Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish. Are these scientists unbiased, or are they in the pocket of some lobby group. It's a critical question. Having said that, it can also most definitely be a form of harassment.
It is easy to see who funded a scholarly paper. The last paragraph is typically used to list the funding sources of the work. The funding agency expects to be listed. If you don't list them, they will probablly cut off the funding.
That said, bias can creep into the scientific process more through funding sources buying silence rather than speech. It is tempting for a researcher to delay publishing results that are critical of the products or goals of a funding agency. It is a problem the scientific community has to face up to (one solution... quit gutting funding for National Science Foundation grants).
There are other ways of buying silence, though. Hauling a researcher in front of a comittee and digging through his personal finances is a great tool. Academic labs typically consist of a researcher, a postdoc or two and some grad students. The lost productivity associated preparing to hand over the raw data for a massive study to a congressional investigation can bring other research to a grinding halt.
The scientific community in this country is fundamentaly open and self correcting. There are flaws. Sometimes bad data gets published or good data gets withheld. For a season or two a researcher might make a nice career out of fabricated data.
In the last, oh, five years or so there has been a tendency to treat the scientific community as a dog that should be brought to heel. The message has gone out "get the wrong result, expect retribution". This might work in the short term to meet political goals but in the long term the administration is poisoning the well.
They are looking at the stretching vibrations of hydrogen attached to oxygen and carbon. These vibrational frequencies are pretty distinct in the infrared reqion due to the differing masses of carbon and oxygen, and also changes in electron density in the bond.
Skydiving is completely unlike the feeling of zero g. The feeling of weightlessness only lasts for the first 2-3 seconds of the jump, and terminal velocity is achieved after 10-11 seconds. You don't even feel the drop after the first few jumps. After that it feels like lying face down on a waterbed. A really noisy waterbed.
By rolling the shoulders in, straightening the feet, and cupping your hand by your side you can turn your body into an airfoil and actually trade some of that downward velocity for horizontal velocity. Subjectively, this feels like upward acceleration, and is an absolutely indescribable sensation.
There are light diodes already commercially avaialable, they're called Faraday isolators. They are used to protect high powered lasers from damage due to back reflection of the beam. Light from the laser goes through a polarizer, then through a rod of suitable material in a strong magnetic field. The field and optical rod rotate the polarization 45 degrees, then the beam goes out, hits something, gets reflected comes back through the rod, gets rotated 45 degrees more and is now blocked by the first polarizer. How to A) polarize both suns and B) build one of these big enough to act as a sail is left as an exercise to the student.
Oxygen is rather nasty stuff and we are fortunate that it is diluted in a lot of nitrogen. It isn't flamable, but it can cause convulsions and central nervous system problems at partial pressures above 2 atm. Even at 1 atm, it can irritate the bronchial tubes. Chronic irritation could, in theory, cause cancer.
As ozone (O3) it causes oxidative damage to cell components, which has been implicated as a cause of cancer. If you think O3 is stretching the definition of oxygen, the O2 molecule has an excited state that can't readily relax back to the ground state, and the excited (singlet) state also readily attacks cell components, possibly inducing cancer. To be sure, oxygen is a low risk (especially considering the risks of not using it) , but depending on how CA sets the bar for warnings, it might be justified
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Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish. Are these scientists unbiased, or are they in the pocket of some lobby group. It's a critical question. Having said that, it can also most definitely be a form of harassment. It is easy to see who funded a scholarly paper. The last paragraph is typically used to list the funding sources of the work. The funding agency expects to be listed. If you don't list them, they will probablly cut off the funding. That said, bias can creep into the scientific process more through funding sources buying silence rather than speech. It is tempting for a researcher to delay publishing results that are critical of the products or goals of a funding agency. It is a problem the scientific community has to face up to (one solution ... quit gutting funding for National Science Foundation grants).
There are other ways of buying silence, though. Hauling a researcher in front of a comittee and digging through his personal finances is a great tool. Academic labs typically consist of a researcher, a postdoc or two and some grad students. The lost productivity associated preparing to hand over the raw data for a massive study to a congressional investigation can bring other research to a grinding halt.
The scientific community in this country is fundamentaly open and self correcting. There are flaws. Sometimes bad data gets published or good data gets withheld. For a season or two a researcher might make a nice career out of fabricated data.
In the last, oh, five years or so there has been a tendency to treat the scientific community as a dog that should be brought to heel. The message has gone out "get the wrong result, expect retribution". This might work in the short term to meet political goals but in the long term the administration is poisoning the well.
Grab an Apple Powerbook 100 series laptop.
They are looking at the stretching vibrations of hydrogen attached to oxygen and carbon. These vibrational frequencies are pretty distinct in the infrared reqion due to the differing masses of carbon and oxygen, and also changes in electron density in the bond.
Skydiving is completely unlike the feeling of zero g. The feeling of weightlessness only lasts for the first 2-3 seconds of the jump, and terminal velocity is achieved after 10-11 seconds. You don't even feel the drop after the first few jumps. After that it feels like lying face down on a waterbed. A really noisy waterbed. By rolling the shoulders in, straightening the feet, and cupping your hand by your side you can turn your body into an airfoil and actually trade some of that downward velocity for horizontal velocity. Subjectively, this feels like upward acceleration, and is an absolutely indescribable sensation.
There are light diodes already commercially avaialable, they're called Faraday isolators. They are used to protect high powered lasers from damage due to back reflection of the beam. Light from the laser goes through a polarizer, then through a rod of suitable material in a strong magnetic field. The field and optical rod rotate the polarization 45 degrees, then the beam goes out, hits something, gets reflected comes back through the rod, gets rotated 45 degrees more and is now blocked by the first polarizer. How to A) polarize both suns and B) build one of these big enough to act as a sail is left as an exercise to the student.
Oxygen is rather nasty stuff and we are fortunate that it is diluted in a lot of nitrogen. It isn't flamable, but it can cause convulsions and central nervous system problems at partial pressures above 2 atm. Even at 1 atm, it can irritate the bronchial tubes. Chronic irritation could, in theory, cause cancer. As ozone (O3) it causes oxidative damage to cell components, which has been implicated as a cause of cancer. If you think O3 is stretching the definition of oxygen, the O2 molecule has an excited state that can't readily relax back to the ground state, and the excited (singlet) state also readily attacks cell components, possibly inducing cancer. To be sure, oxygen is a low risk (especially considering the risks of not using it) , but depending on how CA sets the bar for warnings, it might be justified