"It's the people who have spent their entire lives as upper/ruling class"
Nope. They don't care either. It's the people, who previously had to ration and sacrifice their sons, and currently might know someone who lost a child who are really in charge. Wars are unpopular because they require sacrifice. Leaders who get their citizens killed for poor reasons get voted out. Leaders who make pretty footage for the evening news where nobody (local) gets hurt? Not so much.
That's nice. Do you have a response to the AC's criticism?
"Third generation warfare" sounds an awful lot like what Napoleonic ships did, or Hellenistic triremes. Or US war of independence rebels conducting ambush guerrilla actions for that matter.
Know what? You can hack manned bombers too. It's probably easier than hacking an encrypted satellite channel when the plane you want happens to be flying. All you have to do is kidnap someone's kid.
Personally, if I'm going to search through every program every made by man, I'd like to have a nice fast search and a keyboard to type the first few letters of the program name. If you like your buttons and lists, have at it though.
There's a big difference between a minority and a majority government. And who's to say what the effect was? There was large scale elections fraud by the party that won the election, thus, their right to govern is in question. Even if no ridings were swayed, whoever was involved violated the elections act and, if they were elected, are in office illegally.
Oh please. Rechargeable battery memory hasn't been a serious problem since the days of nickel cadmium. If you actually have a NiCad battery in your phone, you are in a very, very, very small minority, and you'd probably be better off with a remote than that phone for controlling your TV anyway.
Good for you. That's going to suck when channels go away and you're wading through a list of shows instead. I'm sure you can do it, it's just a lot more pleasant with a smartphone or tablet.
Convergence: the functions of a TV (except for the big screen) will converge with smart phones and tablets. Your phone will know what you want to watch, recommend things for you, record shows (for the short remaining time that such a concept still means anything).
The problem is NP-hard if you just take a pile of data and try to find an equation that fits it. Fortunately Newton didn't have to do that - he assumed that the solution was simple, and knew what was actually going on behind the data. People solve NP-hard problems all the time, mostly because we cheat.
Determining that acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s^2 is easy. It's a linear least squares problem that is most definitely polynomial (and low order at that). Figuring out that F=ma is (apparently) NP-hard.
Actually, it sounds to me like we need to be MORE suspicious of computational solutions. Humans take a bunch of shortcuts and make assumptions to derive equations from data (looking for an underlying theory is one of these) and so far they've served us well.
The only "open source" part is voting on what drug to trial. Mix in some stuff about telemedicine and vastly cheaper trials and the corrupt, run by the man current system....
Trial design isn't that hard, and clinical measures aren't that expensive. Imaging, and image analysis is, but imaging also usually vastly reduces the number of subjects, or time, you need.
A kickstarter style approach to funding trials for unpatentable drugs is a much more interesting idea.
Presumably if you're using it for your awesome decade long project, it has a use. If it doesn't you might want to look carefully at just how awesome that project you're betting ten years of your career on is.
"4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion."
The article doesn't say papers. It says "research outputs," which sounds like it includes conference abstracts. If you can't put together four conference abstracts in a few years you need to seriously reconsider your research methodology. If you're working on long term experiments, fine, but you need to be doing some other things as well. Biologists are frequently writing papers about interim results, methods, optimization runs, etc.
Three years is also more than enough time to ruin a masters student and seriously damage a PhD student. In biology, since you mention it, most departments and granting institutions I've been involved with (in Canada) suggest grad students should be going to at least one peer reviewed conference a year. Even if the professor only has one student, that's the quota covered.
"Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers."
Good. As a grad student or a post doc, there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your term and not having a decent publication record to show for it. I know post docs who have material for several decent papers (never mind abstracts) but can't publish it because their supervisors only publish "Nature quality work." They finish their contracts and nobody will hire them because they have giant holes in their publication record and no output from their last post doc. Big, hard projects are great, but they MUST be broken down into smaller, publishable, grad student project sized chunks, and planning big picture projects that way is one of the primary functions of the supervisor. It's also good for science. Developing a bunch of techniques, getting everything perfect, THEN publishing after half a decade or more is BAD. Good science is collaborative. Conferences, and even journals, are not places only to publish final, big picture work. They're also about sharing interesting things you've learned or discovered along the way so others can benefit now, not in 5+ years.
Remember we're talking about professors here, not post docs. The prof counts all of his students' pubs. To have your lab not publish more than four things (sounds like abstracts are acceptable too) in three years sounds to me like a major issue.
An incredibly low threshold like this one is a fair starting place. Usually there is a review process where, if you fail the threshold you're evaluated to see whether your two pubs are both in nature, your wife is an incredible researcher the university might lose if they fire you, etc.
Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.
Bull. If you're focusing on teaching you probably have a teaching position and aren't expected to publish. If you've got a research position you're supposed to be doing research, i.e. supervising grad students. If you do a good job, they'll write papers, which is good for them and good for you.
There are too many professors who are poor supervisors and their students aren't productive. Not publishing hurts a professor, but it hurts his students more.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's the people who have spent their entire lives as upper/ruling class"
Nope. They don't care either. It's the people, who previously had to ration and sacrifice their sons, and currently might know someone who lost a child who are really in charge. Wars are unpopular because they require sacrifice. Leaders who get their citizens killed for poor reasons get voted out. Leaders who make pretty footage for the evening news where nobody (local) gets hurt? Not so much.
That's nice. Do you have a response to the AC's criticism?
"Third generation warfare" sounds an awful lot like what Napoleonic ships did, or Hellenistic triremes. Or US war of independence rebels conducting ambush guerrilla actions for that matter.
Know what? You can hack manned bombers too. It's probably easier than hacking an encrypted satellite channel when the plane you want happens to be flying. All you have to do is kidnap someone's kid.
You have a very interesting definition of morality. Are you rich?
Personally, if I'm going to search through every program every made by man, I'd like to have a nice fast search and a keyboard to type the first few letters of the program name. If you like your buttons and lists, have at it though.
There's a big difference between a minority and a majority government. And who's to say what the effect was? There was large scale elections fraud by the party that won the election, thus, their right to govern is in question. Even if no ridings were swayed, whoever was involved violated the elections act and, if they were elected, are in office illegally.
Canadians don't elect governments. They elect representatives. If more Canadians figured that out, we'd have much better governments.
I think the AC called this one.
Oh please. Rechargeable battery memory hasn't been a serious problem since the days of nickel cadmium. If you actually have a NiCad battery in your phone, you are in a very, very, very small minority, and you'd probably be better off with a remote than that phone for controlling your TV anyway.
Good for you. That's going to suck when channels go away and you're wading through a list of shows instead. I'm sure you can do it, it's just a lot more pleasant with a smartphone or tablet.
Convergence: the functions of a TV (except for the big screen) will converge with smart phones and tablets. Your phone will know what you want to watch, recommend things for you, record shows (for the short remaining time that such a concept still means anything).
And I've been doing it for some time with my iPad, and even longer with my iPhone. What's your point?
Because it's so hard to put your phone or tablet on the charger each night. NOBODY will ever do that!
The TV remote might not go away, just like the buttons on the TV didn't go away. It's just that nobody (except maybe you) will use it anymore.
I've already got four remotes that are gathering dust and a tablet that actually controls what's on the TV screen.
The problem is NP-hard if you just take a pile of data and try to find an equation that fits it. Fortunately Newton didn't have to do that - he assumed that the solution was simple, and knew what was actually going on behind the data. People solve NP-hard problems all the time, mostly because we cheat.
Determining that acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 m/s^2 is easy. It's a linear least squares problem that is most definitely polynomial (and low order at that). Figuring out that F=ma is (apparently) NP-hard.
Actually, it sounds to me like we need to be MORE suspicious of computational solutions. Humans take a bunch of shortcuts and make assumptions to derive equations from data (looking for an underlying theory is one of these) and so far they've served us well.
The only "open source" part is voting on what drug to trial. Mix in some stuff about telemedicine and vastly cheaper trials and the corrupt, run by the man current system....
Trial design isn't that hard, and clinical measures aren't that expensive. Imaging, and image analysis is, but imaging also usually vastly reduces the number of subjects, or time, you need.
A kickstarter style approach to funding trials for unpatentable drugs is a much more interesting idea.
Also an arms race.
Presumably if you're using it for your awesome decade long project, it has a use. If it doesn't you might want to look carefully at just how awesome that project you're betting ten years of your career on is.
That's nice, but we're not talking about the Spanish organization Ciber BBN.
"4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion."
The article doesn't say papers. It says "research outputs," which sounds like it includes conference abstracts. If you can't put together four conference abstracts in a few years you need to seriously reconsider your research methodology. If you're working on long term experiments, fine, but you need to be doing some other things as well. Biologists are frequently writing papers about interim results, methods, optimization runs, etc.
Three years is also more than enough time to ruin a masters student and seriously damage a PhD student. In biology, since you mention it, most departments and granting institutions I've been involved with (in Canada) suggest grad students should be going to at least one peer reviewed conference a year. Even if the professor only has one student, that's the quota covered.
"Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers."
Good. As a grad student or a post doc, there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your term and not having a decent publication record to show for it. I know post docs who have material for several decent papers (never mind abstracts) but can't publish it because their supervisors only publish "Nature quality work." They finish their contracts and nobody will hire them because they have giant holes in their publication record and no output from their last post doc. Big, hard projects are great, but they MUST be broken down into smaller, publishable, grad student project sized chunks, and planning big picture projects that way is one of the primary functions of the supervisor. It's also good for science. Developing a bunch of techniques, getting everything perfect, THEN publishing after half a decade or more is BAD. Good science is collaborative. Conferences, and even journals, are not places only to publish final, big picture work. They're also about sharing interesting things you've learned or discovered along the way so others can benefit now, not in 5+ years.
Remember we're talking about professors here, not post docs. The prof counts all of his students' pubs. To have your lab not publish more than four things (sounds like abstracts are acceptable too) in three years sounds to me like a major issue.
An incredibly low threshold like this one is a fair starting place. Usually there is a review process where, if you fail the threshold you're evaluated to see whether your two pubs are both in nature, your wife is an incredible researcher the university might lose if they fire you, etc.
Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.
Bull. If you're focusing on teaching you probably have a teaching position and aren't expected to publish. If you've got a research position you're supposed to be doing research, i.e. supervising grad students. If you do a good job, they'll write papers, which is good for them and good for you.
There are too many professors who are poor supervisors and their students aren't productive. Not publishing hurts a professor, but it hurts his students more.