"Does it create an ethical obligation, in an journalistic or academic context where citing sources of information is important?"
In an academic context, maybe, maybe not. If he's not the original source of the fact, you're free to - in fact, encouraged to - check out the same sources and refer to those directly.
In a journalistic context, no way. Just as you have zero ethical obligation to refer to a newspaper story that first got you the idea for a blog post.
Um, even if they'd seen his blog post and decided to write an article about the same thing, they have no obligation to credit him or defer to him.
If you see a wire piece about some news, you can look up the same sources then write about the same news without having to acknowledge whatever piece alerted you to the thing in the first place. Copying others text is a definite no-no. Follow others lead to write about the same thing is something every news organization does every day. You don't own the news even if you're first to write about it, no matter how much AP may be lobbying to change that.
What we're talking about here is published, public research, available to anyone with access to a library. From that point of view, it doesn't matter who discovers something potentially harmful, anyone has access to it.
Besides, if human rights and peacefulness are critera for who should be allowed to do research, neither the US nor much of Europa would qualify either.
"Your argument is flawed, because they are already a large military power who have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to conquer the world."
This is all about openly published research. Research that is open to everyone no matter where it's performed. Military considerations do not enter into it.
Yes, there is cheating going on, of course there is. Problem is, cheating is going on elsewhere too, and with only anecdotal evidence it's hard to determine to what degree there really is more cheating in China than in, say, the US or Europe, and to what degree it is a matter of perception.
"And it's also helped by the fact that in China researchers are judged by number of papers they put out [...]"
Yep. But so are researchers everywhere. Your publication count - how many papers, with what impact factor - largely determines your future career no matter where you work. Is that good? No. There's lots of negatives with such a system. Is it a fact of life at the moment? Yes, unfortunately.
"Quality of Chinese research in general is still low. "
Which is why I was asking for a rigorous comparison. My feeling is - I have little hard data - that cheating is more common at lower-level schools than higher-level ones; and at earlier career stages than at later ones, simply because the benefits of cheating is greater, and the risk of getting caught is smaller, in the former cases than the latter.
So to determine relative levels of scientific fraud you need to control for both those factors, and compare research at similar quality levels, from comparable institutions, performed by people at similar stages in their careers. Not easy. But necessary if we're going to go from guesses to real data.
A step rise in Chinese research - and in Indian, and other newly developed countries - means more total research happening around the world. More research and more results is a win for everyone.
In addition, the spread of research efforts mean that more avenues are explored, and that progress is not as dependent on the temporary political and scientific winds in any particular country or region.
On the low-power mobile and embedded side x86 is out. Never mind power-performance - absolute power levels is what matters most. And the big volume in cpus is in this market, from smartphones on the upper end down to windshield wiper controllers and stuff like that on the low end.
On the very, very high end, again, there's good reason not to use x86, and instead do something like Hitatchis Sparc-based cpus. You have basically low or no concern for binary compatibility - you're most likely running a custom-rolled linux and building all your applications from source or from scratch.
You need things like on-chip support for specialized high-speed interconnects, and power-performance as well as absolute power consumption becomes hugely important when you're trying to cram half a million cores into one single building.
Most modern built-in power converters and supplies can handle pretty much anything - if you look at the power brick for your computer, chances are it says "100-240V, 50-60Hz". It's expensive to run separate production lines, so companies have tried to make stuff as universal as possible.
Older things here in Japan often have a small switch at the back, marked "50/60". You set it according to where you live.
Even in the very worst case, Tokyo is not going to have a problem. All effects will be local, within a few kilometers of the site - bad, of course, but with a fairly limited range. There's just no comparison to the devastation from the earthquake.
What saddens me most is that foreign media focuses on the nuclear reactor while downplaying the earthquake and tsunami.
Nah, it's taking the scenic route. It's booked shipment across the pacific, is crossing the Panama canal and headed for Rotterdam harbour. There it'll get off, hitch-hike to Amsterdam where it'll hook up for three weeks with a post-functionalist performance artist from Berlin named Hilda. Once they're out of booze and drugs they'll take the train southeast, get beat up by Italian police when they try to consummate their love at midnight in Fontana de Trevi, then sneak aboard a bulk freighter headed across the Suez.
It'll get to India; it's just taking a a bit of time.
"Funny that in Kobe where I was nothing could be felt, while in Osaka a friend of mine did notice something."
Yes, I was at my desk when it happened, and I wasn't sure if it was an actual earthquake, or if I was just tired and getting a little dizzy. Only when we saw the office door rock back and forth did we realize it really was an earthquake.
"But still, Tokyo escaped most of the damage along with the rest of the country further south where they use 60Hz power, so my question remains: does the 60/50Hz split make it harder to balance power across Japan's grid?"
Yes. It was in the news yesterday.
About 30% of the power in Japan is nuclear. So even if all of northern Honshu is off the grid that's still not a huge part of the total capacity. But with the country effectively split into two separate systems you end up with severe shortages in the northeast while we have plenty of power here in the west, and with no way of redistributing it.
The Japanese 10 petaflops-scale K computer in Kobe uses Sparc-compatible cpus from Fujitsu. Sounds like a good idea if you want to build know-how, not just a machine.
Complementary scales. The Japanese shindo scale describes the effects on a particular point on the surface; this is rather more practically relevant for people in the area than the amount of energy released at the source. So the one and same earthquake is a seven around Sendai, a five near Tokyo and a two in the Osaka area.
Most people get a phone - smartphone included - and use it. They don't particularly care about different OS versions, follow release announcements or read blogs that obsessively list the changelogs from minor update to minor update. They get their Samsung or HTC or Xperia and use it. If an update comes their way it's something between a delightful surprise and an unwelcome source of anxiety.
Ask most Android or iOS users and they'll have no idea what version they use. They are likely to know when a new phone model is available, but not the version of the OS.
The people who care about OS versions and want to run the latest at all times are geeks. We are a small minority, and we're only a vocal minority on the geek blogs and geek websites that only geeks visit.
You can. And as long as you treat the stock market as a longer-term investment - a place to park your money - the HFT activity isn't going to matter to you. Buy a portfolio or shares in a couple of index funds, then revisit your holdings oh, once a year or so. No problem. In a ten or twenty year time-frame you'll have done much better than the mattress or a bank account, and likely be ahead of bondholders.
But trying to play the stock market - to trade your way to wealth - is a losers game today if you're an individual investor without the resources and technical know-how to keep up with other automated traders.
Because clearly, ever more HFT is exactly what everyone needs!
If you are an automated trader then you do need any speed you can get. If you aren't - well, you probably don't have any business being on the stock exchange any more. A bit more or less speed is not going to make any difference; you're hopelessly outgunned either way.
A tablet with video output would be very convenient for presentations, though. Quite a lot of people do slide presentations as part of their work - researchers, university teachers, salespeople and public relations-people and many others. This would mean one less reason to bring a notebook in addition to - or instead of - your tablet.
For presentations the port absolutely has to have a VGA output or be easily converted to it. Most projectors in public venues have only VGA input - I've yet to see a digital input offered anywhere so far - and without it, a tablet would be useless for this.
I think he meant use as in active information transfer. Which I also doubt the brain does; this is a noisy, largely stationary background signal that isn't really able to carry any detailed meaning. Just as for crayfish (good example), our networks have evolved to work best in its presence, but that doesn't mean we actively make use of it in any positive way.
Most national elections around the world is between multiple viable candidates or parties, not just two. If anything, distrust in government seems stronger in countries like the US that allow only two viable choices.
I guess that with only two candidates most people have no choice that actually agrees with their views. They have to hold their nose and pick the least disagreeable, or shrug off the election as meaningless.
With a more proportional system and more viable candidates most people can find somebody that roughly aligns with their views, and they still get some level of representation even if they aren't the majority.
Well, almost all journal papers out there are under strict copyright - you have no rights whatsoever to use those texts, commercially or not, other than the normal exceptions for citation and commentary. So as far as the paper itself goes, this is already more permissive than almost any other journal out there.
And the licence applies to the paper itself, and Creative Commons in general applies to creative works, not scientific results - that kind of thing is generally covered by patents. So the results themselves are not affected. Of course that doesn't mean you can use the results freely; if there's commercial potential it's likely already being patented by the researchers or their sponsoring institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does it create an ethical obligation, in an journalistic or academic context where citing sources of information is important?"
In an academic context, maybe, maybe not. If he's not the original source of the fact, you're free to - in fact, encouraged to - check out the same sources and refer to those directly.
In a journalistic context, no way. Just as you have zero ethical obligation to refer to a newspaper story that first got you the idea for a blog post.
Um, even if they'd seen his blog post and decided to write an article about the same thing, they have no obligation to credit him or defer to him.
If you see a wire piece about some news, you can look up the same sources then write about the same news without having to acknowledge whatever piece alerted you to the thing in the first place. Copying others text is a definite no-no. Follow others lead to write about the same thing is something every news organization does every day. You don't own the news even if you're first to write about it, no matter how much AP may be lobbying to change that.
What we're talking about here is published, public research, available to anyone with access to a library. From that point of view, it doesn't matter who discovers something potentially harmful, anyone has access to it.
Besides, if human rights and peacefulness are critera for who should be allowed to do research, neither the US nor much of Europa would qualify either.
"Your argument is flawed, because they are already a large military power who have repeatedly demonstrated their desire to conquer the world."
This is all about openly published research. Research that is open to everyone no matter where it's performed. Military considerations do not enter into it.
Yes, there is cheating going on, of course there is. Problem is, cheating is going on elsewhere too, and with only anecdotal evidence it's hard to determine to what degree there really is more cheating in China than in, say, the US or Europe, and to what degree it is a matter of perception.
"And it's also helped by the fact that in China researchers are judged by number of papers they put out [...]"
Yep. But so are researchers everywhere. Your publication count - how many papers, with what impact factor - largely determines your future career no matter where you work. Is that good? No. There's lots of negatives with such a system. Is it a fact of life at the moment? Yes, unfortunately.
"Quality of Chinese research in general is still low. "
Which is why I was asking for a rigorous comparison. My feeling is - I have little hard data - that cheating is more common at lower-level schools than higher-level ones; and at earlier career stages than at later ones, simply because the benefits of cheating is greater, and the risk of getting caught is smaller, in the former cases than the latter.
So to determine relative levels of scientific fraud you need to control for both those factors, and compare research at similar quality levels, from comparable institutions, performed by people at similar stages in their careers. Not easy. But necessary if we're going to go from guesses to real data.
A step rise in Chinese research - and in Indian, and other newly developed countries - means more total research happening around the world. More research and more results is a win for everyone.
In addition, the spread of research efforts mean that more avenues are explored, and that progress is not as dependent on the temporary political and scientific winds in any particular country or region.
You have any numbers supporting that assertion? Specifically, is it true when weighted by research impact?
"The worst thing that can happen to a programming language you use is that Stroustrup started to create it."
On the low-power mobile and embedded side x86 is out. Never mind power-performance - absolute power levels is what matters most. And the big volume in cpus is in this market, from smartphones on the upper end down to windshield wiper controllers and stuff like that on the low end.
On the very, very high end, again, there's good reason not to use x86, and instead do something like Hitatchis Sparc-based cpus. You have basically low or no concern for binary compatibility - you're most likely running a custom-rolled linux and building all your applications from source or from scratch.
You need things like on-chip support for specialized high-speed interconnects, and power-performance as well as absolute power consumption becomes hugely important when you're trying to cram half a million cores into one single building.
Many things, such as lights, don't care.
Most modern built-in power converters and supplies can handle pretty much anything - if you look at the power brick for your computer, chances are it says "100-240V, 50-60Hz". It's expensive to run separate production lines, so companies have tried to make stuff as universal as possible.
Older things here in Japan often have a small switch at the back, marked "50/60". You set it according to where you live.
Even in the very worst case, Tokyo is not going to have a problem. All effects will be local, within a few kilometers of the site - bad, of course, but with a fairly limited range. There's just no comparison to the devastation from the earthquake.
What saddens me most is that foreign media focuses on the nuclear reactor while downplaying the earthquake and tsunami.
Nah, it's taking the scenic route. It's booked shipment across the pacific, is crossing the Panama canal and headed for Rotterdam harbour. There it'll get off, hitch-hike to Amsterdam where it'll hook up for three weeks with a post-functionalist performance artist from Berlin named Hilda. Once they're out of booze and drugs they'll take the train southeast, get beat up by Italian police when they try to consummate their love at midnight in Fontana de Trevi, then sneak aboard a bulk freighter headed across the Suez.
It'll get to India; it's just taking a a bit of time.
"Funny that in Kobe where I was nothing could be felt, while in Osaka a friend of mine did notice something."
Yes, I was at my desk when it happened, and I wasn't sure if it was an actual earthquake, or if I was just tired and getting a little dizzy. Only when we saw the office door rock back and forth did we realize it really was an earthquake.
"But still, Tokyo escaped most of the damage along with the rest of the country further south where they use 60Hz power, so my question remains: does the 60/50Hz split make it harder to balance power across Japan's grid?"
Yes. It was in the news yesterday.
About 30% of the power in Japan is nuclear. So even if all of northern Honshu is off the grid that's still not a huge part of the total capacity. But with the country effectively split into two separate systems you end up with severe shortages in the northeast while we have plenty of power here in the west, and with no way of redistributing it.
The Japanese 10 petaflops-scale K computer in Kobe uses Sparc-compatible cpus from Fujitsu. Sounds like a good idea if you want to build know-how, not just a machine.
Complementary scales. The Japanese shindo scale describes the effects on a particular point on the surface; this is rather more practically relevant for people in the area than the amount of energy released at the source. So the one and same earthquake is a seven around Sendai, a five near Tokyo and a two in the Osaka area.
Since the Dalvik VM is nothing like the Java VM, anything that applies for it is not unlikely to apply for any VM-based dynamical language.
Consumers don't care about updates.
Most people get a phone - smartphone included - and use it. They don't particularly care about different OS versions, follow release announcements or read blogs that obsessively list the changelogs from minor update to minor update. They get their Samsung or HTC or Xperia and use it. If an update comes their way it's something between a delightful surprise and an unwelcome source of anxiety.
Ask most Android or iOS users and they'll have no idea what version they use. They are likely to know when a new phone model is available, but not the version of the OS.
The people who care about OS versions and want to run the latest at all times are geeks. We are a small minority, and we're only a vocal minority on the geek blogs and geek websites that only geeks visit.
You can. And as long as you treat the stock market as a longer-term investment - a place to park your money - the HFT activity isn't going to matter to you. Buy a portfolio or shares in a couple of index funds, then revisit your holdings oh, once a year or so. No problem. In a ten or twenty year time-frame you'll have done much better than the mattress or a bank account, and likely be ahead of bondholders.
But trying to play the stock market - to trade your way to wealth - is a losers game today if you're an individual investor without the resources and technical know-how to keep up with other automated traders.
If you are an automated trader then you do need any speed you can get. If you aren't - well, you probably don't have any business being on the stock exchange any more. A bit more or less speed is not going to make any difference; you're hopelessly outgunned either way.
A tablet with video output would be very convenient for presentations, though. Quite a lot of people do slide presentations as part of their work - researchers, university teachers, salespeople and public relations-people and many others. This would mean one less reason to bring a notebook in addition to - or instead of - your tablet.
For presentations the port absolutely has to have a VGA output or be easily converted to it. Most projectors in public venues have only VGA input - I've yet to see a digital input offered anywhere so far - and without it, a tablet would be useless for this.
I think he meant use as in active information transfer. Which I also doubt the brain does; this is a noisy, largely stationary background signal that isn't really able to carry any detailed meaning. Just as for crayfish (good example), our networks have evolved to work best in its presence, but that doesn't mean we actively make use of it in any positive way.
Here's another case, in Moscow, reported earlier : http://www.news.com.au/technology/leukaemia-sufferer-stepan-supin-stays-home-sends-robot-to-school/story-e6frfro0-1225992845324
Most national elections around the world is between multiple viable candidates or parties, not just two. If anything, distrust in government seems stronger in countries like the US that allow only two viable choices.
I guess that with only two candidates most people have no choice that actually agrees with their views. They have to hold their nose and pick the least disagreeable, or shrug off the election as meaningless.
With a more proportional system and more viable candidates most people can find somebody that roughly aligns with their views, and they still get some level of representation even if they aren't the majority.
Well, almost all journal papers out there are under strict copyright - you have no rights whatsoever to use those texts, commercially or not, other than the normal exceptions for citation and commentary. So as far as the paper itself goes, this is already more permissive than almost any other journal out there.
And the licence applies to the paper itself, and Creative Commons in general applies to creative works, not scientific results - that kind of thing is generally covered by patents. So the results themselves are not affected. Of course that doesn't mean you can use the results freely; if there's commercial potential it's likely already being patented by the researchers or their sponsoring institutions.