A good course will give you the essentials, I agree, but very few courses will give you what you need to do, say research in Riemanian geometry. You'll have to pretty much teach yourself that. It is possible !
This "best universities" ranking is precisely what the FA authors are railing against: it's almost purely based on research output. There is no evaluation of the quality of the teaching.
Actually the EU citizen do come to the US, but for the graduate programs (or more rarely on exchange programs for one year or so during undergrad years). The big reason is price, as grad studies can be relatively cheap (your advisor will pay you and your tuition costs, usually), another one is that a bachelor's degree is not really that impressive in Europe, a Masters' degree is much better regarded for some reason.
I don't see any of what you describe happening with Ubuntu. On the contrary, Ubuntu is very eloquent about why Linux is free and why people should use it.
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
Except the market is changing. There is still money to be made in OS in the desktop PC market but this is not growing as fast as it used to and is fast becoming commoditized. No one wants to pay $300 for a new Windows license every 3 years when the whole hardware cost is about that price. In the new markets of various embedded devices, Microsoft is not a leader no matter how you look at it. In the server market, Linux works as well and is cheaper. In the gaming console market, Microsoft is doing OK but is not as dominant as it was with desktop PC.
In other words Microsoft is making money for the time being but is no longer the #1 top company to work for they used to be. Nothing new here.
This has been said elsewhere in this thread, the real breakthrough here is due to compressed sensing, but here are some extra information:
1- Compressed sensing basically used the idea that it is not necessary to sample an image (or a projection in this case) everywhere because natural data is fairly redundant. This is why you can capture a 10 Mpixel image in a digital camera and have it compressed to a 2 Mbyte JPEG file without losing much visible information. Compressed sensing basically does the compression *before* the sampling and not after. Researchers at Rice University for instance built a working, one-pixel camera using this brilliant principle.
2- Compressed (or compressive) sensing was proposed by Emmanuel Candes and Terence Tao respectively at Stanford and UCLA. Tao is a recent Fields medalist. I recommend reading his blog if you like mathematics.
3- This field is really less than 10 years old, it has completely turned on its head classical ideas about sampling-limited signal processing (Nyquist, Shannon, etc). It is a brilliant combination of signal, image processing and recent advances in combinatorial and convex optimization.
4- However this is only the beginning. Because compression happens before sampling, you need to make so-called sparsity assumptions about the signal ; in other words you need to know a great deal about what you are going to try to image. In interventional therapy, precise imaging of the patient is made beforehand in a classical way (CT or MRI), and this kind of technique is only used to make fine adjustments as therapy is ongoing. This is extremely useful and safe because of lower radiation output and because the physicians know what to expect.
5- Here the GPU is useful because it makes the processing fast enough to actually be used. It is an essential brick in the application, but of course not in the theory.
First there is a USA price because oil is traded in US dollars. This makes an enormous difference to the rest of the world because the US price is predictable and relatively stable. Until Europe developed the Euro, in many smaller countries the price of oil could change quite drastically depending on geopolitical situations or simply internal US politics. For instance when Reagan was elected in 1980 he had a "strong dollar" policy, compounding the effect of the 1979 oil crisis for many client countries, but reducing the price of imports into the US.
The reason we have OPEC-regulated high oil prices since 1973 is that the US supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war in 1973. At the very least, the first oil so-called shock dates from this very event.
So at least some wars have had the effect of raising oil prices.
In addition many client countries e.g. in Europe and elsewhere have taken drastic steps to reduce domestic consumption as much as possible, whereas in the US this hasn't been so clear. If anything, reducing demand has been the primary motive for oil prices to come down again.
The radiation around Jupiter comes from various sources, but is essentially due to charged particles trapped in Jupiter's magnetosphere. Some do come from the solar winds, and others from Jupiter itself.
Many comments here are along the line : "how could the scientists *not* release the data, how rude and unscientific". I basically agree that data should eventually be public, however I also understand the scientists who spend decades obtaining data and want it to fructify in the form of publications before others can do whatever they want with it.
Basically competing scientists are told to walk and get their own data. From the efficiency point of view this sounds stupid, but in fact in many case, the act of getting data is itself science. Think of all the effort spent in trying to get a Higgs boson trace! In many cases it makes sense for different teams to collect, analyze and publish based on their own data. It may well be that the analysis in one paper is correct but the data flawed in some ways. In something as complex as climate, this is in fact extremely likely.
What must definitely be made public as soon as one publication it out is the acquisition protocol and enough data to reproduce the results, but maybe not before.
That makes no sense. If as a scientist you started writing biased papers to please the people who pay you, instead of doing good science, soon your peers would notice it and disregard your results. Your chances of advancing in your field would dwindle to zero: no invitation to talk anywhere, no special issue invitation, rejected at conferences, poor book reviews, etc. 10k per paper is not much to be honest in that context.
How naive are you ? research needs money, sometimes a lot of it, how is money obtained in your opinion ?
All research is approved one way or the other. In the US the vast majority of grants are US government grants, whether National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, National Health Services, etc.
All of these have their approval criterial, basically you write a proposal, which is reviewed, by other scientists but also bureaucrats of the various funding agencies. In the end you get the money only if your approval makes sense according to both the science review panel and the bureaucracy.
Question: why is there not a kindle version of your book on Amazon ? I'd like to buy it but I do not want the paper edition. Is there any way I can get a (paid) electronic version ? Thanks.
This girl is taking auditions. In some of these you need to sing the exact correct song to the last alteration, and Broadway songs can be *hard*. Unless you have Mozart's ear combined with perfect pitch, you are not going to cut it.
I think Illustrator CS5 on OSX suffers from Cocoa, full stop. That API is a CPU hog. Even old Aqua Emacs is incredibly slow with Cocoa, much much slower than with Carbon.
The ELO ranking of machines is not really directly comparable to humans, because machines play a lot more between themselves than with humans. This is what the wikipedia page has to say about the ELO ranking of machines:
These ratings, although calculated by using the Elo system (or similar rating methods), have no direct relation to FIDE Elo ratings or to other chess federation ratings of human players. Except for some man versus machine games which the SSDF had organized many years ago (which were far from today's level), there is no calibration between any of these rating lists and player pools. Hence, the results which matter are the ranks and the differences between the ratings, not the absolute level of the numbers. Nevertheless, in view of recent man versus machine matches, it is generally undisputed that the top computer chess ratings should be at least in the range of top human performances, and probably significantly higher.
On average you can count on about 10% of that amount (cloud cover, rain, night, etc). You need to store it, which further reduces the efficiency. So to replace a single nuclear plant of 1GWh, you would need about 30 square miles or so. I'm not sure there exist 30 square miles of 15% efficient solar cells in the world right now, and I'm not sure of how much that would cost. Plus the cells are valid for about 20 years, and then you can trash them. That's a lot of expensive and toxic trash, not to mention the toxic trash that is use to *make* the cells. HF acids for instance.
They probably mean the file server will use AFP, which few clients support. However there exist a client FUSE module, so linux & BSD should work OK. Now there are other server bits that Apple provides, such as calendar servers, it could get hairy.
Actually Betelgeuse is one of the largest known stars. The very largest known star is only about xx the size of Betelgeuse. So not quite the difference between Mercury and the Sun.
I think this lawsuit is not good for CSIRO's reputation. I understand the temptation to earn lots of millions, but in the end this will not serve them.
First let us put things into perspective. CSIRO has not come up with intellectual property worth $1B very often. Lots of more or less useful things, but the wifi patent is basically unique. The Aussie govt pays the 6000 employees salaries every year, at a cost of about $1B *every year*.
Yet there are companies like IBM who license their IP worldwide for many billions every year. So color me unimpressed. If this patent is the best CSIRO scientists can do, this sucks. Many companies can do a lot more every year.
CSIRO does nothing of what is commonly referred to as "Big Science", like at the CERN, Tevatron, ITER, etc. Those cost many billions to *build*, even more to run. They have a small number of mid-size instruments like a 3.6m telescope and a few smaller ones. Some of those were burned in a bushfire a few years back near Canberra, and last I heard they are not going to replace them. They simply have no unique large equipment where people from all over the world flock to do their experiment. They used to have an almost monopoly on Southern skies astronomy, but not Chile (!) has much much better equipment. Due to irrational public fears against "radiations" readily conveyed by the media, Australia has a single tiny research reactor at a "safe" distance from Sydney, and opened their only reasonably sized synchrotron in 2007 in Melbourne !
CSIRO does very little of what is commonly referred to as "basic science". They have no proper math or physics department for instance. They do a lot of development work for industry. In Australia, basic science is done in the Universities.
Science can cost a lot of money. In general it is worth it, in the mid to long run, but if you spend only little, you are dependent on others for big results. The entire computer industry would not have existed without the basic physics research of the early 20th century. Think about that !
So by some definition, CSIRO is now a patent troll, I'm not surprised. When I left a few years ago, the place was run by lawyers, business development people and MBA-style managers. This lawsuit is not good news for the scientists at CSIRO, it will be further "proof" that CSIRO requires less appropriation and must do even more consulting. In Australia, science is seen as a cost center. This is madness, a country as rich as Australia is at the moment cannot hope to survive long selling coal, grain and providing banking and insurance to its own population. It should be using its current, short-lived wealth to become a beacon to the world.
Note; I was a CSIRO employee for 10 years, in the maths and statistics department, and I eventually found that both their funding and basic research policies royally sucked. This is even worse at Universities (I taught at U. of Sydney too). The best Australian scientists and researchers still emigrate to England or the USA, for instance the recent Fields medalist Terence Tao, probably one of the best all-around mathematicians since Poincare and Hilbert. What a waste !
Slashdot Mirror
MIT has a reputation for being a difficult college.
A good course will give you the essentials, I agree, but very few courses will give you what you need to do, say research in Riemanian geometry. You'll have to pretty much teach yourself that. It is possible !
This "best universities" ranking is precisely what the FA authors are railing against: it's almost purely based on research output. There is no evaluation of the quality of the teaching.
Actually the EU citizen do come to the US, but for the graduate programs (or more rarely on exchange programs for one year or so during undergrad years). The big reason is price, as grad studies can be relatively cheap (your advisor will pay you and your tuition costs, usually), another one is that a bachelor's degree is not really that impressive in Europe, a Masters' degree is much better regarded for some reason.
Hang on,
I don't see any of what you describe happening with Ubuntu. On the contrary, Ubuntu is very eloquent about why Linux is free and why people should use it.
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
Hello Bruce, love ElectricFence !
In what way has he killed the DP ? By making its collective brainchild the most popular Linux distribution ? Sounds like it killed it with love, no ?
Except the market is changing. There is still money to be made in OS in the desktop PC market but this is not growing as fast as it used to and is fast becoming commoditized. No one wants to pay $300 for a new Windows license every 3 years when the whole hardware cost is about that price. In the new markets of various embedded devices, Microsoft is not a leader no matter how you look at it. In the server market, Linux works as well and is cheaper. In the gaming console market, Microsoft is doing OK but is not as dominant as it was with desktop PC.
In other words Microsoft is making money for the time being but is no longer the #1 top company to work for they used to be. Nothing new here.
Wooosh
This has been said elsewhere in this thread, the real breakthrough here is due to compressed sensing, but here are some extra information:
1- Compressed sensing basically used the idea that it is not necessary to sample an image (or a projection in this case) everywhere because natural data is fairly redundant. This is why you can capture a 10 Mpixel image in a digital camera and have it compressed to a 2 Mbyte JPEG file without losing much visible information. Compressed sensing basically does the compression *before* the sampling and not after. Researchers at Rice University for instance built a working, one-pixel camera using this brilliant principle.
2- Compressed (or compressive) sensing was proposed by Emmanuel Candes and Terence Tao respectively at Stanford and UCLA. Tao is a recent Fields medalist. I recommend reading his blog if you like mathematics.
3- This field is really less than 10 years old, it has completely turned on its head classical ideas about sampling-limited signal processing (Nyquist, Shannon, etc). It is a brilliant combination of signal, image processing and recent advances in combinatorial and convex optimization.
4- However this is only the beginning. Because compression happens before sampling, you need to make so-called sparsity assumptions about the signal ; in other words you need to know a great deal about what you are going to try to image. In interventional therapy, precise imaging of the patient is made beforehand in a classical way (CT or MRI), and this kind of technique is only used to make fine adjustments as therapy is ongoing. This is extremely useful and safe because of lower radiation output and because the physicians know what to expect.
5- Here the GPU is useful because it makes the processing fast enough to actually be used. It is an essential brick in the application, but of course not in the theory.
Best.
Complex question.
First there is a USA price because oil is traded in US dollars. This makes an enormous difference to the rest of the world because the US price is predictable and relatively stable. Until Europe developed the Euro, in many smaller countries the price of oil could change quite drastically depending on geopolitical situations or simply internal US politics. For instance when Reagan was elected in 1980 he had a "strong dollar" policy, compounding the effect of the 1979 oil crisis for many client countries, but reducing the price of imports into the US.
The reason we have OPEC-regulated high oil prices since 1973 is that the US supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war in 1973. At the very least, the first oil so-called shock dates from this very event.
So at least some wars have had the effect of raising oil prices.
In addition many client countries e.g. in Europe and elsewhere have taken drastic steps to reduce domestic consumption as much as possible, whereas in the US this hasn't been so clear. If anything, reducing demand has been the primary motive for oil prices to come down again.
The radiation around Jupiter comes from various sources, but is essentially due to charged particles trapped in Jupiter's magnetosphere. Some do come from the solar winds, and others from Jupiter itself.
Many comments here are along the line : "how could the scientists *not* release the data, how rude and unscientific". I basically agree that data should eventually be public, however I also understand the scientists who spend decades obtaining data and want it to fructify in the form of publications before others can do whatever they want with it.
Basically competing scientists are told to walk and get their own data. From the efficiency point of view this sounds stupid, but in fact in many case, the act of getting data is itself science. Think of all the effort spent in trying to get a Higgs boson trace! In many cases it makes sense for different teams to collect, analyze and publish based on their own data. It may well be that the analysis in one paper is correct but the data flawed in some ways. In something as complex as climate, this is in fact extremely likely.
What must definitely be made public as soon as one publication it out is the acquisition protocol and enough data to reproduce the results, but maybe not before.
That makes no sense. If as a scientist you started writing biased papers to please the people who pay you, instead of doing good science, soon your peers would notice it and disregard your results. Your chances of advancing in your field would dwindle to zero: no invitation to talk anywhere, no special issue invitation, rejected at conferences, poor book reviews, etc. 10k per paper is not much to be honest in that context.
How naive are you ? research needs money, sometimes a lot of it, how is money obtained in your opinion ?
All research is approved one way or the other. In the US the vast majority of grants are US government grants, whether National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, National Health Services, etc.
All of these have their approval criterial, basically you write a proposal, which is reviewed, by other scientists but also bureaucrats of the various funding agencies. In the end you get the money only if your approval makes sense according to both the science review panel and the bureaucracy.
Question: why is there not a kindle version of your book on Amazon ? I'd like to buy it but I do not want the paper edition. Is there any way I can get a (paid) electronic version ? Thanks.
This girl is taking auditions. In some of these you need to sing the exact correct song to the last alteration, and Broadway songs can be *hard*. Unless you have Mozart's ear combined with perfect pitch, you are not going to cut it.
well, Knuth has stated that TeX version number should converge to Pi and Metafont's to e (2.718...), so both are very unlikely.
I think Illustrator CS5 on OSX suffers from Cocoa, full stop. That API is a CPU hog. Even old Aqua Emacs is incredibly slow with Cocoa, much much slower than with Carbon.
The ELO ranking of machines is not really directly comparable to humans, because machines play a lot more between themselves than with humans. This is what the wikipedia page has to say about the ELO ranking of machines :
On average you can count on about 10% of that amount (cloud cover, rain, night, etc). You need to store it, which further reduces the efficiency. So to replace a single nuclear plant of 1GWh, you would need about 30 square miles or so. I'm not sure there exist 30 square miles of 15% efficient solar cells in the world right now, and I'm not sure of how much that would cost. Plus the cells are valid for about 20 years, and then you can trash them. That's a lot of expensive and toxic trash, not to mention the toxic trash that is use to *make* the cells. HF acids for instance.
So overall I'm not so sure.
They probably mean the file server will use AFP, which few clients support. However there exist a client FUSE module, so linux & BSD should work OK. Now there are other server bits that Apple provides, such as calendar servers, it could get hairy.
chapter and verse please...
All the current X58 chipset-based motherboards can take the 6-core i7-980X, at the cost of a BIOS upgrade.
Actually Betelgeuse is one of the largest known stars. The very largest known star is only about xx the size of Betelgeuse. So not quite the difference between Mercury and the Sun.
I think this lawsuit is not good for CSIRO's reputation. I understand the temptation to earn lots of millions, but in the end this will not serve them.
First let us put things into perspective. CSIRO has not come up with intellectual property worth $1B very often. Lots of more or less useful things, but the wifi patent is basically unique. The Aussie govt pays the 6000 employees salaries every year, at a cost of about $1B *every year*.
Yet there are companies like IBM who license their IP worldwide for many billions every year. So color me unimpressed. If this patent is the best CSIRO scientists can do, this sucks. Many companies can do a lot more every year.
CSIRO does nothing of what is commonly referred to as "Big Science", like at the CERN, Tevatron, ITER, etc. Those cost many billions to *build*, even more to run. They have a small number of mid-size instruments like a 3.6m telescope and a few smaller ones. Some of those were burned in a bushfire a few years back near Canberra, and last I heard they are not going to replace them. They simply have no unique large equipment where people from all over the world flock to do their experiment. They used to have an almost monopoly on Southern skies astronomy, but not Chile (!) has much much better equipment. Due to irrational public fears against "radiations" readily conveyed by the media, Australia has a single tiny research reactor at a "safe" distance from Sydney, and opened their only reasonably sized synchrotron in 2007 in Melbourne !
CSIRO does very little of what is commonly referred to as "basic science". They have no proper math or physics department for instance. They do a lot of development work for industry. In Australia, basic science is done in the Universities.
Science can cost a lot of money. In general it is worth it, in the mid to long run, but if you spend only little, you are dependent on others for big results. The entire computer industry would not have existed without the basic physics research of the early 20th century. Think about that !
So by some definition, CSIRO is now a patent troll, I'm not surprised. When I left a few years ago, the place was run by lawyers, business development people and MBA-style managers. This lawsuit is not good news for the scientists at CSIRO, it will be further "proof" that CSIRO requires less appropriation and must do even more consulting. In Australia, science is seen as a cost center. This is madness, a country as rich as Australia is at the moment cannot hope to survive long selling coal, grain and providing banking and insurance to its own population. It should be using its current, short-lived wealth to become a beacon to the world.
Note; I was a CSIRO employee for 10 years, in the maths and statistics department, and I eventually found that both their funding and basic research policies royally sucked. This is even worse at Universities (I taught at U. of Sydney too). The best Australian scientists and researchers still emigrate to England or the USA, for instance the recent Fields medalist Terence Tao, probably one of the best all-around mathematicians since Poincare and Hilbert. What a waste !