I just was going to mention the CMU project and someone beat me to it. They drove nearly autonomously from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. Here are some (old) relevant links:
The CMU project was not anything that was near consumer-ready and it also was not 100% autonomous. IIRC, humans had to intervene in more complicated driving scenarios and the autonomous system handled the open highway stuff. they report a figure of 96% or so autonomy by miles driven on a shorter trip from Pittsburgh to DC. So it's not like they had everything figured out back in 1995. But still...1995!
Which would you rather be hit with, a 20 MPH wind, or a 20MPH wall of water? Remind me again how they are the same.
If you are trying to figure out what formed some canyons, the WHAT and not just HOW is pretty important. If you are just going to call it 'flow' why bother looking at it at all?
Water and wind both are fluids. They have very different properties, but follow essentially the same physics. That is how they are the same.
The analogy with being hit once by a wave of the same speed is not apt. Although it appears clear now that water existed on Mars, the abundance of this still is being investigated as is the history and geographic distribution. It is possible that water flowed only sporadically in many areas of Mars. If that is the case, then a slower but more persistent wind could have done a significant amount of the erosion work. Thus, it is more like the question of being hit by a 20 MPH wall of water once or a 2 MPH breeze (with occasional strong gusts) for several millennia. If I was a rock, I might prefer the water.
And if I remember correctly, Martian wind often is in the form of sandstorms. So this would be fast moving with an abrasive in the fluid to do the mechanical scouring work.
Although I wouldn't simply assume wind-based erosion to be the case on Mars, I don't understand how it seems so implausible.
Although there is some truth to that, there typically is lots of diversity in PhD graduates from any one department due to the diversity of research groups/advising. A bulk (by time at least) of the undergrad education is coursework and most BS graduates in a CS department have all taken 70-90% the same courses. So there perhaps is some level of uniformity there. In contrast, the bulk of a PhD education is research-oriented and greatly impacted by the advisor you have / research lab you're in. There can be quite a bit of diversity in both culture and ideas coming out of one academic department.
This is an excellent comment. Would bump you up if I had mod points. The notion of practicing so that you can solve problems quickly is hugely important on these exams (any exam with a time limit).
The value of prep courses does extend beyond practicing, though. In particular, testing for things like arcane vocabulary encourages prep courses (or at least books and self prep). There also is some value in coaching and exam strategy. I suspect that this could lead to increases in people's scores (e.g., coaching students to not answer a question if they are unsure of the answer since, at least until the new format, you lose points for wrong answers).
The alliance with Khan Academy is interesting. The education system is stacked heavily in favor of those from the higher rungs of the economic ladder. Although it's not strictly about money (a free course is not useful if culture/family/teachers do not push students to take it and take it seriously), this is a nice step in the right direction.
but that's the problem. $32k will only get you 20hrs per week. It varies by institution, but the full cost of a TA (stipend, tuition, fringe, etc.) is in the $30k range and for that you only can require they work 20 hours a week on average.
As far as feedback is concerned, it varies wildly by institution, professor, type of course, etc.
And I still don't see how you'd teach a lab oriented course (physics, many engineering subjects) in an online fashion. Maybe lecture, but that lab experience is necessary.
One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.
That's not that far off from being reasonable.
If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.
A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two. One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.
There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.
Bullshit. Stockbrokers and lawyers are licensed and subsidized. The supply is artificially limited by government fiat, and demand is artificially increased. Not so for mechanics and programmers. And that's the reason for the difference. It has nothing to do with natural supply and demand.
Artificially limited by fiat? This suggests there is a quota for how many lawyers can be licensed in a given year. I am unaware of such a limit. Having to pass an examination is not the same thing.
The parent has a good point about getting involved in research. It is good for experience, connections, fun (you might get to work on some cool stuff, after all), etc. It is especially valuable if you intend to go to graduate school, but certainly won't hurt your prospects for getting a job with a BS.
I notice lots of responders advising that you go to this or that school. I am faculty in mechanical engineering at a top-tier university and I can tell you the following: as long as you go somewhere reputable and work hard, you should be fine. Ask 10 different people and you'll get 10 different recommendations about what is the best school to put you on a specific career path. In my opinion, the identity of the "best" school depends on the individual. Personal happiness matters as much as US News and World Report rankings. (That being said, if you're capable of getting in to a top-10 engineering program then you'd have to have a pretty big personal reason to settle for someplace ranked 100+.)
What you should do no matter where you wind up is try to get an internship with SpaceX or someone else in that industry. Internships are a great potential pathway to a full-time offer when you graduate as well as a great way for you to figure out if this is really where you want to work.
Going back to the "which college" issue, I believe SpaceX and companies like them take interns from numerous institutions. Some intern hiring has a geographic bias (because companies do not always offer relocation benefits). But I never would choose a university solely for its proximity to a particular company.
To convey my own observations: One of my graduate students interned with SpaceX this past summer (after working for Tesla Motors the summer prior). Although we are a highly reputable engineering school (ranked in top 15 by USN&WR), we're not MIT or CalTech and SpaceX isn't located where we are. Yet this didn't stop my student (and a few undergrads I know here) from landing internships with SpaceX.
The bottom line is that the school is only part of the equation. You need to work hard when you get there and it helps an awful lot to go someplace you will be happy (or else you won't want to work very hard).
Chances are someone with a White Sounding name a Todd vs. Tyrone will get a grant because chances are better that a Todd will have more political connections then a Tyrone will.
Although perhaps this type of bias does crop up in some cases, there actually is political pressure to give grants to a "Tyrone" over a "Todd". For example, the NSF proposal review criteria include consideration of the "Broader Impacts" of the research. One way to address this criterion is to include outreach activities in your proposal that would include underrepresented minorities (could be anything from interacting with minority high school students to involving undergraduate minorities in the research project). So faculty who are black or who are at a historically black university might plausibly have an advantage in this aspect of the review process. There even is pressure from NSF such that any NSF Research Center (major multimillion dollar centers that involve multiple universities) oftentimes must include at least one historically minority institution.
So yes, it is true that PMs must defend the awards they give to politicians and other superiors and therefore are subject to political pressures. However, such pressures are not uniformly stacked against minority groups. I am unfamiliar with NIH, but there is at least some effort to level the field at NSF. (All of that being said, it doesn't matter what your outreach activities look like if the intellectual aspects are judged inadequate by the review panel, which is more on-point to what TFA is talking about. All I'm saying here is that if the intellectual merit of two proposals are deemed equal, the proposal with more minority outreach/participation actually would get the nod at NSF.)
Why would you expect scientists in academia to behave differently from people in any other walk of life? Did you expect monks?
It is important to remember that science is a process. It is folly to look at any one study and bet your life on the results (because there may have been errors in the experiment, the data was limited in size/scope, or the researcher was a hack of the type that you suggest). It only is meaningful to look at a body of work over time. To borrow and tweak your phraseology a bit, I would never do something because a scientist says so, but I would be inclined on the basis that science says so. If a topic is important, there will be more than one scientist working in the area and, eventually, the scientific process should self correct for mistakes and overreaches by any one individual. If one researcher is screaming about the greatness of furry purple nipples, then eventually someone else will contest this claim (in their own self-aggrandizing-interest; perhaps in an effort to advance their own theory about slippery green nipples) and bring to light the deficiencies of the original work. These things get sorted out on important matters, albeit on a rather slow time scale compared to the patience of the average onlooker (think years and decades).
Also, if the professor is paying for the grad student, paying for the equipment/supplies the grad student is using, or committing time to advise him/her, then the faculty member's name certainly should go on the paper. I suppose it is akin to a situation in which an employee at a private company does work on company time/with company equipment and wants to publish or patent it--it's not like the employee can do this without company permission or giving the company credit in some form. You may disagree with this in principle, but the fact is that this reality exists pretty much anywhere you go. So it's not like professors are outliers on this one. (Now, if the grad student did the research completely on his/her own time with no supervision from the professor and with no equipment/supplies from the professor's lab, then maybe there is an issue. But I think such situations are exceptionally rare.)
This is nothing new, though perhaps the scale is larger. Engineering students have been paying more than most other students for decades. The difference was that these differences were called "lab fees" rather than differential tuition. However, they were just as mandatory as tuition. Now by calling tuition, it may occasionally benefit students in terms of some loans and scholarships (occasionally, money can be used for tuition but not for things called fees).
Differential tuition also occurs for business schools, particularly for MBA programs.
What I don't understand is why the/. crowed is so shocked this. The truth is that engineering degrees are more expensive to produce. Usually if a good or service is more expensive to produce, it costs more to buy. The lab fees that engineering students pay covers only a small fraction of the additional cost of engineering education. Have you ever looked at the difference between the salary for an engineering professor and that of a professor in a liberal arts field? This is a consequence of supply and demand.
I'm not saying an engineering degree should cost 10x or even 2x what a LA degree costs. My point simply is that differential tuition is a reaction to basic market forces that we've been ignoring for a long time.
Crohn's disease is pretty common, so how come it wasn't diagnosed? The idiot medicos just pocketed the money for tests, hospital stays, appointments, medical certs etc for 8 years while the girl suffered? Hmmm. Come to think of it I'm not that surprised. There are far more quacks out there than decent doctors in my experience.
Well, Wikipedia can be suspect at times, but here's what it says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crohn%27s_disease#Symptoms):
Many people with Crohn's disease have symptoms for years prior to the diagnosis.[12] The usual onset is between 15 and 30 years of age but can occur at any age.[13] Because of the 'patchy' nature of the gastrointestinal disease and the depth of tissue involvement, initial symptoms can be more vague than with ulcerative colitis. People with Crohn's disease will go through periods of flare-ups and remission.
Really sounds to me like a combo of on-again off-again symptoms and symptoms that are fairly generic (i.e., shared w/ lots of conditions) than doctors and labs trying to squeeze ever last buck out of someone and their insurance. Now, if there is a problem if the first thing they do is run expensive tests for exotic diseases or something like that. I mean, a responsible physician would consider the a priori odds of each condition. And while I'm sure there are plenty of "quacks" out there, I'm not sure that's the first conclusion I would reach for in this particular case.
This comment is spot-on. If the AP is cracking down on the DoD for this, they also need to crack down on PR firms that issue retouched photos of celebrities.
I think I would agree with the AP if the background they added made it look like she was in the field or something. That would have been a gross misrepresentation of the facts. This was just a headshot. The only people who should be upset at the retouching are people interested in dating the General.
And let's not forget the AP probably would have whined (albeit, not publicly) had the DoD issued the original, grainy photo with the cluttered background.
Very true. It is also true that if you think what someone puts on Facebook and MySpace is relevant to their academic performance, then you shouldn't be in charge of admissions decisions for a good school, or any school. If you think it's relevant to job performance, you shouldn't be making hiring decisions, either.
I'll play devil's advocate here. I happen to agree that this kind of thing shouldn't matter, but I think I understand the admissions perspective:
For the college admissions people this is an odds game. The number of applicants who are qualified based on test scores, grades and all the normal junk is larger than the number of spaces they have. Given this, how do they pare it down? Perhaps Googling or checking out the Facebook/MySpace pages for some of the "borderline" students is more practical than throwing darts? I'm guessing their belief is that a student who gave in to peer pressure and the like in high school has worse odds of being successful in college where such pressures go unchecked by parents, etc. I'm not saying it's right, but I think I see where they're coming from.
Now, all of that being said, I think students who are somewhat sheltered in high school are just as likely, and perhaps even more likely, to succumb to the temptations and pressures of college life. I've seen more than a couple people who were honors students in high school simply go off the deep end upon arriving at college. Conversely, I've known several who were "party types" in high school who decided that it was time to get serious about life when they got to college and have been very successful since then. It's just really hard to know how people will react until you do the experiment.
I for one am glad that MySpace and camera phones weren't around when I was a teenager!
Given the researcher's CV includes teaching software engineering at Boston University for several years, and being a project lead for Lotus for many years before that, I imagine he does already have many ideas and sources already. However, I imagine Ask Slashdot could provide at least two useful things for a PhD: direct data on what the "popular view amongst the technically-minded" is about what makes software better, and a wide and easily-cast net for picking up any links or texts that are in use that he might not be aware of.
His PhD seems to be a late-career attempt to crack the big philosophical nut, rather than an early-twentysomething scratching around for an idea. So this Ask Slashdot question seems to be an attempt to search every corner for data, however unlikely, rather than a lazy lack of effort.
You sort-of made my point for me, yet implied I called the guy lazy. Not so.
My use of the term "hypothesis-generating activity" is not derogatory. In fact, I think his use of Ask Slashdot, while likely to have a low SNR, is an interesting non-scientific way to gauge what other SE-types are thinking.
As you say, he can gauge the "popular view amongst the technically minded." No one would ever cite a Slashdot discussion as scientific evidence for anything. However, he can mine the results for ideas that he can firm up into research hypotheses he can then try to validate through other means. Thus, the distinction between hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-validating activities.
Your point about his already having a solid background in SE is well taken. In fact, his experience may be exactly why he used Ask Slashdot: he's been around enough to know he doesn't know everything.
I was sort of thinking this, but I was also wondering what possible value the information he got from this site could be in what should be a well-referenced work. Writing a thesis and backing it up with quotes from random people on the Internet doesn't seem like the wisest decision.
This isn't necessarily his/her intention. The OP could just be looking for some general ideas to get going (or to rule out bad ones before proceeding). I see this as a hypothesis-generating activity, not one in which he/she'd expect to get hypothesis-validating information.
What took awhile (and was solved with a fairly low-tech solution : scotch tape) was how to make a single layer of graphene to measure, whereas graphite usually rolled off into multi-layer pieces.
I met one of the students from the GT group recently and he mentioned the scotch tape solution and said he said his lab were investigating how to manufacture the material practically. For all it's promise, I got the impression that two or three major breakthroughs were needed to make it viable. It's definitely a few years away. (I mean, they're not even up to duct tape yet!)
They're trading cost for risk. It's pretty much a law of the universe that you have to pay in order to reduce your risk (if you're not gaining something else by increasing risk, then you're a moron plain and simple). Although the extra engineering and replicated functionality are added costs, there clearly is someone at DARPA who believes the added costs are likely to be offset by corresponding reductions in risk. Of course, they're not 100% sure of this themselves, which is why part of the work is a study the risk-adjusted economics of the approach.
Along the risk-mitigation line, one of the benefits of a micro-sat cluster would be that you could upgrade its capabilities easier or repair it by replacing failed units. It's easier to add a new sat to the cluster (and deorbit any antiquated/damaged ones) than to physically link up with a sat in orbit in order to effect repairs (that requires people, space walks, etc.). I would guess that's what they mean by "diversification of launch and orbit failure risk." Obviously you're screwed if your entire constellation gets wiped out, but you are better off if it's only one that bites the dust.
almost without a doubt they may have exaggerated quite a bit, but the concept seems kinda solid, maybe similar to how a Turbo or SuperCharger works, only rather than increasing the acceleration, the energy goes toward fuel economy.
No, if I understood the limited info available, it isn't like a turbo-/super-charger at all. it runs using a pneumatic motor or something close to it, not a standard internal combustion engine. At low speeds, a tank containing compressed air powers the motor and no combustion is needed; at higher speeds, they apparently do some sort of thermodynamic voodoo to get extra power out (but if I'm reading this correctly, it has to do with heating the compressed air to get a better rate of work out of it, not from combusting the fuel charge in the cylinder directly--though I must admit the literature is quite vague and they perhaps are doing something IC-like).
Of course, you aren't getting rid of carbon--you're just not dumping it out your tailpipe. Whether this vehicle is green on the whole depends on how much carbon it takes to compress the air into the tank. As a rule of thumb, it's more green to take power from the grid than to convert fossil-/bio-fuel locally. But I won't buy in until someone does the accounting.
On a related note, some in the academic research community currently are looking into fluid power (hydraulics & pneumatics) for implementing hybrid vehicles (similar to today's gas-electric, but w/o the Li-Ion batteries to catch on fire!). I know that the NSF ERC CCEFP http://www.ccefp.org/ has a hybrid pneumatic car as one of their testbeds (unfortunately, they don't have much info about it on the website).
Your comments indicate a common, fundamental problem that explains why so few people have a grasp of what constitutes "science" beyond an elementary-school level. How, exactly, is driving the development of new theories from unexplained observations a "limited view" of science?...
Well, I am quite certain my understanding of science exceeds that of a 4th grader. But we'll get to that in a minute. Another poster (techno-vampire) sums up the wormhole issue quite well:
In this case, theory says that wormholes could exist, but says little if anything about what they'd look like. Before we start looking for evidence, we need to have an idea of what we're looking for and this speculation might give us that. Even if we end up disproving this idea, we've still learned something from it, so it's not completely worthless as long as it makes testable predictions.
This is a great point. E.g., Einstein's theories predicted, among other things, an ultimate speed limit that we had no yet observed. That it had not yet been observed did not make the quest for such an observation (or counterobservation) scientific. Another good example is the cosmological constant. Einstein thought it up, then thought it was one of his greatest failures; others have since found evidence that the universe is expanding. The debate on that topic is ongoing, but the point remains: you have to postulate that something exists before you can test it.
As for your remarks regarding psuedoscientific claims...I don't disagree that many people abuse logic in the name of making a buck, but I think you should go read Karl Popper ("Conjectures and Refutations" among others) or T.S. Kuhn ("The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"). Any claim is scientific if it can be falsified by observation (sometimes indirect). The fallacy that the psuedoscience crowd leverages often is that being a scientifically falsifiable claim makes it true. In actuality, all scientific theories are provisional and *never* are proved true (due to the problem of induction, as articulated by David Hume in the 18th century). The only thing you can do is try to refute them very diligently and then take a leap of faith to believe in them when attempts at refutation have failed (and no better theory exists).
So, a psuedoscientist would say "X is true because X is refutable but no one has done so" and forgets to mention that no one has tried (or they go through some sort of half-assed study with piss-poor methodology and declare victory). I think if you ask the authors of the wormhole work, they'd tell you they have no idea whether the theory will stand up to scrutiny, but that they are anxious to put it to the test and would not expect others to believe it is true should it turn out to be untestable.
Absolutely. I wish I could mod you up, but I've already posted in this discussion.:(
I think some people are quibbling with Step 1: Define the Question. Their complaint is that this is just a silly question that doesn't really matter (since we don't have proof that these things exist, why bother trying to figure out how they could exist...). I'm not of that mind, but clearly many people think that new theories must arise strictly from unexplained observations (I observed the apple fall down rather than up, but I have no theory to tell me why...). This is a rather limited view of science, IMHO (especially for phenomena we can't observe in a lab or nature). If scientists never are able to connect this theory to observation, it simply will fall into the dustbin of history. But that doesn't preclude it from being part of the scientific discussion until it is refuted conclusively.
Slashdot Mirror
I just was going to mention the CMU project and someone beat me to it. They drove nearly autonomously from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. Here are some (old) relevant links:
The CMU project was not anything that was near consumer-ready and it also was not 100% autonomous. IIRC, humans had to intervene in more complicated driving scenarios and the autonomous system handled the open highway stuff. they report a figure of 96% or so autonomy by miles driven on a shorter trip from Pittsburgh to DC. So it's not like they had everything figured out back in 1995. But still...1995!
Which would you rather be hit with, a 20 MPH wind, or a 20MPH wall of water? Remind me again how they are the same.
If you are trying to figure out what formed some canyons, the WHAT and not just HOW is pretty important. If you are just going to call it 'flow' why bother looking at it at all?
Water and wind both are fluids. They have very different properties, but follow essentially the same physics. That is how they are the same.
The analogy with being hit once by a wave of the same speed is not apt. Although it appears clear now that water existed on Mars, the abundance of this still is being investigated as is the history and geographic distribution. It is possible that water flowed only sporadically in many areas of Mars. If that is the case, then a slower but more persistent wind could have done a significant amount of the erosion work. Thus, it is more like the question of being hit by a 20 MPH wall of water once or a 2 MPH breeze (with occasional strong gusts) for several millennia. If I was a rock, I might prefer the water.
And if I remember correctly, Martian wind often is in the form of sandstorms. So this would be fast moving with an abrasive in the fluid to do the mechanical scouring work.
Although I wouldn't simply assume wind-based erosion to be the case on Mars, I don't understand how it seems so implausible.
Although there is some truth to that, there typically is lots of diversity in PhD graduates from any one department due to the diversity of research groups/advising. A bulk (by time at least) of the undergrad education is coursework and most BS graduates in a CS department have all taken 70-90% the same courses. So there perhaps is some level of uniformity there. In contrast, the bulk of a PhD education is research-oriented and greatly impacted by the advisor you have / research lab you're in. There can be quite a bit of diversity in both culture and ideas coming out of one academic department.
This is an excellent comment. Would bump you up if I had mod points. The notion of practicing so that you can solve problems quickly is hugely important on these exams (any exam with a time limit).
The value of prep courses does extend beyond practicing, though. In particular, testing for things like arcane vocabulary encourages prep courses (or at least books and self prep). There also is some value in coaching and exam strategy. I suspect that this could lead to increases in people's scores (e.g., coaching students to not answer a question if they are unsure of the answer since, at least until the new format, you lose points for wrong answers).
The alliance with Khan Academy is interesting. The education system is stacked heavily in favor of those from the higher rungs of the economic ladder. Although it's not strictly about money (a free course is not useful if culture/family/teachers do not push students to take it and take it seriously), this is a nice step in the right direction.
There's a bunch of hydrocarbons that form liquids at the temperatures found on mars.
At what pressure? This matters as much as temperature in determining the phase of a substance.
but that's the problem. $32k will only get you 20hrs per week. It varies by institution, but the full cost of a TA (stipend, tuition, fringe, etc.) is in the $30k range and for that you only can require they work 20 hours a week on average.
As far as feedback is concerned, it varies wildly by institution, professor, type of course, etc.
And I still don't see how you'd teach a lab oriented course (physics, many engineering subjects) in an online fashion. Maybe lecture, but that lab experience is necessary.
160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.
$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.
160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.
One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.
That's not that far off from being reasonable.
If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.
A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two. One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.
There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.
Bullshit. Stockbrokers and lawyers are licensed and subsidized. The supply is artificially limited by government fiat, and demand is artificially increased. Not so for mechanics and programmers. And that's the reason for the difference. It has nothing to do with natural supply and demand.
Artificially limited by fiat? This suggests there is a quota for how many lawyers can be licensed in a given year. I am unaware of such a limit. Having to pass an examination is not the same thing.
The parent has a good point about getting involved in research. It is good for experience, connections, fun (you might get to work on some cool stuff, after all), etc. It is especially valuable if you intend to go to graduate school, but certainly won't hurt your prospects for getting a job with a BS.
I notice lots of responders advising that you go to this or that school. I am faculty in mechanical engineering at a top-tier university and I can tell you the following: as long as you go somewhere reputable and work hard, you should be fine. Ask 10 different people and you'll get 10 different recommendations about what is the best school to put you on a specific career path. In my opinion, the identity of the "best" school depends on the individual. Personal happiness matters as much as US News and World Report rankings. (That being said, if you're capable of getting in to a top-10 engineering program then you'd have to have a pretty big personal reason to settle for someplace ranked 100+.)
What you should do no matter where you wind up is try to get an internship with SpaceX or someone else in that industry. Internships are a great potential pathway to a full-time offer when you graduate as well as a great way for you to figure out if this is really where you want to work.
Going back to the "which college" issue, I believe SpaceX and companies like them take interns from numerous institutions. Some intern hiring has a geographic bias (because companies do not always offer relocation benefits). But I never would choose a university solely for its proximity to a particular company.
To convey my own observations: One of my graduate students interned with SpaceX this past summer (after working for Tesla Motors the summer prior). Although we are a highly reputable engineering school (ranked in top 15 by USN&WR), we're not MIT or CalTech and SpaceX isn't located where we are. Yet this didn't stop my student (and a few undergrads I know here) from landing internships with SpaceX.
The bottom line is that the school is only part of the equation. You need to work hard when you get there and it helps an awful lot to go someplace you will be happy (or else you won't want to work very hard).
Good luck!
Chances are someone with a White Sounding name a Todd vs. Tyrone will get a grant because chances are better that a Todd will have more political connections then a Tyrone will.
Although perhaps this type of bias does crop up in some cases, there actually is political pressure to give grants to a "Tyrone" over a "Todd". For example, the NSF proposal review criteria include consideration of the "Broader Impacts" of the research. One way to address this criterion is to include outreach activities in your proposal that would include underrepresented minorities (could be anything from interacting with minority high school students to involving undergraduate minorities in the research project). So faculty who are black or who are at a historically black university might plausibly have an advantage in this aspect of the review process. There even is pressure from NSF such that any NSF Research Center (major multimillion dollar centers that involve multiple universities) oftentimes must include at least one historically minority institution.
So yes, it is true that PMs must defend the awards they give to politicians and other superiors and therefore are subject to political pressures. However, such pressures are not uniformly stacked against minority groups. I am unfamiliar with NIH, but there is at least some effort to level the field at NSF. (All of that being said, it doesn't matter what your outreach activities look like if the intellectual aspects are judged inadequate by the review panel, which is more on-point to what TFA is talking about. All I'm saying here is that if the intellectual merit of two proposals are deemed equal, the proposal with more minority outreach/participation actually would get the nod at NSF.)
Why would you expect scientists in academia to behave differently from people in any other walk of life? Did you expect monks?
It is important to remember that science is a process. It is folly to look at any one study and bet your life on the results (because there may have been errors in the experiment, the data was limited in size/scope, or the researcher was a hack of the type that you suggest). It only is meaningful to look at a body of work over time. To borrow and tweak your phraseology a bit, I would never do something because a scientist says so, but I would be inclined on the basis that science says so. If a topic is important, there will be more than one scientist working in the area and, eventually, the scientific process should self correct for mistakes and overreaches by any one individual. If one researcher is screaming about the greatness of furry purple nipples, then eventually someone else will contest this claim (in their own self-aggrandizing-interest; perhaps in an effort to advance their own theory about slippery green nipples) and bring to light the deficiencies of the original work. These things get sorted out on important matters, albeit on a rather slow time scale compared to the patience of the average onlooker (think years and decades).
Also, if the professor is paying for the grad student, paying for the equipment/supplies the grad student is using, or committing time to advise him/her, then the faculty member's name certainly should go on the paper. I suppose it is akin to a situation in which an employee at a private company does work on company time/with company equipment and wants to publish or patent it--it's not like the employee can do this without company permission or giving the company credit in some form. You may disagree with this in principle, but the fact is that this reality exists pretty much anywhere you go. So it's not like professors are outliers on this one. (Now, if the grad student did the research completely on his/her own time with no supervision from the professor and with no equipment/supplies from the professor's lab, then maybe there is an issue. But I think such situations are exceptionally rare.)
Anyway, that's the $0.02 for today.
This is nothing new, though perhaps the scale is larger. Engineering students have been paying more than most other students for decades. The difference was that these differences were called "lab fees" rather than differential tuition. However, they were just as mandatory as tuition. Now by calling tuition, it may occasionally benefit students in terms of some loans and scholarships (occasionally, money can be used for tuition but not for things called fees).
Differential tuition also occurs for business schools, particularly for MBA programs.
What I don't understand is why the /. crowed is so shocked this. The truth is that engineering degrees are more expensive to produce. Usually if a good or service is more expensive to produce, it costs more to buy. The lab fees that engineering students pay covers only a small fraction of the additional cost of engineering education. Have you ever looked at the difference between the salary for an engineering professor and that of a professor in a liberal arts field? This is a consequence of supply and demand.
I'm not saying an engineering degree should cost 10x or even 2x what a LA degree costs. My point simply is that differential tuition is a reaction to basic market forces that we've been ignoring for a long time.
Yep, this is old news. I've been in France since this past December and Pandora has been inaccessible the entire time.
Crohn's disease is pretty common, so how come it wasn't diagnosed? The idiot medicos just pocketed the money for tests, hospital stays, appointments, medical certs etc for 8 years while the girl suffered? Hmmm. Come to think of it I'm not that surprised. There are far more quacks out there than decent doctors in my experience.
Well, Wikipedia can be suspect at times, but here's what it says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crohn%27s_disease#Symptoms):
Really sounds to me like a combo of on-again off-again symptoms and symptoms that are fairly generic (i.e., shared w/ lots of conditions) than doctors and labs trying to squeeze ever last buck out of someone and their insurance. Now, if there is a problem if the first thing they do is run expensive tests for exotic diseases or something like that. I mean, a responsible physician would consider the a priori odds of each condition. And while I'm sure there are plenty of "quacks" out there, I'm not sure that's the first conclusion I would reach for in this particular case.
Someone please mod this up.
This comment is spot-on. If the AP is cracking down on the DoD for this, they also need to crack down on PR firms that issue retouched photos of celebrities.
I think I would agree with the AP if the background they added made it look like she was in the field or something. That would have been a gross misrepresentation of the facts. This was just a headshot. The only people who should be upset at the retouching are people interested in dating the General.
And let's not forget the AP probably would have whined (albeit, not publicly) had the DoD issued the original, grainy photo with the cluttered background.
Very true. It is also true that if you think what someone puts on Facebook and MySpace is relevant to their academic performance, then you shouldn't be in charge of admissions decisions for a good school, or any school. If you think it's relevant to job performance, you shouldn't be making hiring decisions, either.
I'll play devil's advocate here. I happen to agree that this kind of thing shouldn't matter, but I think I understand the admissions perspective:
For the college admissions people this is an odds game. The number of applicants who are qualified based on test scores, grades and all the normal junk is larger than the number of spaces they have. Given this, how do they pare it down? Perhaps Googling or checking out the Facebook/MySpace pages for some of the "borderline" students is more practical than throwing darts? I'm guessing their belief is that a student who gave in to peer pressure and the like in high school has worse odds of being successful in college where such pressures go unchecked by parents, etc. I'm not saying it's right, but I think I see where they're coming from.
Now, all of that being said, I think students who are somewhat sheltered in high school are just as likely, and perhaps even more likely, to succumb to the temptations and pressures of college life. I've seen more than a couple people who were honors students in high school simply go off the deep end upon arriving at college. Conversely, I've known several who were "party types" in high school who decided that it was time to get serious about life when they got to college and have been very successful since then. It's just really hard to know how people will react until you do the experiment.
I for one am glad that MySpace and camera phones weren't around when I was a teenager!
You sort-of made my point for me, yet implied I called the guy lazy. Not so.
My use of the term "hypothesis-generating activity" is not derogatory. In fact, I think his use of Ask Slashdot, while likely to have a low SNR, is an interesting non-scientific way to gauge what other SE-types are thinking.
As you say, he can gauge the "popular view amongst the technically minded." No one would ever cite a Slashdot discussion as scientific evidence for anything. However, he can mine the results for ideas that he can firm up into research hypotheses he can then try to validate through other means. Thus, the distinction between hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-validating activities.
Your point about his already having a solid background in SE is well taken. In fact, his experience may be exactly why he used Ask Slashdot: he's been around enough to know he doesn't know everything.
This isn't necessarily his/her intention. The OP could just be looking for some general ideas to get going (or to rule out bad ones before proceeding). I see this as a hypothesis-generating activity, not one in which he/she'd expect to get hypothesis-validating information.
Maybe that would happen if Apple had sued a federal agency or something. There's not too much NYC can do about national IP law (directly, at least).
I really like the idea of a counter suit on the basis that Apple stole the apple from NYC first.
There also is a group investigating this at Georgia Tech: http://www.physics.gatech.edu/npeg/index.html (site has a halfway-decent FAQ for those not familiar with graphene).
I met one of the students from the GT group recently and he mentioned the scotch tape solution and said he said his lab were investigating how to manufacture the material practically. For all it's promise, I got the impression that two or three major breakthroughs were needed to make it viable. It's definitely a few years away. (I mean, they're not even up to duct tape yet!)
They're trading cost for risk. It's pretty much a law of the universe that you have to pay in order to reduce your risk (if you're not gaining something else by increasing risk, then you're a moron plain and simple). Although the extra engineering and replicated functionality are added costs, there clearly is someone at DARPA who believes the added costs are likely to be offset by corresponding reductions in risk. Of course, they're not 100% sure of this themselves, which is why part of the work is a study the risk-adjusted economics of the approach.
Along the risk-mitigation line, one of the benefits of a micro-sat cluster would be that you could upgrade its capabilities easier or repair it by replacing failed units. It's easier to add a new sat to the cluster (and deorbit any antiquated/damaged ones) than to physically link up with a sat in orbit in order to effect repairs (that requires people, space walks, etc.). I would guess that's what they mean by "diversification of launch and orbit failure risk." Obviously you're screwed if your entire constellation gets wiped out, but you are better off if it's only one that bites the dust.
No, if I understood the limited info available, it isn't like a turbo-/super-charger at all. it runs using a pneumatic motor or something close to it, not a standard internal combustion engine. At low speeds, a tank containing compressed air powers the motor and no combustion is needed; at higher speeds, they apparently do some sort of thermodynamic voodoo to get extra power out (but if I'm reading this correctly, it has to do with heating the compressed air to get a better rate of work out of it, not from combusting the fuel charge in the cylinder directly--though I must admit the literature is quite vague and they perhaps are doing something IC-like).
Of course, you aren't getting rid of carbon--you're just not dumping it out your tailpipe. Whether this vehicle is green on the whole depends on how much carbon it takes to compress the air into the tank. As a rule of thumb, it's more green to take power from the grid than to convert fossil-/bio-fuel locally. But I won't buy in until someone does the accounting.
On a related note, some in the academic research community currently are looking into fluid power (hydraulics & pneumatics) for implementing hybrid vehicles (similar to today's gas-electric, but w/o the Li-Ion batteries to catch on fire!). I know that the NSF ERC CCEFP http://www.ccefp.org/ has a hybrid pneumatic car as one of their testbeds (unfortunately, they don't have much info about it on the website).
Well, I am quite certain my understanding of science exceeds that of a 4th grader. But we'll get to that in a minute. Another poster (techno-vampire) sums up the wormhole issue quite well:
In this case, theory says that wormholes could exist, but says little if anything about what they'd look like. Before we start looking for evidence, we need to have an idea of what we're looking for and this speculation might give us that. Even if we end up disproving this idea, we've still learned something from it, so it's not completely worthless as long as it makes testable predictions.This is a great point. E.g., Einstein's theories predicted, among other things, an ultimate speed limit that we had no yet observed. That it had not yet been observed did not make the quest for such an observation (or counterobservation) scientific. Another good example is the cosmological constant. Einstein thought it up, then thought it was one of his greatest failures; others have since found evidence that the universe is expanding. The debate on that topic is ongoing, but the point remains: you have to postulate that something exists before you can test it.
As for your remarks regarding psuedoscientific claims...I don't disagree that many people abuse logic in the name of making a buck, but I think you should go read Karl Popper ("Conjectures and Refutations" among others) or T.S. Kuhn ("The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"). Any claim is scientific if it can be falsified by observation (sometimes indirect). The fallacy that the psuedoscience crowd leverages often is that being a scientifically falsifiable claim makes it true. In actuality, all scientific theories are provisional and *never* are proved true (due to the problem of induction, as articulated by David Hume in the 18th century). The only thing you can do is try to refute them very diligently and then take a leap of faith to believe in them when attempts at refutation have failed (and no better theory exists).
So, a psuedoscientist would say "X is true because X is refutable but no one has done so" and forgets to mention that no one has tried (or they go through some sort of half-assed study with piss-poor methodology and declare victory). I think if you ask the authors of the wormhole work, they'd tell you they have no idea whether the theory will stand up to scrutiny, but that they are anxious to put it to the test and would not expect others to believe it is true should it turn out to be untestable.
Absolutely. I wish I could mod you up, but I've already posted in this discussion. :(
I think some people are quibbling with Step 1: Define the Question. Their complaint is that this is just a silly question that doesn't really matter (since we don't have proof that these things exist, why bother trying to figure out how they could exist...). I'm not of that mind, but clearly many people think that new theories must arise strictly from unexplained observations (I observed the apple fall down rather than up, but I have no theory to tell me why...). This is a rather limited view of science, IMHO (especially for phenomena we can't observe in a lab or nature). If scientists never are able to connect this theory to observation, it simply will fall into the dustbin of history. But that doesn't preclude it from being part of the scientific discussion until it is refuted conclusively.