In most of the sciences at least the journal doesn't do much of that. The editor might do a quick screen to weed out terrible papers, but most get sent off to unpaid peer reviewers who do most of the hard work. There aren't "staffs of experts" and they don't really work with the authors. However, in other areas things might work differently.
One more reason why this is so irritating, is that the publishers hardly have to pay anyone. The scientists writing the papers do so for free, and often have to do the final print formatting themselves. The paper is then sent to the peer reviewers, who perform the reviews for free. In the end, the publisher doesn't pay for content, layout or review, so the journals don't have good reasons to be expensive. Things will gradually change, but it's taking a long time simply because scientists want their name in a big name journal.
One of the problems with such devices is that they don't report the percentage of false positives. This is a much bigger problem than false negatives, since there are more people who are negative (don't have lung cancer) than positive (have lung cancer). It's generally considered very bad to tell someone that they have cancer and then later say "Sorry, but we made a mistake." Though that's good news for them, they get upset that you told them the false bad news first. However, early diagnosis of lung cancer is an important area and if they made progress toward that then I applaud them.
So, the *only* reason LDS outlawed polygamy was to move along Utah statehood. That sounds a lot like a political change of thought, not an overall mindset change. Yet you use the term "nut jobs". It's very possible, even probable that many LDS followers still do believe in polygamy, but don't (openly) practice it because it is illegal. Actually, even in countries where polygamy is legal, members of the LDS church are not allowed to practice it and will be thrown out of the church.
I do not agree that it is hard to feel loved by something that does not think or feel. The easiest way to see this is to look at people who own pets like snakes. The 'algorithm' that a snake runs on doesn't have what we consider emotions, and yet many of these people will insist that their snake 'loves' them. Humans have a very strong tendency to attribute complex reasons for simple acts, such as assuming that a bad harvest meant you didn't sacrifice enough animals to your deity, or that when your husband gives you a monosyllable answer that it means something other than you are interrupting a TV show. I have seen adaptive video games where the computer learns your fighting style, and after a while people generally think that the observed behavior is much more complicated and meaningful than it really is. With some appropriate marketing hype, you can give people an 'excuse' to believe that their love-bot actually has feelings and they will believe it.
I would consider choosing the underdog, but it would depend on whether the major players had long histories of going over budget, missing deadlines and failing to deliver the products. Since both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have these sorts of histories then it seems like the underdog is looking mighty competitive. You might save a bundle and actually end up with something that flies, unlike the billions that we dumped into the other recent rocket programs (X-33, X-34, etc). The recent successes of the private spaceflight have shown that the underdogs are at least capable of making hardware that works for a fraction of what the government can do it for. If the first flight of Space-X's Falcon goes well then there would seem to be very little reason for not choosing the underdog.
One of the difficulties with the 'no profit from grants' rule is the difficulty in determining whether the research from which you are trying to profit was a direct result of the grant or not. If I have multiple grants for my cancer research lab then some might be from the government and some might be from other sources. In reality, it's still the same group of graduate students who slave away in the lab. If they invent something with profit potential then I could just claim that that particular invention was funded by the private grants rather than money from the government.
Many government grants do require some sort of public access to the data and results, but they do not require everything to be free. There are many grants from the military where they require a certain amount of secrecy for obvious reasons.
There was another article on slashdot that discussed the upcoming reversal of earth's magnetic field (coincidently released shortly before a movie about the reversal of earth's magnetic field). If this inchworm research progresses well then when the reversal happens we'll be ready for it and won't have to have a last minute attempt to drill to the core with unproven technology and a crew consisting of a tormented captain, a comedic sidekick, several people who end up dying and a surprizingly attractive foreign 'scientist' who ends up hooking up with the captain before he tragically dies. This way we can have an overpriced government funded inchworm that will save the day with a boring military crew with plenty of time to spare. Let's prepare for the future!
I'm not sure that this will be the best way to perform some deep drilling experiments on Europa since you will be drilling through various forms of ice. The friction of the cutting heads could melt the ice and force the robot to deal with liquids rather than solids. Since the temperature there is so cold it would be easier to have a radiothermal battery that would provide the heat to simply melt through the ice. You have your probe be heavier than water so that it will displace the liquid and melt some more. When you want to resurface, drop some ballast and melt your way back up. However, for places like Mars and many places on Earth, a self-contained drill of this sort would be very useful.
I agree that most of the MMORPGs are going to start competing for the same small group of people. Though new worlds and themes will bring in some people who don't currently play, I can't see this ever being more than a niche market. In the article it states that "one third of players 18 and over spend more time in the game world than at their paying job". I don't see that this type of commitment is possible for the majority of game players.
One possibility for them to attract new people is to have a tiered pricing structure like ISPs do with dial-up access. If I'm paying $14.99 a month for playing Star Wars Galaxies then I would want to play as much as I could to get my money's worth, but if I pay only $5.99 for 20 hours or so then it might be more palatable.
This is a page of Escher images that are posted with permission of the copyright holder. It's one of the best collections on the web.
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~davemc/Pic/Escher/
I think that they're just going through and developing the A cities first. First it was Austin and then Albuquerque and now Albany. I think that they must just be too lazy to turn to a new page in their atlas index. My money is on Ancorage next. Think about it. ..Plenty of room, no traffic and they have Texas beat for income taxes since they actually pay you every year!
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In most of the sciences at least the journal doesn't do much of that. The editor might do a quick screen to weed out terrible papers, but most get sent off to unpaid peer reviewers who do most of the hard work. There aren't "staffs of experts" and they don't really work with the authors. However, in other areas things might work differently.
One more reason why this is so irritating, is that the publishers hardly have to pay anyone. The scientists writing the papers do so for free, and often have to do the final print formatting themselves. The paper is then sent to the peer reviewers, who perform the reviews for free. In the end, the publisher doesn't pay for content, layout or review, so the journals don't have good reasons to be expensive. Things will gradually change, but it's taking a long time simply because scientists want their name in a big name journal.
One of the problems with such devices is that they don't report the percentage of false positives. This is a much bigger problem than false negatives, since there are more people who are negative (don't have lung cancer) than positive (have lung cancer). It's generally considered very bad to tell someone that they have cancer and then later say "Sorry, but we made a mistake." Though that's good news for them, they get upset that you told them the false bad news first. However, early diagnosis of lung cancer is an important area and if they made progress toward that then I applaud them.
Do you think that they should have similar programs to get males into areas where they are typically underrepresented (nursing, etc.)?
I do not agree that it is hard to feel loved by something that does not think or feel. The easiest way to see this is to look at people who own pets like snakes. The 'algorithm' that a snake runs on doesn't have what we consider emotions, and yet many of these people will insist that their snake 'loves' them. Humans have a very strong tendency to attribute complex reasons for simple acts, such as assuming that a bad harvest meant you didn't sacrifice enough animals to your deity, or that when your husband gives you a monosyllable answer that it means something other than you are interrupting a TV show. I have seen adaptive video games where the computer learns your fighting style, and after a while people generally think that the observed behavior is much more complicated and meaningful than it really is. With some appropriate marketing hype, you can give people an 'excuse' to believe that their love-bot actually has feelings and they will believe it.
I would consider choosing the underdog, but it would depend on whether the major players had long histories of going over budget, missing deadlines and failing to deliver the products. Since both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have these sorts of histories then it seems like the underdog is looking mighty competitive. You might save a bundle and actually end up with something that flies, unlike the billions that we dumped into the other recent rocket programs (X-33, X-34, etc). The recent successes of the private spaceflight have shown that the underdogs are at least capable of making hardware that works for a fraction of what the government can do it for. If the first flight of Space-X's Falcon goes well then there would seem to be very little reason for not choosing the underdog.
Many government grants do require some sort of public access to the data and results, but they do not require everything to be free. There are many grants from the military where they require a certain amount of secrecy for obvious reasons.
There was another article on slashdot that discussed the upcoming reversal of earth's magnetic field (coincidently released shortly before a movie about the reversal of earth's magnetic field). If this inchworm research progresses well then when the reversal happens we'll be ready for it and won't have to have a last minute attempt to drill to the core with unproven technology and a crew consisting of a tormented captain, a comedic sidekick, several people who end up dying and a surprizingly attractive foreign 'scientist' who ends up hooking up with the captain before he tragically dies. This way we can have an overpriced government funded inchworm that will save the day with a boring military crew with plenty of time to spare. Let's prepare for the future!
I'm not sure that this will be the best way to perform some deep drilling experiments on Europa since you will be drilling through various forms of ice. The friction of the cutting heads could melt the ice and force the robot to deal with liquids rather than solids. Since the temperature there is so cold it would be easier to have a radiothermal battery that would provide the heat to simply melt through the ice. You have your probe be heavier than water so that it will displace the liquid and melt some more. When you want to resurface, drop some ballast and melt your way back up. However, for places like Mars and many places on Earth, a self-contained drill of this sort would be very useful.
I agree that most of the MMORPGs are going to start competing for the same small group of people. Though new worlds and themes will bring in some people who don't currently play, I can't see this ever being more than a niche market. In the article it states that "one third of players 18 and over spend more time in the game world than at their paying job". I don't see that this type of commitment is possible for the majority of game players. One possibility for them to attract new people is to have a tiered pricing structure like ISPs do with dial-up access. If I'm paying $14.99 a month for playing Star Wars Galaxies then I would want to play as much as I could to get my money's worth, but if I pay only $5.99 for 20 hours or so then it might be more palatable.
This is a page of Escher images that are posted with permission of the copyright holder. It's one of the best collections on the web. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~davemc/Pic/Escher/
I think that they're just going through and developing the A cities first. First it was Austin and then Albuquerque and now Albany. I think that they must just be too lazy to turn to a new page in their atlas index. My money is on Ancorage next. Think about it. . .Plenty of room, no traffic and they have Texas beat for income taxes since they actually pay you every year!