Umm, no. Unless the plane (or your car) is wet, there isn't any steam coming from the top and you can't see heat. The waviness is due to the heating of the surrounding air (or exhaust).
Umm, sort of.
You get waviness and distortion above a hot surface even in the total absence of water or water vapour. I think the parent was getting at the correct idea, but was a bit unclear.
Hot air at a given pressure is less dense than cold air. It has a slightly lower refractive index. Around (and especially above) a hot surface, there will be convection currents and mixing of hot and cold air. What this gives you is a volume of air in which the index of refraction is constantly changing both in space and time. That, in turn, makes that volume a real mess...optically speaking. If someone is trying to take telephoto shots of something on the far side, then they will be out of luck.
A land where your foreign minister was stabbed to death in public, during the day, and you're suggesting nobody would ever need a gun in your country?
Whoa...that's quite the line of reasoning....
Although you're quite correct--had the assailant had a firearm, the foreign minister wouldn't have been stabbed to death.
Even if the foreign minister had been packing heat, as it were, she still probably wouldn't have had a chance to get a shot off--she was attacked by surprise in a shopping center. My understanding is that in Sweden most senior government officials don't travel with a coterie of heavily armed bodyguards. (Can you imagine Colin Powell being allowed to go to Walmart without a security detail?) Random passerby with firearms likely would have injured other innocent people. Whether they do or do not need guns in Sweden is open to debate, but the assassination of the foreign minister is both a poor argument and in poor taste.
If we're going to make specious arguments, it should also be noted that Sweden had only one assassination of a national political figure in the entire twentieth century (their Prime Minister, in 1986), which suggests that maybe they're doing something right....
...erected for the exlusive purpose of providing power for aluminum smelters, which are not that green.
On the other hand, the aluminum may be put to green uses. Vehicles built from aluminum can be lighter and more fuel-efficient than those made from steel. (Steel mills aren't known for being particularly green, either.) Most of our transportation engineering is predicated on the use of metals as a structural material, and all those hydrogen-powered vehicles have to be built out of something--aluminum might well be the best alternative.
The energy of one keypress in X-rays is enough to kill you.
That's very borderline true....
Keys on a keyboard draw maybe a watt when in use. At most. Assuming a keystroke takes about a tenth of a second, you're sucking down 0.1 joules per keystroke.
Delivered to your entire body, that's about 2 milligray (0.2 rad) of absorbed dose. A fatal dose is upwards of 5 gray (500 rad).
To be fair, if you instantaneously delivered that dose to a small volume--10 mL, or a third of an ounce--then you'd hit that with 10 gray and kill most of it. (Assuming it was a reasonably sensitive spot.) If you delivered it right to the spinal cord in the neck, you might be able to kill someone. Frankly, that amount of energy, delivered just about anywhere, might annoy someone--but it won't kill them.
As of 2000, the US spent upwards of $7 billion fighting AIDS, $2 billion of which was just basic research.
Food for thought--the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent $10.8 billion on marketing in 1998. I presume that figure has risen since.
$2 billion is one B-2 bomber.
$2 billion is less than two percent of an Iraq invasion. (And heading rapidly towards 1%.)
$2 billion sounds like a lot of money, but as far as government programs go it's pretty trifling. About four hundred thousand Americans have AIDS or HIV. Curing the disease would have significant direct economic and health benefits for a lot of Americans, even if you leave out the warm fuzzy feeling associated with saving the rest of the world.
WP lets everyone edit (nearly) every page. The only distinction is time spent online. If you spend 4 hours, you can edit twice as much as with 2 hours. Generally, the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education (considering that people with less skills pro'lly won't edit).
On the other hand, you assume that every user and author of Wikipedia will attempt to modify every article he or she comes across. In practice, people seem to be reasonably skilled at recognizing that an article is in good shape, and not tampering with it. Individuals with reasonably expert knowledge will add something, and the rest of us college grads will limit ourselves to cleaning up the copy.
The article on chemotherapy, for instance, is quite detailed and full of specific knowledge, though it's a bit rough around the edges in spots. It's definitely well beyond what the average college grad knows about chemotherapy, at any rate.
As for the peer review issue--Wikipedia isn't a place to publish original scientific research. Articles that represent original, unvetted research are regularly culled. Like a conventional general encyclopedia, Wikipedia reports on established scientific principles, though tends to be a bit more up-to-date. Wikipedia may also include more recent, controversial scientific ideas, but generally the articles will describe the conflict surrounding such new material. Regardless, Wikipedia doesn't publish science that doesn't already appear in a peer-reviewed publication.
On the other hand that's the difference between a Wikipedia talk page--which the parent posts links--and the Wikipedia article. The article is significantly less inflammatory, and takes a much less vitriolic tone. Granted, it still has a ways to go before it achieves what I would consider a properly balanced neutral point of view (NPOV), but it's getting there.
The talk pages are the place for...frank...discussions of ideas, and hashing out what an article should and should not be. Sometimes, they get to be a bit angry and/or childish. Usually this emotion is tempered by the time content arrives (and stays) on the main article page.
As a grad student, for financial reasons I'd given up on the idea of publishing in open-access journals until I get my Ph.D., and hopefully a position at a university that would pay the publication fees. I'm a strong believer in the open-access models, but the fact that traditional subscription journals don't charge authors is a real point in their favor.
For what it's worth, all of the PLoS journals will waive the $1500 publication fee for authors who cannot afford it. It also sounds like a good chunk of money, but for just about any biological or medical lab, it's pretty small potatoes. Cost may be more of an issue if and when PLoS launches journals in other fields.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that some closed-access journals do charge for publication, in the form of page or colour charges.
Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors.
Once again, this may be more of a concern later, but it's very rare for someone not affiliated with either a university or a corporation to publish in the existing PLoS journals. Relatively few graduate students will publish works without at least a faculty supervisor's name on the paper, too. Besides, the $1500 probably is reasonable for defraying PLoS' costs; it's not meant to be a progressive taxation system. As long as they are willing to waive or reduce fees according to the author's financial circumstances, then a formal schedule of fees probably isn't necessary.
Let's talk about the HIV. Let's talk about the HIV virus. Let's talk about HIV.
Actually, the last form is quite acceptable and sounds natural. The definite article isn't necessary for a virus. Disclaimer--I do research work in a hospital, though I do cancer biology, not HIV. My sense of what sounds normal may be different.:)
Yet India is spending billions of dollars on nuclear weapons, a space program of dubious value and high-tech voting equipment that fails to work half the time and is closed to public scrutiny.
That's a fine approach, as long as you're comfortable with knowing that you're going to miss out on some really talented people that way. Sure, you'll hire some good people along the way, but you'll screw yourself by passing up some top notch people as well.
There's nothing intrinsic about GPA that makes it a meaningful indicator of how somebody will perform at a job.
On the other hand, for many jobs there's not just one acceptable employee among all the scores or hundreds of applicants. Unless the company has a bad reputation or other serious issues, then there are likely to be several good potential employees in the resume pile. The problem is not one of finding the single perfect candidate--the problem is in cutting two hundred applicants into twenty interviewees.
So the first-line prescreening tests are designed not to choose interview candidates, but to screen out some of the chaff. Will you lose some good candidates with the bad ones? Definitely. The important thing is that you enrich the pool that's left.
A high GPA suggests that the candidate in question is at least reasonably intelligent, is capable of completing assignments and meeting deadlines, and has at least some knowledge in the area of their degree. These things may be true of some people with a low GPA, and they may be untrue of some with a high GPA--but the pool of candidates is likely to be of a higher average quality after screening on that basis. I dispute the parent's assertion that GPA isn't a meaningful predictor of future job performance. Certainly the correlation isn't perfect, but it's definitely better than chance.
Actually, I'm curious--what is incorrect in the Wikipedia article?
The dates of her birth and death check out, as is her appearance on the 5000-yen note. The year of her father's death is also right. I'm wondering about her siblings...? Beyond that, I haven't the time to fact check, and it's not in my field.
Luckily I ran it by my professor before handing it in, but I will never use Wikipedia as a source on a paper again.
Glad to hear it. I'm kind of surprised that a university professor wouldn't bite your head off for using an encyclopedia as a reference in an academic paper anyway--there should be better sources than a three-paragraph Wikipedia article.
I do still visit wikipedia when I need general information but I even take that with a major grain of salt.
Great! That's what encyclopedias are for.
Am I alone in thinking wikipedia should A) have experts come in and run a "stable" version of the encyclopedia
Perfect. And at twenty-five edits per minute, with one minute to review each edit, you'll just need a full-time team of a hundred highly-qualified fact checkers. That will cost, what, five million or so per year? This assumes that the rate of growth of Wikipedia does not increase, and that existing articles are not also reviewed.
I believe Wikipedia needs to find more qualified editors to verify information. I believe that Johnny 8th-grader should still be allowed to edit the World War Two article, but Joe college professor should regularly monitor the article to check its accuracy. If Johnny is regularly posting incorrect information, block him from doing so.
For what it's worth, Joe College Professor probably is monitoring the WWII article. Every logged in Wikipedia user has his own Watchlist, which will notify the user whenever an article on his Watchlist is changed. I have a dozen or two articles on my list that are in my area of expertise; I presume experts in other areas monitor articles in a similar manner. I think of myself as a sort of curator for that part of Wikipedia's collection.
Of course, for a high traffic article like World War Two, I would expect that nearly any Wikipedian who happened by after the article was mangled would be sensible enough to revert it to a previous, intelligible version.
Me: Hey, I'm going to make this change. The article is based on an outdated understanding of the source material. Here are the studys... Wikian: That's not right. I have a book that clearly states XYZ.
True--but sometimes a bit of give and take is necessary, too. Even when there is a new study (or more than one, for that matter) which reinterprets a historical event, there are often many people in the real world who may not want to change world views. You often have the same problem even if you ask an older expert. (Heck, if the old guy writes the Britannica article, the dead tree version is going to be stuck with the old theory, too.) It takes time to change minds, in Wikipedia as much as in the real world.
Sometimes diplomatic phrasing of the change helps quite a bit, so that people don't feel utterly snubbed. Something like
Although it has long been believed that
X, recent research by Y and Z now suggests that W. New evidence--particularly foo and bar--strongly supports this interpretation. Some historians, including Tom, Dick, and Harry, dispute these new findings, on the grounds that foo is not a cromulent word.
If there is a current dispute, address all of the reasonable points of view. If there has been a genuine shift in opinion, present the new view, but mention the old one for historical interest. Try not to delete anything unless absolutely necessary; just move it around to an appropriate section of the article. Heck, sometimes further new evidence will revive a deprecated theory, and it's handy to have the text around when that happens.
Of course, sometimes some people on the Internet are just jerks, and there's not a lot you can do about them--if you meet one of those, you have my sympathy.
Re:I'll tell you what they're doing!
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
How would they get the stock owners to hand over their shares for free?
Sorry; poor phrasing on my part. The Google IPO already raised about $1.6 billion in cash. Most of that is presumably still liquid, which Google is free to piss away just about however they please--without having to go hat in hand back to shareholders.
Google's market capitalization is closer to fifty billion, so my use of the word 'worth' was a bit sloppy.
Re:I'll tell you what they're doing!
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Google folks should be focusing on small, judicious changes to their flagship product (www.google.com), and just rake in the billions like they were before the IPO.
You're right. They should rely on a single product to produce billions of dollars for the rest of the life of the company. They shouldn't ever plan for the future, or diversify their offerings just in case someone develops a competing search engine.
That business model worked real well for Altavista, didn't it?
Or, for that matter, Microsoft--after all, MS can make money forever with just Windows and Office, right? Nobody would ever consider independently developing a product to challenge the market leader....
If Google is worth just one billion dollars, they can pay a hundred grand per year to a staff of a thousand for ten years just to dick around. And if they keep hiring the best and the brightest, then they ought to be able to get at least one more billion-dollar idea (or a few hundred-million-dollar ones) out of that crew over the course of the next decade, right?
I'm prepared to trust the business acumen of Google over that of a Slashdot poster, I'm afraid.
Er...actually, where a drug is a substitute for an existing treatment, the control arm of the study usually receives the traditional drug--not sugar pills. The idea is to determine whether a new drug is more or less effective than existing treatments--or, perhaps, if it will help a different population of patients.
Where there is no treatment, the control group may well receive sugar pills and sterile saline--but there's no guarantee that the group receiving the experimental drug will do better. Remember, we're doing clinical trials because we don't know if the drug is going to be effective, or have horrible side effects, etc. Either way, the risks--including the chance that a person will be assigned to the control group--are explained in detail before patients can give consent to participate in a trial.
Finally, if there is a dramatic difference in the efficacy of a treatment--the new drug has significantly greater efficacy, which can be demonstrated in a statistically significant manner before the end of the trial--a drug trial will often be cut short, and the experimental drug provided to the entire cohort of patients. The last thing a drug company wants to do is delay the release of a successful drug.
Cloning
I have to ask about this one--which 'popular press' are you reading, and where did you get the impression that they don't discuss cloning?
Granted it's not usually a particularly deep discussion, but the morning broadsheet isn't usually big on ethical analyses of nonscientific topics, either.
More data points are great, but we need higher resolution data than radar can provide at that range.
The key here is that they're not necessarily looking for angular position--which, you're right, they can get much more accurately using a respectable backyard optical telescope. What Aricebo gives is better information on range and radial velocity (from the time for a radar pulse to return, and its Doppler shift, respectively). This information combined with the optical measurements we already have will give us a much better measure of its course than either technique alone.
Truly, if this logic held, we would have been done with pyramid schemes in the early 20th century.
Dude--pyramid schemes regularly collapse. Unfortunately, people keep starting new ones. The guys who start the schemes usually make money. The people at the bottom of the pyramid get left holding the bag.
This year's pyramid schemes are different from last year's pyramid schemes, precisely because last year's are no longer sustainable.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never heard such crystal-clear equations.
Umm, sort of.
You get waviness and distortion above a hot surface even in the total absence of water or water vapour. I think the parent was getting at the correct idea, but was a bit unclear.
Hot air at a given pressure is less dense than cold air. It has a slightly lower refractive index. Around (and especially above) a hot surface, there will be convection currents and mixing of hot and cold air. What this gives you is a volume of air in which the index of refraction is constantly changing both in space and time. That, in turn, makes that volume a real mess...optically speaking. If someone is trying to take telephoto shots of something on the far side, then they will be out of luck.
Whoa...that's quite the line of reasoning....
Although you're quite correct--had the assailant had a firearm, the foreign minister wouldn't have been stabbed to death.
Even if the foreign minister had been packing heat, as it were, she still probably wouldn't have had a chance to get a shot off--she was attacked by surprise in a shopping center. My understanding is that in Sweden most senior government officials don't travel with a coterie of heavily armed bodyguards. (Can you imagine Colin Powell being allowed to go to Walmart without a security detail?) Random passerby with firearms likely would have injured other innocent people. Whether they do or do not need guns in Sweden is open to debate, but the assassination of the foreign minister is both a poor argument and in poor taste.
If we're going to make specious arguments, it should also be noted that Sweden had only one assassination of a national political figure in the entire twentieth century (their Prime Minister, in 1986), which suggests that maybe they're doing something right....
On the other hand, the aluminum may be put to green uses. Vehicles built from aluminum can be lighter and more fuel-efficient than those made from steel. (Steel mills aren't known for being particularly green, either.) Most of our transportation engineering is predicated on the use of metals as a structural material, and all those hydrogen-powered vehicles have to be built out of something--aluminum might well be the best alternative.
That's very borderline true....
Keys on a keyboard draw maybe a watt when in use. At most. Assuming a keystroke takes about a tenth of a second, you're sucking down 0.1 joules per keystroke.
Delivered to your entire body, that's about 2 milligray (0.2 rad) of absorbed dose. A fatal dose is upwards of 5 gray (500 rad).
To be fair, if you instantaneously delivered that dose to a small volume--10 mL, or a third of an ounce--then you'd hit that with 10 gray and kill most of it. (Assuming it was a reasonably sensitive spot.) If you delivered it right to the spinal cord in the neck, you might be able to kill someone. Frankly, that amount of energy, delivered just about anywhere, might annoy someone--but it won't kill them.
Food for thought--the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent $10.8 billion on marketing in 1998. I presume that figure has risen since.
$2 billion is one B-2 bomber.
$2 billion is less than two percent of an Iraq invasion. (And heading rapidly towards 1%.)
$2 billion sounds like a lot of money, but as far as government programs go it's pretty trifling. About four hundred thousand Americans have AIDS or HIV. Curing the disease would have significant direct economic and health benefits for a lot of Americans, even if you leave out the warm fuzzy feeling associated with saving the rest of the world.
On the other hand, you assume that every user and author of Wikipedia will attempt to modify every article he or she comes across. In practice, people seem to be reasonably skilled at recognizing that an article is in good shape, and not tampering with it. Individuals with reasonably expert knowledge will add something, and the rest of us college grads will limit ourselves to cleaning up the copy.
The article on chemotherapy, for instance, is quite detailed and full of specific knowledge, though it's a bit rough around the edges in spots. It's definitely well beyond what the average college grad knows about chemotherapy, at any rate.
As for the peer review issue--Wikipedia isn't a place to publish original scientific research. Articles that represent original, unvetted research are regularly culled. Like a conventional general encyclopedia, Wikipedia reports on established scientific principles, though tends to be a bit more up-to-date. Wikipedia may also include more recent, controversial scientific ideas, but generally the articles will describe the conflict surrounding such new material. Regardless, Wikipedia doesn't publish science that doesn't already appear in a peer-reviewed publication.
The talk pages are the place for...frank...discussions of ideas, and hashing out what an article should and should not be. Sometimes, they get to be a bit angry and/or childish. Usually this emotion is tempered by the time content arrives (and stays) on the main article page.
For what it's worth, all of the PLoS journals will waive the $1500 publication fee for authors who cannot afford it. It also sounds like a good chunk of money, but for just about any biological or medical lab, it's pretty small potatoes. Cost may be more of an issue if and when PLoS launches journals in other fields.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that some closed-access journals do charge for publication, in the form of page or colour charges.
Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors.
Once again, this may be more of a concern later, but it's very rare for someone not affiliated with either a university or a corporation to publish in the existing PLoS journals. Relatively few graduate students will publish works without at least a faculty supervisor's name on the paper, too. Besides, the $1500 probably is reasonable for defraying PLoS' costs; it's not meant to be a progressive taxation system. As long as they are willing to waive or reduce fees according to the author's financial circumstances, then a formal schedule of fees probably isn't necessary.
Actually, the last form is quite acceptable and sounds natural. The definite article isn't necessary for a virus. Disclaimer--I do research work in a hospital, though I do cancer biology, not HIV. My sense of what sounds normal may be different. :)
This is Slashdot.
If you check the archives, this has probably been reported at least once a month since the development of multicellular life on Earth.
Have a closeup image, too.
If I bring home a new espresso maker, it doesn't spontaneously alter or upgrade the properties of my old espresso maker....
You misspelled 'the United States'.
I didn't realize that there was such a thing as an obligatory Zoolander reference....
There's nothing intrinsic about GPA that makes it a meaningful indicator of how somebody will perform at a job.
On the other hand, for many jobs there's not just one acceptable employee among all the scores or hundreds of applicants. Unless the company has a bad reputation or other serious issues, then there are likely to be several good potential employees in the resume pile. The problem is not one of finding the single perfect candidate--the problem is in cutting two hundred applicants into twenty interviewees.
So the first-line prescreening tests are designed not to choose interview candidates, but to screen out some of the chaff. Will you lose some good candidates with the bad ones? Definitely. The important thing is that you enrich the pool that's left.
A high GPA suggests that the candidate in question is at least reasonably intelligent, is capable of completing assignments and meeting deadlines, and has at least some knowledge in the area of their degree. These things may be true of some people with a low GPA, and they may be untrue of some with a high GPA--but the pool of candidates is likely to be of a higher average quality after screening on that basis. I dispute the parent's assertion that GPA isn't a meaningful predictor of future job performance. Certainly the correlation isn't perfect, but it's definitely better than chance.
The dates of her birth and death check out, as is her appearance on the 5000-yen note. The year of her father's death is also right. I'm wondering about her siblings...? Beyond that, I haven't the time to fact check, and it's not in my field.
Luckily I ran it by my professor before handing it in, but I will never use Wikipedia as a source on a paper again.
Glad to hear it. I'm kind of surprised that a university professor wouldn't bite your head off for using an encyclopedia as a reference in an academic paper anyway--there should be better sources than a three-paragraph Wikipedia article.
I do still visit wikipedia when I need general information but I even take that with a major grain of salt.
Great! That's what encyclopedias are for.
Am I alone in thinking wikipedia should A) have experts come in and run a "stable" version of the encyclopedia
Perfect. And at twenty-five edits per minute, with one minute to review each edit, you'll just need a full-time team of a hundred highly-qualified fact checkers. That will cost, what, five million or so per year? This assumes that the rate of growth of Wikipedia does not increase, and that existing articles are not also reviewed.
For what it's worth, Joe College Professor probably is monitoring the WWII article. Every logged in Wikipedia user has his own Watchlist, which will notify the user whenever an article on his Watchlist is changed. I have a dozen or two articles on my list that are in my area of expertise; I presume experts in other areas monitor articles in a similar manner. I think of myself as a sort of curator for that part of Wikipedia's collection.
Of course, for a high traffic article like World War Two, I would expect that nearly any Wikipedian who happened by after the article was mangled would be sensible enough to revert it to a previous, intelligible version.
Wikian: That's not right. I have a book that clearly states XYZ.
True--but sometimes a bit of give and take is necessary, too. Even when there is a new study (or more than one, for that matter) which reinterprets a historical event, there are often many people in the real world who may not want to change world views. You often have the same problem even if you ask an older expert. (Heck, if the old guy writes the Britannica article, the dead tree version is going to be stuck with the old theory, too.) It takes time to change minds, in Wikipedia as much as in the real world.
Sometimes diplomatic phrasing of the change helps quite a bit, so that people don't feel utterly snubbed. Something like
If there is a current dispute, address all of the reasonable points of view. If there has been a genuine shift in opinion, present the new view, but mention the old one for historical interest. Try not to delete anything unless absolutely necessary; just move it around to an appropriate section of the article. Heck, sometimes further new evidence will revive a deprecated theory, and it's handy to have the text around when that happens.Of course, sometimes some people on the Internet are just jerks, and there's not a lot you can do about them--if you meet one of those, you have my sympathy.
Sorry; poor phrasing on my part. The Google IPO already raised about $1.6 billion in cash. Most of that is presumably still liquid, which Google is free to piss away just about however they please--without having to go hat in hand back to shareholders.
Google's market capitalization is closer to fifty billion, so my use of the word 'worth' was a bit sloppy.
You're right. They should rely on a single product to produce billions of dollars for the rest of the life of the company. They shouldn't ever plan for the future, or diversify their offerings just in case someone develops a competing search engine.
That business model worked real well for Altavista, didn't it?
Or, for that matter, Microsoft--after all, MS can make money forever with just Windows and Office, right? Nobody would ever consider independently developing a product to challenge the market leader....
If Google is worth just one billion dollars, they can pay a hundred grand per year to a staff of a thousand for ten years just to dick around. And if they keep hiring the best and the brightest, then they ought to be able to get at least one more billion-dollar idea (or a few hundred-million-dollar ones) out of that crew over the course of the next decade, right?
I'm prepared to trust the business acumen of Google over that of a Slashdot poster, I'm afraid.
Er...actually, where a drug is a substitute for an existing treatment, the control arm of the study usually receives the traditional drug--not sugar pills. The idea is to determine whether a new drug is more or less effective than existing treatments--or, perhaps, if it will help a different population of patients.
Where there is no treatment, the control group may well receive sugar pills and sterile saline--but there's no guarantee that the group receiving the experimental drug will do better. Remember, we're doing clinical trials because we don't know if the drug is going to be effective, or have horrible side effects, etc. Either way, the risks--including the chance that a person will be assigned to the control group--are explained in detail before patients can give consent to participate in a trial.
Finally, if there is a dramatic difference in the efficacy of a treatment--the new drug has significantly greater efficacy, which can be demonstrated in a statistically significant manner before the end of the trial--a drug trial will often be cut short, and the experimental drug provided to the entire cohort of patients. The last thing a drug company wants to do is delay the release of a successful drug.
Cloning
I have to ask about this one--which 'popular press' are you reading, and where did you get the impression that they don't discuss cloning?
Granted it's not usually a particularly deep discussion, but the morning broadsheet isn't usually big on ethical analyses of nonscientific topics, either.
The key here is that they're not necessarily looking for angular position--which, you're right, they can get much more accurately using a respectable backyard optical telescope. What Aricebo gives is better information on range and radial velocity (from the time for a radar pulse to return, and its Doppler shift, respectively). This information combined with the optical measurements we already have will give us a much better measure of its course than either technique alone.
Dude--pyramid schemes regularly collapse. Unfortunately, people keep starting new ones. The guys who start the schemes usually make money. The people at the bottom of the pyramid get left holding the bag.
This year's pyramid schemes are different from last year's pyramid schemes, precisely because last year's are no longer sustainable.
Denmark?