Profiling inevitably produces more false (usually an order of magnitude more) positives than real positives, and generally produces as many false negatives as false positivves. In other words, you're a lot more likely to spend your time searching someone for no reason than catch an actual bad guy, and as likely to let a real bad guy through as not.
This is true for any system which attempts to pick out extraordinarily rare events (unless it has a degree of accuracy higher than the rarity of the event). It is not an automatic disqualification of the effectiveness of the system.
In other words, the false positives outnumbering the real positives (and the false negatives outnumbering the false positives) is purely a result of the number of real positives being a very small fraction relative to the number of real negatives. It says nothing about the efficacy of the system. If the system can generate a ratio of false positives to real positives smaller than the ratio of real negatives to real positives, then it is effective. Maybe the improved effectiveness over random sampling is small enough so as not to be worth the cost in money or loss of rights, but it is more effective than the random sampling proposed in TFA.
Yes, the deadliest coast in the world. 16 attacks (not all fatal) in... a decade. And how many millions swim off the coast every year? Even if you take Australia as a whole, on average the number of people killed by sharks per year is: one
This is a conditional probability - you need to account for the degree of exposure to see how that overall fatality rate relates to a specific individual. Since shark attacks are exceedingly rare on land, the overall fatality rate is skewed down by the overwhelming number of hours spent on land (which contributes 0 probability of shark attack). This is different from things like mosquitos, where (nearly) everyone is at risk of a mosquito bite all the time. The overall probability of being killed by a shark is
p = [ (hours on land)*(zero) + (hours on water)*(chance of fatal shark attack) ] / (hours total)
So say the entire population (including everyone who's landlocked) goes to the beach an average of 2 times a year and spends a total of 30 minutes in the water, and suffers 1 shark fatality per year. But the average surfer goes to the beach 3 times a week and spends 2 hours in the water each time. Then the average fatality rate for surfers is equivalent to 312 fatalities per year for the entire population. In other words, if the entire population spent as much time in the water as surfers do, you'd expect to see 312 shark fatalities per year. (The actual rate is lower since a disproportionate number of hours in the water is contributed by these surfers vs. casual beachgoing swimmers.)
Same thing happens for police officers, who are frequently criticized for complaining about the dangerous situations they encounter when their overall fatality rate is lower than for construction workers. But construction workers are exposed to their danger 40 hours a week. As best as I could determine, police officers spend only 10% of their time on patrol, and probably only 1% of that time is in what would be considered a dangerous situation (chasing and apprehending a resisting suspect). So whereas construction workers are exposed to a constant level of moderate risk, police officers face a low risk 99.9% of the time, then an incredibly high risk the other 0.1% of the time..999*(low risk) +.001*(very high risk) = average low risk. But since their overall fatality rate is slightly below construction workers, that means that 0.1% of the time they're facing a risk of death hundreds of times higher than what construction workers face. That's what they're complaining about.
Some people use their blog as a source of income. That income depends on their blog having an established, searchable presence.
Some of my relatives use a booth at a weekly swap meet as a source of income. That income depends on their booth having an established, locatable presence. Yet the swap meet could change their policies and refuse to sell them booth space at any time.
If you're going to base your livelihood on a business, it's best to put it entirely under your own control. In my relatives' case, buy/rent their own store location (or get together with other booths at the swap meet to co-own it). In a blogger's case, pay the $10/yr for your own domain and $5/mo for hosting.
This is the same reason why captive marketplaces like iTunes or the App Store are a bad idea. No matter how successful you are, you're still at the complete mercy of the marketplace owner.
"Just make your own blog" is a terrible option when you already *have* an established blog, because it means moving and losing a lot of your traffic.
Well that's the risk you took when you decided not to put in the extra effort and money to start with your own blog, and instead took the easy way out and started with a hosted site which took care of most of the setup work for you. Do you have any idea how many businesses are locked into Quickbooks for their accounting because it was the quick and easy solution when they were first starting out, but now that they've grown beyond its capabilities they're finding it difficult to switch because Intuit makes it impossible to get your data out of their database?
Look, there are two types of people in this situation. Those who complain about how unfair all this is and get nowhere because while it's dick move on Yahoo/Tumblr's part, there's nothing wrong nor illegal about it. And those who take the lesson learned to heart, pay the cost to transition over to the right way to do it, and get on with life. That's the best way to improve your odds of independent success. Running a business isn't about only picking the "good" choices. It's about picking the best choice you have available. Making your own blog may be a terrible option, but if it's less terrible than being put out of business at the whim of some Yahoo exec, then it's the right choice.
Extracting usable work energy from waste heat has always been possible. The problem isn't making the heat do work. The problem is doing so cost-effectively. For most applications, these heat capture devices have such low power densities that it's counterproductive to add them (e.g. adding a stirling engine to your ICE car's exhaust system would burn more fuel due to the extra weight than the fuel savings you'd get from putting the heat energy to work). At that point, it's not worth implementing compared to just dumping the heat straight into a heat sink.
The abstract says they're getting power densities of 0.5 Watts/m^2 in an unoptimized device. That's pretty deep in "not worth it" territory. This device would have to have an area of 1,5000 square meters exposed to the car's exhaust gases just to generate 1 extra hp. I suspect the additional back-pressure alone from all that piping (never mind the weight) would cost the engine a lot more than 1 hp of generation capacity.
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
Ex: a news panel discussing the decision not to allow blood test results showing Trayvon had used marijuana in the last 60 days before his killing.
That's racist b/c the whole notion is absolutely immaterial. First, the discussion should have been about **ZIMMERMAN's** blood contents, b/c oh, **he wasn't tested for drugs/alcohol** until much later if at all.
It may or may not be immaterial, but it's a tried and true strategy. It's been known from statistical and psychological studies in the 1960s that one of the best way to get off a murder charge is to convince the jury that the deceased deserved to be killed. So discrediting the character of the deceased is a primary strategy in any murder case where the defense thinks it's viable. Race has nothing to do with it - the defense would've tried it if Martin were white, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic, whatever. That's why the state did everything it could to prevent the defense from getting any dirt on Martin's character - because (as pathetic as it may be) character assassination is an effective strategy when defending against murder charges in a jury trial.
And given that the state wanted only second degree murder charges, the lack of a blood test on Zimmerman actually worked in their favor. A blood test showing Zimmerman was under the unfluence of drugs or alcohol and thus was not fully in control of his mental faculties would've worked against second degree murder charges. (Though it would have worked in favor of a manslaughter charge.)
The way it works is that you fine the entity responsible for the integrity of the data (NHS) for the data breach. Then the NHS sues the contractor for damages caused by their failure to provide promised services, for the amount of the fines plus whatever administrative costs were incurred.
Social security, and welfare existed long before the 60's. Food stamps and medicare are from the 60's, however, welfare was scaled back decades ago when Clinton was in office. So your notion that the safety net has exploded is patently false. That said, the costs have certainly shot up. Medicare has skyrocketed due to the crazy increases in medical costs. Social security has shot up in spite of the fact that the benefits have been reduced because people are living longer. Welfare and unemployment are up because unemployment is up.
Medical costs in this country are beyond screwed up. The amount spent by the Federal and State governments on health care exceeds that of Canada on a per capita basis. That's right, the Canadian government spends less per person on health care than the U.S. government does on average. And they cover nearly all of everyone's medical costs (some people still buy supplemental insurance there), while U.S. government spending averages out to about half of everyone's medical costs. So don't go trying to blame it all on private health care. Both private and public health care spending are to blame.
For anyone unfamiliar with the terminology, hog is when a wave crest is at the center of the ship and both ends are in troughs. The ship's entire weight is supported by the midsection, with the two ends hanging as cantilever (unsupported) beams. It's one of the extremes marine engineers design ships to withstand (maximum moment), unsuccessfully in this case.
The opposite is sag, where wave crests support the ends and a trough in the middle leaves the center unsupported.
The containers don't magically appear next to the crane for loading onto the ship. They have to be lifted off of trains or trucks which bring them to the docks. Then they sit and wait for the ship to arrive and be unloaded. Then they're loaded onto the ship. It'd be trivial to weigh them when they're first taken off the train or truck.
A more prone failure point is corruption among the dockyard workers - they get bribed to ignore that a container is overweight. This used to be common at airports before 9/11 and before they started charging for every checked bag. If you had an overweight bag which the airline would charge $75 for, you simply went to curbside checking. Slip the airline employee there a $20 and he'd tag it as if it were a regular bag. I was shocked the first time I saw my uncle do it (for a Delta flight at LAX), but the employee was blase about it as if it were normal. And now that I knew what to look for, I saw it happen several times in the few minutes I was there.
The key difference is that the bricks were put there specifically to prevent the building from collapsing. If properly constructed, they will provide adequate strength but not too much, so as to maximize usable space inside the building. (If you simply wanted to maximize strength, the building would just be a solid block of stone with no usable space inside.) Removing bricks compromises that strength and creates the danger of dropping below the threshold of adequate strength.
The rocks were not put there to prevent earthquakes. They are just there (and in fact are where the energy released in an earthquakes is stored), and will eventually release their energy in an earthquake even if people do nothing.
So a better analogy would be tree which overhangs you house at an awkward angle. Each year, all by itself, it tilts a little more. You know that eventually it's going to fall over on top of your house. The city hires a tree trimmer to cut the tree down one branch at a time - he is not adding any energy to the tree, but he is causing energy releases. Are you going to get mad at him because those branches are falling on your house one by one damaging the shingles, and demand that the city stop cutting the tree down on the grounds that it is dangerous for your home?
That's precisely what they do. It's called a controlled burn.
Is it such a foreign concept that sometimes a little bad can lead to a greater good? Real-world solution spaces are never uniformly sloped - they're full of peaks and valleys, local minima and local maxima. Sometimes you get stuck in a local minima, and to get to an even lower minima you have to go over a local maxima. Vaccinations kill a few people each year, but they save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives so on balance they're worth it. Bigger avalanches are prevented by dropping explosives onto mountainsides to trigger smaller avalanches.
The key difference here is one of responsibility. We're incorrectly attributing the entirety of responsibility for the earthquake to the fracking, when in fact probably 99.99999% of it is due to nature (which built up most of the energy stored in the rock) and 0.00001% due to the fracking. If there had been no fracking, the energy will eventually still be released in an earthquake, but because it's then 100% nature's fault there's no human element to blame it on and so it's considered "ok". Due to this illogical reasoning by most people, they only practice controlled burns in forested areas, not in areas adjacent to homes. Better to let nature wipe out those homes so the homeowners only have themselves to blame.
Strain is just mechanical energy stored up as deflections from the rocks' rest state. So yes the strain does go away. If it didn't, no energy would be released and there would be no earthquake.
The pilot was a trainee learning the capabilities and handling of the 777 and his co-pilot, the instructor was merely incompetent? I'll believe that before I believe cultural hierarchies resulted in the crash.
The trainee pilot was 46 years old. The instructor pilot was 49. So if there was a cultural hierarchy bias, it was in favor of the instructor.
While it's premature to say for sure, it's looking more and more like the pilots (all three of them in the cockpit) assumed the autothrottle would keep the plane at 137 knots, when clearly the autothrottle had been disengaged. That suggests a training issue rather than a cultural one. AA587 crashed because the pilots had been trained (by American Airlines) to use alternating (left/right) hard rudder inputs in response to wake turbulence. Unfortunately that day, that caused the lateral forces on the tail to exceed the manufacturer's maximum loading, and the tail snapped off.
The iPhone's lens is a 4.1mm focal length f/2.4, so it's 1.71 mm wide. The Rayleigh criterion for a 1.71mm diameter lens in the red spectrum (700 nm) is 0.0286 degrees. That's the smallest angular separation you can resolve using that lens. It gives a view equivalent to a 33mm lens (in the 35mm format), which corresponds to a 57x40 degree field of view (I dunno the aspect ratios on these camera phones so I'll assume 3:2) . So the maximum resolution it supports is 1999x1398, or 2.8 MP.
The Bayer filter means only one pixel in 4 is red, so the camera's 8 MP is effectively capturing only 2 MP of red image data, which is less than the 2.8 MP limit I just calculated. The extra "data" bumping it up to 8 MP is "made up" by the Bayer filter processing algorithm. Unless they go with a bigger lens or a wider field of view, the camera simply can't resolve more than about 8-10 subpixels of data (counting each color pixel as separate). Increase the pixel count and you'll just be capturing two blurry pixels instead of one sharp one. You can see this if you compare a cell phone pic with a DSLR pic at 100%. Because more of the data is "made up" by the Bayer algorithm in the cell phone pic, it looks blurrier than the DSLR pic where adjacent subpixels are getting truly different optical data.
I haven't seen specs on the Lumina 1020 optical hardware. But its predecessor the 808 uses a 8.02mm f/2.4 lens, which is 3.34mm across - nearly twice as wide as the iPhone's. It has an angular resolution limit of 0.0146 degrees. Its field of view is a 26mm equivalent, or 69.4x49.6 degrees. That puts its maximum capture resolution at 4737x3386 pixels, or 16 MP. The 41 MP sensor means about 10.2 MP of red data is captured, which again is less than the 16 MP theoretical limit.
In practical use, the "you need a big lens to capture that much resolution" rule only applies to telephotos. In fact the Rayleigh criterion was derived while probing the theoretical resolving limits of telescopes. If you're using a tiny lens, what you give up in angular resolution you can make back with a wide field of view.
But what about optical quality? One of the advantages of using such a small lens is that it's a lot easier to grind it "perfectly". It takes a lot of work and quality control to grind a professional chunk of glass 77mm in diameter within a fraction of a wavelength to the desired shape. It's much easier to grid a 2mm wide lens into the desired shape, and it doesn't cost you much to just chuck it in the trash if it didn't come out perfectly.
That's a natural consequence of a progressive income tax. The rich areas subsidize the poor areas. And contrary to the submitter's assertion, the urban areas tend to have (substantially) higher incomes than rural areas, not the other way around.
Yeah there are a few rich people with expensive vacation homes in remote areas. But they're outliers - just a small percentage of rural residences. This is a disturbing trend I'm seeing more and more: trying to decide policy based on outliers, rather than the average. It doesn't matter that flying is safer than driving, because when a plane crashes it gets splashed all over the news for weeks while car accidents are ignored. It doesn't matter that nuclear power kills the fewest people per amount of energy generated, because a single failure is reported worldwide for months and sticks in people's minds for decades. It doesn't matter that 99.99999% of people who play the lottery lose money, because everyone fantasizes about what they'll do if they win. People try to make decisions based on the outliers, even when they contradict the average.
Yep. Most computer users turned out to be media consumers who a) don't need the hassle of maintaining a PC, and b) like the size/shape of tablets.
Is there any data that actually backs this up? Every tablet owner I know, every one of them, also owns a PC or Mac. So they're getting a tablet in addition to their PC, not to replace it.
Each of those sensors had an arrow that was supposed to point toward the top of the vehicle, however multiple sensors on the failed rocket were pointing downward instead.
I've never considered this a good way to denote orientation - you have to learn that the arrow is supposed to point up. If you ask a random person on the street who's never seen this (it's common in packaging) which way the arrow is supposed to point, I'll bet half will say down because that's the way gravity pulls things.
Even more amazing is that the design of the sensors permits them to be installed in the wrong orientation in the first place. Even the simplest of mechanical interlocks (such as a notch at one end that must be matched with a corresponding projection) could have prevented the accident.
A mechanical interlock is one of those things which is unappreciated when it's there. So what happens is you design stuff with interlocks for years, and nothing goes wrong. Then someone thinks, "Nothing has ever gone wrong with this before, why bother designing a safety system to prevent a problem which has never occurred?" They skip the interlock this iteration, and it causes a catastrophic failure.
The US once sent a probe all the way to mars, only to have it fail because the ground computer was in imperial units while the orbiter was in SI units.
That was a symptom, not the problem. The problem was that the people or software were not cross-checking the units on the numbers being copied. If you don't check the units, the exact same error can happen even if you use all SI units - e.g. someone hands you numbers in kN and you assume they're Newtons. Always check your units. If you get a number which doesn't have units, ask the person you got the numbers from what the units are. Never assume. And don't let the person you ask assume. Except for dimensionless numbers, any number without a unit should be treated the same as if someone typed in gibberish.
In the Mars CO case the actual units happened to be Imperial while the assumed units were SI. But the fundamental problem was people were assuming what the units were, not an Imperial/SI mismatch. Using a consistent set of units merely increases the chances that the units you assume coincidentally are the actual units you were given. It doesn't fix the problem (doesn't increase the chance to 100%).
In fact if you want to guarantee you've fixed the problem, every time a number gets passed to another subroutine or printed out to be passed to another person, it should be converted randomly to a modified SI unit (kilo, Mega, micro, etc) or its equivalent Imperial unit. That forces the receiving subroutine/person to check the units instead of assuming what the units are. If you do this, any subroutines or people still making assumptions will fail early in the testing phases, allowing you to correct them long before they can kill the actual mission.
The XL1 has a 27-hp electric battery, which can propel it about 31 miles on its own, up to 62 mph. It can fully recharge, Volkswagen says, in an hour and a half. The maximum speed overall, using the full hybrid drivetrain, is 94 mph. Thereâ(TM)s a 2.6-gallon fuel tank, which lets the XL1 achieve a total range of 310 miles
So subtract the 31 miles on battery, leaving 279 miles on gas, and it can get 107.3 MPG on gas alone. The 262 MPG figure probably comes from a shorter test drive where the first 31 miles were on battery, the remainder on gas, then attributing the total distance to gas. Which if I did my math right is a 52.5 mile run.
Thing is, if you're going to cheat this way, why not just make it a 32 mile run and claim your car gets over 3400 MPG.
It's also worth pointing out that outside of research, these ultra-high mileage vehicles are rather pointless. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, so higher MPG means smaller savings. e.g. Consider a trip of 300 miles in a variety of different cars:
15 MPG SUV = 20 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 12 gallons consumed
50 MPG hybrid = 6 gallons consumed
100 MPG research car = 3 gallons consumed
300 MPG super-car = 1 gallon consumed
So if you consider a switch from an SUV to a super-car on a 300 mile trip, where exactly do the 19 gallons of fuel saved come from?
8 gallons saved comes from the 10 MPG jump from 15 to 25 MPG.
6 gallons saved comes from the 25 MPG jump from 25 to 50 MPG.
3 gallons saved comes from the 50 MPG jump from 50 MPG to 100 MPG.
2 gallons saved comes from the 200 MPG jump from 100 MPG to 300 MPG.
The biggest fuel savings comes from the low end of the MPG range. The smallest savings from the high end. Or in other words, in a SUV to super-car switch:
42.1% of the fuel savings comes from the 15-25 MPG jump
31.6% of the fuel savings comes from the 25-50 MPG jump
15.8% of the fuel savings comes from the 50-100 MPG jump
10.5% of the fuel savings comes from the 100-300 MPG jump
Diminishing returns says the cost-effectiveness of improving mileage rapidly drops off above about 50 MPG. If we want to reduce overall fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on ad campaigns to get people out of gas guzzlers into smaller cars. Not concentrating on designing ultra-high mileage vehicles.
It also doesn't seem like it would be relevant in this case. According to Korean newspapers, the trainee pilot in command of the B777 (Lee Kang-kook) with just 43 hours on the B777 was 46 years old. The training co-pilot (Lee Jeong-min) with 3200 hours on the B777 was 49 years old. So even if the cultural age-based hierarchy were there, it would've been present as deference to the more experienced pilot.
If it was the older and more experienced pilot who screwed up and failed to note the dangerously low airspeed, pretty much any trainee pilot from any culture would've figured his trainer knew what he was doing. The Korean Ministry of Transportation has already stated that ultimate responsibility lay with Lee Jeong-Min, as he was the trainer on the flight.
Difference is when a private company pulls a stunt like taking down its entire IT system, customers start to abandon it and head to a competitor. If they screw up badly enough, they go bankrupt and everyone who worked there is out of a job. That creates a huge incentive to do things in a manner least disruptive to their customers.
When a government agency pulls the same stunt, they tell the customers "f- you, wait in line like a good citizen while we get everything worked out, because we're the government. We have a monopoly on the service we're providing so you're subservient to us, not the other way around." No matter how badly they screw it up, they can't go bankrupt because their department was created in order to fulfill a need; and as long as the legislature says that need needs to be fulfilled, there has to be a department to do it. (This is the same reason why vendor lock-in and monopolies are bad in private industry. I've often wondered if government could be made more efficient by, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, creating two agencies for each job/service. Force them to compete for funding based on customers serviced or data requests fulfilled per dollar spent, and scale the pay of everyone who works there accordingly.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is true for any system which attempts to pick out extraordinarily rare events (unless it has a degree of accuracy higher than the rarity of the event). It is not an automatic disqualification of the effectiveness of the system.
In other words, the false positives outnumbering the real positives (and the false negatives outnumbering the false positives) is purely a result of the number of real positives being a very small fraction relative to the number of real negatives. It says nothing about the efficacy of the system. If the system can generate a ratio of false positives to real positives smaller than the ratio of real negatives to real positives, then it is effective. Maybe the improved effectiveness over random sampling is small enough so as not to be worth the cost in money or loss of rights, but it is more effective than the random sampling proposed in TFA.
This is a conditional probability - you need to account for the degree of exposure to see how that overall fatality rate relates to a specific individual. Since shark attacks are exceedingly rare on land, the overall fatality rate is skewed down by the overwhelming number of hours spent on land (which contributes 0 probability of shark attack). This is different from things like mosquitos, where (nearly) everyone is at risk of a mosquito bite all the time. The overall probability of being killed by a shark is
.999*(low risk) + .001*(very high risk) = average low risk. But since their overall fatality rate is slightly below construction workers, that means that 0.1% of the time they're facing a risk of death hundreds of times higher than what construction workers face. That's what they're complaining about.
p = [ (hours on land)*(zero) + (hours on water)*(chance of fatal shark attack) ] / (hours total)
So say the entire population (including everyone who's landlocked) goes to the beach an average of 2 times a year and spends a total of 30 minutes in the water, and suffers 1 shark fatality per year. But the average surfer goes to the beach 3 times a week and spends 2 hours in the water each time. Then the average fatality rate for surfers is equivalent to 312 fatalities per year for the entire population. In other words, if the entire population spent as much time in the water as surfers do, you'd expect to see 312 shark fatalities per year. (The actual rate is lower since a disproportionate number of hours in the water is contributed by these surfers vs. casual beachgoing swimmers.)
Same thing happens for police officers, who are frequently criticized for complaining about the dangerous situations they encounter when their overall fatality rate is lower than for construction workers. But construction workers are exposed to their danger 40 hours a week. As best as I could determine, police officers spend only 10% of their time on patrol, and probably only 1% of that time is in what would be considered a dangerous situation (chasing and apprehending a resisting suspect). So whereas construction workers are exposed to a constant level of moderate risk, police officers face a low risk 99.9% of the time, then an incredibly high risk the other 0.1% of the time.
Some of my relatives use a booth at a weekly swap meet as a source of income. That income depends on their booth having an established, locatable presence. Yet the swap meet could change their policies and refuse to sell them booth space at any time.
If you're going to base your livelihood on a business, it's best to put it entirely under your own control. In my relatives' case, buy/rent their own store location (or get together with other booths at the swap meet to co-own it). In a blogger's case, pay the $10/yr for your own domain and $5/mo for hosting.
This is the same reason why captive marketplaces like iTunes or the App Store are a bad idea. No matter how successful you are, you're still at the complete mercy of the marketplace owner.
Well that's the risk you took when you decided not to put in the extra effort and money to start with your own blog, and instead took the easy way out and started with a hosted site which took care of most of the setup work for you. Do you have any idea how many businesses are locked into Quickbooks for their accounting because it was the quick and easy solution when they were first starting out, but now that they've grown beyond its capabilities they're finding it difficult to switch because Intuit makes it impossible to get your data out of their database?
Look, there are two types of people in this situation. Those who complain about how unfair all this is and get nowhere because while it's dick move on Yahoo/Tumblr's part, there's nothing wrong nor illegal about it. And those who take the lesson learned to heart, pay the cost to transition over to the right way to do it, and get on with life. That's the best way to improve your odds of independent success. Running a business isn't about only picking the "good" choices. It's about picking the best choice you have available. Making your own blog may be a terrible option, but if it's less terrible than being put out of business at the whim of some Yahoo exec, then it's the right choice.
Extracting usable work energy from waste heat has always been possible. The problem isn't making the heat do work. The problem is doing so cost-effectively. For most applications, these heat capture devices have such low power densities that it's counterproductive to add them (e.g. adding a stirling engine to your ICE car's exhaust system would burn more fuel due to the extra weight than the fuel savings you'd get from putting the heat energy to work). At that point, it's not worth implementing compared to just dumping the heat straight into a heat sink.
The abstract says they're getting power densities of 0.5 Watts/m^2 in an unoptimized device. That's pretty deep in "not worth it" territory. This device would have to have an area of 1,5000 square meters exposed to the car's exhaust gases just to generate 1 extra hp. I suspect the additional back-pressure alone from all that piping (never mind the weight) would cost the engine a lot more than 1 hp of generation capacity.
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
I thought 3.11 was Windows for Warehouses?
The only way I can see it being relevant is that it was much more unusual that the jury lacked any men, than that it lacked any black members.
It may or may not be immaterial, but it's a tried and true strategy. It's been known from statistical and psychological studies in the 1960s that one of the best way to get off a murder charge is to convince the jury that the deceased deserved to be killed. So discrediting the character of the deceased is a primary strategy in any murder case where the defense thinks it's viable. Race has nothing to do with it - the defense would've tried it if Martin were white, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic, whatever. That's why the state did everything it could to prevent the defense from getting any dirt on Martin's character - because (as pathetic as it may be) character assassination is an effective strategy when defending against murder charges in a jury trial.
And given that the state wanted only second degree murder charges, the lack of a blood test on Zimmerman actually worked in their favor. A blood test showing Zimmerman was under the unfluence of drugs or alcohol and thus was not fully in control of his mental faculties would've worked against second degree murder charges. (Though it would have worked in favor of a manslaughter charge.)
The way it works is that you fine the entity responsible for the integrity of the data (NHS) for the data breach. Then the NHS sues the contractor for damages caused by their failure to provide promised services, for the amount of the fines plus whatever administrative costs were incurred.
Cue the "They're listening to everything you do in your home!" hate that enveloped the XBox One in 3... 2... 1...
That is patently false. Almost the entirety of the growth in the Federal budget since the 1960s is due to Medicare/Medicaid, then Social Security, both as a percentage of the budget and in raw dollars. Basically, everything we've gained in 50 years from cutting defense spending by 60% since the 1960s has been consumed by growth in those two social programs, and then some.
Medical costs in this country are beyond screwed up. The amount spent by the Federal and State governments on health care exceeds that of Canada on a per capita basis. That's right, the Canadian government spends less per person on health care than the U.S. government does on average. And they cover nearly all of everyone's medical costs (some people still buy supplemental insurance there), while U.S. government spending averages out to about half of everyone's medical costs. So don't go trying to blame it all on private health care. Both private and public health care spending are to blame.
For anyone unfamiliar with the terminology, hog is when a wave crest is at the center of the ship and both ends are in troughs. The ship's entire weight is supported by the midsection, with the two ends hanging as cantilever (unsupported) beams. It's one of the extremes marine engineers design ships to withstand (maximum moment), unsuccessfully in this case.
The opposite is sag, where wave crests support the ends and a trough in the middle leaves the center unsupported.
The containers don't magically appear next to the crane for loading onto the ship. They have to be lifted off of trains or trucks which bring them to the docks. Then they sit and wait for the ship to arrive and be unloaded. Then they're loaded onto the ship. It'd be trivial to weigh them when they're first taken off the train or truck.
A more prone failure point is corruption among the dockyard workers - they get bribed to ignore that a container is overweight. This used to be common at airports before 9/11 and before they started charging for every checked bag. If you had an overweight bag which the airline would charge $75 for, you simply went to curbside checking. Slip the airline employee there a $20 and he'd tag it as if it were a regular bag. I was shocked the first time I saw my uncle do it (for a Delta flight at LAX), but the employee was blase about it as if it were normal. And now that I knew what to look for, I saw it happen several times in the few minutes I was there.
The key difference is that the bricks were put there specifically to prevent the building from collapsing. If properly constructed, they will provide adequate strength but not too much, so as to maximize usable space inside the building. (If you simply wanted to maximize strength, the building would just be a solid block of stone with no usable space inside.) Removing bricks compromises that strength and creates the danger of dropping below the threshold of adequate strength.
The rocks were not put there to prevent earthquakes. They are just there (and in fact are where the energy released in an earthquakes is stored), and will eventually release their energy in an earthquake even if people do nothing.
So a better analogy would be tree which overhangs you house at an awkward angle. Each year, all by itself, it tilts a little more. You know that eventually it's going to fall over on top of your house. The city hires a tree trimmer to cut the tree down one branch at a time - he is not adding any energy to the tree, but he is causing energy releases. Are you going to get mad at him because those branches are falling on your house one by one damaging the shingles, and demand that the city stop cutting the tree down on the grounds that it is dangerous for your home?
That's precisely what they do. It's called a controlled burn.
Is it such a foreign concept that sometimes a little bad can lead to a greater good? Real-world solution spaces are never uniformly sloped - they're full of peaks and valleys, local minima and local maxima. Sometimes you get stuck in a local minima, and to get to an even lower minima you have to go over a local maxima. Vaccinations kill a few people each year, but they save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives so on balance they're worth it. Bigger avalanches are prevented by dropping explosives onto mountainsides to trigger smaller avalanches.
The key difference here is one of responsibility. We're incorrectly attributing the entirety of responsibility for the earthquake to the fracking, when in fact probably 99.99999% of it is due to nature (which built up most of the energy stored in the rock) and 0.00001% due to the fracking. If there had been no fracking, the energy will eventually still be released in an earthquake, but because it's then 100% nature's fault there's no human element to blame it on and so it's considered "ok". Due to this illogical reasoning by most people, they only practice controlled burns in forested areas, not in areas adjacent to homes. Better to let nature wipe out those homes so the homeowners only have themselves to blame.
Strain is just mechanical energy stored up as deflections from the rocks' rest state. So yes the strain does go away. If it didn't, no energy would be released and there would be no earthquake.
The trainee pilot was 46 years old. The instructor pilot was 49. So if there was a cultural hierarchy bias, it was in favor of the instructor.
While it's premature to say for sure, it's looking more and more like the pilots (all three of them in the cockpit) assumed the autothrottle would keep the plane at 137 knots, when clearly the autothrottle had been disengaged. That suggests a training issue rather than a cultural one. AA587 crashed because the pilots had been trained (by American Airlines) to use alternating (left/right) hard rudder inputs in response to wake turbulence. Unfortunately that day, that caused the lateral forces on the tail to exceed the manufacturer's maximum loading, and the tail snapped off.
The iPhone's lens is a 4.1mm focal length f/2.4, so it's 1.71 mm wide. The Rayleigh criterion for a 1.71mm diameter lens in the red spectrum (700 nm) is 0.0286 degrees. That's the smallest angular separation you can resolve using that lens. It gives a view equivalent to a 33mm lens (in the 35mm format), which corresponds to a 57x40 degree field of view (I dunno the aspect ratios on these camera phones so I'll assume 3:2) . So the maximum resolution it supports is 1999x1398, or 2.8 MP.
The Bayer filter means only one pixel in 4 is red, so the camera's 8 MP is effectively capturing only 2 MP of red image data, which is less than the 2.8 MP limit I just calculated. The extra "data" bumping it up to 8 MP is "made up" by the Bayer filter processing algorithm. Unless they go with a bigger lens or a wider field of view, the camera simply can't resolve more than about 8-10 subpixels of data (counting each color pixel as separate). Increase the pixel count and you'll just be capturing two blurry pixels instead of one sharp one. You can see this if you compare a cell phone pic with a DSLR pic at 100%. Because more of the data is "made up" by the Bayer algorithm in the cell phone pic, it looks blurrier than the DSLR pic where adjacent subpixels are getting truly different optical data.
I haven't seen specs on the Lumina 1020 optical hardware. But its predecessor the 808 uses a 8.02mm f/2.4 lens, which is 3.34mm across - nearly twice as wide as the iPhone's. It has an angular resolution limit of 0.0146 degrees. Its field of view is a 26mm equivalent, or 69.4x49.6 degrees. That puts its maximum capture resolution at 4737x3386 pixels, or 16 MP. The 41 MP sensor means about 10.2 MP of red data is captured, which again is less than the 16 MP theoretical limit.
In practical use, the "you need a big lens to capture that much resolution" rule only applies to telephotos. In fact the Rayleigh criterion was derived while probing the theoretical resolving limits of telescopes. If you're using a tiny lens, what you give up in angular resolution you can make back with a wide field of view.
But what about optical quality? One of the advantages of using such a small lens is that it's a lot easier to grind it "perfectly". It takes a lot of work and quality control to grind a professional chunk of glass 77mm in diameter within a fraction of a wavelength to the desired shape. It's much easier to grid a 2mm wide lens into the desired shape, and it doesn't cost you much to just chuck it in the trash if it didn't come out perfectly.
That's a natural consequence of a progressive income tax. The rich areas subsidize the poor areas. And contrary to the submitter's assertion, the urban areas tend to have (substantially) higher incomes than rural areas, not the other way around.
Yeah there are a few rich people with expensive vacation homes in remote areas. But they're outliers - just a small percentage of rural residences. This is a disturbing trend I'm seeing more and more: trying to decide policy based on outliers, rather than the average. It doesn't matter that flying is safer than driving, because when a plane crashes it gets splashed all over the news for weeks while car accidents are ignored. It doesn't matter that nuclear power kills the fewest people per amount of energy generated, because a single failure is reported worldwide for months and sticks in people's minds for decades. It doesn't matter that 99.99999% of people who play the lottery lose money, because everyone fantasizes about what they'll do if they win. People try to make decisions based on the outliers, even when they contradict the average.
Is there any data that actually backs this up? Every tablet owner I know, every one of them, also owns a PC or Mac. So they're getting a tablet in addition to their PC, not to replace it.
I've never considered this a good way to denote orientation - you have to learn that the arrow is supposed to point up. If you ask a random person on the street who's never seen this (it's common in packaging) which way the arrow is supposed to point, I'll bet half will say down because that's the way gravity pulls things.
A mechanical interlock is one of those things which is unappreciated when it's there. So what happens is you design stuff with interlocks for years, and nothing goes wrong. Then someone thinks, "Nothing has ever gone wrong with this before, why bother designing a safety system to prevent a problem which has never occurred?" They skip the interlock this iteration, and it causes a catastrophic failure.
That was a symptom, not the problem. The problem was that the people or software were not cross-checking the units on the numbers being copied. If you don't check the units, the exact same error can happen even if you use all SI units - e.g. someone hands you numbers in kN and you assume they're Newtons. Always check your units. If you get a number which doesn't have units, ask the person you got the numbers from what the units are. Never assume. And don't let the person you ask assume. Except for dimensionless numbers, any number without a unit should be treated the same as if someone typed in gibberish.
In the Mars CO case the actual units happened to be Imperial while the assumed units were SI. But the fundamental problem was people were assuming what the units were, not an Imperial/SI mismatch. Using a consistent set of units merely increases the chances that the units you assume coincidentally are the actual units you were given. It doesn't fix the problem (doesn't increase the chance to 100%).
In fact if you want to guarantee you've fixed the problem, every time a number gets passed to another subroutine or printed out to be passed to another person, it should be converted randomly to a modified SI unit (kilo, Mega, micro, etc) or its equivalent Imperial unit. That forces the receiving subroutine/person to check the units instead of assuming what the units are. If you do this, any subroutines or people still making assumptions will fail early in the testing phases, allowing you to correct them long before they can kill the actual mission.
So subtract the 31 miles on battery, leaving 279 miles on gas, and it can get 107.3 MPG on gas alone. The 262 MPG figure probably comes from a shorter test drive where the first 31 miles were on battery, the remainder on gas, then attributing the total distance to gas. Which if I did my math right is a 52.5 mile run.
Thing is, if you're going to cheat this way, why not just make it a 32 mile run and claim your car gets over 3400 MPG.
It's also worth pointing out that outside of research, these ultra-high mileage vehicles are rather pointless. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, so higher MPG means smaller savings. e.g. Consider a trip of 300 miles in a variety of different cars:
15 MPG SUV = 20 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 12 gallons consumed
50 MPG hybrid = 6 gallons consumed
100 MPG research car = 3 gallons consumed
300 MPG super-car = 1 gallon consumed
So if you consider a switch from an SUV to a super-car on a 300 mile trip, where exactly do the 19 gallons of fuel saved come from?
8 gallons saved comes from the 10 MPG jump from 15 to 25 MPG.
6 gallons saved comes from the 25 MPG jump from 25 to 50 MPG.
3 gallons saved comes from the 50 MPG jump from 50 MPG to 100 MPG.
2 gallons saved comes from the 200 MPG jump from 100 MPG to 300 MPG.
The biggest fuel savings comes from the low end of the MPG range. The smallest savings from the high end. Or in other words, in a SUV to super-car switch:
42.1% of the fuel savings comes from the 15-25 MPG jump
31.6% of the fuel savings comes from the 25-50 MPG jump
15.8% of the fuel savings comes from the 50-100 MPG jump
10.5% of the fuel savings comes from the 100-300 MPG jump
Diminishing returns says the cost-effectiveness of improving mileage rapidly drops off above about 50 MPG. If we want to reduce overall fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on ad campaigns to get people out of gas guzzlers into smaller cars. Not concentrating on designing ultra-high mileage vehicles.
It also doesn't seem like it would be relevant in this case. According to Korean newspapers, the trainee pilot in command of the B777 (Lee Kang-kook) with just 43 hours on the B777 was 46 years old. The training co-pilot (Lee Jeong-min) with 3200 hours on the B777 was 49 years old. So even if the cultural age-based hierarchy were there, it would've been present as deference to the more experienced pilot.
If it was the older and more experienced pilot who screwed up and failed to note the dangerously low airspeed, pretty much any trainee pilot from any culture would've figured his trainer knew what he was doing. The Korean Ministry of Transportation has already stated that ultimate responsibility lay with Lee Jeong-Min, as he was the trainer on the flight.
Difference is when a private company pulls a stunt like taking down its entire IT system, customers start to abandon it and head to a competitor. If they screw up badly enough, they go bankrupt and everyone who worked there is out of a job. That creates a huge incentive to do things in a manner least disruptive to their customers.
When a government agency pulls the same stunt, they tell the customers "f- you, wait in line like a good citizen while we get everything worked out, because we're the government. We have a monopoly on the service we're providing so you're subservient to us, not the other way around." No matter how badly they screw it up, they can't go bankrupt because their department was created in order to fulfill a need; and as long as the legislature says that need needs to be fulfilled, there has to be a department to do it. (This is the same reason why vendor lock-in and monopolies are bad in private industry. I've often wondered if government could be made more efficient by, as counter-intuitive as this sounds, creating two agencies for each job/service. Force them to compete for funding based on customers serviced or data requests fulfilled per dollar spent, and scale the pay of everyone who works there accordingly.)