I just finished writing a scientific paper for publication. Apparently, this filter is very reliant on using long-term pattern recognition. When I fed this application my introduction only, it told me my work was INAUTHENTIC with a 35% chance of authenticity. When I fed it the first two sections, it said it was AUTHENTIC with a 66% chance of authenticity. And finally, when I fed it the entire paper, it said it was AUTHENTIC at the 87% level.
So apparently, all you need to do to beat this filter is insert the same buzzwords and phrases at many different points in a long article, and you should be fine.
...to carry out rooooly important projects...like testing the effect of zero G on spiders. Yeah. Like spiders are ever going to be able to fund their own space program.
Riiiight. "Rooooly important projects, like the effect of zero G on spiders." Well, if the shuttle is still going up, we could maybe use it for something like servicing the Hubble space telescope and extending its life! You know, since it's still at the forefront taking cutting edge pictures like the wonderful mosaic of M101, which is a slashdot story from earlier today...
That's right, the shuttle is the ONLY way we're going to save Hubble. And now that we've gotten a director of NASA to replace O'Keefe, it looks like it might actually happen. The shuttle is worth it for that mission alone.
This somehow reminds me of a man going to the Doctor's office:
Doc: Well, I'm afraid you have tuberculosis. I need to know, are you a creationist? Patient: What does that have to do with anything? D: Well, I could give you the drugs that would cure Tuberculosis as it was discovered in 1937, or the modern drugs that treat the disease as it has evolved into today. P: What's so great about the modern drugs? D: They're intelligently designed...
Now some of the big telecoms companies want to be able to sell premium services for things like streaming video or voice over IP, and some people are worried that this will eventually lead to a segregated internet.
Hopefully, this will allow small companies to have an edge, by simply providing access to all services without artificially jacking up the price for access to what has become standard services.
It's not just that it opposes religious teaching, but that it appears to promote a selfish, self-centred (or, if they're more sophisticated, gene-centred) teaching in its place.
If this is really the case, then I think everyone who understands the principle of scientific investigation should be up in arms about this.
Specifically, it is ridiculous (scientifically) to reject or fight against a scientific conclusion simply because you don't like its implications. Einstein famously "didn't believe" in quantum mechanics because he didn't like its implications (such as the EPR paradox). But you know what? The EPR paradox is now a famous illustration of the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics.
And, IMO, the philosophical implications of Darwinism have absolutely nothing to do with its scientific validity. (Which, by the way, far supersede any scientific validity ID has in terms of predictive and "post"-dictive power.)
Remember the "zapper gun"? Remember the "power glove"? Great nintendo inventions to make you feel like you were actually hunting ducks or fighting Mike Tyson?
The problem was in the functionality of these things -- boxing (and all other games) were hopeless with the power glove. I haven't used the new nintendo controller, but will it actually be functional is a prime question here that I haven't seen addressed yet...
Put this in perspective, people. There are TWO space shuttles still in service, and even though they have a CFC exemption, and it was the breaking off of a piece of that insulation that caused the Colombia disaster, they STILL use non-fluorocarbon (non-freon based) foam for insulation on the shuttles.
As stated in the comments to the article on the bottom of the page, underground fires and about a bazillion other natural sources have more of an environmental impact than the shuttle. If anything, industries and the world's large polluters ought to learn from the efficiency of NASA wiht regard to abusing/respecting the environment.
Can someone explain to me how exactly Blackadder and Fawlty Towers scored so relatively low compared to The Office and Only Fools and Horses?
Yes, they said the formula for a successful sitcom, not necessarily the formula for a quality sitcom. Apparently, having a huge nerd cult following doesn't mean success as much as having more people watch your show.
Duh.
Its time to crush this 30 year old unholy alliance between the IRS and the 3 party tax prep companys.
What does a national sales tax vs. a national income tax have to do with 3rd party tax prep companies? Seriously! If you don't want a 3rd party company doing your taxes, just do them yourself. It's not hard, just a little time consuming.
As an aside on a national sales tax, a recent issue of The Onion said it best,
As an incredibly wealthy man who spends almost nothing, I wholeheartedly endorse the consumption tax!
Steven Beckwith, director of Space Telescope Science Institute, had this to say when the decision was first announced to cancel the 2006 mission. Here's a little snippet:
In recent years, the telescope has helped scientists determine the precise age of the universe (13.7 billion years), discover planets outside our solar system, and chart weather patterns on Mars. By some estimates, Hubble's resume accounts for 33 percent of NASA scientific discoveries.
In addition to what it was scientifically designed for, Hubble has done a lot of other cool things that were unknowable when it was first designed, including using Supernovae to discover the acceleration of the universe (which it's still doing), imaging individual, old stars in galaxies to determine their ages, and lots of other stuff that we cannot do with anything else.
Applying for Hubble Telescope time is still the most difficult time to get for astronomers, because there's SO MUCH that we can do, especially with the new camera (ACS/WFC) that's on there. But when your president won't spend the money to make a safe shuttle mission to service the damned thing, what can you do except speak out?
While this looks promising for prosthetics, as the article says, I wonder if this has any implication for simple knee-replacement surgery? As someone whose family has a history of knee replacement surgeries, it sure would be nice if they could make an artificial knee that would last more than 15 years...
As far as I know (and I have checked the latest update here, 2M1207b is an extrasolar planet candidate orbiting a brown dwarf, 2M1207a. Although it may be picking nits as to what's a large planet or a tiny star, as brown dwarfs emit light (I believe) from gravitational collapse, not from nuclear fusion as most standard stars do.
Although there is certainly no debate about these two objects being extrasolar planets, it is not the case that they were DISCOVERED using infrared. They were known extrasolar planets that were imaged in the IR using the spitzer telescope.
Incidentally, they are not even the first pictures of extrasolar planets, as there is a nice one here from September of last year, that was reported on slashdot.
I didn't see this on/. until now, but one of my friends asked me to elaborate on the astrophysics points of this article for him, and this was what I said...
So, as you might or might not know, I'm pretty skeptical about "new" physics. So here is my take on the astrophysics-related problems.
#2 - The horizon problem. What this means is that, at some point in the past, what we call "the entire universe" was in causal contact with one another. Inflation is the theory that generally explains how this is possible, and I like this theory very much. Because it not only solves this problem, but explains why the spatial curvature of the universe is flat, why there are no magnetic monopoles, and where the seeds for structure formation came from, inflation (or something very much like it) is expected to have occurred in the past. No one knows definitively, what KIND of inflation occurred (there are many models of it), but this is no longer considered an outstanding problem.
#3 -- the GZK cutoff vs. ultra-high-energy cosmic rays -- There are a number of examples that are up to a factor of 10 higher than the cutoff. The reason a cutoff is expected is because a cosmic ray (i.e. a proton) coming from outside our galaxy above 5*10^19 eV would interact with the CMB, producing a pion and losing energy, until it is below 5*10^19 eV. However, we have no experience measuring energies this high, and it is easy to imagine that there is a systematic effect in measuring these energies, and that there is no inconsistency. It's not like we see cosmic rays a factor of 100 or 1000 times as energetic... so I'm not convinced this is a real effect.
#5 -- dark matter. This has been known to be a problem since 1933, actually. Does it exist? Almost definitely -- either that, or general relativity is wrong. GR might be wrong, but it has passed every experimental test thus far. There are a few leading candidates for what dark matter might be, but no one has detected it yet (despite what DAMA claims). Neutrinos have mass, but not enough to make up the dark matter. But if GR is correct, there is overwhelming evidence for dark matter from the microwave background, large scale structure, rotation curves of spiral galaxies, velocity dispersions in clusters of galaxies, absorption from the lyman-alpha forest, and gravitational lensing. There is also an insufficient amount of "normal matter" (protons, neutrons, and electrons) to make up the dark matter, as is well known from nucleosynthesis.
#8 -- There is a simple possible explanation for the pioneer anomaly -- solar heating of one side of the spacecraft, causing it to speed up. If that's NOT responsible, then indeed, we don't know what's causing it. This may be an indicator of new physics, but it may also be much ado about nothing more than the non-uniform heating of metal.
#9 -- Dark Energy. This is a big mystery. BIG. As in, there is currently no good explanation, this is almost undoubtedly a real effect, and people (including me) are working hard on this. Katie Freese (in the article) has a possible explanation, but it's not a very good one, and if correct, requires a new set of gravitational laws as well. This may be the most interesting unsolved problem in astrophysics today.
#12 -- variations of the fine-structure constant. Most people think John Webb is crazy, and his team is the only one that sees time-variation in alpha. Everyone else who looks at the same data and does analysis gets a null result. If there were stock in this, I would sell it all. What the article reports is sensationalistic and erroneous. Check out http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0402177, wh ich gives a non-detection with error-bars much smaller than Webb's papers.
Too bad that they report some real effects, some speculative effects, and some almost-definitive non-effects all together, with no discrimination.
Even the Bush White House has said over six months ago that humans are responsible for global warming.
Unfortunately, there are many people who will refuse to let your overwhelming evidence influence their dogma...
The answer has been around since ancient times. Herodotus says, from the article:
"They [the hippopotami] present the following appearance; four-footed, with cloven hooves like cattle; blunt-nosed; with a horse's mane, visible tusks, a horse's tail and voice; big as the biggest bull. Their hide is so thick that, when it is dried, spearshafts are made of it." (Herodotus, 2.71.1).
Of course, Aristotle's opinion simply copies Herodotus', leading us to conclude that either these two have never seen a hippopotamus, or evolution happens faster than anyone ever thought!
Anyone here who's a scientist ever try to use "google scholar"? Unfortunately, it's not very good.
What I'd like to see (as an Astrophysicist) is some way to do a search that combined results from difficult-to-navigate scientific sites, such as NASA's ADS abstract service, the Spires HEP database, and the arXiv.org preprint database. Finding what you need on these individual sites is often a pain, and to be able to search a compilation of them would sure be nice for me...
The US is pretty egalitarian in our education system, compared to your typical poor country.
Hold on a second. Now, I grew up in New York City, and attended public school there until age 17. I taught High School in inner city Los Angeles, and I'm currently living in Gainesville, FL, where I get a good look at the school system. My little brother went to High School in Centreville, VA.
Can I tell you how different these four experiences were? I was branded a nerd growing up because of my success in math, but it wasn't a horrible stigma. It wasn't like I couldn't play baseball or basketball because of that. It wasn't like I got beaten up every day. And I got a lot of encouragement from people all around me -- even from some of my peers.
My brother, who lives in a Virginia suburb, goes to a high school where the average SAT score is over 1200. Success at math is not only not "uncool", it's actually the norm. Meanwhile, where I taught high school, in a school with ~500 HS juniors, NO ONE in the school even managed a 700 on the math, and only a handful achieved a 600 or better.
There is a HUGE socioeconomic stratification in terms of education in this country. The question is, what can we do about it? The first step is admitting we have a problem (which we do), that there's no reason why we should be lagging behind ANYONE! Now, what's the solution?
There are diminishing returns on labor as time increases. But the point is that there ARE indeed returns, even at hour 80.
This is *not* necessarily true. There is a point of diminishing returns, as you say (which I'm at right now at 6PM the day before Thanksgiving), and there's a point of NEGATIVE returns. That's where you work so much that you actually start to create more problems than positive work.
Admittedly, that's not a point I often reach, but it's a point that definitely does exist. I am an astrophysicist, and I can tell you that while working into the wee hours of the night is often necessary, sometimes when I'm there at 4 AM, and I know I'm calculating things wrong, I just go home. I know, I'm a big slacker, but if I DON'T go home, I'll just be making a bigger mess for myself to clean up.
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
It's known that many species were already extinct by then, and there was a large asteroid impact around that time, causing some sort of a climate change that finished them off.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
(One of the great things about/. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)
You'll never get exposure to these great media as long as the record companies and MPAA have their way.
It's not just movies and recording industries, mind you. When I was a kid (13-17), I pirated lots of software... and I mean a LOT of software.
When I was in college (18-21), I pirated (or downloaded... whatever) a lot of music. Lots and lots of free music, hundreds upon hundreds of songs.
Now, I'm 26, I have an income, and I'm free to purchase whatever I can afford. I'll give you one guess what types of software and music I've been purchasing. Did you guess the types that I "stole" and liked when I was younger? Good guess...
Isn't it common knowledge that the single most "stolen/pirated" thing out there in the electronic world is "Windows"? That really destroyed that company...
I don't know why this is such a recurring theme here on/., but people seem to love to talk about these Rube Goldberg-type solutions to problems that involve a myriad of technology, when they can be solved quickly and easily for cheap. Why spend $3500 for a hypo-allergenic cat (that doesn't stop all allergies, just the one to the specific protein engineered out of them), when you can spend $15 for a month's prescription of zyrtec. $15 * 12 months * 15 years (life of cat) = $2160, is still much less than $3500.
As for housebreaking: I have two cats. The cats were kept with their housebroken mother for the first 5 months of their lives. (The first two is sufficient.) During that time, the mother will automatically housebreak the cats. If these cats are kept with their mother for the first two months of their lives, their future owners will be thankful for it. As an aside, the one thing that burns me up about the pet population problem are these young girls (~20) who LoooooooooooOOOOOooooove kittens. You know, love kittens, until they're about 5-6 months old. (You know, my cats when I got them.) But by that time, the kittens are big, adult sized cats, and they don't want them anymore. So, off to the shelter they go, to be replaced by... MORE KITTENS. I don't know how many pets are euthanized because of stupid people in this fashion... but I'm happy that I did my part to save 2.
I don't go there for any sort of analysis or good editorial content.
It sounds like what you're complaining about *IS* the editorial content. I think it's great, personally, as a scientist, to see a writer who's passionate about one party over the other and isn't afraid to let that show.
But if it's not objective, well, at least you can view the results of the tests at the site linked above in the article -- that should be enough of the serious analysis you seem to be wanting.
Slashdot Mirror
MY EYES! The goggles, they do nothing!
I just finished writing a scientific paper for publication. Apparently, this filter is very reliant on using long-term pattern recognition. When I fed this application my introduction only, it told me my work was INAUTHENTIC with a 35% chance of authenticity. When I fed it the first two sections, it said it was AUTHENTIC with a 66% chance of authenticity. And finally, when I fed it the entire paper, it said it was AUTHENTIC at the 87% level.
So apparently, all you need to do to beat this filter is insert the same buzzwords and phrases at many different points in a long article, and you should be fine.
It sounds like the clue train is coming in:
Last stop is you, Mister story-poster.
Alright, it sounds like he's saying that he "cares" about the "quality" of the "product".
This might be because he has a "reputation" and he doesn't want to "ruin it".
Any questions?
This somehow reminds me of a man going to the Doctor's office:
Doc: Well, I'm afraid you have tuberculosis. I need to know, are you a creationist?
Patient: What does that have to do with anything?
D: Well, I could give you the drugs that would cure Tuberculosis as it was discovered in 1937, or the modern drugs that treat the disease as it has evolved into today.
P: What's so great about the modern drugs?
D: They're intelligently designed...
Specifically, it is ridiculous (scientifically) to reject or fight against a scientific conclusion simply because you don't like its implications. Einstein famously "didn't believe" in quantum mechanics because he didn't like its implications (such as the EPR paradox). But you know what? The EPR paradox is now a famous illustration of the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics.
And, IMO, the philosophical implications of Darwinism have absolutely nothing to do with its scientific validity. (Which, by the way, far supersede any scientific validity ID has in terms of predictive and "post"-dictive power.)
Remember the "zapper gun"? Remember the "power glove"? Great nintendo inventions to make you feel like you were actually hunting ducks or fighting Mike Tyson?
The problem was in the functionality of these things -- boxing (and all other games) were hopeless with the power glove. I haven't used the new nintendo controller, but will it actually be functional is a prime question here that I haven't seen addressed yet...
Put this in perspective, people. There are TWO space shuttles still in service, and even though they have a CFC exemption, and it was the breaking off of a piece of that insulation that caused the Colombia disaster, they STILL use non-fluorocarbon (non-freon based) foam for insulation on the shuttles.
As stated in the comments to the article on the bottom of the page, underground fires and about a bazillion other natural sources have more of an environmental impact than the shuttle. If anything, industries and the world's large polluters ought to learn from the efficiency of NASA wiht regard to abusing/respecting the environment.
While this looks promising for prosthetics, as the article says, I wonder if this has any implication for simple knee-replacement surgery? As someone whose family has a history of knee replacement surgeries, it sure would be nice if they could make an artificial knee that would last more than 15 years...
As far as I know (and I have checked the latest update here, 2M1207b is an extrasolar planet candidate orbiting a brown dwarf, 2M1207a. Although it may be picking nits as to what's a large planet or a tiny star, as brown dwarfs emit light (I believe) from gravitational collapse, not from nuclear fusion as most standard stars do.
Although there is certainly no debate about these two objects being extrasolar planets, it is not the case that they were DISCOVERED using infrared. They were known extrasolar planets that were imaged in the IR using the spitzer telescope. Incidentally, they are not even the first pictures of extrasolar planets, as there is a nice one here from September of last year, that was reported on slashdot.
I didn't see this on /. until now, but one of my friends asked me to elaborate on the astrophysics points of this article for him, and this was what I said...
h ich gives a non-detection with error-bars much smaller than Webb's
So, as you might or might not know, I'm pretty skeptical about
"new" physics. So here is my take on the astrophysics-related problems.
#2 - The horizon problem. What this means is that, at some point in the
past, what we call "the entire universe" was in causal contact with one
another. Inflation is the theory that generally explains how this is
possible, and I like this theory very much. Because it not only solves
this problem, but explains why the spatial curvature of the universe is
flat, why there are no magnetic monopoles, and where the seeds for
structure formation came from, inflation (or something very much like
it) is expected to have occurred in the past. No one knows definitively,
what KIND of inflation occurred (there are many models of it), but this is
no longer considered an outstanding problem.
#3 -- the GZK cutoff vs. ultra-high-energy cosmic rays -- There are a
number of examples that are up to a factor of 10 higher than the
cutoff. The reason a cutoff is expected is because a cosmic ray (i.e. a
proton) coming from outside our galaxy above 5*10^19 eV would interact
with the CMB, producing a pion and losing energy, until it is below
5*10^19 eV. However, we have no experience measuring energies this high,
and it is easy to imagine that there is a systematic effect in measuring
these energies, and that there is no inconsistency. It's not like we see
cosmic rays a factor of 100 or 1000 times as energetic... so I'm not
convinced this is a real effect.
#5 -- dark matter. This has been known to be a problem since 1933,
actually. Does it exist? Almost definitely -- either that, or general
relativity is wrong. GR might be wrong, but it has passed every
experimental test thus far. There are a few leading candidates for what
dark matter might be, but no one has detected it yet (despite what DAMA
claims). Neutrinos have mass, but not enough to make up the dark matter.
But if GR is correct, there is overwhelming evidence for dark matter from
the microwave background, large scale structure, rotation curves of spiral
galaxies, velocity dispersions in clusters of galaxies, absorption from
the lyman-alpha forest, and gravitational lensing. There is also an
insufficient amount of "normal matter" (protons, neutrons, and electrons)
to make up the dark matter, as is well known from nucleosynthesis.
#8 -- There is a simple possible explanation for the pioneer anomaly --
solar heating of one side of the spacecraft, causing it to speed up. If
that's NOT responsible, then indeed, we don't know what's causing it.
This may be an indicator of new physics, but it may also be much ado about
nothing more than the non-uniform heating of metal.
#9 -- Dark Energy. This is a big mystery. BIG. As in, there is
currently no good explanation, this is almost undoubtedly a real effect,
and people (including me) are working hard on this. Katie Freese (in the
article) has a possible explanation, but it's not a very good one, and
if correct, requires a new set of gravitational laws as well. This may be
the most interesting unsolved problem in astrophysics today.
#12 -- variations of the fine-structure constant. Most people think John
Webb is crazy, and his team is the only one that sees time-variation in
alpha. Everyone else who looks at the same data and does analysis gets a
null result. If there were stock in this, I would sell it all.
What the article reports is sensationalistic and erroneous. Check out
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0402177,
w
papers.
Too bad that they report some real effects, some speculative effects, and
some almost-definitive non-effects all together, with no discrimination.
Even the Bush White House has said over six months ago that humans are responsible for global warming. Unfortunately, there are many people who will refuse to let your overwhelming evidence influence their dogma...
Anyone here who's a scientist ever try to use "google scholar"? Unfortunately, it's not very good. What I'd like to see (as an Astrophysicist) is some way to do a search that combined results from difficult-to-navigate scientific sites, such as NASA's ADS abstract service, the Spires HEP database, and the arXiv.org preprint database. Finding what you need on these individual sites is often a pain, and to be able to search a compilation of them would sure be nice for me...
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
/. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)
It's known that many species were already extinct by then, and there was a large asteroid impact around that time, causing some sort of a climate change that finished them off.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
(One of the great things about
I don't know why this is such a recurring theme here on /., but people seem to love to talk about these Rube Goldberg-type solutions to problems that involve a myriad of technology, when they can be solved quickly and easily for cheap. Why spend $3500 for a hypo-allergenic cat (that doesn't stop all allergies, just the one to the specific protein engineered out of them), when you can spend $15 for a month's prescription of zyrtec. $15 * 12 months * 15 years (life of cat) = $2160, is still much less than $3500.
As for housebreaking: I have two cats. The cats were kept with their housebroken mother for the first 5 months of their lives. (The first two is sufficient.) During that time, the mother will automatically housebreak the cats. If these cats are kept with their mother for the first two months of their lives, their future owners will be thankful for it. As an aside, the one thing that burns me up about the pet population problem are these young girls (~20) who LoooooooooooOOOOOooooove kittens. You know, love kittens, until they're about 5-6 months old. (You know, my cats when I got them.) But by that time, the kittens are big, adult sized cats, and they don't want them anymore. So, off to the shelter they go, to be replaced by... MORE KITTENS. I don't know how many pets are euthanized because of stupid people in this fashion... but I'm happy that I did my part to save 2.