The reason Solyndra failed is that it was competing against Chinese solar manufacturers who received even greater production subsidies. Should we give up on any industry that is a priority for the Chinese government? Or should we try to compete?
There is much more to it. Grad students have their tuition paid out of their supervisors' grants. Additionally, there is a 50 to 60% overhead on the grant, including this tuition payment as well as grad student salary and benefits. A university certainly makes more money from hiring a grad student than the student does.
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly.
This is somewhat troubling, isn't it? If the decay rate is quadratic in the number of qubits, and this turns out to be due to some fundamental physical law as opposed to limitations of the current technology, does that mean we can never have quantum computers with any significant amount of memory?
Not really. The researchers trapped and entangled 14 ions in a single ion trap. Quantum computers based on ion traps will have thousands of traps, with never more than one or two ions per trap. (Machines with hundreds of traps have been tested, ions moved between traps, etc.; see, e.g., [1]) It has been known since at least 1997 [2] that you can't have a scalable system with only a single ion trap (that would be true even were the decay rate quadratic in the number of ions per trap).
[1] Home, J. P. et al. Complete methods set for scalable ion trap quantum information processing. Science 325, 1227–1230 (2009). arXiv:0907.1865 [quant-ph] [2] Wineland, D.J. et al. Experimental issues in coherent quantum state manipulation of trapped atomic ions. J. Res. Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol. 103, 259–328 (1998). arXiv:quant-ph/9710025
It really is *not* widely known as the Nobel prize of computing. The Wikipedia citation is to an ACM press release---and ACM is the organization that gives out the award! In general, the Turing award has had a very poor history of recipients. It is better than the Nobel peace prize but worse than the economics prize (and therefore far worse than physics, etc.).
This is a classic example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you don't sell your technology to China, then your competitors will, so you should too. Government export restrictions should be imposed for everybody's benefit.
Why would a tenured MIT professor give it up to switch departments? The same author has 129 papers on the quant-ph section of the arXiv, going back to 1996. He's been working in this field for quite a while.
Formal peer review is itself an appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority may be a fallacy in a logical argument. In a fully logical argument, there are no shortcuts. You can't outsource logic, either to reviewers or moderators. But for most of what we do, we need to judge the credibility of sources and can tolerate some mistakes. There is a sliding scale of credibility.
Anyway, this paper is simple enough to read for anybody with high school-level quantum mechanics background.
It may be more clear to say gallons per miles, but it is for the social good to say miles per gallon. Measuring in miles per gallon perceptually exaggerates the benefits of getting cars with marginally improved mileage, leading people to buy more efficient cars than they would be a more clear measurement standard. Measuring in gallons per mile shows much more clearly the quickly diminishing returns of buying more efficient cars.
More generally, mathematics is an excellent field for amateurs, with tons and tons of accessible problems that can be solved with persistence. Check out some of Martin Gardner's books.
Brian Hayes has some similar explorations (http://bit-player.org/).
No, that isn't the problem at all. There are plenty of people in the US with PhDs who want to be scientists. Most of them can't find jobs. There isn't funding for 90% of them. Unless there are research jobs available, there is no point trying to draw more young students into PhD programs.
I don't think it is entirely accurate to say that there are better opportunities elsewhere. It is more that there is much higher competition to get an academic job in the US than abroad. And the reason that the competition is so much harder is because the US is attracting academics from around the world (unlike most countries). Science is globalized.
This is also why Americans aren't entering the academic track as much. The competition is extremely high, in a fully globalized market. This has driven salaries down and worsened working conditions. If you are trying to get out of China, it is still very worth while. But for an American, it isn't worth it any more.
I don't get it. What is the point of building a train line to where nobody lives? You can already fly from San Francisco to LA in an hour. Sure, add thirty minutes to get through security and thirty minutes to get to the airport. Planes run constantly, probably a hundred a day. If you reserve early, you can do it for $50.
Now you want to build a train that will take two transfers and at least two hours just to get to, before even starting? Add another hour or two because of the transfers, and then three or four more hours to get to LA. Why?
Nonsense. For the price of the servicing missions, we could have sent up new Hubbles. They were just make-work for the astronauts who don't really have anything to do up there. (If they aren't fixing the Hubble, they are running experiments on earthworms for fifth graders.)
For the price of the ISS, we could have dozens of Hubbles. We are sacrificing so much money and so much science for those earthworm experiments. (Another good recent experiment was the Japanese astronaut's brave attempt to wear the same underwear for a month. I guess, what else is there to do in zero-gravity?)
The basic problem in 2000 was that Florida had stupid people running the election. They came up with the dumbest ballots possible. When they are rebuked, they buy (using federal money) the worst election machines possible. These people are still there.
I think the poster answered his own question. Why would you want to be a scientist when 90% of your competitors are from China and India? Science has been globalized. American research scientists have no job security and are poorly paid.
"Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming."
Not really. The time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO2 to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years.
He stated it very poorly, but he wasn't wrong. The military has never wanted to invest in nation-building capabilities. It is afraid (perhaps rightly) that if it prepares for nation-building, then that will only encourage us to embark on more nation-building missions. When Bush was elected, the military no doubt sighed in relief that finally they'd be free of these difficult and often indefinite nation-building exercises.
But of course, Bush has been even more ambitious a nation-builder than Clinton. And I think the future will show us engaged in ever more of these missions.
We have a world-class military that can defeat any nation. We spend more on defense than everybody else combined. But we do not have a capable nation-building force. See Afghanistan, and Iraq -- some of the poor planning and implementation failures can be blamed on the administration, but definitely not all of it.
Either Congress and the military need to commit the additional resources needed to develop these capabilities, or perhaps we should start an entirely new branch of the military. Not carrying out nation-building in the future is just not a realistic option.
The maximum I am willing to pay for an item doesn't just pop out of thin air. It takes effort to determine what my maximum should be. I don't want to waste time evaluating this carefully and precisely unless there is a decent chance that work will pay off with me winning the auction.
I therefore tend to be conservative in my maximum bid. I put in a lower-bound on my maximum. Then if I am outbid later and notice it, if I have time, I can do a more careful analysis.
The problem with sniping is that it prevents me from knowing what my chances of winning are. I don't know how much interest there really is in an item, whether there is any realistic chance of me winning or not. So I don't know if it is worth spending time to figure out exactly what my maximum bid should be, $10, $10.10 or even $15. So I am conservative, underbid, and end up losing.
According to most people replying to you, I must be irrational. I should just bid my maximum straight out. But, then I would waste time determining my maximum on auctions which I had no chance of winning. That's a waste of time -- quite irrational.
Also realize that the computation of the maximum bid has different costs for different people. Indecisive people take more time to compute their true maximum bid.
Don't worry, Congress is on the case. Republicans are trying to overturn state laws protecting against identity theft. Overriding the California law is particularly important, even to people who don't live in California -- it is the California law which has forced companies to disclose identity thefts in the first place (they have to disclose thefts involving Californians, but that's most of them).
'The so-called Financial Data Protection Act of 2006 (HR3997) would also weaken state laws requiring disclosure of security breaches. In California, businesses must notify people if their personal info "was, or is reasonably believed to have been, acquired by an unauthorized person."
'Under the proposed federal legislation, such disclosure would have to be made only if a company determines that a security breach "is reasonably likely to result in harm or inconvenience" to individual consumers.
'"Basically, the company would have to know that you're a victim of identity theft before it needs to tell you that you could be a victim of identity theft," said Ed Mierzwinski, director of the U.S. Public Interest Group's consumer program in Washington.'
"Think of what you personally could do for your own child for $10,000 a year. I'm certain you could find a way to give him or her a quality education for that much money."
How? Private schools cost more than that. How are you going to give your child a quality education without putting him in school?
If you are suggesting home schooling, the opportunity cost on me is way more than $10,000 a year.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Solyndra failed is that it was competing against Chinese solar manufacturers who received even greater production subsidies. Should we give up on any industry that is a priority for the Chinese government? Or should we try to compete?
There is much more to it. Grad students have their tuition paid out of their supervisors' grants. Additionally, there is a 50 to 60% overhead on the grant, including this tuition payment as well as grad student salary and benefits. A university certainly makes more money from hiring a grad student than the student does.
From TFA:
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly.
This is somewhat troubling, isn't it? If the decay rate is quadratic in the number of qubits, and this turns out to be due to some fundamental physical law as opposed to limitations of the current technology, does that mean we can never have quantum computers with any significant amount of memory?
Not really. The researchers trapped and entangled 14 ions in a single ion trap. Quantum computers based on ion traps will have thousands of traps, with never more than one or two ions per trap. (Machines with hundreds of traps have been tested, ions moved between traps, etc.; see, e.g., [1]) It has been known since at least 1997 [2] that you can't have a scalable system with only a single ion trap (that would be true even were the decay rate quadratic in the number of ions per trap).
[1] Home, J. P. et al. Complete methods set for scalable ion trap quantum information
processing. Science 325, 1227–1230 (2009). arXiv:0907.1865 [quant-ph]
[2] Wineland, D.J. et al. Experimental issues in coherent quantum state manipulation
of trapped atomic ions. J. Res. Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol. 103, 259–328 (1998). arXiv:quant-ph/9710025
By the way, an arXiv link for this article is arXiv:1009.6126 [quant-ph].
It really is *not* widely known as the Nobel prize of computing. The Wikipedia citation is to an ACM press release---and ACM is the organization that gives out the award! In general, the Turing award has had a very poor history of recipients. It is better than the Nobel peace prize but worse than the economics prize (and therefore far worse than physics, etc.).
It can't be cleaned up. The technology doesn't exist. $270 billion wouldn't get it, any more than it would give us an anti-gravity machine.
This is a classic example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you don't sell your technology to China, then your competitors will, so you should too. Government export restrictions should be imposed for everybody's benefit.
Why would a tenured MIT professor give it up to switch departments? The same author has 129 papers on the quant-ph section of the arXiv, going back to 1996. He's been working in this field for quite a while.
Formal peer review is itself an appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority may be a fallacy in a logical argument. In a fully logical argument, there are no shortcuts. You can't outsource logic, either to reviewers or moderators. But for most of what we do, we need to judge the credibility of sources and can tolerate some mistakes. There is a sliding scale of credibility.
Anyway, this paper is simple enough to read for anybody with high school-level quantum mechanics background.
It may be more clear to say gallons per miles, but it is for the social good to say miles per gallon. Measuring in miles per gallon perceptually exaggerates the benefits of getting cars with marginally improved mileage, leading people to buy more efficient cars than they would be a more clear measurement standard. Measuring in gallons per mile shows much more clearly the quickly diminishing returns of buying more efficient cars.
More generally, mathematics is an excellent field for amateurs, with tons and tons of accessible problems that can be solved with persistence. Check out some of Martin Gardner's books.
Brian Hayes has some similar explorations (http://bit-player.org/).
Google voice will call out to Canada for free, but will not forward to Canada (for free or pay).
No, that isn't the problem at all. There are plenty of people in the US with PhDs who want to be scientists. Most of them can't find jobs. There isn't funding for 90% of them. Unless there are research jobs available, there is no point trying to draw more young students into PhD programs.
A Canuck with a bit more tech savviness would set up her own Hulu competitor, streaming ad-supported videos to Canadians.
The fact that such a service doesn't exist probably means that it wouldn't be profitable.
Why bother to tailor a product to the 12 Canadians that actually know how to read? Most of 'em are more interested in moose head.
Canadians actually read quite a lot. There is not much else to do when stuck inside for their eleven months of winter.
I don't think it is entirely accurate to say that there are better opportunities elsewhere. It is more that there is much higher competition to get an academic job in the US than abroad. And the reason that the competition is so much harder is because the US is attracting academics from around the world (unlike most countries). Science is globalized. This is also why Americans aren't entering the academic track as much. The competition is extremely high, in a fully globalized market. This has driven salaries down and worsened working conditions. If you are trying to get out of China, it is still very worth while. But for an American, it isn't worth it any more.
I don't get it. What is the point of building a train line to where nobody lives? You can already fly from San Francisco to LA in an hour. Sure, add thirty minutes to get through security and thirty minutes to get to the airport. Planes run constantly, probably a hundred a day. If you reserve early, you can do it for $50. Now you want to build a train that will take two transfers and at least two hours just to get to, before even starting? Add another hour or two because of the transfers, and then three or four more hours to get to LA. Why?
Nonsense. For the price of the servicing missions, we could have sent up new Hubbles. They were just make-work for the astronauts who don't really have anything to do up there. (If they aren't fixing the Hubble, they are running experiments on earthworms for fifth graders.) For the price of the ISS, we could have dozens of Hubbles. We are sacrificing so much money and so much science for those earthworm experiments. (Another good recent experiment was the Japanese astronaut's brave attempt to wear the same underwear for a month. I guess, what else is there to do in zero-gravity?)
The basic problem in 2000 was that Florida had stupid people running the election. They came up with the dumbest ballots possible. When they are rebuked, they buy (using federal money) the worst election machines possible. These people are still there.
I think the poster answered his own question. Why would you want to be a scientist when 90% of your competitors are from China and India? Science has been globalized. American research scientists have no job security and are poorly paid.
"Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming." Not really. The time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO2 to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years.
But of course, Bush has been even more ambitious a nation-builder than Clinton. And I think the future will show us engaged in ever more of these missions.
We have a world-class military that can defeat any nation. We spend more on defense than everybody else combined. But we do not have a capable nation-building force. See Afghanistan, and Iraq -- some of the poor planning and implementation failures can be blamed on the administration, but definitely not all of it.
Either Congress and the military need to commit the additional resources needed to develop these capabilities, or perhaps we should start an entirely new branch of the military. Not carrying out nation-building in the future is just not a realistic option.
If we put weapons into space, then so will everyone else. We will become much less safe. This policy is premature, expensive, and counterproductive.
I therefore tend to be conservative in my maximum bid. I put in a lower-bound on my maximum. Then if I am outbid later and notice it, if I have time, I can do a more careful analysis.
The problem with sniping is that it prevents me from knowing what my chances of winning are. I don't know how much interest there really is in an item, whether there is any realistic chance of me winning or not. So I don't know if it is worth spending time to figure out exactly what my maximum bid should be, $10, $10.10 or even $15. So I am conservative, underbid, and end up losing.
According to most people replying to you, I must be irrational. I should just bid my maximum straight out. But, then I would waste time determining my maximum on auctions which I had no chance of winning. That's a waste of time -- quite irrational.
Also realize that the computation of the maximum bid has different costs for different people. Indecisive people take more time to compute their true maximum bid.
Credit Freeze Under Fire
'The so-called Financial Data Protection Act of 2006 (HR3997) would also weaken state laws requiring disclosure of security breaches. In California, businesses must notify people if their personal info "was, or is reasonably believed to have been, acquired by an unauthorized person."
'Under the proposed federal legislation, such disclosure would have to be made only if a company determines that a security breach "is reasonably likely to result in harm or inconvenience" to individual consumers.
'"Basically, the company would have to know that you're a victim of identity theft before it needs to tell you that you could be a victim of identity theft," said Ed Mierzwinski, director of the U.S. Public Interest Group's consumer program in Washington.'
How? Private schools cost more than that. How are you going to give your child a quality education without putting him in school?
If you are suggesting home schooling, the opportunity cost on me is way more than $10,000 a year.