User-generated content would not have had a place to flourish if it were not for the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. You'd have a hard time arguing with that. Any person who is not a member of of the **AA agrees that many of the copyright infringement rules included in it are crap. But it is certainly plausible to argue that benefit of user-generated content outweighed the impacts of draconian rules on DeCSS, etc.
I would argue that this problem is not only pretty much non-existent in chemistry and physics, but that even biology, at least cell and molecular biology do not have this issue either. Typically when a biologist publishes a protein structure or sequences an organism's DNA no one shows up later and says it is wrong. In fact, it's rather large news when it does.
For example, there was a bit of a controversy over protein crystallographers recently. A person had published a paper on a protein structure that seemed to contradict all previous though functions for the protein. It turned out that they had used the wrong parameters in their phasing program. However, this doesn't happen in most to most papers, and certainly not a majority of them.
I would say that this problem is mostly specific to medical research. By its very nature, medical research is a good deal more prone to human fallibility since both subjects and researchers are human beings.
My my, someone has a grudge against the NIF. This is two comments in one day complaining about it. You do realize that this is how most multi-billion dollar projects occur. The LHC is over budget and behind schedule, the Tevatron was over budget, ITER is over budget. Besides according to Wikipedia, NIF costs approximately $4.2 billion not $15 billion. And it was only rebaselined once, not three times. It is amazingly difficult to accurately predict how much a large project will cost. Mind you that this is completely ignoring the fact that the three nuclear weapons labs were basically told to spend $x on stuff to make up for the lack of nuclear tests without any real plan.
I have serious doubts that a space elevator will only cost $10 billion. It all depends on how much R & D is necessary to invent the appropriate material for the cable. Once the material is invented, it would be relatively cheap to construct a cable; it would be a good deal cheaper than making superconducting magnets or terawatt lasers. They're probably seriously lowballing the R & D money, but the estimate is not as outrageous as you might think.
Outside of Slashdot, there are very few people who would voluntarily donate money to scientific research.
If I can make them pay for my science, then they have justification for making me pay for their $WASTEFUL_PROJECT. Everybody loses.
No, they don't. I gave specific reasons why public science funding is warranted. $WASTEFUL_PROJECT should have to match similar criteria to get funding. If it does match those criteria, then it isn't wasteful.
Imagine if the same portion of your paycheck's federal withholding that is being spent by the feds on science, were instead voluntarily contributed, by you, to a foundation of your choosing.
Except it wouldn't happen. Outside of Slashdot, there are very few people who would voluntarily donate money to scientific research. If you accept taxation as reasonable, then spending public money on a positive externality is a good thing. Most economists consider a Pigovian subsidy to be one of the best ways to provide for a positive externality and that's what federally funded basic research does.
Everyone seems to have this idea that politicians decide that $x are sent to Professor Smith at State U to study subject A. That's not how it works. The NSF gets about $6 billion dollars and based on grant proposals which are ranked by peer review, select the funding recipients.
You are aware that pharmaceutical companies rarely get money from the federal science agencies, right? The NIH typically funds university professors, not big evil pharma. They commercialize the discoveries of biologists. Without federal funding those discoveries probably wouldn't exist.
I'd like to see ATT run its telephone systems without the transistor, or its decendant the microchip! This illustrates a fundamental flaw in business school thinking, that they usually only consider direct profits of self-interested entities, and not the profits of society as a whole.
That's my exact point. Businesses are only supposed to consider their direct profits. That's what makes markets work. When a positive or negative externality comes into play the government is supposed to step in with either subsidies or taxes, respectively.
To be honest, if Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor someone else would have. The result for AT&T would have been the same. Your logic could be used to argue that meatpacking plants should run a EE research lab since their machines have microprocessors in them.
The problem is that the government doesn't fund research. They fund people who build weapons. Unless your lab is tied to the defense dept. you won't get funding.
While I'll agree that there isn't enough money for scientific funding, to claim that the government doesn't fund any non-defense related research is absurd. Have you heard of the DOE, NSF, or NIH?
The DOE runs numerous national labs all of which do a good deal of basic research. While they do build nuclear weapons the arm with the most funding of the BES division, which runs most of the synchrotron light facilities in the country, neutron scattering sources at Oak Ridge and does a good deal of research into electron microscopy. They also hand out grants to universities.
The NSF pays for tons of basic research as well. They gave Caltech and MIT hundreds of millions for LIGO, a gravitational wave detector. That has absolutely nothing to do with the defense department or weaponry.
Honestly, if you want to complain about the government funding of science, do it the right way. Write your Congress people telling them that more money should be sent towards the NSF and less towards building luxury pods for Air Force generals. It actually works, as evidenced by the additional science funding passed in a recent supplemental funding bill.
There is more to fundamental physics research than particle physics though. There's still plenty of work being done in condensed matter physics and AMO (atomic, molecular, & optical).
However, I actually don't fault Bell Labs for getting out of this area. Fundamental physics research provides very little for the company. AT&T never made money off of the transistor. They haven't turned into a laser manufacturer.
Scientific research is a public good and as such, should be funded by the government. Without the benefit of a monopoly, Bell Labs can't really afford to spend money on fundamental research, which costs a lot of money, and results in very little private gain.
I agree with most of your points. But the main motivation behind lead-free solder is not the protection of the hardware user. The lead is a concern when we dispose of the hardware though, when the heavy metals can leach into groundwater, poisoning aquifers and the like.
By the rules of swimming, if the athletes have the same time to the hundredth of a second, it's a dead heat. Athletics goes to the photo finish, so even if two athletes have the same "official" time, the tie gets broken.
No, even in track and field, there can be a tie, as seen in the womans' 100 m dash, where two sprinters tied for 2nd.
Emissions from coal plants are treatable with scrubbers and similar measures, and requiring coal plants to meet standards is far more direct and effective. Trying to accomplish the same effect with financial measures is a very roundabout, and inefficient approach.
Someone clearly hasn't taken a basic economics course. If so, you would have heard of the Pigovian tax, which is considered by economists as one of the most efficient ways to account for negative externalities. On the other hand, a direct emissions limit would prevent the use of "dirty" technologies, even when their benefit is so great that it outweighs the cost of pollution.
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
Clearly, quantum mechanics and relativity have had no effect on engineering so far. Transistors have no connection to quantum mechanics at all. Lasers are clearly based on classical optics. And relativity has had no effect on modern engineering at all, you know GPS, synchrotron light sources, they never happened.
How is chemistry based on classical models any how? Kids learn about atomic orbitals in high school chemistry. Sure most chemists aren't cranking through full-blown QED calculations, but to claim that chemists don't use quantum mechanics is just wrong.
Along the same vein, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series is excellent. It's probably more for the preteen set than for teenagers though, but it's still a great read when you get older.
Strictly speaking, black holes don't emit anything other than Hawking radiation, the x-rays are a result of rapidly accelerating gases in their accretion disk.
From the article it sounds like a pump-probe experiment. They excite the neon with a 2.5 femtosecond pulse and then image the excited state with a 80 attosecond pulse. (You obviously need the imaging pulse to be shorter than the excitation pulse.) I'm not sure how much detail you would be able to get from this though, as the wavelength and brightness of the light source would be a limiting factor.
They're effectively the same thing. If no light falls on your detector, it's essentially the same as having a closed shutter.
When you can figure out how to open and close a shutter in less than a trillionth of a second you can let them know. It's far easier to create a short pulse of light.
Not that I don't appreciate NASA's false-colouring of images, but why is it that they never just send a visible spectrum camera up there? You do realize that you get the exact same result as a color camera (in fact better) by taking three pictures with red, green and blue filters in front of your black and white camera?
Ok, sure I did. But I think you missed the point. I wasn't saying anything was dark matter. I'm saying we found more real matter. Those generous question marks were my pokes against people who want dark matter to explain everything away when perfectly normal matter will suffice.
Except there aren't people like that. We knew this normal matter existed, we just didn't know where it was.
Every time we talk about something new being found in the universe, someone likes to say, "Oh look at those stupid astronomers, making up stuff no one can prove. There never was any dark matter." I know that's not what you specifically said, but by bringing it into the conversation and conflating this observation with theories of dark matter, you essentially did the same thing. Your basically attempted to make other people look stupid by making an ill-informed, seemingly insightful comment. I'm rather disappointed to see that it that the mods fell for it.
Always wondered why a simple explanation like dust never took hold, and everyone started talking about invisible matter to explain what should be there.
We know that there is some sort of matter missing due to weird graviational interactions. We also know that according our measurements of the cosmic microwave background, this matter doesn't exist, i.e., this matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic fields. That's why it's not normal baryonic matter.
Therefore, we say that there must be dark matter. Plain old dust would have showed up in our readings of the CMB.
That for the interval covered by the (George W.) Bush administration, my browser was full of liberal (and Democratic) generated blogs vilifying him and anybody else connected with his administration. There probably were two or three thousand entries a day. For the prior eight years we had a Democrat in office, and I don't remember even a single conservative (or Republican) generated blog vilifying the Democrats. I'd almost have to say that if you observed my browser, Democrats and liberals love to blog and conservatives and Republicans don't. Yes, that's true, but I can easily choose not to read these blogs. On the other hand, I have no choice in regards to the reception of chain mails.
What I'm curious about is how those police departments that recently bought UAVs can legally use them in public airspace....
They probably qualify under the same rules that allow you to fly RC airplanes and helicopters as the UAVs police use, usually aren't much bigger than that.
Not Invented Here Syndrome. YouTube is still a fairly new purchase, so it's hard to tell what'll happen there, but we've heard similar complaints about other things they've purchased like GrandCentral, Dodgeball, Jaiku, JotSpot, Urchin, etc. You do know that Google Maps and Google Earth, two of their most popular non-search products were the result of acquisitions, right?
I'm going to be responding to your post out of order if you don't mind. I don't think I've taken anything out of context.
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
I don't deny that Wikipedia is a valuable resource of information, but there are plenty of questions you can't answer with it. Here's one for example, (which I'll admit is contrived, but it's the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment). You're on the market for a new air conditioner for your house in 2020. There are these fancy new Peltier coolers which you can embed in your walls that are far more efficient than your traditional air conditioner. However, they do cost a bit more and the relatively new mass production of them makes their reliability unproven (according to a salesmen). Are the efficiency gains in buying a Peltier cooler worth the extra cost?
If there's a tremendous worry that Wikipedia is somehow destroying academic integrity, I'm going to need a free, web-based solution...that allows me to, at a few concise clicks, satisfy my thirst for knowledge.
And there we have the problem many have with Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is enough to satisfy your thirst for knowledge, well lets just say you weren't very thirsty. A thirst for knowledge shouldn't be able to be satisfied with a few concise clicks. Sure Wikipedia might be useful for some basic information, but it isn't going to give you a thorough understanding of anything.
I'm sick of hearing all the griping about Wikipedia, because it's whole purpose is to fulfill the job we're allegedly paying all this money at institutions for: procurement of knowledge. And these hooligans are trying to give it away for free... preposterous.
It's not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for an education. A good education should teach you how to think. A college education should give you a thorough grounding in whatever field you choose.
Sometimes I don't want to know the nuances of the issue, I'm just trying to find who the NBA's scoring leader was, or what, for purposes of the article I'm reading, *is* a Boson Particle.
Yet here you seem to understand the issues people have with Wikipedia. It doesn't give you the nuances of the issue. And besides I don't think any college professors were planning on charging you for the name of the NBA's scoring leader. A course in quantum mechanics does more than just memorizing the names of particles.
I can't read a book every time I've got a question, I'd literally do nothing at that point. Hell, I barely have the time to use Wikipedia to answer my question. I've got a lot of questions but having a phone on me with Wikipedia access means more of my questions get answered.
I have no disagreement with you here. I use Wikipedia for the same purposes as what you state above, but...
Until there's a substitute that these people (charging thousands upon thousands for their answers in the form of collegiate education) can provide that helps me with that problem (my insatiable curiosity) Wikipedia's a gamble I'm willing to take.
That is not what a collegiate education is. If you go to college and Wikipedia could have thought you everything you learned there, I'll agree those thousands were useless, but so were you.
If they've got such a problem with it, maybe they shouldn't charge $90 for their textbooks. Or thousands of dollars for their expertise.
That $90 textbook is not the same as Wikipedia. While I would be the first to argue that textbooks are outrageously overpriced, you can in no way compare a well-written textbook to Wikipedia. To give an example, take Spacetime Physics, by Taylor and Wheeler. While the Wikipedia article on SR has no f
Slashdot Mirror
User-generated content would not have had a place to flourish if it were not for the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. You'd have a hard time arguing with that. Any person who is not a member of of the **AA agrees that many of the copyright infringement rules included in it are crap. But it is certainly plausible to argue that benefit of user-generated content outweighed the impacts of draconian rules on DeCSS, etc.
I would argue that this problem is not only pretty much non-existent in chemistry and physics, but that even biology, at least cell and molecular biology do not have this issue either. Typically when a biologist publishes a protein structure or sequences an organism's DNA no one shows up later and says it is wrong. In fact, it's rather large news when it does.
For example, there was a bit of a controversy over protein crystallographers recently. A person had published a paper on a protein structure that seemed to contradict all previous though functions for the protein. It turned out that they had used the wrong parameters in their phasing program. However, this doesn't happen in most to most papers, and certainly not a majority of them.
I would say that this problem is mostly specific to medical research. By its very nature, medical research is a good deal more prone to human fallibility since both subjects and researchers are human beings.
>
Do you have this analysis that shows all the externalities? I don't think you do.
He may not, but your analysis specifically disallows externalities by only taking into account employee time.
My my, someone has a grudge against the NIF. This is two comments in one day complaining about it. You do realize that this is how most multi-billion dollar projects occur. The LHC is over budget and behind schedule, the Tevatron was over budget, ITER is over budget. Besides according to Wikipedia, NIF costs approximately $4.2 billion not $15 billion. And it was only rebaselined once, not three times. It is amazingly difficult to accurately predict how much a large project will cost. Mind you that this is completely ignoring the fact that the three nuclear weapons labs were basically told to spend $x on stuff to make up for the lack of nuclear tests without any real plan.
I have serious doubts that a space elevator will only cost $10 billion. It all depends on how much R & D is necessary to invent the appropriate material for the cable. Once the material is invented, it would be relatively cheap to construct a cable; it would be a good deal cheaper than making superconducting magnets or terawatt lasers. They're probably seriously lowballing the R & D money, but the estimate is not as outrageous as you might think.
If I can make them pay for my science, then they have justification for making me pay for their $WASTEFUL_PROJECT. Everybody loses.
No, they don't. I gave specific reasons why public science funding is warranted. $WASTEFUL_PROJECT should have to match similar criteria to get funding. If it does match those criteria, then it isn't wasteful.
Imagine if the same portion of your paycheck's federal withholding that is being spent by the feds on science, were instead voluntarily contributed, by you, to a foundation of your choosing.
Except it wouldn't happen. Outside of Slashdot, there are very few people who would voluntarily donate money to scientific research. If you accept taxation as reasonable, then spending public money on a positive externality is a good thing. Most economists consider a Pigovian subsidy to be one of the best ways to provide for a positive externality and that's what federally funded basic research does.
Everyone seems to have this idea that politicians decide that $x are sent to Professor Smith at State U to study subject A. That's not how it works. The NSF gets about $6 billion dollars and based on grant proposals which are ranked by peer review, select the funding recipients.
You are aware that pharmaceutical companies rarely get money from the federal science agencies, right? The NIH typically funds university professors, not big evil pharma. They commercialize the discoveries of biologists. Without federal funding those discoveries probably wouldn't exist.
I'd like to see ATT run its telephone systems without the transistor, or its decendant the microchip! This illustrates a fundamental flaw in business school thinking, that they usually only consider direct profits of self-interested entities, and not the profits of society as a whole.
That's my exact point. Businesses are only supposed to consider their direct profits. That's what makes markets work. When a positive or negative externality comes into play the government is supposed to step in with either subsidies or taxes, respectively.
To be honest, if Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor someone else would have. The result for AT&T would have been the same. Your logic could be used to argue that meatpacking plants should run a EE research lab since their machines have microprocessors in them.
The problem is that the government doesn't fund research. They fund people who build weapons. Unless your lab is tied to the defense dept. you won't get funding.
While I'll agree that there isn't enough money for scientific funding, to claim that the government doesn't fund any non-defense related research is absurd. Have you heard of the DOE, NSF, or NIH? The DOE runs numerous national labs all of which do a good deal of basic research. While they do build nuclear weapons the arm with the most funding of the BES division, which runs most of the synchrotron light facilities in the country, neutron scattering sources at Oak Ridge and does a good deal of research into electron microscopy. They also hand out grants to universities. The NSF pays for tons of basic research as well. They gave Caltech and MIT hundreds of millions for LIGO, a gravitational wave detector. That has absolutely nothing to do with the defense department or weaponry. Honestly, if you want to complain about the government funding of science, do it the right way. Write your Congress people telling them that more money should be sent towards the NSF and less towards building luxury pods for Air Force generals. It actually works, as evidenced by the additional science funding passed in a recent supplemental funding bill.
There is more to fundamental physics research than particle physics though. There's still plenty of work being done in condensed matter physics and AMO (atomic, molecular, & optical). However, I actually don't fault Bell Labs for getting out of this area. Fundamental physics research provides very little for the company. AT&T never made money off of the transistor. They haven't turned into a laser manufacturer. Scientific research is a public good and as such, should be funded by the government. Without the benefit of a monopoly, Bell Labs can't really afford to spend money on fundamental research, which costs a lot of money, and results in very little private gain.
I agree with most of your points. But the main motivation behind lead-free solder is not the protection of the hardware user. The lead is a concern when we dispose of the hardware though, when the heavy metals can leach into groundwater, poisoning aquifers and the like.
By the rules of swimming, if the athletes have the same time to the hundredth of a second, it's a dead heat. Athletics goes to the photo finish, so even if two athletes have the same "official" time, the tie gets broken.
No, even in track and field, there can be a tie, as seen in the womans' 100 m dash, where two sprinters tied for 2nd.
Emissions from coal plants are treatable with scrubbers and similar measures, and requiring coal plants to meet standards is far more direct and effective. Trying to accomplish the same effect with financial measures is a very roundabout, and inefficient approach.
Someone clearly hasn't taken a basic economics course. If so, you would have heard of the Pigovian tax, which is considered by economists as one of the most efficient ways to account for negative externalities. On the other hand, a direct emissions limit would prevent the use of "dirty" technologies, even when their benefit is so great that it outweighs the cost of pollution.
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
Clearly, quantum mechanics and relativity have had no effect on engineering so far. Transistors have no connection to quantum mechanics at all. Lasers are clearly based on classical optics. And relativity has had no effect on modern engineering at all, you know GPS, synchrotron light sources, they never happened.
How is chemistry based on classical models any how? Kids learn about atomic orbitals in high school chemistry. Sure most chemists aren't cranking through full-blown QED calculations, but to claim that chemists don't use quantum mechanics is just wrong.
Along the same vein, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series is excellent. It's probably more for the preteen set than for teenagers though, but it's still a great read when you get older.
Strictly speaking, black holes don't emit anything other than Hawking radiation, the x-rays are a result of rapidly accelerating gases in their accretion disk.
From the article it sounds like a pump-probe experiment. They excite the neon with a 2.5 femtosecond pulse and then image the excited state with a 80 attosecond pulse. (You obviously need the imaging pulse to be shorter than the excitation pulse.) I'm not sure how much detail you would be able to get from this though, as the wavelength and brightness of the light source would be a limiting factor.
They're effectively the same thing. If no light falls on your detector, it's essentially the same as having a closed shutter. When you can figure out how to open and close a shutter in less than a trillionth of a second you can let them know. It's far easier to create a short pulse of light.
Except there aren't people like that. We knew this normal matter existed, we just didn't know where it was.
Every time we talk about something new being found in the universe, someone likes to say, "Oh look at those stupid astronomers, making up stuff no one can prove. There never was any dark matter." I know that's not what you specifically said, but by bringing it into the conversation and conflating this observation with theories of dark matter, you essentially did the same thing. Your basically attempted to make other people look stupid by making an ill-informed, seemingly insightful comment. I'm rather disappointed to see that it that the mods fell for it.
We know that there is some sort of matter missing due to weird graviational interactions. We also know that according our measurements of the cosmic microwave background, this matter doesn't exist, i.e., this matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic fields. That's why it's not normal baryonic matter.
Therefore, we say that there must be dark matter. Plain old dust would have showed up in our readings of the CMB.
What I'm curious about is how those police departments that recently bought UAVs can legally use them in public airspace....
They probably qualify under the same rules that allow you to fly RC airplanes and helicopters as the UAVs police use, usually aren't much bigger than that.Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
I don't deny that Wikipedia is a valuable resource of information, but there are plenty of questions you can't answer with it. Here's one for example, (which I'll admit is contrived, but it's the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment). You're on the market for a new air conditioner for your house in 2020. There are these fancy new Peltier coolers which you can embed in your walls that are far more efficient than your traditional air conditioner. However, they do cost a bit more and the relatively new mass production of them makes their reliability unproven (according to a salesmen). Are the efficiency gains in buying a Peltier cooler worth the extra cost?
If there's a tremendous worry that Wikipedia is somehow destroying academic integrity, I'm going to need a free, web-based solution...that allows me to, at a few concise clicks, satisfy my thirst for knowledge.
And there we have the problem many have with Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is enough to satisfy your thirst for knowledge, well lets just say you weren't very thirsty. A thirst for knowledge shouldn't be able to be satisfied with a few concise clicks. Sure Wikipedia might be useful for some basic information, but it isn't going to give you a thorough understanding of anything.
I'm sick of hearing all the griping about Wikipedia, because it's whole purpose is to fulfill the job we're allegedly paying all this money at institutions for: procurement of knowledge. And these hooligans are trying to give it away for free... preposterous.
It's not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for an education. A good education should teach you how to think. A college education should give you a thorough grounding in whatever field you choose.
Sometimes I don't want to know the nuances of the issue, I'm just trying to find who the NBA's scoring leader was, or what, for purposes of the article I'm reading, *is* a Boson Particle.
Yet here you seem to understand the issues people have with Wikipedia. It doesn't give you the nuances of the issue. And besides I don't think any college professors were planning on charging you for the name of the NBA's scoring leader. A course in quantum mechanics does more than just memorizing the names of particles.
I can't read a book every time I've got a question, I'd literally do nothing at that point. Hell, I barely have the time to use Wikipedia to answer my question. I've got a lot of questions but having a phone on me with Wikipedia access means more of my questions get answered.
I have no disagreement with you here. I use Wikipedia for the same purposes as what you state above, but...
Until there's a substitute that these people (charging thousands upon thousands for their answers in the form of collegiate education) can provide that helps me with that problem (my insatiable curiosity) Wikipedia's a gamble I'm willing to take.
That is not what a collegiate education is. If you go to college and Wikipedia could have thought you everything you learned there, I'll agree those thousands were useless, but so were you.
If they've got such a problem with it, maybe they shouldn't charge $90 for their textbooks. Or thousands of dollars for their expertise.
That $90 textbook is not the same as Wikipedia. While I would be the first to argue that textbooks are outrageously overpriced, you can in no way compare a well-written textbook to Wikipedia. To give an example, take Spacetime Physics, by Taylor and Wheeler. While the Wikipedia article on SR has no f