Yes you are quite right. I missed your qualifying "from both role playing groups" statement and thought you were saying that all the results were meaningless. Sorry, my bad.
In fact the study makes your point, more or less demonstrating that people are less concerned with protecting other people's login information. Their behavior was (on average) less secure when they were role-playing with other people's data, rather than using their own. However even with their own data they were not sufficiently careful (on average).
If you read the original study paper (warning: PDF), in the ethical guidelines section they state:
Ethical guidelines are of particular concern in this study, because we ask participants to perform tasks using their own account information.
Despite the fact that they were asking the participants to "role-play", they were told to use their own login credentials. Apparently, many of them were easily induced into handing out this information.
Totally tangential to the actual topic of the study, but I noticed that in the details of the study they interviewed the people about their normal computer habits. They state:
28 participants (42%) reported using Microsoft Internet Explorer as their primary browser, 30 participants (45%) use Mozilla Firefox, 7 participants (10%) use Apple Safari, 1 participant (2%) uses Opera, and 1 participant (2%) uses an unspecified browser. Of the 39 participants who did not use Internet Explorer as their primary browser, 28 (72%) use Internet Explorer as their secondary browser.
The reason I find this interesting is that frequently we throw around statistics from web-site access, and people will complain "well you can't use stats from site X because that site will inherently have more [geeky/non-geeky] users and hence skew the results" (a valid complaint, of course). The above statistics are (reportedly) a random sampling of Bank of America customers with online account (no selection based on computer expertise, etc.).
The above stats suggest that Firefox usage may be even higher than previously suspected. Obviously this sampling of 67 people is not exhaustive and may not be generalizable, but I was quite surprised when I saw those numbers.
What bothers me about TiVo is that they are in a conflict-of-interest situation. They have people buying TiVos (and subscriptions) on the one hand, and they have advertisers and media companies on the other. Let's face it: the needs and wants of the two groups are not usually aligned. At some point, they may decide that the needs of the media companies are more profitable than the needs of the users. (I would argue that this monitoring move is one example.) I would prefer not to sign up with companies that undertaken these conflict-of-interest scenarios.
Obviously it's up to each consumer to decide whether the service TiVo is offering is worth it. Suffice it to say, I'm not convinced.
"I promise with my hand on a Bible that your data is not being archived and sold," said Todd Juenger, TiVo's vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement.
Well that's a very nice promise, but what it misses is that the danger of abuse is a very good reason to avoid something, even if you know no abuse of the system is occuring at present. While this VP can make promises right now, he cannot guarantee that at no point in the future will these techniques be used against customers. TiVo might change their policies, or get bought-out by someone else. Moreover, by building the infrastructure to monitor their customers like this, they are creating an avenue for attack.
This attack may come from someone who cracks the system and uses it to spy on others, or the attack may come from law-suits which (for whatever reason I can't currently imagine) demand that TiVo turn over records of what a particular person was watching. Or maybe this attack will never come.
I would argue that avoiding these kinds of systems is not paranoid... moreover I would argue that avoiding them is necessary. Do not let yet another system be co-opted to monitor you! Even if it is 'for a good cause' (and I'm not convinced that advertising is 'a good cause') it can eventually be used against you.
In short, I'm just going to add this to the list of reasons I prefer MythTV. My device, my control, my privacy.
I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.
(I'm not saying I particularly approve of the Apple ads, but I don't think your comments about having to throw out apple hardware are particularly fair.)
As someone involved in academic research, I have to agree with the parent comments.
Basically, science nowadays is very much an "advanced degree" field. From your post I'm guessing you have a B.Eng. Unfortunately even with a B.Eng. and lots of years in software development, you do not yet have the qualifications to be hired as a research scientist.
It also depends, however, on whether you want to be "involved in science" (as a technician, programmer, etc.) or whether you want to be "a research scientist" (planning experiments, interpreting results, etc.). If you want to be involved, then I'd say with your current qualifications you should certainly be able to find a neat job at some university or research institute. Your programming skills will be quite valuable, in fact. Yes, you will take a pay cut, but the environment may be much more stimulating. In this kind of post, you'll end up being connected to a wide range of different science projects, which can be really rewarding. (You may end up in a job where every day a Grad Student comes up to you and says "would it be possible to program something to do..." which could be alot of fun.)
If you want to really "be a scientist" then I'm afraid your only option is to get another degree. The upside is that while getting such a Masters of Ph.D. you'll be "doing science" which can be alot of fun. This will also let you know, immediately, whether this is something you want to do for many years to come. The downside, of course, is that you will be spending another 5 years on education, and receiving a rather small stipend while doing it. (Also, keep in mind that many of your fellow grad students will be about 20 years old.)
I wish you the best of luck. Personally I love science, and getting an advanced degree has been "worth it" for me. But given your situation, it might make more sense to try and find a job, with your current qualifications, that is closely tied to science.
Well you have to a little careful here. The argument relates not to energy per se, but the energy dispersal, i.e.: entropy. That's why I said 'usage of energy' instead of simply 'energy.' It turns out that entropy increase in the demon is larger than the entropy decrease you get by sorting gas molecules.
The argument would be the same with massive objects. If you attempt to devise a way to generate a low-entropy situation using "massive moving objects" then I assure you that there will be a corresponding increase in entropy elsewhere that will offset it. (Remember that a fast-moving object has high kinetic energy, but this doesn't say much about the entropy of the system it is a part of.)
my understanding is that the idea of Maxwell's demon is not to create energy out of nothing, but rather a way to cheaply extract the thermal energy out of a hot gas and end up with a cold gas and a more useful form of energy
You're right, and thermodynamics tells us these things are related. If you can find a way to reverse the flow of entropy, that's a way of creating "useful energy" out of "useless energy". Thus you could create electricity using just the ambient temperature around you. But, since thermodynamics says that entropy always increases, this is in practice not possible.
The reason you've provided seems like a technological limitation, not a fundamental law of physics.
I agree it sounds like only a technical problem, but if you do the calculation you will find that it is actually a very fundamental limit. There are established limits in information theory, for instance, that describe the minimum amount of entropy you'll need to creat in order to encode information. Basically if you look at it, the demon would have to do something in order to: (1) determine the velocity of a molecule, (2) decide what to do, and (3) open/close the flap. These actions will increase the entropy of the demon far more than he's decreasing the entropy of the gas (by sorting the gas molecules).
Remember it's not just a matter of disturbing the gas molecules, it's a matter of the demon itself needing to increase in entropy in order to make the measurement. Although your hypothetical 'macroscopic-sized superballs' may be easier to sort, the amount of entropy decrease you'd get by sorting them would be very very small, and would be offset by the increase in entropy in the observer.
Let's get the pedantic "This is not actually a Maxwell Demon" comments out of the way first. The original thought experiment of Maxwell's Demon was to suggest a hypothetical creature/device/demon that could watch molecules and make decisions based on what those molecules were doing. By watching the motion of molecules, the demon could open/close a flap and thus sort molecules by kinetic energy. This would allow the demon to generate a hot gas out of nowhere, without any energy input. This would thus contradict thermodynamics (which states that entropy always increases, etc.).
The reason that such a demon cannot be created is that the very act of making an observation (of a gas molecule's trajectory, for instance), requires the usage of energy. And on the scale we're talking about, that usage of energy is exactly the 'work' you are doing to raise the temperature of the gas in sorting the molecules. Thus no such thing as a maxwell demon can be made, and thermodynamics is intact.
This most recent report, as stated, requires an input of energy to move/sort molecules. Thus it doesn't violate thermodynamics and it's not really a Maxwell Demon. The article seems a bit confused on this issue, stating:
As Maxwell had predicted long ago, it does not need energy because it is powered by light.
I would content that the light is an input of energy, and thus saying "it does not need energy" is rather silly.
In any case, the actual research (see David Leigh's page) is about photo-activated molecular shuttles: molecules that switch between well-defined states with input of light. You can thus trap or move other molecules using light. Certainly one step towards the much-anticipated "nanotechnology" but not quite the fine control of molecular positions one would imagine when using the term "Maxwell Demon."
Well, the idea is fine: create a site where academics can post plain-English summaries of their research, and where companies can go looking for people doing research in a particular field. Thus it helps to link-up those who have well-defined problems to others who are working on well-defined solutions. This allows companies to either find research they can start funding (because they want the results), or, in the case of more mature research, to find research patents that they want to license.
So far, so good. It's a good idea precisely because it is simple. The problem, however, is that there is little reason, at present, for either academics or companies to use this site. The site will only become useful once it has built up a significant community of users. Only then will it be useful to either side.
Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult. They will only do it if there is a good chance that some company will take notice. Likewise companies are not going to waste time looking through a small database of random research results.
So it's a catch-22 where no one is going to use the thing until it's useful; hence it will never become useful. Perhaps with their startup money they will pay people to start inputting findings, at least until the network reaches a critical mass. But until the site has a big enough of a following, you're going to have a hard time gaining visibility. This is same problem alot of "networking" sites have: it's hard to build up a big community. What they really need is to figure out some way to make the site useful, even while it is small in size.
You make some good points. However let me just point out that private ownership has its own set of problems.
Beware: Anecdotal evidence follows!
A guy I know (now retired) worked as management in both private and public companies over the years. At one privately owned company (a medium-sized business owned by a couple of family members, sales in the millions), the place was severely mis-managed due to the fact that it was private. The problem was that the owner wanted to "do the right thing" which often came into conflict with the long-term viability of the business. He felt bad for the employees and was very reticent to fire people. At first this seems great: the company has a very 'family' atmosphere and everyone feels like they are 'part of the team.' However it was not sustainable, because many employees became complacent, even lazy, and were not performing up to the level of their salary.
Without being willing to make tough choices (including firing people, slicing salaries, etc.) a privately-owned company can become highly inefficient. In the long-term, this ruins the company, which isn't good for *any* of the employees. Again, you need to make some tough choices for the long-term benefit of the company.
Of course that's just one anecdote. There are lots of private companies with strong leadership that do very well. There are also plenty of public companies that do it properly, and don't compromise long-term business plans just to make quarterly earnings. But the 'pressure' of stock prices can also do good things for companies, helping them streamline and expand, which is good for the employees as well as the investors.
All I'm pointing out is that both public and private companies have their own pros and cons. (The 'better one to work for' probably varies from industry to industry...)
Actually the petition linked to in the summary is not an internet petition, you are supposed to print it out, and mail it to your Member of Parliament (or to a local collector if you prefer, they list many on the webpage). I signed it and I encourage all Canadians reading slashdot to take a look.
And to be clear: it is not a "petition against Vista" or something like that. It is a petition to prevent extensions to Canadian copyright law. There is currently pressure for Canada to enact DMCA-like legislation. To anyone who wants to be able to legally play a DVD on Linux in Canada, this is a major threat. Thus this is a petition stating clearly that the undersigned voters DO NOT want extensions to current copyright. This has implications for many things, Vista included.
in Canada, it's not copyright infringement if it's for personal use
Indeed, and that's what the U.S. movie industry so scared about. Quote from the article:
But here's the catch. Under the Copyright Act, you have to prove that an individual camcording in the theatre is doing it for distribution purposes.
Camcording a movie in Canada is not illegal (it could be for personal use). The illegal part is distributing the recording to others, but that is a completely separate event. Again from the article:
We don't want to have to prove the economic loss from distribution. We want it to be a Criminal Code activity to be caught camcording. Period.
Fantastic! Let's just assume everyone is a criminal if we even suspect that they don't support the status-quo monopoly!
Personally I don't want Canadians giving up any of their freedoms just to maintain the current distribution monopolies. All Canadians in the audience should consider signing the petition against copyright extension: http://www.digital-copyright.ca/billc60/.
Although the news writeup doesn't make this clear, the original scientific paper is comparing the data density achieved with RAM, not with hard disks. What they are doing is minituarizing high-speed volatile random-access memory. Although a 3 terabyte hard disk may not excite you, would you be impressed with 3 terabytes of RAM?
If we could increase the data-density of RAM by a few orders of magnitude (without sacrificing access times, of course), we could avoid one of the main bottlenecks in modern computers.
These are extremely small structures and this leads to an interaction between the light (which is an electromagnetic wave of course) that is essentially identical to when radiofrequency EM radiation propagates down a normal (macroscopic) coax cable. Specifically, in the introduction they say:
In this work, we show experimentally that a nanoscopic analog of the conventional coaxial cable, with properly chosen metals for the electrodes and proper electrode dimensions, indeed retains approximately all of the above properties of its conventional macroscale cousin.
Then they go through the details. Their device uses a multiwall carbon-nanotube (MWCNT) as the center conductor (it is a 'metallic' CNT). The MWCNT is embedded in aluminum oxide, which acts as the optically transparent 'dielectric'. The outer wrapping electrode is made of chromium.
The mere creation of these nano-sized devices is quite an accomplishment. The fact that they've demonstrated successful transmission of light through these sub-wavelength sized devices is even more impressive. I can imagine a wide range of applications in nano-scale imaging (imagine a massive array of NSOMs), lithography, or even optical computing.
Your post is very good and demonstrates lucid, critical thinking on the issue. It's important to distinguish between businesses and government entities. The first must follow laws but otherwise do not have to afford you any special "rights." The latter create laws and must above all else never infringe our rights (like free speech, etc.). You say:
Yes I know the analogy isn't perfect because the Airline industry is federally regulated, but it's still the same thing.
I think that's the critical problem here. It's one thing for each individual airline to ask for ID before giving you a boarding pass. (It makes sense! I don't want them to give my boarding pass to someone else.) And the airlines can all maintain their own little databases with frequent flyer numbers. They can even ask for ID (again) to get onto the airplane itself, at the gate.
But the TSA in the United States is not a business, it is a U.S. government agency. Them requiring ID to go through the security zones is not a "business policy" but rather a "security measure" put in place by a government agency. It can be argued that the paid security guards are simply operating under the umbrella of the "aviation industry" and that all the airlines endorse the policies. Yet the policies do not come from the airlines.
Flying is a part of modern society, and as such should be regulated like many other common goods (roads, sewage, etc.). In fact it is regulated like that! So I don't see much of a difference between the TSA requiring ID before going through security and the DMV creating a new "security measure" that says that cops can pull you over randomly and check your ID.
I'm not sure which side of the fence I'm on, btw... just thinking aloud.
Yes my fingerprints are also in a U.S. government database (also for non-criminal reasons). It was a justifiable reason so it didn't bother me. But why is it worrisome in general to have our data in so many databases? Because:
-Abuse of system. The data is there, so someone could abuse it and run checks they are not supposed to.
-False positives. Once you're in the system, you're a candidate for showing up in some searches, even if you're not actually the match.
-Privacy. It's an intangible thing, but somehow knowing that information on you is being recorded is just uncomfortable and an invasion of your freedoms.
Of course we understand that for some reasons we need to have these databases anyway. It seems reasonable that a convicted criminal's prints should be put in a database. Also for high security situations it's a necessary safeguard.
However everytime we expand these databases without a highly justifiable reason, we are infringing on the privacy and liberty of people (even if just a little bit) and open ourselves to potential problems. The "if you have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work. After all, we all have things to "hide", but if they are not illegal then the government should stay out.
As another poster pointed out, this concept is widespread in Canada. It's called INTERAC and it's so widespread that you can almost not even carry cash.
In my experience the fraud protection has been really good. If your PIN or card details are stolen, any money lost is reimbursed by the bank. Moreover, when they detect that a retailer is stealing card numbers somehow (which they detect using a program to analyze log files and look for inconsistencies, etc.), they immediately cancel the cards of anyone who used that retailer, and contact the customers to let them know a new card is in the mail.
So actually the fraud protection is quite good. It's better than cash, in any case. If your cash gets stolen: too bad you lost the money. And if you are given counterfeit bills: too bad you can't use them anywhere. However with Interac when you get defrauded you've got some amount of protection.
Of course this all hinges on the banks doing "the right thing" (and/or the laws being set up to force the banks to do the right thing). In Canada the system seems to work great. Not sure if it's the same elsewhere.
Yup, I can related! The azo chromophores we used were a very bright red, even in very small concentration. It sounds like the quantities we were dealing with were quite a bit smaller, so with care it was usually possible to avoid getting everything red. However for a couple years we had a postdoc who was, to put it lightly, clumsy when it comes to lab techniques.
First he dropped a bit of azo solution on the newly polished floor, and decided that he would clean it up with acetone...which of course completely ruined the finish on the tiles in that room!
Then we noticed redish stains on the phone, computers, and all over the place. Since the azos we were working with were not exactly bio-safe, this caused us some measure of concern.
And finally, at one point he wanted to run a gel chromatograph on an azo-polymer, so he used the machine in another research lab. Needless to say, that lab was not amused when the effluent from their GPC was running red for the next weeks. We had to buy them a new column, and were banned from using their equipment any more.
Just for your information: chemistry does get more rigorous at the higher levels. I, too, found high-school and 1st-year university chemistry to be very wishy-washy and 'inconsistent' as you put it. It seemed like alot of rules that didn't necessarily mix well.
When you go deeper into it, and learn about physical chemistry, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, it all becomes much more complicated, but also much more consistent and unified. It's a real problem with chemistry education, however, because those introductory classes do not do a good job showing what the field is really like. Hence, very few students become interested in pursuing it.
Well I am a chemist... and in fact my Ph.D. thesis had alot to do with these kinds of chromophores!
Yes the molecules in question are "azobenzenes" (benzenes linked via N=N) and "stilbenes" (benzenes linked via C=C). These are well-established classes of molecules that have strong "nonlinear optical" properties.
The reason they are "nonlinear optical molecules" is because (in basic terms) the electron distribution is highly asymetric. You can see the chemical structures in the arXiv preprint (pdf). One end of the molecule has a group that 'attracts' electrons, and the other end has a group that 'donates' electrons, and the end result is that the electron distribution is strongly skewed. This means that when light hits the molecule, the electron cloud oscillates not like a normal sine wave (harmonic oscillator) but in a much more skewed way (think of a sawtooth wave). This means that when it re-emits light, that light can be very different from the incident light.
That's why these molecules can be used as amplifiers in lasers, and "frequency doublers" (where you input a certain frequency of laser light, and what comes out has double the frequency (i.e. half the wavelength)). They are remarkable molecules, really. This new paper is certainly noteworthy, but I'm not sure it's going to revolutionize the world of telecommunications anytime soon...
The summary and Roland's article (not surprisingly?) get the details about these 'limits' somewhat wrong. If you read the intro to the arXiv article (warning: PDF), they say:
Quantum cal-culations using sum rules have been used to place an upper-bound on the molecular susceptibilities; [1, 2, 3, 4] but, the largest nonlinear susceptibilities of the best molecules fall short of the fundamental limit by a factor of 10^(3/2).[4, 5] A thorough analysis shows that there is no reason why the molecular hyperpolarizability can not exceed this apparent limit.[6] In this letter, we report on a novel set of molecules where the one with modulated conjugation[7] is found to have a hyperpolarizability that
breaches the apparent limit.
If you look up reference [4], which you can find here, you see this is an "Erratum" (publication pointing out a mistake you made in a previous publication). In it, he shows (see graph), that what he previously plotted as the "limit" was a plotting mistake (not a theoretical mistake). So what he claims is that there is a fundamental (quantum) limit, but there is also an "apparent limit" based on the accumulated experimental data on chromophores so far.
Thus, this new paper is claiming to have broken through an "apparent limit" that existed before. Nothing fundamental about this limit, of course... it was merely that synthetic chemists had yet to be able to create molecules that good. This new report is a 'breakthrough' in the sense that they've made molecules with still higher nonlinear susceptibilities. (But still not violating the theories...)
Will this ever show up in real technology? Probably not. In 'real devices' of course having good optical response is only half the challenge. It must also be cheap enough, stable enough, easy to process, etc. So it's a step forward, but I would call it's more a 'pushing the edge of what can be synthesized' rather than a 'telecom breakthrough' as Roland tries to spin it.
Yes you are absolutely right (which is why I prefaced my post with "I agree with you"). Despite the fact that VoIP is becoming more widespread, it is being implemented very much as a "black box" consumer device that is not in any way connected to other computer equipment. People will still store their speed-dial in the actual phone, for instance.
So you're quite right that TFA is needlessly alarmist.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you are quite right. I missed your qualifying "from both role playing groups" statement and thought you were saying that all the results were meaningless. Sorry, my bad.
In fact the study makes your point, more or less demonstrating that people are less concerned with protecting other people's login information. Their behavior was (on average) less secure when they were role-playing with other people's data, rather than using their own. However even with their own data they were not sufficiently careful (on average).
Despite the fact that they were asking the participants to "role-play", they were told to use their own login credentials. Apparently, many of them were easily induced into handing out this information.
The reason I find this interesting is that frequently we throw around statistics from web-site access, and people will complain "well you can't use stats from site X because that site will inherently have more [geeky/non-geeky] users and hence skew the results" (a valid complaint, of course). The above statistics are (reportedly) a random sampling of Bank of America customers with online account (no selection based on computer expertise, etc.).
The above stats suggest that Firefox usage may be even higher than previously suspected. Obviously this sampling of 67 people is not exhaustive and may not be generalizable, but I was quite surprised when I saw those numbers.
Well said.
What bothers me about TiVo is that they are in a conflict-of-interest situation. They have people buying TiVos (and subscriptions) on the one hand, and they have advertisers and media companies on the other. Let's face it: the needs and wants of the two groups are not usually aligned. At some point, they may decide that the needs of the media companies are more profitable than the needs of the users. (I would argue that this monitoring move is one example.) I would prefer not to sign up with companies that undertaken these conflict-of-interest scenarios.
Obviously it's up to each consumer to decide whether the service TiVo is offering is worth it. Suffice it to say, I'm not convinced.
This attack may come from someone who cracks the system and uses it to spy on others, or the attack may come from law-suits which (for whatever reason I can't currently imagine) demand that TiVo turn over records of what a particular person was watching. Or maybe this attack will never come.
I would argue that avoiding these kinds of systems is not paranoid... moreover I would argue that avoiding them is necessary. Do not let yet another system be co-opted to monitor you! Even if it is 'for a good cause' (and I'm not convinced that advertising is 'a good cause') it can eventually be used against you.
In short, I'm just going to add this to the list of reasons I prefer MythTV. My device, my control, my privacy.
I think the point is that to upgrade a Mac to the latest version of Mac OS X doesn't require rebuilding the computer (nor buying a new one). In fact each version of OS X is a little more efficient and streamlined, so that older hardware may actually run *faster* with the new OS.
(I'm not saying I particularly approve of the Apple ads, but I don't think your comments about having to throw out apple hardware are particularly fair.)
As someone involved in academic research, I have to agree with the parent comments.
Basically, science nowadays is very much an "advanced degree" field. From your post I'm guessing you have a B.Eng. Unfortunately even with a B.Eng. and lots of years in software development, you do not yet have the qualifications to be hired as a research scientist.
It also depends, however, on whether you want to be "involved in science" (as a technician, programmer, etc.) or whether you want to be "a research scientist" (planning experiments, interpreting results, etc.). If you want to be involved, then I'd say with your current qualifications you should certainly be able to find a neat job at some university or research institute. Your programming skills will be quite valuable, in fact. Yes, you will take a pay cut, but the environment may be much more stimulating. In this kind of post, you'll end up being connected to a wide range of different science projects, which can be really rewarding. (You may end up in a job where every day a Grad Student comes up to you and says "would it be possible to program something to do..." which could be alot of fun.)
If you want to really "be a scientist" then I'm afraid your only option is to get another degree. The upside is that while getting such a Masters of Ph.D. you'll be "doing science" which can be alot of fun. This will also let you know, immediately, whether this is something you want to do for many years to come. The downside, of course, is that you will be spending another 5 years on education, and receiving a rather small stipend while doing it. (Also, keep in mind that many of your fellow grad students will be about 20 years old.)
I wish you the best of luck. Personally I love science, and getting an advanced degree has been "worth it" for me. But given your situation, it might make more sense to try and find a job, with your current qualifications, that is closely tied to science.
Well you have to a little careful here. The argument relates not to energy per se, but the energy dispersal, i.e.: entropy. That's why I said 'usage of energy' instead of simply 'energy.' It turns out that entropy increase in the demon is larger than the entropy decrease you get by sorting gas molecules.
The argument would be the same with massive objects. If you attempt to devise a way to generate a low-entropy situation using "massive moving objects" then I assure you that there will be a corresponding increase in entropy elsewhere that will offset it. (Remember that a fast-moving object has high kinetic energy, but this doesn't say much about the entropy of the system it is a part of.)
I agree it sounds like only a technical problem, but if you do the calculation you will find that it is actually a very fundamental limit. There are established limits in information theory, for instance, that describe the minimum amount of entropy you'll need to creat in order to encode information. Basically if you look at it, the demon would have to do something in order to: (1) determine the velocity of a molecule, (2) decide what to do, and (3) open/close the flap. These actions will increase the entropy of the demon far more than he's decreasing the entropy of the gas (by sorting the gas molecules).
Remember it's not just a matter of disturbing the gas molecules, it's a matter of the demon itself needing to increase in entropy in order to make the measurement. Although your hypothetical 'macroscopic-sized superballs' may be easier to sort, the amount of entropy decrease you'd get by sorting them would be very very small, and would be offset by the increase in entropy in the observer.
The reason that such a demon cannot be created is that the very act of making an observation (of a gas molecule's trajectory, for instance), requires the usage of energy. And on the scale we're talking about, that usage of energy is exactly the 'work' you are doing to raise the temperature of the gas in sorting the molecules. Thus no such thing as a maxwell demon can be made, and thermodynamics is intact.
This most recent report, as stated, requires an input of energy to move/sort molecules. Thus it doesn't violate thermodynamics and it's not really a Maxwell Demon. The article seems a bit confused on this issue, stating:
I would content that the light is an input of energy, and thus saying "it does not need energy" is rather silly.
In any case, the actual research (see David Leigh's page) is about photo-activated molecular shuttles: molecules that switch between well-defined states with input of light. You can thus trap or move other molecules using light. Certainly one step towards the much-anticipated "nanotechnology" but not quite the fine control of molecular positions one would imagine when using the term "Maxwell Demon."
Well, the idea is fine: create a site where academics can post plain-English summaries of their research, and where companies can go looking for people doing research in a particular field. Thus it helps to link-up those who have well-defined problems to others who are working on well-defined solutions. This allows companies to either find research they can start funding (because they want the results), or, in the case of more mature research, to find research patents that they want to license.
So far, so good. It's a good idea precisely because it is simple. The problem, however, is that there is little reason, at present, for either academics or companies to use this site. The site will only become useful once it has built up a significant community of users. Only then will it be useful to either side.
Academics are already very busy, and finding time to post summaries is going to be difficult. They will only do it if there is a good chance that some company will take notice. Likewise companies are not going to waste time looking through a small database of random research results.
So it's a catch-22 where no one is going to use the thing until it's useful; hence it will never become useful. Perhaps with their startup money they will pay people to start inputting findings, at least until the network reaches a critical mass. But until the site has a big enough of a following, you're going to have a hard time gaining visibility. This is same problem alot of "networking" sites have: it's hard to build up a big community. What they really need is to figure out some way to make the site useful, even while it is small in size.
You make some good points. However let me just point out that private ownership has its own set of problems.
Beware: Anecdotal evidence follows!
A guy I know (now retired) worked as management in both private and public companies over the years. At one privately owned company (a medium-sized business owned by a couple of family members, sales in the millions), the place was severely mis-managed due to the fact that it was private. The problem was that the owner wanted to "do the right thing" which often came into conflict with the long-term viability of the business. He felt bad for the employees and was very reticent to fire people. At first this seems great: the company has a very 'family' atmosphere and everyone feels like they are 'part of the team.' However it was not sustainable, because many employees became complacent, even lazy, and were not performing up to the level of their salary.
Without being willing to make tough choices (including firing people, slicing salaries, etc.) a privately-owned company can become highly inefficient. In the long-term, this ruins the company, which isn't good for *any* of the employees. Again, you need to make some tough choices for the long-term benefit of the company.
Of course that's just one anecdote. There are lots of private companies with strong leadership that do very well. There are also plenty of public companies that do it properly, and don't compromise long-term business plans just to make quarterly earnings. But the 'pressure' of stock prices can also do good things for companies, helping them streamline and expand, which is good for the employees as well as the investors.
All I'm pointing out is that both public and private companies have their own pros and cons. (The 'better one to work for' probably varies from industry to industry...)
An internet petition, of all things?
Actually the petition linked to in the summary is not an internet petition, you are supposed to print it out, and mail it to your Member of Parliament (or to a local collector if you prefer, they list many on the webpage). I signed it and I encourage all Canadians reading slashdot to take a look.
And to be clear: it is not a "petition against Vista" or something like that. It is a petition to prevent extensions to Canadian copyright law. There is currently pressure for Canada to enact DMCA-like legislation. To anyone who wants to be able to legally play a DVD on Linux in Canada, this is a major threat. Thus this is a petition stating clearly that the undersigned voters DO NOT want extensions to current copyright. This has implications for many things, Vista included.
Indeed, and that's what the U.S. movie industry so scared about. Quote from the article: Camcording a movie in Canada is not illegal (it could be for personal use). The illegal part is distributing the recording to others, but that is a completely separate event. Again from the article: Fantastic! Let's just assume everyone is a criminal if we even suspect that they don't support the status-quo monopoly!
Personally I don't want Canadians giving up any of their freedoms just to maintain the current distribution monopolies. All Canadians in the audience should consider signing the petition against copyright extension: http://www.digital-copyright.ca/billc60/.
Although the news writeup doesn't make this clear, the original scientific paper is comparing the data density achieved with RAM, not with hard disks. What they are doing is minituarizing high-speed volatile random-access memory. Although a 3 terabyte hard disk may not excite you, would you be impressed with 3 terabytes of RAM?
If we could increase the data-density of RAM by a few orders of magnitude (without sacrificing access times, of course), we could avoid one of the main bottlenecks in modern computers.
Rybczynski, J.; Kempa, K.; Herczynski, A.; Wang, Y.; Naughton, M. J.; Ren, Z. F.; Huang, Z. P.; Cai, D.; Giersig, M. "Subwavelength waveguide for visible light" Applied Physics Letters 2007, 90, (2), 021104. (doi: 10.1063/1.2430400).
The paper is here, although only subscribers can read the fulltext. The abstract says this:
These are extremely small structures and this leads to an interaction between the light (which is an electromagnetic wave of course) that is essentially identical to when radiofrequency EM radiation propagates down a normal (macroscopic) coax cable. Specifically, in the introduction they say:
Then they go through the details. Their device uses a multiwall carbon-nanotube (MWCNT) as the center conductor (it is a 'metallic' CNT). The MWCNT is embedded in aluminum oxide, which acts as the optically transparent 'dielectric'. The outer wrapping electrode is made of chromium.
The mere creation of these nano-sized devices is quite an accomplishment. The fact that they've demonstrated successful transmission of light through these sub-wavelength sized devices is even more impressive. I can imagine a wide range of applications in nano-scale imaging (imagine a massive array of NSOMs), lithography, or even optical computing.
I think that's the critical problem here. It's one thing for each individual airline to ask for ID before giving you a boarding pass. (It makes sense! I don't want them to give my boarding pass to someone else.) And the airlines can all maintain their own little databases with frequent flyer numbers. They can even ask for ID (again) to get onto the airplane itself, at the gate.
But the TSA in the United States is not a business, it is a U.S. government agency. Them requiring ID to go through the security zones is not a "business policy" but rather a "security measure" put in place by a government agency. It can be argued that the paid security guards are simply operating under the umbrella of the "aviation industry" and that all the airlines endorse the policies. Yet the policies do not come from the airlines.
Flying is a part of modern society, and as such should be regulated like many other common goods (roads, sewage, etc.). In fact it is regulated like that! So I don't see much of a difference between the TSA requiring ID before going through security and the DMV creating a new "security measure" that says that cops can pull you over randomly and check your ID.
I'm not sure which side of the fence I'm on, btw... just thinking aloud.
Yes my fingerprints are also in a U.S. government database (also for non-criminal reasons). It was a justifiable reason so it didn't bother me. But why is it worrisome in general to have our data in so many databases? Because:
-Abuse of system. The data is there, so someone could abuse it and run checks they are not supposed to.
-False positives. Once you're in the system, you're a candidate for showing up in some searches, even if you're not actually the match.
-Privacy. It's an intangible thing, but somehow knowing that information on you is being recorded is just uncomfortable and an invasion of your freedoms.
Of course we understand that for some reasons we need to have these databases anyway. It seems reasonable that a convicted criminal's prints should be put in a database. Also for high security situations it's a necessary safeguard.
However everytime we expand these databases without a highly justifiable reason, we are infringing on the privacy and liberty of people (even if just a little bit) and open ourselves to potential problems. The "if you have nothing to hide" argument doesn't work. After all, we all have things to "hide", but if they are not illegal then the government should stay out.
As another poster pointed out, this concept is widespread in Canada. It's called INTERAC and it's so widespread that you can almost not even carry cash.
In my experience the fraud protection has been really good. If your PIN or card details are stolen, any money lost is reimbursed by the bank. Moreover, when they detect that a retailer is stealing card numbers somehow (which they detect using a program to analyze log files and look for inconsistencies, etc.), they immediately cancel the cards of anyone who used that retailer, and contact the customers to let them know a new card is in the mail.
So actually the fraud protection is quite good. It's better than cash, in any case. If your cash gets stolen: too bad you lost the money. And if you are given counterfeit bills: too bad you can't use them anywhere. However with Interac when you get defrauded you've got some amount of protection.
Of course this all hinges on the banks doing "the right thing" (and/or the laws being set up to force the banks to do the right thing). In Canada the system seems to work great. Not sure if it's the same elsewhere.
Yup, I can related! The azo chromophores we used were a very bright red, even in very small concentration. It sounds like the quantities we were dealing with were quite a bit smaller, so with care it was usually possible to avoid getting everything red. However for a couple years we had a postdoc who was, to put it lightly, clumsy when it comes to lab techniques.
First he dropped a bit of azo solution on the newly polished floor, and decided that he would clean it up with acetone...which of course completely ruined the finish on the tiles in that room!
Then we noticed redish stains on the phone, computers, and all over the place. Since the azos we were working with were not exactly bio-safe, this caused us some measure of concern.
And finally, at one point he wanted to run a gel chromatograph on an azo-polymer, so he used the machine in another research lab. Needless to say, that lab was not amused when the effluent from their GPC was running red for the next weeks. We had to buy them a new column, and were banned from using their equipment any more.
Thanks!
Just for your information: chemistry does get more rigorous at the higher levels. I, too, found high-school and 1st-year university chemistry to be very wishy-washy and 'inconsistent' as you put it. It seemed like alot of rules that didn't necessarily mix well.
When you go deeper into it, and learn about physical chemistry, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, it all becomes much more complicated, but also much more consistent and unified. It's a real problem with chemistry education, however, because those introductory classes do not do a good job showing what the field is really like. Hence, very few students become interested in pursuing it.
Sorry, screwed up the link. The arXiv preprint for the paper that TFA mentions can be found here:
0 .pdf
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0608/060830
(warning: pdf)
Amazingly, Roland actually gave the link to the arXiv paper at the end of his writeup.
Well I am a chemist... and in fact my Ph.D. thesis had alot to do with these kinds of chromophores!
Yes the molecules in question are "azobenzenes" (benzenes linked via N=N) and "stilbenes" (benzenes linked via C=C). These are well-established classes of molecules that have strong "nonlinear optical" properties.
The reason they are "nonlinear optical molecules" is because (in basic terms) the electron distribution is highly asymetric. You can see the chemical structures in the arXiv preprint (pdf). One end of the molecule has a group that 'attracts' electrons, and the other end has a group that 'donates' electrons, and the end result is that the electron distribution is strongly skewed. This means that when light hits the molecule, the electron cloud oscillates not like a normal sine wave (harmonic oscillator) but in a much more skewed way (think of a sawtooth wave). This means that when it re-emits light, that light can be very different from the incident light.
That's why these molecules can be used as amplifiers in lasers, and "frequency doublers" (where you input a certain frequency of laser light, and what comes out has double the frequency (i.e. half the wavelength)). They are remarkable molecules, really. This new paper is certainly noteworthy, but I'm not sure it's going to revolutionize the world of telecommunications anytime soon...
If you look up reference [4], which you can find here, you see this is an "Erratum" (publication pointing out a mistake you made in a previous publication). In it, he shows (see graph), that what he previously plotted as the "limit" was a plotting mistake (not a theoretical mistake). So what he claims is that there is a fundamental (quantum) limit, but there is also an "apparent limit" based on the accumulated experimental data on chromophores so far.
Thus, this new paper is claiming to have broken through an "apparent limit" that existed before. Nothing fundamental about this limit, of course... it was merely that synthetic chemists had yet to be able to create molecules that good. This new report is a 'breakthrough' in the sense that they've made molecules with still higher nonlinear susceptibilities. (But still not violating the theories...)
Will this ever show up in real technology? Probably not. In 'real devices' of course having good optical response is only half the challenge. It must also be cheap enough, stable enough, easy to process, etc. So it's a step forward, but I would call it's more a 'pushing the edge of what can be synthesized' rather than a 'telecom breakthrough' as Roland tries to spin it.
Yes you are absolutely right (which is why I prefaced my post with "I agree with you"). Despite the fact that VoIP is becoming more widespread, it is being implemented very much as a "black box" consumer device that is not in any way connected to other computer equipment. People will still store their speed-dial in the actual phone, for instance.
So you're quite right that TFA is needlessly alarmist.