I have no qualms about storing tax returns, financial records, etc on my laptop.
See, I still wouldn't store this kind of info on my laptop if possible. Encrypted or not, if I lose the information, I lose the information; I might as well just work from the desktop- or paper-based copies, since I'd need to keep either or both of these as a back-up to my laptop. I'll admit that I'm not one who needs to work with this sensitive info on a portable basis, so there's no real need for me to use a laptop in the first place.
My first thought is, naturally, how can we apply this to masers? If you could "switch" this material's negative index of refraction very quickly--say, through physical deformation with a piezoelectric transducer, which should interrupt the properties of the lattice--wouldn't you have yourself a very nice solution for generating short pulses? Put one of these right before the output coupler and switch it at a high rate, and you have your pulsed maser.
Are people going to start thinking that students _must_ suffer in order to do well in math, or that their degree of suffering is a useful metric for how well they will be doing im math? Even the CNN summary notes that in any given nation students who were more confident tended to be the better students. Confidence IS important, and this study _underscores_ that. We shouldn't be making the subject roses and daffodils, but at the same time isn't it possible that students from nations who are less confident overall simply are either more modest, more realistic, or just _less likely to report that they're confident_ about their math skills? Did they normalize for possible societal tendencies towards modesty under authority? I imagine that Japan, a mentioned nation, would necessarily have lower results than the USA.
I would agree, though, that perhaps texts could be more math-focused. If you want to have helpful visuals, then use visuals that give a good representation of ideas, rather than ones that tangentially relate to mathematics. Has anyone directly studied whether students at this level prefer or "get more out of" texts with "pretty" images as opposed to "useful" ones? Yes, I realize that those are very subjective terms, but I'm willing to bet they could be made at least somewhat more objective. One thing I've always wanted to see more of in math textbooks--now we're getting into higher level stuff--would be better and more easily-utilized tools for visualizing... path integrals, shell integration... I can't remember any very good examples at the moment, but then again Linear Algebra and Vector Calc were years ago.
Combine this technology operating in a very low-power mode with something like this thing I read about earlier on/., and do we get smart DVD drives that can detect if they're authorized to play a given disc securely and over air? I mean, you could stick an RFID on each DVD and then a reader somewhere in the drive, but is this a more off-the-shelf type of combination?
EVERYONE asks me that. No, I actually played a LOT of Morrowind. I realize, though, that many people didn't enjoy that kind of game, slower paced with lots of text to read, and also that there _may_ be better ways to spend what ultimately end up being project dollars or man-hours on writing "flavor" text. I would personally love to see more games include more text, but that's not likely to happen--especially in the flash and glam console world where a pretty picture is worth US$599.
'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience...
And yet, with all that, still no content. You can fit--how many Libraries of Congress?--onto that disc, and they're just pouring in huge textures and cinematics, higher resolution audio. Not that I'm saying that video games need to have a lot of text; maybe it's more true that video games don't really need to fill so much space.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: wake me up when we need a daughterboard for the AI or, better still, the PLOT.
So your travel-aide computer can automatically alert you to the fact that your planned route is blocked by a huge accident very soon after the acciden occurs?
I have to think that since high neutron flux can have a nasty habit of changing non-radioactive materials into radioactive ones that we would be more likely to see radioactive debris from a neutron bomb detonated underground. Also, for the same "size" of explosion, I would guess that one would need a higher yield neutron bomb as opposed to a more conventional nuclear weapon because you're losing a lot of what should be providing the fission to start your fusion explosion (or, in a fission bomb, what gives you fission in the first place). Conventional nuclear weapon--how's that for a contradiction in terms?
(Please note: I am not a nuclear weapons expert. Correct me whenever I'm wrong.)
What if a kid managed to do this entirely from, say, a public library? Or from school itself? In the latter case, the parent probably isn't even _permitted to try_ and find out what their child has been doing on the school's computers, and in the former case it's logistically impossible if you don't want to be following the kid everywhere. Does anyone have some insight into what a parent would do in this case?
KI is one of those things you could probably afford to always have on hand "just in case." Still, I think that I-131, I-127, and other radioactive iodine isotopes are not the main concern from a for reals nuclear bomb. Iodine should be way down on the decay chain--don't have my chart of the nuclides on hand. That means that you won't see much iodine coming out of a nuclear bomb--not for a while.
Now, for a "dirty bomb," which could be full of medical I-131 or god-knows-what-else, or for people living near nuclear power plants, keeping KI around might not be a bad idea.
Standard warning: I'm not a Radiation Safety professional (yet), so take the advice above with a large grain of (iodized) salt.
I don't see how this is immediately very useful for electron-beam cancer therapy. This system seems infinitely complex compared to the current methods for generating electron beams--the one I can come up with off the top of my head is thermionic emission from a tungsten wire plus acceleration through a potential in vacuum. This process generates the keV-MeV range electrons that are necessary for therapy (I think) or for producing X-rays.
Now, I'm a medical physics _student,_ so if anyone has some better insights into this please feel free to correct me. I'm honestly not even sure if that method I outlined above is commonly used for generating electron beams for therapy--I know it is for x-ray generation. I suppose it's probably more common to use a linac to generate particle beams. I'm also not 100% certain that high electron energies _aren't_ desirable for cancer therapy (most of what I've done so far has been x-ray imaging). Once again, anyone feel free to correct me, but it seems that therapy aims for the keV-MeV range.
The strong bias towards math probably exists because... well, this is going to sound stupid, but math is quantitative, and writing is qualitative.
It's easy to say that little Timmy is a math prodigy because he's solving integrals in his head by the time he's in seventh grade. It's very difficult to say that little Billy is a literary prodigy because the degree of assimilation and the quality of work produced are both measured very subjectively. In math and science, there are simple, fairly straightforward ways of measuring how well a student _recalls_ concepts and how well they can _apply_ the concepts. That latter one does require someone to read a bunch of logic on paper, and then estimate how well the kid has applied the concepts they've learned (i.e. does the student seem to understand "force" or is she just plugging and chugging), but that can be objectively determined (did she get the right answer, and do her steps to that answer clear and logical).
In writing, someone has to actually sit down and read everything they student has written, judge it as objectively as they can, and then assign it a number grade. You could give a test on sentence structure, comprehension, and so on--which they do--and still have no idea if the kid can write. The writing needs to be clear and logical, but what's clear and logical in an essay is by no means as straightforward as what's clear and logical in a physics problem solution.
What I'm trying to say, really, is that there is probably a bias towards math at least in some part because basic-level math is very easy to grade and evaluate, whereas to judge writing is more nebulous.
You can register the copyright which helps with enforcing it...
This is almost certainly a bad choice of words on the part of the author. The only real reason I can come up with for anyone to "take steps" to copyright their work (really, as you've said, to register the copyright) is to enforce it. Why would anyone bother to register their copyright unless they suspected they may need to prove that it was theirs? The author certainly intended to say that the designers have taken steps to prepare to enforce their copyright--which, to most people, is the same as actually copyrighting it.
I very much doubt the average person--maybe even the average journalist--knows much at all about copyright. I certainly don't.
I know that this has already been beaten to death, but, for instance, Wikipedia's stub on Radiometry, one of the oldest fields in optics, is also rather terse--and that's the entry for an _entire field in optics._
It DOES, I might add, as a saving grace contain the most important radiometric lesson that anyone in the sciences needs to learn: if you say the word "intensity," you probably ACTUALLY mean irradiance. This bothers optics folks to NO END.
Really, the system would need to know the difference between _unique_ ideas and _commonly known_ ideas. Claiming common knowledge as your own idea by implication (i.e. by paraphrase without citing a source) isn't plagiarism; claiming the unique idea or of another is. The problem with that definition, of course, is defining what exactly is "common" knowledge. I'd bet almost every assignnment produced by high-school level kids would NOT be based on recently-published research papers, interviews, or anything of the sort (interviews slightly more likely than papers), and would instead be compilations of well-known facts. The place for plagiarism to come in there would be in copying another student's unique idea (very few, I imagine, are producing any significant, unique insights at this level of the game--and if they are, that VERY MUCH needs to be protected) or in directly copying the words of anyone (which, really, is probably more of a copyright issue at this level).
Slashdot Mirror
There's a guy out there who made a few hilarious short parodies called "Metal Gear Awesome," and "Awesome the Hedgehog."
I think he could do a terrific Jack Thompsome.
It's "buddy"?
Oh god. For years, when I've sung that song I've always sung it as "Betty"!
"I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can call... me... Al!"
And here I thought Paul Simon was just a weirdo.
I have no qualms about storing tax returns, financial records, etc on my laptop.
See, I still wouldn't store this kind of info on my laptop if possible. Encrypted or not, if I lose the information, I lose the information; I might as well just work from the desktop- or paper-based copies, since I'd need to keep either or both of these as a back-up to my laptop. I'll admit that I'm not one who needs to work with this sensitive info on a portable basis, so there's no real need for me to use a laptop in the first place.
Maybe they're getting tired of the "yes, no, maybe" tags that always show up whenever they ask a yes/no question?
My first thought is, naturally, how can we apply this to masers? If you could "switch" this material's negative index of refraction very quickly--say, through physical deformation with a piezoelectric transducer, which should interrupt the properties of the lattice--wouldn't you have yourself a very nice solution for generating short pulses? Put one of these right before the output coupler and switch it at a high rate, and you have your pulsed maser.
It's official--IE7 is the web browser used by Jesus!
Or just farm animals.
Are people going to start thinking that students _must_ suffer in order to do well in math, or that their degree of suffering is a useful metric for how well they will be doing im math? Even the CNN summary notes that in any given nation students who were more confident tended to be the better students. Confidence IS important, and this study _underscores_ that. We shouldn't be making the subject roses and daffodils, but at the same time isn't it possible that students from nations who are less confident overall simply are either more modest, more realistic, or just _less likely to report that they're confident_ about their math skills? Did they normalize for possible societal tendencies towards modesty under authority? I imagine that Japan, a mentioned nation, would necessarily have lower results than the USA.
I would agree, though, that perhaps texts could be more math-focused. If you want to have helpful visuals, then use visuals that give a good representation of ideas, rather than ones that tangentially relate to mathematics. Has anyone directly studied whether students at this level prefer or "get more out of" texts with "pretty" images as opposed to "useful" ones? Yes, I realize that those are very subjective terms, but I'm willing to bet they could be made at least somewhat more objective. One thing I've always wanted to see more of in math textbooks--now we're getting into higher level stuff--would be better and more easily-utilized tools for visualizing... path integrals, shell integration... I can't remember any very good examples at the moment, but then again Linear Algebra and Vector Calc were years ago.
Combine this technology operating in a very low-power mode with something like this thing I read about earlier on /., and do we get smart DVD drives that can detect if they're authorized to play a given disc securely and over air? I mean, you could stick an RFID on each DVD and then a reader somewhere in the drive, but is this a more off-the-shelf type of combination?
Or am I full of crap?
EVERYONE asks me that. No, I actually played a LOT of Morrowind. I realize, though, that many people didn't enjoy that kind of game, slower paced with lots of text to read, and also that there _may_ be better ways to spend what ultimately end up being project dollars or man-hours on writing "flavor" text. I would personally love to see more games include more text, but that's not likely to happen--especially in the flash and glam console world where a pretty picture is worth US$599.
'It's not just about graphics,' he said. 'It's about 7.1 audio, it's about speech, it's about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it's high-res textures, it's animation, it's everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience...
And yet, with all that, still no content. You can fit--how many Libraries of Congress?--onto that disc, and they're just pouring in huge textures and cinematics, higher resolution audio. Not that I'm saying that video games need to have a lot of text; maybe it's more true that video games don't really need to fill so much space.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: wake me up when we need a daughterboard for the AI or, better still, the PLOT.
to the three dimensions of the Imax cinema
So, is the third dimension apparent depth? If Imax shows are still displayed on flat screens...
Keep reading. The article says that a relativistic solution to that estimation indicates 138 is the heaviest.
Beyond that, it's just an estimate. The universe is full of surprises.
So your travel-aide computer can automatically alert you to the fact that your planned route is blocked by a huge accident very soon after the acciden occurs?
I have to think that since high neutron flux can have a nasty habit of changing non-radioactive materials into radioactive ones that we would be more likely to see radioactive debris from a neutron bomb detonated underground. Also, for the same "size" of explosion, I would guess that one would need a higher yield neutron bomb as opposed to a more conventional nuclear weapon because you're losing a lot of what should be providing the fission to start your fusion explosion (or, in a fission bomb, what gives you fission in the first place). Conventional nuclear weapon--how's that for a contradiction in terms?
(Please note: I am not a nuclear weapons expert. Correct me whenever I'm wrong.)
What if a kid managed to do this entirely from, say, a public library? Or from school itself? In the latter case, the parent probably isn't even _permitted to try_ and find out what their child has been doing on the school's computers, and in the former case it's logistically impossible if you don't want to be following the kid everywhere. Does anyone have some insight into what a parent would do in this case?
Does anyone know what effect this test might have on the Doomsday Clock?
KI is one of those things you could probably afford to always have on hand "just in case." Still, I think that I-131, I-127, and other radioactive iodine isotopes are not the main concern from a for reals nuclear bomb. Iodine should be way down on the decay chain--don't have my chart of the nuclides on hand. That means that you won't see much iodine coming out of a nuclear bomb--not for a while.
Now, for a "dirty bomb," which could be full of medical I-131 or god-knows-what-else, or for people living near nuclear power plants, keeping KI around might not be a bad idea.
Standard warning: I'm not a Radiation Safety professional (yet), so take the advice above with a large grain of (iodized) salt.
I don't see how this is immediately very useful for electron-beam cancer therapy. This system seems infinitely complex compared to the current methods for generating electron beams--the one I can come up with off the top of my head is thermionic emission from a tungsten wire plus acceleration through a potential in vacuum. This process generates the keV-MeV range electrons that are necessary for therapy (I think) or for producing X-rays.
Now, I'm a medical physics _student,_ so if anyone has some better insights into this please feel free to correct me. I'm honestly not even sure if that method I outlined above is commonly used for generating electron beams for therapy--I know it is for x-ray generation. I suppose it's probably more common to use a linac to generate particle beams. I'm also not 100% certain that high electron energies _aren't_ desirable for cancer therapy (most of what I've done so far has been x-ray imaging). Once again, anyone feel free to correct me, but it seems that therapy aims for the keV-MeV range.
The strong bias towards math probably exists because... well, this is going to sound stupid, but math is quantitative, and writing is qualitative.
It's easy to say that little Timmy is a math prodigy because he's solving integrals in his head by the time he's in seventh grade. It's very difficult to say that little Billy is a literary prodigy because the degree of assimilation and the quality of work produced are both measured very subjectively. In math and science, there are simple, fairly straightforward ways of measuring how well a student _recalls_ concepts and how well they can _apply_ the concepts. That latter one does require someone to read a bunch of logic on paper, and then estimate how well the kid has applied the concepts they've learned (i.e. does the student seem to understand "force" or is she just plugging and chugging), but that can be objectively determined (did she get the right answer, and do her steps to that answer clear and logical).
In writing, someone has to actually sit down and read everything they student has written, judge it as objectively as they can, and then assign it a number grade. You could give a test on sentence structure, comprehension, and so on--which they do--and still have no idea if the kid can write. The writing needs to be clear and logical, but what's clear and logical in an essay is by no means as straightforward as what's clear and logical in a physics problem solution.
What I'm trying to say, really, is that there is probably a bias towards math at least in some part because basic-level math is very easy to grade and evaluate, whereas to judge writing is more nebulous.
You can register the copyright which helps with enforcing it...
This is almost certainly a bad choice of words on the part of the author. The only real reason I can come up with for anyone to "take steps" to copyright their work (really, as you've said, to register the copyright) is to enforce it. Why would anyone bother to register their copyright unless they suspected they may need to prove that it was theirs? The author certainly intended to say that the designers have taken steps to prepare to enforce their copyright--which, to most people, is the same as actually copyrighting it.
I very much doubt the average person--maybe even the average journalist--knows much at all about copyright. I certainly don't.
2k is all the Windows OS you'll ever need on your desktop.
Not if you want to play any new PC games that use DX10.
I know that this has already been beaten to death, but, for instance, Wikipedia's stub on Radiometry, one of the oldest fields in optics, is also rather terse--and that's the entry for an _entire field in optics._
It DOES, I might add, as a saving grace contain the most important radiometric lesson that anyone in the sciences needs to learn: if you say the word "intensity," you probably ACTUALLY mean irradiance. This bothers optics folks to NO END.
Except from gamers that have to upgrade to use the latest features in their graphic card.
I can't say for sure, but I'm willing to be that DX10 could've been programmed for XP. This is a case of the horse building a cart.
Change schools. I hope you're an undergrad, for your sake.
Really, the system would need to know the difference between _unique_ ideas and _commonly known_ ideas. Claiming common knowledge as your own idea by implication (i.e. by paraphrase without citing a source) isn't plagiarism; claiming the unique idea or of another is. The problem with that definition, of course, is defining what exactly is "common" knowledge. I'd bet almost every assignnment produced by high-school level kids would NOT be based on recently-published research papers, interviews, or anything of the sort (interviews slightly more likely than papers), and would instead be compilations of well-known facts. The place for plagiarism to come in there would be in copying another student's unique idea (very few, I imagine, are producing any significant, unique insights at this level of the game--and if they are, that VERY MUCH needs to be protected) or in directly copying the words of anyone (which, really, is probably more of a copyright issue at this level).