Vote randomly and at least you become a part of the statistical errors of the election. That's in contrast to the the systematic errors (also know as "election results") created by the non-random "informed" people...
FUD city.
From TFA: Code Search is "another tool that makes it a tad easier for the attacker,"
Like gcc and perl. Gee, those pesky tools. What do you know, personal computers are another tool that makes it a tad easer for the attacker too.
Obviously developers concerned with security should take note of any new and current tools available, but to create a tone like Google is providing a date rape drug for crackers is just raw fud propaganda.
"Theoretical science" is an oxymoron. Science is explicitly experimental in nature. That isn't to say that theory is worthless. As a physicist I have published theory papers and did theory work for my Ph.D. But the value of pure theory is the degree to which it couples back and tells us about experiments. Ideas are great. But in science, if they don't tell you about experimental results, then it is just pure mathematics (internal consistency) or, worse, a masturbatory exercise.
IMHO, String Theory is really, at best, a mathematical model that has yet to be tested. The ideas are fundamentally rooted in real physics, so it isn't like they are just making it up. In principle, it could be helping to develop mathematical tools to help solve other problems (they should advertise that if that is true). But I don't want any this fruity post hoc crap; let's have some real predictive tests. I also worry about the cost-benefit. Even if string theory eventually does make a prediction that turns out to be true within the next 500 years, is string theory causing a kind of contemporary brain drain, drawing young bright thinkers away from well-defined theory/experiment problems that really matter in physics right now?
If the student is enrolled at a University, the student usually owns the copyright to their own work, but the Unviersity still has nonexclusive rights to do basicaly whatever it thinks is best for "the system". A typical University statement to this effect is below (italics mine). IANAL, but based on these legal statements below I think the University has a pretty good case to use the material for said purpose as described in the article without violating the students' copyright.
"Students will normally own the copyright to the scholarly and creative publications they develop, including works fulfilling course requirements (term papers and projects), Senior Projects, and Masters Theses/Projects. Students retain copyright ownership as long as they are not paid for the work that results in the creation and do not receive extraordinary University resources in support of the work. Nonetheless, by enrolling at the University, the student grants the University a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to mark on, modify, publicize and retain the work as may be required by the faculty, department, or the University"
IAAP (who worked on RHIC physics). The same arguments used in 1999-2000 with RHIC (and with Fermilab before that) should be used here. There is no chance for doomsday catastrophe. While these events at the LHC are "high energy" from a human technology point of view (per event per particle), the LHC generates low energy events at low rates compared to nature itself. There are millions of LHC-like events (or "greater") per second that occur on the surface of the moon alone, not to mention in our own atmosphere from cosmic rays. While cosmic rays are carefully studied, the reason we build machines such as RHIC, Fermilab, and LHC is, as scientists, we like to study events systematically and carefully at specific energies in a relatively low-noise environment (difficult to do with cosmic rays, which is why we might not formally detect strangelets or black holes in such events when measured). However, if there were problems with voracious black holes, stranglets, or other doomsday scenarios due to elementary particle collisions, they would have happened long, long ago in nature (locally) -- we would have seen evidence for it on the moon, atmosphere, etc. (assuming we survived long enough to witness it with such a high event rate - it probably would have happened long before we had a chance to even evolve).
This article initially struck me as absurd. However, I realized that the guy has a number of very good points. IANAL, however I think that there may be an existing real-world equivalent of this that has been in place for years. If you have ever gambled in a casino in Vegas, for example, before you can play a typical table game like blackjack or craps you must convert your real money into chips. The game tables do not work with real cash. You place a $100 bill on the table and the dealer gives you a bunch of clay chips in return. In that casino, those chips can be converted back into cash at the cashier's booth. Technically, until you cash out, the casino owns the chips AND they have your real money too! You are taxed only once you cash out. Outside the casino, the chips are essentially worthless. If you never cash out and took the chips home, the casino still will pay taxes on the $100 you gave them initially. In principle, you can exchange the chips with someone outside who intends on returning to that casino, but try going to the bank with them or paying at a restaurant and they are as valuable as monopoly game money. However, the casino might offer some special "comps" for big winners. If you have more than X chips, they might give you a free dinner or a stay at their resort. This service isn't cash, and thus isn't taxable.
In this analogy, the ISK and the casino chip are essentially a one-to-one. They are both currencies earned in games provided by a service (CPP vs. casino) and both have a specialized way of converting the object directly to other services (more time in the Eve game or "comps" at the casino). In both cases, both services "own" the abstract currency (ISK vs. chips). Certainly in the case of the casino, any means of converting the abstract currency into real cash will result in taxation (in the casino, on eBay, or otherwise). In their abstract state as chips, if there is a well-defined means of converting it to cash, you could probably make a legal case if you were scammed, but that isn't clear. While online games are not viewed as casinos, we could still probably learn a lot from simply observing legal precedents of how casinos operate to learn what the legal future of currency exchange in online games might become.
What we have here is a fairly classic causal vs. correlation fallacy. The author of TFA notices a correlation and assumes a causal relation. But why not consider that there is a common underlying mechanism for both? Or that the causality is the converse?
While the author's hypothesis is fine, he/she doesn't really support it with meaningful data. It is, as the author put it, "a rambling explaination" not a real argument. It is "opinion driven argumentation" for something that one could actually try and support wtih real data. It would take a much more careful analysis to determine the real relationship.
In short, from TFA, it isn't clear to me that the existence of more strategy guides is causing more complex games any more than the converse. The article could be titled "How Gaming Affected Strategy Guides" with only minor change of text.
Nigel:It really puts perspective on things,though
on
Google Launches Trends
·
· Score: 1
Reminds me of a pre-technology leading to Larry Niven's Variable Swords from Ringworld. It "just" involves a statis field for stability and a little ball afixed on the tip so you know where the end of the sword is. Too bad the former's probably a show stopper -- for a while anyway.
I did not personally find the article or the research very credible. The reasons are quite numerous, and I won't discuss them all. But first let me say that I think the underlying hypothesis is fairly reasonable. If I look around me I might say, to first order, that people I know appear to have the "fresh" attitudes of a 20 year old well into their 40s. I might point out that the article is not saying people are "childlike", like a 6-year-old, as other threads have implied -- only "immature". However, this observation has a very skewed baseline. What are we using as a control when we make such an observation like "people used to be more mature"? We are using our childlike memories of our parents, teachers, doctors, etc. as we saw them from the eyes of someone growing up. But I've often been very surprised to learn, post hoc, what my folks and childhood mentors were up to during they're 20s, 30s, and even their 40s and 50s when they weren't interacting with me. Far from stagnating into "maturity" many of them retained a childlike curiosity for the world. They strove to understand themselves and experimented with a lot of crazy stuff (and I'm not just talking drugs here). However, I only saw them through a very specific filter. I feel the article is falling into the same trap, and it even admits this:
People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence...
Again, I ask, what is the "research" described in the article using as a control or baseline? This is never discussed -- and it sounds like this "research" is nothing more than an elaborate opinion-piece. TFA even use David Brooks as a kind of "reference." I enjoy David Brooks, even if I don't always agree with him. He is a respectable social commentator and pundit, but he is ultimately a professional opinionist, not a respected psychological researcher.
Also, can someone help me out with this quote from the article:
Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. [bold emphasis mine]
Genes shifting as the result of a psychological shift? WTF? It was my understanding that genes needed a bit more than "psychology" to change. Are these guys implying a Lamarckian evolution based not even on physical characteristics but somehow "attitudes affecting evolutionary physiology"? With little snips like this, it makes this work seem very fishy to me, bordering on crackpotism.
Anyway, while the basic hypothesis has merit, the research the article describes doesn't seem to demonstrate or prove (or even have the ability to demonstrate or prove) the proposed effect.
Actually, in science, contrary to simple cliches, being a good researcher ("knowedge in the subject", as you put it) and a good teacher are generally correlated. Historically, the best teachers were the best researchers and vice versa. In my experience, most so-called "good researchers" who couldn't teach were really "talented technicians", not scientists. Of course, the world needs talented technicians. Just don't call them professor and put them in front of a classroom with a bunch of people trying to learn a new topic.
Probably like many slashdotters I've had a web presence for a while. In my case, I've had a persistent web page since 1996 - the early middle part of the contemporary Web's ramp up. Since putting the site up, I've been very careful about what information I choose to put in public directories about myself -- knowing full well that the information is, well, PUBLIC. I'm not saying I shy away from controversy. I'm an atheist, skeptic, scientist, and writer and have many links and comments about said topics on my site. Some of these things are not generally popular. When I hit the job market after my Ph.D. I simply ASSUMED people would Google me. And, lo and behold, in at least half the interviews someone would say "I saw your website and loved such-and-such." In some ways I used my website as an employer filter: if someone would not hire me based on information on my site, I would not want to work for them anyway.
Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.
The implicit statement in the story summary that the disclaimers some companies like to put into emails could somehow constitute a valid contract is a big, fat piece of Slash-FUD
It seems the summary mutated to "email with disclaimer" from "signature and disclaimer" in TFA and "disclaimer" only (in Rekon title) and "name or initials" in Rekon blog ariticle. While it may be slasfud, I guess the confusion is somewhat understandable since all the articles speak of it differently. So does a disclaimer alone in a sig (the part after "--") without a name make something a valid offer? Or is "disclaimer" being used in some specialized way to mean "name"?
From TFA: "The end result of this could be that people who include a signature and disclaimer at the bottom of their emails might actually be making themselves more liable than people who just send one line emails."
From Rekon: "Disclaimers could make emails into contracts
Article in The Register about a recent High Court judgment on the application of the Statute of Frauds and Perjuries 1677 to e-mail messages. In short, the sender's name or initials as a signature in the body of the e-mail is a valid signature, but names or addresses that appear only in the headers do not count."
--
The above observations may or may not be a binding contract
Obviously this isn't exactly a scientific ranking and is somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, it probably has some qualitative merit.
But it seems odd: If you compare software engineer to college professor, it is clear, based on their data, that the 10-year growth parameter is fairly heavily weighted in their ranking since professor is equal or higher in all other areas.
Software Engineer:
average salary: $80.5k
10-year growth: 46%
Average annual job openings: 44.8k
Stress: B
Flexibility: B
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
College Professor:
average salary: $81.5k
10-year growth: 31%
Average annual job openings: 95.3k
Stress: B
Flexibility: A
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
It seems like *if you had the job*, the quality of that job *right now* would be somewhat independent of the 10-year growth parameter. In that same spirit, if they folded in some "job security" parameter, it seems the tenture (or tenture-track) options of a professor would trump all others.
I sympathize with your sarcasm. We physicists can tend to be overly zealous in our refutations. However, two things:
1) I'm all in favor of such studies in principle. "Biological/Health effects of X" type studies are important and there certainly can be murky, unexpected biophysical relationships that should be investigated.
2) A correlation is not a cause. I want to know a PHYSICAL MECHANISM by which cell phones can cause brain tumors, not just a correlation statistic. The classic back-of-the-envelope calculations you see physicist-slashdotters doing is an effort to isolate the problem from obvious potential "first causes" (ionizing radiation etc.). Without and understanding of mechanism, you fall into the flying spaghetti monsterist's pirates vs. global warming spoof-dogma.
At the risk of sounding trollish here, I have to ask what's the point of making a Simpsons movie?
Well, from the studio's POV, the answer is clear: $$$. However, I cannot understand why FANS would want a movie. As a fan myself, I would MUCH rather have advertisers pay for 3 half-hour segments I can Tivo and watch at my leisure than one 1.5 hour "diluted episode" where I must pay $10+parking+food=$20+. Not to mention the psychological stress induced from just setting foot in theater drenched in sticky crap, chatty middle-aged know-nothings, and creepy teenage residues of every sort. In the case of some TV shows like Star Trek, you main gain some leverage going to the big screen because the special effects will be beefed up. This might offset some theater-vs.-home issues...
Ok, perhaps I need to get out more. But my question remains...
You raise a very good point here. How protons and neutrons (and hadrons in general) get their mass from quark binding is quite non-intuitive.
For example, let's compare the situation to a hydrogen atom. If you take a free proton and an electron, the total mass will be M=me+mp. Let them bind into hydrogen in the ground state and they LOSE mass; some of that mass is reallocated into the potential energy. The mass of a hydrogen atom is then Mh=M-binding (binding=13.6 eV).
However, for quarks in a proton, it goes the "other way." Bare quarks have a very small mass, but when bound in a proton, the proton become very heavy compared to the sum of the quark masses! Indeed, the quarks themselves seem to gain mass.
This is all the result of what is called chiral symmetry breaking. The mass imparted to hadrons by the breaking of this symmetry is far larger than that of the Higgs mechanism. For example, see Frank Wilczek's fun article on the topic.
Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship
on
Neutrino Mass Confirmed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You may have to dust off some of your quantum knoweldge here:
States of definite energy/mass are stationary *by definition* in quantum mechanics. They don't change in time. States of definite flavor (electron-ness, muon-ness, tau-ness) for a long time were assumed to be also states of definite energy for the neutrino.
But it is natural to ask: what if states of definite flavor and states of definite mass are NOT the same? And which are we measuring in the lab? If they are not the same state, then flavor (the thing we apparently measure in the lab) will change in time and you get "flavor oscillations".
You might ask why normal electrons don't change into muons. This is because for electrons and muons, it appears that states of definite flavor and states of definite mass ARE the same. Not true for neutrinos.
As has been pointed out by other readers, the fact that neutrinos have mass has been established by previous neutrino oscillation experiments such as SuperK, SNO, and KamLAND. These experiment, however, are only sensitive to the difference of the squared masses between the different neutrino energy eigenstates (states of definite energy). They cannot tell us what the absolute mass is. MINOS is similar in that regard.
A recent APS study (see the main report in particular) has tagged determining the absolute mass of the neutrino as amongst the highest priorities in the field. Another big mystery is to determine if the neutrino is it's own antiparticle (i.e. if it is of a Dirac or Majorana character). There is an interesting kind of decay known as "neutrinoless double beta decay" that only proceeds if the neutrino is its own antiparticle. This decay has never been observed (some members of the Heidelberg-Moscow experiment may disagree with me), but there is an active community currently looking for it in different candidate isotopes of Ge, Xe, Mo, and Te. The rate of this decay is directly proportional to the square of the effective neutrino mass. The lower limit on the lifetime of this decay in Tellurium is about 1E24 years, about ten orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe. Not a trivial experiment to do.
Hopefully, in the next few years, discovery of this decay (and a strong statement about the absolute neutrino mass from the decay rate) will be a big headline story on Slashdot (and perhaps the NY Times and Physical Review Letters too - hopefully not in that order; are you listening Mr. Fleischman?).
I see this time he's publishing his results through http://home.businesswire.com/ in instead of the New York Times. Ahhh, now there's peer review for you.
Reg: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had,
and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: Yeah.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they
ever given us in return? (he pauses smugly)
Xerxes: Coffee.
Reg: What?
Xerxes: Coffee.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
Masked commando #1: And the camera.
Stan: Oh, yeah, the camera, Reg. Remember what photography used to be
like?
Reg: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you coffee and the camera are
two things that the Muslims have done.
Matthias: And algebra.
Reg: Well, yes, obviously algebra. I mean, algebra goes without saying,
doesn't it? But apart from coffee, the camera, and algebra...
Masked commando #2: Chess.
Xerxes: Surgical instruments.
Masked commando #3: Windmill.
General audience: Ohh...
Reg: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
Masked commando #1: And the fountain pen!
General audience: Oh, yes! True!
Francis: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss if the Muslims
left, Reg.
Masked commando #4: The three course meal!
...
Reg: All right, but apart from coffee, the camera, chess, surgical
instruments, the windmill, the fountain pen, and the three course meal,
what have the Muslims ever done for us?
I know it sounds trite but, for me, the fun with these games, like with
life, isn't the endpoint (obtaining item X, getting to level 60, etc.) but
rather the path itself. Obtaining that new level or item gives a
little ping in the brain's pleasure center, but the real fun is the
whole experience. Struggling the hard way from level one to get
money and resources, making a name for yourself in the game, figuring
out all the nuances of PvP between classes, mastering instances, etc.
are the only fun parts of the game IMHO. If you are just going to buy
your way to level 60 and max your skills just for the sake of doing that
"because 60th is the highest", games like this probably aren't for you.
Save your $60 and do something else.
Like the author of TFA, I'm a working stiff who can only manage to play
WoW a couple hours a week on average. And I'm milking it for all its worth.
I'm savoring every moment and enjoying the hell out of myself. I actually
pity the folks who played their brains out for a few weeks to reach
level 60 only discover there is virtually no end game. Also, WoW is not tedius
at all compared to some online games. It is well-tuned to players like me, actually rewarding time away from the server with experience bonuses. I have found each character level unique and interesting and I have rarely felt really broke or stuck. The ability to have many alts of different races and classes adds great variety to the game.
To buy easy gold may seem, superficially, to have certain
conveniences, depending where you are in the game. Granted, sometimes a
little extra game money can free up a tedious distinctly un-fun character
log jam. I'm sympathetic. After adventuring with a player who had a higher
level alt, he tossed my 11th level character a single gold piece in the
context of the game. It was a breath
of fresh air for that character and allowed me to get a few
extra items and class training I had neglected. For a level or two,
money wasn't such a big deal.
To have purchased 500G for $60 at that level would have made me wonder why
I had bothered to decide to play the game at all. My advice: just stop
playing the game and *pretend* you had the experience of leveling up and
gaining the skills and experience in-game because the sensation will be
about the same -- and about as satisfying.
Slashdot Mirror
Vote randomly and at least you become a part of the statistical errors of the election. That's in contrast to the the systematic errors (also know as "election results") created by the non-random "informed" people...
From TFA: Code Search is "another tool that makes it a tad easier for the attacker,"
Like gcc and perl. Gee, those pesky tools. What do you know, personal computers are another tool that makes it a tad easer for the attacker too.
Obviously developers concerned with security should take note of any new and current tools available, but to create a tone like Google is providing a date rape drug for crackers is just raw fud propaganda.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think you are thinking of Googol...
IMHO, String Theory is really, at best, a mathematical model that has yet to be tested. The ideas are fundamentally rooted in real physics, so it isn't like they are just making it up. In principle, it could be helping to develop mathematical tools to help solve other problems (they should advertise that if that is true). But I don't want any this fruity post hoc crap; let's have some real predictive tests. I also worry about the cost-benefit. Even if string theory eventually does make a prediction that turns out to be true within the next 500 years, is string theory causing a kind of contemporary brain drain, drawing young bright thinkers away from well-defined theory/experiment problems that really matter in physics right now?
"Students will normally own the copyright to the scholarly and creative publications they develop, including works fulfilling course requirements (term papers and projects), Senior Projects, and Masters Theses/Projects. Students retain copyright ownership as long as they are not paid for the work that results in the creation and do not receive extraordinary University resources in support of the work. Nonetheless, by enrolling at the University, the student grants the University a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to mark on, modify, publicize and retain the work as may be required by the faculty, department, or the University"
See Doomsday Fears at RHIC in particular the reference Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC
In this analogy, the ISK and the casino chip are essentially a one-to-one. They are both currencies earned in games provided by a service (CPP vs. casino) and both have a specialized way of converting the object directly to other services (more time in the Eve game or "comps" at the casino). In both cases, both services "own" the abstract currency (ISK vs. chips). Certainly in the case of the casino, any means of converting the abstract currency into real cash will result in taxation (in the casino, on eBay, or otherwise). In their abstract state as chips, if there is a well-defined means of converting it to cash, you could probably make a legal case if you were scammed, but that isn't clear. While online games are not viewed as casinos, we could still probably learn a lot from simply observing legal precedents of how casinos operate to learn what the legal future of currency exchange in online games might become.
In short, from TFA, it isn't clear to me that the existence of more strategy guides is causing more complex games any more than the converse. The article could be titled "How Gaming Affected Strategy Guides" with only minor change of text.
David: Too much, there's too much fucking perspective now.
Reminds me of a pre-technology leading to Larry Niven's Variable Swords from Ringworld. It "just" involves a statis field for stability and a little ball afixed on the tip so you know where the end of the sword is. Too bad the former's probably a show stopper -- for a while anyway.
People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence...
Again, I ask, what is the "research" described in the article using as a control or baseline? This is never discussed -- and it sounds like this "research" is nothing more than an elaborate opinion-piece. TFA even use David Brooks as a kind of "reference." I enjoy David Brooks, even if I don't always agree with him. He is a respectable social commentator and pundit, but he is ultimately a professional opinionist, not a respected psychological researcher.
Also, can someone help me out with this quote from the article:
Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. [bold emphasis mine]
Genes shifting as the result of a psychological shift? WTF? It was my understanding that genes needed a bit more than "psychology" to change. Are these guys implying a Lamarckian evolution based not even on physical characteristics but somehow "attitudes affecting evolutionary physiology"? With little snips like this, it makes this work seem very fishy to me, bordering on crackpotism.
Anyway, while the basic hypothesis has merit, the research the article describes doesn't seem to demonstrate or prove (or even have the ability to demonstrate or prove) the proposed effect.
Actually, in science, contrary to simple cliches, being a good researcher ("knowedge in the subject", as you put it) and a good teacher are generally correlated. Historically, the best teachers were the best researchers and vice versa. In my experience, most so-called "good researchers" who couldn't teach were really "talented technicians", not scientists. Of course, the world needs talented technicians. Just don't call them professor and put them in front of a classroom with a bunch of people trying to learn a new topic.
Clearly many people who are creating myspace sites have a strange relationship with this very public forum. On one hand they view it and understand it as public. It is the web afterall and everyone is just a Google search away. But yet they still seem to place a psychological shield around it. So while they surely must know it is public, they still regard it as somehow very private and personal ("my space") and are shocked when people hold them accountable for the information content they advertise.
It seems the summary mutated to "email with disclaimer" from "signature and disclaimer" in TFA and "disclaimer" only (in Rekon title) and "name or initials" in Rekon blog ariticle. While it may be slasfud, I guess the confusion is somewhat understandable since all the articles speak of it differently. So does a disclaimer alone in a sig (the part after "--") without a name make something a valid offer? Or is "disclaimer" being used in some specialized way to mean "name"?
From TFA:
"The end result of this could be that people who include a signature and disclaimer at the bottom of their emails might actually be making themselves more liable than people who just send one line emails."
From Rekon:
"Disclaimers could make emails into contracts
Article in The Register about a recent High Court judgment on the application of the Statute of Frauds and Perjuries 1677 to e-mail messages. In short, the sender's name or initials as a signature in the body of the e-mail is a valid signature, but names or addresses that appear only in the headers do not count."
--
The above observations may or may not be a binding contract
But it seems odd: If you compare software engineer to college professor, it is clear, based on their data, that the 10-year growth parameter is fairly heavily weighted in their ranking since professor is equal or higher in all other areas.
Software Engineer:
average salary: $80.5k
10-year growth: 46%
Average annual job openings: 44.8k
Stress: B
Flexibility: B
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
College Professor:
average salary: $81.5k
10-year growth: 31%
Average annual job openings: 95.3k
Stress: B
Flexibility: A
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
It seems like *if you had the job*, the quality of that job *right now* would be somewhat independent of the 10-year growth parameter. In that same spirit, if they folded in some "job security" parameter, it seems the tenture (or tenture-track) options of a professor would trump all others.
1) I'm all in favor of such studies in principle. "Biological/Health effects of X" type studies are important and there certainly can be murky, unexpected biophysical relationships that should be investigated.
2) A correlation is not a cause. I want to know a PHYSICAL MECHANISM by which cell phones can cause brain tumors, not just a correlation statistic. The classic back-of-the-envelope calculations you see physicist-slashdotters doing is an effort to isolate the problem from obvious potential "first causes" (ionizing radiation etc.). Without and understanding of mechanism, you fall into the flying spaghetti monsterist's pirates vs. global warming spoof-dogma.
Well, from the studio's POV, the answer is clear: $$$. However, I cannot understand why FANS would want a movie. As a fan myself, I would MUCH rather have advertisers pay for 3 half-hour segments I can Tivo and watch at my leisure than one 1.5 hour "diluted episode" where I must pay $10+parking+food=$20+. Not to mention the psychological stress induced from just setting foot in theater drenched in sticky crap, chatty middle-aged know-nothings, and creepy teenage residues of every sort. In the case of some TV shows like Star Trek, you main gain some leverage going to the big screen because the special effects will be beefed up. This might offset some theater-vs.-home issues...
Ok, perhaps I need to get out more. But my question remains...
For example, let's compare the situation to a hydrogen atom. If you take a free proton and an electron, the total mass will be M=me+mp. Let them bind into hydrogen in the ground state and they LOSE mass; some of that mass is reallocated into the potential energy. The mass of a hydrogen atom is then Mh=M-binding (binding=13.6 eV).
However, for quarks in a proton, it goes the "other way." Bare quarks have a very small mass, but when bound in a proton, the proton become very heavy compared to the sum of the quark masses! Indeed, the quarks themselves seem to gain mass. This is all the result of what is called chiral symmetry breaking. The mass imparted to hadrons by the breaking of this symmetry is far larger than that of the Higgs mechanism. For example, see Frank Wilczek's fun article on the topic.
But it is natural to ask: what if states of definite flavor and states of definite mass are NOT the same? And which are we measuring in the lab? If they are not the same state, then flavor (the thing we apparently measure in the lab) will change in time and you get "flavor oscillations".
You might ask why normal electrons don't change into muons. This is because for electrons and muons, it appears that states of definite flavor and states of definite mass ARE the same. Not true for neutrinos.
A recent APS study (see the main report in particular) has tagged determining the absolute mass of the neutrino as amongst the highest priorities in the field. Another big mystery is to determine if the neutrino is it's own antiparticle (i.e. if it is of a Dirac or Majorana character). There is an interesting kind of decay known as "neutrinoless double beta decay" that only proceeds if the neutrino is its own antiparticle. This decay has never been observed (some members of the Heidelberg-Moscow experiment may disagree with me), but there is an active community currently looking for it in different candidate isotopes of Ge, Xe, Mo, and Te. The rate of this decay is directly proportional to the square of the effective neutrino mass. The lower limit on the lifetime of this decay in Tellurium is about 1E24 years, about ten orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe. Not a trivial experiment to do.
Hopefully, in the next few years, discovery of this decay (and a strong statement about the absolute neutrino mass from the decay rate) will be a big headline story on Slashdot (and perhaps the NY Times and Physical Review Letters too - hopefully not in that order; are you listening Mr. Fleischman?).
I see this time he's publishing his results through http://home.businesswire.com/ in instead of the New York Times. Ahhh, now there's peer review for you.
Ahhh, the loop hole: a virus is not technically a life form.
Reg: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: Yeah.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return? (he pauses smugly)
Xerxes: Coffee.
Reg: What?
Xerxes: Coffee.
Reg: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
Masked commando #1: And the camera.
Stan: Oh, yeah, the camera, Reg. Remember what photography used to be like?
Reg: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you coffee and the camera are two things that the Muslims have done.
Matthias: And algebra.
Reg: Well, yes, obviously algebra. I mean, algebra goes without saying, doesn't it? But apart from coffee, the camera, and algebra...
Masked commando #2: Chess.
Xerxes: Surgical instruments.
Masked commando #3: Windmill.
General audience: Ohh...
Reg: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
Masked commando #1: And the fountain pen!
General audience: Oh, yes! True!
Francis: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss if the Muslims left, Reg.
Masked commando #4: The three course meal!
Reg: All right, but apart from coffee, the camera, chess, surgical instruments, the windmill, the fountain pen, and the three course meal, what have the Muslims ever done for us?
Like the author of TFA, I'm a working stiff who can only manage to play WoW a couple hours a week on average. And I'm milking it for all its worth. I'm savoring every moment and enjoying the hell out of myself. I actually pity the folks who played their brains out for a few weeks to reach level 60 only discover there is virtually no end game. Also, WoW is not tedius at all compared to some online games. It is well-tuned to players like me, actually rewarding time away from the server with experience bonuses. I have found each character level unique and interesting and I have rarely felt really broke or stuck. The ability to have many alts of different races and classes adds great variety to the game.
To buy easy gold may seem, superficially, to have certain conveniences, depending where you are in the game. Granted, sometimes a little extra game money can free up a tedious distinctly un-fun character log jam. I'm sympathetic. After adventuring with a player who had a higher level alt, he tossed my 11th level character a single gold piece in the context of the game. It was a breath of fresh air for that character and allowed me to get a few extra items and class training I had neglected. For a level or two, money wasn't such a big deal.
To have purchased 500G for $60 at that level would have made me wonder why I had bothered to decide to play the game at all. My advice: just stop playing the game and *pretend* you had the experience of leveling up and gaining the skills and experience in-game because the sensation will be about the same -- and about as satisfying.
So the FCC's answer seems to be to provide free shameful advertising to prevent paid shameful advertising....