I think this is more-or-less just what they're doing. ONly thing is that alot of course homepages are eventually taken down, or sometimes even password-protected. In any case, the course homepages are usually presented only for students in the class. The OCW courseware is MEANT to be publically viewable. It doesn't necessarily mean the professor is willing to put more time into making it better, but now the school will actively support the endeavour to make them publically accessible.
I worked at an MIT lab for 3 years, and for a few months, they offered a linear algebra course on site at the lab. It was strange because first they showed a video of Strang lecturing, but then he personally went up to the front of the lab class and asked if there were any questions. Interesting that he didn't do the lectures himself there, even though he was there.
But he's a cool lecturer (I only attended 1-2 sessions before I went back to school). so, you should definitely take advantage of Strang's lectures, especially if it blows away your Bates prof.
But you can also take advantage of the opportunity to go to class and try to clarify concepts that Strang's lecture may not have fully explained. You'd certainly be getting a much better education than just going to your own class, if you took it seriously.
In many cases, though, I don't think it's because of the fear of fraud charges that keeps scientists honest. I think what is USUALLY the case is that scientists have a tendency to be truthful to their work because that is the nature of science - finding out truth of either physics or chemistry or astronomy, you name it.
If the up-and-coming scientists were after fame and/or glory and/or riches, there are far easier and more efficient ways to achieve those goals than in science. And especially because the road to PhD and beyond is definitely not easy, that usually leaves the most devoted.
One would hope that this devotion to science would overpower any desire to falsify data. I think in Schon's case, though, he may have let the fame he had (albeit in a small circle) get to his head so he could keep up with his publications.
He got too greedy, and it caught up to him. I think this is interesting because in light of this, many professors are now scrutinizing their student's work more carefully then they may have previously. After all, if one's advisor's name will go on a publication, that advisor doesn't want to be associated with the next Schon.
Of course, the idea behind peer review is that everyone's ideas are suspect anyway until the results have been reproduced.
The purpose of peer review is NOT to wait for reproducibility but to make sure the article in question is WORTHY enough to be printed. One usually assumes the data is accurate, but one questions the math and physics behind the various deductive claims.
Tis a shame to single out a man for damnation on the basis of one slip when damnation is the default case.
It wasn't ONE case, it was SEVERAL suspicious data sets, which eventually got noticed when a graph, supposedly representing different data, was used AT LEAST TWICE.
In other words, after several slips, and finding out UTTER FABRICATION used by the scientist, then the man is 'singled out' to be judged if he is worthy of 'damnation'. Don't worry, Bell Labs gave him his trial, for the past several months, and now they have determined he is GUILTY.
I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up, and technology later, sometimes generations later, is able to support their ideas.
It is the hunch that usually leads scientists to study the phenomena/theories in question in the first place. The hard part is devising an experiment to prove/disprove what you're looking for without too many intervening factors that can get in the way. In fact, sometimes just coming up with the experiment itself is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But scientists should NEVER EVER fake data, no matter HOW STRONGLY they believe they are right. If they're that sure, then they can publish all the theoretical articles they want. But NEVER publish fraudulent data as true. Science is about truth, truth is about absolute, not about hunches. That's why scientists do (or should, if they don't shy away from it) report estimated uncertainties for all experimentally-determined values and data points.
If scientists didn't adhere to these lofty expectations, one wouldn't be able to believe any of the journals, which would be a major setback for all fields of science. If you had inherent mistrust of scientists, then science would become just like politics.
I dont know what he was working on, but I would like to give the guy the benifit of the doubt until I can read the report and experimental data.
Sorry, this guy WAS given the benefit of the doubt for many years. His results were irreproducible, which as you know, is one of the main characteristics of science. Everything must be reproducible. He claimed to grow Aluminum Oxide films that could withstand far greater electric fields before breaking down than anyone else on the planet, which is odd considering people mimicked his exact sputtering/growth techniques. For years nobody could reproduce any of his experiments. Much of the discord boiled down to a specific sputtering chamber Schon had back in Germany, where he claimed he was able to grow his thin films. Eventually Schon tried to regrow some films again in this chamber, and said he was unable to repeat his earlier work.
I worked in a physics lab this past summer where nearly every day at lunchtime the professor (Dr. Michael Tinkham, who's rather reknowned in superconductivity circles) would hold up a copy of Physics Today with a picture of Schon and warn us of the consequences of abandoning truth in favor of increased publications.
What Prof. Tinkham pointed out to us is that Schon became something of a minor deity in the realm of experimental physics, getting significant publications, usually quite often in the top physics journals such as Nature, Science, Physical Review, etc. The problem was that he soon had a reputation of greatness to maintain, so he may have gotten a little clumsy regarding data acquisition and analysis, in favor of keeping his astonishing rate of publications steady.
Eventually, things caught up to him. I'm not sure how much of his questionable work was little details that slipped though his fingers, how much was semi-conscious oversight, and how much was flat-out fabrication and fraud. But after he was caught then all his work became suspect.
The worst thing he did was re-use a dataset entirely, claiming it was a plot of something else, and left the exact same noise spurs and other anomalies.
Usually it's rare to find such blatant scientific fraud, but there was another
recent fraud.
At least he's not moving the Lab's money into offshore shell companies to show earnings.
Sure, and at least he's also not killing people.
But in the realm of science, what he's done is destroy the credibility that scientists strive for, and even NEED to be respected for. It's great that he's been caught, and hopefully it'll be a lesson to any up-and-coming experimentalists that no matter how much you believe in your theories, you have a committment to truth.
Maybe there should be some kind of hippocratic oath for scientists, that would be cool.
The story of CNN faking it's camera footage of the Palestinians celebrating the attacks has been demonstrated to be Urban Legend .
It was reported that the celebrating Palestinians were there celebrating when Iraq invaded Kuwait (ironically, an occupied people celebrating the recent occupation of another people), but this has been disproved through the above link with quotes by CNN and Reuters executives.
Also noted in the link is the Palestinian Authority's attempts to confiscate footage of the celebrations.
While not quite what you're looking for, and not including any page-turning abilities, these two projects are pretty cool.
Here is a Lego Copy Machine that is one of the coolest Lego Mindstorms projects. I don't know who made the first Lego copier, but whoever did is cool as hell. Basically, the only non-lego part is a pen, which moves up or down, depending if the light sensor sees white or black.
pretty damn cool.
For a variation on the theme, here is a
scanner , which uses only rubber wheels in addition to the other Legos.
Electronics use electrons, so spintronics must use...spintrons?
No, they use Spin-dependent electrons. This is spintronics, in a nutshell.
Up until now, almost all electronic devices have made use only of the electronic charge. Ie, amplifying it, switching on it, transferring it, etc.
Well, in a subtle manner, there is spin dependence in the above, due to Pauli exclusion, but that's buried in the quantum statistics.
Remember the electron is a spin-1/2 fermion, and hence has two possible states for a measure of it's spin in any given direction. Spin is an inherent property of many particles, with no classical analog, but you can think of it roughly as an angular momentum. Spin is quantized, unlike a spinning top. A spinning top is a classical system, which can have any rotational speed from 0 to any positive/negative values. (Negative means opposite direction of spin as a positive value).
Since the electrons are quantized spin-1/2 particles, there are only two measures of the spin angular momentum that are valid. +-(1/2)hbar where hbar is the Planck constant. Thus, an electron can only spin one way or another, there are no intermediate values (including no zero value, so it's ALWAYS spinning). Also note that this spin doesn't really represent the electron spinning about it's own axis, it's an inherently internal concept that's is actually quite involved.
These two values of spin of an electron can now be exploited in new devices. Right now the goal is to make devices that can inject electrons of one value of spin, and make transistors that work only for certain values of spin, or preserve spin parity, etc. Quantum computation would work nicely here too because the two states of spin are a good basis for representing a binary digit.
I haven't read the Scientific American article, so I don't know if I'm just repeating the obvious or not. But I'm a graduate physics student right now, and I hope to eventually work on some applications of spintronics. It is a currently buzzing field with much potential.
The transition from laboratory discovery to actual heavy industry usage of GMR-based devices in the recording industry has been incredibly fast. One of the only other technologies that has transferred this quickly from lab to industry was the transistor, and it is obvious how influential and revolutionary transistors were. This gives a brief indication of the relative influence spintronics may have on the industry.
Because electronics are not always about electrons. In many semiconductors, the charge carriers are
positive. What matters is the transfer of charge, which comes in units of e, the electron charge.
I don't know how much solid-state physics you already have, but for the benefit of others, I'll clarify a bit. The positive charge carriers are still really due to electrons.
Nearly-empty bands can be thought of as having mobile negatively-charged electrons, while almost-full bands can be thought of as having mobile positively-charged holes. The holes are merely lack of electrons, and act like a physical entity, but is really the lack of an entity. Kind of like bubbles in a liquid. They denote locales where the fluid is not, but the bubble looks like a particle in itself moving through the liquid medium.
That's like asking Faraday, Ampere, Maxwell, Tesla, and others why they were bothering to play around with these obscure facets of electricity 100-200 years ago. Sure, it's neat watching a giant lightning bolt jump across two electrodes, but what real purpose will it have for future research?
Hopefully you won't find it difficult to answer that question, as you power up your Pentium IV processor to hack some PERL code, crunch some numbers to decode your encrypted email, and look at the latest NASA gallery images represented on your monitor as a rasterized RGB image driven by an electron beam.
And as you insert a CD into the CD player which is read by a GaAs laser and decrypted by more microelectronics, so you can listen to the solid-state (or vacuum-tube if you prefer) amplifier drive a magnetic speaker coil for your listening pleasure.
And then as you get in your car, with the engine ignited by carefully-timed spark plug firings, where you turn on the radio and pick up frequency-modulated electromagnetic radiation and decode it into stereo sound, again sent to an amplifier and speakers for your listening pleasure.
So, you see, it's hard to determine, a priori, the benefits of certain scientific advances and the effects they'll have on civilization. Neutrino oscillations are important because they put another piece into the puzzle that high-energy physicists are trying to solve relating how all the elementary particles fit together.
Some potential uses for this might deal with gaining further insights into nuclear power and better ways to do it. Specifically, fusion power. The sun is a fusion reactor, but scientists haven't been able to efficiently harness fusion power here on earth yet. This neutrino puzzle helps verify some of the hypotheses scientists had about nuclear processes in the sun that weren't fully understood or adequately measured with older neutrino counters.
It might also help long-range communication. Neutrinos can pass through the earth without being affected, and scientists had once tried to use this method for talking to submarines on the other side of the planet. The obvious problem is how do you detect said neutrons. I think I heard something that they were able to make a receiver that could receive data at a rate of a few bits per day. Not very efficient. Well, learning more about neutrons and their oscillations might give insight into ways to improve neutrino communications.
There are most likely many other things too, that we just don't know about or don't have use for. Maybe they'll prove efficient for long-range communications to other planets, and possibly for quantum encryption during these communications. We just don't know yet, but if we don't try we'll never know.
emacs/vi it definitely necessary, but it's a showstopper.
Simple solution - do what I did for my father. Install nano (an open-source pico clone). It's relatively easy to use (very similar to the 'edit' program that came with the later DOS's).
This way the users learn how the system functions with respect to the scripts, and after they're hooked, get them on vi/emacs. If they're not hooked, then there's no reason to learn vi/emacs anyway.
Obviously not many of you have been in Japan. The people in there don't like the US much and they'd prefer
buying something made in Japan rather than in the US.
I disagree ENTIRELY. Where were you in Japan? I spent several weeks there a few years ago, and was shown incredible hospitality by almost everyone I ran into. I stayed with a host family who was great, met many Japanese friends at the university I was studying at, and even met many friendly folks I ran into on the streets.
The American group I was with also visited a junior high school, and the kids were all over us, many wanting autographs of their new American friends. Sometimes a few of us Americans would be standing on a street corner, and a bus of Japense schoolkids would drive by, and they'd all wave at us, almost like we were rockstars or something.
It was a somewhat strange, but really cool experience, and I learned ALOT by watching the hospitality the Japense (both our hosts and strangers) showed us. So, anyway, my experience with Japan has been entirely contrary to yours, and I didn't see much anti-American sentiment at all.
FYI, I was in Kitakyushu (the northernmost part of Kyushu, the southernmost island). When we went to Tokyo at the end of the trip, the hospitality seemed somewhat less warm, but it was definitely not anti-American.
What are your opinions of books 6-10? I completely agree, regarding books 1-5.
I read 1-5 back in high school, and just recently bought the 10-volume compendium to re-read. I loved 1-5, but I was less pleased with books 6-10. I couldn't make it past book 8, I felt the Merlin series lacked some of the charm of the first 5, and felt like a chore to read.
There is also the American Computer Science League (www.acsl.org) for junior high through high schoolers. In
addition to programming, there is a written test.
I was in ACSL back in high school, this is the first time I've heard it mentioned on slashdot. Was it really small beans that not many other American slashdotters have done it?
It was pretty cool back in high school (for me, i graduated in '93) the school would fly us out to miami or houston or other places for the all-star competition at the end of the regular season.
The programs were usually doable, the test was tricky because most of the time it was following very closely syntactic and algorithmic details to determine the value of a variable when a loop exits, etc. The tests were mostly bookkeeping, though. It was really easy to miss a small detail, and get the question way wrong. There were a few, but not too many, computer-science type questions (such as figuring out how nested a particular recursion loop would be, which would take WAY too long to run through manually on paper), representations of Finite-State Automata, etc. But most of the normal questions just involved base 2, 8, 10, or 16 math and conversions, and/or running through algorithms on paper, keeping manual track of all flags and stuff.
Hmm, that's a good point about setting the compiler flags. The Debian packages that I use have pre-compiled binaries, and I'm not sure which CPU (386?) they're compiled for.
With Debian, I can upgrade the system easily by first doing "apt-get update" which goes through the list of sources and checks for newer versions of installed packages. Then I do an "apt-get distupgrade" which loads the packages, gunzips and untars them, installs them, and also launches some configuration scripts if necessary.
These packages are binaries, though. There are ways to deal with source.deb files, but I'm not sure how to deal with them. I'm not certain, but I don't think there's anything as powerful as the 'build world' for your specific architecture as with FreeBSD. That sounds like a really cool perk.
I've bought several FreeBSD CD's from cheapBytes, but I've never gotten around to trying them out on a spare partition or harddrive. I really should give it a try one of these days.
FreeBSD has always been a one stop OS, and this is going to confuse things. If you're a Linux geek, try FreeBSD. You'll find that a one
stop OS is nice; you don't have to hunt for patches, or wait till your distribution gets the latest kernel, or worry about matching glibc with
your kernel... With FreeBSD you decide if you want to run -STABLE or -CURRENT, and you just track it. The only time you have to worry
about versions is with external packages.
Hi Jeremy, this might sound like a troll but I really don't mean it to be, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like one. I use Debian Linux, which seems very much like a one-stop OS using apt-get from the official debian web package sites.
Thus, having settled on one specific distribution of Linux, is this really different from the "one-stop" coolness of FreeBSD? You mention FreeBSD has stable and current selections, this is also similar to Debian's selection of available packages too (Stable, Testing, and Unstable).
Is there much of a maintenance difference between FreeBSD and Debian (I'm not talking about kernel or startup scripts or things like that, just the "one-stop-ness" of it all)?
Thanks.
ruthfully, there was a lot
that was left out of the movie that I'm afraid will make the later films a little rough. Hopefully the extra footage will
eliminate future wrinkles.
Does anyone else out there think that instead of squashing FOTR into one 3 hour movie with cut scenes and modifications, it might have been better to break it up into 2 movies based on the two distinct books within FOTR?
This way there could be two 2-hour movies portraying FOTR more accurately, and not whizzing too many things by. I thought some scenes seemed rushed, even though they were severely truncated already. For instance, at the Prancing Pony.
Of course, there's the issue that the public might get tired of a 6-movie series instead of a trilogy, and thus reduce demand which would rake in less dollars.
However, from a fan-of-the-book viewpoint, I think the 6-movie approach would be truer to form and more interesting.
Any comments?
The technique used here (NMR) is probably the best understood way of doing quantum computing (a lot of the basics are dragged
straight out of medical imaging technology).
Offtopic, but you've got it backwards. NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) was developed by physicsts, and later applied to medicine by biophysicists. At the advice of some marketing genius, they changed the acronym to MRI, knowing that most of the public wouldn't go into a giant machine with the word "Nuclear" in it's title.
It's actually the same physics processes in action for NMR and MRI, though.
So, the basics didn't come from the medical industry, but vice versa.
I'm way too busy cramming for my quantum mechanics final (when the TA actually says it's gonna be hard, then it's gonna be friggin' impossible). So I'm too busy to write about stuff (not too busy to browse/. though;-) )
Here's a link to one of my posts on the Spintronics slashdot article a few weeks ago. I think I posted it a few hours too late for most people (moderators included) to notice it.
Explains basics of GMR, which is based on magnetoelectronics, or it's catchier nickname Spintronics. Also related to GMR are the non-volatile RAM's commercially available now.
Cool part is that GMR devices were commercially available only a few years after discovery in the lab. That's an accomplishment usually reserved for potentially ground-breaking devices (ie, transistors). T'will be very interesting to see how this field progresses in the future.
Let me give an example to how the system probobably works in the big picture. (Disclaimer - I might be wrong).
Some defense guys somewhere in the US government decide that, after running into many difficulties trying to find hidden Taliban hideouts, that the armed forces need better heat-vision technology. Specifically, higher sensitivity and resolution are required.
DARPA comes forward with the Super-Cool-Heat-Vision (SCHV) program to fund research specifically aimed to advance heat-vision technology. The SCHV program is allocated $20 million dollars annually, for 4 years.
DARPA puts out Announcement of Opportunity describing the SCHV program, and invites research labs to participate. The research labs, in turn, submit proposals describing how their specific laboratory can further the technology, and gives specific goals that they believe they can achieve within the allotted time frame.
DARPA chooses the best programs, based on attempted goals as well as quality of research (ie, if the goals are grand but, as is often the case, depend on "magical non-existent devices" it's basically ignored).
DARPA allocates the $20 million to the different projects. Annually, DARPA checks each group's status to determine the next year's funding to that group. Sometimes groups are not funded the next year due to lack of beneficial results.
Eventually, the SCHV program is finished. Some groups have come up with useful heat-vision devices and prototypes.
Here I'm not sure of the details regarding patents and IP issues. I don't know if Company XYZ has to pay licensing fees to the research groups if it uses the technology. But eventually, company XYZ offers commercially-available heat-vision goggles that are far more useful than the previously-availably heat-vision devices. The US Army will then order 100,000 units from company XYZ. Company XYZ makes $$$.
DARPA's purpose was to further the progression from concept to obtainable entity.
I used to work at an MIT laboratory that was sponsored with DARPA funding. I left 2 years ago to go back to school to get my PhD in physics. I'm not sure of the exact details, but here's the basic scoop as far as I see it.
DARPA essentially funds research laboratories to perform research projects that will further advance technology related to DARPA interests. In my case, the research was unclassified, and our group was able to colloborate with other groups and colleages, present our research at conferences, as well as publish our methods/systems/data in scientific journals.
The laboratories that DARPA funds are either university laboratories, FFRDCs (Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers), and commercial laboratories (ie, IBM or Motorola research labs, for instance). It is usually standard practice for employees of all the above labs, upon the beginning of employment, to sign contracts handing over patent rights to the employer (ie, the FFRDC or the company). Actually, I'm not sure about students, as I haven't signed any patent forms yet. But did when I was an employee of MIT. So did Richard Feynman when he worked for Los Alamos (FFRDC).
So, essentially, DARPA has certain technological goals it wants to achieve, and funds a variety of sources to help achieve them. Usually for each specific project, DARPA funds a variety of research labs, and has them compete for further funding. The research labs in turn present their results at least annually for funding renewal. Eventually, DARPA gets it's results (or lack of them), and gets what it needs in terms of advanced technology, and then cna use that technology within more advanced systems.
I do not know specifically what kind of strings come attached with DARPA funding. However, I would imagine that most likely the research labs themselves get some significant percentage of patent rights as a bonus for conducting DARPA research. Otherwise there is no incentive for, say, Boeing to research a new type of stealth aerofoil if DARPA holds on to all patent rights.
I know my boss at MIT had his share of patents, but of course, MIT essentially owns said patents.
Note that DARPA's ultimate purpose is to get better technology into Defense-related projects. They advocate using COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) hardware/devices whenever possible.
That is, don't waste $$$ designing your own op-amp if Analog-Devices has one that's within your specifications. Of course, you must roll your own if the COTS op-amps don't meet your bandwidth/linearity/bias/power/etc requirements.
So, DARPA doesn't care about who gets the patent rights for that op-amp, they want the research that makes use the op-amp. So, in this example, your tax dollars are already going to Analog Devices and helping their own patent processes.
Your concerns about tax dollars funding university patents are either too narrow or too broad. Realize DARPA funds commercial entities as well as FFRDS too, which have similar patent processes.
However,
DARPA's fundamental purpose is to fund advanced research projects to further American defense interests. That's what it does, and it will support commercial, government, or university research labs to achieve this goal. It's a government agency, so obviously it is funded with tax dollars. I don't think DARPA cares about patents, as long as it can utilize the fruits of the research.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is more-or-less just what they're doing. ONly thing is that alot of course homepages are eventually taken down, or sometimes even password-protected. In any case, the course homepages are usually presented only for students in the class. The OCW courseware is MEANT to be publically viewable. It doesn't necessarily mean the professor is willing to put more time into making it better, but now the school will actively support the endeavour to make them publically accessible.
I worked at an MIT lab for 3 years, and for a few months, they offered a linear algebra course on site at the lab. It was strange because first they showed a video of Strang lecturing, but then he personally went up to the front of the lab class and asked if there were any questions. Interesting that he didn't do the lectures himself there, even though he was there.
But he's a cool lecturer (I only attended 1-2 sessions before I went back to school). so, you should definitely take advantage of Strang's lectures, especially if it blows away your Bates prof.
But you can also take advantage of the opportunity to go to class and try to clarify concepts that Strang's lecture may not have fully explained. You'd certainly be getting a much better education than just going to your own class, if you took it seriously.
In many cases, though, I don't think it's because of the fear of fraud charges that keeps scientists honest.
I think what is USUALLY the case is that scientists have a tendency to be truthful to their work because that is the nature of science - finding out truth of either physics or chemistry or astronomy, you name it.
If the up-and-coming scientists were after fame and/or glory and/or riches, there are far easier and more efficient ways to achieve those goals than in science. And especially because the road to PhD and beyond is definitely not easy, that usually leaves the most devoted.
One would hope that this devotion to science would overpower any desire to falsify data. I think in Schon's case, though, he may have let the fame he had (albeit in a small circle) get to his head so he could keep up with his publications.
He got too greedy, and it caught up to him. I think this is interesting because in light of this, many professors are now scrutinizing their student's work more carefully then they may have previously. After all, if one's advisor's name will go on a publication, that advisor doesn't want to be associated with the next Schon.
The purpose of peer review is NOT to wait for reproducibility but to make sure the article in question is WORTHY enough to be printed. One usually assumes the data is accurate, but one questions the math and physics behind the various deductive claims.
Tis a shame to single out a man for damnation on the basis of one slip when damnation is the default case.
It wasn't ONE case, it was SEVERAL suspicious data sets, which eventually got noticed when a graph, supposedly representing different data, was used AT LEAST TWICE.
In other words, after several slips, and finding out UTTER FABRICATION used by the scientist, then the man is 'singled out' to be judged if he is worthy of 'damnation'. Don't worry, Bell Labs gave him his trial, for the past several months, and now they have determined he is GUILTY.
It is the hunch that usually leads scientists to study the phenomena/theories in question in the first place. The hard part is devising an experiment to prove/disprove what you're looking for without too many intervening factors that can get in the way. In fact, sometimes just coming up with the experiment itself is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But scientists should NEVER EVER fake data, no matter HOW STRONGLY they believe they are right. If they're that sure, then they can publish all the theoretical articles they want. But NEVER publish fraudulent data as true. Science is about truth, truth is about absolute, not about hunches. That's why scientists do (or should, if they don't shy away from it) report estimated uncertainties for all experimentally-determined values and data points. If scientists didn't adhere to these lofty expectations, one wouldn't be able to believe any of the journals, which would be a major setback for all fields of science. If you had inherent mistrust of scientists, then science would become just like politics.
I dont know what he was working on, but I would like to give the guy the benifit of the doubt until I can read the report and experimental data.
Sorry, this guy WAS given the benefit of the doubt for many years. His results were irreproducible, which as you know, is one of the main characteristics of science. Everything must be reproducible. He claimed to grow Aluminum Oxide films that could withstand far greater electric fields before breaking down than anyone else on the planet, which is odd considering people mimicked his exact sputtering/growth techniques. For years nobody could reproduce any of his experiments. Much of the discord boiled down to a specific sputtering chamber Schon had back in Germany, where he claimed he was able to grow his thin films. Eventually Schon tried to regrow some films again in this chamber, and said he was unable to repeat his earlier work.
I worked in a physics lab this past summer where nearly every day at lunchtime the professor (Dr. Michael Tinkham, who's rather reknowned in superconductivity circles) would hold up a copy of Physics Today with a picture of Schon and warn us of the consequences of abandoning truth in favor of increased publications.
What Prof. Tinkham pointed out to us is that Schon became something of a minor deity in the realm of experimental physics, getting significant publications, usually quite often in the top physics journals such as Nature, Science, Physical Review, etc. The problem was that he soon had a reputation of greatness to maintain, so he may have gotten a little clumsy regarding data acquisition and analysis, in favor of keeping his astonishing rate of publications steady.
Eventually, things caught up to him. I'm not sure how much of his questionable work was little details that slipped though his fingers, how much was semi-conscious oversight, and how much was flat-out fabrication and fraud. But after he was caught then all his work became suspect.
The worst thing he did was re-use a dataset entirely, claiming it was a plot of something else, and left the exact same noise spurs and other anomalies.
Usually it's rare to find such blatant scientific fraud, but there was another recent fraud.
At least he's not moving the Lab's money into offshore shell companies to show earnings.
Sure, and at least he's also not killing people. But in the realm of science, what he's done is destroy the credibility that scientists strive for, and even NEED to be respected for. It's great that he's been caught, and hopefully it'll be a lesson to any up-and-coming experimentalists that no matter how much you believe in your theories, you have a committment to truth.
Maybe there should be some kind of hippocratic oath for scientists, that would be cool.
Here is the link that should have been in the above article, to snopes urban legend site.
http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/cnn.htm
To try it again as a referenced link, go
here .
It was reported that the celebrating Palestinians were there celebrating when Iraq invaded Kuwait (ironically, an occupied people celebrating the recent occupation of another people), but this has been disproved through the above link with quotes by CNN and Reuters executives.
Also noted in the link is the Palestinian Authority's attempts to confiscate footage of the celebrations.
Here is a Lego Copy Machine that is one of the coolest Lego Mindstorms projects. I don't know who made the first Lego copier, but whoever did is cool as hell. Basically, the only non-lego part is a pen, which moves up or down, depending if the light sensor sees white or black.
pretty damn cool.
For a variation on the theme, here is a scanner , which uses only rubber wheels in addition to the other Legos.
No, they use Spin-dependent electrons. This is spintronics, in a nutshell.
Up until now, almost all electronic devices have made use only of the electronic charge. Ie, amplifying it, switching on it, transferring it, etc.
Well, in a subtle manner, there is spin dependence in the above, due to Pauli exclusion, but that's buried in the quantum statistics.
Remember the electron is a spin-1/2 fermion, and hence has two possible states for a measure of it's spin in any given direction. Spin is an inherent property of many particles, with no classical analog, but you can think of it roughly as an angular momentum. Spin is quantized, unlike a spinning top. A spinning top is a classical system, which can have any rotational speed from 0 to any positive/negative values. (Negative means opposite direction of spin as a positive value).
Since the electrons are quantized spin-1/2 particles, there are only two measures of the spin angular momentum that are valid. +-(1/2)hbar where hbar is the Planck constant. Thus, an electron can only spin one way or another, there are no intermediate values (including no zero value, so it's ALWAYS spinning). Also note that this spin doesn't really represent the electron spinning about it's own axis, it's an inherently internal concept that's is actually quite involved.
These two values of spin of an electron can now be exploited in new devices. Right now the goal is to make devices that can inject electrons of one value of spin, and make transistors that work only for certain values of spin, or preserve spin parity, etc. Quantum computation would work nicely here too because the two states of spin are a good basis for representing a binary digit.
I haven't read the Scientific American article, so I don't know if I'm just repeating the obvious or not. But I'm a graduate physics student right now, and I hope to eventually work on some applications of spintronics. It is a currently buzzing field with much potential.
The transition from laboratory discovery to actual heavy industry usage of GMR-based devices in the recording industry has been incredibly fast. One of the only other technologies that has transferred this quickly from lab to industry was the transistor, and it is obvious how influential and revolutionary transistors were. This gives a brief indication of the relative influence spintronics may have on the industry.
positive. What matters is the transfer of charge, which comes in units of e, the electron charge.
I don't know how much solid-state physics you already have, but for the benefit of others, I'll clarify a bit. The positive charge carriers are still really due to electrons.
Nearly-empty bands can be thought of as having mobile negatively-charged electrons, while almost-full bands can be thought of as having mobile positively-charged holes. The holes are merely lack of electrons, and act like a physical entity, but is really the lack of an entity. Kind of like bubbles in a liquid. They denote locales where the fluid is not, but the bubble looks like a particle in itself moving through the liquid medium.
Hopefully you won't find it difficult to answer that question, as you power up your Pentium IV processor to hack some PERL code, crunch some numbers to decode your encrypted email, and look at the latest NASA gallery images represented on your monitor as a rasterized RGB image driven by an electron beam.
And as you insert a CD into the CD player which is read by a GaAs laser and decrypted by more microelectronics, so you can listen to the solid-state (or vacuum-tube if you prefer) amplifier drive a magnetic speaker coil for your listening pleasure.
And then as you get in your car, with the engine ignited by carefully-timed spark plug firings, where you turn on the radio and pick up frequency-modulated electromagnetic radiation and decode it into stereo sound, again sent to an amplifier and speakers for your listening pleasure.
So, you see, it's hard to determine, a priori, the benefits of certain scientific advances and the effects they'll have on civilization. Neutrino oscillations are important because they put another piece into the puzzle that high-energy physicists are trying to solve relating how all the elementary particles fit together.
Some potential uses for this might deal with gaining further insights into nuclear power and better ways to do it. Specifically, fusion power. The sun is a fusion reactor, but scientists haven't been able to efficiently harness fusion power here on earth yet. This neutrino puzzle helps verify some of the hypotheses scientists had about nuclear processes in the sun that weren't fully understood or adequately measured with older neutrino counters.
It might also help long-range communication. Neutrinos can pass through the earth without being affected, and scientists had once tried to use this method for talking to submarines on the other side of the planet. The obvious problem is how do you detect said neutrons. I think I heard something that they were able to make a receiver that could receive data at a rate of a few bits per day. Not very efficient. Well, learning more about neutrons and their oscillations might give insight into ways to improve neutrino communications.
There are most likely many other things too, that we just don't know about or don't have use for. Maybe they'll prove efficient for long-range communications to other planets, and possibly for quantum encryption during these communications. We just don't know yet, but if we don't try we'll never know.
Simple solution - do what I did for my father. Install nano (an open-source pico clone). It's relatively easy to use (very similar to the 'edit' program that came with the later DOS's).
This way the users learn how the system functions with respect to the scripts, and after they're hooked, get them on vi/emacs. If they're not hooked, then there's no reason to learn vi/emacs anyway.
Weird! I mistyped Japanese as Japense the same way two times in that post. How strange.
I disagree ENTIRELY. Where were you in Japan? I spent several weeks there a few years ago, and was shown incredible hospitality by almost everyone I ran into. I stayed with a host family who was great, met many Japanese friends at the university I was studying at, and even met many friendly folks I ran into on the streets.
The American group I was with also visited a junior high school, and the kids were all over us, many wanting autographs of their new American friends. Sometimes a few of us Americans would be standing on a street corner, and a bus of Japense schoolkids would drive by, and they'd all wave at us, almost like we were rockstars or something.
It was a somewhat strange, but really cool experience, and I learned ALOT by watching the hospitality the Japense (both our hosts and strangers) showed us. So, anyway, my experience with Japan has been entirely contrary to yours, and I didn't see much anti-American sentiment at all.
FYI, I was in Kitakyushu (the northernmost part of Kyushu, the southernmost island). When we went to Tokyo at the end of the trip, the hospitality seemed somewhat less warm, but it was definitely not anti-American.
I read 1-5 back in high school, and just recently bought the 10-volume compendium to re-read. I loved 1-5, but I was less pleased with books 6-10. I couldn't make it past book 8, I felt the Merlin series lacked some of the charm of the first 5, and felt like a chore to read.
does anyone else agree or disagree?
I was in ACSL back in high school, this is the first time I've heard it mentioned on slashdot. Was it really small beans that not many other American slashdotters have done it?
It was pretty cool back in high school (for me, i graduated in '93) the school would fly us out to miami or houston or other places for the all-star competition at the end of the regular season.
The programs were usually doable, the test was tricky because most of the time it was following very closely syntactic and algorithmic details to determine the value of a variable when a loop exits, etc. The tests were mostly bookkeeping, though. It was really easy to miss a small detail, and get the question way wrong. There were a few, but not too many, computer-science type questions (such as figuring out how nested a particular recursion loop would be, which would take WAY too long to run through manually on paper), representations of Finite-State Automata, etc. But most of the normal questions just involved base 2, 8, 10, or 16 math and conversions, and/or running through algorithms on paper, keeping manual track of all flags and stuff.
With Debian, I can upgrade the system easily by first doing "apt-get update" which goes through the list of sources and checks for newer versions of installed packages. Then I do an "apt-get distupgrade" which loads the packages, gunzips and untars them, installs them, and also launches some configuration scripts if necessary.
These packages are binaries, though. There are ways to deal with source .deb files, but I'm not sure how to deal with them. I'm not certain, but I don't think there's anything as powerful as the 'build world' for your specific architecture as with FreeBSD. That sounds like a really cool perk.
I've bought several FreeBSD CD's from cheapBytes, but I've never gotten around to trying them out on a spare partition or harddrive. I really should give it a try one of these days.
Hi Jeremy, this might sound like a troll but I really don't mean it to be, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like one. I use Debian Linux, which seems very much like a one-stop OS using apt-get from the official debian web package sites.
Thus, having settled on one specific distribution of Linux, is this really different from the "one-stop" coolness of FreeBSD? You mention FreeBSD has stable and current selections, this is also similar to Debian's selection of available packages too (Stable, Testing, and Unstable). Is there much of a maintenance difference between FreeBSD and Debian (I'm not talking about kernel or startup scripts or things like that, just the "one-stop-ness" of it all)? Thanks.
Does anyone else out there think that instead of squashing FOTR into one 3 hour movie with cut scenes and modifications, it might have been better to break it up into 2 movies based on the two distinct books within FOTR?
This way there could be two 2-hour movies portraying FOTR more accurately, and not whizzing too many things by. I thought some scenes seemed rushed, even though they were severely truncated already. For instance, at the Prancing Pony.
Of course, there's the issue that the public might get tired of a 6-movie series instead of a trilogy, and thus reduce demand which would rake in less dollars. However, from a fan-of-the-book viewpoint, I think the 6-movie approach would be truer to form and more interesting. Any comments?
Offtopic, but you've got it backwards. NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) was developed by physicsts, and later applied to medicine by biophysicists. At the advice of some marketing genius, they changed the acronym to MRI, knowing that most of the public wouldn't go into a giant machine with the word "Nuclear" in it's title. It's actually the same physics processes in action for NMR and MRI, though.
So, the basics didn't come from the medical industry, but vice versa.
Here's a link to one of my posts on the Spintronics slashdot article a few weeks ago. I think I posted it a few hours too late for most people (moderators included) to notice it.
Explains basics of GMR, which is based on magnetoelectronics, or it's catchier nickname Spintronics. Also related to GMR are the non-volatile RAM's commercially available now.
Cool part is that GMR devices were commercially available only a few years after discovery in the lab. That's an accomplishment usually reserved for potentially ground-breaking devices (ie, transistors). T'will be very interesting to see how this field progresses in the future.
Did little story this come before the spherical cows?
Some defense guys somewhere in the US government decide that, after running into many difficulties trying to find hidden Taliban hideouts, that the armed forces need better heat-vision technology. Specifically, higher sensitivity and resolution are required.
DARPA comes forward with the Super-Cool-Heat-Vision (SCHV) program to fund research specifically aimed to advance heat-vision technology. The SCHV program is allocated $20 million dollars annually, for 4 years.
DARPA puts out Announcement of Opportunity describing the SCHV program, and invites research labs to participate. The research labs, in turn, submit proposals describing how their specific laboratory can further the technology, and gives specific goals that they believe they can achieve within the allotted time frame.
DARPA chooses the best programs, based on attempted goals as well as quality of research (ie, if the goals are grand but, as is often the case, depend on "magical non-existent devices" it's basically ignored).
DARPA allocates the $20 million to the different projects. Annually, DARPA checks each group's status to determine the next year's funding to that group. Sometimes groups are not funded the next year due to lack of beneficial results.
Eventually, the SCHV program is finished. Some groups have come up with useful heat-vision devices and prototypes.
Here I'm not sure of the details regarding patents and IP issues. I don't know if Company XYZ has to pay licensing fees to the research groups if it uses the technology. But eventually, company XYZ offers commercially-available heat-vision goggles that are far more useful than the previously-availably heat-vision devices. The US Army will then order 100,000 units from company XYZ. Company XYZ makes $$$.
DARPA's purpose was to further the progression from concept to obtainable entity.
DARPA essentially funds research laboratories to perform research projects that will further advance technology related to DARPA interests. In my case, the research was unclassified, and our group was able to colloborate with other groups and colleages, present our research at conferences, as well as publish our methods/systems/data in scientific journals.
The laboratories that DARPA funds are either university laboratories, FFRDCs (Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers), and commercial laboratories (ie, IBM or Motorola research labs, for instance). It is usually standard practice for employees of all the above labs, upon the beginning of employment, to sign contracts handing over patent rights to the employer (ie, the FFRDC or the company). Actually, I'm not sure about students, as I haven't signed any patent forms yet. But did when I was an employee of MIT. So did Richard Feynman when he worked for Los Alamos (FFRDC).
So, essentially, DARPA has certain technological goals it wants to achieve, and funds a variety of sources to help achieve them. Usually for each specific project, DARPA funds a variety of research labs, and has them compete for further funding. The research labs in turn present their results at least annually for funding renewal. Eventually, DARPA gets it's results (or lack of them), and gets what it needs in terms of advanced technology, and then cna use that technology within more advanced systems.
I do not know specifically what kind of strings come attached with DARPA funding. However, I would imagine that most likely the research labs themselves get some significant percentage of patent rights as a bonus for conducting DARPA research. Otherwise there is no incentive for, say, Boeing to research a new type of stealth aerofoil if DARPA holds on to all patent rights. I know my boss at MIT had his share of patents, but of course, MIT essentially owns said patents.
Note that DARPA's ultimate purpose is to get better technology into Defense-related projects. They advocate using COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) hardware/devices whenever possible. That is, don't waste $$$ designing your own op-amp if Analog-Devices has one that's within your specifications. Of course, you must roll your own if the COTS op-amps don't meet your bandwidth/linearity/bias/power/etc requirements. So, DARPA doesn't care about who gets the patent rights for that op-amp, they want the research that makes use the op-amp. So, in this example, your tax dollars are already going to Analog Devices and helping their own patent processes.
Your concerns about tax dollars funding university patents are either too narrow or too broad. Realize DARPA funds commercial entities as well as FFRDS too, which have similar patent processes. However, DARPA's fundamental purpose is to fund advanced research projects to further American defense interests. That's what it does, and it will support commercial, government, or university research labs to achieve this goal. It's a government agency, so obviously it is funded with tax dollars. I don't think DARPA cares about patents, as long as it can utilize the fruits of the research.