The lack of thinking is somewhat appalling. I am a "data scientist". I came from one of the science fields that understands data, high energy particle physics. People are often surprised when I tell them that their fancy map-reduce tools are not particularly interesting when it comes to actually understanding your data. The tools are not interesting. Do you hear that "big data" conference organizers. Too little time is spent understanding what the data is telling and how do you know that it is telling you that and not something else.
Making sense of data takes knowledge and common sense. Qualifications I often find lacking in many of the job candidates I've interviewed. They know how to run the latest tool, but can't explain what the results mean when they get them.
It is true that many use Mac and most others use Linux. There are a few who do use windows and the reason this works is because no one uses their laptop to do science. They use it for writing slides for the talks that they have to give every week to their collegues. Real work is done on a computing cluster. Any operating system which has ssh will work for HEP. I know I had a windows, linux and osx laptop at various points. It doesn't really matter that much because as I said you are going to do all of your real scientific work on the cluster at the lab. I always liked to have a small, light-weight laptop because it was less onerous to carry around the lab, to conferences and collaboration meetings. What you really want is battery life so that you can sit in the back of a boring meeting and write code on the cluster in your ssh terminal. I think I liked my macbook air best, but had a lenovo x200 as well that worked great because it seriously had ~10 hr battery life.
Just my two cents. Battery life was the most important feature because all real work took place on the cluster.
Yes this is entirely the case. I would expect that the number of photons produced to fall off as a steeply falling power law. There will be vastly more UV photons than x-rays and vastly more x-rays than gammas. Until one gets to really high energies where the photon is showering and the shower is producing lots of additional ionizing particles, it is a good approximation that a single photon will damage only one atom or bond.
If there were a significant flux of x-rays that would already be pretty bad and it wouldn't really matter how many gammas were also there, because the x-rays are already ionizing radiation and they could possibly significantly elevate risks for affected persons. So while a single gamma might not be devastating, if that were accompanied by a large flux of x-rays, bad things would still happen.
I'm sorry but that is untrue. The film badge is effective for measuring doses from x-ray sources, used in medical and dental offices and research labs of all types. If there are lots of x-ray and gamma ray photons produced in the dark lightning then the film badge will provide an accurate measure of the dose. The number density of the produced products will likely fall in energy as a power law and so you would have tremendously more x-rays where you have good measurement than the number of gammas where you have more energy. What is more if the photons have an energy that is a good deal larger than 1 MeV then there is a very non negligible chance that they will pair convert in the air and then you have electrons for which as you point out the film badge works very well. The bulk of the dose is most likely to be at an energy where standard and common dosimeters are well suited to measure it.
There are dosimeters on board. I have completed several radiation safety courses during my work and radiation levels for airline crew are monitored and tracked just like they are for workers in nuclear and other research fields. Frequent fliers are not monitored and tracked. I work at CERN and I know exactly how much ionizing and neutron dose I receive during my work, but I also have to travel between my home at Fermilab and CERN and I have no idea how much dose I receive on my trans-Atlantic flights. The pilot of the plane is monitored and his dose is tracked. That pilot should also have access to his personal dose, but I don't know what the level of transparency is in the airline industry. So if there were a significant likelihood, the data is there.
Speaking from a physics point of view, a huge acceleration is need to produce x-ray and gamma rays. And they aren't hard to detect. It would seem that a balloon experiment flying some CsI or other crystals in some thunderstorms would quickly detect this phenomena even if it is 1/1000 or even 1/10000.
If you want better education, then you need to have it be a funding priority. Right now it is a talking point priority, but when it comes to putting real money into education it will usually lose out to inmates in prison. When the states fall on hard times, education always suffers. When times are good schools are the last thing that gets in on it. Becoming a teacher is not the path to fame, fortune and wealth. Typically becoming an educator means sacrifice.
There is the saying: Those who can do; those who can't teach.
That is part of the problem with education. If you want people who know what they are about you will have to pay for it.
If teaching could compete in the marketplace for top talent, maybe they wouldn't get the brightest because I don't think education is ever going to pay "that" well. But they could get and retain kind, competent and knowledgeable educators who know their stuff and have the respect of parents and the community. That would go a lot farther than any computer software of fancy electronics.
Let's get things straightened out. About a month ago the CDF experiment at the Tevatron at Fermilab found a "bump" in their data. It was statistically significant and was unexplained. This "bump" cannot be the Higgs boson from The Standard Model because it has the completely wrong cross-section. This was a fully public result from the CDF experiment.
About the same time there was a "leaked" abstract from an internal note from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC which claimed to have a signal for a Higgs boson. This was never a public or published result.
Now today we have an announcement from the D0 experiment at the Tevatron that they looked into the CDF bump and see nothing. This isn't a set back for the Higgs since it was never about the Higgs. The ATLAS leaked abstract has never been confirmed even by ATLAS so lets not get our underpants in a knot. Lets also not conflate the two since they don't have anything to do with each other.
Speaking as a graduate of physics, I don't know that requiring a programming course is really that useful. I am currently working on a high energy particle experiment and most of what I do each day is write computer programs. None of my programming knowledge was gained in a class at the undergraduate or graduate level. I currently work in C++, Perl, and Tcl. The department can check with the CS department and give recommendations on classes to be taken during your undergraduate education, but making it a requirement seems a bit over the line.
A good researcher is going to learn to use his tools, one way or another. Most (probably all) physics students are geeks plain and simple. Figuring out a computer language isn't really that hard. Learning good programming practices is harder, but truth is that most "trained programmers" have poor practices too. In my field, mission critical software is written by a people who have degrees in computer science and the like not by physicists. We also have frequent workshops and seminars to help us learn to effectively use the computing infrastructure built up around our experiment. This is big science with huge collaborations and millions of dollars, but I've also worked in a small AMO group and it wasn't that different.
Leave the heavy computing tasks to the pros, and let the scientists do what they do best tinker, experiment, learn and discover. I won't dispute the need to program, but I still don't think that there needs to be required courses on it in science curriculum in general.
From your graphic you get a 91% reduction in carbon using switchgrass over gasoline. I think 91% is not to be taken lightly. Also the energy balance is between 2 and 36, so if we take 17 then we are still making great gains.
As other have pointed out the test will not confirm string theory or measure any of its parameters or predictions. The test described in the article says that they are only probing Lorentz invariance, analyticity, and unitarity. These are basic assumptions of String Theory and so if they are found not to be the case then string theory cannot be "correct". What is left out is the fact that these are also the basic assumptions of all modern theories that are quantum mechanical. If you find a problem with one of these principles not only have you killed String Theory but also the Standard Model and most other modern physics theories. Now as I grad student in experimental physics I can't say that I would dread such a discovery. It would open a lot of new avenues for discovery, but a finding described in the paper would be bad for a lot more than just String Theory.
Where the Gimp really does excel.
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First off let me just say that I've never used Adobe Photoshop so I can't speak to its features as compared to Gimp, but I can say that my wife uses Gimp for all of her photo editing needs. My wife is not a pro, yet. She does do some cool things with our photos, and I would say that Gimp is very competative with Photoshop Elements. (I have used this once.) My wife feels that the Gimp is superior to elements.
Just to point out a few things that make the Gimp great for your average user with a digital camera.
1) Most consumer digital cameras, including mine, use RGB color space and usually JPEG as storage. The Gimp does RGB so you can edit your photos. You are not creating original art for commercial printing as much as a derivative work based on your photos, as such my wife doesn't need CMYK.
2) The Gimp, in its attempt to lure creative types, has features that PS elements will not have for fear of poaching on full Photoshop teritory.
3) The Gimp is free. Let me just stress this. I am a student. My wife enjoys digital photo manipulation and digital scrapbooking. The Gimp meets all of our needs. My wife also is somewhat of a Gimp evangelist now on some of the digital scrapbooking forums where PS elements reigns supreme. I don't know how many converts she has, but she has received inquiries and is very outspoken on the economic advantages of a free program that gets the job done well.
That said, there are a few "rich ladies" (my wife's term) on the message boards who have the full Photoshop and expensive DSLR cameras. Some produce, by my wife's admission, spectacular photos and pages, but some others produce the highest resolution garbage you've ever seen. Often money cannot buy results.
I am very happy with the Gimp. It provides a creative outlet for my wife and doesn't break the bank. For editing your personal digital photo collection, I and my wife think it is a first rate piece of software.
This is really the crux of a measurement. How many assumptions from the model are used to make the measurement? In an ideal experiment, the measurement itself is what verifies or falsifies the model, but in reality there are usually other parameters that are needed as inputs to the experiment that are computed using the model, thus the model dependence. I'm in experimental high energy particle physics and we worry about this every day, and try to reduce the number of theoretical inputs needed to make sense of our data. I'm sure the astronomers do likewise, but sometimes inputs are unavoidable. This doesn't make the measurement invalid because a model should be self consistent as well. So if you correctly compute the inputs using the model, and your results still differ from the model then some double checking of everything needs to be done because the model is showing a flaw. The true size of the flaw is the really hard thing to quantify because all of the quatities are model-dependent. In the end this could turn out to be nothing or the start of something.
I welcome all chinks in scientific theories because it generally leads to new scientific understanding and a new round of theories and models. Really that's what science is all about. In my field, we all hope that the LHC finds the Higgs, that will solidify the Standard Model, but we also hope that it finds lots of things that don't fit the Standard Model, that would point the direction for future discovery. If we didn't find anything unusual at the LHC it might put a huge damper on particle physics, and I'd have to switch areas of research.
If you think about it you will soon come to the conclusion that there are only two sources of energy readily used on the earth, nuclear and geo-thermal. It's just that the largest reactor is the sun. Fossil, solar, wind and hyrdo are all nuclear at their heart. So in a sense a nuclear power plant is just cutting out the middle steps of storage. I know there are lots of differences like fission and fusion, but in the not so distant future that might disapear also.
I recently bought a wireless card because it was cheap after rebate at CompUSA. I was glad to see that the card had open linux drivers from the chipset maker and that there was a community project to improve them. Mine is based on the rt2500 chipset but there are others supported by the driver. You can find more info at their site.
I've seen Bill Nye specials that are more keen on science than this piece of junk
As a physics grad student at UMD, I got emails about this program because one of UMD's professors was was on the program. I was hoping for an interesting science show. I didn't expect much because I generally don't agree with the string theorists, but what I got was two hours of repetative drivel on unification being great and nothing on unification. I could have found out as much about sting theory by watching Eric Clapton play guitar.
I'm pretty sure that this accelerator is used more as a light source and not for finding particles. I just looked briefly at the documents but they all seemed to be dealing with the light beam rather than the actual particle beam. I don't think that there are going to be any great particle discoveries from this accelerator, but there will certainly be some very, verry cool pictures take. I was working at the Cornell Synchrotron and they had some awesome pics of the cold virus that they had taken using the x-rays of their beam.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of thinking is somewhat appalling. I am a "data scientist". I came from one of the science fields that understands data, high energy particle physics. People are often surprised when I tell them that their fancy map-reduce tools are not particularly interesting when it comes to actually understanding your data. The tools are not interesting. Do you hear that "big data" conference organizers. Too little time is spent understanding what the data is telling and how do you know that it is telling you that and not something else.
Making sense of data takes knowledge and common sense. Qualifications I often find lacking in many of the job candidates I've interviewed. They know how to run the latest tool, but can't explain what the results mean when they get them.
It is true that many use Mac and most others use Linux. There are a few who do use windows and the reason this works is because no one uses their laptop to do science. They use it for writing slides for the talks that they have to give every week to their collegues. Real work is done on a computing cluster. Any operating system which has ssh will work for HEP. I know I had a windows, linux and osx laptop at various points. It doesn't really matter that much because as I said you are going to do all of your real scientific work on the cluster at the lab. I always liked to have a small, light-weight laptop because it was less onerous to carry around the lab, to conferences and collaboration meetings. What you really want is battery life so that you can sit in the back of a boring meeting and write code on the cluster in your ssh terminal. I think I liked my macbook air best, but had a lenovo x200 as well that worked great because it seriously had ~10 hr battery life.
Just my two cents. Battery life was the most important feature because all real work took place on the cluster.
Yes this is entirely the case. I would expect that the number of photons produced to fall off as a steeply falling power law. There will be vastly more UV photons than x-rays and vastly more x-rays than gammas. Until one gets to really high energies where the photon is showering and the shower is producing lots of additional ionizing particles, it is a good approximation that a single photon will damage only one atom or bond.
If there were a significant flux of x-rays that would already be pretty bad and it wouldn't really matter how many gammas were also there, because the x-rays are already ionizing radiation and they could possibly significantly elevate risks for affected persons. So while a single gamma might not be devastating, if that were accompanied by a large flux of x-rays, bad things would still happen.
I'm sorry but that is untrue. The film badge is effective for measuring doses from x-ray sources, used in medical and dental offices and research labs of all types. If there are lots of x-ray and gamma ray photons produced in the dark lightning then the film badge will provide an accurate measure of the dose. The number density of the produced products will likely fall in energy as a power law and so you would have tremendously more x-rays where you have good measurement than the number of gammas where you have more energy. What is more if the photons have an energy that is a good deal larger than 1 MeV then there is a very non negligible chance that they will pair convert in the air and then you have electrons for which as you point out the film badge works very well. The bulk of the dose is most likely to be at an energy where standard and common dosimeters are well suited to measure it.
There are dosimeters on board. I have completed several radiation safety courses during my work and radiation levels for airline crew are monitored and tracked just like they are for workers in nuclear and other research fields. Frequent fliers are not monitored and tracked. I work at CERN and I know exactly how much ionizing and neutron dose I receive during my work, but I also have to travel between my home at Fermilab and CERN and I have no idea how much dose I receive on my trans-Atlantic flights. The pilot of the plane is monitored and his dose is tracked. That pilot should also have access to his personal dose, but I don't know what the level of transparency is in the airline industry. So if there were a significant likelihood, the data is there.
Speaking from a physics point of view, a huge acceleration is need to produce x-ray and gamma rays. And they aren't hard to detect. It would seem that a balloon experiment flying some CsI or other crystals in some thunderstorms would quickly detect this phenomena even if it is 1/1000 or even 1/10000.
Maybe it is the determination and habits of individual learners that is important and not what is in his or her genetic makeup.
If you want better education, then you need to have it be a funding priority. Right now it is a talking point priority, but when it comes to putting real money into education it will usually lose out to inmates in prison. When the states fall on hard times, education always suffers. When times are good schools are the last thing that gets in on it. Becoming a teacher is not the path to fame, fortune and wealth. Typically becoming an educator means sacrifice.
There is the saying:
Those who can do; those who can't teach.
That is part of the problem with education. If you want people who know what they are about you will have to pay for it.
If teaching could compete in the marketplace for top talent, maybe they wouldn't get the brightest because I don't think education is ever going to pay "that" well. But they could get and retain kind, competent and knowledgeable educators who know their stuff and have the respect of parents and the community. That would go a lot farther than any computer software of fancy electronics.
Let's get things straightened out. About a month ago the CDF experiment at the Tevatron at Fermilab found a "bump" in their data. It was statistically significant and was unexplained. This "bump" cannot be the Higgs boson from The Standard Model because it has the completely wrong cross-section. This was a fully public result from the CDF experiment.
About the same time there was a "leaked" abstract from an internal note from the ATLAS experiment at the LHC which claimed to have a signal for a Higgs boson. This was never a public or published result.
Now today we have an announcement from the D0 experiment at the Tevatron that they looked into the CDF bump and see nothing. This isn't a set back for the Higgs since it was never about the Higgs. The ATLAS leaked abstract has never been confirmed even by ATLAS so lets not get our underpants in a knot. Lets also not conflate the two since they don't have anything to do with each other.
Speaking as a graduate of physics, I don't know that requiring a programming course is really that useful. I am currently working on a high energy particle experiment and most of what I do each day is write computer programs. None of my programming knowledge was gained in a class at the undergraduate or graduate level. I currently work in C++, Perl, and Tcl. The department can check with the CS department and give recommendations on classes to be taken during your undergraduate education, but making it a requirement seems a bit over the line.
A good researcher is going to learn to use his tools, one way or another. Most (probably all) physics students are geeks plain and simple. Figuring out a computer language isn't really that hard. Learning good programming practices is harder, but truth is that most "trained programmers" have poor practices too. In my field, mission critical software is written by a people who have degrees in computer science and the like not by physicists. We also have frequent workshops and seminars to help us learn to effectively use the computing infrastructure built up around our experiment. This is big science with huge collaborations and millions of dollars, but I've also worked in a small AMO group and it wasn't that different.
Leave the heavy computing tasks to the pros, and let the scientists do what they do best tinker, experiment, learn and discover. I won't dispute the need to program, but I still don't think that there needs to be required courses on it in science curriculum in general.
From your graphic you get a 91% reduction in carbon using switchgrass over gasoline. I think 91% is not to be taken lightly. Also the energy balance is between 2 and 36, so if we take 17 then we are still making great gains.
As other have pointed out the test will not confirm string theory or measure any of its parameters or predictions. The test described in the article says that they are only probing Lorentz invariance, analyticity, and unitarity. These are basic assumptions of String Theory and so if they are found not to be the case then string theory cannot be "correct". What is left out is the fact that these are also the basic assumptions of all modern theories that are quantum mechanical. If you find a problem with one of these principles not only have you killed String Theory but also the Standard Model and most other modern physics theories. Now as I grad student in experimental physics I can't say that I would dread such a discovery. It would open a lot of new avenues for discovery, but a finding described in the paper would be bad for a lot more than just String Theory.
First off let me just say that I've never used Adobe Photoshop so I can't speak to its features as compared to Gimp, but I can say that my wife uses Gimp for all of her photo editing needs. My wife is not a pro, yet. She does do some cool things with our photos, and I would say that Gimp is very competative with Photoshop Elements. (I have used this once.) My wife feels that the Gimp is superior to elements.
Just to point out a few things that make the Gimp great for your average user with a digital camera.
1) Most consumer digital cameras, including mine, use RGB color space and usually JPEG as storage. The Gimp does RGB so you can edit your photos. You are not creating original art for commercial printing as much as a derivative work based on your photos, as such my wife doesn't need CMYK.
2) The Gimp, in its attempt to lure creative types, has features that PS elements will not have for fear of poaching on full Photoshop teritory.
3) The Gimp is free. Let me just stress this. I am a student. My wife enjoys digital photo manipulation and digital scrapbooking. The Gimp meets all of our needs. My wife also is somewhat of a Gimp evangelist now on some of the digital scrapbooking forums where PS elements reigns supreme. I don't know how many converts she has, but she has received inquiries and is very outspoken on the economic advantages of a free program that gets the job done well.
That said, there are a few "rich ladies" (my wife's term) on the message boards who have the full Photoshop and expensive DSLR cameras. Some produce, by my wife's admission, spectacular photos and pages, but some others produce the highest resolution garbage you've ever seen. Often money cannot buy results.
I am very happy with the Gimp. It provides a creative outlet for my wife and doesn't break the bank. For editing your personal digital photo collection, I and my wife think it is a first rate piece of software.
This is really the crux of a measurement. How many assumptions from the model are used to make the measurement? In an ideal experiment, the measurement itself is what verifies or falsifies the model, but in reality there are usually other parameters that are needed as inputs to the experiment that are computed using the model, thus the model dependence. I'm in experimental high energy particle physics and we worry about this every day, and try to reduce the number of theoretical inputs needed to make sense of our data. I'm sure the astronomers do likewise, but sometimes inputs are unavoidable. This doesn't make the measurement invalid because a model should be self consistent as well. So if you correctly compute the inputs using the model, and your results still differ from the model then some double checking of everything needs to be done because the model is showing a flaw. The true size of the flaw is the really hard thing to quantify because all of the quatities are model-dependent. In the end this could turn out to be nothing or the start of something.
I welcome all chinks in scientific theories because it generally leads to new scientific understanding and a new round of theories and models. Really that's what science is all about. In my field, we all hope that the LHC finds the Higgs, that will solidify the Standard Model, but we also hope that it finds lots of things that don't fit the Standard Model, that would point the direction for future discovery. If we didn't find anything unusual at the LHC it might put a huge damper on particle physics, and I'd have to switch areas of research.
If you think about it you will soon come to the conclusion that there are only two sources of energy readily used on the earth, nuclear and geo-thermal. It's just that the largest reactor is the sun. Fossil, solar, wind and hyrdo are all nuclear at their heart. So in a sense a nuclear power plant is just cutting out the middle steps of storage. I know there are lots of differences like fission and fusion, but in the not so distant future that might disapear also.
Just a thought.
I recently bought a wireless card because it was cheap after rebate at CompUSA. I was glad to see that the card had open linux drivers from the chipset maker and that there was a community project to improve them. Mine is based on the rt2500 chipset but there are others supported by the driver. You can find more info at their site.
Rt2x00
I haven't had any problems using my card with Scientific Linux 4.
Actually I did find the question mark. But I'm still wondering, really what is the question?
Here is an entire post to "Ask Slashdot" without a question mark in the body. What is the question?
As a physics grad student at UMD, I got emails about this program because one of UMD's professors was was on the program. I was hoping for an interesting science show. I didn't expect much because I generally don't agree with the string theorists, but what I got was two hours of repetative drivel on unification being great and nothing on unification. I could have found out as much about sting theory by watching Eric Clapton play guitar.
I'm pretty sure that this accelerator is used more as a light source and not for finding particles. I just looked briefly at the documents but they all seemed to be dealing with the light beam rather than the actual particle beam. I don't think that there are going to be any great particle discoveries from this accelerator, but there will certainly be some very, verry cool pictures take. I was working at the Cornell Synchrotron and they had some awesome pics of the cold virus that they had taken using the x-rays of their beam.