While it is certianly true that pumping water requires more energy than blowing air you have to move a lot less water so I wouldn't be surprised if they could make the water cooling rig only two or three times more energy intensive than current air cooling.
I know from keeping fish that water pumps use very little power. Even my monster pump that shifts FSM knows how may litres of water an hour only uses about 50W. I also have a tiny pump that is still way larger than you would use for a laptop that draws
I've been in almost exactly the same position as you are now. Fortunately the university that I was working at had a more flexible approach to the situation. Ownership of inventions was shared. Either the university or the inventor could exploit the idea and pay royalties to the other. In reality if the invention was like most inventions (of no real worth) they would generally consider just signing the rights over to you.
It's probably worth talking to them about something like shared rights. I don't suppose you will have much luck though. In my experience the person paying you will claim everything you do.
At best you are going to be in the situation where your previous employers will hate you with a passion. If your new company doesn't take off you will need to go to them for a reference.
At worst you will spend several months coding the project, struggle like hell to find your first customer and then get sued into oblivion.
I once thought that I could do what you are suggesting but I thought better of it. Now I'm older and hopefully wiser I can see that we would have failed miserably.
The problem is that you know the area in which you work very well so it is tempting to write code that fixes problems in that area. What I suggest you do is look at the periphery of you current employers offerings. Could you, using your domain specific knowledge, improve the way your companies clients handle their data?
I've not RTFA but my guess is that this will only work water. It's not like PTFE (Teflon) which is almost inert it's a nano-material that traps a layer of air. The water probably can't wet the fabric due to surface tension. Most liquids have very low surface tensions so would be able to wet the fabric. Water is rather unique in having a high surface tension due to extensive hydrogen bonding.
My guess as to why chips last so well when thermally cycled would be because they undergo very little contraction as they cool. Microchips are made from extremely pure single crystals of silicon (essentially) so they are already in a very low energy state. Cooling them down isn't going to change very much. I wouldn't be surprised if newer SOI chips break more often when thermally cycled as they are in a higher energy state to begin with. Anyway, I have no evidence of this, just a gut feel from studying materials at a wide range of temperatues.
I don't think that is necessasarily true. I could easily imagine that they would simply build some sort of sound suppression system into the engine. Anything like that would reduce efficiency just like the baffle boxes on a car do. With a budget of just 2 million that would be a quick fix.
Unless the aircraft is lighter than air type craft with no directional control I can't see this being "silent". It just takes way to much power to get off the ground for any realistic aircraft to even be classed as quiet at moderate range. Having said that I'm sure they can do a lot to make planes quieter I just hope they don't sacrifice efficiency for it though.
As a kid I always thought that Wooly Mammoths died out aroud the same time as the dinosaurs but I heard a while back that they might have been around until a couple of thousand years ago. I now know that man hunted them to the dinosaur date is wrong but when did the last one shed it's mortal coil?
Now correct me if I am wrong but back in my chemistry days I'm sure we used a copper target in the x-ray machine. Has a switch been made to lead targets then. I also remember that the single crystal machine (I did mostly powder diffraction work) used a block of lead on the far side to catch the non-scattered radiation. It was a mightly thick block of lead though so I imagine bremsstrahlung radiation wasn't much of a problem.
Firstly let me say that I completely agree with the anti-stop & search arguments. It's 100% wrong that you can be stopped & searched without a good reason and I feel that over the last few years we have lost a huge number of freedoms we should have but...
Science is littered with devices that the inventor thought would do X and it turned out it was rubbish at X but great at Y. Fair enough this machine might not be any good at catching terrorists (although I would guess it has probably never been shown a bona-fide terrorist considering how rare they are) but maybe it's really good at spotting general criminal behaviour. We can't tell whether it's any good though because we don't know what arrest rate a random stop and search would generate. If a random process produced 0.1% then the machine is 10 times better and possibly a crime fighting tool in the future. If a random process produces a 1% arrest rate then the system is useless and should be consigned to the bin.
On the more philosophical point of whether the machine should be deployed at all I would have to say no. A false positive rate of 99% is absurd and it seems to be mostly catching people that are (mostly) law abiding. Criminalizing the entire population is not something we want to do.
Simple solution then... a space age tool belt. Just attach the tools to a vest that is worn over the suit. Clips of some sort come to mind but Velcro would probably be a better option.
I can see what you mean about not wanting a bag tied to the suit but then why would you go out into space carrying what amounts to a old fashions tool box?
If arrest rate isn't the statistic you would use to determine efficiency what would you use? In fact what else could you measure considering the systems only goal is to spot criminals? Presumably you could possibly use detection rate but that would mean that you would be stopping people, searching them and letting them go even if they had done something (petty) wrong.
If 97% of the passengers were commiting a criminal offence then the system would appear to be working exceeding well and could be considered a success by the people that installed it.
Whether we should be arresting people left right and centre for petty crimes is a philosophical debate (I think we shouldn't be BTW).
This is just another case of statistics being used to try to manipulate the story. Saying that this detection method only managed about a 1% arrest rate is meaningless unless we also know what the arrest rate was with previous / other methods. If other methods were only achieving 0.1% then this is fantastic improvement.
On a more personal note though I think any technique that can only manage a 1% success rate probably needs scrapping. There are obviously far to many false positives for the system to be trusted and of course you can't count the number of false negatives. The fact that it was specifically brought into catch terrorists and it would seem it hasn't succeeded speaks even worse of it (I imagine if they had caught a terrorist they would be shouting it from the roof tops).
We sort of already do carry around a barcode - in our DNA. While we aren't even close to being able to process it fast enough to make it viable at the moment I could easily imagine we will be able to in the future. Welcome to the world of Gattaca only we won't be able to get round the checks as easily as he does in the film.
A few people have commented that the computer used to take the readings will be a large power drain but I have to run a server 24/7 for my business anyway so the software will simply run on that. It would also be possible to run a tiny little ITX based box that draw hardly any power. From experience anything less than about 90W and my antiquated meter to turn.
I'm quite frankly shocked and a little disapointed that they didn't manage to work a terrorist angle into that list of "badness". What are journalists coming to these days.
I really like the idea of being able to access any book I want over the Internet. I could easily see something like that spark a new are of learning but I fear that it will cause publishing to adopt a model more like music publications. A small number of companies end up with a complete strangle hold over the market and churn out the same rubbish over and over again.
I agree that there are certain areas where the semantic web is actually pretty useful and I think health care is one of those areas. The important thing to realize though is why it works well in that area: it is a very tightly defined domain, it's a domain that has a lot of money, it has a limited number of highly skilled people interacting with the system, etc, etc. This doesn't describe the real world in general.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has experienced this with the semantic web. In the end I left because it was quite clear that the project I was working on was going no where fast and I wanted to actually solve problems. The real problem with the semantic web work was that no one had looked at it from a business point of view. To be adopted a technology has got to increase profits either by growing the customer base or reducing overhead, the semantic web (currently) does neither.
Even though I have left that area of development I keep an eye on it but so far I've seen essentially no progress. We will end up with semantic searching, of that I'm sure, but I don't think the solution will look like the stuff we are currently working on.
Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style!
on
Untangling Web Information
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I worked, in a research capacity, on technologies for building the semantic web for a while and to be quite honest with you I can't see how it could ever work in the real world. Just in the department I was in there must have been a dozen different ideas for how to build a semantic web and the only thing that tied them all together was the fact that they all relied on humans doing a lot of work to tell a computer what the content was about.
I'm sure that some of this semantic web technology will be useful somewhere but it's not going to take the world by storm simply because it doesn't work well enough and it requires too much up front effort for possibly / probably no gain.
The only way I can really see it working is if we can develop AI to the point where it can actually understand what it is reading without a human having to first develop some huge ontology and join the dots for it. But that's just my opinion.
Not having a tap was not that great a problem for them. Don't forget that the number of people back then was a tiny fraction of the number we have now. Most probably they were tapping natural springs and just diverting the water into a pipe. It would have been flowing away either way. Also, without chlorination you really don't want sitting water as it will gather all manner of "bad things".
There is a lot of rubbish talked about lead piping. The actual danger of lead piping is minimal to non-existant. Lead is exceedingly insoluble in water so the amount that makes it into the water is tiny.After a year or two lead pipes gather scale on the inside of them which actually stops the water coming into contact with the lead reducing concentations to tiny levels. Finally, lead taken in orally is not a huge problem for humans as it can't pass through the gut wall in any great amount. Lead breathed in has been shown to be a problem though.
This is not to say the Romans didn't have a problem with lead poisoning. They used to boil up old wine in lead pots because they discovered that they could produce a sweet tasing wine or crystal. That crystal was lead acetate. Some people used to consume vast quantaties of this stuff which was cause them to slowly starve to death (lead blocks the absorption of nutriants from food in the gut the treatment is normally just stop eating lead and eat lots of fibre rich food for a few weeks).
It's interesting that you say that the machine should make some mistakes because I picked the second conversation in the article as the machine generated one because it had mistakes that didn't "feel" human.
I have to say though that both conversations felt very strange and unhuman much like all the other Turning test conversations I've read. They are always very question and answer based where as real conversations aren't anything like that. I think there is still scope for a test like the Turning test but the way it is carried out would have to change. Rather than trying to trick the machine into showing it's flaws just hold a regular conversation with it and see if it feels like a human.
In ten years of driving I haven't once required the ability to stomp on the accelerator to escape or avoid a dangerous situation. When you drive a complete gutless wonder of a car rapid acceleration is not possible anyway. I can think of situations where being able to break the speed limit might help, such as going through an amber light, but realistically you shouldn't have gone through if you couldn't go through safely.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is certianly true that pumping water requires more energy than blowing air you have to move a lot less water so I wouldn't be surprised if they could make the water cooling rig only two or three times more energy intensive than current air cooling.
I know from keeping fish that water pumps use very little power. Even my monster pump that shifts FSM knows how may litres of water an hour only uses about 50W. I also have a tiny pump that is still way larger than you would use for a laptop that draws
I've been in almost exactly the same position as you are now. Fortunately the university that I was working at had a more flexible approach to the situation. Ownership of inventions was shared. Either the university or the inventor could exploit the idea and pay royalties to the other. In reality if the invention was like most inventions (of no real worth) they would generally consider just signing the rights over to you.
It's probably worth talking to them about something like shared rights. I don't suppose you will have much luck though. In my experience the person paying you will claim everything you do.
At best you are going to be in the situation where your previous employers will hate you with a passion. If your new company doesn't take off you will need to go to them for a reference.
At worst you will spend several months coding the project, struggle like hell to find your first customer and then get sued into oblivion.
I once thought that I could do what you are suggesting but I thought better of it. Now I'm older and hopefully wiser I can see that we would have failed miserably.
The problem is that you know the area in which you work very well so it is tempting to write code that fixes problems in that area. What I suggest you do is look at the periphery of you current employers offerings. Could you, using your domain specific knowledge, improve the way your companies clients handle their data?
Oh, and before I forget, get a lawyer.
I've not RTFA but my guess is that this will only work water. It's not like PTFE (Teflon) which is almost inert it's a nano-material that traps a layer of air. The water probably can't wet the fabric due to surface tension. Most liquids have very low surface tensions so would be able to wet the fabric. Water is rather unique in having a high surface tension due to extensive hydrogen bonding.
My guess as to why chips last so well when thermally cycled would be because they undergo very little contraction as they cool. Microchips are made from extremely pure single crystals of silicon (essentially) so they are already in a very low energy state. Cooling them down isn't going to change very much. I wouldn't be surprised if newer SOI chips break more often when thermally cycled as they are in a higher energy state to begin with. Anyway, I have no evidence of this, just a gut feel from studying materials at a wide range of temperatues.
I don't think that is necessasarily true. I could easily imagine that they would simply build some sort of sound suppression system into the engine. Anything like that would reduce efficiency just like the baffle boxes on a car do. With a budget of just 2 million that would be a quick fix.
Unless the aircraft is lighter than air type craft with no directional control I can't see this being "silent". It just takes way to much power to get off the ground for any realistic aircraft to even be classed as quiet at moderate range. Having said that I'm sure they can do a lot to make planes quieter I just hope they don't sacrifice efficiency for it though.
As a kid I always thought that Wooly Mammoths died out aroud the same time as the dinosaurs but I heard a while back that they might have been around until a couple of thousand years ago. I now know that man hunted them to the dinosaur date is wrong but when did the last one shed it's mortal coil?
Now correct me if I am wrong but back in my chemistry days I'm sure we used a copper target in the x-ray machine. Has a switch been made to lead targets then. I also remember that the single crystal machine (I did mostly powder diffraction work) used a block of lead on the far side to catch the non-scattered radiation. It was a mightly thick block of lead though so I imagine bremsstrahlung radiation wasn't much of a problem.
Firstly let me say that I completely agree with the anti-stop & search arguments. It's 100% wrong that you can be stopped & searched without a good reason and I feel that over the last few years we have lost a huge number of freedoms we should have but...
Science is littered with devices that the inventor thought would do X and it turned out it was rubbish at X but great at Y. Fair enough this machine might not be any good at catching terrorists (although I would guess it has probably never been shown a bona-fide terrorist considering how rare they are) but maybe it's really good at spotting general criminal behaviour. We can't tell whether it's any good though because we don't know what arrest rate a random stop and search would generate. If a random process produced 0.1% then the machine is 10 times better and possibly a crime fighting tool in the future. If a random process produces a 1% arrest rate then the system is useless and should be consigned to the bin.
On the more philosophical point of whether the machine should be deployed at all I would have to say no. A false positive rate of 99% is absurd and it seems to be mostly catching people that are (mostly) law abiding. Criminalizing the entire population is not something we want to do.
Simple solution then... a space age tool belt. Just attach the tools to a vest that is worn over the suit. Clips of some sort come to mind but Velcro would probably be a better option.
I can see what you mean about not wanting a bag tied to the suit but then why would you go out into space carrying what amounts to a old fashions tool box?
If arrest rate isn't the statistic you would use to determine efficiency what would you use? In fact what else could you measure considering the systems only goal is to spot criminals? Presumably you could possibly use detection rate but that would mean that you would be stopping people, searching them and letting them go even if they had done something (petty) wrong.
If 97% of the passengers were commiting a criminal offence then the system would appear to be working exceeding well and could be considered a success by the people that installed it.
Whether we should be arresting people left right and centre for petty crimes is a philosophical debate (I think we shouldn't be BTW).
This is just another case of statistics being used to try to manipulate the story. Saying that this detection method only managed about a 1% arrest rate is meaningless unless we also know what the arrest rate was with previous / other methods. If other methods were only achieving 0.1% then this is fantastic improvement.
On a more personal note though I think any technique that can only manage a 1% success rate probably needs scrapping. There are obviously far to many false positives for the system to be trusted and of course you can't count the number of false negatives. The fact that it was specifically brought into catch terrorists and it would seem it hasn't succeeded speaks even worse of it (I imagine if they had caught a terrorist they would be shouting it from the roof tops).
Antimatter is the new hydrogen. Always mistaken for an energy source but once the containment issues are fixed a really good energy store.
We sort of already do carry around a barcode - in our DNA. While we aren't even close to being able to process it fast enough to make it viable at the moment I could easily imagine we will be able to in the future. Welcome to the world of Gattaca only we won't be able to get round the checks as easily as he does in the film.
A few people have commented that the computer used to take the readings will be a large power drain but I have to run a server 24/7 for my business anyway so the software will simply run on that. It would also be possible to run a tiny little ITX based box that draw hardly any power. From experience anything less than about 90W and my antiquated meter to turn.
Or we could stick the balloon dog with a pin, I find that a pretty effective way to get rid of them.
I'm quite frankly shocked and a little disapointed that they didn't manage to work a terrorist angle into that list of "badness". What are journalists coming to these days.
I really like the idea of being able to access any book I want over the Internet. I could easily see something like that spark a new are of learning but I fear that it will cause publishing to adopt a model more like music publications. A small number of companies end up with a complete strangle hold over the market and churn out the same rubbish over and over again.
I agree that there are certain areas where the semantic web is actually pretty useful and I think health care is one of those areas. The important thing to realize though is why it works well in that area: it is a very tightly defined domain, it's a domain that has a lot of money, it has a limited number of highly skilled people interacting with the system, etc, etc. This doesn't describe the real world in general.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has experienced this with the semantic web. In the end I left because it was quite clear that the project I was working on was going no where fast and I wanted to actually solve problems. The real problem with the semantic web work was that no one had looked at it from a business point of view. To be adopted a technology has got to increase profits either by growing the customer base or reducing overhead, the semantic web (currently) does neither.
Even though I have left that area of development I keep an eye on it but so far I've seen essentially no progress. We will end up with semantic searching, of that I'm sure, but I don't think the solution will look like the stuff we are currently working on.
I worked, in a research capacity, on technologies for building the semantic web for a while and to be quite honest with you I can't see how it could ever work in the real world. Just in the department I was in there must have been a dozen different ideas for how to build a semantic web and the only thing that tied them all together was the fact that they all relied on humans doing a lot of work to tell a computer what the content was about.
I'm sure that some of this semantic web technology will be useful somewhere but it's not going to take the world by storm simply because it doesn't work well enough and it requires too much up front effort for possibly / probably no gain.
The only way I can really see it working is if we can develop AI to the point where it can actually understand what it is reading without a human having to first develop some huge ontology and join the dots for it. But that's just my opinion.
Not having a tap was not that great a problem for them. Don't forget that the number of people back then was a tiny fraction of the number we have now. Most probably they were tapping natural springs and just diverting the water into a pipe. It would have been flowing away either way. Also, without chlorination you really don't want sitting water as it will gather all manner of "bad things".
There is a lot of rubbish talked about lead piping. The actual danger of lead piping is minimal to non-existant. Lead is exceedingly insoluble in water so the amount that makes it into the water is tiny.After a year or two lead pipes gather scale on the inside of them which actually stops the water coming into contact with the lead reducing concentations to tiny levels. Finally, lead taken in orally is not a huge problem for humans as it can't pass through the gut wall in any great amount. Lead breathed in has been shown to be a problem though.
This is not to say the Romans didn't have a problem with lead poisoning. They used to boil up old wine in lead pots because they discovered that they could produce a sweet tasing wine or crystal. That crystal was lead acetate. Some people used to consume vast quantaties of this stuff which was cause them to slowly starve to death (lead blocks the absorption of nutriants from food in the gut the treatment is normally just stop eating lead and eat lots of fibre rich food for a few weeks).
It's interesting that you say that the machine should make some mistakes because I picked the second conversation in the article as the machine generated one because it had mistakes that didn't "feel" human.
I have to say though that both conversations felt very strange and unhuman much like all the other Turning test conversations I've read. They are always very question and answer based where as real conversations aren't anything like that. I think there is still scope for a test like the Turning test but the way it is carried out would have to change. Rather than trying to trick the machine into showing it's flaws just hold a regular conversation with it and see if it feels like a human.
In ten years of driving I haven't once required the ability to stomp on the accelerator to escape or avoid a dangerous situation. When you drive a complete gutless wonder of a car rapid acceleration is not possible anyway. I can think of situations where being able to break the speed limit might help, such as going through an amber light, but realistically you shouldn't have gone through if you couldn't go through safely.