becomes significant, it means that the existing scientific base and funding was wrecked. (Feels like Roman Empire AD400).
In reality, people who work at something for a living (meaning full time employement) after many years of full time education, are the ones who produce results which are scientifically and economically useful.
Hobbyist science is nice entertainment. Sure, a few former biologists (i.e. used to work full time learning and doing science until they couldn't get a job any more) might make some minor contributions----but their experience and knowledge came from working full time in the real industry.
And nearly all professional science is "do it yourself or get your postdocs to do it"---who else knows enough? It takes lots of money and full time sustained effort for decades to get somewhere.
Comparing today to Darwin's day is foolish---scientific productivity increased enormously once a significant number of people were able to do it for a living and with less regard for class history and personal family wealth.
"Maybe intelligence is too variable, complex and human to be measured in a single number?"
Anything can be measured in a single number, the question is 'how useful and predictive' is this number? With IQ, the empirical answer is "reasonably but not universally predictive".
There actually is a technical point behind IQ. If you measure performance across all sorts of cognitive (and sometimes other) aspects, appropriately normalize the subscores and then look at the principal component (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis) across large samples of individuals you observe a phenomenon: a significant (though not total) fraction of the variance can be explained by the single, largest principal component called 'g' in psychometric literature. This phenomenon did not have to be true empirically, but it is, and the degree to which it is true is also quantifiable.
In a nutshell, people who perform high or low on some subsets are also substantially more likely to perform high or low on other cognitively-oriented subtasks.
So, yes, "intelligence" does mean something and is a fact of Nature. Note, that of course, the subjects typically tested on an 'IQ' test have now been post-hoc chosen to be those which have high g-loading, i.e. are substantially correlated within individuals.
If the typically tested tasks had also included, for instance *) ability to sing on tune *) ability to catch thrown balls while running, *) ability to distinguish odors *) ability to discern emotions in faces, etc, all of which clearly require brainpower, their "loading on the principal component of IQ" would be substantially weaker than the correlation between performance on predicting numerical sequences and analogies in natural language.
Why don't they price "pay per view" in the market AT THE SAME PRICE THAT CLEARS THE EXISTING PAY PER VIEW MARKET.
I.e. the price of a cinema ticket if not less?
The studios don't even have to pay a distributor, just internet infrastructure.
Aside to the usual bigots: Think about it. Doesn't this mean that, contrary to stereotype, them "Hollywood Jews" aren't actually those legendary evil-genius rapacious wicked businessmen?
"It appears the film studios have gone cold on the idea of helping develop legal avenues to access copyrighted content as a way to combat piracy Instead, they've produced research to show people will continue pirating even if there are legitimate content sources available."
WTF?
I have a new suggestion for the film industry: help develop a legal avenue to access copyrighted content as a way to make money. It seems that the industry is more interested in protecting the profits of its legacy customers instead of looking after its own. Why?
Here's the business model:
Film Studio: film -> internet -> film watcher Film watcher: money -> internet -> film studio.
Stop obsessing about pirates and start obsessing about business.
If the film studios logically applied their illogical suppositions, they would also cease distributing films to physical cinemas because pirates are gonna keep a-pirating.
Statement: They can NOT force me to buy insurance if I would rather pay cash directly to my physician.
This is true. It is impermissible for Congress to make failure to buy health insurance a federal crime.
The law actually in question does not do so, contrary to the paranoia of the right-wing crazies. It is improper terminology and a bad political idea to call it a "mandate" instead of what it actually is. It imposes a fine---more correctly a tax---on those who do not. And this is 100% legal.
It has been established precedent since the early 1800's (Supreme Court decisions) that the US Government has the power to tax even where it does not have the power to regulate, e.g. in this circumstance. Other examples, the US government imposes taxes on gasoline and tobacco, even when these items are consumed within states for non-commercial purposes.
In the latest re-re-re-release of Wizard Of Oz 3DD, they digitally innovate a new character, Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Toto and the new superhero, Mister Potter's Patent Lawyer.
The Wicked Witch Of the West is digitally morphed with Richard Stallman's equally ugly visage.
"In quebec we invented neologism for things like e-mail to avoid language assimilation. We value french much more then france.
Even our language police is a pain in the butt if you have more than 16 employees and have a provincial charter."
Translation from Anglais Quebecois into English:
"In quebec we invented neologism for things like e-mail to avoid language assimilation. We value being a peevish and resentful people with a vexatious language-police bureaucracy much more than *France* of all places---c'est incroyable."
And exactly one of "Gay Marriage, Abortion, Climate Change, Conservative/Liberal" is a physics problem subject to rigorous empirical validation independent of human opinion.
"Max Tegmark explains this nicely in a commentary (here [mit.edu] or here [arxiv.org]). Briefly: if unitary quantum mechanics is right (and all available data suggests that it is), then this implies that the other branches of the wavefunction are just as real as the one we experience. Hence, quantum mechanics predicts that these other branches exist."
I like the axioms: wavefunctions exist and Schroedinger's equation is right for all time, but I think the effect of 'collapse' is a physical effect, inside QM, in this one universe.
"I think you're missing the point. The job market for programmers is changing, in Silicon Valley there are now far more positions than programmers. These guys aren't trying to rule out bad programmers, they are trying to attract good ones.'
No, they're trying to rule out programmers older than 27 who think this is preposterous BS.
"It seems more about politics and memorization than creating and measuring ability in targeted fields, and I suspect the ivy leagues are the gravest offenders."
Have you talked to a large number of Ivy League graduates recently compared to other schools?
"Here's the real question you need to ask yourself before putting anything in the cloud: do you trust them to be more competent than yourself at backing things up, providing uptime and securing the data?"
Generally it is, yes, yes, and yes.
The final question: "Can you trust them to work as diligently as your employees to recover from some cock-up whose effective and immediate resolution is critical to your business?" "Or, conversely, is holding your most critical data hostage for predatory consulting rates their business model?"
Does Google or Apple outsource substantial amounts of their programming which used to be USA/EU to India? The others, sure but I haven't seen it with those two .
Steve Jobs wanted to be able to scream at the programmers and designers and do his cult-leader magic spells when necessary. That wouldn't work if they were so distant.
And yes, Apple software has been pretty good recently (e.g. iOS for iPad).
A simple tax code, without flexibility in interpretation (which means that IRS just says "no you can't do that" even though there isn't any specific justification in the code), means giant loopholes and tax evasion in practice.
A substantial fraction of the tax code is the way it is because they are patches done to attempt to preclude diversions of income which were not intended by the simple code.
All sorts of very simple appearing programs in fact have egregious security bugs in the corner cases.
"Somewhere along the road they decided they were no longer a hardware company so now their priorities changed. Software is a now source of income for them and the reason why their hardware behaves differently. "
I don't think that's it at all.
It's somewhere along the road, Apple started making enormous farktons of money from hardware and so management felt able to pay enough people to rewrite GPL stuff so they would have more control and not have to negotiate with ideologues who can't be paid off.
That they decide to BSD license some of it is their gift.
Apple devotes pretty huge internal team to hardware design (they have their own CPU designers after all), even if they don't bang together the glass themselves.
"The abstract isn't saying the wave-function is real, if says if the wave-function isn't real than quantum theory is wrong. Since general theory of relativity and quantum theory are incompatible in some aspects we *know* quantum-theory is partially wrong (like Newtonian physics)."
No, we don't actually know that quantum mechanics is wrong until we have conclusive experimental demonstration thereof. More physicists are prone to believe that general relativity is the large-scale continuum description of Real Gravity than basic quantum mechanics.
The problem is that so far both quantum mechanics and general relativity have passed all sorts of experimental tests exceptionally well as competing theories fall down.
"So, while mathematically interesting, it's old news."
Really? Suppose Einstein and Schroedinger had this result in 1930?
*) Quantum physics isn't mystical mumbo-jumbo the way Bohr thinks it is (only statements you can make at the fundamental level are statistical), it is physics like all physics since Newton. There's an equation of motion.
*) Yes, it's in an abstract Hilbert space, and that means that some effects really are non-local, but we have to live with that since it's experimentally true, and there are proper relativistically-transforming equations of motion, which is all that relativity really demands at the core.
Unless this has been explicitly contradicted by results, I also believe that moreover, the "observation" principle which has to be inserted by-hand as a magic-projection-operator in Bohr's world (where's the equation of motion for that?)---turns out to be nothing but an approximation to the effect of the continuous, deterministic and eternal evolution equations for a macroscopically large collection of atoms used as an "observer".
The Copenhagen procedure is a very useful calculational tool, like Fermi's Golden Rules. As fundamental physics, it is nonsensical mumbo-jumbo because there is no physical explanation for 'observation'.
"allegations surfaced that a NASA director may have broken the rules when he gave foreign nationals access to an agency research facility."
My guess as to what happened.
So there was no actual *item* being exported.
My guess, it was some foreign researchers coming over to do research, most likely, and most likely of a usual and unclassified nature and it was an ordinary approval.
So now, "unnamed whistleblowers" make allegations that somewhere the foreigners may have picked up some information which happens to be covered by ITAR in some way. ITAR is vague.
It's completely different from actual classified information which, as the name says, is properly classified as to who may and may not receive it, and every bit of it is clearly marked and everybody who works with it knows what they can and cannot discuss with foreigners. This ITAR could be anything random.
If foreigners had received actual classified information illegally then it would have been a problem, but nobody's saying that they did. NASA respects that seriously.
I have a wholly unsubstantiated hypothesis that this event is actually nothing but sabotage by incumbent and expensive Traditional Government Contractors (or possibly government workers at Marshall) who are upset at NASA's direction to actually go free-market and buy from smaller innovative companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
"5 million years ago the Earth was roughly 2 C warmer than it is today, CO_2 levels were in excess of what they are expected to go to by the end of the century in the worst case "anthropogenic" scenario"
"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said."
Notice, carbon dioxide levels "as high as they are today", not as high as they will soon get.
"So spending $4.00 per KW-hour to "prevent a disaster" that there isn't a shred of evidence that the Earth's climate system is capable of supporting"
That's just a lie. Past climate has been in a much hotter condition with significant changed compared to today. (If there's no Arctic ice cap and no ice in Greenland, how hot will it be in India in the summer? 130F? 140F?)
During that time humans did not exist, much less technological civilization. Next, humans are inducing change on a time-scale which is geologically unprecedented with a known potent physical change.
Slashdot Mirror
becomes significant, it means that the existing scientific base and funding was wrecked. (Feels like Roman Empire AD400).
In reality, people who work at something for a living (meaning full time employement) after many years of full time education, are the ones who produce results which are scientifically and economically useful.
Hobbyist science is nice entertainment. Sure, a few former biologists (i.e. used to work full time learning and doing science until they couldn't get a job any more) might make some minor contributions----but their experience and knowledge came from working full time in the real industry.
And nearly all professional science is "do it yourself or get your postdocs to do it"---who else knows enough? It takes lots of money and full time sustained effort for decades to get somewhere.
Comparing today to Darwin's day is foolish---scientific productivity increased enormously once a significant number of people were able to do it for a living and with less regard for class history and personal family wealth.
"Maybe intelligence is too variable, complex and human to be measured in a single number?"
Anything can be measured in a single number, the question is 'how useful and predictive' is this number? With IQ, the empirical answer is "reasonably but not universally predictive".
There actually is a technical point behind IQ. If you measure performance across all sorts of cognitive (and sometimes other) aspects, appropriately normalize the subscores and then look at the principal component (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis) across large samples of individuals you observe a phenomenon: a significant (though not total) fraction of the variance can be explained by the single, largest principal component called 'g' in psychometric literature. This phenomenon did not have to be true empirically, but it is, and the degree to which it is true is also quantifiable.
In a nutshell, people who perform high or low on some subsets are also substantially more likely to perform high or low on other cognitively-oriented subtasks.
So, yes, "intelligence" does mean something and is a fact of Nature. Note, that of course, the subjects typically tested on an 'IQ' test have now been post-hoc chosen to be those which have high g-loading, i.e. are substantially correlated within individuals.
If the typically tested tasks had also included, for instance *) ability to sing on tune *) ability to catch thrown balls while running, *) ability to distinguish odors *) ability to discern emotions in faces, etc, all of which clearly require brainpower, their "loading on the principal component of IQ" would be substantially weaker than the correlation between performance on predicting numerical sequences and analogies in natural language.
If it's at home, somebody needs to break in physically, commit a felony, risk their life, and know to obtain one single password from a monitor.
Other passwords are compromised in mass dictionary attack and hacking invisibly, in foreign jurisdictions, and never get compromised.
I have another theory about the results: older people are more responsible.
They are truly failing microeconomics 101.
Why don't they price "pay per view" in the market AT THE SAME PRICE THAT CLEARS THE EXISTING PAY PER VIEW MARKET.
I.e. the price of a cinema ticket if not less?
The studios don't even have to pay a distributor, just internet infrastructure.
Aside to the usual bigots: Think about it. Doesn't this mean that, contrary to stereotype, them "Hollywood Jews" aren't actually those legendary evil-genius rapacious wicked businessmen?
"It appears the film studios have gone cold on the idea of helping develop legal avenues to access copyrighted content as a way to combat piracy
Instead, they've produced research to show people will continue pirating even if there are legitimate content sources available."
WTF?
I have a new suggestion for the film industry: help develop a legal avenue to access copyrighted content as a way to make money. It seems that the industry is more interested in protecting the profits of its legacy customers instead of looking after its own. Why?
Here's the business model:
Film Studio: film -> internet -> film watcher
Film watcher: money -> internet -> film studio.
Stop obsessing about pirates and start obsessing about business.
If the film studios logically applied their illogical suppositions, they would also cease distributing films to physical cinemas because pirates are gonna keep a-pirating.
WTF?
How about we trade a "Stop Piracy" button for a "Stop Adam Sandler" button? mkay?
Statement: They can NOT force me to buy insurance if I would rather pay cash directly to my physician.
This is true. It is impermissible for Congress to make failure to buy health insurance a federal crime.
The law actually in question does not do so, contrary to the paranoia of the right-wing crazies. It is improper terminology and a bad political idea to call it a "mandate" instead of what it actually is. It imposes a fine---more correctly a tax---on those who do not. And this is 100% legal.
It has been established precedent since the early 1800's (Supreme Court decisions) that the US Government has the power to tax even where it does not have the power to regulate, e.g. in this circumstance. Other examples, the US government imposes taxes on gasoline and tobacco, even when these items are consumed within states for non-commercial purposes.
In the latest re-re-re-release of Wizard Of Oz 3DD, they digitally innovate a new character, Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Toto and the new superhero, Mister Potter's Patent Lawyer.
The Wicked Witch Of the West is digitally morphed with Richard Stallman's equally ugly visage.
"In quebec we invented neologism for things like e-mail to avoid language assimilation. We value french much more then france.
Even our language police is a pain in the butt if you have more than 16 employees and have a provincial charter."
Translation from Anglais Quebecois into English:
"In quebec we invented neologism for things like e-mail to avoid language assimilation. We value being a peevish and resentful people with a vexatious language-police bureaucracy much more than *France* of all places---c'est incroyable."
And exactly one of "Gay Marriage, Abortion, Climate Change, Conservative/Liberal" is a physics problem subject to rigorous empirical validation independent of human opinion.
"Max Tegmark explains this nicely in a commentary (here [mit.edu] or here [arxiv.org]). Briefly: if unitary quantum mechanics is right (and all available data suggests that it is), then this implies that the other branches of the wavefunction are just as real as the one we experience. Hence, quantum mechanics predicts that these other branches exist."
I like the axioms: wavefunctions exist and Schroedinger's equation is right for all time, but I think the effect of 'collapse' is a physical effect, inside QM, in this one universe.
"I think you're missing the point. The job market for programmers is changing, in Silicon Valley there are now far more positions than programmers. These guys aren't trying to rule out bad programmers, they are trying to attract good ones.'
No, they're trying to rule out programmers older than 27 who think this is preposterous BS.
"It seems more about politics and memorization than creating and measuring ability in targeted fields, and I suspect the ivy leagues are the gravest offenders."
Have you talked to a large number of Ivy League graduates recently compared to other schools?
"Here's the real question you need to ask yourself before putting anything in the cloud: do you trust them to be more competent than yourself at backing things up, providing uptime and securing the data?"
Generally it is, yes, yes, and yes.
The final question: "Can you trust them to work as diligently as your employees to recover from some cock-up whose effective and immediate resolution is critical to your business?" "Or, conversely, is holding your most critical data hostage for predatory consulting rates their business model?"
I'm getting the feeling that your boss (and probably owner) has been exploiting you for a while and you've bought the Reality Distortion Field.
In software, larger numbers of lower skilled people cause destruction of wealth and productivity.
How about doing contract-to-hire with a local, and supervise seriously.
Actually these days you have to pay the contracting corporation no matter what.
Does Google or Apple outsource substantial amounts of their programming which used to be USA/EU to India? The others, sure but I haven't seen it with those two .
Steve Jobs wanted to be able to scream at the programmers and designers and do his cult-leader magic spells when necessary. That wouldn't work if they were so distant.
And yes, Apple software has been pretty good recently (e.g. iOS for iPad).
A simple tax code, without flexibility in interpretation (which means that IRS just says "no you can't do that" even though there isn't any specific justification in the code), means giant loopholes and tax evasion in practice.
A substantial fraction of the tax code is the way it is because they are patches done to attempt to preclude diversions of income which were not intended by the simple code.
All sorts of very simple appearing programs in fact have egregious security bugs in the corner cases.
"Somewhere along the road they decided they were no longer a hardware company so now their priorities changed. Software is a now source of income for them and the reason why their hardware behaves differently. "
I don't think that's it at all.
It's somewhere along the road, Apple started making enormous farktons of money from hardware and so management felt able to pay enough people to rewrite GPL stuff so they would have more control and not have to negotiate with ideologues who can't be paid off.
That they decide to BSD license some of it is their gift.
Apple devotes pretty huge internal team to hardware design (they have their own CPU designers after all), even if they don't bang together the glass themselves.
Apple pays for a pig farm that you can also play in and gives you free sausages and they make their own spicy sausages which you have to buy.
"The abstract isn't saying the wave-function is real, if says if the wave-function isn't real than quantum theory is wrong. Since general theory of relativity and quantum theory are incompatible in some aspects we *know* quantum-theory is partially wrong (like Newtonian physics)."
No, we don't actually know that quantum mechanics is wrong until we have conclusive experimental demonstration thereof. More physicists are prone to believe that general relativity is the large-scale continuum description of Real Gravity than basic quantum mechanics.
The problem is that so far both quantum mechanics and general relativity have passed all sorts of experimental tests exceptionally well as competing theories fall down.
"So, while mathematically interesting, it's old news."
Really? Suppose Einstein and Schroedinger had this result in 1930?
BTW, I believe Einstein was closer to being right on this one. http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
His instincts were right.
I think:
*) Quantum physics isn't mystical mumbo-jumbo the way Bohr thinks it is (only statements you can make at the fundamental level are statistical), it is physics like all physics since Newton. There's an equation of motion.
*) Yes, it's in an abstract Hilbert space, and that means that some effects really are non-local, but we have to live with that since it's experimentally true, and there are proper relativistically-transforming equations of motion, which is all that relativity really demands at the core.
Unless this has been explicitly contradicted by results, I also believe that moreover, the "observation" principle which has to be inserted by-hand as a magic-projection-operator in Bohr's world (where's the equation of motion for that?)---turns out to be nothing but an approximation to the effect of the continuous, deterministic and eternal evolution equations for a macroscopically large collection of atoms used as an "observer".
The Copenhagen procedure is a very useful calculational tool, like Fermi's Golden Rules. As fundamental physics, it is nonsensical mumbo-jumbo because there is no physical explanation for 'observation'.
I wonder if he assumed that any encryption software would be jiggered by the US or Israelis and somehow compromise his security more.
"allegations surfaced that a NASA director may have broken the rules when he gave foreign nationals access to an agency research facility."
My guess as to what happened.
So there was no actual *item* being exported.
My guess, it was some foreign researchers coming over to do research, most likely, and most likely of a usual and unclassified nature and it was an ordinary approval.
So now, "unnamed whistleblowers" make allegations that somewhere the foreigners may have picked up some information which happens to be covered by ITAR in some way. ITAR is vague.
It's completely different from actual classified information which, as the name says, is properly classified as to who may and may not receive it, and every bit of it is clearly marked and everybody who works with it knows what they can and cannot discuss with foreigners. This ITAR could be anything random.
If foreigners had received actual classified information illegally then it would have been a problem, but nobody's saying that they did. NASA respects that seriously.
I have a wholly unsubstantiated hypothesis that this event is actually nothing but sabotage by incumbent and expensive Traditional Government Contractors (or possibly government workers at Marshall) who are upset at NASA's direction to actually go free-market and buy from smaller innovative companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
"5 million years ago the Earth was roughly 2 C warmer than it is today, CO_2 levels were in excess of what they are expected to go to by the end of the century in the worst case "anthropogenic" scenario"
Hold on, stop.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091008152242.htm
"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and geological observations that we now have for the last 20 million years lend strong support to the idea that carbon dioxide is an important agent for driving climate change throughout Earth's history," she said."
Notice, carbon dioxide levels "as high as they are today", not as high as they will soon get.
"So spending $4.00 per KW-hour to "prevent a disaster" that there isn't a shred of evidence that the Earth's climate system is capable of supporting"
That's just a lie. Past climate has been in a much hotter condition with significant changed compared to today. (If there's no Arctic ice cap and no ice in Greenland, how hot will it be in India in the summer? 130F? 140F?)
During that time humans did not exist, much less technological civilization. Next, humans are inducing change on a time-scale which is geologically unprecedented with a known potent physical change.
How much astrophysics and atmospheric science could they do with the money?
postdocs are WAY WAY cheaper than cost+ military contractors