I don't get it, are you complaining about NASA's PR department as it affects gen-X'ers? Are you suggesting that all photos NASA provides to the press and the public be an array of 'boring' greyscale images with their associated filter response functions? So then people won't be misled by false color, and will know what to expect when they see the raw data?
Speaking of the PR photos, how many astronomers do you think their colorized photos hay have inspired at a young age (or any age) throughout the decades? Is it worthwhile to colorize a photo to increase public appreciation of astronomy? Or do you really think that's being insincere?
Anwyay, have you ever shaved, combed your hair, applied deodorant, brushed your teeth, and worn nice clothes? If so you're just as guilty of what you accuse NASA of by presenting a facade to the public that doesn't accurately reflect how your unkempt au natural body really is.
Strangely enough, Paul Krugman of the New York Times has an opinion column today entitled "The Iceberg Cometh", which I just happened to go to after seeing this slashdot heading. I was confused at first, wondering why he would care about such an iceberg collision, until I read the article.
No, his column isn't about icebergs per se, but about the administration's attempts to paint the social security situation like it's on a collision course w/ an iceberg.
So anyway, offtopic yada yada (except for the title).
Considering that electronics engineers study a *lot* more than just transformers, I'd say that the EE's opinion on the matter is justified
Considering everyone reading this article is using a computer with some form of magnetic storage, I'd say he's got a valid point.
Ferromagnetism is way too prolific in magnetic storage, so I'll ignore that and talk about other magnetic effects.
Magnetism is directly tied to any inductive element in a circuit, and manifests itself through self and mutual induction. Eg, a signal-carrying wire has a non-zero self inductance based on its geometry.
Design of circuit elements at GHz frequencies requires minimizing inductance (usually by making things as small as possible), or carefully designing inductive elements, which would otherwise attenuate higher-frequencies and thereby limit the component bandwidth.
And on the other hand, inductors are very useful in filter design, one fairly common item being an RF choke. But they're usually avoided by microwave or RF engineers. As my old boss said when we were considering using inductors to try to calibrate out a certain nonlinearity in a GHz-bandwidth circuit "Engineers usually avoid inductors because they don't understand them."
So besides magnetic storage, magnetic fields are employed in transformers, as the parent said, which are used in almost all AC-powered devices. Then there are electric motors and dynamos (which would include all automobile starters and alternators). There's also NMR (MRI is merely NMR in a hospital, they took the "nuclear" out of the acronym because they knew people wouldn't go inside a big machine with the word nuclear in it). And they're very common in physics and material science research. I regularly use superconducting magnets (up to 10 Tesla) to probe nano-scale systems.
[I'm not an EE, I'm a physics graduate student. But I did EE research (microwave and optoelectronic) with professional EE's for several years before coming to grad school.]
You are correct that using that standard as the sole test of 'goodness' of course is somewhat limiting, but it does give at least a 1st or 2nd order indication. Regarding your career, how long has it been since you received your PhD (I'm still in grad school, so perhaps you can claim I'm not fully exposed to the 'real world' yet)? It usually takes a few years for a scientist to establish themselves in the field anyway. You'll need to present your work at conferences, give talks at other institutions, as well as build on contacts through your advisor and fellow grad students first.
What you say about the space sciences tends to be true for all sciences (in my experience so far, at least). Of course nobody will read all the papers, but unless you're really studying something out in left field, there are usually some researchers in your area of specialty that will be interested in what you publish. There are even overlaps of things with no apparent connection. For example, some high-energy physicists realized some fluid-dynamics equations describing microscopic interactions of specific liquid crystal systems are very similar to general relativity on universal scales. I don't know how these two seemingly unrelated groups happened to find their common connection, but obviously some scientists have their eyes open.
You are correct that papers with the overall number of citations tend to be by older authors (usually written by men), but if you normalize the standard to number of citations per year, or something like that, you will get a better idea. Also - the main point of the thread's parent is not to find out who has the BEST paper, but to distinguish the 'real' science from the pseudoscience.
Who was the well-respected scientist that you mention in your post as having written an article that was "total garbage"? Is it 'garbage' because it's been proven wrong, or posits a highly contentuous theory? Or does it just have erroneous conclusions? Did the author write a followup? This is research is all about, the idea isn't to be right all the time, but to refine or change hypotheses to match with newly-available data. Even the best scientists will make mistakes, but a worthy scientist will acknowledge and learn from his/her mistakes.
As to citing your own work, in the current rankings I believe it counts as a cite, but self-cites shouldn't be counted in such a system. Similarly, repeated cites from within a small circle should be weighed less, to prevent colleagues from bolstering each other unneccessarily.
Regarding actually reading papers you cite, do you actually know that many people that cite a work without looking it up?
I don't know where you do research or who you work with, but the physicists I work with, especially those in my group, have folders and folders of papers, going back many orders of recursion to the citations of the citations of the citations, etc. My advisor, and other paper authors I've spoken with, all know to great detail the specific papers that they cite. If your colleagues have questionable scientific standards, my advice would be to just to the best job you can, and be as honest to yourself and the Art as you can, and you're career will eventually make it's way.
Richard Gross is a scientist, and therefore a dork just like the rest of us 'round here. If the term "dork" offends you, you can substitute "person" and preserve my meaning, with only a small loss of specificity.
The way you wrote "some dork" implied (to me at least) you condescend his scientific insight and knowledge on the subject.
Agree with you about slashdot's journalistic integrity in general, though. From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) they just use the same titlet that the submitter used, which is kinda lame and lazy.
The problem is more with the media than the scientific community, I just worry about a giant collection of catchy scientific headlines for slow news days.
But those problems you mention are independent of an open science publication service. Or perhaps maybe they'll get worse, but if you want to deceive people you can easily do so under the current system anyway.
Will this not make it much easier for crackpots with agendas to spread bogus/bullshit scientific "facts"?
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.
The length of a day fluctuates two milliseconds, or a thousand times more, over the course of a year. Most of this attributed to the annual pattern of ocean storms.
Most of the annual effects and zonal tidal effects are actually quite regular, which can be seen in the graphs.
But over long time scales they'll average out, which implies this one event may actually be somewhat significant on top of that.
But on the other hand, it might not be significant, as the top graph shows the much slower variation due to Earth liquid core. Those effects don't seem to have regularity (they might over thousand-year timescale), and compared to them 3us is pretty small.
However, what makes the quake's impact different from the seasonal/zonal variations is that it's one incident that caused such a change. They also mention 1983 El Niño as another significant even too.
Come on now, is it really good journalism to put the title "Quake Changes Earth's Rotation, Moves Islands" on this, because some dork theorizes that the quake may have accelerated the Earth's rotation, but the change would be too small to measure? Please.
Did you even read the article? Firstly, you call Dr. Gross some dork after complaining about journalistic integrity. But if you did even a slight amount of searching you'd find he's a fairly competent and influential geophysicist, being one of the main figures in solving the puzzle of
Chandler's Wobble for instance.
Beyond that, that article mentions two effects he predicted due to the quake, both difficult to measure. One is the speedup of the Earth's rotation, which could be measureable after a long integrating time, or maybe not due to other factors that also accumulate.
But - the other effect he predicted is that the extra 'tilt' that may have gone into the axis of Chandler's wobble (the article doesn't explicitly say this, it might actually be nutation they're talking about but I'm not sure). Anyway, that tilt he thinks will add about an inch to the wobble 'amplitude' which is around 30 feet (how much the poles wobble).
So while these might be too small for specific measure right now, compared to the amplitudes of the factors to begin with (and averaging out the regular seasonal variations in earth's spin), they can prove to be significant for just one geological event, which occured in the blink of an eye in geological timescales.
But hey, thanks for complaining about shoddy journalism while providing your highly competent scientific and journalistic contribution to the story.
Earthquakes can't change the Earth's orbit anymore than you can fly by pulling your hair upwards.
nitpicking correction - earthquakes cannot change the orbit of Earth's center of mass. An explosion powerful enough to eject some matter in space, while probably nearly impossible, will effect the orbit of the remaining earth (however slightly).
Just like a grenade's center of mass follows the same orbit(trajectory) before and after the explosion (ignoring air resistance). But the explosion does change the trajectory of all the little shards.
Your analogy is flawed, the camera doesn't stare at only you the whole time, it stares either at a fixed area or sweeps around the restaurant. So your analogy would be more like a person that kept staring at the door of the restaurant, looking at whoever came in or out. Which is kind of what the restaurant host does anyway.
Plus, the camera in this kiosk takes one picture (presumably), so it's more like a stranger briefly glancing at you. Not at all the same as being stared at.
But - do you really feel like your being stared at every time you go into stores or the bank? Nearly every store has some kind of video monitoring these days, and in most cases it doesn't get looked at, or maybe a bored security guard will see you on the screen, along with hundreds of other people, day in and day out.
When presented with this scenario, most people begin to understand and are less likely to present the "I'm an honest person" retort.
It's not about honesty, it's about public spaces. Do you have a right to privacy? And likewise, does someone else have a right to look at you on the street.
Sure, it would be greatly annoying and unnerving if you were in a restaurant and a video camera in the corner moved around and tracked only you. And similarly if a person was staring at you the same way. But as to the point of this/. article, the cameras on the kiosks are really no different than store cameras. So if you have a problem with these kiosk cameras, you should logically have similar problems with all store monitoring cameras.
Oh, come on. Class out the peer-reviewed journals you don't like as "crank" and publish a research that says "Journals I like agree with me".
Do you know which journals were cast out as "crank"? Or are you assuming that the scientists doing the summary study are necessarily biased? And where would you draw the line?
For example, consider the schism between science and religion. Should peer-reviewed journals (I'm making these up) such as Baptist Science Letters and Physica Catholica be counted when considering evolutionary biological models or in estimating the age of the universe? Would a biologist be considered biased if they didn't consider creationism in some particular theory of evolution of fire ants? Are cosmologists who study the age of the universe biased for ignoring sources claiming the earth is 5000 years old, and only considering other sources with evidence to the contrary?
The begged question is Will it be bad or will it be good? Wouldn't warmer climates provide more arable land?
Which begs an even bigger question - should us humans change the entire planet's ecosphere as we see fit, or instead should we work within constraints to minimize our overall impact on the ecosphere?
Anyway, warmer temperatures might provide more arable land in climes that are colder now, but could also create more arid land in currently fertile areas. Plus, the melting of polar caps would change sea-water salinity, which affects the thermohaline circulation, which affects local temperatures.
See this site, for example. Note that towards the end when they discuss effects of global warming it's still very parameter dependent, so the exact effects are difficult to predict.
In the hydrogen atom example given previously, after you see how to use Schrodinger's Equation in spherical coordinates and to separate the variables and solve the three differential equations (making use of Bessel functions and Legendre polynomials), you painstakingly wind up with the hydrogenic wavefunctions.
In case any pedants respond to this post, of course it should be Laguerre polynomials, not Bessel functions, for the radial component of the hydrogenic wavefunctions.
Also, I ask you this-- In my junior and senior engineering courses why in the world should I be forced to work out the time consuming calculus or algebra part by hand when that's not even the concept being taught?
Because most actual worthwhile problems of junior and senior level classes (at least in physics) are not merely higher-level 'plug-and-chug', so for these worthwhile problems the algebra and calculus shouldn't be the limiting factor. If you're usually too bogged down in algebra/calculus, then you need to work smarter, not harder.
It's the real straightforward plug-and-chug type problems (ie start from this equation and these definitions and those theorems, and then derive this other equation) that the algebra and calculus get repetitive. While in 1st year classes plug-and-chug problems are usually 2-3 lines long, but higher-level plug-and-chugs can easily become pages long. [Example of this could be calculating the Fourier Expansion of a square wave, or solving the Schrodinger's equation of the hydrogen atom] In these cases the problem consists entirely of algebra/calculus, but the entire reason the professor assigned it in the first place is to give you the experience of working through it. There are just some of these problems that you just need to run through at least once in your life. In the hydrogen atom example given previously, after you see how to use Schrodinger's Equation in spherical coordinates and to separate the variables and solve the three differential equations (making use of Bessel functions and Legendre polynomials), you painstakingly wind up with the hydrogenic wavefunctions. You will then use these wavefunctions with confidence for the rest of your undergraduate and graduate quantum mechanics studies.
During my undergraduate years I would usually just barrel through a problem instead of trying to find more clever ways of doing it. Many times I would wind up with ridicululously long complicated algebraic equations, and would then pray I didn't make any mistakes and that most terms would cancel. I would then be amazed that what took me 4 pages to do would take the professor 4 lines in his solution.
The key is to find tricks to make your work easier. With integrals try to exploit symmetry as often as possible to reduce your work. Eg, quantum mechanics requires lots of integrals, but these quite often integrate to zero, and you can immediately discount certain integrals if you know the proper symmetry. Same with Fourier transforms. And in algebra, it gets MUCH easier if you can constantly find clever ways to rename variables, or especially groups of variables. In linear algebra try to put matrices into block-diagonal forms, etc.
Also during my undergrad, any integrals that weren't simple exponentials or algebraics I went right to Mathematica to solve. I quickly found out, though, that I then became unable to do any more difficult integral without Mathematica if I needed it. In grad school I instead calculated most integrals by hand, and quickly found out that most integrals on the homeworks weren't so difficult once I got used to it.
But more importantly is that the professors realize they are not asking you calculus questions. If you're doing reasonable physics or engineering, then algebra and calculus are essential skills that you will undoubtedly need for any future research (less so if you're strictly an experimentalist). But usually most credit is assigned if you've done the problem right, and only made small algebraic/calculus mistakes.
I agree, you'd be surprised how many students are dependent on their calculators. When I TA'd the general physics class that most of the pre-meds have to take, it was appalling how many students couldn't even multiply 80 x 0.04 without a calculator.
The system is just horseshit. No responsibility, teachers can't teach, kids are a bunch of bastards, and the parents are taking absolutely no responsibility for the kids.
Actually, quite a bit of the problem rests on the parents. My mom teaches 3rd grade in an inner-city public school, just outside of NYC. There's a strong correlation between the problem kids and the parents.
This is most notable at the parent-teacher conferences. The kids that do well in the class usually have parents that come to these conferences, and listen to the teacher's descriptions and suggestions. The kids that don't do well typically have parents that never show up at these conferences or otherwise show absolutely no interest in their child's education.
One time at such a conference my mother told a student's mother that the student was very poorly behaved. The student's mother's response was "Oh, just smack him upside the head when he acts up like that". A different teacher once saw a mother pull up to the school and unload the kids who were in the trunk (dept. of social services was called on this one). There's actually many more examples of things like this.
Another correlation is that many of the problem students rarely or never miss a day of school. In other words, even if they're sick, their parents still force them to go to school. This is because some of the parents think of school as a free day-care system to get the kids out of the house. While some of these families certainly have both parents work in the day, other families have mothers that don't work but still send the kid to school to keep them out of the house in the day.
It's pretty sad because these factors indicate that many of these children are not getting the proper parental support and nurturing they need, which in turn will lead them to develop a similarly neglectful lifestyle. Some of the parents hated school when they were little and pass on the same hatred of school to the kids. Some parents outright tell their kids not to worry too much about homework or studying.
It's really a sad state of affairs. Part of the problem, that another poster said elsewhere, is that in the USA school is really uncool. And being smart in some area, except gym class, is really uncool. Much of these perceptions are easily fed by the media, eg in commercials, tv shows, and movies. But if we could change these perceptions, IMHO it would really make a difference.
NASA works very closely with private industry, and in fact many of the major NASA errors have come from contractors (ie, faulty Hubble mirror, the infamous metric/imperial debacle, etc).
Hi, thanks for your responses. I wasn't trying to be elitist, and I've seen both sides of the debate. I've seen many friends forced out of cool old houses, eg art studios in Boston. And it was actually sad because not only are they destroying the awesome old building, but more important to me was that the underground artist culture was being hit too. One specific place I'm thinking of in Boston had many artists living and working there, and provided an outlet for the Boston art community for studio space and gallery presentation. That place [which actually had connection to the great Boston Molasses Disaster] is now gone for yet another office building.
i have never gone so far to think that only one type of development due to style or relative value [therefore indicating the socio-economic bracket of the occupants] should be restricted to their own respective areas.
It's more complicated than that, this is a neighborhood in the middle of the city, surrounded on all sides by the city, and the people living here want to maintain the historical architectural heritage. So there are no new houses being built (actually one house was just built on a plot where another house burnt down awhile ago). The architectural restrictions are somewhat loose, in that some things are prohibited (eg certain materials, certain fence styles), but there's still quite a bit of leeway within these bounds.
you have gated communities. quiet suburbs from horrid social restrictions.
This isn't an isolated gated community, if that's what you're thinking of. It's really a section of the city with several main city roads running through it, but also has smaller quieter streets and beautiful parks, etc.
thats what i really thought and did not make obvious by not quoting this
Actually, my quote doesn't really apply to Baltimore, because there are so many cheap rowhouses you can buy one for cheaper than a trailer home.
I'm actually in a similar situation as you. I'm a graduate student, and my girlfriend and I got sick of renting shitholes as well, and were able to buy this house. Our house is basically right on the border between the super fancy neighborhood and a poorer more-shady neighborhood. To give you an example, houses literally opposite our backyard have sold for about $700,000, but across the street you can find rowhomes for $20,000. [Other parts of the city you can find homes for a few thousand!] So we have mansions and manicured gardens behind us, but on the other side of the street two people were just shot and killed two blocks away a few months ago. Baltimore is weird that way, that you have sudden cutoffs between the rich and poor neighborhoods. We're effectively right on the border, actually just within the borders of the 'good' neighborhood, and pay dues to the association, etc. It's even more complicated because we're actually in a smaller sub-neighborhood if the rich neighborhood, where we have 36 smaller houses around 3 common courts on a busy road, but the rest of the people live in these large mansions behind us. But we're within the bounds, so it's cool to be part of the historic neighborhood, yet have an affordable home to boot.
I can see how I appeared elitist, but actually I think trailer homes are pretty cool. My uncle has one, for example. But there's a difference between wanting to preserve historical heritage and being snobby. I guess it's touchy ground, someone else remarked that one can make the same "heritage" claims to justify wanting to exclude blacks from a neighborhood, which is of course morally repugnant. But architecture-wise, I don't think trying to preserve some cool historical areas of the city is elitist.
Your points about 'investment' are actually quite accurate in regards to some of the 'elite' in our neighborhood. During a city-wide cleanup last year, a bunch of us in the 'sub-neighborhood' organized and cleaned the common a
The one thing with codes and permits, though, is for safety and insurance liability. You do bring up a valid point about an arbitrary county line, but that is, unfortunately, how insurance companies base their claims. Also, I believe that building codes are determined by county.
I do believe these standards were formed back in the day to keep shoddy repairs from burning down a house, or keeping the insurance company from being liable for substandard repairs. In the meantime the whole contractor business has been built around this system, so now these guys want to preserve the status quo.
But it is some sort of necessary evil that must be adhered to, otherwise more people would die in fires and roof collapses, and insurance companies would all go broke.
About the arbitrary county line, that's an unfortunate effect of tax rates and city commerce, etc. Here in Baltimore City, we have one of the highest property tax rates, you go right over the county line and the tax rate drops significantly. This is how the zoning works, though. It's different to get contracting work done in the metropolis center than in the county, and that county line is where the demarcation line is.
I don't think it has to do with unions, but more of a home-insurance liability issue.
About your situation with the PVC piping, that's sort of a necessary evil. It all really boils down to home insurance. The insurance company shouldn't be responsible for real hack-jobs (I'm not saying your plubming job is a hack job, think of hack job as an electrician putting a penny in an old-style fuse box to 'solve' the problem of a blowing fuse). Flooding is a very costly problem, and insurance companies have probably been burnt too many times by some contractors doing crappy jobs.
For insurance, there needs to be some adequate code that they can be sure your house meets, and that's why it exists. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to deal with. But that plumber was legally obligated to fix that 'violation', because if you did wind up with a leak and the insurance inspector saw that Y-piece, the union plumber would lose his job in an instant.
About your fusebox issue, here's a great counter-example. Suppose your handy-man 'fixed' the problem by just putting a penny in the fuse box (assuming you have the old screw-in fuses). If you had a fire because of that, the insurance company morally shouldn't be responsible for such a stupid 'fix'. So they require licensed electricians and all that paperwork. It's not even about merely money, but about safety too. You need to draw the line somewhere, and having a standard to comply with solves that problem.
Otherwise there'd be no way of knowing where along the gamut a contractor fixed something, between pure dangerous hack and working compliant fix.
I agree with you it's a pain in the ass, but I don't think it's a conspiracy at all. I believe it was formed for safety and insurance standards. Now that whole occupational fields are built around this system they want to preserve the status quo. But that's not the original intent.
why do you have the "right" to determine what changes take place in your neighborhood? did you buy the whole neighborhood?
In the case of my neighborhood, it was determined to apply for the historic designation by a vast majority of the residents. In fact, the only problems with residents fighting these restrictions came from people that bought properties after the historic designation. And in most cases these were just greedy real-estate 'flippers'.
Here's a question - should someone have the right to buy the Liberty Bell and smelt it down to make earrings?
This does beg the question of what should be considered historic and what isn't. But when you have a majority of an old neighborhood wanting to preserve the architecture, that seems like a valid request to me. And it was approved by the city and state historic registers, so obviously the authorities agree with it too.
Let me get this straight - you want to stop people from doing what they want so that the "character" of the neighborhood is not lost?
What sort of elitist attitude is that?
It's in areas that have had their cultural heritage already preserved. You wouldn't put a giant glass&concrete skyscraper in the middle of historic colonial Williamsburg, even if you own the land. If you don't want to be subject to historic limitations, you shouldn't be buying land in a historical area.
This has been fought many times in the courts, and the claim that you can do what you want on your own land carries limitations. At the extreme end, you cannot kill people on your land, for instance. And in certain designated areas you are certainly limited by architectural guidelines. The courts have already defined this position well over the past few decades.
But wait - I'm sure that if a black man moves into the neighborhood with his "black culture" and "black architecture" it would affect the likes of you because it's not culturally in keeping with what you have in mind, right? Who are you to define it, anyway?
Discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity is morally repugnant and wrong. Restricting architectural renovations in a historic area with cultural heritage is NOT morally wrong. If you think it is, can you explain why in more detail?
And FYI there are many historic areas with minority architectures. Little Italy in Boston, for example, or Chinatown in various cities, etc. And I'm sure we'll see many more culturally-preserved areas that immigrants set up in 50+ years.
Don't even begin to think that you or any of the elitist snobs who live around you can tell me what to do with my house.
Elitist? If you move into an area designated as historic by the city and state, and you intend to greatly change the architecture, in defiance of the neighbors objections, you really are an asshat.
But do not even pretend that you even can tell others what to do with their land, and justify it using some bullshit reason such as preserving living history.
Are you the type of person that cheers when a company knock down a 300 year old brownstone in the city to make way for yet another McDonalds and Starbucks? There is PLENTY of land that you can do what you want on, if your intent is on destroying officially-designated historical landmarks for your own purposes, you really are an asshat if you insist on buying that particular piece of land. Especially if the neighbors have already voiced their disapproval.
i just bought a beautiful house. your attitude makes want to burn it down to the ground. thanks.
Why do you think that building more houses quickly, even paper shanties, is mutually exclusive with having some older cultural areas designated historic? They're both compatible projects, and both have worthwhile aims.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of the PR photos, how many astronomers do you think their colorized photos hay have inspired at a young age (or any age) throughout the decades? Is it worthwhile to colorize a photo to increase public appreciation of astronomy? Or do you really think that's being insincere?
Anwyay, have you ever shaved, combed your hair, applied deodorant, brushed your teeth, and worn nice clothes? If so you're just as guilty of what you accuse NASA of by presenting a facade to the public that doesn't accurately reflect how your unkempt au natural body really is.
No, his column isn't about icebergs per se, but about the administration's attempts to paint the social security situation like it's on a collision course w/ an iceberg.
So anyway, offtopic yada yada (except for the title).
Considering everyone reading this article is using a computer with some form of magnetic storage, I'd say he's got a valid point.
Ferromagnetism is way too prolific in magnetic storage, so I'll ignore that and talk about other magnetic effects. Magnetism is directly tied to any inductive element in a circuit, and manifests itself through self and mutual induction. Eg, a signal-carrying wire has a non-zero self inductance based on its geometry.
Design of circuit elements at GHz frequencies requires minimizing inductance (usually by making things as small as possible), or carefully designing inductive elements, which would otherwise attenuate higher-frequencies and thereby limit the component bandwidth. And on the other hand, inductors are very useful in filter design, one fairly common item being an RF choke. But they're usually avoided by microwave or RF engineers. As my old boss said when we were considering using inductors to try to calibrate out a certain nonlinearity in a GHz-bandwidth circuit "Engineers usually avoid inductors because they don't understand them."
So besides magnetic storage, magnetic fields are employed in transformers, as the parent said, which are used in almost all AC-powered devices. Then there are electric motors and dynamos (which would include all automobile starters and alternators). There's also NMR (MRI is merely NMR in a hospital, they took the "nuclear" out of the acronym because they knew people wouldn't go inside a big machine with the word nuclear in it). And they're very common in physics and material science research. I regularly use superconducting magnets (up to 10 Tesla) to probe nano-scale systems.
[I'm not an EE, I'm a physics graduate student. But I did EE research (microwave and optoelectronic) with professional EE's for several years before coming to grad school.]
What you say about the space sciences tends to be true for all sciences (in my experience so far, at least). Of course nobody will read all the papers, but unless you're really studying something out in left field, there are usually some researchers in your area of specialty that will be interested in what you publish. There are even overlaps of things with no apparent connection. For example, some high-energy physicists realized some fluid-dynamics equations describing microscopic interactions of specific liquid crystal systems are very similar to general relativity on universal scales. I don't know how these two seemingly unrelated groups happened to find their common connection, but obviously some scientists have their eyes open.
You are correct that papers with the overall number of citations tend to be by older authors (usually written by men), but if you normalize the standard to number of citations per year, or something like that, you will get a better idea. Also - the main point of the thread's parent is not to find out who has the BEST paper, but to distinguish the 'real' science from the pseudoscience.
Who was the well-respected scientist that you mention in your post as having written an article that was "total garbage"? Is it 'garbage' because it's been proven wrong, or posits a highly contentuous theory? Or does it just have erroneous conclusions? Did the author write a followup? This is research is all about, the idea isn't to be right all the time, but to refine or change hypotheses to match with newly-available data. Even the best scientists will make mistakes, but a worthy scientist will acknowledge and learn from his/her mistakes.
As to citing your own work, in the current rankings I believe it counts as a cite, but self-cites shouldn't be counted in such a system. Similarly, repeated cites from within a small circle should be weighed less, to prevent colleagues from bolstering each other unneccessarily.
Regarding actually reading papers you cite, do you actually know that many people that cite a work without looking it up? I don't know where you do research or who you work with, but the physicists I work with, especially those in my group, have folders and folders of papers, going back many orders of recursion to the citations of the citations of the citations, etc. My advisor, and other paper authors I've spoken with, all know to great detail the specific papers that they cite. If your colleagues have questionable scientific standards, my advice would be to just to the best job you can, and be as honest to yourself and the Art as you can, and you're career will eventually make it's way.
The way you wrote "some dork" implied (to me at least) you condescend his scientific insight and knowledge on the subject.
Agree with you about slashdot's journalistic integrity in general, though. From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) they just use the same titlet that the submitter used, which is kinda lame and lazy.
But those problems you mention are independent of an open science publication service. Or perhaps maybe they'll get worse, but if you want to deceive people you can easily do so under the current system anyway.
I'm a physics grad student now, but let me give my take on it. The answer to your question is really yes or now. Much like the printing press and the internet let's any crackpot publish/disseminate bogus facts, but it gives the same abilities to people that have something worthwhile to say.
But how do you tell the good stuff from the bad? Firstly, most scientists worth their salt will be able to immediately distinguish whether a paper is written by an expert in the field, or someone bullshitting. Now as to someone outright lying, well the case of Jan Hendrick Schon reveals that problem can exist within the peer-reviewed literature too. However, seeing how afterwards he was exposed he was fired, and even had his PhD revoked by his university, can hopefully deter other would-be frauders. Scientific 'trolling' may be a harder problem to crack, though.
One such method to determine relative 'goodness' of an author, or a paper, is to see how many times it is cited by another paper. In fact, one of my former professors at U. Penn was one of the motivators for this method because she experienced alot of discrimination trying to get a faculty job. (In the old days, and even today to a smaller extent, female PhD physicists are underrepresented). She had to use these citation numbers to prove her work was as influential as some of the top men in the field.
Of course, with fully open access, it will be relatively easy to create many 'spam' articles that cite your own article to increase it's perceived importance. One way to combat this might be to weigh citing scores lower if they come from within an intimate circle. Another would be to have a moderation and meta-moderation system to acknowledge which papers in their field are worthy of being cited. Of course this goes back to the 'elite' problem of someone being unfairly shut out, but at least they can still publish their paper openly, if they need to point out 20 years down the line they were the first to publish a certain theory.
There actually already are such open venues, for example the arxiv will allow AFAIK anybody to publish a paper there.
Other than publications, the American Physical Society , for example, gets some federal funding and hence provide some public services. For example, at some of the larger meetings they might provide a room for presentations from non-physicists or others, kind of like the local public access station on cable TV. Sometimes talks are given on philosophy of physics, sometimes there are just crackpot talks, but any decent physicist will be able to tell by a talk whether it is worthwhile or not.
Most of the annual effects and zonal tidal effects are actually quite regular, which can be seen in the graphs. But over long time scales they'll average out, which implies this one event may actually be somewhat significant on top of that.
But on the other hand, it might not be significant, as the top graph shows the much slower variation due to Earth liquid core. Those effects don't seem to have regularity (they might over thousand-year timescale), and compared to them 3us is pretty small.
However, what makes the quake's impact different from the seasonal/zonal variations is that it's one incident that caused such a change. They also mention 1983 El Niño as another significant even too.
Did you even read the article? Firstly, you call Dr. Gross some dork after complaining about journalistic integrity. But if you did even a slight amount of searching you'd find he's a fairly competent and influential geophysicist, being one of the main figures in solving the puzzle of Chandler's Wobble for instance.
Beyond that, that article mentions two effects he predicted due to the quake, both difficult to measure. One is the speedup of the Earth's rotation, which could be measureable after a long integrating time, or maybe not due to other factors that also accumulate.
But - the other effect he predicted is that the extra 'tilt' that may have gone into the axis of Chandler's wobble (the article doesn't explicitly say this, it might actually be nutation they're talking about but I'm not sure). Anyway, that tilt he thinks will add about an inch to the wobble 'amplitude' which is around 30 feet (how much the poles wobble).
So while these might be too small for specific measure right now, compared to the amplitudes of the factors to begin with (and averaging out the regular seasonal variations in earth's spin), they can prove to be significant for just one geological event, which occured in the blink of an eye in geological timescales.
But hey, thanks for complaining about shoddy journalism while providing your highly competent scientific and journalistic contribution to the story.
nitpicking correction - earthquakes cannot change the orbit of Earth's center of mass. An explosion powerful enough to eject some matter in space, while probably nearly impossible, will effect the orbit of the remaining earth (however slightly).
Just like a grenade's center of mass follows the same orbit(trajectory) before and after the explosion (ignoring air resistance). But the explosion does change the trajectory of all the little shards.
Plus, the camera in this kiosk takes one picture (presumably), so it's more like a stranger briefly glancing at you. Not at all the same as being stared at.
But - do you really feel like your being stared at every time you go into stores or the bank? Nearly every store has some kind of video monitoring these days, and in most cases it doesn't get looked at, or maybe a bored security guard will see you on the screen, along with hundreds of other people, day in and day out.
When presented with this scenario, most people begin to understand and are less likely to present the "I'm an honest person" retort.
It's not about honesty, it's about public spaces. Do you have a right to privacy? And likewise, does someone else have a right to look at you on the street.
Sure, it would be greatly annoying and unnerving if you were in a restaurant and a video camera in the corner moved around and tracked only you. And similarly if a person was staring at you the same way. But as to the point of this /. article, the cameras on the kiosks are really no different than store cameras. So if you have a problem with these kiosk cameras, you should logically have similar problems with all store monitoring cameras.
Do you know which journals were cast out as "crank"? Or are you assuming that the scientists doing the summary study are necessarily biased? And where would you draw the line?
For example, consider the schism between science and religion. Should peer-reviewed journals (I'm making these up) such as Baptist Science Letters and Physica Catholica be counted when considering evolutionary biological models or in estimating the age of the universe? Would a biologist be considered biased if they didn't consider creationism in some particular theory of evolution of fire ants? Are cosmologists who study the age of the universe biased for ignoring sources claiming the earth is 5000 years old, and only considering other sources with evidence to the contrary?
Which begs an even bigger question - should us humans change the entire planet's ecosphere as we see fit, or instead should we work within constraints to minimize our overall impact on the ecosphere?
Anyway, warmer temperatures might provide more arable land in climes that are colder now, but could also create more arid land in currently fertile areas. Plus, the melting of polar caps would change sea-water salinity, which affects the thermohaline circulation, which affects local temperatures.
See this site, for example. Note that towards the end when they discuss effects of global warming it's still very parameter dependent, so the exact effects are difficult to predict.
In case any pedants respond to this post, of course it should be Laguerre polynomials, not Bessel functions, for the radial component of the hydrogenic wavefunctions.
Because most actual worthwhile problems of junior and senior level classes (at least in physics) are not merely higher-level 'plug-and-chug', so for these worthwhile problems the algebra and calculus shouldn't be the limiting factor. If you're usually too bogged down in algebra/calculus, then you need to work smarter, not harder.
It's the real straightforward plug-and-chug type problems (ie start from this equation and these definitions and those theorems, and then derive this other equation) that the algebra and calculus get repetitive. While in 1st year classes plug-and-chug problems are usually 2-3 lines long, but higher-level plug-and-chugs can easily become pages long. [Example of this could be calculating the Fourier Expansion of a square wave, or solving the Schrodinger's equation of the hydrogen atom] In these cases the problem consists entirely of algebra/calculus, but the entire reason the professor assigned it in the first place is to give you the experience of working through it. There are just some of these problems that you just need to run through at least once in your life. In the hydrogen atom example given previously, after you see how to use Schrodinger's Equation in spherical coordinates and to separate the variables and solve the three differential equations (making use of Bessel functions and Legendre polynomials), you painstakingly wind up with the hydrogenic wavefunctions. You will then use these wavefunctions with confidence for the rest of your undergraduate and graduate quantum mechanics studies.
During my undergraduate years I would usually just barrel through a problem instead of trying to find more clever ways of doing it. Many times I would wind up with ridicululously long complicated algebraic equations, and would then pray I didn't make any mistakes and that most terms would cancel. I would then be amazed that what took me 4 pages to do would take the professor 4 lines in his solution.
The key is to find tricks to make your work easier. With integrals try to exploit symmetry as often as possible to reduce your work. Eg, quantum mechanics requires lots of integrals, but these quite often integrate to zero, and you can immediately discount certain integrals if you know the proper symmetry. Same with Fourier transforms. And in algebra, it gets MUCH easier if you can constantly find clever ways to rename variables, or especially groups of variables. In linear algebra try to put matrices into block-diagonal forms, etc.
Also during my undergrad, any integrals that weren't simple exponentials or algebraics I went right to Mathematica to solve. I quickly found out, though, that I then became unable to do any more difficult integral without Mathematica if I needed it. In grad school I instead calculated most integrals by hand, and quickly found out that most integrals on the homeworks weren't so difficult once I got used to it.
But more importantly is that the professors realize they are not asking you calculus questions. If you're doing reasonable physics or engineering, then algebra and calculus are essential skills that you will undoubtedly need for any future research (less so if you're strictly an experimentalist). But usually most credit is assigned if you've done the problem right, and only made small algebraic/calculus mistakes.
I agree, you'd be surprised how many students are dependent on their calculators. When I TA'd the general physics class that most of the pre-meds have to take, it was appalling how many students couldn't even multiply 80 x 0.04 without a calculator.
Actually, quite a bit of the problem rests on the parents. My mom teaches 3rd grade in an inner-city public school, just outside of NYC. There's a strong correlation between the problem kids and the parents.
This is most notable at the parent-teacher conferences. The kids that do well in the class usually have parents that come to these conferences, and listen to the teacher's descriptions and suggestions. The kids that don't do well typically have parents that never show up at these conferences or otherwise show absolutely no interest in their child's education. One time at such a conference my mother told a student's mother that the student was very poorly behaved. The student's mother's response was "Oh, just smack him upside the head when he acts up like that". A different teacher once saw a mother pull up to the school and unload the kids who were in the trunk (dept. of social services was called on this one). There's actually many more examples of things like this.
Another correlation is that many of the problem students rarely or never miss a day of school. In other words, even if they're sick, their parents still force them to go to school. This is because some of the parents think of school as a free day-care system to get the kids out of the house. While some of these families certainly have both parents work in the day, other families have mothers that don't work but still send the kid to school to keep them out of the house in the day.
It's pretty sad because these factors indicate that many of these children are not getting the proper parental support and nurturing they need, which in turn will lead them to develop a similarly neglectful lifestyle. Some of the parents hated school when they were little and pass on the same hatred of school to the kids. Some parents outright tell their kids not to worry too much about homework or studying.
It's really a sad state of affairs. Part of the problem, that another poster said elsewhere, is that in the USA school is really uncool. And being smart in some area, except gym class, is really uncool. Much of these perceptions are easily fed by the media, eg in commercials, tv shows, and movies. But if we could change these perceptions, IMHO it would really make a difference.
NASA works very closely with private industry, and in fact many of the major NASA errors have come from contractors (ie, faulty Hubble mirror, the infamous metric/imperial debacle, etc).
i have never gone so far to think that only one type of development due to style or relative value [therefore indicating the socio-economic bracket of the occupants] should be restricted to their own respective areas.
It's more complicated than that, this is a neighborhood in the middle of the city, surrounded on all sides by the city, and the people living here want to maintain the historical architectural heritage. So there are no new houses being built (actually one house was just built on a plot where another house burnt down awhile ago). The architectural restrictions are somewhat loose, in that some things are prohibited (eg certain materials, certain fence styles), but there's still quite a bit of leeway within these bounds.
you have gated communities. quiet suburbs from horrid social restrictions.
This isn't an isolated gated community, if that's what you're thinking of. It's really a section of the city with several main city roads running through it, but also has smaller quieter streets and beautiful parks, etc.
thats what i really thought and did not make obvious by not quoting this
Actually, my quote doesn't really apply to Baltimore, because there are so many cheap rowhouses you can buy one for cheaper than a trailer home.
I'm actually in a similar situation as you. I'm a graduate student, and my girlfriend and I got sick of renting shitholes as well, and were able to buy this house. Our house is basically right on the border between the super fancy neighborhood and a poorer more-shady neighborhood. To give you an example, houses literally opposite our backyard have sold for about $700,000, but across the street you can find rowhomes for $20,000. [Other parts of the city you can find homes for a few thousand!] So we have mansions and manicured gardens behind us, but on the other side of the street two people were just shot and killed two blocks away a few months ago. Baltimore is weird that way, that you have sudden cutoffs between the rich and poor neighborhoods. We're effectively right on the border, actually just within the borders of the 'good' neighborhood, and pay dues to the association, etc. It's even more complicated because we're actually in a smaller sub-neighborhood if the rich neighborhood, where we have 36 smaller houses around 3 common courts on a busy road, but the rest of the people live in these large mansions behind us. But we're within the bounds, so it's cool to be part of the historic neighborhood, yet have an affordable home to boot.
I can see how I appeared elitist, but actually I think trailer homes are pretty cool. My uncle has one, for example. But there's a difference between wanting to preserve historical heritage and being snobby. I guess it's touchy ground, someone else remarked that one can make the same "heritage" claims to justify wanting to exclude blacks from a neighborhood, which is of course morally repugnant. But architecture-wise, I don't think trying to preserve some cool historical areas of the city is elitist.
Your points about 'investment' are actually quite accurate in regards to some of the 'elite' in our neighborhood. During a city-wide cleanup last year, a bunch of us in the 'sub-neighborhood' organized and cleaned the common a
The one thing with codes and permits, though, is for safety and insurance liability. You do bring up a valid point about an arbitrary county line, but that is, unfortunately, how insurance companies base their claims. Also, I believe that building codes are determined by county.
I do believe these standards were formed back in the day to keep shoddy repairs from burning down a house, or keeping the insurance company from being liable for substandard repairs. In the meantime the whole contractor business has been built around this system, so now these guys want to preserve the status quo.
But it is some sort of necessary evil that must be adhered to, otherwise more people would die in fires and roof collapses, and insurance companies would all go broke.
About the arbitrary county line, that's an unfortunate effect of tax rates and city commerce, etc. Here in Baltimore City, we have one of the highest property tax rates, you go right over the county line and the tax rate drops significantly. This is how the zoning works, though. It's different to get contracting work done in the metropolis center than in the county, and that county line is where the demarcation line is.
About your situation with the PVC piping, that's sort of a necessary evil. It all really boils down to home insurance. The insurance company shouldn't be responsible for real hack-jobs (I'm not saying your plubming job is a hack job, think of hack job as an electrician putting a penny in an old-style fuse box to 'solve' the problem of a blowing fuse). Flooding is a very costly problem, and insurance companies have probably been burnt too many times by some contractors doing crappy jobs.
For insurance, there needs to be some adequate code that they can be sure your house meets, and that's why it exists. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to deal with. But that plumber was legally obligated to fix that 'violation', because if you did wind up with a leak and the insurance inspector saw that Y-piece, the union plumber would lose his job in an instant.
About your fusebox issue, here's a great counter-example. Suppose your handy-man 'fixed' the problem by just putting a penny in the fuse box (assuming you have the old screw-in fuses). If you had a fire because of that, the insurance company morally shouldn't be responsible for such a stupid 'fix'. So they require licensed electricians and all that paperwork. It's not even about merely money, but about safety too. You need to draw the line somewhere, and having a standard to comply with solves that problem.
Otherwise there'd be no way of knowing where along the gamut a contractor fixed something, between pure dangerous hack and working compliant fix.
I agree with you it's a pain in the ass, but I don't think it's a conspiracy at all. I believe it was formed for safety and insurance standards. Now that whole occupational fields are built around this system they want to preserve the status quo. But that's not the original intent.
In the case of my neighborhood, it was determined to apply for the historic designation by a vast majority of the residents. In fact, the only problems with residents fighting these restrictions came from people that bought properties after the historic designation. And in most cases these were just greedy real-estate 'flippers'.
Here's a question - should someone have the right to buy the Liberty Bell and smelt it down to make earrings?
This does beg the question of what should be considered historic and what isn't. But when you have a majority of an old neighborhood wanting to preserve the architecture, that seems like a valid request to me. And it was approved by the city and state historic registers, so obviously the authorities agree with it too.
What sort of elitist attitude is that?
It's in areas that have had their cultural heritage already preserved. You wouldn't put a giant glass&concrete skyscraper in the middle of historic colonial Williamsburg, even if you own the land. If you don't want to be subject to historic limitations, you shouldn't be buying land in a historical area.
This has been fought many times in the courts, and the claim that you can do what you want on your own land carries limitations. At the extreme end, you cannot kill people on your land, for instance. And in certain designated areas you are certainly limited by architectural guidelines. The courts have already defined this position well over the past few decades.
But wait - I'm sure that if a black man moves into the neighborhood with his "black culture" and "black architecture" it would affect the likes of you because it's not culturally in keeping with what you have in mind, right? Who are you to define it, anyway?
Discriminating on the basis of race or ethnicity is morally repugnant and wrong. Restricting architectural renovations in a historic area with cultural heritage is NOT morally wrong. If you think it is, can you explain why in more detail?
And FYI there are many historic areas with minority architectures. Little Italy in Boston, for example, or Chinatown in various cities, etc. And I'm sure we'll see many more culturally-preserved areas that immigrants set up in 50+ years.
Don't even begin to think that you or any of the elitist snobs who live around you can tell me what to do with my house.
Elitist? If you move into an area designated as historic by the city and state, and you intend to greatly change the architecture, in defiance of the neighbors objections, you really are an asshat.
But do not even pretend that you even can tell others what to do with their land, and justify it using some bullshit reason such as preserving living history.
Are you the type of person that cheers when a company knock down a 300 year old brownstone in the city to make way for yet another McDonalds and Starbucks? There is PLENTY of land that you can do what you want on, if your intent is on destroying officially-designated historical landmarks for your own purposes, you really are an asshat if you insist on buying that particular piece of land. Especially if the neighbors have already voiced their disapproval.
Why do you think that building more houses quickly, even paper shanties, is mutually exclusive with having some older cultural areas designated historic? They're both compatible projects, and both have worthwhile aims.
Oops typo. I meant Taos.