I find this comment confusing. The reason I'm enticed to run one is so that I can get access to lots of other hotspots all over the place. To me that provides significant value.
Yeah, I think I was confused. After thinking it through a little more (juggling a bunch of other things at the moment), it makes sense.
According to this table, Toshiba has been building nuclear power plants business since the 1960s, and is currently the largest nuclear plant supplier in Japan. I suspect that they're fairly qualified.
If not for the hysterical campaigns against nuclear energy, we would not be having this awful dependency on oil and other grossly unhealthy fossil fuels...
Indeed. For all the "OMG, nuclear power is going to kill us all!" folks, here's an interesting bit of information:
Risks from reactor accidents are estimated by the rapidly developing science of "probabilistic risk analysis" (PRA). A PRA must be done separately for each power plant (at a cost of $5 million) but we give typical results here: A fuel melt-down might be expected once in 20,000 years of reactor operation. In 2 out of 3 melt-downs there would be no deaths, in 1 out of 5 there would be over 1000 deaths, and in 1 out of 100,000 there would be 50,000 deaths. The average for all meltdowns would be 400 deaths. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning.
It still isn't too clear though on what the advantage is of having a "Linus" hotspot instead of just having it be open-access. My guess is that the main benefit is that hotspot users are authenticated with a "global" ID, which would help deter abuse, spamming, etc.
Hm... I tried submitting this story a couple times in the past week, with no luck. I've pasted my submission below, which has a little more info on why the Rocket Racing League could be significant, and a video of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting the rocket-plane prototype:
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis's Rocket Racing League has announced its first rocketplane team, headed by two F-16 pilots. The team's expected annual operating cost is up to $1 million, compared to $18 million for a NASCAR vehicle. A video is also available of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting a prototype racer at the 2005 X Prize Cup. It's hoped that the competition will help foster the development of more robust, economical, and reliable rocket technology.
I'm still not sure on whether or not this League will be successful. It's a neat idea, but it'll be tricky to do this well, without making it boring or too tacky.
Somalia is presently without government, and has a completely free market capitalist system - I hear they have pretty good wireless service because of that (don't ask about the roads, water supply, electricity or schools though) so if you really don't want to take part in the community of the USA you can move to a community that seems closer to your ideals.
This is a faulty comparison, as Somalia's being without a government doesn't change the fact that it's in one of the poorest regions in the world. Even the countries around it with intact governments are doing horifically.
While many here are opposed to NASA's development of new rockets, it strikes me that a private orgainization could use the heavy lit to send cargo to the moon and to Mars.
Personally, I suspect that a private organization would be more in favor of using something like SpaceX's $78 million Falcon 9-S9 or one of its descendants, rather than whatever ultra-expensive shuttle-derived heavy vehicle NASA is developing.
I don't know if the rocket itself runs Linux, but Dell's website cites SpaceX as an example of a company which uses Linux for high-performance computing. From Dell's site:
SpaceX uses an eight-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Infiniband switches to further the company's mission to dramatically reduce the cost and increase the reliability of access to space. With this cluster, SpaceX should be able to reduce the time needed to run computational aerodynamics simulations, structural analyses and trajectory optimizations. More information on SpaceX is available at www.spacex.com;
I thought astronauts were meant to gather valuable research data about humans living and working in space.
Space exploration is a job for probots, not people.
The thing is, "space exploration" really refers to two different things: space science and preparing for space settlement. Humans tend to be quite useful for the latter.
Pre-launch comments from SpaceX's Elon Musk
on
Falcon 1 Ready to Launch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, who started SpaceX with the money he got from selling PayPal to eBay. He's a pretty good example of someone who grew up with dreams about space who's trying to make those dreams a reality. I think his efforts with towards dramatically decreasing the cost of space launch are quite important, and crucial for his (and my) long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planet species.
This set of notes by Michael Belfiore from their pre-launch press conference for their launch attempt last year is a pretty interesting read and gives great insight into what Musk wants to do with SpaceX. Some excerpts:
SpaceX's second Gen rocket engine will be the biggest rocket engine in the world, though not the biggest in history. The F1 engine that sent people to the moon is no longer in production, so Musk doesn't count that....
Q: What customers will you put on Falcon 9? A: We haven't thought a lot about it because it's speculative, but big customers would be NASA, Bigelow Aerospace, which is launching its first subscale space station module next year, and potentially people who just want to go to orbit and just spend some time on orbit. Also we could do a loop around the moon, which actually wouldn't require a huge rocket. [Space Adventures recently cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to do just that, so that may be what inspired Musk to say that.]...
Q: When will you go to space? A: I'm not doing this to go into space myself, per se. I want to help build a space faring civilization. It would have been very easy for me to pay to go to the International Space Station myself. I want to help other people get to space....
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so....
Q: When will you fly cargo missions to the space station? A: I hope in the next 3 to 4 years....
Another question from me: Are you developing a manned vehicle right now, or have you thought that far ahead yet? A: I can't comment on that right now....
Q: What's next in the entreprenurial space field? A: Lots of people doing things--Paul Allen [who funded SpaceShipOne], Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, John Carmack with Armadillo Aerospace...Musk thinks we're heading toward a Netscape moment, when someone turns a profit, and hopefully it'll be SpaceX, and then investment capital will start to flow in.
For those who haven't heard the term before, sousveillance refers to the use of technology by members of society to watch and record the activities of others, particularly authority figures. It seems like it's becoming increasingly futile for organizations to try to resist sousveillance, as the police in the article attempted to do. As technology progresses, cameras and cameraphones are just getting smaller, cheaper, and harder to detect. Eventually it gets to the point where people have things like retinal implants and little remote-control cameras, and it becomes absurdly impractical to try to keep them away from all the things you want to keep secret.
I've recently started reading David Brin's The Transparent Society, which proposes the somewhat counterintuitive notion that instead of resisting government invasions of privacy, we instead ensure that everybody is able to watch everybody. In effect, the answer to the question "Who watches the watchers?" becomes "Make everybody a watcher." This of course has its problems and I'm still not sure what I quite think of it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. The first chapter of his book is available online. I highly recommend skimming through it.
Looking through the article and several of the comments here, there doesn't seem to be much of a focus on the "big picture" lessons from the Challenger accident. There's a recent post Rand Simberg made at Transterrestrial Musings which sums up some of my own thoughts on the matter:
It's twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA's confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn't severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.
Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it--they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.
But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn't be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it's childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn't that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.
This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)--that the American people won't accept the loss of astronauts. But we've shown throughout our history that we're willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA's goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.
Will the American people be inspired by that? I can't say--I only know that I am not.
Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we're going to get that from the current plan, or planners.
I think you may have misinterpreted me -- I actually agree with you. The cutting edge should always be dangerous. If people aren't dying regularly, you aren't pushing the envelope enough. However, the cutting edge pushes forward, and what was once cutting edge becomes routine and accessible to everybody. For an example, look at the daredevils and barnstormers of aviation early last century, and how it led the way to the routine air transport we have today.
It should be noted that this past Thursday was NASA's Day of Remembrance. This is in honor of the astronauts who died in all three of America's space accidents -- Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia -- which all occurred around the last week of January (January 27 - February 1). There's a commemorative page on NASA's site.
That said, I look forward to the day when a spacecraft accident is no more notable than an automobile or airplane accident. The best way to honor our lost astronauts is to make space travel more routine, allowing it to get safer and more accessible through experience.
Another novel and interesting way I came across to predict the spread of infectious disease is the University of Iowa's Flu Prediction Market. A description from their page:
Information about influenza activity is diverse and widely distributed. Different health care professionals have different information regarding influenza activity. This information could be quite helpful in predicting future influenza activity if it could be aggregated and analyzed efficiently. However, because this information is disparate, standard research and statistical methods have not proven to be effective. Thus, the medical community does not have access to accurate influenza forecasts. The Influenza Prediction Market is an attempt to satisfy the need for accurate information regarding future influenza activity.
The first experimental prediction market was the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM). It has developed methods to predict future events ranging from election results to movie box office receipts and has a forecasting record substantially superior to alternative mechanisms. We propose that markets for infectious diseases may be useful for predicting infectious disease activity quickly, accurately, and inexpensively by aggregating the expert opinion of health care professionals.
They're currently working on expanding the system, but with their current market they give various health care workers $100 they can bid with, and depending on how accurate their bidding is they can get additional money.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system? To test drugs and medical devices? To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines? To enforce environmental standards?
If the government doesn't do it, who will?
A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist would likely answer that the things you mentioned should be dealt with by assurance contracts, not government coercion.
Things like this are why I think futarchy is better than democracy. With a democracy, a government tends to make decisions based on the self-deceiving ideologies of individuals, with relatively little feedback based on actual results. In a futarchy, people would vote on a measure of national welfare and prediction markets would be used to predict what policies would actually be most effective in promoting national welfare. In the past, prediction markets have been shown to be much better than opinion polls and individual experts at predicting future events.
As an example, consider the current debate over public healthcare. In the end, most people don't really care about whether healthcare is publically or privately run, they just want to be healthy. The public discourse is dominated by people who exclude contradicting evidence, who are mostly concerned with promoting their ideology. With a prediction market, people would end up having to put their money where their mouth is, encouraging them to consider contradictory evidence and make the best decision possible.
(Some relevant info from a slashdot story I submitted a few months ago, which didn't make the cut)
Besides the obvious exercise benefits, it seems that the Dance Dance Revolution video game may also help out children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A recent study in which sixth-graders with ADHD played DDR Disney Mix for an hour each week suggests that playing the game improved their focus and attention, although further studies are planned to get a better understanding of how it could help kids out.
I think it's rather relevant that he has an astronautics doctorate from MIT when the submission is about a plan for spacecraft which exploit interplanetary transport orbits.
Slashdot Mirror
All I know is, the bill had better be sent to the Americans.
Why's that? Coal fires in China release 360 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, as much as all the cars in America.
The estimated cost is about $50 billion.
Wouldn't be better to spend this tiny amount of money with measures to prevent and control the emission of CO2 at the atmosphere?
That depends... would the economic cost of reducing CO2 emissions by the equivalent amount be more or less than $50 billion?
This isn't a completely rhetorical question... if anybody has figures, I'd be very curious to see them.
I find this comment confusing. The reason I'm enticed to run one is so that I can get access to lots of other hotspots all over the place. To me that provides significant value.
Yeah, I think I was confused. After thinking it through a little more (juggling a bunch of other things at the moment), it makes sense.
According to this table, Toshiba has been building nuclear power plants business since the 1960s, and is currently the largest nuclear plant supplier in Japan. I suspect that they're fairly qualified.
If not for the hysterical campaigns against nuclear energy, we would not be having this awful dependency on oil and other grossly unhealthy fossil fuels...
Indeed. For all the "OMG, nuclear power is going to kill us all!" folks, here's an interesting bit of information:
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm
Risks from reactor accidents are estimated by the rapidly developing science of "probabilistic risk analysis" (PRA). A PRA must be done separately for each power plant (at a cost of $5 million) but we give typical results here: A fuel melt-down might be expected once in 20,000 years of reactor operation. In 2 out of 3 melt-downs there would be no deaths, in 1 out of 5 there would be over 1000 deaths, and in 1 out of 100,000 there would be 50,000 deaths. The average for all meltdowns would be 400 deaths. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning.
Are you sure you read the site? The reason to run a Linus hotspot is so that you will get reciprocal access to all the other Linus hostpots out there.
Sure, but I guess I'm still not seeing how this differs from just running an open-access point, from the POV of somebody running a hotspot.
And how did parent get modded informative?
Probably because I was the only person who actually mentioned where the company's website was.
The article didn't really tell too much about what's distinctive about FON, so I went to their website here:
http://en.fon.com/
And of course, their blog: http://blog.fon.com/en/
It still isn't too clear though on what the advantage is of having a "Linus" hotspot instead of just having it be open-access. My guess is that the main benefit is that hotspot users are authenticated with a "global" ID, which would help deter abuse, spamming, etc.
Hm... I tried submitting this story a couple times in the past week, with no luck. I've pasted my submission below, which has a little more info on why the Rocket Racing League could be significant, and a video of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting the rocket-plane prototype:
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis's Rocket Racing League has announced its first rocketplane team, headed by two F-16 pilots. The team's expected annual operating cost is up to $1 million, compared to $18 million for a NASCAR vehicle. A video is also available of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting a prototype racer at the 2005 X Prize Cup. It's hoped that the competition will help foster the development of more robust, economical, and reliable rocket technology.
I'm still not sure on whether or not this League will be successful. It's a neat idea, but it'll be tricky to do this well, without making it boring or too tacky.
Somalia is presently without government, and has a completely free market capitalist system - I hear they have pretty good wireless service because of that (don't ask about the roads, water supply, electricity or schools though) so if you really don't want to take part in the community of the USA you can move to a community that seems closer to your ideals.
This is a faulty comparison, as Somalia's being without a government doesn't change the fact that it's in one of the poorest regions in the world. Even the countries around it with intact governments are doing horifically.
While many here are opposed to NASA's development of new rockets, it strikes me that a private orgainization could use the heavy lit to send cargo to the moon and to Mars.
Personally, I suspect that a private organization would be more in favor of using something like SpaceX's $78 million Falcon 9-S9 or one of its descendants, rather than whatever ultra-expensive shuttle-derived heavy vehicle NASA is developing.
Although Resident Evil and 2 wasn't bad... I still won't forgive him over Doom.
;)
Uwe Boll did not direct any of those movies.
Or perhaps the GP was trying to suggest that those movies were punishments from God?
Does it run Linux....
I don't know if the rocket itself runs Linux, but Dell's website cites SpaceX as an example of a company which uses Linux for high-performance computing. From Dell's site:
SpaceX uses an eight-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Infiniband switches to further the company's mission to dramatically reduce the cost and increase the reliability of access to space. With this cluster, SpaceX should be able to reduce the time needed to run computational aerodynamics simulations, structural analyses and trajectory optimizations. More information on SpaceX is available at www.spacex.com;
I thought astronauts were meant to gather valuable research data about humans living and working in space.
Space exploration is a job for probots, not people.
The thing is, "space exploration" really refers to two different things: space science and preparing for space settlement. Humans tend to be quite useful for the latter.
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, who started SpaceX with the money he got from selling PayPal to eBay. He's a pretty good example of someone who grew up with dreams about space who's trying to make those dreams a reality. I think his efforts with towards dramatically decreasing the cost of space launch are quite important, and crucial for his (and my) long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planet species.
...
...
...
...
...
...
This set of notes by Michael Belfiore from their pre-launch press conference for their launch attempt last year is a pretty interesting read and gives great insight into what Musk wants to do with SpaceX. Some excerpts:
SpaceX's second Gen rocket engine will be the biggest rocket engine in the world, though not the biggest in history. The F1 engine that sent people to the moon is no longer in production, so Musk doesn't count that.
Q: What customers will you put on Falcon 9?
A: We haven't thought a lot about it because it's speculative, but big customers would be NASA, Bigelow Aerospace, which is launching its first subscale space station module next year, and potentially people who just want to go to orbit and just spend some time on orbit. Also we could do a loop around the moon, which actually wouldn't require a huge rocket. [Space Adventures recently cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to do just that, so that may be what inspired Musk to say that.]
Q: When will you go to space?
A: I'm not doing this to go into space myself, per se. I want to help build a space faring civilization. It would have been very easy for me to pay to go to the International Space Station myself. I want to help other people get to space.
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.
Q: When will you fly cargo missions to the space station?
A: I hope in the next 3 to 4 years.
Another question from me: Are you developing a manned vehicle right now, or have you thought that far ahead yet?
A: I can't comment on that right now.
Q: What's next in the entreprenurial space field?
A: Lots of people doing things--Paul Allen [who funded SpaceShipOne], Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, John Carmack with Armadillo Aerospace...Musk thinks we're heading toward a Netscape moment, when someone turns a profit, and hopefully it'll be SpaceX, and then investment capital will start to flow in.
I think the most interesting example of military space was the USSR's Polyus orbital weapons platform:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_spacecraft
The USSR launched this back in 1986, but it had a launch "accident" and was unable to successfully deploy.
For those who haven't heard the term before, sousveillance refers to the use of technology by members of society to watch and record the activities of others, particularly authority figures. It seems like it's becoming increasingly futile for organizations to try to resist sousveillance, as the police in the article attempted to do. As technology progresses, cameras and cameraphones are just getting smaller, cheaper, and harder to detect. Eventually it gets to the point where people have things like retinal implants and little remote-control cameras, and it becomes absurdly impractical to try to keep them away from all the things you want to keep secret.
I've recently started reading David Brin's The Transparent Society, which proposes the somewhat counterintuitive notion that instead of resisting government invasions of privacy, we instead ensure that everybody is able to watch everybody. In effect, the answer to the question "Who watches the watchers?" becomes "Make everybody a watcher." This of course has its problems and I'm still not sure what I quite think of it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. The first chapter of his book is available online. I highly recommend skimming through it.
This what I call a classic example of misuse of technology this guy should have his research license revoked for promoting junk like that.
I'm sorry, but since when do scientists need a license to do research?
Looking through the article and several of the comments here, there doesn't seem to be much of a focus on the "big picture" lessons from the Challenger accident. There's a recent post Rand Simberg made at Transterrestrial Musings which sums up some of my own thoughts on the matter:
t ml
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/006406.h
It's twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA's confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn't severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.
Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it--they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.
But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn't be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it's childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn't that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.
This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)--that the American people won't accept the loss of astronauts. But we've shown throughout our history that we're willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA's goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.
Will the American people be inspired by that? I can't say--I only know that I am not.
Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we're going to get that from the current plan, or planners.
I think you may have misinterpreted me -- I actually agree with you. The cutting edge should always be dangerous. If people aren't dying regularly, you aren't pushing the envelope enough. However, the cutting edge pushes forward, and what was once cutting edge becomes routine and accessible to everybody. For an example, look at the daredevils and barnstormers of aviation early last century, and how it led the way to the routine air transport we have today.
It should be noted that this past Thursday was NASA's Day of Remembrance. This is in honor of the astronauts who died in all three of America's space accidents -- Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia -- which all occurred around the last week of January (January 27 - February 1). There's a commemorative page on NASA's site.
That said, I look forward to the day when a spacecraft accident is no more notable than an automobile or airplane accident. The best way to honor our lost astronauts is to make space travel more routine, allowing it to get safer and more accessible through experience.
Another novel and interesting way I came across to predict the spread of infectious disease is the University of Iowa's Flu Prediction Market. A description from their page:
Information about influenza activity is diverse and widely distributed. Different health care professionals have different information regarding influenza activity. This information could be quite helpful in predicting future influenza activity if it could be aggregated and analyzed efficiently. However, because this information is disparate, standard research and statistical methods have not proven to be effective. Thus, the medical community does not have access to accurate influenza forecasts. The Influenza Prediction Market is an attempt to satisfy the need for accurate information regarding future influenza activity.
The first experimental prediction market was the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM). It has developed methods to predict future events ranging from election results to movie box office receipts and has a forecasting record substantially superior to alternative mechanisms. We propose that markets for infectious diseases may be useful for predicting infectious disease activity quickly, accurately, and inexpensively by aggregating the expert opinion of health care professionals.
They're currently working on expanding the system, but with their current market they give various health care workers $100 they can bid with, and depending on how accurate their bidding is they can get additional money.
Do we want the government to run an air-traffic-control system? To test drugs and medical devices? To fund the development and production of influenza vaccines? To enforce environmental standards?
If the government doesn't do it, who will?
A libertarian or anarcho-capitalist would likely answer that the things you mentioned should be dealt with by assurance contracts, not government coercion.
Things like this are why I think futarchy is better than democracy. With a democracy, a government tends to make decisions based on the self-deceiving ideologies of individuals, with relatively little feedback based on actual results. In a futarchy, people would vote on a measure of national welfare and prediction markets would be used to predict what policies would actually be most effective in promoting national welfare. In the past, prediction markets have been shown to be much better than opinion polls and individual experts at predicting future events.
As an example, consider the current debate over public healthcare. In the end, most people don't really care about whether healthcare is publically or privately run, they just want to be healthy. The public discourse is dominated by people who exclude contradicting evidence, who are mostly concerned with promoting their ideology. With a prediction market, people would end up having to put their money where their mouth is, encouraging them to consider contradictory evidence and make the best decision possible.
(Some relevant info from a slashdot story I submitted a few months ago, which didn't make the cut)
Besides the obvious exercise benefits, it seems that the Dance Dance Revolution video game may also help out children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A recent study in which sixth-graders with ADHD played DDR Disney Mix for an hour each week suggests that playing the game improved their focus and attention, although further studies are planned to get a better understanding of how it could help kids out.
Who cares what school he's gone to?
I think it's rather relevant that he has an astronautics doctorate from MIT when the submission is about a plan for spacecraft which exploit interplanetary transport orbits.