George Whitesides is a world famous chemist. If not for his intellectual curiosity, he could just earn a comfortable living by consulting for industry and VC firms. As for practicality and simplicity, Whitesides often looks for an inexpensive solution that can produce results that are almost as good as those achieved with state-of-the-art equipment. His group pioneered a number of such creative inventions in microfluidics and nanotechnology, many of which have been widely used and further enhanced by others. When I read that this paper device was developed by a Harvard professor, Whitesides was my first guess.
I recently read about justincaseidie.com, which offers a simple digital notification service. From their website:
... in just a few clicks, you can save a message that will only be sent to it's intended recipient if you die. Well...almost. It will actually only be sent if you fail to log back in to the system within the timeframe that you set, we're just sort of assuming that only death would stop you doing this.
Re:One thing Google could do about incoming spam..
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 1
I also see some ads that match the language actually used in e-mails. However, I suspect that the current system Google uses to make decisions about ads is rather unsophisticated, since I also get ads in Japanese (or what I think might be Japanese) simply because a thread mentions Japan multiple times.
Apparently, the author of those informative articles on Linux and Mozilla, Tristan Shuddery, had lately fallen from favor with God and other people posting on the same blog. In fact, Mr. Shuddery is now literally at the top of God's people hitlist ("God wants them dead because they harm America!"). But God's people still "feel compelled to pray for the soul of the treacherous and traitorous Tristan J. Shuddery" even though they "feel as if even You would be willing to let Satan keep him".
I am just not good enough at these people's twisted logic, but as a naive reader it leaves me wondering if the earlier "godly" exposures of OSS movement by Mr. Shuddery were really coming from God or not?
I was working from home last week, so I was using my Comcast connection extensively every day. The problems with Google connection happened several times a day. Intermittently, my attempts to connect to www.google.com failed for 5-10 min at a time. Oddly enough, going directly to Google services (Gmail, Notebook, Bookmarks, etc.) worked just fine.
I am using a web-based service that, among other features, helps to control which calls will ring my phone(s): GrandCentral. It allows to define several groups of white-listed numbers with separate response behavior (ring, send to voicemail, etc.) and also includes a couple of different screening options. For dealing with known telemarketers they even offer to play a "number not in service" message, but most auto-dialers can't get past the call screening anyway. It's a free service while in beta, but they promise to keep basic features free indefinitely, including "unlimited inbound minutes, unlimited voicemail (up to 30 days old), and access to all of our core features". This NYT write-up describes a few of the options in more detail.
It is interesting, however, that "military manuals" had to find an "serious" justification for the video games.
So I offered a couple of possible reasons for both of the "interesting" aspects, in a way of background information for Slashdot readers who didn't learn how to disassemble AK47 in school. Sure, DOSAAF was useful for many kids, the militarism notwithstanding. But as most people outside of the former Soviet block had never heard about that organization, I figured it was worth mentioning as a possible connection to the "military style" manuals.
In his talk at a scientific meeting about a year ago, the professor who came up with this technology specifically mentioned Roomba as his motivation for the project. Apparently he owns several and finds them very useful. He actually used Roombas in slides shown during the talk and set the scale for preliminary calculations based on robots of that size.
Not surprising in a country where in the 50s physics textbooks had to justify presenting the theory of relativity by its correct alignment with Marxist philosophy! By the 70s and 80s, fewer people actually believed in those standard justifications, but one still had to formally have some connection to the "goals set by the Communist Party". People had to play by the rules (no pun intended), whether they actually believed the propaganda or not.
As for the military connection, some of the youth-oriented recreational facilities had been run by an organization that specifically was charged with getting young people ready for military service. Usually, they ran sports-related activities, like parachute jumping or shooting ranges (both funfair-style and for sports like biathlon), but I wouldn't be surprised if the same outfit sponsored some of the arcades, especially in smaller towns.
I was surprised not to see Google Notebook as one of the first answers, as it indeed works very well for organizing material found on the web. I guess, Slashdot is less of a Google fan club than many people assume it to be!
The FF extension makes saving "permanent" pages easy via a right-click option. For pages that may become inaccessible over time, the content of interest can be copy-pasted directly into the Notebook entry. And Google search options coupled with the possibility of creating multiple Notebooks (and sections within each Notebook) make sorting and reorganizing notes very straightforward.
As the NIST press release blurb correctly indicates, mass spectrometry can be powerful for sorting and identifying biomolecules. DNA is probably the simplest example, because enzymes can chop a long strand of DNA into many small pieces. These enzymes cut only in places with well-defined sequences, so with enough information about the length of the resulting pieces the whole sequence can be reconstructed. How practical is that? Well, the method used in the various genome projects is conceptually very similar, so looking at a bunch of fragments of biomolecules can be a practical way to identify them.
The pores add a capability of doing the measurements on very small samples, e.g., DNA from a few cells, while keeping the setup small. The pores can also be effectively multiplexed, at least in principle.
Other clever uses of mass-spectrometry are possible, essentially because molecular biology offers many tools that are supposed to produce a predictable distribution of fragments. Indeed, it is always a trade off between the number of different fragments and the sharpness of their mass distributions, but specific experimental signatures sometimes can be obtained. For example, with proper design one can arrange for a certain size fragment to appear after several cutting steps only if a given DNA or protein sequence has mutated or is from a known pathogen.
I think that you're missing the point of my post. The original question in this thread was about the other side of the story. I gave basically a summary of the official story, which was not included in TFA or widely discussed in the US/European media. In my experience, lenta.ru is relatively neutral in their coverage, hence the choice of their image gallery.
The basic problem in discussing details of Russian political issues on Slashdot is that most readers here cannot understand the original reports in Russian, nor appreciate the host of the underlying cultural issues. Accordingly, Slashdot is not a good forum to debate Russian politics (I am actually surprised that this story made the front page). My comparison to another highly controversial issue--anti-globalization--was simply a way to indicate that reasonable people may disagree on their interpretation of the events. Neither the government nor the opposition have my personal full sympathy, but fortunately I can afford that view as an outsider.
I don't do YouTube if I can help it, but I did read the LJ story that you suggested. The author does explicitly say that he had no trouble getting to the square where the meeting was officially allowed (although he says that others may had trouble getting there). He does describe substantial security measures, and some police activity in the subway, but nothing that applied to him personally (other than passing through metal detectors). He also explicitly says that the police attempts to disperse the meeting only started well after the officially alloted time ran out, at which point the organizers announced that the meeting was over and people should leave. Again, one may argue about the amount of force used to disperse the people who refused to leave or whether pre-meeting security measures were overblown, but technically even that report from the participant does not contradict the main points of the official story.
As for national-bolsheviks, yes, they are not the only opposition party and I never intended to imply that they were. Some others are better, and some are worse. The LJ description of the sanctioned meeting does say that the approximately 300 national-bolsheviks were the rowdiest bunch there--constantly burned orange torches and yelled "Revolution!"--so they are not exactly behaving like a mainstream Western "unitarian/democratic socialist party" yet.
Part of the story is the other participants in the opposition movement. Despite his apparent popularity in the West, Kasparov's participation alone probably would not have caused the permits to be denied.
A gallery of news photos from the event may help to understand the story better. I am not going to try explaining the backgrounds of all the opposition groups, but one of them is called "national-bolsheviks" and even a quick glance at their symbols may suggest that the West would not want the leaders of this movement to rule in Russia. Some "national-bolshevik" events have turned violent in the past, so the Russian Federal and Moscow City governments may have a legitimate security concern when considering the location and type of these events.
In this case, the authorities actually did allow the opposition meeting on one of squares in Moscow, but not the preceding march starting from a different square. So there was no total ban, but the opposition did not get everything they wanted. The response of Western governments to the anti-globalization marches may be a reasonable analogy. I am not saying that there is no concern over democracy in Russia in general, but in this specific event both sides have contributed to the outcome.
For those who cannot read the captions in Russian, these are pictures of Kasparov from the march.
The distinction between the fundamental and applied research at the nanoscale is basically that between nanoscience and nanotechnology. But this distinction is currently a lot fuzzier than similar boundaries in the more traditional branches of science (e.g., fundamental life sciences vs. biotechnology) simply because there has not been enough nanoscience done yet to enable most of the nanotechnology, especially in the way the latter is typically presented to the general public.
Take electronics, for example. For all the fundamental research that goes on in semiconductor physics, the actual technology has evolved a lot more conservatively, changing the processes only when being faced with insurmountable limitations of the existing methods. In fact, while fundamentally GaAs may indeed be a superior semiconductor, Silicon will rule the day in technology simply because it is a more studied material from an applied prospective.
But if we now think about a single-electron (or a nanotube-based) transistor, the distinction between the fundamental and applied research is minimal, simply because neither has advanced enough in terms of making practical devices. So until the first generation nanoscience and nanotechnology actually establish commercially-viable processes, materials, and devices, the choice of the "science" vs. "technology" (or "fundamental" vs. applied") moniker will be mostly up to personal preferences of individual researchers.
I have already mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll restate the point here. I my search for a good writing guide for improving technical writing, I repeatedly found that older books were much easier to understand than the ones from the last decade or so. Apart from the "learn the rules before breaking them" mantra, the prescriptive and proscriptive style of the older books is often complemented by rational explanations of the rules - something that people with an inclination for science and engineering require for and equate with learning said rules. In other words, it a lot easier for me to analyze and rationalize a simplistic prescriptive rule than a series of examples of usage by "good writers". Whereas, apparently, many people in humanities learn best from considering many examples, I find a sequence of logically-connected rules to be easier to understand.
So I would suggest that these differences in the style of explanation and learning between the humanities and science/engineering communities are one of the reasons why books like Elements of Style are still useful. They may indeed not teach me to write the great american novel, but the terse and reader-oriented style they prescribe is an excellent match for most writing I have to do as a scientist.
I spent the last year working hard on improving my writing skills, and I can attest that translating a writing guide into a set of rational design rules is a crucial first step when teaching writing to scientists or engineers. Most humanities people have a very different view of what it means to "analyze" or even "understand" something, and accordingly most writing guides heavily rely on examples, rather than on logical explanations. I find that older books, like the venerable "Elements of Style" already mentioned here, are easier for me to understand and learn from, because they tend to be more prescriptive, and thus focus on the rules and, most importantly, rationalize the rules rather than simply state them. If I understand why a certain style element works best, I can much easier spot and correct the incorrect usage.
Bartleby offers a free electronic (HTML) version of "Elements of Style".
On the same site, they offer a few more classic texts and reference books on English Usage, Style & Composition. I find their collection of electronic references very useful, because it includes a "search" function, which by default searches through the entire collection. Very handy for looking up grammar rules or proper word usage.
I have not been a regular Slashdot reader for very long, but I already have heard about this guy, so I am not going to defend his specific marketing practices. It also seems that the bad publicity his previous posts have generated is taking a toll in a very effective way, which is bound to be noticed by the editors, namely the lowest number of comments I have seen so far for a science story.
The 110$ charge for an abstract is not surprising given that JNN is a second-tier journal (impact factor 2) published by a commercial publisher, rather than a scientific society. American Scientific Publishers (NOTE: the site generates errors in FF and Opera) is known for heavy marketing of their journals and charging respectively high prices.
ASP also tries to tightly control the electronic files for the stuff they publish. For example, I have written a chapter for their ENN and yet I do not have a PDF of the published version, they only provided hardcopy reprints. So ironically enough, looking at extracts of papers from this publisher on a blog (albeit, perhaps not this particular one) may be helpful for some people, as ASP journals are not widely subscribed to by universities and research labs, and sometimes even the authors do not have a PDF that they can circulate.
This particular method has more to do with processing bulk quantities of nanotubes, rather than producing them. The closest connection to advanced electronics applications of NTs, is that selectively coating NTs with polymers and/or biomolecules is considered a promising route for purification and separation between conducting and semiconducting ones (the former are good as connectors, but the latter are needed for diodes and transistors). Selective attachment of a few biomolecules can also be useful for making self-assembling circuits. This particular method, however, produces a rather thick (30-50 nm) coating and not very specific attachment sites for biomolecules, so it lacks the features that would make it useful for electronics applications. The thick polymer layers are also likely to degrade contacts either between NTs or NTs and CMOS devices, which of course will reduce the possible operational frequencies for such hypothetical electronic components. Just a couple of reasons why using thinner polymers and/or biomolecules, such as DNA, to wrap NTs is currently considered as a more promising approach for electronics applications.
On the other hand, using these coated NTs for biosensors is indeed promising. The requirements for biosensing are significantly different compared to those for electronic components, and having a relatively thick polymer layer, which can be functionalized with many biomolecules, is in fact an advantage.
I just tested a few of my own papers and noticed that while the complete text resulted in over 90% authenticity score, shorter sections of the same paper typically scored below 20%. If a section is long enough, it does not matter whether it's logically disconnected (e.g., paragraphs picked from several different chapters), so it seems that sufficient length is crucial for this testing. Was your "bogus narrative" significantly shorter than the other texts, by any chance?
"If knowledge is power, then the intellectual-horsepower rating of tomorrow's vehicles is going to be tarmac-shreddingly high."
"And European culture is generally more tolerant of restrictions on individual freedom. A case in point: In a European Airbus, if the pilot pulls the stick back so far that the plane is about to stall, the stick effectively locks up. If an American-made Boeing jet is about to go outside the envelope, a cockpit alarm sounds, but the stick still responds."
Just a couple of quotes that seem custom-made for this discussion from an interesting review of technologies for intelligent cars in Popular Science.
And a review from Impact Labs describes some details of actual hardware and software solutions currently being developed with a goal "to be able, within the next two years, to drive from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles with 100 percent autonomy--without any human intervention whatsoever."
Sorry about the missing links - I barely got the story in on Friday before the Pink Ponies invasion began! I picked the BBC story as a compromise between a general level write-up and some science content (although it still beats me what did "shedding light" have to do with anything).
Anyway, thanks for posting the extra links, hopefully your post gets modded up so that people can follow-up the story. I have been in your shoes a few years back, when I watched Slashdot discuss my work on atomic memory, and it was both an exciting and humbling experience.
For the last few years my interest in high-energy physics has been rather casual, so I'm not going to pretend to know the most widely accepted numbers for things like dark energy fractions and neutrino masses. In fact, if MINOS data have only been recently released, some of the numbers might change, since they usually result from global fits to all available data, so we might have to wait a few months to see what effect, if any, this has on predominant models.
As for the Sun measurements - the first spectrum measured probably will be for Solar neutrinos, since besides nuclear reactors and thermonuclear explosions, that is our most intense neutrino source. Do you know of some serious uncertainties in solar nuclear physics, so that you would expect major surprises in that spectrum?
From what my grad school friends, who worked on the IceCube project, told me, the exiting type of events they look in neutrino astronomy are the very energetic ones - basically those that can only be produced by a handful of exotic processes. For such high-energy neutrinos, their incoming direction can be determined precisely enough to follow up with other types of telescopes in hopes of determining the actual source. It's a game of very small numbers, but the idea is that these events should easily stand out from any background.
Your mention of multipole moments of solar mass distribution again does remind me of sun-quake measurements, but I'm not sure how sensitive they actually are.
I'm sure that BBC picked the Thomas quote for the same reason that I chose to include it in the post - it provides a reasonably concise answer to the "why do I care about this?" question for most people. And I haven't seen anybody yet describe the various caveats of the Standard Model and its extensions in one sentence.
Perhaps the closest is a recent Why Files story, which gives a good summary of Big Bang cosmology, updated from the recent microwave background measurements. You're right, that up to 3/4 of the mass is in dark energy, whatever that might be. You're also correct that there are a lot more neutrinos (and photons) than atoms (or protons). And apparently, because of the large numbers of neutrinos, their masses could matter if they were heavy enough. According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).
Neutrino masses also affect the fine-tuning of the Standard Model (SM), so any new experimental results will make a generation of graduate students and theorists happy, as the current problem is finding significant enough discrepancies in the SM to provide direction for fixing it in the future. Having results from several different experiments, which effectively look for oscillations on different length-scales (Earth-to-Sun vs. 10s or 100s of miles), provides additional constraints in that search.
Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while. Perhaps you were thinking of solar quakes being used to probe the interior of the Sun?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean one of these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moydodyr
George Whitesides is a world famous chemist. If not for his intellectual curiosity, he could just earn a comfortable living by consulting for industry and VC firms. As for practicality and simplicity, Whitesides often looks for an inexpensive solution that can produce results that are almost as good as those achieved with state-of-the-art equipment. His group pioneered a number of such creative inventions in microfluidics and nanotechnology, many of which have been widely used and further enhanced by others. When I read that this paper device was developed by a Harvard professor, Whitesides was my first guess.
I recently read about justincaseidie.com, which offers a simple digital notification service. From their website:
I also see some ads that match the language actually used in e-mails. However, I suspect that the current system Google uses to make decisions about ads is rather unsophisticated, since I also get ads in Japanese (or what I think might be Japanese) simply because a thread mentions Japan multiple times.
Apparently, the author of those informative articles on Linux and Mozilla, Tristan Shuddery, had lately fallen from favor with God and other people posting on the same blog. In fact, Mr. Shuddery is now literally at the top of God's people hitlist ("God wants them dead because they harm America!"). But God's people still "feel compelled to pray for the soul of the treacherous and traitorous Tristan J. Shuddery" even though they "feel as if even You would be willing to let Satan keep him".
I am just not good enough at these people's twisted logic, but as a naive reader it leaves me wondering if the earlier "godly" exposures of OSS movement by Mr. Shuddery were really coming from God or not?
I was working from home last week, so I was using my Comcast connection extensively every day. The problems with Google connection happened several times a day. Intermittently, my attempts to connect to www.google.com failed for 5-10 min at a time. Oddly enough, going directly to Google services (Gmail, Notebook, Bookmarks, etc.) worked just fine.
I am using a web-based service that, among other features, helps to control which calls will ring my phone(s): GrandCentral. It allows to define several groups of white-listed numbers with separate response behavior (ring, send to voicemail, etc.) and also includes a couple of different screening options. For dealing with known telemarketers they even offer to play a "number not in service" message, but most auto-dialers can't get past the call screening anyway. It's a free service while in beta, but they promise to keep basic features free indefinitely, including "unlimited inbound minutes, unlimited voicemail (up to 30 days old), and access to all of our core features". This NYT write-up describes a few of the options in more detail.
The parent noted
So I offered a couple of possible reasons for both of the "interesting" aspects, in a way of background information for Slashdot readers who didn't learn how to disassemble AK47 in school. Sure, DOSAAF was useful for many kids, the militarism notwithstanding. But as most people outside of the former Soviet block had never heard about that organization, I figured it was worth mentioning as a possible connection to the "military style" manuals.
In his talk at a scientific meeting about a year ago, the professor who came up with this technology specifically mentioned Roomba as his motivation for the project. Apparently he owns several and finds them very useful. He actually used Roombas in slides shown during the talk and set the scale for preliminary calculations based on robots of that size.
Not surprising in a country where in the 50s physics textbooks had to justify presenting the theory of relativity by its correct alignment with Marxist philosophy! By the 70s and 80s, fewer people actually believed in those standard justifications, but one still had to formally have some connection to the "goals set by the Communist Party". People had to play by the rules (no pun intended), whether they actually believed the propaganda or not.
As for the military connection, some of the youth-oriented recreational facilities had been run by an organization that specifically was charged with getting young people ready for military service. Usually, they ran sports-related activities, like parachute jumping or shooting ranges (both funfair-style and for sports like biathlon), but I wouldn't be surprised if the same outfit sponsored some of the arcades, especially in smaller towns.
I was surprised not to see Google Notebook as one of the first answers, as it indeed works very well for organizing material found on the web. I guess, Slashdot is less of a Google fan club than many people assume it to be!
The FF extension makes saving "permanent" pages easy via a right-click option. For pages that may become inaccessible over time, the content of interest can be copy-pasted directly into the Notebook entry. And Google search options coupled with the possibility of creating multiple Notebooks (and sections within each Notebook) make sorting and reorganizing notes very straightforward.
As the NIST press release blurb correctly indicates, mass spectrometry can be powerful for sorting and identifying biomolecules. DNA is probably the simplest example, because enzymes can chop a long strand of DNA into many small pieces. These enzymes cut only in places with well-defined sequences, so with enough information about the length of the resulting pieces the whole sequence can be reconstructed. How practical is that? Well, the method used in the various genome projects is conceptually very similar, so looking at a bunch of fragments of biomolecules can be a practical way to identify them.
The pores add a capability of doing the measurements on very small samples, e.g., DNA from a few cells, while keeping the setup small. The pores can also be effectively multiplexed, at least in principle.
Other clever uses of mass-spectrometry are possible, essentially because molecular biology offers many tools that are supposed to produce a predictable distribution of fragments. Indeed, it is always a trade off between the number of different fragments and the sharpness of their mass distributions, but specific experimental signatures sometimes can be obtained. For example, with proper design one can arrange for a certain size fragment to appear after several cutting steps only if a given DNA or protein sequence has mutated or is from a known pathogen.
I think that you're missing the point of my post. The original question in this thread was about the other side of the story. I gave basically a summary of the official story, which was not included in TFA or widely discussed in the US/European media. In my experience, lenta.ru is relatively neutral in their coverage, hence the choice of their image gallery.
The basic problem in discussing details of Russian political issues on Slashdot is that most readers here cannot understand the original reports in Russian, nor appreciate the host of the underlying cultural issues. Accordingly, Slashdot is not a good forum to debate Russian politics (I am actually surprised that this story made the front page). My comparison to another highly controversial issue--anti-globalization--was simply a way to indicate that reasonable people may disagree on their interpretation of the events. Neither the government nor the opposition have my personal full sympathy, but fortunately I can afford that view as an outsider.
I don't do YouTube if I can help it, but I did read the LJ story that you suggested. The author does explicitly say that he had no trouble getting to the square where the meeting was officially allowed (although he says that others may had trouble getting there). He does describe substantial security measures, and some police activity in the subway, but nothing that applied to him personally (other than passing through metal detectors). He also explicitly says that the police attempts to disperse the meeting only started well after the officially alloted time ran out, at which point the organizers announced that the meeting was over and people should leave. Again, one may argue about the amount of force used to disperse the people who refused to leave or whether pre-meeting security measures were overblown, but technically even that report from the participant does not contradict the main points of the official story.
As for national-bolsheviks, yes, they are not the only opposition party and I never intended to imply that they were. Some others are better, and some are worse. The LJ description of the sanctioned meeting does say that the approximately 300 national-bolsheviks were the rowdiest bunch there--constantly burned orange torches and yelled "Revolution!"--so they are not exactly behaving like a mainstream Western "unitarian/democratic socialist party" yet.
Part of the story is the other participants in the opposition movement. Despite his apparent popularity in the West, Kasparov's participation alone probably would not have caused the permits to be denied.
A gallery of news photos from the event may help to understand the story better. I am not going to try explaining the backgrounds of all the opposition groups, but one of them is called "national-bolsheviks" and even a quick glance at their symbols may suggest that the West would not want the leaders of this movement to rule in Russia. Some "national-bolshevik" events have turned violent in the past, so the Russian Federal and Moscow City governments may have a legitimate security concern when considering the location and type of these events.
In this case, the authorities actually did allow the opposition meeting on one of squares in Moscow, but not the preceding march starting from a different square. So there was no total ban, but the opposition did not get everything they wanted. The response of Western governments to the anti-globalization marches may be a reasonable analogy. I am not saying that there is no concern over democracy in Russia in general, but in this specific event both sides have contributed to the outcome.
For those who cannot read the captions in Russian, these are pictures of Kasparov from the march.
The distinction between the fundamental and applied research at the nanoscale is basically that between nanoscience and nanotechnology. But this distinction is currently a lot fuzzier than similar boundaries in the more traditional branches of science (e.g., fundamental life sciences vs. biotechnology) simply because there has not been enough nanoscience done yet to enable most of the nanotechnology, especially in the way the latter is typically presented to the general public.
Take electronics, for example. For all the fundamental research that goes on in semiconductor physics, the actual technology has evolved a lot more conservatively, changing the processes only when being faced with insurmountable limitations of the existing methods. In fact, while fundamentally GaAs may indeed be a superior semiconductor, Silicon will rule the day in technology simply because it is a more studied material from an applied prospective.
But if we now think about a single-electron (or a nanotube-based) transistor, the distinction between the fundamental and applied research is minimal, simply because neither has advanced enough in terms of making practical devices. So until the first generation nanoscience and nanotechnology actually establish commercially-viable processes, materials, and devices, the choice of the "science" vs. "technology" (or "fundamental" vs. applied") moniker will be mostly up to personal preferences of individual researchers.
I have already mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll restate the point here. I my search for a good writing guide for improving technical writing, I repeatedly found that older books were much easier to understand than the ones from the last decade or so. Apart from the "learn the rules before breaking them" mantra, the prescriptive and proscriptive style of the older books is often complemented by rational explanations of the rules - something that people with an inclination for science and engineering require for and equate with learning said rules. In other words, it a lot easier for me to analyze and rationalize a simplistic prescriptive rule than a series of examples of usage by "good writers". Whereas, apparently, many people in humanities learn best from considering many examples, I find a sequence of logically-connected rules to be easier to understand.
So I would suggest that these differences in the style of explanation and learning between the humanities and science/engineering communities are one of the reasons why books like Elements of Style are still useful. They may indeed not teach me to write the great american novel, but the terse and reader-oriented style they prescribe is an excellent match for most writing I have to do as a scientist.
I spent the last year working hard on improving my writing skills, and I can attest that translating a writing guide into a set of rational design rules is a crucial first step when teaching writing to scientists or engineers. Most humanities people have a very different view of what it means to "analyze" or even "understand" something, and accordingly most writing guides heavily rely on examples, rather than on logical explanations. I find that older books, like the venerable "Elements of Style" already mentioned here, are easier for me to understand and learn from, because they tend to be more prescriptive, and thus focus on the rules and, most importantly, rationalize the rules rather than simply state them. If I understand why a certain style element works best, I can much easier spot and correct the incorrect usage.
Bartleby offers a free electronic (HTML) version of "Elements of Style".
On the same site, they offer a few more classic texts and reference books on English Usage, Style & Composition. I find their collection of electronic references very useful, because it includes a "search" function, which by default searches through the entire collection. Very handy for looking up grammar rules or proper word usage.
I have not been a regular Slashdot reader for very long, but I already have heard about this guy, so I am not going to defend his specific marketing practices. It also seems that the bad publicity his previous posts have generated is taking a toll in a very effective way, which is bound to be noticed by the editors, namely the lowest number of comments I have seen so far for a science story.
The 110$ charge for an abstract is not surprising given that JNN is a second-tier journal (impact factor 2) published by a commercial publisher, rather than a scientific society. American Scientific Publishers (NOTE: the site generates errors in FF and Opera) is known for heavy marketing of their journals and charging respectively high prices.
ASP also tries to tightly control the electronic files for the stuff they publish. For example, I have written a chapter for their ENN and yet I do not have a PDF of the published version, they only provided hardcopy reprints. So ironically enough, looking at extracts of papers from this publisher on a blog (albeit, perhaps not this particular one) may be helpful for some people, as ASP journals are not widely subscribed to by universities and research labs, and sometimes even the authors do not have a PDF that they can circulate.
This particular method has more to do with processing bulk quantities of nanotubes, rather than producing them. The closest connection to advanced electronics applications of NTs, is that selectively coating NTs with polymers and/or biomolecules is considered a promising route for purification and separation between conducting and semiconducting ones (the former are good as connectors, but the latter are needed for diodes and transistors). Selective attachment of a few biomolecules can also be useful for making self-assembling circuits. This particular method, however, produces a rather thick (30-50 nm) coating and not very specific attachment sites for biomolecules, so it lacks the features that would make it useful for electronics applications. The thick polymer layers are also likely to degrade contacts either between NTs or NTs and CMOS devices, which of course will reduce the possible operational frequencies for such hypothetical electronic components. Just a couple of reasons why using thinner polymers and/or biomolecules, such as DNA, to wrap NTs is currently considered as a more promising approach for electronics applications.
On the other hand, using these coated NTs for biosensors is indeed promising. The requirements for biosensing are significantly different compared to those for electronic components, and having a relatively thick polymer layer, which can be functionalized with many biomolecules, is in fact an advantage.
I just tested a few of my own papers and noticed that while the complete text resulted in over 90% authenticity score, shorter sections of the same paper typically scored below 20%. If a section is long enough, it does not matter whether it's logically disconnected (e.g., paragraphs picked from several different chapters), so it seems that sufficient length is crucial for this testing. Was your "bogus narrative" significantly shorter than the other texts, by any chance?
Just a couple of quotes that seem custom-made for this discussion from an interesting review of technologies for intelligent cars in Popular Science.
And a review from Impact Labs describes some details of actual hardware and software solutions currently being developed with a goal "to be able, within the next two years, to drive from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles with 100 percent autonomy--without any human intervention whatsoever."
Sorry about the missing links - I barely got the story in on Friday before the Pink Ponies invasion began! I picked the BBC story as a compromise between a general level write-up and some science content (although it still beats me what did "shedding light" have to do with anything).
Anyway, thanks for posting the extra links, hopefully your post gets modded up so that people can follow-up the story. I have been in your shoes a few years back, when I watched Slashdot discuss my work on atomic memory, and it was both an exciting and humbling experience.
For the last few years my interest in high-energy physics has been rather casual, so I'm not going to pretend to know the most widely accepted numbers for things like dark energy fractions and neutrino masses. In fact, if MINOS data have only been recently released, some of the numbers might change, since they usually result from global fits to all available data, so we might have to wait a few months to see what effect, if any, this has on predominant models.
As for the Sun measurements - the first spectrum measured probably will be for Solar neutrinos, since besides nuclear reactors and thermonuclear explosions, that is our most intense neutrino source. Do you know of some serious uncertainties in solar nuclear physics, so that you would expect major surprises in that spectrum?
From what my grad school friends, who worked on the IceCube project, told me, the exiting type of events they look in neutrino astronomy are the very energetic ones - basically those that can only be produced by a handful of exotic processes. For such high-energy neutrinos, their incoming direction can be determined precisely enough to follow up with other types of telescopes in hopes of determining the actual source. It's a game of very small numbers, but the idea is that these events should easily stand out from any background.
Your mention of multipole moments of solar mass distribution again does remind me of sun-quake measurements, but I'm not sure how sensitive they actually are.
I'm sure that BBC picked the Thomas quote for the same reason that I chose to include it in the post - it provides a reasonably concise answer to the "why do I care about this?" question for most people. And I haven't seen anybody yet describe the various caveats of the Standard Model and its extensions in one sentence.
Perhaps the closest is a recent Why Files story, which gives a good summary of Big Bang cosmology, updated from the recent microwave background measurements. You're right, that up to 3/4 of the mass is in dark energy, whatever that might be. You're also correct that there are a lot more neutrinos (and photons) than atoms (or protons). And apparently, because of the large numbers of neutrinos, their masses could matter if they were heavy enough. According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).
Neutrino masses also affect the fine-tuning of the Standard Model (SM), so any new experimental results will make a generation of graduate students and theorists happy, as the current problem is finding significant enough discrepancies in the SM to provide direction for fixing it in the future. Having results from several different experiments, which effectively look for oscillations on different length-scales (Earth-to-Sun vs. 10s or 100s of miles), provides additional constraints in that search.
Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while. Perhaps you were thinking of solar quakes being used to probe the interior of the Sun?