Is this serious, or just push back from economists who are upset that a number of papers and editorials have recently appeared in high profile scientific journals questioning the description of economics as science? Allegories, for example, are not scientific.
The next time some physicist is accused of misplacing (or selling) secret data, just remember this. NRL isn't just some lab somewhere, it's a military lab. While I'm sure this guy didn't want to go selling secrets anywhere, taking old hard drives can lose some scientists their jobs very easily.
An expanding BEC isn't anywhere close to a supernova. This would be similar to snapping the valve off of a liquid helium tank. The guys at CERN could blow themselves up with this, but that's about it. They could blow themselves up lots of ways.
It was called a "bosenova" because it shrinks before it expands, not because it's super destructive.
These FAST guys are using multiple sensors. If they've got 10 sensors that are 40% accurate, they'll have no troubles singling out the proper people for screening. Imagine going through security at the airport and only 1 in 100 people need to go through the metal detector... everyone else can just go on in. How is that bad?
The whole argument is stupid. They're not looking at random variables. The problem DHS is trying to solve is not how to build a 99.9999% accurate sensor. That's a stupid idea.
In the city of New York, there's only one lawyer I know. The probability of me finding him is thus abysmally small by Doctorow's argument, yet I somehow manage to meet up with him regularly. Is that a miracle, or am I using some extra information to overcome the daunting statistics? DHS is trying to generate that extra information.
I don't know that you're mistaken. I think the electoral college was one of those purposeful deviations from pure democracy, but there are no founding fathers around right now for us to ask. You answered my question. I don't think you're crazy, I just happen to disagree.
And if the electoral college was removed, would this change? The 6 or states would be different, but there would still only be a few states in which each candidate would campaign.
You don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president. The states do have a constitutional right to pick electors for the president. Where are you getting these "rights of voters" in a presidential election? Such rights only exist due to the actions of the individual states.
Certainly the process could be improved, but I think the idea should be to develop a more intelligent voting system, not one even more geared toward mob rule.
When medical schools have trouble recruiting students, then you can start talking about barriers that exist which keep people from applying.
There are not too few people applying to medical school. The admissions percentages have basically stayed the same for at least 10 years. If medical schools want to admit more people now, they can. There's no need to broaden the application pool. This is just the Journal taking potshots at science and medical doctors who are still upset over being taken down a peg in a hard class.
He did a calculation that showed that something which adsorbs more light is more efficient.
He'll find out soon enough that carbon nanotubes have some serious problems when you try and use them in solar cells. Also, solar cells already are 3D (the mars rovers' solar cells kick ass).
It is remarkable that a 12 year old made the connections he's made (I'm assuming he's latched onto the varying bandgaps of carbon nanotubes to increase the adsorption cross section of a solar cell... everyone gets excited by that idea, but "everyone" tends to be at least 20 when they think of it). I'd be thrilled to have him work in my lab when he's ready (I work with carbon nanotubes). It's a bit premature to say he's solving the world's energy needs.
He came into his position as head of education under a lot of scrutiny. Many people in the Royal Society felt it was inappropriate for a member of the clergy to hold one of the most important scientific education positions in the country. They were waiting for him to screw up, and he knew it. His view that time in science class should be used by the teacher to debate evolution with creationist students is not at all in line with most of the Royal Society. He should have kept it to himself.
It's not like he got into trouble for some offhand remarks to a small press outlet somewhere, it was his blog, and his subtitle: "...discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory." While his comments in their entirety are perfectly normal for any reasonable person, they don't reflect what the membership and leadership of the Royal Society want out there in their name. Does the oldest and most prestigious scientific organization in the world want it to be attributable to them that "because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson?"
Yeah, I'm taking his quotes out of context. He had a high profile position and should have been more careful.
you're at a university and you have a desire to hack something...
Go find a professor to set you up with a real project, something that someone (even if it's just a faculty member) has asked to be done. There's no shortage of stuff to do out there, but there's a major shortage of common sense. Actions matter more than intentions, so give yourself the protection of an academic role, or an internship in a professional organization.
A similar thing happened at my old university. A student broke into the student housing computer system and may have caused all sorts of trouble. The administration wanted to press criminal charges, but because he had done this under the supervision of a computer science faculty member and because it was presented at an academic conference, the computer science department was able to convince the administration to back off.
I completely agree with Marth's conclusion, but his letter is not insightful, he's simply registering a complaint about the rise of proteomics. It's not a research article, it's a letter to the editor. We get the same things in physics journals lamenting the rise of string theory or the decrease in funding for superconductivity.
Marth's call for interdisciplinary research and fresh ideas is good, but he's already made a mistake by grouping the molecules together using his own judgment. It would be better to present them all to a widely varying group of scientists and ask them to group the molecules in any way they would like. The idea that there are ~100 important biological building blocks is not new. But... this is just a letter to the editor, and the poster looks good, and we get the idea. Roland should not have picked it up, and it shouldn't be here, it was probably written for a department head somewhere who doesn't want to fund a new interdisciplinary program.
IBM researchers whom I've talked to at APS meetings say they must either produce something to fund their research or get outside funding. The answer was to compete with academic labs for federal grants and do contract research for other companies. The problem is this takes away what made the industrial labs so great: the ability of a scientist to work on what they felt was important rather than do what some grant reviewer thought was important.
A few thousand neutrons is a gross underestimation. Some of these reactor are getting around 700,000 n/s, or were several years ago... they may be much higher now. Curies are not the relevant unit when talking about the danger of radiation, you want the rather squishy unit of rems or sieverts.
Alpha particles from a smoke detector are very easy to shield and effect you differently than the fast neutrons produced by fusion. Over several years, the materials around a fusion reactor do become radioactive.
As someone who has worked in fusion, there is significant radiation created by the process. The larger reactors can't run on the ideal deuterium/tritium mixture because it would irradiate entire cities while the reactor burned. I would not want a small one in my garage. The reactor I worked on was in a concrete bunker a fair distance away from any people. It was also the size of a large house.
If you want to live in the future and be on the cutting edge of science, go to grad school and study physics (you're never too old). There are not enough people seriously studying fusion. You'll get paid to work on reactors (big or small) which may have a commercial future. We wear snarky shirts that no one understands too.
Go take a look at what you can make doing research at Stanford with a PhD. $40k at an elite research institution in Palo Alto to work on SLAC or genetically engineer biofuels ain't much, and don't even think about overtime. Making $100k in Silicon Valley is great, go for the overtime, but don't think you're downtrodden.
In 1972 it was discovered that titanium dioxide is a strong oxidizer when exposed to light. The following years saw this applied to paints used in hospitals, coatings on windows and building concrete.
This is old technology which has been in use in Japan for many years. Yes, it does work.
I have a family member who was in the California assembly at the beginning of term limits. He talked quite a bit about controlled growth and spending caps as a way to prepare for future economic downturns. It turns out he was right about that.
His argument against term limits was that it took a few years just to learn how to be an effective legislator and described the situation just as you have. A few more years and he may have been able to convince enough people that controlled growth was a good thing. Legislators now don't think more than 4 years ahead. There's no reason for them to do so, they won't be in office if their projects eventually go haywire, and they need immediate results to run for the next office.
Do you really think hundreds of scientists, all out to prove each other wrong would overlook highly publicized results? Or maybe the one guy saying something different is wrong.
If that's not good enough, hematite, another form of iron oxide is magnetic at lower Martian surface temperatures. Any kid who has gone out to the desert with a magnet knows that you can pick up all sorts of stuff with it. Maybe people should try a little experimental verification before they claim the entire scientific community is lying (or perpetuating a myth if that sounds better).
Ok, not all the names we've gotten rid of are stupid. I like truth and beauty too, but it was the most recent example of name changing I could think of. I think the guys who discovered the "b" quark wanted to go with "truth" and "beauty," but couldn't find the "t" quark. Theorists were already using "top" and "bottom" at the time, so when the discoverers of the "t" quark went with "top" that basically was the end of it.
There was almost a "dogma" moment in particle physics when the guy who first thought of quarks called them "fictitious." What he meant by the word was not the normal usage. Everyone assumed he thought they didn't exist even though he meant they couldn't be isolated. Hmm, maybe that would have been a better example.
I am a scientist. Francis Crick was using the wrong word (he would not disagree with that statement). "Dogma" does not belong in science. When eminent scientists name something in a stupid way, we tend to revise the wording a generation or two later. That's why we have top and bottom quarks instead of truth and beauty. They didn't have to take any Nobel prizes away to do that. We use "momentum" instead of "quantity of motion," but no one suggests Newton was a bad scientist because of it. In chemistry, we use "oxygen" instead of "dephlogisticated air," and even the English eventually thought Priestly's original name wasn't any good. Eventually, biology will stop being dogmatic. As biology mixes more with the physical sciences, biologists will start to get as embarrassed about the word as physical scientists think they should be. Read the bottom of the wikipedia article you linked to, it's already happening in the more quantitative areas of biology.
That would have been funnier if the House actually used Robert's Rules of Order. If they did use Robert's Rules, the Republicans would have had their vote and this farce would never have happened.
If you read the actual article (you need to be a AAAS member or otherwise have access to Science), you would see that that these MIT guys are using a cobalt oxide catalyst which is created during the electrolysis of water. Yeah, it's really efficient, which is good (I don't know that I buy the green thing), but it's also self-repairing. Although it seems to be future work, they're envisioning tailoring the chemistry so that the activity of the catalyst is maintained by an equilibrium of dissolving and redeposition of the catalyst electrode. As a bonus, it looks really easy to make.
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Is this serious, or just push back from economists who are upset that a number of papers and editorials have recently appeared in high profile scientific journals questioning the description of economics as science? Allegories, for example, are not scientific.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) to get an erection during prolonged space flight.
The next time some physicist is accused of misplacing (or selling) secret data, just remember this. NRL isn't just some lab somewhere, it's a military lab. While I'm sure this guy didn't want to go selling secrets anywhere, taking old hard drives can lose some scientists their jobs very easily.
An expanding BEC isn't anywhere close to a supernova. This would be similar to snapping the valve off of a liquid helium tank. The guys at CERN could blow themselves up with this, but that's about it. They could blow themselves up lots of ways.
It was called a "bosenova" because it shrinks before it expands, not because it's super destructive.
These FAST guys are using multiple sensors. If they've got 10 sensors that are 40% accurate, they'll have no troubles singling out the proper people for screening. Imagine going through security at the airport and only 1 in 100 people need to go through the metal detector... everyone else can just go on in. How is that bad?
The whole argument is stupid. They're not looking at random variables. The problem DHS is trying to solve is not how to build a 99.9999% accurate sensor. That's a stupid idea.
In the city of New York, there's only one lawyer I know. The probability of me finding him is thus abysmally small by Doctorow's argument, yet I somehow manage to meet up with him regularly. Is that a miracle, or am I using some extra information to overcome the daunting statistics? DHS is trying to generate that extra information.
I don't know that you're mistaken. I think the electoral college was one of those purposeful deviations from pure democracy, but there are no founding fathers around right now for us to ask. You answered my question. I don't think you're crazy, I just happen to disagree.
And if the electoral college was removed, would this change? The 6 or states would be different, but there would still only be a few states in which each candidate would campaign.
You don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president. The states do have a constitutional right to pick electors for the president. Where are you getting these "rights of voters" in a presidential election? Such rights only exist due to the actions of the individual states.
Certainly the process could be improved, but I think the idea should be to develop a more intelligent voting system, not one even more geared toward mob rule.
When medical schools have trouble recruiting students, then you can start talking about barriers that exist which keep people from applying.
There are not too few people applying to medical school. The admissions percentages have basically stayed the same for at least 10 years. If medical schools want to admit more people now, they can. There's no need to broaden the application pool. This is just the Journal taking potshots at science and medical doctors who are still upset over being taken down a peg in a hard class.
He did a calculation that showed that something which adsorbs more light is more efficient.
He'll find out soon enough that carbon nanotubes have some serious problems when you try and use them in solar cells. Also, solar cells already are 3D (the mars rovers' solar cells kick ass).
It is remarkable that a 12 year old made the connections he's made (I'm assuming he's latched onto the varying bandgaps of carbon nanotubes to increase the adsorption cross section of a solar cell... everyone gets excited by that idea, but "everyone" tends to be at least 20 when they think of it). I'd be thrilled to have him work in my lab when he's ready (I work with carbon nanotubes). It's a bit premature to say he's solving the world's energy needs.
He came into his position as head of education under a lot of scrutiny. Many people in the Royal Society felt it was inappropriate for a member of the clergy to hold one of the most important scientific education positions in the country. They were waiting for him to screw up, and he knew it. His view that time in science class should be used by the teacher to debate evolution with creationist students is not at all in line with most of the Royal Society. He should have kept it to himself.
It's not like he got into trouble for some offhand remarks to a small press outlet somewhere, it was his blog, and his subtitle: "...discussing creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolutionary theory." While his comments in their entirety are perfectly normal for any reasonable person, they don't reflect what the membership and leadership of the Royal Society want out there in their name. Does the oldest and most prestigious scientific organization in the world want it to be attributable to them that "because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson?"
Yeah, I'm taking his quotes out of context. He had a high profile position and should have been more careful.
you're at a university and you have a desire to hack something...
Go find a professor to set you up with a real project, something that someone (even if it's just a faculty member) has asked to be done. There's no shortage of stuff to do out there, but there's a major shortage of common sense. Actions matter more than intentions, so give yourself the protection of an academic role, or an internship in a professional organization.
A similar thing happened at my old university. A student broke into the student housing computer system and may have caused all sorts of trouble. The administration wanted to press criminal charges, but because he had done this under the supervision of a computer science faculty member and because it was presented at an academic conference, the computer science department was able to convince the administration to back off.
I completely agree with Marth's conclusion, but his letter is not insightful, he's simply registering a complaint about the rise of proteomics. It's not a research article, it's a letter to the editor. We get the same things in physics journals lamenting the rise of string theory or the decrease in funding for superconductivity.
Marth's call for interdisciplinary research and fresh ideas is good, but he's already made a mistake by grouping the molecules together using his own judgment. It would be better to present them all to a widely varying group of scientists and ask them to group the molecules in any way they would like. The idea that there are ~100 important biological building blocks is not new. But... this is just a letter to the editor, and the poster looks good, and we get the idea. Roland should not have picked it up, and it shouldn't be here, it was probably written for a department head somewhere who doesn't want to fund a new interdisciplinary program.
IBM researchers whom I've talked to at APS meetings say they must either produce something to fund their research or get outside funding. The answer was to compete with academic labs for federal grants and do contract research for other companies. The problem is this takes away what made the industrial labs so great: the ability of a scientist to work on what they felt was important rather than do what some grant reviewer thought was important.
A few thousand neutrons is a gross underestimation. Some of these reactor are getting around 700,000 n/s, or were several years ago... they may be much higher now. Curies are not the relevant unit when talking about the danger of radiation, you want the rather squishy unit of rems or sieverts.
Alpha particles from a smoke detector are very easy to shield and effect you differently than the fast neutrons produced by fusion. Over several years, the materials around a fusion reactor do become radioactive.
As someone who has worked in fusion, there is significant radiation created by the process. The larger reactors can't run on the ideal deuterium/tritium mixture because it would irradiate entire cities while the reactor burned. I would not want a small one in my garage. The reactor I worked on was in a concrete bunker a fair distance away from any people. It was also the size of a large house.
If you want to live in the future and be on the cutting edge of science, go to grad school and study physics (you're never too old). There are not enough people seriously studying fusion. You'll get paid to work on reactors (big or small) which may have a commercial future. We wear snarky shirts that no one understands too.
Titanium dioxde does this same thing (breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen using only light) and that was discovered more than 30 years ago.
Go take a look at what you can make doing research at Stanford with a PhD. $40k at an elite research institution in Palo Alto to work on SLAC or genetically engineer biofuels ain't much, and don't even think about overtime. Making $100k in Silicon Valley is great, go for the overtime, but don't think you're downtrodden.
In 1972 it was discovered that titanium dioxide is a strong oxidizer when exposed to light. The following years saw this applied to paints used in hospitals, coatings on windows and building concrete.
This is old technology which has been in use in Japan for many years. Yes, it does work.
I have a family member who was in the California assembly at the beginning of term limits. He talked quite a bit about controlled growth and spending caps as a way to prepare for future economic downturns. It turns out he was right about that.
His argument against term limits was that it took a few years just to learn how to be an effective legislator and described the situation just as you have. A few more years and he may have been able to convince enough people that controlled growth was a good thing. Legislators now don't think more than 4 years ahead. There's no reason for them to do so, they won't be in office if their projects eventually go haywire, and they need immediate results to run for the next office.
Like the NYT reporter, you're assuming everything he said was true. Given his history, why would you do that?
Do you really think hundreds of scientists, all out to prove each other wrong would overlook highly publicized results? Or maybe the one guy saying something different is wrong.
Another name for iron oxide?
Magnetite.
If that's not good enough, hematite, another form of iron oxide is magnetic at lower Martian surface temperatures. Any kid who has gone out to the desert with a magnet knows that you can pick up all sorts of stuff with it. Maybe people should try a little experimental verification before they claim the entire scientific community is lying (or perpetuating a myth if that sounds better).
Ok, not all the names we've gotten rid of are stupid. I like truth and beauty too, but it was the most recent example of name changing I could think of. I think the guys who discovered the "b" quark wanted to go with "truth" and "beauty," but couldn't find the "t" quark. Theorists were already using "top" and "bottom" at the time, so when the discoverers of the "t" quark went with "top" that basically was the end of it.
There was almost a "dogma" moment in particle physics when the guy who first thought of quarks called them "fictitious." What he meant by the word was not the normal usage. Everyone assumed he thought they didn't exist even though he meant they couldn't be isolated. Hmm, maybe that would have been a better example.
I am a scientist. Francis Crick was using the wrong word (he would not disagree with that statement). "Dogma" does not belong in science. When eminent scientists name something in a stupid way, we tend to revise the wording a generation or two later. That's why we have top and bottom quarks instead of truth and beauty. They didn't have to take any Nobel prizes away to do that. We use "momentum" instead of "quantity of motion," but no one suggests Newton was a bad scientist because of it. In chemistry, we use "oxygen" instead of "dephlogisticated air," and even the English eventually thought Priestly's original name wasn't any good. Eventually, biology will stop being dogmatic. As biology mixes more with the physical sciences, biologists will start to get as embarrassed about the word as physical scientists think they should be. Read the bottom of the wikipedia article you linked to, it's already happening in the more quantitative areas of biology.
That would have been funnier if the House actually used Robert's Rules of Order. If they did use Robert's Rules, the Republicans would have had their vote and this farce would never have happened.
If you read the actual article (you need to be a AAAS member or otherwise have access to Science), you would see that that these MIT guys are using a cobalt oxide catalyst which is created during the electrolysis of water. Yeah, it's really efficient, which is good (I don't know that I buy the green thing), but it's also self-repairing. Although it seems to be future work, they're envisioning tailoring the chemistry so that the activity of the catalyst is maintained by an equilibrium of dissolving and redeposition of the catalyst electrode. As a bonus, it looks really easy to make.