"Breathalyzer" alcohol tests are notoriously unreliable.
Any links to support this? In most US states (if not all), refusal to take a breahalyzer test automatically implies failing it, which will obviously work against you in court.
The above mentioned countries have a population of 53 million and generated 12.7% of papers, while America, with a population of 288M, published 34%.
Huh? Did you even read that first link you posted? Firstly, they analyed both number of publications AND number of citations, but the focus was more on citations than publications. Usually it's citations that ar measured for 'quality' of published work, because as my advisor told me the other day, it's relatively easy to publish a large number of shoddy works.
[On a side note, my advisor made an amusing metaphor. She related scientific publishing to Hollywood. Namely, if an actor doesn't appear in a movie for a few years and then stars in something good, his/her career doesn't really suffer even though they were out of the spotlight for awhile. But if an actor, trying to keep their presence, stars in mediocre movie after mediocre movie, their reputation will really take a beating. So too in science, it's better to publish really good meaningful papers than shoddy repetitive articles just to get publications through the door.]
Anyway, the numbers you mention that I quoted in this post are misleading, because they shouldn't be normalized to the size of the whole population, but the size of the population of scientists. Maybe those countries have a higher density of scientists, which would be a tidbit of information worthy in itself. I actually don't know the population of scientists in the countries you listed, but there's no reason to normalize to the total population.
The size of a country's population is irrevelent to a scientist doing research, what really matters is the size and quality of the scientific community they're working within. Renormalize your numbers to this size, and that's the figure that counts.
One might speculate whether the social democracies with their high taxes and well-funded universities do more hardcore research. Here in America it seems that research is aimed more at the low-lying, commercially-viable fruit.
Not necessarily true at all, why would you say Europe is studying more hard-core research than America? Where are you living, where have you done research, and in what field? In my field (experimental condensed matter physics) I routinely read related publications from institutions around the globe (eg US, Netherlands, France, Russia, etc) and there's really no observable difference at all between the focus, relevence, or quality of the research amongst these countries. Actually, many papers are jointly written, with authors residing in different countries anyway, so things really do blend together.
It's kind of ironic, but to those of us actually within the scientific community, we're all for collaborative international progress, all trying to further scientific knowledge in general, and not playing stupid nationalistic favorites. The people that usually claim "my country is scientifically superior than yours, nya nya nya" are typically those not within the fields, trying to ride of the successes of others.
It's not clear to me whether the OP was suggesting that phonons were quanta of a "temperature field".
No, I wasn't. I was trying to give some general examples for non-physicists, and it's easiest to visualize a scalar field over higher-rank tensor fields. There's no reason why you cannot say temperature distribution is a field, you just cannot quantize such a system in the traditional sense. (as you have already noted).
Obviously phonons are lattice vibration quanta and not quanta of a 'temperature field'. But my point was, in trying to give a hand-waving general explanation, that for some system not in thermal equilibrium, the heat energy that will be transmitted to reach equilibrium is carried by these spin-0 phonons.
In a way I think what was most inspiring about Titan was the great unknown. We didn't know if there was a solid surface, liquid oceans of hydrocarbons, obvious forms of life, etc. It was really a huge deal, getting the probe onto the surface, with the ability to survive a variety of scenarios (liquid ocean, solid land, muddy tarpits, etc).
After the probe landed, and we saw a seeming barren rocky surface, the mission suddenly isn't as sexy anymore. To many in the general public, it's yet another rocky barren landscape, not much different from the moon, Mars, etc. Of course to the planetary scientists there's loads of amazing things to study. But to the average Joe, there unfortunately wasn't anything groundbreaking to instill a sense of awe.
You could think of it in terms of interactions. Ie, you might be able to visualize sunlight traveling to Earth as a wave, but it might be harder to think of your cable TV signal traveling down the coaxial cable as being photons transmitted. But you're manipulating electrons, which of course are elementary particles, and these particles interact via the Electromagnetic Force. And quantum field theory tells us that individual quanta of the electromagnetic force are Photons (uncharged particles with spin of 1).
So when you have to masses separated by some finite distance, they obviously interact, as noted by the gravitational force. So it's only natural to come up with a graviton which is the interacting carrier between these two masses.
You can also learn some things about the dimensionality of the fields. For example, you can think of a scalar field as every point in space (or spacetime) having a distinct scalar value that describes something. An example is tempature, each point in space would have a unique temperature. How do two points in space transmit their temperature to each other (like an ice cube melting in a tumbler of Scotch)? Well, through the exchange of kinetic energy, which in the quantized sense would be individual quanta of lattice vibrations. These are called phonons and have a spin of Zero, as expected from a scalar field (a scalar is a tensor of rank zero).
One step more complicated is a vector field, or really a rank-1 tensor field. Each point in space now has a vector (magnitude and direction) associated with it. One popular example is the electromagnetic field. This is a rank-1 tensor field, and thus carriers that mediate the field exchange between two points would be expected to have spin-1. Photons.
Getting even more complicated, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity describes how mass affects the curvature of space-time, and Einstein's equations that describe such motion make use of rank-two tensors to describe the curvature (you can roughly think of rank-2 tensor like a vector of vectors). So the carriers of this interaction can be expected to be spin-2 particles, hence the proposed graviton.
But gravity is actually more complicated, and there's the proposed Higgs mechanism which gives rise to mass, through a scalar Higgs Field. So the accompanying carrier of this mass information is the predicted Higgs Boson, which is expected to have zero spin.
You mean the Daily Show line "Where more Americans get their news than any other nationality" didn't clue you in that they're just making fun of the system as a whole?
Have you only watched the Daily Show during the last four years? Stewart has basically been cleverly mocking the hypocrisy of the country's political leaders since the show started. It's been a Republican administration for the past 4 years (and a fully-dominated Republican Senate/House for the past 2 years), so that's where most of his focus goes.
During the Clinton years there was definitely a slew of anti-Clinton, anti-Lewinski, anti-Gore jokes, etc. But when you have a president like Bush who gives comedians enough material without even trying (along with an administration with policies just dripping with potential for satire), you cannot expect them not to pounce on it.
For example, I remember back during the Clinton years they basically showed a bunch of clips tacked together of Clinton saying "I did not have relations with that woman... I did have a relationship with Monica Lewinsky", etc, showing his hypocrisy. Guess what? It was funny then, and his take on the Bush administration is funny now.
And finally, as Stewart said on Crossfire - he didn't realize that CNN takes it's queues on integrity from Comedy Central. It's COMEDY CENTRAL, a COMEDY channel, not a NEWS channel.
The Daily Show is one of the greatest programs currently on American television. Perhaps part of the reason for it's success is that since it's obviously a satirical show, it can press questions many of the other "so-called liberal media" outlets feel intimidated to represent. For example, the Daily Show was one of the first national 'news' programs to publically acknowledge the whole Jeff Gannon controversy in the White House that most other media outlets are surprisingly quiet about (basically the White House repeatedly gave a press clearance to a mole, under a fake name, who planted easy questions for Bush to answer, after the heightened 9/11 White House security. This guy w/ the fake name also had access to 'classified' information before it was revealed by either Bush or other staff. Meanwhile actual journalists, like Maureen Dowd were consistently refused press passes to White House briefings. This has all been unraveled in the past 2 weeks, like Watergate, with the mainstream press just starting to hesitatingly picking up on it.)
And of course there's this brilliant tidbit where he blasts CNN's crossfire for being theater instead of actual news. The best part is when conservative crossfire host Tucker Carlson tries to ask Jon Stewart why he gave Kerry softball questions when he was on the Daily Show, Stewart responded (paraphrased from memory) "What I didn't realize, and maybe this explains alot, is that CNN takes its queues on integrity from Comedy Central. The show that leads into mine is puppets making crank phone calls."
Jon Stewart is brilliant, and since the Daily Show has the satirical factor embedded in it, it allows him more freedom than most other media outlets. And ironically in many cases he does a better job at explaining the news. For example, Daily Show viewers tend to be more informed than viewers of many other programs.
Okay, that's true, but if two scientists get two differing results for the same simulation topic, obviously there's a disparity there that needs to be resolved. So one model must have faulty assumptions or faulty calculations, or something.
But another thing is to consider that there are X scientific studies, and Y of them show global warming happening due to human activity. If Y approaches X, then that is also something to consider.
This is a GREAT idea, and hopefully will have a positive return.
The fact that they're getting elementary school students involved with 'cool' science projects (visual astronomy is always cool) is a great way to stimulate scientific interest in these children. The US has problems with the current status of public schools, but this seems like a great step in the right direction.
One aspect that makes me particularly happy is that they've coordinated w/ the general community, to turn off the streetlights. This will make most community members feel involved in the project, even if only remotely. Many universities around the globe offer weekly or monthly public observatory hours, but few people make use of this or are even aware of it. But when you involve a community as a whole, people will notice. More neighbors might stroll over to see some interesting things in the sky, or even just become aware that there's a nearby telescope they never knew existed.
It might also encourage parents who would otherwise not really care about their child's education (unfortunately many parents think of school as free day-care), to ask some questions and maybe even encourage them a bit more. This move is definitely a good thing, and I really hope it works out well.
We have practically no climate data of any real value beyond a few hundred years or so, yet we're expected to just ooh and aah every time some simulation from some scientist comes across that purports exactly how climates change over eons.
You bring up some good points, but on the other side, this doesn't give reason to dispute the scientists claims. Can you find a valid flaw, or faulty assumption in their model that invalidates their conclusions?
Many naysayers often mention that the Earth's climate changes drastically in the past hundred million years, so the fact that it's changing now doesn't really mean anything. But the million-dollar question is - are humans changing the climate, or is it changing due to other factors. If it is in fact us changing the climate, then that's a problem that needs to be rectified quickly, and each year that we delay finding this out can have more negative environmental impacts.
The reasoning that the climate changed so often in the past, and hence we can ignore it now, is pretty dangerous. It's kind of like reasoning that since hundreds of thousands of people die each year in natural tragedies (floods, earthquakes, etc), it shouldn't be of relevence that 1000 people died because a company dumped toxic chemicals into the local aquifier.
I'm American, and most people I associate with (probably all) understand human activity will increase global warming. Similarly, they believe in evolution as well. In fact, of the hundreds of people I do know, I cannot think of anyone that's a creationist (although my girlfriend's sister's family is pretty religious so they MIGHT believe it, but we usually try to avoid such contentious discussions with them). Of course there's the auto industry, and SUV drivers/sellers too, that has lobbying power and really annoys me, but seriously, Americans are not all like the stereotype you make us out to be. Where are you from anyway?
But then again, I've lived on the East Coast my whole life, and I'm currently a physics graduate student, so science triumphs over religion anyway, among the peers in my field. But even amongst my non-science friends the same pattern is there. And I'd imagine most slashdotters, regardless of country, tend to be of the science-oriented type that would have similar experiences of not knowing any creationists.
Sorry, but it really bothers me that so many people on slashdot think all Americans don't care about global warming and that we're also mostly science-ignoring creationists. You'll find such people in ANY country, not just the USA. But slashdotters living in metropolitan Europe, for instance, might be more likely to think there are no creationist Europeans since they don't encounter them daily, and hence that it's only the Flag-Waving Americans they read about that have these views.
It's a classic scenario. What we really have to worry about is going back in time and accidentally doing something that makes us cease to exist.
Exactly. That's why it's absolutely imperative that every father give his son "the talk" on his wedding day.
You know the one, about how if he accidentally makes a toaster that sends him back in time, he shouldn't touch anything because even the slightest change could affect the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Any links to support this? In most US states (if not all), refusal to take a breahalyzer test automatically implies failing it, which will obviously work against you in court.
Huh? Did you even read that first link you posted? Firstly, they analyed both number of publications AND number of citations, but the focus was more on citations than publications. Usually it's citations that ar measured for 'quality' of published work, because as my advisor told me the other day, it's relatively easy to publish a large number of shoddy works.
[On a side note, my advisor made an amusing metaphor. She related scientific publishing to Hollywood. Namely, if an actor doesn't appear in a movie for a few years and then stars in something good, his/her career doesn't really suffer even though they were out of the spotlight for awhile. But if an actor, trying to keep their presence, stars in mediocre movie after mediocre movie, their reputation will really take a beating. So too in science, it's better to publish really good meaningful papers than shoddy repetitive articles just to get publications through the door.]
Anyway, the numbers you mention that I quoted in this post are misleading, because they shouldn't be normalized to the size of the whole population, but the size of the population of scientists. Maybe those countries have a higher density of scientists, which would be a tidbit of information worthy in itself. I actually don't know the population of scientists in the countries you listed, but there's no reason to normalize to the total population.
The size of a country's population is irrevelent to a scientist doing research, what really matters is the size and quality of the scientific community they're working within. Renormalize your numbers to this size, and that's the figure that counts.
One might speculate whether the social democracies with their high taxes and well-funded universities do more hardcore research. Here in America it seems that research is aimed more at the low-lying, commercially-viable fruit.
Not necessarily true at all, why would you say Europe is studying more hard-core research than America? Where are you living, where have you done research, and in what field? In my field (experimental condensed matter physics) I routinely read related publications from institutions around the globe (eg US, Netherlands, France, Russia, etc) and there's really no observable difference at all between the focus, relevence, or quality of the research amongst these countries. Actually, many papers are jointly written, with authors residing in different countries anyway, so things really do blend together.
It's kind of ironic, but to those of us actually within the scientific community, we're all for collaborative international progress, all trying to further scientific knowledge in general, and not playing stupid nationalistic favorites. The people that usually claim "my country is scientifically superior than yours, nya nya nya" are typically those not within the fields, trying to ride of the successes of others.
No, I wasn't. I was trying to give some general examples for non-physicists, and it's easiest to visualize a scalar field over higher-rank tensor fields. There's no reason why you cannot say temperature distribution is a field, you just cannot quantize such a system in the traditional sense. (as you have already noted).
Obviously phonons are lattice vibration quanta and not quanta of a 'temperature field'. But my point was, in trying to give a hand-waving general explanation, that for some system not in thermal equilibrium, the heat energy that will be transmitted to reach equilibrium is carried by these spin-0 phonons.
After the probe landed, and we saw a seeming barren rocky surface, the mission suddenly isn't as sexy anymore. To many in the general public, it's yet another rocky barren landscape, not much different from the moon, Mars, etc. Of course to the planetary scientists there's loads of amazing things to study. But to the average Joe, there unfortunately wasn't anything groundbreaking to instill a sense of awe.
So when you have to masses separated by some finite distance, they obviously interact, as noted by the gravitational force. So it's only natural to come up with a graviton which is the interacting carrier between these two masses.
You can also learn some things about the dimensionality of the fields. For example, you can think of a scalar field as every point in space (or spacetime) having a distinct scalar value that describes something. An example is tempature, each point in space would have a unique temperature. How do two points in space transmit their temperature to each other (like an ice cube melting in a tumbler of Scotch)? Well, through the exchange of kinetic energy, which in the quantized sense would be individual quanta of lattice vibrations. These are called phonons and have a spin of Zero, as expected from a scalar field (a scalar is a tensor of rank zero).
One step more complicated is a vector field, or really a rank-1 tensor field. Each point in space now has a vector (magnitude and direction) associated with it. One popular example is the electromagnetic field. This is a rank-1 tensor field, and thus carriers that mediate the field exchange between two points would be expected to have spin-1. Photons.
Getting even more complicated, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity describes how mass affects the curvature of space-time, and Einstein's equations that describe such motion make use of rank-two tensors to describe the curvature (you can roughly think of rank-2 tensor like a vector of vectors). So the carriers of this interaction can be expected to be spin-2 particles, hence the proposed graviton.
But gravity is actually more complicated, and there's the proposed Higgs mechanism which gives rise to mass, through a scalar Higgs Field. So the accompanying carrier of this mass information is the predicted Higgs Boson, which is expected to have zero spin.
You'll have to eat 12093749283745 bowls of Raisin Bran to get all the nutrition of one bowl of Total.
Have you only watched the Daily Show during the last four years? Stewart has basically been cleverly mocking the hypocrisy of the country's political leaders since the show started. It's been a Republican administration for the past 4 years (and a fully-dominated Republican Senate/House for the past 2 years), so that's where most of his focus goes.
During the Clinton years there was definitely a slew of anti-Clinton, anti-Lewinski, anti-Gore jokes, etc. But when you have a president like Bush who gives comedians enough material without even trying (along with an administration with policies just dripping with potential for satire), you cannot expect them not to pounce on it.
For example, I remember back during the Clinton years they basically showed a bunch of clips tacked together of Clinton saying "I did not have relations with that woman ... I did have a relationship with Monica Lewinsky", etc, showing his hypocrisy. Guess what? It was funny then, and his take on the Bush administration is funny now.
And finally, as Stewart said on Crossfire - he didn't realize that CNN takes it's queues on integrity from Comedy Central. It's COMEDY CENTRAL, a COMEDY channel, not a NEWS channel.
And of course there's this brilliant tidbit where he blasts CNN's crossfire for being theater instead of actual news. The best part is when conservative crossfire host Tucker Carlson tries to ask Jon Stewart why he gave Kerry softball questions when he was on the Daily Show, Stewart responded (paraphrased from memory) "What I didn't realize, and maybe this explains alot, is that CNN takes its queues on integrity from Comedy Central. The show that leads into mine is puppets making crank phone calls."
Jon Stewart is brilliant, and since the Daily Show has the satirical factor embedded in it, it allows him more freedom than most other media outlets. And ironically in many cases he does a better job at explaining the news. For example, Daily Show viewers tend to be more informed than viewers of many other programs.
But another thing is to consider that there are X scientific studies, and Y of them show global warming happening due to human activity. If Y approaches X, then that is also something to consider.
The fact that they're getting elementary school students involved with 'cool' science projects (visual astronomy is always cool) is a great way to stimulate scientific interest in these children. The US has problems with the current status of public schools, but this seems like a great step in the right direction.
One aspect that makes me particularly happy is that they've coordinated w/ the general community, to turn off the streetlights. This will make most community members feel involved in the project, even if only remotely. Many universities around the globe offer weekly or monthly public observatory hours, but few people make use of this or are even aware of it. But when you involve a community as a whole, people will notice. More neighbors might stroll over to see some interesting things in the sky, or even just become aware that there's a nearby telescope they never knew existed.
It might also encourage parents who would otherwise not really care about their child's education (unfortunately many parents think of school as free day-care), to ask some questions and maybe even encourage them a bit more. This move is definitely a good thing, and I really hope it works out well.
You bring up some good points, but on the other side, this doesn't give reason to dispute the scientists claims. Can you find a valid flaw, or faulty assumption in their model that invalidates their conclusions?
Many naysayers often mention that the Earth's climate changes drastically in the past hundred million years, so the fact that it's changing now doesn't really mean anything. But the million-dollar question is - are humans changing the climate, or is it changing due to other factors. If it is in fact us changing the climate, then that's a problem that needs to be rectified quickly, and each year that we delay finding this out can have more negative environmental impacts.
The reasoning that the climate changed so often in the past, and hence we can ignore it now, is pretty dangerous. It's kind of like reasoning that since hundreds of thousands of people die each year in natural tragedies (floods, earthquakes, etc), it shouldn't be of relevence that 1000 people died because a company dumped toxic chemicals into the local aquifier.
I'm American, and most people I associate with (probably all) understand human activity will increase global warming. Similarly, they believe in evolution as well. In fact, of the hundreds of people I do know, I cannot think of anyone that's a creationist (although my girlfriend's sister's family is pretty religious so they MIGHT believe it, but we usually try to avoid such contentious discussions with them). Of course there's the auto industry, and SUV drivers/sellers too, that has lobbying power and really annoys me, but seriously, Americans are not all like the stereotype you make us out to be. Where are you from anyway?
But then again, I've lived on the East Coast my whole life, and I'm currently a physics graduate student, so science triumphs over religion anyway, among the peers in my field. But even amongst my non-science friends the same pattern is there. And I'd imagine most slashdotters, regardless of country, tend to be of the science-oriented type that would have similar experiences of not knowing any creationists.
Sorry, but it really bothers me that so many people on slashdot think all Americans don't care about global warming and that we're also mostly science-ignoring creationists. You'll find such people in ANY country, not just the USA. But slashdotters living in metropolitan Europe, for instance, might be more likely to think there are no creationist Europeans since they don't encounter them daily, and hence that it's only the Flag-Waving Americans they read about that have these views.
Exactly. That's why it's absolutely imperative that every father give his son "the talk" on his wedding day.
You know the one, about how if he accidentally makes a toaster that sends him back in time, he shouldn't touch anything because even the slightest change could affect the future.
I'm reminded of a Wang Computers tee-shirt my friend had back in the 80's. Nothing but a slogan :
"My Wang never goes down!"