running the experiment will destroy the earth (their argument is essentially that extremely small probabilities should be replaced in favor of the measured probability that the relevant group, in this case LHC physicists, is wrong).
Thus the argument comes to: is it plausible that we may need to know advanced particle physics in the future to prevent catastrophe. I think it's certainly plausible. They strangely propose a 90% error on themselves, which would actually make the risk of not doing the experiment much higher than the risk of doing it (LHC physicist error is around 0.3% in their higher estimations).
I think one political way we get around this "white elephant" problem in science is by consolidating our interests. We can go to Congress and ask them to increase the biophysics department spending at NSF. They can go to one program manager there who can show a summary of all the NSF biophysics research, and explain what a 10% increase would do, in essence treating "biophysics research" as a single large project. There is mixed success with this. In nanotechnology, we were able to get a huge amount of funding this way in the late '90s, but now there are no coherent goals or organization. The crazy thing is that LHC is not really that different. The particle physicists have a culture of large single projects, but they're all just giant collaborations. There are many smaller labs producing single components and experiments, but the central management for the project is scientific, not governmental, and that seems to make a huge difference to the news media and politicians. Maybe because of these political economic reasons.
I wish the government shared your point of view! As a scientist, I'm not entitled to a lab, or funding, or students. I have to ask the government for the ability to do research and their permission to do the research I'd like to do (they regularly check on what I'm doing). If there's no government agency (or private company) that wants to fund me to do what I'd like, I have to do what they want me to do to pay the bills. Occasionally, you can slip some research in that's not supported, but you're not going to get something like the LHC without the government wanting it to happen.
The question of funding the LHC is not quite the same. If we didn't fund the LHC, that money may or may not be invested in other areas of science. Even though it's a lot of money for one scientific project, it's a small amount to the collected governments which fund it. The highly educated people working on the LHC would have to be doing something else, and comprise a not insignificant section of the physics workforce.
There is no need for comments on this article other than the parent. In fact, this article should just be put into idle.
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations and the failure of many people to think logically. I'm not the biggest fan of LHC, but I'd like to see some intelligent criticism out there (Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists? Are particle accelerators the best way to do this measurement?), not this junk.
Note that they're not looking at webpage referrals, but citations in other scientific papers. Rather than simply counting citations, they're weighting the citations by the number of citations the citing papers received. Thus, if your paper is cited by a paper which is very popular, then your paper will get a boost to it's citation score.
Graphene is not (at all) a RT superconductor. It's a room temperature quantum conductor with zero-mass relativistic charge carriers, and a mobility that makes modern transistors look very, very slow. That's plenty cool enough. Our danger is not failing to deliver HTSCs, but if we fail to deliver THz transistors. That's where the effort is and that's where the funding is.
It is the lowest resistance material at room temperature. Most people don't know what a ballistic conductor is, or how the conduction mechanism in graphene works. A word they do understand is "superconductor," so that ends up in all the press releases. Some clever PR guy makes a connection between "almost zero resistance" and "almost a superconductor." He doesn't know any better. Rest assured that the physicists working on graphene do know the difference between the two, and we're not stealing anyone's thunder.
This is a great paper, I've already tried this technique and it easily produces graphene.
Strangely, this technique is not new. This paper kind of jump-started many memories in the field and it turns out that in the 1980s, people were already growing graphene with a method similar to this, and identified it as single layer graphite. There are even atomic resolution images of graphene from the early 90s. For a material "discovered" in 2004, that's kind of a shock. It turns out the word "graphene" didn't show up until 2004, and no one made good electrical devices until then.
Graphene is not a room temperature superconductor... it's just the best room temperature conductor we've found. Nobody panic.
You should look up what he actually said, not the twisted versions posted online. It was more or less a re-statement of the earlier talks given about women in science at the conference he was at (which was about women in science). If what you find mentions "physical differences", "innate ability" or anything like that, it's someone else's words. He talked about statistics, test scores and work load. He's an economist and was trying to show that there were good economic reasons for women to not want to do science, even in the absence of discrimination. Instead it came off as women couldn't or shouldn't do science. Oops. How is it that the other speakers at the conference had the same substance in their talks, but didn't receive the response he got?
I'd never disagree that he got railroaded after the media got involved.
It was a big blow to gender equality in science. Things like lifestyle, stability, salary and needless competition discourage women (and Americans in general) from going into physical science. That's a pretty mainstream view in science. Instead of attacking those things, everyone got convinced that if we got rid of a few sexist leaders, everything would be fine. The attacks on Summers initially came from the faculty outside of science, who have not seen first hand what the grad student/postdoc/assistant professor meat-grinder is really like.
Women scientists were justifiably upset when reporters came asking them if they felt they were smart enough to do science. Anyone who's managed to get a science faculty position at Harvard is probably pretty paranoid at that point, and academic politics is not collegial in the least. As a university president, you have to have the expectation that the faculty are going to be as hard on you as possible. Anything which may lessen a professor's available research time or funding will be attacked ruthlessly. The donations stopped coming in, so he had to go.
The useful lesson here is not about free speech, but that the way in which you say something is just as important as the content of what you say.
The professor was trying explain that Summers was wrong for the way in which he said things (an evaluation Summers agrees with), regardless of the content. Having just explained the need for tact and the awful consequences that come from ignoring that need, does your son's comment seem so harmless?
Even as a physical scientist, I have to be careful of this. Tact is not some PC fluffy mumbo-jumbo. It's a way to keep discussion substantive and prevent emotions from tainting your judgment.
Also, I would bet your son dropped the class (good move on his part), which would make his statements to you true, but misleading. I've seen some faculty who have enjoyed dealing with "troublemakers," I've never seen someone kick a student out of a class.
This idea that an entity which provides you with research funding, space, equipment and access to specialist help is undeserving of some fruit of that labor is getting old. Half of my grant funding goes to purchase goods and services outside of my own lab (overhead), and I would hope that some of the benefits reaped in those other labs are re-invested in the university.
If you're getting something from your university/company expect them to take something from you in return. Don't be an idiot and give it all away, and don't put your great ideas into throw-away class projects. After that, you can stop whining about it. Those professors you're so afraid of are stuck in the same system.
The goal of competition is to drive the price of goods services toward zero profit. That is the economic definition of perfect competition (in other words, the criteria for a good market is not the number of companies, but the markup on the goods being sold). That we are absurdly far away from this case points out that either the number of companies is too small or the market is not working properly. "Not working properly" could mean bad government regulation, criminal business practices (unenforced good government regulation) or just that things are strange and don't make logical sense.
That you seem to believe that there's no benefit to offering lower prices than your competitors argues for the last case. I have a feeling the OP would argue for the criminal business practices case, not the too few companies case.
If you find something you're good at, that is useful and potentially lucrative, why keep it a hobby? Why be an amateur biologist or physicist, when you can be a professional? It's not that hard, and someone else will buy all the equipment for you.
There's a high school teacher in my area who is into nanotechnology. Rather than try and get together the $1 million equipment necessary to do nanotech research himself, he contacted a university physicist and arraigned to work in his lab during summers. If he wanted to, he could eventually leave his teaching job and be a full time researcher. Why don't more hobbyists do that kind of thing, even if it's just to learn the techniques and go start a company? What do you think the Google guys were doing at Stanford before they started Google?
Re:it's not so much that there are blind spots
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I understand. My first comment was an oblique way of saying that medical doctors aren't as scientific as they should be.
It's very easy to find blind spots in any science.
Simply ask a doctor to explain why inflammation happens or ask a physicist where G comes from.
Any scientific person who is unwilling to say "I don't know" once in a while is not as scientific as they should be.
As for determining whether moles will turn into cancer... there are particular chemicals given off by cancerous cells, and melanoma's "scent" has been mapped (after years of looking at moles and the chemicals which are present in the ones that do and do not turn into cancer). There is no fast or easy test for these chemicals, but I'm working on that.
I like your ideas, but being from California, I've seen what too-strict term limits can do. A local politician I respect (he proposed a bill about 15 years ago in California almost identical to your first suggestion... it didn't pass, of course) explained to me that it takes some time and training to be a good legislator. Usually, there is enough of a mix of new and old legislators that the new ones can pick things up (before you get too cynical, there are *some* good things done by legislators, at the very least it takes some time to learn restraint). He correctly predicted the current situation in California due to term limits (3 terms): there are no "grown ups" in the legislature anymore. Everyone is so focused on the short term glory and the next potential position that the state can't even pass a budget. Forget inter-party bickering, there's enough intra-party bickering to grind things to a halt. There's no leadership. A less active government is welcome, but a government that can no longer pay for basic infrastructure or services because the treasury isn't authorized to spend is absurd. The state lost ~$100 million borrowing money because that was allowed (maybe) without a budget, while using normal revenue was not: crazy.
Long story short: if the politician I know hadn't been put out on term limits, some of those suggestions you have may have already been law in California, instead we have a non-functioning government.
In pristine, defect free graphene the electron-to-hole mobility ratio appears to be nearly one.
Finding pristine graphene is a bit difficult, and the hole mobility is generally larger than the electron mobility in "normal" samples (due to contamination from lithography processes and interaction with the silicon oxide usually used as a dielectric).
The mobility of most graphene devices is around 2000 cm^2/Vs, but with perfect graphene, suspended from the surface and annealed, you can get that up to a maximum of 200,000... which probably represents close to the physical limitation of the material.
There are certain school districts that have enormously powerful unions. You'll walk into a teacher's house and see stacks of union magazines and newspapers. There are the usual union meetings in addition to union organized educational seminars.
Is the teacher going to know that Microsoft spent money on the union? No.
Has the teacher been to workshops or read articles on "how to best educate students in the digital age," which happened to mention the things in that letter sent to Ken? Absolutely. She believes she is improving education by getting rid of Linux in her classroom, and has confidence because someone above her has said so.
Slashdot Mirror
Real scientists don't go to conferences like this unless we're being paid to talk there.
This is just a way for us to raise money. The google guys were grad students once, they know how things work.
I had a boss who named servers after seemingly random geography: Akansas, Merced, Trinity...
Thanks to google, we were able to figure out what he did before he was in charge of a lab, though he was a bit disappointed it was that easy for us to figure out. Visitors to the lab were always a bit confused as to our naming scheme until we started adding names like Hudson and Colorado.
I agree! You put it much more clearly than I did.
I do hope they send their paper out for review. The risks and rewards of physics research are very interesting, and worth a complete look rather than just a rough draft posted to arxiv.
Coming from a more traditional programming background (I was a computational physicist before I was an experimental physicist), I had many of the same problems you have with Labview. There are very few people in academia (and no classes) which I feel properly use labview, but I was lucky to have someone recently back from industry to show me examples of what Labview should do. Everyone is caught up in hooking up hardware and learning the basic program design that most academics learn horrible, horrible programming habits for Labview.
The "deterministic data flow path" is a mistake and should never be taught. You should have quickly learned that labview is multithreaded, even if your program is linear, so why not use it? It excels at parallel tasks with a minimum amount of work on your part, and works best as a lab tool when using multiple asynchronous loops. Buffers and queues should be some of the first things taught. That National Instruments makes both labview and some of the best scientific DAQ cards available means it's far to convenient to use anything but Labview and an NI card.
As to why Labview and all these other programs aren't open source? I would love that. If the NSF or DOE had half the guts the NIH did, we would have open source tools. There's no reason for there not to be an open source version of labview when there's an open source tool for calculating protein structure. Physics started the internet, data sharing and public online journal articles, but we've been left behind the last 5 years or so by medicine. There's no leadership at the top (where is the top?) to push through the kinds of laws the NIH has used to make biology research transparent and more cost effective.
The authors of this paper neglected to include errors working against their desired outcome (oddly, one of the main points of their paper). This really comes up in their argument that inconsequential actions with no "plausible" mechanism of catastrophe should not be treated by their theory. The example they give is dropping a pencil: there's no way to know whether dropping or not dropping a pencil could destroy the planet. Plausibility is a tricky thing, and there are certainly situations where knowledge of advanced physics could help save life as we know it. What if we *need* to do this experiment to prevent the destruction of the planet? I have no idea what the probability on that is, but by their arguments, it is nearly the same as the probability that running the experiment will destroy the earth (their argument is essentially that extremely small probabilities should be replaced in favor of the measured probability that the relevant group, in this case LHC physicists, is wrong).
Thus the argument comes to: is it plausible that we may need to know advanced particle physics in the future to prevent catastrophe. I think it's certainly plausible. They strangely propose a 90% error on themselves, which would actually make the risk of not doing the experiment much higher than the risk of doing it (LHC physicist error is around 0.3% in their higher estimations).
Fun bar conversation. Bad science.
Those are some really interesting points.
I think one political way we get around this "white elephant" problem in science is by consolidating our interests. We can go to Congress and ask them to increase the biophysics department spending at NSF. They can go to one program manager there who can show a summary of all the NSF biophysics research, and explain what a 10% increase would do, in essence treating "biophysics research" as a single large project. There is mixed success with this. In nanotechnology, we were able to get a huge amount of funding this way in the late '90s, but now there are no coherent goals or organization. The crazy thing is that LHC is not really that different. The particle physicists have a culture of large single projects, but they're all just giant collaborations. There are many smaller labs producing single components and experiments, but the central management for the project is scientific, not governmental, and that seems to make a huge difference to the news media and politicians. Maybe because of these political economic reasons.
I wish the government shared your point of view! As a scientist, I'm not entitled to a lab, or funding, or students. I have to ask the government for the ability to do research and their permission to do the research I'd like to do (they regularly check on what I'm doing). If there's no government agency (or private company) that wants to fund me to do what I'd like, I have to do what they want me to do to pay the bills. Occasionally, you can slip some research in that's not supported, but you're not going to get something like the LHC without the government wanting it to happen.
The question of funding the LHC is not quite the same. If we didn't fund the LHC, that money may or may not be invested in other areas of science. Even though it's a lot of money for one scientific project, it's a small amount to the collected governments which fund it. The highly educated people working on the LHC would have to be doing something else, and comprise a not insignificant section of the physics workforce.
There is no need for comments on this article other than the parent. In fact, this article should just be put into idle.
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations and the failure of many people to think logically. I'm not the biggest fan of LHC, but I'd like to see some intelligent criticism out there (Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists? Are particle accelerators the best way to do this measurement?), not this junk.
Note that they're not looking at webpage referrals, but citations in other scientific papers. Rather than simply counting citations, they're weighting the citations by the number of citations the citing papers received. Thus, if your paper is cited by a paper which is very popular, then your paper will get a boost to it's citation score.
You're right. The first real application for graphene will likely be high frequency antennas.
Graphene is not (at all) a RT superconductor. It's a room temperature quantum conductor with zero-mass relativistic charge carriers, and a mobility that makes modern transistors look very, very slow. That's plenty cool enough. Our danger is not failing to deliver HTSCs, but if we fail to deliver THz transistors. That's where the effort is and that's where the funding is.
It is the lowest resistance material at room temperature. Most people don't know what a ballistic conductor is, or how the conduction mechanism in graphene works. A word they do understand is "superconductor," so that ends up in all the press releases. Some clever PR guy makes a connection between "almost zero resistance" and "almost a superconductor." He doesn't know any better. Rest assured that the physicists working on graphene do know the difference between the two, and we're not stealing anyone's thunder.
This is a great paper, I've already tried this technique and it easily produces graphene.
Strangely, this technique is not new. This paper kind of jump-started many memories in the field and it turns out that in the 1980s, people were already growing graphene with a method similar to this, and identified it as single layer graphite. There are even atomic resolution images of graphene from the early 90s. For a material "discovered" in 2004, that's kind of a shock. It turns out the word "graphene" didn't show up until 2004, and no one made good electrical devices until then.
Graphene is not a room temperature superconductor... it's just the best room temperature conductor we've found. Nobody panic.
You should look up what he actually said, not the twisted versions posted online. It was more or less a re-statement of the earlier talks given about women in science at the conference he was at (which was about women in science). If what you find mentions "physical differences", "innate ability" or anything like that, it's someone else's words. He talked about statistics, test scores and work load. He's an economist and was trying to show that there were good economic reasons for women to not want to do science, even in the absence of discrimination. Instead it came off as women couldn't or shouldn't do science. Oops. How is it that the other speakers at the conference had the same substance in their talks, but didn't receive the response he got?
I'd never disagree that he got railroaded after the media got involved.
It was a big blow to gender equality in science. Things like lifestyle, stability, salary and needless competition discourage women (and Americans in general) from going into physical science. That's a pretty mainstream view in science. Instead of attacking those things, everyone got convinced that if we got rid of a few sexist leaders, everything would be fine. The attacks on Summers initially came from the faculty outside of science, who have not seen first hand what the grad student/postdoc/assistant professor meat-grinder is really like.
Women scientists were justifiably upset when reporters came asking them if they felt they were smart enough to do science. Anyone who's managed to get a science faculty position at Harvard is probably pretty paranoid at that point, and academic politics is not collegial in the least. As a university president, you have to have the expectation that the faculty are going to be as hard on you as possible. Anything which may lessen a professor's available research time or funding will be attacked ruthlessly. The donations stopped coming in, so he had to go.
The useful lesson here is not about free speech, but that the way in which you say something is just as important as the content of what you say.
The professor was trying explain that Summers was wrong for the way in which he said things (an evaluation Summers agrees with), regardless of the content. Having just explained the need for tact and the awful consequences that come from ignoring that need, does your son's comment seem so harmless?
Even as a physical scientist, I have to be careful of this. Tact is not some PC fluffy mumbo-jumbo. It's a way to keep discussion substantive and prevent emotions from tainting your judgment.
Also, I would bet your son dropped the class (good move on his part), which would make his statements to you true, but misleading. I've seen some faculty who have enjoyed dealing with "troublemakers," I've never seen someone kick a student out of a class.
Well, to a nanotechnologist, carbon *is* a metal, unless it's a semiconductor.
This idea that an entity which provides you with research funding, space, equipment and access to specialist help is undeserving of some fruit of that labor is getting old. Half of my grant funding goes to purchase goods and services outside of my own lab (overhead), and I would hope that some of the benefits reaped in those other labs are re-invested in the university.
If you're getting something from your university/company expect them to take something from you in return. Don't be an idiot and give it all away, and don't put your great ideas into throw-away class projects. After that, you can stop whining about it. Those professors you're so afraid of are stuck in the same system.
The goal of competition is to drive the price of goods services toward zero profit. That is the economic definition of perfect competition (in other words, the criteria for a good market is not the number of companies, but the markup on the goods being sold). That we are absurdly far away from this case points out that either the number of companies is too small or the market is not working properly. "Not working properly" could mean bad government regulation, criminal business practices (unenforced good government regulation) or just that things are strange and don't make logical sense.
That you seem to believe that there's no benefit to offering lower prices than your competitors argues for the last case. I have a feeling the OP would argue for the criminal business practices case, not the too few companies case.
I ask this of all garage enthusiasts:
If you find something you're good at, that is useful and potentially lucrative, why keep it a hobby? Why be an amateur biologist or physicist, when you can be a professional? It's not that hard, and someone else will buy all the equipment for you.
There's a high school teacher in my area who is into nanotechnology. Rather than try and get together the $1 million equipment necessary to do nanotech research himself, he contacted a university physicist and arraigned to work in his lab during summers. If he wanted to, he could eventually leave his teaching job and be a full time researcher. Why don't more hobbyists do that kind of thing, even if it's just to learn the techniques and go start a company? What do you think the Google guys were doing at Stanford before they started Google?
I understand. My first comment was an oblique way of saying that medical doctors aren't as scientific as they should be.
It's very easy to find blind spots in any science.
Simply ask a doctor to explain why inflammation happens or ask a physicist where G comes from.
Any scientific person who is unwilling to say "I don't know" once in a while is not as scientific as they should be.
As for determining whether moles will turn into cancer... there are particular chemicals given off by cancerous cells, and melanoma's "scent" has been mapped (after years of looking at moles and the chemicals which are present in the ones that do and do not turn into cancer). There is no fast or easy test for these chemicals, but I'm working on that.
Term limits...
I like your ideas, but being from California, I've seen what too-strict term limits can do. A local politician I respect (he proposed a bill about 15 years ago in California almost identical to your first suggestion... it didn't pass, of course) explained to me that it takes some time and training to be a good legislator. Usually, there is enough of a mix of new and old legislators that the new ones can pick things up (before you get too cynical, there are *some* good things done by legislators, at the very least it takes some time to learn restraint). He correctly predicted the current situation in California due to term limits (3 terms): there are no "grown ups" in the legislature anymore. Everyone is so focused on the short term glory and the next potential position that the state can't even pass a budget. Forget inter-party bickering, there's enough intra-party bickering to grind things to a halt. There's no leadership. A less active government is welcome, but a government that can no longer pay for basic infrastructure or services because the treasury isn't authorized to spend is absurd. The state lost ~$100 million borrowing money because that was allowed (maybe) without a budget, while using normal revenue was not: crazy.
Long story short: if the politician I know hadn't been put out on term limits, some of those suggestions you have may have already been law in California, instead we have a non-functioning government.
In pristine, defect free graphene the electron-to-hole mobility ratio appears to be nearly one.
Finding pristine graphene is a bit difficult, and the hole mobility is generally larger than the electron mobility in "normal" samples (due to contamination from lithography processes and interaction with the silicon oxide usually used as a dielectric).
The mobility of most graphene devices is around 2000 cm^2/Vs, but with perfect graphene, suspended from the surface and annealed, you can get that up to a maximum of 200,000... which probably represents close to the physical limitation of the material.
IBM and Columbia are working together on this. Their grant calls for them to push this up to 50 THz.
Oh, and what was done last year was a single electron transistor... normal transistors were available just about as soon as graphene was, in 2004.
Have any relatives that are teachers?
There are certain school districts that have enormously powerful unions. You'll walk into a teacher's house and see stacks of union magazines and newspapers. There are the usual union meetings in addition to union organized educational seminars.
Is the teacher going to know that Microsoft spent money on the union? No.
Has the teacher been to workshops or read articles on "how to best educate students in the digital age," which happened to mention the things in that letter sent to Ken? Absolutely. She believes she is improving education by getting rid of Linux in her classroom, and has confidence because someone above her has said so.
She's going to be fine. The administrator who let that e-mail go through the list-serv is losing his job though.