If the X-Prize folk searched "atmospheric water generator", they would find multiple commercial products that run on electricity. Then, they would simply need to set up a solar panel system, and they'd be done.
I live in a desert, and have looked into getting one of these systems. The (commercial) system I'm looking at has a cost that would meet their guidelines for production and cost, provided a working life of about 20 years. That's... not unreasonable.
Why don't we all use this technology? Because I'm billed for water (in the desert, in a drought) at $0.0015 per liter. If I'm really wasting water, and I get a fine for over-use, then I'm punished with a rate of $0.0036 per liter. If the cost for atmospheric water condensing was $0.02 (the X-Prize target), it still wouldn't be cheaper than aqueducts hundreds of miles long or ocean desalination (the two sources of my water). If they're going to have a cost target, it should be a lot lower. Really, they should be looking for creative ways to scale and capitalize the existing systems. We don't need more technology here, just different financing models.
Ok, a $300M annual charity gift is a big deal, and that's great. But this is not going to drastically change things. Nationwide, the NIH annual R&D budget is about $30B. The USA as a whole has spent over $100B annually on medical research for several years now. This is ~60% more than the total VC investment across all fields in the USA last year.
Maybe you should look at that a bit. Also, you may want to actually find out how Medicare and Medicaid work.
Medicare pays for nearly all drugs, generic or brand name. The catch is that Medicare pays what it wants, not what the companies charge. Epinephrine (the drug used in EpiPen) is a generic. The delivery mechanism (the pen) is a device with a separate set of rules. The competition in the market is about the pens, not the drug.
Medicaid has formularies that are managed by plan (i.e. by local committees or a company running a plan). Not all drugs/devices end up on the formularies. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is people asking for brand names (i.e. "My patient needs an EpiPen." rather than "My patient needs an epinephrine auto-injector.") Depending on your local plan, Medicaid may (North Carolina) or may not (Colorado) include an alternative to "EpiPen".
So, yes. "Medicaid" does have a generic alternative to "EpiPen", you just may not be able to get it where you are.
Now, I pointed out in my original post that a simple Google search would find this information for you. It is telling that the "EpiPen" brand is so strong that people (you, for example) continue to assume a real monopoly even when told how to prove to yourself that this is not true.
There are other epinephrine auto-injectors on the market in the US, cleared by the FDA. A simple Google search will show Adrenaclick at the top of page 1 (FDA cleared, available, and cheaper than EpiPen). It's not hard to find.
The problem here is that people want an "EpiPen", which is a BRAND, not a drug. These guys do not have a monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors (the thing people need), they have a trademark on "EpiPen" (their product name), which is totally reasonable.
This is not an FDA issue, a generic drug access issue, or an issue with the pharma industry's reduction of effective R&D everywhere but the US. This is about people being susceptible to marketing and branding.
Equal pay for equal work is a nice phrase, but this is not the way the world works. Forget gender for a minute, and think about whether this approach has a chance to work in any situation where we're trying to equalize economic outcomes.
You don't get paid just based on the work you do. The risks you take, your ability to negotiate, and your ability to leverage your existing finances can play a much bigger role in how much money you make than your actual work. This is why investors make more money than management, who make more money than the people doing the work.
This policy of focusing on salary, standardized benefits, and career development worked in the economy a generation or two removed from today. Now, wealth and advancement are generated through job-hopping or maintaining ownership of your work, not annualized salary. I think telling women they'll do well by sticking with one company and fighting for raises and career development is a recipe to create a gender wage gap.
It's really interesting that you and I agree on the problem so closely, but we disagree on the economic system that's the root of the issue. I agree even that at the root, the problem we're discussing with science comes from what are essentially subsidies for already rich people and organizations at the expense of the workers. The difference is that I think that scientific research, as a market, has been socialized rather than left too open to the pressure of capitalist competition. The government controls every detail from the total size of the market down to how much lab techs are paid. The NIH, for example, had to be ordered by Congress to raise postdoc salaries (which they kind-of did) because the bureaucratic goal of maximizing the scientific workforce and productivity was at odds with their responsibility to pay people a fair salary.
I'm with you on the idea that modern states really use a mix of capitalism and communism. I really don't care how we describe the problem: I call it overly socialized, but I'd be just as happy to call it "crony capitalism." What I'd like is to see us improve the quality of science and the way we treat our young scientists.
The physics analysis is not a controversial at all. The big controversy here is over what should be funded.
Cosmologists and quantum theorists are in good company when it comes to leveraging popular fantasies for fame and fortune. I'm a condensed matter physicist, and about every five years for a very long time we have discovered a material "stronger than steel," or that "will replace silicon."
This is now the culture of science (not just physics) because we have allowed basic research to become a profit center. Universities and (to a lesser extent) companies do not pay for scientific research any more, they get paid to do scientific research. Dig in to a university budget some time. The government is the only customer that matters in this world, and that all-important customer only cares about publications (peer reviewed articles, mass media, whatever). To keep our jobs, we have to be very good at telling stories and painting a picture of the future.
This is key because the customers for basic research used to care about actionable information first, and publicity second. We've reversed that.
The result is that most basic researchers are essentially professional science bloggers. Illuminating possibilities is a lot more interesting and lucrative than proving (or disproving) things.
I am a physicist. What makes my job interesting is not endless connect-the-dots logical connections, but the opposite: my job is to make (educated) guesses based on imperfect information.
The interesting part comes in figuring out when there's enough evidence to make a reasonable conclusion. We (the other scientists and I) debate whether a piece of data is really "true," what conclusions could be supported by collected evidence, and what "reasonable" means in "reasonable conclusion." I work with two other physicists, one of whom I trained, and one was trained by my grad school mentor. Even with such similar backgrounds, we disagree on all of these seemingly logical and mathematically calculable things daily. We work at a company, and can't afford to continue gathering data until we all agree. So, I have to make decisions based on incomplete information and logical disagreement all the time.
My dad is a lawyer/politician who has held elected office for most of my life. As an elected official, his job is to make decisions with a very controlled timeline, and somewhat controlled budget. This means he's routinely making decisions without all the information one would wish. While law lacks the rigor of the statistical calculations we use in science, the idea of gradations of certainty is there, and is used in politics.
Essentially, the argument that evidence can be gathered until a logical political conclusion can be reached is impractical and not rooted in reality. We do not even do that in science. Further, the suggestion that scientists have a monopoly on logic and evidence determination is wrong. The implication that politicians and government officials broadly do not currently desire to make logical conclusions based on evidence is counter-productive and incorrect. Certainly there are corrupt officials who do not desire this, but to imply that our government as a whole is illogical is dangerous.
I don't think that's what the FBI statement is saying at all, and I think you're looking at something that's not the statement...
It's very clear that the FBI found that classified information was exposed, but not "in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice." The FBI characterization of what was done is "extremely careless." This is interesting wording because that is not a legal term associated with disclosure of classified material; "grossly negligent" is the legal term associated with the threshold for felony mishandling of classified information.
The FBI statement is also very clear on the security classification of what they found, which is why I think you're reading something else.
110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.
That's pretty darn specific. If it was just the confidential stuff, I think your implication that the government classifies everything and this isn't a big deal would be very strong. Multiple accidental Top Secret information leaks is a bit different, though. In the last 15 years, we have sent many government workers to jail for leaking information like this, or even just having it stored at their house.
One thing stands out in your recollection for me: the inspirational focus on product innovation. Setting the circuses aside, that sounds very different from board meetings I'm used to (in the USA). I can see the appeal of that. While very profitable, innovations in marketing are not so inspirational.
In an abstract way, this is true. Practically though, no one can effectively compete with Google.
There is not much difference in the effective power Google has compared to AT&T prior to being broken up. Both AT&T (then) and Google (now) use intense vertical integration, bundling of various services at below a-la-carte market prices, and large R&D efforts to maintain dominance. While people (such as Sprint) were free to compete with AT&T prior to 1982, the (legal) fact is that there was no economic way to effectively compete with them. The same is nearly true of Yahoo and Bing in contrast with Google today.
Ok, I actually do have a sincere (and off-topic) question for you.
Why do you go to these meetings?
I present for my company at meetings. It seems phone calls are much preferred to face to face meetings unless there's something really critical (bad) going on. Certainly, we don't get anyone who isn't fluent in English. So... why do you go to the Japanese shareholder meetings?
Maybe they're entertaining? I've never seen any ruckii at our meetings. To have that happen almost annually would be incredible. Now, the on-topic discussion is Sony's ethical mis-steps, so maybe they've earned these disruptions.
In my view, good investor management nearly demands that shareholder meetings are boring and predictable. If there's something good happening that you can raise money on, don't sit on it! If there's something bad going on, don't surprise your investors with it. A formal meeting recaps communications that have been going on since the last formal meeting.
I'm a scientist and have worked in the sensor field for a long time. I have had students I've trained attempt this (commercial breath detection of cancer) with promising initial results. It's pretty easy to do the demo these guys are doing. It's very hard to do this with real people. The gap between cool academic demo and manufactured product is huge. The gap between product and FDA cleared diagnostic is even larger.
My favorite part of this is the tortured logic around the (lack of) funding for anything. The budget for 2017 plans on $106M being spent on street repairs. For the climate action plan, they hope that 10% of the street repairs are helpful for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. So, that's a $10.6M expenditure on the CAP plan! The vast majority of the people being "hired" on this plan are being hired into the sewer repair project. This is a long-term program that was going to hire those people anyway. Also, this is part of the reason the roads need to be repaired so badly, they're being torn up all over town, and then "repaired" when the sewer guys move on.
These are both good things to do, but we were doing them anyway, and not because we're trying to fight climate change. They money being "spent" in this plan, and the people being "hired" have nothing to do at all with the headline.
Since 1999 the US government has paid more for basic research to universities than the combined private and public investment in early stage commercialization (government research grants vs angel investing + venture capital + SBIR). We've built our R&D system such that it costs more to commercialize a good idea than it does to do the basic research. Basic research costs are kept low by subsidies from the researchers who accept degrees, PhDs, postdoctoral fellowships, and tenure in lieu of money.
So, now we have an overabundance of basic research ideas and projects, and a shortage of commercialization opportunities and industry funding.
How does that lead to the government needing to spend more? The government is spending enough.
1) Let's go back to requiring DoD contractors spend 15% of their overhead funding on internal R&D. 2) Let's require SBIR recipients to work on their funded projects full time. 3) Let's require that "diversified investments" advertised to the general public include 0.5% of total funds invested in companies less than 5 years old.
The money is out there, and the researchers are out there. The government doesn't need to pay for everything, nor the scientific community accept the expansive view of "basic" research to include everything up to sales (and in some cases, past that). There needs to be a nudge in the right direction though.
The problem with this approach to patents is that when I create a patent that covers similar technology as the "non-working" version, but actually works properly, I still get my patent granted.
You *can* patent nonsense, but that doesn't prevent actual patents of existing inventions from parallel (non-infringing by addition of crucial invention) patents.
A political scientist wants to teach statistics without algebra or logs? Instead of "math," the political scientist wants to teach the Consumer Price Index and other political tools as science. Wow.
That's dumb, but the arguments being made in the NYT article go beyond dumb and are dangerous: Not all employers need people with algebra. Ok. So we shouldn't teach algebra. Oh, ok.
A reasonable follow up question: Do employers need people who have read canonical American literature, or have any appreciation for history, art, or poetry?
Well, I am an employer, I can answer that question. I don't NEED my employees to know any of that stuff. None of that goes onto the job description. During a job interview, I will never hear "this Research Biologist job looks great, I'm super qualified for that, but I've never read Hemmingway." It's not important. I would be very concerned if someone had no interests or studies outside of their job, but each individual subject is not important.
TFA says "Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives." That line of thinking leads to full time work-study. Work ethic, punctuality, experience being managed in a job... there are some skills directly applicable to EVERY workplace, and it doesn't require ANY difficult academic subjects. Tailoring the educational system to job postings is stupid and a pathway to a very poorly educated population.
Math should be relevant to "real" people. That's not controversial. So let's judge math education based on real-world applicability for everyone, not just "employers."
People should be able to handle their personal finances, and understand what they're signing on to when they sign a loan or a job offer. Algebra *should* be enabling that, but we teach it poorly and people cannot apply it to their lives.
These are the kinds of things everyone should be able to do with math: Assume you need to put a $1000 on a credit card for a year. Evaluate three different (real) credit card offers and determine which will require you to pay the least amount back.
Assume you get a job offer with a $40k annual salary. This offer comes with a 401k retirement plan that you will own. Your employer will pay into your 401k account the same amount you pay into it, up to 3% of your salary. How much money are you paid annually for this job if you submit 3% of your salary to the 401k?
You have two job offers for temporary work, and can only take one. The first is for 25 hours at $15 an hour and the second is at $18 an hour for between 15 and 25 hours. How many hours do you need to get at the $18/hour job to get paid the same total amount as the $15/hour job?
If people can't do these problems (and many can't), then I agree that it's pointless to try and teach polynomials and logs, and that's really a bad thing!
People in liberal arts and social science need to think about that this is math that is 400 years old. In the 1600s, people thought this was important enough to work on and use. This is math that was useful in the Renaissance, and we have built on it and increased it's utility since then (notably: basic statistics...). This is "advanced" and "modern" in the same way that novels are (a 400 year old art form). No one would suggest that reading novels is an impediment for graduation, and anyway, not important to the workplace, so we should be more modern and just read blog posts in school.
This brings up a really interesting issue regarding ownership of the computers. Legally, grantees do not own equipment purchased under a grant, but are by tradition (if an academic institution) given custodianship of the equipment at the end of the grant.
Sale or re-purposing of the equipment as the department is doing may technically be a violation of federal contracting laws (not that anyone will enforce it...).
First, do the people talking about the science get their units right? Forget mixing imperial and metric, do the words and the measurements match up at all?
Energy density is energy per volume. Wh/gal, Wh/L, MJ/L, or something like that.
Specific energy is energy per weight. Wh/lb, Wh/kg, MJ/kg, or something like that.
They're reporting an "energy density" with units of "specific energy." Are they doing their comparisons well if they don't understan what they're looking at? Have they done the measurement properly?
Maybe this is a great invention, but this wasn't ready for publication or press release.
You've got an aggressively paternalistic view of homelessness.
I've been homeless (while working). It had little to do with money, and everything to do with me not being concerned about having a traditional place to live for a little while. My understanding is that my situation was typical of homelessness (where I live, at least). I really doubt UBI would change much here.
What UBI will change is people's willingness to quit a job and try their own thing. That's what Y Combinator wants to see happen here. We're seeing a slow, steady drop in startup creation, and that's a problem for their business model.
Figuring out where you are in the FDA regulated world can be difficult, but Theranos isn't in that situation. Diagnostic manufacturers and diagnostic labs go through FDA clearance. No ambiguity there (ok, LDTs are ambiguous, but that loophole is closing).
Theranos knew this, and successfully went through FDA with a herpes diagnostic, as well as being qualified as a diagnostic lab. Given all that regulatory engagement, it boggles the mind that they didn't see this coming. Either they didn't know they were running a lab that was faking test results (which is bad), or they knew and didn't believe the FDA would find out (which is worse).
I've bought DNA snippets for use in experiments for years (DNA is about $0.50/base from existing companies). The cost of DNA has been trivial for scientific work for a long time. The real cost is in the labor and equipment that goes into running an experiment. On a million dollar a year project, reducing the cost of DNA from $1000 a year to $10 a year doesn't really change the pace of research. That's not enough savings to hire another person to get more work done, or buy any of the equipment necessary.
The Aliso Canyon you're looking for is the Aliso Canyon in the city of Los Angeles (it's a city "park" that's really just a couple of old trails). It's in the neighborhood of Porter Ranch at the edge of the San Fernando Valley.
I'm sure there's a lot of extraneous media hype surrounding this, but SCGC was meeting with residents and moving people out well before the media got involved. Methane isn't really a big health hazard, but SCGC is taking this pretty seriously.
This article is pretty light on details. I know some of the residents in that area, and these are things some retired engineers have passed on to me from community meetings SCGC has had with them.
This is an old (early 20th century) oil field with over 80 wells. If you've never driven around LA, you may not know that there are still operational oil fields inside the city, but think of the La Brea tar pits, and it makes sense.
All of the wells in this field were designed to pump out oil. The pipes used in the wells are larger inner diameter than typically used with methane and have thinner and more porous wall material than typically used with methane. The pipes used are perfectly fine for oil, but would not be approved for a new methane well.
SCGC uses this underground cavern emptied of oil as storage for methane for Los Angeles in lieu of constructed tanks. They can and do pump methane in and out, it's all processed and comes from somewhere else.
What they did not do is verify that this old oil field will actually hold methane before they started using it. This leak looks like the methane is going through the porous concrete pipe that makes up the well and through the surrounding rock to the surface. This is why they can't seal the leak by clogging the pipe. It seems unlikely that anything short of capping all of the wells at the bottom or pumping out the methane will stop the leaking for good. They're halfway through drilling for one well, and don't intend to start on others until they show signs of leaking. All of their sensors are at ground level, so they will have no advance notice of an imminent leak.
The local schools have been closed due to air quality issues, and a few thousand people have been temporarily moved at SCGC's expense. This leak accounts for 25% of the total expected statewide carbon emissions.
I've worked in a large government lab that included a small cold fusion group. The cold fusion scientists at that lab were extremely careful and competent (and never made any claims about power generation). Their work essentially revolved around running nuclear reactions using something other than heat to drive the reaction. Totally non-controversial.
The management and senior scientists at the lab would routinely make fun of these people. They absolutely dealt with a completely undeserved lack of credibility because the words "cold fusion" were associated with their work. Scientists are people, we make human judgments, like it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
If the X-Prize folk searched "atmospheric water generator", they would find multiple commercial products that run on electricity. Then, they would simply need to set up a solar panel system, and they'd be done.
I live in a desert, and have looked into getting one of these systems. The (commercial) system I'm looking at has a cost that would meet their guidelines for production and cost, provided a working life of about 20 years. That's... not unreasonable.
Why don't we all use this technology? Because I'm billed for water (in the desert, in a drought) at $0.0015 per liter. If I'm really wasting water, and I get a fine for over-use, then I'm punished with a rate of $0.0036 per liter. If the cost for atmospheric water condensing was $0.02 (the X-Prize target), it still wouldn't be cheaper than aqueducts hundreds of miles long or ocean desalination (the two sources of my water). If they're going to have a cost target, it should be a lot lower. Really, they should be looking for creative ways to scale and capitalize the existing systems. We don't need more technology here, just different financing models.
Ok, a $300M annual charity gift is a big deal, and that's great. But this is not going to drastically change things. Nationwide, the NIH annual R&D budget is about $30B. The USA as a whole has spent over $100B annually on medical research for several years now. This is ~60% more than the total VC investment across all fields in the USA last year.
http://adrenaclick.com/
Maybe you should look at that a bit. Also, you may want to actually find out how Medicare and Medicaid work.
Medicare pays for nearly all drugs, generic or brand name. The catch is that Medicare pays what it wants, not what the companies charge. Epinephrine (the drug used in EpiPen) is a generic. The delivery mechanism (the pen) is a device with a separate set of rules. The competition in the market is about the pens, not the drug.
Medicaid has formularies that are managed by plan (i.e. by local committees or a company running a plan). Not all drugs/devices end up on the formularies. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is people asking for brand names (i.e. "My patient needs an EpiPen." rather than "My patient needs an epinephrine auto-injector.") Depending on your local plan, Medicaid may (North Carolina) or may not (Colorado) include an alternative to "EpiPen".
So, yes. "Medicaid" does have a generic alternative to "EpiPen", you just may not be able to get it where you are.
Now, I pointed out in my original post that a simple Google search would find this information for you. It is telling that the "EpiPen" brand is so strong that people (you, for example) continue to assume a real monopoly even when told how to prove to yourself that this is not true.
There are other epinephrine auto-injectors on the market in the US, cleared by the FDA. A simple Google search will show Adrenaclick at the top of page 1 (FDA cleared, available, and cheaper than EpiPen). It's not hard to find.
The problem here is that people want an "EpiPen", which is a BRAND, not a drug. These guys do not have a monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors (the thing people need), they have a trademark on "EpiPen" (their product name), which is totally reasonable.
This is not an FDA issue, a generic drug access issue, or an issue with the pharma industry's reduction of effective R&D everywhere but the US. This is about people being susceptible to marketing and branding.
Equal pay for equal work is a nice phrase, but this is not the way the world works. Forget gender for a minute, and think about whether this approach has a chance to work in any situation where we're trying to equalize economic outcomes.
You don't get paid just based on the work you do. The risks you take, your ability to negotiate, and your ability to leverage your existing finances can play a much bigger role in how much money you make than your actual work. This is why investors make more money than management, who make more money than the people doing the work.
This policy of focusing on salary, standardized benefits, and career development worked in the economy a generation or two removed from today. Now, wealth and advancement are generated through job-hopping or maintaining ownership of your work, not annualized salary. I think telling women they'll do well by sticking with one company and fighting for raises and career development is a recipe to create a gender wage gap.
It's really interesting that you and I agree on the problem so closely, but we disagree on the economic system that's the root of the issue. I agree even that at the root, the problem we're discussing with science comes from what are essentially subsidies for already rich people and organizations at the expense of the workers. The difference is that I think that scientific research, as a market, has been socialized rather than left too open to the pressure of capitalist competition. The government controls every detail from the total size of the market down to how much lab techs are paid. The NIH, for example, had to be ordered by Congress to raise postdoc salaries (which they kind-of did) because the bureaucratic goal of maximizing the scientific workforce and productivity was at odds with their responsibility to pay people a fair salary.
I'm with you on the idea that modern states really use a mix of capitalism and communism. I really don't care how we describe the problem: I call it overly socialized, but I'd be just as happy to call it "crony capitalism." What I'd like is to see us improve the quality of science and the way we treat our young scientists.
The physics analysis is not a controversial at all. The big controversy here is over what should be funded.
Cosmologists and quantum theorists are in good company when it comes to leveraging popular fantasies for fame and fortune. I'm a condensed matter physicist, and about every five years for a very long time we have discovered a material "stronger than steel," or that "will replace silicon."
This is now the culture of science (not just physics) because we have allowed basic research to become a profit center. Universities and (to a lesser extent) companies do not pay for scientific research any more, they get paid to do scientific research. Dig in to a university budget some time. The government is the only customer that matters in this world, and that all-important customer only cares about publications (peer reviewed articles, mass media, whatever). To keep our jobs, we have to be very good at telling stories and painting a picture of the future.
This is key because the customers for basic research used to care about actionable information first, and publicity second. We've reversed that.
The result is that most basic researchers are essentially professional science bloggers. Illuminating possibilities is a lot more interesting and lucrative than proving (or disproving) things.
I am a physicist. What makes my job interesting is not endless connect-the-dots logical connections, but the opposite: my job is to make (educated) guesses based on imperfect information.
The interesting part comes in figuring out when there's enough evidence to make a reasonable conclusion. We (the other scientists and I) debate whether a piece of data is really "true," what conclusions could be supported by collected evidence, and what "reasonable" means in "reasonable conclusion." I work with two other physicists, one of whom I trained, and one was trained by my grad school mentor. Even with such similar backgrounds, we disagree on all of these seemingly logical and mathematically calculable things daily. We work at a company, and can't afford to continue gathering data until we all agree. So, I have to make decisions based on incomplete information and logical disagreement all the time.
My dad is a lawyer/politician who has held elected office for most of my life. As an elected official, his job is to make decisions with a very controlled timeline, and somewhat controlled budget. This means he's routinely making decisions without all the information one would wish. While law lacks the rigor of the statistical calculations we use in science, the idea of gradations of certainty is there, and is used in politics.
Essentially, the argument that evidence can be gathered until a logical political conclusion can be reached is impractical and not rooted in reality. We do not even do that in science. Further, the suggestion that scientists have a monopoly on logic and evidence determination is wrong. The implication that politicians and government officials broadly do not currently desire to make logical conclusions based on evidence is counter-productive and incorrect. Certainly there are corrupt officials who do not desire this, but to imply that our government as a whole is illogical is dangerous.
I don't think that's what the FBI statement is saying at all, and I think you're looking at something that's not the statement...
It's very clear that the FBI found that classified information was exposed, but not "in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice." The FBI characterization of what was done is "extremely careless." This is interesting wording because that is not a legal term associated with disclosure of classified material; "grossly negligent" is the legal term associated with the threshold for felony mishandling of classified information.
The FBI statement is also very clear on the security classification of what they found, which is why I think you're reading something else.
That's pretty darn specific. If it was just the confidential stuff, I think your implication that the government classifies everything and this isn't a big deal would be very strong. Multiple accidental Top Secret information leaks is a bit different, though. In the last 15 years, we have sent many government workers to jail for leaking information like this, or even just having it stored at their house.
Thanks for sharing.
One thing stands out in your recollection for me: the inspirational focus on product innovation. Setting the circuses aside, that sounds very different from board meetings I'm used to (in the USA). I can see the appeal of that. While very profitable, innovations in marketing are not so inspirational.
In an abstract way, this is true. Practically though, no one can effectively compete with Google.
There is not much difference in the effective power Google has compared to AT&T prior to being broken up. Both AT&T (then) and Google (now) use intense vertical integration, bundling of various services at below a-la-carte market prices, and large R&D efforts to maintain dominance. While people (such as Sprint) were free to compete with AT&T prior to 1982, the (legal) fact is that there was no economic way to effectively compete with them. The same is nearly true of Yahoo and Bing in contrast with Google today.
Ok, I actually do have a sincere (and off-topic) question for you.
Why do you go to these meetings?
I present for my company at meetings. It seems phone calls are much preferred to face to face meetings unless there's something really critical (bad) going on. Certainly, we don't get anyone who isn't fluent in English. So... why do you go to the Japanese shareholder meetings?
Maybe they're entertaining? I've never seen any ruckii at our meetings. To have that happen almost annually would be incredible. Now, the on-topic discussion is Sony's ethical mis-steps, so maybe they've earned these disruptions.
In my view, good investor management nearly demands that shareholder meetings are boring and predictable. If there's something good happening that you can raise money on, don't sit on it! If there's something bad going on, don't surprise your investors with it. A formal meeting recaps communications that have been going on since the last formal meeting.
I'm a scientist and have worked in the sensor field for a long time. I have had students I've trained attempt this (commercial breath detection of cancer) with promising initial results. It's pretty easy to do the demo these guys are doing. It's very hard to do this with real people. The gap between cool academic demo and manufactured product is huge. The gap between product and FDA cleared diagnostic is even larger.
My favorite part of this is the tortured logic around the (lack of) funding for anything. The budget for 2017 plans on $106M being spent on street repairs. For the climate action plan, they hope that 10% of the street repairs are helpful for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. So, that's a $10.6M expenditure on the CAP plan! The vast majority of the people being "hired" on this plan are being hired into the sewer repair project. This is a long-term program that was going to hire those people anyway. Also, this is part of the reason the roads need to be repaired so badly, they're being torn up all over town, and then "repaired" when the sewer guys move on.
These are both good things to do, but we were doing them anyway, and not because we're trying to fight climate change. They money being "spent" in this plan, and the people being "hired" have nothing to do at all with the headline.
Since 1999 the US government has paid more for basic research to universities than the combined private and public investment in early stage commercialization (government research grants vs angel investing + venture capital + SBIR). We've built our R&D system such that it costs more to commercialize a good idea than it does to do the basic research. Basic research costs are kept low by subsidies from the researchers who accept degrees, PhDs, postdoctoral fellowships, and tenure in lieu of money.
So, now we have an overabundance of basic research ideas and projects, and a shortage of commercialization opportunities and industry funding.
How does that lead to the government needing to spend more? The government is spending enough.
1) Let's go back to requiring DoD contractors spend 15% of their overhead funding on internal R&D.
2) Let's require SBIR recipients to work on their funded projects full time.
3) Let's require that "diversified investments" advertised to the general public include 0.5% of total funds invested in companies less than 5 years old.
The money is out there, and the researchers are out there. The government doesn't need to pay for everything, nor the scientific community accept the expansive view of "basic" research to include everything up to sales (and in some cases, past that). There needs to be a nudge in the right direction though.
The problem with this approach to patents is that when I create a patent that covers similar technology as the "non-working" version, but actually works properly, I still get my patent granted.
You *can* patent nonsense, but that doesn't prevent actual patents of existing inventions from parallel (non-infringing by addition of crucial invention) patents.
A political scientist wants to teach statistics without algebra or logs? Instead of "math," the political scientist wants to teach the Consumer Price Index and other political tools as science. Wow.
That's dumb, but the arguments being made in the NYT article go beyond dumb and are dangerous: Not all employers need people with algebra. Ok. So we shouldn't teach algebra. Oh, ok.
A reasonable follow up question: Do employers need people who have read canonical American literature, or have any appreciation for history, art, or poetry?
Well, I am an employer, I can answer that question. I don't NEED my employees to know any of that stuff. None of that goes onto the job description. During a job interview, I will never hear "this Research Biologist job looks great, I'm super qualified for that, but I've never read Hemmingway." It's not important. I would be very concerned if someone had no interests or studies outside of their job, but each individual subject is not important.
TFA says "Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives." That line of thinking leads to full time work-study. Work ethic, punctuality, experience being managed in a job... there are some skills directly applicable to EVERY workplace, and it doesn't require ANY difficult academic subjects. Tailoring the educational system to job postings is stupid and a pathway to a very poorly educated population.
Math should be relevant to "real" people. That's not controversial. So let's judge math education based on real-world applicability for everyone, not just "employers."
People should be able to handle their personal finances, and understand what they're signing on to when they sign a loan or a job offer. Algebra *should* be enabling that, but we teach it poorly and people cannot apply it to their lives.
These are the kinds of things everyone should be able to do with math:
Assume you need to put a $1000 on a credit card for a year. Evaluate three different (real) credit card offers and determine which will require you to pay the least amount back.
Assume you get a job offer with a $40k annual salary. This offer comes with a 401k retirement plan that you will own. Your employer will pay into your 401k account the same amount you pay into it, up to 3% of your salary. How much money are you paid annually for this job if you submit 3% of your salary to the 401k?
You have two job offers for temporary work, and can only take one. The first is for 25 hours at $15 an hour and the second is at $18 an hour for between 15 and 25 hours. How many hours do you need to get at the $18/hour job to get paid the same total amount as the $15/hour job?
If people can't do these problems (and many can't), then I agree that it's pointless to try and teach polynomials and logs, and that's really a bad thing!
People in liberal arts and social science need to think about that this is math that is 400 years old. In the 1600s, people thought this was important enough to work on and use. This is math that was useful in the Renaissance, and we have built on it and increased it's utility since then (notably: basic statistics...). This is "advanced" and "modern" in the same way that novels are (a 400 year old art form). No one would suggest that reading novels is an impediment for graduation, and anyway, not important to the workplace, so we should be more modern and just read blog posts in school.
This brings up a really interesting issue regarding ownership of the computers. Legally, grantees do not own equipment purchased under a grant, but are by tradition (if an academic institution) given custodianship of the equipment at the end of the grant.
Sale or re-purposing of the equipment as the department is doing may technically be a violation of federal contracting laws (not that anyone will enforce it...).
First, do the people talking about the science get their units right? Forget mixing imperial and metric, do the words and the measurements match up at all?
Energy density is energy per volume. Wh/gal, Wh/L, MJ/L, or something like that.
Specific energy is energy per weight. Wh/lb, Wh/kg, MJ/kg, or something like that.
They're reporting an "energy density" with units of "specific energy." Are they doing their comparisons well if they don't understan what they're looking at? Have they done the measurement properly?
Maybe this is a great invention, but this wasn't ready for publication or press release.
You've got an aggressively paternalistic view of homelessness.
I've been homeless (while working). It had little to do with money, and everything to do with me not being concerned about having a traditional place to live for a little while. My understanding is that my situation was typical of homelessness (where I live, at least). I really doubt UBI would change much here.
What UBI will change is people's willingness to quit a job and try their own thing. That's what Y Combinator wants to see happen here. We're seeing a slow, steady drop in startup creation, and that's a problem for their business model.
Figuring out where you are in the FDA regulated world can be difficult, but Theranos isn't in that situation. Diagnostic manufacturers and diagnostic labs go through FDA clearance. No ambiguity there (ok, LDTs are ambiguous, but that loophole is closing).
Theranos knew this, and successfully went through FDA with a herpes diagnostic, as well as being qualified as a diagnostic lab. Given all that regulatory engagement, it boggles the mind that they didn't see this coming. Either they didn't know they were running a lab that was faking test results (which is bad), or they knew and didn't believe the FDA would find out (which is worse).
I've bought DNA snippets for use in experiments for years (DNA is about $0.50/base from existing companies). The cost of DNA has been trivial for scientific work for a long time. The real cost is in the labor and equipment that goes into running an experiment. On a million dollar a year project, reducing the cost of DNA from $1000 a year to $10 a year doesn't really change the pace of research. That's not enough savings to hire another person to get more work done, or buy any of the equipment necessary.
The Aliso Canyon you're looking for is the Aliso Canyon in the city of Los Angeles (it's a city "park" that's really just a couple of old trails). It's in the neighborhood of Porter Ranch at the edge of the San Fernando Valley.
I'm sure there's a lot of extraneous media hype surrounding this, but SCGC was meeting with residents and moving people out well before the media got involved. Methane isn't really a big health hazard, but SCGC is taking this pretty seriously.
This article is pretty light on details. I know some of the residents in that area, and these are things some retired engineers have passed on to me from community meetings SCGC has had with them.
This is an old (early 20th century) oil field with over 80 wells. If you've never driven around LA, you may not know that there are still operational oil fields inside the city, but think of the La Brea tar pits, and it makes sense.
All of the wells in this field were designed to pump out oil. The pipes used in the wells are larger inner diameter than typically used with methane and have thinner and more porous wall material than typically used with methane. The pipes used are perfectly fine for oil, but would not be approved for a new methane well.
SCGC uses this underground cavern emptied of oil as storage for methane for Los Angeles in lieu of constructed tanks. They can and do pump methane in and out, it's all processed and comes from somewhere else.
What they did not do is verify that this old oil field will actually hold methane before they started using it. This leak looks like the methane is going through the porous concrete pipe that makes up the well and through the surrounding rock to the surface. This is why they can't seal the leak by clogging the pipe. It seems unlikely that anything short of capping all of the wells at the bottom or pumping out the methane will stop the leaking for good. They're halfway through drilling for one well, and don't intend to start on others until they show signs of leaking. All of their sensors are at ground level, so they will have no advance notice of an imminent leak.
The local schools have been closed due to air quality issues, and a few thousand people have been temporarily moved at SCGC's expense. This leak accounts for 25% of the total expected statewide carbon emissions.
I've worked in a large government lab that included a small cold fusion group. The cold fusion scientists at that lab were extremely careful and competent (and never made any claims about power generation). Their work essentially revolved around running nuclear reactions using something other than heat to drive the reaction. Totally non-controversial.
The management and senior scientists at the lab would routinely make fun of these people. They absolutely dealt with a completely undeserved lack of credibility because the words "cold fusion" were associated with their work. Scientists are people, we make human judgments, like it or not.