This is tripping my BS detector. Googling for "Kevin Holleran" site:uk returns next to nothing about this "millionaire" other than that someone of that name was the director of a half dozen companies, not of which look particularly spacey. Can you really get to be a Shuttle-investing millionaire and leave no google trail at all?
His "new kind of science" is borderline kook, and sometimes just full-on kook. He is a very smart guy, but he spends way too much time in the company of people whose salary he pays.
I have known lots of loyal employers -- especially when you are talking about a small shop, rather than a big firm. Not everyone is a jackass.
Moreover, loyalty cuts both ways - if (as a group) we don't give it, we cannot ask for it.
That said, loyalty is a finite quantity. This is a firm with several employees and "management" so an extra 10k for one person should be within their grasp (or perhaps some sort of equity stake / profit sharing if cash flow is short before the launch) -- and if it really would break them, now is probably a good time to bail.
Consequently, you should a) figure out what it would take to make you happy about staying and then b) be open with your current employer. Explain that you don't want to leave -- especially now -- but that you owe it to yourself (and your family, if that is an issue) to take this offer seriously, and that you are giving them a chance to respond. If they say no, or accuse you of holding them to ransom, or are otherwise obnoxious then you can leave in good conscience.
Firstly, there is a common misconception that dark matter is a pure kludge, introduced to explain the apparently discrepancy between the observed stellar content of galaxies and their rotation curves. However, at this point there are several independent lines of evidence for dark matter.
-- Weak and strong lensing by galaxy clusters, which distorts the images of "background" galaxies, and is a function of the total mass of the lensing object.
-- The pattern of hot and cold spots in the microwave background (CMB) whose physics is dominated by the gravitational potential of the dark matter, some 380,000 years after the big bang, long before the first galaxies formed.
-- The velocities of galaxies in clusters, which would not be gravitationally bound in the absence of dark matter.
Any of these observations can be explained by "modifying' gravity. However, each of these observations apparently requires a different modification to standard gravity from the others (not that the article being discussed here only talks about galactic rotation curves), whereas all these observations are consistently explained by dark matter. Consequently, Occam's razor alone gives you a strong preference for dark matter over modified gravity. Moreover, the properties of the CMB in the presence of dark matter were computed before they were actually observed (look up "acoustic peaks" or "Doppler peaks"), so dark matter is indeed a theory that has made successful and non-trivial predictions.
My personal sniff test for any modified gravity theory for dark matter is whether it least acknowledges the above issues -- if it doesn't, it is not worth reading. And this one fails it, as do most others.
Also, this theory apparently "explains" the Pioneer anomaly -- but that "anomaly" now seems to be explained by not properly accounting for the anisotropic emission of heat from the spacecraft, which means that this theory actually makes predictions that are at odds with observations.
Finally, so far as I can see the author of this paper is only tenuously affiliated with CERN (likely as a visitor, rather than a staff member there) -- this doesn't alter the value of the content, but the original posting using this affiliation to establish the author's bona fides, so it is relevant to that extent.
I ban laptops in the college classes I teach, in physics.
For me the turning point was sitting in the back row of a large lecture taught by a colleague and seeing dozens of laptops open, and students reading CNN, Facebook, Travelocity, Gmail but none actually taking notes. Even if it was not distracting for the students themselves, it has to be distracting those around and behind them.
I offer an exemption for anyone who uses a laptop for notetaking. And in this case the student was kind enough to give me a copy at the end of the semester. So far I guess I have had around 500 student-classes, and precisely one exemption has been requested (and granted) -- and that was in a small class with a dozen students where cyberloafing is typically much less of a problem.
The policy is in my syllabus, and announced on Day One.
I am a professor, and for large "entry level" classes, I let students bring their own notes and print-outs of model answers on the homework. But absolutely no electronica of any sort.
If asked, I would permit a hard-copy dictionary between English and a student's native language. So far, no-one has requested this (we have a good number of international students, but usually with superb English).
I set questions that can be answered without a calculator, and I will accept an unevaluated cosine or similar function, even if it is primarily a numerical question.
My original plan was to permit open book, until I realized that some students had only on-line PDF versions of the text, so that idea went out the window.
I am not really worried about students trying to learn the subject on wikipedia in the course of a three hour exam -- if you don't know it coming into the room, you are hard put to learn it while you take the exam. But since net capable devices can also facilitate messaging, I have no choice but to ban them, if I am to maintain the integrity of the exam.
Homework counts for a big chunk of the grade -- and there I encourage collaboration. The exams are there to make sure that the collaboration does not get out o hand:-) (And I warn the students of my policy early in the semester)
From memory, LISA is usually listed as being in the $1.5- $2 billion dollar range, which puts in the same category as Hubble or the forthcoming James Webb telescope.
One way or another, Ars has to make its payroll or go out of business. I am sure they would love to get by with a couple of graceful text ads for worthy products at the bottom of each page, but it would seem that in the real world the people who work there can't make their mortgage and feed their kids that way.
But if it really bugs you, you can just not visit sites whose advertising content annoys you. And doesn't Ars sell subscriptions, which I assume are ad-free?
Part of the death-spiral of our local newspaper seems to have been a rise in hard-to-block pop-ups on its website. I could have beefed up my pop-up blocker, or I could just delete it from my list of bookmarks / feeds. I deleted it. (And I realized that almost all of the information it offers is actually available elsewhere, partly because our town has an experimental "hyperlocal" news site with original reporting)
This argument is as old as the net, but the answer to intrusive ads seems to be easier than a pop-up blocker. As they used to say in the days of TV, if you don't like it, just turn it off.
As it happens, my students and I are about to release a fairly specialized code - we discussed license terms, and eventually settled on the BSD (and explicitly avoided the GPL), which requires "citation" but otherwise leaves anyone free to use it.
That said, writing a scientific code can involve a good deal of work, but the "payoff" usually comes in the form of results and conclusions, rather than the code itself. In those circumstances, there is a sound argument for delaying any code release until you have published the results you hoped to obtain when you initiated the project, even if these form a sequence of papers (rather than insisting on code release with the first published results)
Thirdly, in many cases scientists will share code with colleagues when asked politely, even if they are not in the public domain.
Fourthly, I fairly regularly spot minor errors in numerical calculations performed by other groups (either because I do have access to the source, or because I can't reproduce their results) -- in almost all cases these do not have an impact on their conclusions, so while the "error count" can be fairly high, the number of "wrong" results coming from bad code is overestimated by this accounting.
Are you a grad student? Even if you coded it, and even if you believe it to be "your" work, you probably can't claim complete ownership, since there was likely some input from your advisor and perhaps other people in the group.
My students regularly write code, but my input is almost certainly present in the choice of problem, and usually in algorithm choice, design, debugging and verification. But the student would write close to 100% of the code.
In practice, very few codes written for academic purposes can be commercially exploited -- is this a money issue, or a "moral" issue??
In my group (in physics/cosmology), we don't necessarily release our codes, since they can often be used for more than one project, and we want to harvest the full fruits of our labor (and they are likely only of use to other academic scientists in any case). However, I would not share or reuse a code a student or post-doc of mine had worked on without discussing it with the person concerned, and I would expect my students to pay me the same courtesy once they move on (and so far they have).
My advice is to talk to your advisor and don't be an ass. Unless there really is money involved it is likely that no-one is trying to screw you. If the issue is academic credit, you should simply make sure that the project itself is described in a paper which will be cited by other users. And, if you can, release the source, with a good README since the academic world ran on "reputation" long before eBay was invented, and writing a widely used tool will do you no end of good.
We watched the debates on CNN's live feed. However, I think they just put the "raw" video on line (which was already in the public domain, I think, as lots of places streamed it in real time) -- any "added value" the network provided was not given away for free.
For personal letters and so forth I veer between MS Word and LaTeX, but for anything with any complexity or math, LaTeX is still the only choice I know of.
A student of mine doing his first project gave a report with the math done in MS Word, and while he might not know all the tricks it looked horrible, and was nearly unreadable -- whereas the same things would have looked fine in LaTeX document produced by a neophyte.
The post and wikileaks article seems unduly breathless -- of the 2000 hits you get for the procurement code, about half of the linked articles also contain the string "NSA" -- and this (in the sample I looked at), usually appears in the acknowledgments section. This is hardly some big secret that has slipped out onto the web.
It is well known that the NSA pays for fundamental research, and I know a number of very good scientists whose very interesting work is openly supported by them.
As to the ethical issues involved, if you are doing work that you report in the open scientific literature, the NSA will have access to it whether or not they actually pay for it -- along with the rest of the world.
This particle is not related to the rumored detection of the Higgs. It is 30 times lighter than the unexplained resonance that is at the basis of these rumors.
I had two H1-Bs for several years, one for my day job and one for some consulting I was doing on the side. It was not that hard - the first H1-B was for a job at a large university, and these are routinely approved. The second was for work with a small start-up spun off by another university, and that was tougher, since it was a small firm and they had not filed an H1-B petition before and they retained a very good immigration lawyer (who I then hired to do my green card application a year or so later).
The issue here is that a company with one part-time employee (ie the one you are thinking of registering) may have a hard job getting an H1-B application approved.
I would talk to a lawyer, but you *might* be safe if you register the company in your own country, and not to the US -- Google will pay out to other countries??
I have been wondering about these issues as well - I am not so concerned by the lack of BASIC per se (although I learned to program on an Apple//e, and BASIC there was truly in your face, since firing it up produced a blinking cursor which just asked you to start typing code).
Fast forward a few years, and I am a theoretical cosmologist, supervising PhD students and teaching Mathematical Methods to grad students. I have noticed that comparatively few of the students who walk into my office to ask about projects are proficient in *any* low level programming language (i.e. C/C++ or Fortran 77/90 -- all of which are widely used in my line of work), but they will often turn in their problem sets as a Mathematica notebook. However, in order to get my work done I need to do some fairly heavy duty simulations, and these run in Fortran or C/C++. The tools the students do know, such as Mathematica, are fine for simple things and prototyping but they are just too slow for "production" use, and there is a big learning curve for students who have not *any* programming before to get to the point where they can understand and extend code written in one of these languages.
These students (all very smart -- juniors and seniors, and beginning grad students) are often extremely computer literatate -- they just have little idea of what goes on under the hood. Whereas back in the day of the Apple ][, under the hood was pretty much all there was. In my teaching I try to present problems where I know that Mathematica will choke, to force my students to think more carefully about the tools they are using. (This is primarily to improve their analytical skills -- computer algebra is great for doing away with drudgery, and it has largely supplanted integral tables -- until the day you meet a problem Mathematica can't evaluate, in which case you are in deep trouble since you haven't developed the skills that might let you tackle it on its own).
Perhaps computers should all ship with Apple ][ or Atari emulators?
I have two children, one 7 months old and one just starting kindergarten a month or so shy of his 5th birthday. Essentially the only broadcast TV Boy#1 sees is PBS cartoons (we have basic cable plus Netflix), and we often feel like granola eating luddites compared to a lot of our friends. He has seen mainstream cartoons and movies at friends' houses (and we have the usual Pixar crowd plus some movies, which he likes although he usually wants to fast forward the scary parts), along with Playstation and Nintendo, and so far he has accepted that other families do things differently from his own.
He plays outside, paints, draws, runs, jumps, rides his bike, knows basic math (addition and subtraction with numbers less than 20 or so, and I am not sure how high he can count anymore). He knows his letters, and can recognize a bunch of words and is certainly "ready" to read, as the jargon has it. He loves to help me "build". He designed and I constructed a wooden garage for him out of off-cuts, and he got me to buzz round the edges of the roof with my router to give it a nice edge (he knew what the router was for, and could visualize the finished product), and I am trying to find tools he can safely use -- he constructs huge sculptures from offcuts and glue, which he calls "Star Wars things" and then spends several sessions painting them. He goes sledding, swims, jump off the diving board, eats all kinds of foods, and knows that any good breakfast wil have protein, carbs and some fruit.
He also knows Spiderman's real name is Peter Parker, can identify Batman at about 100 yards (as well as Batcat and Batdog, minor deities he and his preschoolmates include in the pantheon on the same footing as Batman himself), and can hum a passable rendition of the Star Wars theme, despite never having been provided with this information by his parents. And he went off to his first day of school with a Superman backpack -- so far as I can see his room has only one other superman, but about four spidermen and a couple of batmen... He can operate a digital camera (he took a lovely shot of his Mum and Boy#2 the other day -- and she tells me that he carefully asked to her to move as he composed the shot on the screen), and work the DVD player.
Bringing up kids is almost always about flexibility and compromise -- in the end, you have to live in your culture and times, even as you try to give your kids the tools they will need to navigate through the world. But a lot of what my son loves to do would not be a part of his life if he spent too much time in front of a screen -- and in the long run, it is much better to experience the natural world first hand than it is to watch it via some electronic simulacrum, as we learn through touch and smell, as well as just sight and sound.
But what I have seen is this. Kids we know with similar backgrounds to us who watch a lot of TV or spend a lot of screen time, are almost always more "jumpy" than kids who don't -- and I am not implying that Boy#1 is any sort of angel (he threw a fit in the supermarket over the weekend that had people turning and staring from a couple of ailses away, and I explained to him that behaving badly wouldn't get him what he wanted -- namely some sugary cereal with a cartoon character on the box), and more likely to initiate violent play -- which my kid will cheefully join in with, at least until he gets hurt.
And if you want to rail against the corruption of modern life, TV is not the only issue -- avoiding shitty convenience food is a huge part of raising happy and healthy kids. I never expected to be a nutrition nazi, but loading kids with sugar does terrible things to their attention span and plays havoc with their emotions as they come down from the rush...
The other thing I have noticed recently is that Boy #1 is completely unable to make a distrinction between a nature program and a commercial (and he certainly does learn from some of the TV he watches) -- he happily told me that "Peanuts is the best video ever" parroting a trai
The electron volt is a measure of energy -- the amount of energy needed to move an electron through a potential difference of one volt in an electric field. (Think of it as moving a small ball up a hill). Thanks to "E=mc^2" this is also a measure of an equivalent mass -- and it is frequeuntly used to specify the masses of subatomic particles. (For comparison, an electron "weighs" about 500,000 eV -- even by particle standards, 2eV is very small)
Excuse me? You should try keeping up with experiment if you're going to make broad statements like this. Minos, up here at fermilab, recently discovered that neutrinos do in fact have mass. This was suspected a year or few ago, which was why Minos was built, but is nonetheless quite surprising. It is surprising because it is really the first definitive measurement which is nearly unquestionably outside the standard model. (I don't need to tell you this, I suppose, but others will read this too: The standard model assumes explicitly that neutrinos have no mass at all.)
Our definition of "surprise" clearly differs. I don't think any theorists were astonished by the discovery of neutrino masses, and (as others have pointed out) the first compelling evidence for a massive neutrino sector came from Kamiokande, not Minos. [The solar neutrino deficit was known for a long time before this, and one of the possible explanations for this was alway recognized to be oscillations between the neutrino flavor eigenstates, which requires a non-zero mass term]
By "surprise" I meant something that would radically shake up theoretical particle physics, or falsify a large chunk of the model space -- eg a failure to find the Higgs (and there is an upper limit on the Higgs mass in minimal models, although that has not yet been probed experimentally), evidence for "missing mass" in interactions that would provide evidence for "large" extra dimension, a fouth family, evidence that fermions are composite particles... Any or all of these things would cause a huge kerfuffle amongst theorists and none of them has happened. Back in the 60s, experimental particle physics would routinely discover states that came as a complete surprise to theorists (the sort of thing that led Rabi to say "who ordered that!" ), and that hasn't happened for ages.
Anyway, the problem that most experimentalists, such as myself, see with String Theory is that in some ways it is a step backwards from the standard model. It is purported to be "parameterless", which contrasts with the plethora of unconstrained parameters that the standard model contains. However, this is really only a bit of sleight of hand. Instead of numerical parameters, which are (relatively) easy to measure, and continuous, we now have the topology of space, which is discrete (no smooth change from one topology to the next) and quite difficult to measure, and embodies immensely more variation than the parameters of the standard model.
But no-one should mistake the standard model for a truly fundamental theory -- it was *constructed* to explain the observed data (and if you talk to some old timers, they will tell you that it was regarded as a kludge when it was put together). It can't tell us *why* SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) is the gauge group of particle physics, nor does it say anything about quantum gravity, nor does it tell what happens well above the TeV scale (and at this point the standard model, as currently understood, must break down in some way).
Woit is correct when he says that string theory should not be "the only game in town" -- but its conceptual depth makes it a tempting and worthwhile framework for theorists to investigate. As I said above, the situation Woit complains about is due primarily to the lack of experimental "news" in the last twenty years, rather than evidence that theoretical physicists have lost their bearings.
I am a cosmologist, albeit one who works "close" to string theory (I am not a string theorist, but many of my collaborators are), and I am familiar with Woit's arguments (and have met the gentleman himself several times).
However, my impression -- and I speak as someone who works inside a particle theory group, and who has served on faculty-level particle physics search committees -- is that string theory is far from having a "lock" on theoretical particle physics today. In the article, Woit is quoted as follows: "By his count, of 22 recently tenured professors in particle theory at the six top U.S. departments, 20 are string theorists." Looking at the Particle Physics Rumor Mill (http://physics.wm.edu/~calvin/) which assembles the short lists for faculty jobs in particle theory many of (and perhaps most) the people getting offers are not "hard core" string theorists. Many of them will have written papers with some string content, but have wider interests in cosmology, particle phenomenology, and/or physics "beyond the standard model".
This statistic differs from Woit's, in that it is not just counting "top" physics departments, and looks at Assistant Prof hires, and not tenured faculty (although *outside* the top six, most Assistant Profs can expect to be promoted to tenue). However, I suspect that the "twenty out of twenty two" statistic is either over a very carefully chosen interval, or reflect a very broad definition of who counts as a "string theorist".
My feeling is that string theorists have a *hard* time getting jobs. In general, many places outside the top ten (ande most of the jobs are outside the top ten) do not have string theorists on their faculty, and string theorists have a hard time differentiating themselves from other people in their field, which makes it hard for them to get hired -- especially as they are competing against other, very smart people.
The real issue here is that particle physicists have received no "surprises" in many years -- perhaps the only genuinely unexpected recent data point being the non-zero value of the cosmological constant. And this did not create a new problem, since the challenge for the theoretical community was always to explain why the CC was around 10^120 times smaller than its "natural" value, which is not much easier than explaining why it is actually slightly different from zero. In this enviroment, we have no good way to "prune" theoretical ideas, and the hope of many is that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will yield results that cannot be explained within the context of the so-called "standard model" of particle physics. In this sense *any* theoretical framework that had been worked on since the mid 1970s would risk falling into the same trap as string theory, since there is no data we can't explain with existing models -- if it was incompatible with the standard model it would have been dead on arrival, but any model which yields the standard model in some limit is not falsifiable with current data.
On the other hand, string theory does provide a rich mathematical structure with some very surprising results. The so-called "AdS/CFT" correspondence sets up a completely unexpected relationship between gravity and a particular class of field theories, and some calculations in QCD (the theory of the "strong" nuclear interaction) can be "organized" and performed using string theoretic ideas. This does not "test" string theory, but it does show that there are deep and unexpected consequences to what is ultimately a very simple idea and, in the absence of data, this motivates theoriests to keep working in this area.
I am particle physicist / cosmologist, and macs are widely used in my field -- both for number crunching, and as personal machines.
To provide some anecdotal data, I was at a conference last month and I would guess that at least 50% of the speakers were using Macs, and that ratio has been climbing steadily over the last few years. With the exception of Mathematica, all the "technical" software I compile from source, and these packages almost always assume you have access to a Unix commandline of one sort or another. Moreover, I have friends in the bioinformatics world, and many of them seem to be working with Macs.
(FWIW, I am looking forward to buying an intel Mac Book -- I bought an HP laptop for my post-doc, which he uses with Linux, and it runs circles around my G4 powerbook.)
The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??
Apple can't keep the date they launch new computers secret (next Tuesday for the next batch intel powerbooks, by all accounts). And that is a secret with a finite lifetime (three months ago not even Steve Jobs knew the date -- a week from now everyone will know it).
The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.
Remember this giant conspiracy is brought to you by the same people who run FEMA and promote "absitence only" sex education as a solution to teen pregnancy. But somehow the conspiracy works well until some script kiddie breaks into NASA over a dialup line (you plan to find free energy devices that will change the face of civilization, and you can't spring for DSL??) and you find that all these "secrets" are protected by default passwords. This guy presumably did hack into NASA, but the rest of it crap -- he is either nuts, or hoping that the Feds will decide it isn't worth the bother to have the guy spouting this nonsense on the stand.
I am currently a Comcast customer in New England, and I was thinking of switching to DSL. Comcast is expensive, and has frequent technical problems with DNS. Worse, they want to bundle broadband with premium cable, so as a non-premium cable user I wind up paying a more, so they can give a "discount" to people who are buying the whole package.
My plan was to buy an external antenna for the TV (since the only broadcast we warch is the occasional local news, and PBS cartoons for the youngest member of the household) and switch to DSL, which here would be sold through Verizon. However, either way I am still dealing with a company that sees Broadband as an "add on" which competes to some extent with its original core business.
To me, one of the biggest advantages of something like municipal wireless broadband is that the people who sell it would make their money by providing reliable internet service, and would not be worried that it would cannibalize their existing income streams from selling TV or phone service.
I was interested in this from a purely technical perspective. If they really did "break in" rather than just snoop on network traffic, does this mean that had to make use of some sort of exploit in the user's software or OS to do so? And does this mean that users of minority OSes (Linux and MacOS but also any other Unix for that matter) are much less likely to be targeted by a lawsuit?
Slashdot Mirror
Snake Wrangling For Kids http://www.briggs.net.nz/snake-wrangling-for-kids.html
Free, python based, and downloadable. Worked for my kid.
This is tripping my BS detector. Googling for "Kevin Holleran" site:uk returns next to nothing about this "millionaire" other than that someone of that name was the director of a half dozen companies, not of which look particularly spacey. Can you really get to be a Shuttle-investing millionaire and leave no google trail at all?
His "new kind of science" is borderline kook, and sometimes just full-on kook. He is a very smart guy, but he spends way too much time in the company of people whose salary he pays.
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/?dupe=with_honor "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity"
I have known lots of loyal employers -- especially when you are talking about a small shop, rather than a big firm. Not everyone is a jackass.
Moreover, loyalty cuts both ways - if (as a group) we don't give it, we cannot ask for it.
That said, loyalty is a finite quantity. This is a firm with several employees and "management" so an extra 10k for one person should be within their grasp (or perhaps some sort of equity stake / profit sharing if cash flow is short before the launch) -- and if it really would break them, now is probably a good time to bail.
Consequently, you should a) figure out what it would take to make you happy about staying and then b) be open with your current employer. Explain that you don't want to leave -- especially now -- but that you owe it to yourself (and your family, if that is an issue) to take this offer seriously, and that you are giving them a chance to respond. If they say no, or accuse you of holding them to ransom, or are otherwise obnoxious then you can leave in good conscience.
A couple of comments here.
Firstly, there is a common misconception that dark matter is a pure kludge, introduced to explain the apparently discrepancy between the observed stellar content of galaxies and their rotation curves. However, at this point there are several independent lines of evidence for dark matter.
-- Weak and strong lensing by galaxy clusters, which distorts the images of "background" galaxies, and is a function of the total mass of the lensing object.
-- The pattern of hot and cold spots in the microwave background (CMB) whose physics is dominated by the gravitational potential of the dark matter, some 380,000 years after the big bang, long before the first galaxies formed.
-- The velocities of galaxies in clusters, which would not be gravitationally bound in the absence of dark matter.
Any of these observations can be explained by "modifying' gravity. However, each of these observations apparently requires a different modification to standard gravity from the others (not that the article being discussed here only talks about galactic rotation curves), whereas all these observations are consistently explained by dark matter. Consequently, Occam's razor alone gives you a strong preference for dark matter over modified gravity. Moreover, the properties of the CMB in the presence of dark matter were computed before they were actually observed (look up "acoustic peaks" or "Doppler peaks"), so dark matter is indeed a theory that has made successful and non-trivial predictions.
My personal sniff test for any modified gravity theory for dark matter is whether it least acknowledges the above issues -- if it doesn't, it is not worth reading. And this one fails it, as do most others.
Also, this theory apparently "explains" the Pioneer anomaly -- but that "anomaly" now seems to be explained by not properly accounting for the anisotropic emission of heat from the spacecraft, which means that this theory actually makes predictions that are at odds with observations.
Finally, so far as I can see the author of this paper is only tenuously affiliated with CERN (likely as a visitor, rather than a staff member there) -- this doesn't alter the value of the content, but the original posting using this affiliation to establish the author's bona fides, so it is relevant to that extent.
I ban laptops in the college classes I teach, in physics.
For me the turning point was sitting in the back row of a large lecture taught by a colleague and seeing dozens of laptops open, and students reading CNN, Facebook, Travelocity, Gmail but none actually taking notes. Even if it was not distracting for the students themselves, it has to be distracting those around and behind them.
I offer an exemption for anyone who uses a laptop for notetaking. And in this case the student was kind enough to give me a copy at the end of the semester. So far I guess I have had around 500 student-classes, and precisely one exemption has been requested (and granted) -- and that was in a small class with a dozen students where cyberloafing is typically much less of a problem.
The policy is in my syllabus, and announced on Day One.
I am a professor, and for large "entry level" classes, I let students bring their own notes and print-outs of model answers on the homework. But absolutely no electronica of any sort.
If asked, I would permit a hard-copy dictionary between English and a student's native language. So far, no-one has requested this (we have a good number of international students, but usually with superb English).
I set questions that can be answered without a calculator, and I will accept an unevaluated cosine or similar function, even if it is primarily a numerical question.
My original plan was to permit open book, until I realized that some students had only on-line PDF versions of the text, so that idea went out the window.
I am not really worried about students trying to learn the subject on wikipedia in the course of a three hour exam -- if you don't know it coming into the room, you are hard put to learn it while you take the exam. But since net capable devices can also facilitate messaging, I have no choice but to ban them, if I am to maintain the integrity of the exam.
Homework counts for a big chunk of the grade -- and there I encourage collaboration. The exams are there to make sure that the collaboration does not get out o hand :-) (And I warn the students of my policy early in the semester)
From memory, LISA is usually listed as being in the $1.5- $2 billion dollar range, which puts in the same category as Hubble or the forthcoming James Webb telescope.
Worth every penny, too, in my opinion.
One way or another, Ars has to make its payroll or go out of business. I am sure they would love to get by with a couple of graceful text ads for worthy products at the bottom of each page, but it would seem that in the real world the people who work there can't make their mortgage and feed their kids that way.
But if it really bugs you, you can just not visit sites whose advertising content annoys you. And doesn't Ars sell subscriptions, which I assume are ad-free?
Part of the death-spiral of our local newspaper seems to have been a rise in hard-to-block pop-ups on its website. I could have beefed up my pop-up blocker, or I could just delete it from my list of bookmarks / feeds. I deleted it. (And I realized that almost all of the information it offers is actually available elsewhere, partly because our town has an experimental "hyperlocal" news site with original reporting)
This argument is as old as the net, but the answer to intrusive ads seems to be easier than a pop-up blocker. As they used to say in the days of TV, if you don't like it, just turn it off.
[Suspect I might burn some karma on this one]
As it happens, my students and I are about to release a fairly specialized code - we discussed license terms, and eventually settled on the BSD (and explicitly avoided the GPL), which requires "citation" but otherwise leaves anyone free to use it.
That said, writing a scientific code can involve a good deal of work, but the "payoff" usually comes in the form of results and conclusions, rather than the code itself. In those circumstances, there is a sound argument for delaying any code release until you have published the results you hoped to obtain when you initiated the project, even if these form a sequence of papers (rather than insisting on code release with the first published results)
Thirdly, in many cases scientists will share code with colleagues when asked politely, even if they are not in the public domain.
Fourthly, I fairly regularly spot minor errors in numerical calculations performed by other groups (either because I do have access to the source, or because I can't reproduce their results) -- in almost all cases these do not have an impact on their conclusions, so while the "error count" can be fairly high, the number of "wrong" results coming from bad code is overestimated by this accounting.
Are you a grad student? Even if you coded it, and even if you believe it to be "your" work, you probably can't claim complete ownership, since there was likely some input from your advisor and perhaps other people in the group.
My students regularly write code, but my input is almost certainly present in the choice of problem, and usually in algorithm choice, design, debugging and verification. But the student would write close to 100% of the code.
In practice, very few codes written for academic purposes can be commercially exploited -- is this a money issue, or a "moral" issue??
In my group (in physics/cosmology), we don't necessarily release our codes, since they can often be used for more than one project, and we want to harvest the full fruits of our labor (and they are likely only of use to other academic scientists in any case). However, I would not share or reuse a code a student or post-doc of mine had worked on without discussing it with the person concerned, and I would expect my students to pay me the same courtesy once they move on (and so far they have).
My advice is to talk to your advisor and don't be an ass. Unless there really is money involved it is likely that no-one is trying to screw you. If the issue is academic credit, you should simply make sure that the project itself is described in a paper which will be cited by other users. And, if you can, release the source, with a good README since the academic world ran on "reputation" long before eBay was invented, and writing a widely used tool will do you no end of good.
Original poster here:
We watched the debates on CNN's live feed. However, I think they just put the "raw" video on line (which was already in the public domain, I think, as lots of places streamed it in real time) -- any "added value" the network provided was not given away for free.
For personal letters and so forth I veer between MS Word and LaTeX, but for anything with any complexity or math, LaTeX is still the only choice I know of.
A student of mine doing his first project gave a report with the math done in MS Word, and while he might not know all the tricks it looked horrible, and was nearly unreadable -- whereas the same things would have looked fine in LaTeX document produced by a neophyte.
The post and wikileaks article seems unduly breathless -- of the 2000 hits you get for the procurement code, about half of the linked articles also contain the string "NSA" -- and this (in the sample I looked at), usually appears in the acknowledgments section. This is hardly some big secret that has slipped out onto the web.
It is well known that the NSA pays for fundamental research, and I know a number of very good scientists whose very interesting work is openly supported by them.
As to the ethical issues involved, if you are doing work that you report in the open scientific literature, the NSA will have access to it whether or not they actually pay for it -- along with the rest of the world.
This particle is not related to the rumored detection of the Higgs. It is 30 times lighter than the unexplained resonance that is at the basis of these rumors.
I had two H1-Bs for several years, one for my day job and one for some consulting I was doing on the side. It was not that hard - the first H1-B was for a job at a large university, and these are routinely approved. The second was for work with a small start-up spun off by another university, and that was tougher, since it was a small firm and they had not filed an H1-B petition before and they retained a very good immigration lawyer (who I then hired to do my green card application a year or so later).
The issue here is that a company with one part-time employee (ie the one you are thinking of registering) may have a hard job getting an H1-B application approved.
I would talk to a lawyer, but you *might* be safe if you register the company in your own country, and not to the US -- Google will pay out to other countries??
I have been wondering about these issues as well - I am not so concerned by the lack of BASIC per se (although I learned to program on an Apple
Fast forward a few years, and I am a theoretical cosmologist, supervising PhD students and teaching Mathematical Methods to grad students. I have noticed that comparatively few of the students who walk into my office to ask about projects are proficient in *any* low level programming language (i.e. C/C++ or Fortran 77/90 -- all of which are widely used in my line of work), but they will often turn in their problem sets as a Mathematica notebook. However, in order to get my work done I need to do some fairly heavy duty simulations, and these run in Fortran or C/C++. The tools the students do know, such as Mathematica, are fine for simple things and prototyping but they are just too slow for "production" use, and there is a big learning curve for students who have not *any* programming before to get to the point where they can understand and extend code written in one of these languages.
These students (all very smart -- juniors and seniors, and beginning grad students) are often extremely computer literatate -- they just have little idea of what goes on under the hood. Whereas back in the day of the Apple ][, under the hood was pretty much all there was. In my teaching I try to present problems where I know that Mathematica will choke, to force my students to think more carefully about the tools they are using. (This is primarily to improve their analytical skills -- computer algebra is great for doing away with drudgery, and it has largely supplanted integral tables -- until the day you meet a problem Mathematica can't evaluate, in which case you are in deep trouble since you haven't developed the skills that might let you tackle it on its own).
Perhaps computers should all ship with Apple ][ or Atari emulators?
I have two children, one 7 months old and one just starting kindergarten a month or so shy of his 5th birthday. Essentially the only broadcast TV Boy#1 sees is PBS cartoons (we have basic cable plus Netflix), and we often feel like granola eating luddites compared to a lot of our friends. He has seen mainstream cartoons and movies at friends' houses (and we have the usual Pixar crowd plus some movies, which he likes although he usually wants to fast forward the scary parts), along with Playstation and Nintendo, and so far he has accepted that other families do things differently from his own.
He plays outside, paints, draws, runs, jumps, rides his bike, knows basic math (addition and subtraction with numbers less than 20 or so, and I am not sure how high he can count anymore). He knows his letters, and can recognize a bunch of words and is certainly "ready" to read, as the jargon has it. He loves to help me "build". He designed and I constructed a wooden garage for him out of off-cuts, and he got me to buzz round the edges of the roof with my router to give it a nice edge (he knew what the router was for, and could visualize the finished product), and I am trying to find tools he can safely use -- he constructs huge sculptures from offcuts and glue, which he calls "Star Wars things" and then spends several sessions painting them. He goes sledding, swims, jump off the diving board, eats all kinds of foods, and knows that any good breakfast wil have protein, carbs and some fruit.
He also knows Spiderman's real name is Peter Parker, can identify Batman at about 100 yards (as well as Batcat and Batdog, minor deities he and his preschoolmates include in the pantheon on the same footing as Batman himself), and can hum a passable rendition of the Star Wars theme, despite never having been provided with this information by his parents. And he went off to his first day of school with a Superman backpack -- so far as I can see his room has only one other superman, but about four spidermen and a couple of batmen... He can operate a digital camera (he took a lovely shot of his Mum and Boy#2 the other day -- and she tells me that he carefully asked to her to move as he composed the shot on the screen), and work the DVD player.
Bringing up kids is almost always about flexibility and compromise -- in the end, you have to live in your culture and times, even as you try to give your kids the tools they will need to navigate through the world. But a lot of what my son loves to do would not be a part of his life if he spent too much time in front of a screen -- and in the long run, it is much better to experience the natural world first hand than it is to watch it via some electronic simulacrum, as we learn through touch and smell, as well as just sight and sound.
But what I have seen is this. Kids we know with similar backgrounds to us who watch a lot of TV or spend a lot of screen time, are almost always more "jumpy" than kids who don't -- and I am not implying that Boy#1 is any sort of angel (he threw a fit in the supermarket over the weekend that had people turning and staring from a couple of ailses away, and I explained to him that behaving badly wouldn't get him what he wanted -- namely some sugary cereal with a cartoon character on the box), and more likely to initiate violent play -- which my kid will cheefully join in with, at least until he gets hurt.
And if you want to rail against the corruption of modern life, TV is not the only issue -- avoiding shitty convenience food is a huge part of raising happy and healthy kids. I never expected to be a nutrition nazi, but loading kids with sugar does terrible things to their attention span and plays havoc with their emotions as they come down from the rush...
The other thing I have noticed recently is that Boy #1 is completely unable to make a distrinction between a nature program and a commercial (and he certainly does learn from some of the TV he watches) -- he happily told me that "Peanuts is the best video ever" parroting a trai
The electron volt is a measure of energy -- the amount of energy needed to move an electron through a potential difference of one volt in an electric field. (Think of it as moving a small ball up a hill). Thanks to "E=mc^2" this is also a measure of an equivalent mass -- and it is frequeuntly used to specify the masses of subatomic particles. (For comparison, an electron "weighs" about 500,000 eV -- even by particle standards, 2eV is very small)
Our definition of "surprise" clearly differs. I don't think any theorists were astonished by the discovery of neutrino masses, and (as others have pointed out) the first compelling evidence for a massive neutrino sector came from Kamiokande, not Minos. [The solar neutrino deficit was known for a long time before this, and one of the possible explanations for this was alway recognized to be oscillations between the neutrino flavor eigenstates, which requires a non-zero mass term]
By "surprise" I meant something that would radically shake up theoretical particle physics, or falsify a large chunk of the model space -- eg a failure to find the Higgs (and there is an upper limit on the Higgs mass in minimal models, although that has not yet been probed experimentally), evidence for "missing mass" in interactions that would provide evidence for "large" extra dimension, a fouth family, evidence that fermions are composite particles... Any or all of these things would cause a huge kerfuffle amongst theorists and none of them has happened. Back in the 60s, experimental particle physics would routinely discover states that came as a complete surprise to theorists (the sort of thing that led Rabi to say "who ordered that!" ), and that hasn't happened for ages.
Anyway, the problem that most experimentalists, such as myself, see with String Theory is that in some ways it is a step backwards from the standard model. It is purported to be "parameterless", which contrasts with the plethora of unconstrained parameters that the standard model contains. However, this is really only a bit of sleight of hand. Instead of numerical parameters, which are (relatively) easy to measure, and continuous, we now have the topology of space, which is discrete (no smooth change from one topology to the next) and quite difficult to measure, and embodies immensely more variation than the parameters of the standard model.
But no-one should mistake the standard model for a truly fundamental theory -- it was *constructed* to explain the observed data (and if you talk to some old timers, they will tell you that it was regarded as a kludge when it was put together). It can't tell us *why* SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) is the gauge group of particle physics, nor does it say anything about quantum gravity, nor does it tell what happens well above the TeV scale (and at this point the standard model, as currently understood, must break down in some way).
Woit is correct when he says that string theory should not be "the only game in town" -- but its conceptual depth makes it a tempting and worthwhile framework for theorists to investigate. As I said above, the situation Woit complains about is due primarily to the lack of experimental "news" in the last twenty years, rather than evidence that theoretical physicists have lost their bearings.
I am a cosmologist, albeit one who works "close" to string theory (I am not a string theorist, but many of my collaborators are), and I am familiar with Woit's arguments (and have met the gentleman himself several times).
However, my impression -- and I speak as someone who works inside a particle theory group, and who has served on faculty-level particle physics search committees -- is that string theory is far from having a "lock" on theoretical particle physics today. In the article, Woit is quoted as follows: "By his count, of 22 recently tenured professors in particle theory at the six top U.S. departments, 20 are string theorists." Looking at the Particle Physics Rumor Mill (http://physics.wm.edu/~calvin/) which assembles the short lists for faculty jobs in particle theory many of (and perhaps most) the people getting offers are not "hard core" string theorists. Many of them will have written papers with some string content, but have wider interests in cosmology, particle phenomenology, and/or physics "beyond the standard model".
This statistic differs from Woit's, in that it is not just counting "top" physics departments, and looks at Assistant Prof hires, and not tenured faculty (although *outside* the top six, most Assistant Profs can expect to be promoted to tenue). However, I suspect that the "twenty out of twenty two" statistic is either over a very carefully chosen interval, or reflect a very broad definition of who counts as a "string theorist".
My feeling is that string theorists have a *hard* time getting jobs. In general, many places outside the top ten (ande most of the jobs are outside the top ten) do not have string theorists on their faculty, and string theorists have a hard time differentiating themselves from other people in their field, which makes it hard for them to get hired -- especially as they are competing against other, very smart people.
The real issue here is that particle physicists have received no "surprises" in many years -- perhaps the only genuinely unexpected recent data point being the non-zero value of the cosmological constant. And this did not create a new problem, since the challenge for the theoretical community was always to explain why the CC was around 10^120 times smaller than its "natural" value, which is not much easier than explaining why it is actually slightly different from zero. In this enviroment, we have no good way to "prune" theoretical ideas, and the hope of many is that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will yield results that cannot be explained within the context of the so-called "standard model" of particle physics. In this sense *any* theoretical framework that had been worked on since the mid 1970s would risk falling into the same trap as string theory, since there is no data we can't explain with existing models -- if it was incompatible with the standard model it would have been dead on arrival, but any model which yields the standard model in some limit is not falsifiable with current data.
On the other hand, string theory does provide a rich mathematical structure with some very surprising results. The so-called "AdS/CFT" correspondence sets up a completely unexpected relationship between gravity and a particular class of field theories, and some calculations in QCD (the theory of the "strong" nuclear interaction) can be "organized" and performed using string theoretic ideas. This does not "test" string theory, but it does show that there are deep and unexpected consequences to what is ultimately a very simple idea and, in the absence of data, this motivates theoriests to keep working in this area.
I am particle physicist / cosmologist, and macs are widely used in my field -- both for number crunching, and as personal machines.
To provide some anecdotal data, I was at a conference last month and I would guess that at least 50% of the speakers were using Macs, and that ratio has been climbing steadily over the last few years. With the exception of Mathematica, all the "technical" software I compile from source, and these packages almost always assume you have access to a Unix commandline of one sort or another. Moreover, I have friends in the bioinformatics world, and many of them seem to be working with Macs.
(FWIW, I am looking forward to buying an intel Mac Book -- I bought an HP laptop for my post-doc, which he uses with Linux, and it runs circles around my G4 powerbook.)
The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??
Apple can't keep the date they launch new computers secret (next Tuesday for the next batch intel powerbooks, by all accounts). And that is a secret with a finite lifetime (three months ago not even Steve Jobs knew the date -- a week from now everyone will know it).
The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.
Remember this giant conspiracy is brought to you by the same people who run FEMA and promote "absitence only" sex education as a solution to teen pregnancy. But somehow the conspiracy works well until some script kiddie breaks into NASA over a dialup line (you plan to find free energy devices that will change the face of civilization, and you can't spring for DSL??) and you find that all these "secrets" are protected by default passwords. This guy presumably did hack into NASA, but the rest of it crap -- he is either nuts, or hoping that the Feds will decide it isn't worth the bother to have the guy spouting this nonsense on the stand.
I am currently a Comcast customer in New England, and I was thinking of switching to DSL. Comcast is expensive, and has frequent technical problems with DNS. Worse, they want to bundle broadband with premium cable, so as a non-premium cable user I wind up paying a more, so they can give a "discount" to people who are buying the whole package.
My plan was to buy an external antenna for the TV (since the only broadcast we warch is the occasional local news, and PBS cartoons for the youngest member of the household) and switch to DSL, which here would be sold through Verizon. However, either way I am still dealing with a company that sees Broadband as an "add on" which competes to some extent with its original core business.
To me, one of the biggest advantages of something like municipal wireless broadband is that the people who sell it would make their money by providing reliable internet service, and would not be worried that it would cannibalize their existing income streams from selling TV or phone service.
I was interested in this from a purely technical perspective. If they really did "break in" rather than just snoop on network traffic, does this mean that had to make use of some sort of exploit in the user's software or OS to do so? And does this mean that users of minority OSes (Linux and MacOS but also any other Unix for that matter) are much less likely to be targeted by a lawsuit?