I'm not usually a spelling or grammar nazi (a case of the pot calling the kettle black), but it is kind of funny that you replaced "aisle: A passageway between rows of seats, as in an auditorium or an airplane." with "isle: An island, especially a small one.", thus implying that politcos are insular.
Furthermore, in the US, the red cross appears to be a registered trademark of Johnson and Johnson, although they do take care to point out "Products bearing this trademark have no connection with the American National Red Cross."
That's a pretty embarassing error right there! You ever have a moment when someone asks you what your favorite colour is and you think "blue" but you say yellow? That's the same kind of embarassing!
I am never convinced that this standard explanation really satisfies the layman, I always get the feeling that it is short enough to not be boring, but long enough for them to think "I have no idea what he is talking about, but if I smile, say 'oh, right!' and nod when he is done, then we can start talking about house prices in the Bay Area." Maybe people are always thinking that when I talk:)
However, my assertion of "several years of university physics" was an exaggeration. My father-in-law came away from the one hour public lecture Steve Sekula gave at SLAC last year and seemed happy that he knew what we were doing at SLAC. Don't know that the talk would condense down to a good web page, though.
"Although C and P individually are maximally violated by the weak interaction, the combination CP is nearly conserved"
This error, however, was not the result of a temporary brain aberation. I probably should be embarrased that I did not know this, but then the only time I really paid any attention to the central analyses of BaBar was whilst writing the general chapters of my thesis. I spent a year or so looking for radiative pengiun decays (didn't find any), but most of my BaBar time was spent in IR-2 greasing the wheels of the dataflow system. Hope neither of my PhD examiners read/., they might want my degree certificate back:-/
That's not splitting hairs, that is correcting my appalling error:)
And yes, that is why I am experimentalist (actually it is worse than that - I write real-time software for DAQ systems).
I did my experimental particle physics PhD on an experiment named BaBar, you know, like the elephant. Are you telling me that isn't public-friendly?
A similar experiment based in Japan is called Belle and one in upstate NY called CLEO. One of the other experiments at the LHC is called ATLAS. They all seem reasonably public-friendly names (but then I am one of the folks you are saying don't know what a public-freindly name is, so I suppose my views are irrelevant).
As to the PR, it's pretty hard to make particle physics accessible to other physicists, let alone the general public. The essence of the question that BaBar and Belle were trying to answer is "Is CP violated in strong interactions?". It generally takes several years of university physics just to understand the question. The most "successful" PR projects never even seem to get to the crux of the project.
Incidentally, the answer is "yes, maximally". Your tax dollars at work!
They can if they don't need to pay to maintain a car, cover insurance, pay for gas...
To be honest, I have no idea how much it would cost the canonical "old person" in the US to have essential supplies delivered. However, we ran the numbers for my granny when she hit seventy (in the UK, so petrol and insurance might be more expensive) and it worked out to be cheaper for her to pay for a taxi to and from the local supermarket once a week than to keep a car.
More of a concern would be the psychological impact of increased isolation, unless they attend some kind of seniors' centre.
I read your qeustion as "What is the current relationship between peer-review and journals?". If the question is rather "Why should peer-reivew be intimately tied to the publication of papers in a journal?" the I would answer; it doesn't need to be. It made sense, when the primary publication method was via print, to peer-review papers prior to publication and coordinate the effort through the publishers.
Now that the internet provides a cheaper, more efficient way of publishing papers a coordinated effort needs to be made to seperate the peer-review process.
All we need now are a some people to coordinate it, some money to pay for it, and to get the international communities of each of the relevant disciplines to agree to it:)
Tends to be retroactive review. No-one is going to do a full-blown peer review of your paper before the conference (at least not at the high energy physics and computing conferences that I have attended), but the community will certainly know about badly written papers or papers based on bad science by the time everyone has returned to their home institutions.
Papers that are submitted to a (respectible) journal are reviewed by a number (~3) of experts in the field who were not associated with the production of the paper. This ensures that there are no factual errors, and allows suspect practices to be challenged before the document is unleased on a wider audience. There is usually a month or two of the paper bouncing back and forth between authors and reviewers before it is finally published.
Gotta watch out for those pesky journalled filesystems though! I don't think a typical shred program does anything useful on an ext3 filesystem, for example. IIRC you can't be sure that you are really overwriting the physical location of the the orignal data (especially if the file has grown over time) and the journalling will (presumably for files below a certain size) just optimise away the intermediate disk writes and just write the final bunch of 0's...
I guess you really need to repartition the drive using non-journalled filesystems only and shred all the free space.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be a fs expert - I just remember looking for a shred application a few months back and being dissapointed that none of them worked with ext3.
At some institutions, such as Santa Clara University, CA, they have done exactly that. There are distinct degrees for Computer Engineering, part of the Engineering Dept., and Computer Science, part of the Mathematics dept. There is some overlap of classes, but the Comp. Sci. degree is much more mathematical.
What makes the "real world" different from the (presumably "fake world") one works in to get a PhD?
The overall goal of the umbrella organisation may be different but you have to work with all the same types of people - some driven, some lazy, some helpful, some obstructionist - with all the same types of restrictions - do it now, for no money, without bothering your boss with the details.
Of course, my PhD is in a physical science, and I did the research at an international laboratory, which gives context to my former (and, as I admitted, very generalised) post. My former flatmate whose PhD was in medieval history certainly didn't live in any kind of world that I could recognise as "real":)
Caveat 1: Only for a fixed time period (so if you take four years to finish you PhD you are on your own for the last year.
Caveat 2: Not a huge amount! (Although if you do a PhD in experimental particle physics you can get sent to Stanford University, CA, with accomodation paid and an additional stipend for cost of living:)
If you believe that the sole reason for getting a degree is to gain knowledge, then no. If you believe that a university education is about learning to learn, then yes.
A BS (BSc, BA in the UK) demonstrates (in theory) an ability to follow a prescribed course of study at the pace set by the lecturers but with the self-discipline required to go to the library rather than goof off. You should make a good worker bee who doesn't need to be continuously supervised.
A MS (MSc, MPhys, MChem...) demonstrates an ability to function independantly within broad parameters to achieve a general objective set by your supervisor. You should be capable of working at a remote site without seeing your direct boss for six months (and you should be capable of picking up the phone when you need help - rather than just sitting and stewing until someone demands to know what you have been doing for months).
A PhD demonstrates that you can determine your own goals, demand information and contributions from a wide range of individuals (even people who are senior to you in an organisation), set your own schedule, work towards a project goal that is years in the future and say with a tough project longer than some people stay at one company in Si Valley (at least during the "new job every six months" boom:) Furthermore, you have demonstrated that you don't need someone to have done it before - you have proved you can create something original!
Of course, these are all grotesque generalisations, and I know several PhDs I wouldn't trust to drink a glass of water without close supervision and paramedics standing by. Equally, there are other paths that demonstrate the same skill set. Furthermore, it can be hard to maintain one's non-conformist, independant spirit when one is producing a PhD thesis that must, by definition, conform to your examiner's views.
It doesn't. It runs a single monolithic binary. Think really big embedded system. Like most embedded real-time systems there isn't really an operating system. (A "Real-Time Operating System" isn't really an operating system it is just a collection of prebuilt libraries to link into your binary). In this case, they don't even have an RTOS, the whole thing is home grown.
Scottish air traffic control, based in Prestwick, near Glasgow, houses the air traffic controllers who are responsible for Scotland and (IIRC) transatlantic traffic. The London air traffic control centre houses the controllers for the London airports (and the air corridor north) while Swanwick (not Swanwage) houses the controllers for the rest of the England. However, the computing is all centralised at West Drayton.
The 'fridge size boxes are 70's vintage (I suspect bits have been replaced over the years). The CPUs are only about five years old. The system consists of two identical computers for hot failover and they they had to get two custom CPUs made by the original manufacturer (IBM, I think) to deal with Y2K.
As for the software? Written in some weird language called Jovial, and continually repatched - never rewritten.
BTW, where the heck is Swanage? The new NATS center is in Swanwick!
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I'm not usually a spelling or grammar nazi (a case of the pot calling the kettle black), but it is kind of funny that you replaced "aisle: A passageway between rows of seats, as in an auditorium or an airplane." with "isle: An island, especially a small one.", thus implying that politcos are insular.
Furthermore, in the US, the red cross appears to be a registered trademark of Johnson and Johnson, although they do take care to point out "Products bearing this trademark have no connection with the American National Red Cross."
"Is CP violated in strong interactions?".
That's a pretty embarassing error right there! You ever have a moment when someone asks you what your favorite colour is and you think "blue" but you say yellow? That's the same kind of embarassing!
I am never convinced that this standard explanation really satisfies the layman, I always get the feeling that it is short enough to not be boring, but long enough for them to think "I have no idea what he is talking about, but if I smile, say 'oh, right!' and nod when he is done, then we can start talking about house prices in the Bay Area." Maybe people are always thinking that when I talk:)
However, my assertion of "several years of university physics" was an exaggeration. My father-in-law came away from the one hour public lecture Steve Sekula gave at SLAC last year and seemed happy that he knew what we were doing at SLAC. Don't know that the talk would condense down to a good web page, though.
"Although C and P individually are maximally violated by the weak interaction, the combination CP is nearly conserved"
This error, however, was not the result of a temporary brain aberation. I probably should be embarrased that I did not know this, but then the only time I really paid any attention to the central analyses of BaBar was whilst writing the general chapters of my thesis. I spent a year or so looking for radiative pengiun decays (didn't find any), but most of my BaBar time was spent in IR-2 greasing the wheels of the dataflow system. Hope neither of my PhD examiners read /., they might want my degree certificate back:-/
That's not splitting hairs, that is correcting my appalling error :)
And yes, that is why I am experimentalist (actually it is worse than that - I write real-time software for DAQ systems).
I did my experimental particle physics PhD on an experiment named BaBar, you know, like the elephant. Are you telling me that isn't public-friendly?
A similar experiment based in Japan is called Belle and one in upstate NY called CLEO. One of the other experiments at the LHC is called ATLAS. They all seem reasonably public-friendly names (but then I am one of the folks you are saying don't know what a public-freindly name is, so I suppose my views are irrelevant).
As to the PR, it's pretty hard to make particle physics accessible to other physicists, let alone the general public. The essence of the question that BaBar and Belle were trying to answer is "Is CP violated in strong interactions?". It generally takes several years of university physics just to understand the question. The most "successful" PR projects never even seem to get to the crux of the project.
Incidentally, the answer is "yes, maximally". Your tax dollars at work!
They can if they don't need to pay to maintain a car, cover insurance, pay for gas... To be honest, I have no idea how much it would cost the canonical "old person" in the US to have essential supplies delivered. However, we ran the numbers for my granny when she hit seventy (in the UK, so petrol and insurance might be more expensive) and it worked out to be cheaper for her to pay for a taxi to and from the local supermarket once a week than to keep a car. More of a concern would be the psychological impact of increased isolation, unless they attend some kind of seniors' centre.
Depends how you read the question :).
I read your qeustion as "What is the current relationship between peer-review and journals?". If the question is rather "Why should peer-reivew be intimately tied to the publication of papers in a journal?" the I would answer; it doesn't need to be. It made sense, when the primary publication method was via print, to peer-review papers prior to publication and coordinate the effort through the publishers.
Now that the internet provides a cheaper, more efficient way of publishing papers a coordinated effort needs to be made to seperate the peer-review process.
All we need now are a some people to coordinate it, some money to pay for it, and to get the international communities of each of the relevant disciplines to agree to it:)
Tends to be retroactive review. No-one is going to do a full-blown peer review of your paper before the conference (at least not at the high energy physics and computing conferences that I have attended), but the community will certainly know about badly written papers or papers based on bad science by the time everyone has returned to their home institutions.
Papers that are submitted to a (respectible) journal are reviewed by a number (~3) of experts in the field who were not associated with the production of the paper. This ensures that there are no factual errors, and allows suspect practices to be challenged before the document is unleased on a wider audience. There is usually a month or two of the paper bouncing back and forth between authors and reviewers before it is finally published.
Gotta watch out for those pesky journalled filesystems though! I don't think a typical shred program does anything useful on an ext3 filesystem, for example. IIRC you can't be sure that you are really overwriting the physical location of the the orignal data (especially if the file has grown over time) and the journalling will (presumably for files below a certain size) just optimise away the intermediate disk writes and just write the final bunch of 0's ...
I guess you really need to repartition the drive using non-journalled filesystems only and shred all the free space.
Disclaimer: I don't claim to be a fs expert - I just remember looking for a shred application a few months back and being dissapointed that none of them worked with ext3.
At some institutions, such as Santa Clara University, CA, they have done exactly that. There are distinct degrees for Computer Engineering, part of the Engineering Dept., and Computer Science, part of the Mathematics dept. There is some overlap of classes, but the Comp. Sci. degree is much more mathematical.
What makes the "real world" different from the (presumably "fake world") one works in to get a PhD?
The overall goal of the umbrella organisation may be different but you have to work with all the same types of people - some driven, some lazy, some helpful, some obstructionist - with all the same types of restrictions - do it now, for no money, without bothering your boss with the details.
Of course, my PhD is in a physical science, and I did the research at an international laboratory, which gives context to my former (and, as I admitted, very generalised) post. My former flatmate whose PhD was in medieval history certainly didn't live in any kind of world that I could recognise as "real":)
In the UK you get funded for your PhD.
Caveat 1: Only for a fixed time period (so if you take four years to finish you PhD you are on your own for the last year.
Caveat 2: Not a huge amount! (Although if you do a PhD in experimental particle physics you can get sent to Stanford University, CA, with accomodation paid and an additional stipend for cost of living :)
If you believe that the sole reason for getting a degree is to gain knowledge, then no. If you believe that a university education is about learning to learn, then yes.
A BS (BSc, BA in the UK) demonstrates (in theory) an ability to follow a prescribed course of study at the pace set by the lecturers but with the self-discipline required to go to the library rather than goof off. You should make a good worker bee who doesn't need to be continuously supervised.
A MS (MSc, MPhys, MChem ...) demonstrates an ability to function independantly within broad parameters to achieve a general objective set by your supervisor. You should be capable of working at a remote site without seeing your direct boss for six months (and you should be capable of picking up the phone when you need help - rather than just sitting and stewing until someone demands to know what you have been doing for months).
A PhD demonstrates that you can determine your own goals, demand information and contributions from a wide range of individuals (even people who are senior to you in an organisation), set your own schedule, work towards a project goal that is years in the future and say with a tough project longer than some people stay at one company in Si Valley (at least during the "new job every six months" boom :) Furthermore, you have demonstrated that you don't need someone to have done it before - you have proved you can create something original!
Of course, these are all grotesque generalisations, and I know several PhDs I wouldn't trust to drink a glass of water without close supervision and paramedics standing by. Equally, there are other paths that demonstrate the same skill set. Furthermore, it can be hard to maintain one's non-conformist, independant spirit when one is producing a PhD thesis that must, by definition, conform to your examiner's views.
It doesn't. It runs a single monolithic binary. Think really big embedded system. Like most embedded real-time systems there isn't really an operating system. (A "Real-Time Operating System" isn't really an operating system it is just a collection of prebuilt libraries to link into your binary). In this case, they don't even have an RTOS, the whole thing is home grown.
Not quite.
Scottish air traffic control, based in Prestwick, near Glasgow, houses the air traffic controllers who are responsible for Scotland and (IIRC) transatlantic traffic. The London air traffic control centre houses the controllers for the London airports (and the air corridor north) while Swanwick (not Swanwage) houses the controllers for the rest of the England. However, the computing is all centralised at West Drayton.
The new systems will not be online by 2006!
The 'fridge size boxes are 70's vintage (I suspect bits have been replaced over the years). The CPUs are only about five years old. The system consists of two identical computers for hot failover and they they had to get two custom CPUs made by the original manufacturer (IBM, I think) to deal with Y2K.
As for the software? Written in some weird language called Jovial, and continually repatched - never rewritten.
BTW, where the heck is Swanage? The new NATS center is in Swanwick!