Do ~NOT~ try to build one unless you know what you are doing! High voltage electrocution, neutron irradiation, and likely bankruptcy all await you if you venture down that path. Trust me, I know, I am alive only through sheer luck and the help of my friends. Also, like most patents, the important stuff is left out, and I don't feel like posting it. And for those who criticize the design - yes, I know. I spent years working on that @#$%ing thing, I know.
As Idarubicin pointed out, water and high voltage can make for fun sparks.
However, I wonder where he found the attenuation coefficients for "AOL CD's". Its not in my Nuclear Handbook. When I did this in college, I used paraffin wax, because 1) it was cheap 2) it was a decent moderator 3) it had known characteristics, so I could use the results from attenuation experiments to show that my neutrons were 2.45 Mev +/- 0.1 Mev. It's nice to know that the neutrons you are measuring are actually from D+D -> He3 + n.
I have a little experience in this matter, and what really impresses me are the kid's scrounging abilities. A neutron detector in a scrap yard? A turbo-molecular pump from the DI? (FYI, Deseret Industries is the Utah equivalent of the Salvation Army or Goodwill). How in the heck? Jeez, do you know how much money that would have saved when I built ~my~ deuteron collider? I thought I was doing good by scrounging HV supplies out of a junked ion implanter. BTW, the Deseret News got it wrong - the CD's are a neutron MODERATOR not MODULATOR. In my experience, Paraffin Wax is probably better than CD's, and is cheap, but maybe he had too many AOL cd's lying around.
Yes, I built a fusion reactor in college too. Seriously. It's on my resume. Of course, I was a junior by the time I got it built. I didn't want to go with the Farnsworth design though - everyone knows how it underperforms (although it ~could~ be improved). Mine was a beam collider, more similar to the works of Rostoker or Maglich. It produced a LOT more fusion - I had to limit my time near it while it was on, in order to keep my dose down to reasonable levels. Darwin Awards, I know. Seriously, I was careful, and received about a Rad or two in the years I worked on it (more from x-rays than neutrons). Lead is your friend, water and borax too. I wish my college professors had been as supportive as the ones at USU appear to be. They discouraged undergraduate research, thinking we didn't know enough to do anything real (of course, skipping class to go work on FUZZY didn't get on their good side).
Yes, Farnsworth fusors are old news. I still think they are cool - the primary reason big science moves so slow is that it is so big. I don't know why more colleges don't build ones and let their kids play around with them. They're cheap! Get enough people messing with them and maybe something will come of it.
Strangely enough, I grew up in Utah too. Must be something in the water...
National competencies are just the sum of individual competencies, times a conglomeration factor which occurs when you get lots of good people in one spot (ie Silicon Valley). I don't know that government officials are the best people to be directing the direction of innovation - heck, I innovate and I don't know where things are going. I think the best things that the developed nations can do to promote both having their people working in innovative fields and innovation itself, is to 1) create an environment that fosters innovation (many developed countries already do a good job of this) 2) encourage innovative people to move to your country and 3) encourage the people in your country to become innovators. Then let the innovators decide what they want to develop. If its something really worthwhile, it will be something you or I didn't think of.
IUTBAFR (I Used to be a Fusion Researcher), and frankly, I never felt it was even close to the worst job in science. But I always worried about becoming a Richard Post. You see, fusion research is full of old-timers who've been working on it since Project Sherwood days, who have always been thinking "just a few more years and we'll have it". I suppose it's kind of like being a Red Sox fan. When they started work on Fusion for Peace in the 50's, it was 20-30 years away. When I started working on fusion in 1995 it was 20-30 years away. Now its 2003 and it's 20-30 years away...
A little bit of info about Richard Post. He was the primary proponent of "open" systems, basically magnetic cylinders which were either very long, had magnetic "mirrors" or had some sort of electromagnetic "endcap". It was a rival to the Tokamak method of plasma containment. A few were built, but the vast majority of the magnetic confinement money and attention went to Tokamaks. Whether it should have is a matter of debate. Basically, Richard Post spent much of his career trying to get research funds for a design which was not the favorite. There was still enough money for a decent research program, and the research basically showed that the mirrors (which were easy to do) caused too many problems (hence the term "mirror instability"), and nobody ever came up with a good enough endcap. Last I heard, Post was doing some work on flywheel technology.
I put in my tour of duty. Maybe sometime I will go back to working on fusion, but I'd like to get ~something~ done before then. I fear not accomplishing anything with my life.
FYI, my personal opinion (warning: rant) is that the primary reason fusion is such a slow business is that it takes years to simulate a design, raise money for it, build it, then test it and see how it performs. Imagine how long it would have taken to create the airplane if you had to spend 20 years every time you went back to the drawing board. I feel that as long as bigger = better in fusion, sustainable fusion will never happen. If you have to build it that big to make it work, the design is wrong.
I can't speak for the other sciences, but a PhD physicist working in industry (not at a university) made an average of $100,000/year in 2002 (source: Industrial Physicist Magazine.
Of course, before you get to that point, you have to go through the grad school grind, post-doc etc. This is analogous to how medical doctors have internships, residencies, etc. It ~is~ a long hard road. Reducing the number of foreigners coming in won't result in more US scientists - it will just result in more scientists working in other countries. People tend to go into science because they love science - that applies to people in Mumbai as well as here.
Of course, if you want to pay scientists more, I'm not complaining! But until you convince more US kids to love science, cutting off our foreign compatriots just leaves us even more short-handed than we already are. This is the current situation
There are very few students in the US going into physics. It's not like there are high barriers - if you want to see a warm welcome, go into a physics dept. and tell them you are really interested in doing physics. The only real barrier is desire and if you are capable of handling the subject matter (I realize not everyone is good at or wants to do math).
These people aren't stealing anybody's job. If you could pull random Americans off the street and put them to work as physics grad students, don't you think we'd be doing that? Last semester I taught part time at a University that is surrounded by a ghetto. Why would we import guys from around the world to work there when there are unemployed people on the next block? Its because Igor and Arvint can do the job, and a lot of Americans would rather be on a "reality" show. Not that there aren't any Americans in physics - I'm one.
Where is your physics degree, reporter? If you have one, I can find you a job in under 30 minutes. But I know you don't have one, because if you did, you would know what the situation is, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
One of my physics students last semester missed an entire month of class while he was being interviewed by the INS. I let him make up the work, but he still had the lowest grade in the class. Missing a month of class will always hurt, no matter how smart you are, and he wasn't my smartest student.
Two of my students (out of a class of twelve) had to miss at least a day of class due to the INS. I am sure that some just weren't able to attend, but I don't deal with admissions, so I wouldn't know.
Well, everyone has different competitive advantages (that's what makes economics, and the world, so interesting). You are going to be much better at identifying what yours are than any stranger on the internet. You already have an MBA, that's a big plus, but takes you nowhere on its own. Ask your business school friends what they think you are good at, that is sellable.
Are you locked into IT? Because my first advice would be to find an industry which ~doesn't~ have half the world jumping into it due to the formerly high return on skills investment (remember when every joe and his brother learned HTML over the weekend and got a job?). There will, of course, be niches in IT which do quite well, but in order to succeed in those, you have to be better than many, many people. Remember that all those programmers who want to stay programmers will be trying to remain ahead of the pack, increasing their skills and leaving the lesser skilled jobs to the newcomers.
What really matters is what you are good at. Which is usually highly correlated with what you enjoy. So whatever it is, I'd find a way to do ~that~ better than anyone else. But if what you are good at doesn't determine your industry path (maybe you are good at managing people, or making friends, or posting to slashdot), then you can choose to follow the money:
1) Starting a company in India - more difficult than foniksonik thinks, I believe. It used to be illegal for foreigners, but that may have changed. Besides, there are always ways to get in on the action - just ask Draper International. I don't know if too many people have jumped on this boat yet, but I doubt it. You have an MBA, you should understand where I am going with this.
2) Start a company here. Doing what? You tell me. You know what you are good at. If you are looking for business opportunities, they are always out there. Post a resume link, I'm looking for partners, maybe I've got something up your alley. I'm not going to post any real opportunities to slashdot.
3) Develop skills with a high barrier to entry, in a field which is ~not~ going to disappear. This is tough, but rewarding. Brain surgeons do this - as long as brain surgery is around, they'll tend to do well. On the other hand, if the field disappears (think blacksmiths), that investment was wasted. For best results, combine with 1 or 2 (run a company full of brain surgeons), then...
You are correct: correlation does not imply causality.
However, many of the people posting on slashdot have implied that by allowing more labor to enter the US, that we would end up with an economy populated entirely by low-wage workers. You know, the whole "If we let all the Mexicans in, we'll be poor like the Mexicans" arguement.
If this arguement holds water, then the states with the most immigration should be the poorest. And yet they are the richest. Perhaps other factors might explain the difference - location, natural resources, luck, etc. Our sample size is only 50 states after all. Maybe California is ~so~ rich that they can afford to have all those poor immigrants come and still be better off than Alabama.
However, because there is a correlation between the locus of immigration and the locus of economic growth, I do not need to show that immigration is the cause of the growth. Frankly I don't care whether it is a cause or a symptom. All I need to do is show that immigrants are not "stealing American's jobs". In order to rebut my arguement, you would need to show that the jobs which immigrants have taken would have been taken by Americans. I don't think you can do so in an America where 11.1% of our population is imported, and we have 6.1% unemployment. If the immigrants had not come, would we have -5% unemployment? (yes I do know about the statistical games they play with the unemployment figures, it is still valid by proportion of population, if we assume that unemployment in the immigrant population is less than or equal to that in the population as a whole, which is true).
So obviously, not all of the immigrants have stolen American jobs. But those jobs came from somewhere... Once you admit that "some" of the jobs were not stolen from Americans, how can you say that the majority of the jobs weren't? If you kicked out all the immigrants and gave the job to an American (regardless of how unfair that might be) until all Americans who wanted a job had one, you'd still have immigrants left over. And I guarrantee you that kicking a few million people out of the economy would result in the loss of many, many jobs. So therefore the presence of immigrants has resulted in job creation.
There is far more to job creation than capital density with respect to population. That is an important factor, but other factors are also important.
Unemployment in Bangalore is 10% source A more recent source (thehindu.com) gives 10.5% for "urban youth" for Mar 2003, so I figure its still about the same. I can't find the engineering unemployment rate.
Funny how lack of barriers and "protections" are always perceived as the cause for unemployment, no matter which side of the barrier you are on. It's always the other guy's fault. If you want to stop H-1B's, please replace it with an increase in the quotas for citizens. I'd rather have those programmers and doctors as Americans, thank you.
I guess it's just us old-family Americans who get it. All these 3rd and 4th generation Americans whose great-grandparents came over and became Americans want to lock out the rest of the world, as if they founded this country. We let them in, and we want to let other people in too. Why? Because we've seen how it benefits America.
Let's take a look at the economic performance of places where immigration happens, and where it doesn't. percent by state Now, which state do you think has a better economy, New York or West Virginia? California or Mississipi? Obviously, the immigrants are going to where the economy is good, so if Mississippi's economy picks up, then they are likely to see more immigrants. However, if having a large number of immigrants hurts our economy, then I'd say that NY and California should have gone downhill and Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia should have become the economic powerhouses of the nation long ago. I also think it's interesting that the poorest states in the union are also the ones which have some of the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, despite having hardly any immigrants there anyways. As if an Indian moving to San Jose is stealing a job from a guy in Mobile.
It is natural for jobs to go to the person who can do the job who asks the least pay for it. People bitch about it when they are trying to get a job, but no one bitches about it when they hire someone to wash their car. We have four choices: A) let people come to America and work, B) let the jobs go to places where people work cheaper, C) work for cheaper than the other people, or D) wait for our economy to go so far into the crapper that no one would ever come here to work.
Ok, you pick.
Personally, I'd pick A. Of course, it would be better if we'd let them become citizens, because then they'd be Americans. But as long as we have people like you, who insist that only Native Born Americans = Americans, we insist that only a few are allowed to become citizens, not matter how many want to.
That's funny, one of my best friends, a programmer, moved from the US to Mexico to get a job. She was having trouble finding one here.
I think Cali has too many programmers. Try Alabama or Mississippi instead - lowest percentage of immigrants in the nation, and not a lot of programmers either. And in some parts you can live dirt poor too. Obviously having no immigrants is helpful to a state's economy, right?
Yesterday my grandmother sold her autograph collection, gathered over a lifetime of meeting famous people. She saved two for me - Teller and Oppenheimer. She had met Teller in Dallas, via some Hungarian friends, and drove him to the airport. She was planning on giving me the two physicists' autographs (because I am a physicist), and it was just coincidence that she gave them to me the day he died.
I had always hoped to meet Dr. Teller. Firstly, because meeting famous scientists can often be interesting, and secondly, because I wanted to tell him about "The Question". "The Question" is a sci-fi novel written by Dana Barbour. The villian in the novel is a fictional character named Edward Teller, who happened to have a dominant role in the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb. The disclaimer at the front of the book declares that all characters are fictional, and any resemblance to people living or dead is completely coincidental. In the book, Edward Teller tries to destroy the world by getting people to launch H-bombs at each other. I don't remember the exact plot, but it involved an underground secret lair. I always wondered what Dr. Teller would have made of it.
I became aware of the Cruxshadows by a) going to school with Rachel, and b) because my sister used to hang out with Rouge. The first time my sis saw someone with a Cruxshadows poster on their wall she just about shit herself;).
I have a copy of Intercontinental Drift (grins).
BTW I don't think they are a Metropolis band. Dancing Ferret I think?
You should also check out Middle Pillar records too. I am a huge Changelings fan, although they may not be too ambient for you.
Doesn't a stronger fall off at greater distances actually go against the data we have for anomalous gravitational effects? If anything, both cosmological ("dark matter") and experimental data point to gravity being stronger than Newton at long distances.
See also: "Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11", Anderson, J.D., Laing, P.A., Lau, E.L., Liu, A.S., Nieto, M.M., and Turyshev, S.G., Physics Review D, v65, 082004, (2002)
The activity in the vials (from Tc-99m) died off long ago: half life of 6 hours, each is over a year old... the likelihood of a single atom still being metastable is very small. The activity from Tc-99 itself, with a 212,000 year half life, is very very small. If I start with one Curie of Tc-99m, then after it decays to Tc-99, I should have about 3.2*10^-9 Curies of Tc-99 (as the activity is so much lower). This ignores the Mo-99 contamination which is inevitably present.
Our instruments have no problem measuring Tc-99m. That is what they are designed for. However, I had to look up whether they could measure 292 keV betas. It turns out that we have trouble measuring below about 500 keV betas. So you are correct, the thin layer of aluminum blocks the Tc-99 betas. On the other hand, I'm not too worried about radiation which can't even penetrate the vial. I'm not planning on drinking it, even if it is only 3.2*10^-9 Curies.
I couldn't find this on the iTunes website, but I wonder if you are allowed to have 2 accounts on the same computer? You, know, for say, 2 roommates who use the same computer. If so, can you have 1000 accounts on the same computer? I don't know if there are additional costs involved - not being a Mac user I haven't checked it out before.
But if you are able to create a new account for each song you buy, then the technical barrier to selling is gone, as you can just sell the account access information for the account which contains that one song. Of course, having to create a new account for each song might be a pain, thereby eliminating the good of using iTunes in the first place, but it might be able to be done in principle...
Remember that activity is inversely proportional to half-life. If you have a half life of 212,000 years, then the activity level is very low.
I have six vials of Tc-99 sitting right here on my desk. Their radioactivity is not even measureable (and, yes, I do have instruments capable of measuring to 10^-8 curies). They used to be vials of Tc-99m, which has a half-life of six hours. One of them used to be a full Curie, which can be slightly hazardous. I am much more comfortable with my 212,000 year half life Tc than my 6 hour half life Tc.
I think you have actually hit on something important here.
I am a collector and reader of old sci-fi. The ~vast majority~ of golden and silver age sci-fi are short stories (usually reprinted from magazines) and short novels. There are, of course, series and serials, but the majority of the works are stand alone stories.
When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, I see two kinds of sci-fi. One is the wall of spin-off series. You know, the hundereds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battletech, etc. series, which are usually written by many different authors, using the same characters and ideas. There is nothing wrong with this: its fun, and occasionally good stuff comes from it. However, when it dominates the market, there is a lack of new ideas being expressed - which is what brought us to sci-fi in the first place.
On the other side of the aisle, I see the regular sci-fi authors. About a third of the books I see are series. Now, I love a good trilogy, but if you compare a 1000 page trilogy with a thousand pages of short stories, which do you think is going to have more ~ideas~?
At its core, sci-fi is about ideas. Yes, good characters, good plot, good scenery are all nice, but in the end I want to hear something NEW. And I don't care whether it takes you 1000 pages or 10 to tell me. But authors get paid by the page, and publishers get paid by the book.
I wonder if it's not that we have less sci-fi ideas, but that they are padded more these days. Is that the price of popularity?
My point is that you have an expectation of privacy if no one else is there. There is no expectation of remaining alone, as it is public lands.
If I can't walk 100 miles into the desert, look around and see no one around, and reasonably expect some privacy, then the "expectation of privacy" is legal fiction.
Oh, that's nothing. I used to lurk on sci.physics.fusion, the mainstay of cold fusion discussion on the net (before there was a web). Crazy stuff - Archimedes Plutonium fit right in!
This story is about the highest magnetic field generated by a purely superconducting magnet.
NHMFL also holds the records in other areas: (45 T continuous, 70 T pulsed) Before NHMFL, I believe the records were held by the Bitter Lab in Massachusetts.
I used to work with some of the NHMFL guys. Go 'Noles!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well, goodbye Internet anonymity!!!
Serves me right for bragging in an open forum.
They already are:
US Patent number 5818891
Do ~NOT~ try to build one unless you know what you are doing! High voltage electrocution, neutron irradiation, and likely bankruptcy all await you if you venture down that path. Trust me, I know, I am alive only through sheer luck and the help of my friends. Also, like most patents, the important stuff is left out, and I don't feel like posting it. And for those who criticize the design - yes, I know. I spent years working on that @#$%ing thing, I know.
As Idarubicin pointed out, water and high voltage can make for fun sparks.
However, I wonder where he found the attenuation coefficients for "AOL CD's". Its not in my Nuclear Handbook. When I did this in college, I used paraffin wax, because 1) it was cheap 2) it was a decent moderator 3) it had known characteristics, so I could use the results from attenuation experiments to show that my neutrons were 2.45 Mev +/- 0.1 Mev. It's nice to know that the neutrons you are measuring are actually from D+D -> He3 + n.
I have a little experience in this matter, and what really impresses me are the kid's scrounging abilities. A neutron detector in a scrap yard? A turbo-molecular pump from the DI? (FYI, Deseret Industries is the Utah equivalent of the Salvation Army or Goodwill). How in the heck? Jeez, do you know how much money that would have saved when I built ~my~ deuteron collider? I thought I was doing good by scrounging HV supplies out of a junked ion implanter. BTW, the Deseret News got it wrong - the CD's are a neutron MODERATOR not MODULATOR. In my experience, Paraffin Wax is probably better than CD's, and is cheap, but maybe he had too many AOL cd's lying around.
Yes, I built a fusion reactor in college too. Seriously. It's on my resume. Of course, I was a junior by the time I got it built. I didn't want to go with the Farnsworth design though - everyone knows how it underperforms (although it ~could~ be improved). Mine was a beam collider, more similar to the works of Rostoker or Maglich. It produced a LOT more fusion - I had to limit my time near it while it was on, in order to keep my dose down to reasonable levels. Darwin Awards, I know. Seriously, I was careful, and received about a Rad or two in the years I worked on it (more from x-rays than neutrons). Lead is your friend, water and borax too. I wish my college professors had been as supportive as the ones at USU appear to be. They discouraged undergraduate research, thinking we didn't know enough to do anything real (of course, skipping class to go work on FUZZY didn't get on their good side).
Yes, Farnsworth fusors are old news. I still think they are cool - the primary reason big science moves so slow is that it is so big. I don't know why more colleges don't build ones and let their kids play around with them. They're cheap! Get enough people messing with them and maybe something will come of it.
Strangely enough, I grew up in Utah too. Must be something in the water...
National competencies are just the sum of individual competencies, times a conglomeration factor which occurs when you get lots of good people in one spot (ie Silicon Valley). I don't know that government officials are the best people to be directing the direction of innovation - heck, I innovate and I don't know where things are going. I think the best things that the developed nations can do to promote both having their people working in innovative fields and innovation itself, is to 1) create an environment that fosters innovation (many developed countries already do a good job of this) 2) encourage innovative people to move to your country and 3) encourage the people in your country to become innovators. Then let the innovators decide what they want to develop. If its something really worthwhile, it will be something you or I didn't think of.
Dammit, we made the list!
IUTBAFR (I Used to be a Fusion Researcher), and frankly, I never felt it was even close to the worst job in science. But I always worried about becoming a Richard Post. You see, fusion research is full of old-timers who've been working on it since Project Sherwood days, who have always been thinking "just a few more years and we'll have it". I suppose it's kind of like being a Red Sox fan. When they started work on Fusion for Peace in the 50's, it was 20-30 years away. When I started working on fusion in 1995 it was 20-30 years away. Now its 2003 and it's 20-30 years away...
A little bit of info about Richard Post. He was the primary proponent of "open" systems, basically magnetic cylinders which were either very long, had magnetic "mirrors" or had some sort of electromagnetic "endcap". It was a rival to the Tokamak method of plasma containment. A few were built, but the vast majority of the magnetic confinement money and attention went to Tokamaks. Whether it should have is a matter of debate. Basically, Richard Post spent much of his career trying to get research funds for a design which was not the favorite. There was still enough money for a decent research program, and the research basically showed that the mirrors (which were easy to do) caused too many problems (hence the term "mirror instability"), and nobody ever came up with a good enough endcap. Last I heard, Post was doing some work on flywheel technology.
I put in my tour of duty. Maybe sometime I will go back to working on fusion, but I'd like to get ~something~ done before then. I fear not accomplishing anything with my life.
FYI, my personal opinion (warning: rant) is that the primary reason fusion is such a slow business is that it takes years to simulate a design, raise money for it, build it, then test it and see how it performs. Imagine how long it would have taken to create the airplane if you had to spend 20 years every time you went back to the drawing board. I feel that as long as bigger = better in fusion, sustainable fusion will never happen. If you have to build it that big to make it work, the design is wrong.
I can't speak for the other sciences, but a PhD physicist working in industry (not at a university) made an average of $100,000/year in 2002 (source: Industrial Physicist Magazine.
Of course, before you get to that point, you have to go through the grad school grind, post-doc etc. This is analogous to how medical doctors have internships, residencies, etc. It ~is~ a long hard road. Reducing the number of foreigners coming in won't result in more US scientists - it will just result in more scientists working in other countries. People tend to go into science because they love science - that applies to people in Mumbai as well as here.
Of course, if you want to pay scientists more, I'm not complaining! But until you convince more US kids to love science, cutting off our foreign compatriots just leaves us even more short-handed than we already are. This is the current situation
There are very few students in the US going into physics. It's not like there are high barriers - if you want to see a warm welcome, go into a physics dept. and tell them you are really interested in doing physics. The only real barrier is desire and if you are capable of handling the subject matter (I realize not everyone is good at or wants to do math).
These people aren't stealing anybody's job. If you could pull random Americans off the street and put them to work as physics grad students, don't you think we'd be doing that? Last semester I taught part time at a University that is surrounded by a ghetto. Why would we import guys from around the world to work there when there are unemployed people on the next block? Its because Igor and Arvint can do the job, and a lot of Americans would rather be on a "reality" show. Not that there aren't any Americans in physics - I'm one.
Where is your physics degree, reporter? If you have one, I can find you a job in under 30 minutes. But I know you don't have one, because if you did, you would know what the situation is, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
One of my physics students last semester missed an entire month of class while he was being interviewed by the INS. I let him make up the work, but he still had the lowest grade in the class. Missing a month of class will always hurt, no matter how smart you are, and he wasn't my smartest student.
Two of my students (out of a class of twelve) had to miss at least a day of class due to the INS. I am sure that some just weren't able to attend, but I don't deal with admissions, so I wouldn't know.
Well, everyone has different competitive advantages (that's what makes economics, and the world, so interesting). You are going to be much better at identifying what yours are than any stranger on the internet. You already have an MBA, that's a big plus, but takes you nowhere on its own. Ask your business school friends what they think you are good at, that is sellable.
;) /. tradition.
Are you locked into IT? Because my first advice would be to find an industry which ~doesn't~ have half the world jumping into it due to the formerly high return on skills investment (remember when every joe and his brother learned HTML over the weekend and got a job?). There will, of course, be niches in IT which do quite well, but in order to succeed in those, you have to be better than many, many people. Remember that all those programmers who want to stay programmers will be trying to remain ahead of the pack, increasing their skills and leaving the lesser skilled jobs to the newcomers.
What really matters is what you are good at. Which is usually highly correlated with what you enjoy. So whatever it is, I'd find a way to do ~that~ better than anyone else. But if what you are good at doesn't determine your industry path (maybe you are good at managing people, or making friends, or posting to slashdot), then you can choose to follow the money:
1) Starting a company in India - more difficult than foniksonik thinks, I believe. It used to be illegal for foreigners, but that may have changed. Besides, there are always ways to get in on the action - just ask Draper International. I don't know if too many people have jumped on this boat yet, but I doubt it. You have an MBA, you should understand where I am going with this.
2) Start a company here. Doing what? You tell me. You know what you are good at. If you are looking for business opportunities, they are always out there. Post a resume link, I'm looking for partners, maybe I've got something up your alley. I'm not going to post any real opportunities to slashdot.
3) Develop skills with a high barrier to entry, in a field which is ~not~ going to disappear. This is tough, but rewarding. Brain surgeons do this - as long as brain surgery is around, they'll tend to do well. On the other hand, if the field disappears (think blacksmiths), that investment was wasted. For best results, combine with 1 or 2 (run a company full of brain surgeons), then...
4) Profit!!!
Sorry, its
krysith
You are correct: correlation does not imply causality.
However, many of the people posting on slashdot have implied that by allowing more labor to enter the US, that we would end up with an economy populated entirely by low-wage workers. You know, the whole "If we let all the Mexicans in, we'll be poor like the Mexicans" arguement.
If this arguement holds water, then the states with the most immigration should be the poorest. And yet they are the richest. Perhaps other factors might explain the difference - location, natural resources, luck, etc. Our sample size is only 50 states after all. Maybe California is ~so~ rich that they can afford to have all those poor immigrants come and still be better off than Alabama.
However, because there is a correlation between the locus of immigration and the locus of economic growth, I do not need to show that immigration is the cause of the growth. Frankly I don't care whether it is a cause or a symptom. All I need to do is show that immigrants are not "stealing American's jobs". In order to rebut my arguement, you would need to show that the jobs which immigrants have taken would have been taken by Americans. I don't think you can do so in an America where 11.1% of our population is imported, and we have 6.1% unemployment. If the immigrants had not come, would we have -5% unemployment? (yes I do know about the statistical games they play with the unemployment figures, it is still valid by proportion of population, if we assume that unemployment in the immigrant population is less than or equal to that in the population as a whole, which is true).
So obviously, not all of the immigrants have stolen American jobs. But those jobs came from somewhere... Once you admit that "some" of the jobs were not stolen from Americans, how can you say that the majority of the jobs weren't? If you kicked out all the immigrants and gave the job to an American (regardless of how unfair that might be) until all Americans who wanted a job had one, you'd still have immigrants left over. And I guarrantee you that kicking a few million people out of the economy would result in the loss of many, many jobs. So therefore the presence of immigrants has resulted in job creation.
There is far more to job creation than capital density with respect to population. That is an important factor, but other factors are also important.
Unemployment in Bangalore is 10% source
A more recent source (thehindu.com) gives 10.5% for "urban youth" for Mar 2003, so I figure its still about the same. I can't find the engineering unemployment rate.
So what do they blame? Globalization
Funny how lack of barriers and "protections" are always perceived as the cause for unemployment, no matter which side of the barrier you are on. It's always the other guy's fault. If you want to stop H-1B's, please replace it with an increase in the quotas for citizens. I'd rather have those programmers and doctors as Americans, thank you.
I guess it's just us old-family Americans who get it. All these 3rd and 4th generation Americans whose great-grandparents came over and became Americans want to lock out the rest of the world, as if they founded this country. We let them in, and we want to let other people in too. Why? Because we've seen how it benefits America.
C'mon slashdotters, read some history.
krysith
(four ancestors on the Mayflower)
I won't call you a racist.
I'll just call you ill-informed.
Let's take a look at the economic performance of places where immigration happens, and where it doesn't. percent by state
Now, which state do you think has a better economy, New York or West Virginia? California or Mississipi? Obviously, the immigrants are going to where the economy is good, so if Mississippi's economy picks up, then they are likely to see more immigrants. However, if having a large number of immigrants hurts our economy, then I'd say that NY and California should have gone downhill and Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia should have become the economic powerhouses of the nation long ago. I also think it's interesting that the poorest states in the union are also the ones which have some of the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, despite having hardly any immigrants there anyways. As if an Indian moving to San Jose is stealing a job from a guy in Mobile.
It is natural for jobs to go to the person who can do the job who asks the least pay for it. People bitch about it when they are trying to get a job, but no one bitches about it when they hire someone to wash their car. We have four choices: A) let people come to America and work, B) let the jobs go to places where people work cheaper, C) work for cheaper than the other people, or D) wait for our economy to go so far into the crapper that no one would ever come here to work.
Ok, you pick.
Personally, I'd pick A. Of course, it would be better if we'd let them become citizens, because then they'd be Americans. But as long as we have people like you, who insist that only Native Born Americans = Americans, we insist that only a few are allowed to become citizens, not matter how many want to.
That's funny, one of my best friends, a programmer, moved from the US to Mexico to get a job. She was having trouble finding one here.
I think Cali has too many programmers. Try Alabama or Mississippi instead - lowest percentage of immigrants in the nation, and not a lot of programmers either. And in some parts you can live dirt poor too. Obviously having no immigrants is helpful to a state's economy, right?
Does that mean instead of software pirates, now we will have software privateers? ;)
Yesterday my grandmother sold her autograph collection, gathered over a lifetime of meeting famous people. She saved two for me - Teller and Oppenheimer. She had met Teller in Dallas, via some Hungarian friends, and drove him to the airport. She was planning on giving me the two physicists' autographs (because I am a physicist), and it was just coincidence that she gave them to me the day he died.
I had always hoped to meet Dr. Teller. Firstly, because meeting famous scientists can often be interesting, and secondly, because I wanted to tell him about "The Question". "The Question" is a sci-fi novel written by Dana Barbour. The villian in the novel is a fictional character named Edward Teller, who happened to have a dominant role in the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb. The disclaimer at the front of the book declares that all characters are fictional, and any resemblance to people living or dead is completely coincidental. In the book, Edward Teller tries to destroy the world by getting people to launch H-bombs at each other. I don't remember the exact plot, but it involved an underground secret lair. I always wondered what Dr. Teller would have made of it.
I became aware of the Cruxshadows by a) going to school with Rachel, and b) because my sister used to hang out with Rouge. The first time my sis saw someone with a Cruxshadows poster on their wall she just about shit herself ;).
I have a copy of Intercontinental Drift (grins).
BTW I don't think they are a Metropolis band. Dancing Ferret I think?
You should also check out Middle Pillar records too. I am a huge Changelings fan, although they may not be too ambient for you.
Doesn't a stronger fall off at greater distances actually go against the data we have for anomalous gravitational effects? If anything, both cosmological ("dark matter") and experimental data point to gravity being stronger than Newton at long distances.
See also:
"Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11", Anderson, J.D., Laing, P.A., Lau, E.L., Liu, A.S., Nieto, M.M., and Turyshev, S.G., Physics Review D, v65, 082004, (2002)
The activity in the vials (from Tc-99m) died off long ago: half life of 6 hours, each is over a year old... the likelihood of a single atom still being metastable is very small. The activity from Tc-99 itself, with a 212,000 year half life, is very very small. If I start with one Curie of Tc-99m, then after it decays to Tc-99, I should have about 3.2*10^-9 Curies of Tc-99 (as the activity is so much lower). This ignores the Mo-99 contamination which is inevitably present.
Our instruments have no problem measuring Tc-99m. That is what they are designed for. However, I had to look up whether they could measure 292 keV betas. It turns out that we have trouble measuring below about 500 keV betas. So you are correct, the thin layer of aluminum blocks the Tc-99 betas. On the other hand, I'm not too worried about radiation which can't even penetrate the vial. I'm not planning on drinking it, even if it is only 3.2*10^-9 Curies.
Ok, slashdotters, I have a question.
I couldn't find this on the iTunes website, but I wonder if you are allowed to have 2 accounts on the same computer? You, know, for say, 2 roommates who use the same computer. If so, can you have 1000 accounts on the same computer? I don't know if there are additional costs involved - not being a Mac user I haven't checked it out before.
But if you are able to create a new account for each song you buy, then the technical barrier to selling is gone, as you can just sell the account access information for the account which contains that one song. Of course, having to create a new account for each song might be a pain, thereby eliminating the good of using iTunes in the first place, but it might be able to be done in principle...
Remember that activity is inversely proportional to half-life. If you have a half life of 212,000 years, then the activity level is very low.
I have six vials of Tc-99 sitting right here on my desk. Their radioactivity is not even measureable (and, yes, I do have instruments capable of measuring to 10^-8 curies). They used to be vials of Tc-99m, which has a half-life of six hours. One of them used to be a full Curie, which can be slightly hazardous. I am much more comfortable with my 212,000 year half life Tc than my 6 hour half life Tc.
I think you have actually hit on something important here.
I am a collector and reader of old sci-fi. The ~vast majority~ of golden and silver age sci-fi are short stories (usually reprinted from magazines) and short novels. There are, of course, series and serials, but the majority of the works are stand alone stories.
When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, I see two kinds of sci-fi. One is the wall of spin-off series. You know, the hundereds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battletech, etc. series, which are usually written by many different authors, using the same characters and ideas. There is nothing wrong with this: its fun, and occasionally good stuff comes from it. However, when it dominates the market, there is a lack of new ideas being expressed - which is what brought us to sci-fi in the first place.
On the other side of the aisle, I see the regular sci-fi authors. About a third of the books I see are series. Now, I love a good trilogy, but if you compare a 1000 page trilogy with a thousand pages of short stories, which do you think is going to have more ~ideas~?
At its core, sci-fi is about ideas. Yes, good characters, good plot, good scenery are all nice, but in the end I want to hear something NEW. And I don't care whether it takes you 1000 pages or 10 to tell me. But authors get paid by the page, and publishers get paid by the book.
I wonder if it's not that we have less sci-fi ideas, but that they are padded more these days. Is that the price of popularity?
My point is that you have an expectation of privacy if no one else is there. There is no expectation of remaining alone, as it is public lands.
If I can't walk 100 miles into the desert, look around and see no one around, and reasonably expect some privacy, then the "expectation of privacy" is legal fiction.
Oh, that's nothing. I used to lurk on sci.physics.fusion, the mainstay of cold fusion discussion on the net (before there was a web). Crazy stuff - Archimedes Plutonium fit right in!
This story is about the highest magnetic field generated by a purely superconducting magnet.
NHMFL also holds the records in other areas: (45 T continuous, 70 T pulsed) Before NHMFL, I believe the records were held by the Bitter Lab in Massachusetts.
I used to work with some of the NHMFL guys. Go 'Noles!