While your argument has merit when reviewing the 19th and 20th centuries, it is missing a key point. The entire goal of mechanizing and automating work is to eliminate the need for human labor.
The only reason to have a human do a job is because either we can't make a machine do it, or we don't want to. And in the long run, the people paying for the work will choose whichever is the most cost effective.
So I find the argument that there will always be more work to be done is questionable. Maybe there will and maybe there won't.
Personally, I thing ignorant people *should* be learning about and experimenting with radiation detection equipment. The lack of understanding causes a huge amount of trouble, and this is how people learn. And telling people that they are too uneducated to ever understand this stuff is exactly why the public refuses to trust us when we say that they don't need to worry about Fukishema unless they are next door.
What they need to be told at the same time they start to measure radiation is Don't Panic. The governments radiation monitoring is very very conservative. If the government panics you might consider being a tad concerned. Yea, a few people will still panic - but you won't stop them no matter what you tell them. And the rest will actually start learning about this stuff.
So, in answer to this ask slashdot:
1) Unless the the reactor explodes yet again (and 10x larger than last time), don't worry. Your child will be in far more danger from more mundane problems, like cars, falling out a window, pollution, and electricity - and you can do something about those problems. They are more likely to drown in the clogged gutter than get irradiated by it. But when they are a little older they should love playing in it.
2) There are not consumer radiation detectors like there are smoke alarms. Unless you work at a reactor, you are normally worried about small leaks with long term exposure. Professionally, those are normally measured by
dosimeters. If you ever work at a facility like Los Alamos National Lab, you will have to wear one. You probably could get one to monitor your child, but the money would be better spend mitigating other, more serious, risks - or invest it today and it will help pay for their college...
3) Low cost hand held radiation detectors that give a live readout should be available from educational scientific supply stores. As others have noted, they are not all that accurate, and you really should not panic without a sold understanding of what is going on. But my high school class had fun when the teacher handed them out. Shortly thereafter the students found the uranium ore that he had stashed in a storage cabinet.
4) Understanding the risks with radiation does take a lot of research. You need to get a good idea of atomic chemistry. Just a few things you need to understand are the different types of radiation (electro-magnetic, alpha, beta, gamma, neutron, etc), what damage each type does, ionizing radiation, how it does biologic damage, and the ability of your body to repair damage. One thing to look into is how radiation danger is often evaluated based on the Linear No Threshold Model, and how that hypothesis is strongly disputed for low levels (in my non-expert view, disproved).
5) Sources: you can start by checking Wikipedia and google, but as you know they are not always accurate - and they are prone to getting overrun by alarmists. I don't know how much the Wikipeida editors actually know about radiation, vs just think they now.
One source I like is Enginering Disasters: Lessons to be Learned, by Don Lawson. He has several chapters on radiation, along with a good discussion of the Linear No Threshold Model. Some of his points are not as well supported as I would like, but still worth considering.
Another source to consider is entry level collage physics text books. Some of them should cover the basics of nuclear chemistry and radiation. For this topic, previous editions are very cheap and just as good (or better) as long as they were published within the past 30-40 years.
In short, you are saying that the HFT people make it easier for the prospective long-term buyers and sellers to come together to make a trade - both in time and location.
In the case of HFT with holding times under a day I disagree with there being any value added (and the ones everyone is upset about are down in the sub-second range). The system of people posting buy and sell prices allows time for a buyer to come along after someone decides to sell. As for bringing they buyer and seller together, that is the job of the broker. It is what they are paid to do, and they were quite able to do it back before HFT. (though computers make the brokers job far easier, and I don't blame brokers for using them)
I never said that computers have to be involved in HFT. That simply depends what frequency is considered high frequency and if human reaction time can meet your definition.
Market making: you could define HFT as market making with holding times less than X second(s). I claim that HFTs are not doing something useful because of the extremely short time they hold the stock. Just about any long term trader will be OK waiting a few seconds for a transaction to occur - and many of them would be happy waiting far longer. So they don't need HFT to provide for transactions in the sub-second range.
If you slow down HFT enough it could become valuable as market making (and it will no longer be high frequency). How slow that has to be depends on how patient the long term investors are when they decide to buy and sell.
Personally I think that stock purchases and sails should be based on a solid analysis of the merits of the company combined with the finical needs of the investor. The result being that stocks don't change price very quickly, and most people are happy waiting hours or even few days for a trade to take place. Thus, there should be little need for market making. Though there would be room for market makers operating with daily to weekly holding times.
Sadly, I suspect that trading speed will keep increasing well into the VHF and the UHF range.
It works something like this:
1) Someone invests money, holding the stock for many years.
2) They decide to sell it
3) N high frequency traders buy it from them, on average making a bit of money.
4) Eventually another long term investor buys it. On average, for what the first guy sold it for plus what the HFT people made.
Thus, the money they skimmed off should have either gone to the first long term investor or kept by the second. They are both doing something useful. The HFT guys are not.
For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
While it might be interesting, comparing the power usage of Google and Wal-Mart is about as useful as the above comparison of Google to residences. Internet search & internet advertising are very different businesses from retail department stores & warehouses. Instead compare Google's power use to that of Microsoft, Yahoo, and other computing/data centre companies. If possible, account for the differences in what each company does. As for Wal-Mart, compare them to K-Mart, Kroger, and maybe even Amazon - they are all retail stores.
California is going broke - any responsible legislator should be trying to fix their budget. Which means decreasing spending or increasing income. There are limited options to do this by more efficient operation. But this mostly means increasing taxes or cutting services. However, If a tax increase goes to a public vote it will be voted down. And if a reduction in government services goes to a public vote it will be voted down.
What they should do is clearly bundle the tax with the services that it covers. Then the package could go to public vote. You both the tax and the services or neither of them. But sending the tax alone (or the services alone) to public vote results in the deficit problems that California is current suffering form.
Yea, I know that this will never happen - but I think it would a big improvement if it did.
One of the reasons people stay at NRAO is the work environment. No secrecy. Very minimal hassle with security. No dress code (except for PPE). Flexible hours. A relatively small amount of bureaucracy. Most supervisors respect their subordinates. Cool projects to work on. And 2 days of vacation per month (at least for the engineers). I am not saying that it is perfect - and there are exceptions to the above. But it is much better than many other work environments.
Yes - I imagine that NRAO / ESO / NAOJ / ALMA employes represent a full range of/. UIDs. But the question was asking if his username was selected due to his work on the project. I was suggesting that since it is an old UID the odds are that he got it before the project coated him with dust (yea, he could have changed username, but that is rare). Regardless, he answered the question.
Despite what the summary says, we will still have to take antennas down the mountain to service them. We just won't have to take them down specifically to service the receiver.
For those of you wondering: Alma has 2 major work sites. The Array Operations Site (AOS) at 5000 meters elevation. This is a great spot for scientific observations, but also harsh work environment. So there is also an Operations Support Facility (OSF) at 3000m where the antennas are assembled and tested. The antenna transporters, of which are far more impressive than the Front End Service Vehicle, easily move the antennas to the high site. They will also move them around at the high site, much like the different configurations of the VLA (well, now the EVLA).
Actually, moving those antennas gets boring fast - and we want to keep it that way (yes, I am currently working there). The transporter goes at a few KPH - around a fast walk. Or 1st gear, if you insist on car analogies. Moving them around is only a big deal because of the cost in time, manpower, and down time of the antenna. It is about a 1/2 day trip to take an antenna 1-way, so the time adds up fast.
I appreciate the difficulty in running a school system. With all the complicated laws plus fear of lawsuits I would hesitate to try working for one.
I think that the big problem with the U.S. schools is that too many people look to the federal government to solve problems instead of their local school board. The result being an unwieldily mired in rules and crowned with the Leave The Children Behind Act.
It would be much better if people would concern themselves primarily with their own school district. When someone has a problem with how schools are run they should take it up with their school. Not only would they then be faced with exactly what the school is dealing with, but they would also have a far better chance of improving things. I think that community oversight of local schools combined with fewer high level rules would improve the quality of most schools. Yes, a few would fail, but that will always be the case.
Anyway, I don't see/. as being anywhere near the height of intelligent discussion, but I hope that some of the comments here help you to improve your system.
But I have a very different prospective. The school I went to, Los Alamos High School, got involved in the internet in the early 90s (or late 80s? - before I was there). Not only did they have student email, but they it was on a student run server. And a few trusted students had the root password - and got a very good education by running the system. The computing instructor supervised the system. As the web caught the system grew (and was upgraded from an old Sun to an O200). By the late 90s it did email, web, and file sharing for the entire school.
They did not attempt to micro-manage what the students did. There was an acceptable use policy (typical illegal use, harassment, hardware theft, and the like). Some students had their accounts revoked for violating it. But there was no mas surveillance.
The system worked well until the teacher supervising it retired. By that time the internet was a big deal, and the upper administration wanted nothing to do with a server that they could not directly control. So they pulled the plug. From what I hear, the following students were worse off for it. I graduated well before then, so I don't really know. And I admit that legal issues today might necessitate changes in the system, but they could have kept something like it running.
The point is that you can run student email without Orwellian over site of what the students do. I find it sad that people feel the need for this level of control over what students do. And I think that it will ultimately be harmful, much in the same way as helicopter parenting.
The VLA is not being shut down, nor is it being replaced by some array in Chile. I work in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Socorro, NM, office, so I know.
They are currently completing substantial Enhancements to the VLA, so it is becoming known as the EVLA. There has been talk of completely renaming it, though I don't know if that will actually happen. Anyway, the enhancements amount to replacing all of the 70s electronics with modern stuff. The VLA dishes, transporters, and track are remaining pretty much the same. Though they are replacing any worn out components, like the azimuth bearings. The upgrades are a *huge* improvement, much like switching your scientific calculations from an old Timex PC to your favorite modern computer. You can expect the VLA to be around for quite some time to come, and it will be producing far better data than before.
The project in Chile is the Alma Project. For the past decade an international partnership of NRAO and other observatories has been building a millimeter wave telescope in Chile. It is a lot like the VLA. But it has more dishes (28 vs 66), smaller dishes (25m vs 12m & 8m), and operates at a higher frequency. Alma does not replace the VLA; it complements the VLA.
Now, like everyone else, NRAO is feeling the budget crunch. So far this has not resulted in the closure of any of the major NRAO instruments. Hopefully that will continue to be the case, although that depends on what the next next few years bring.
For more information on the VLA, ALMA, and other cool radio telescopes please check here.
Sandia National Labs has one of these towers (though it is not used for electric power generation). From what I hear (2nd & 3rd hand), if a bird goes into the central beam nothing comes out - the entire bird is vaporized (with maybe a dusting of ash left). Now, if you are wondering about bird deaths per MW I don't know. As others has stated, these things are probably kill fewer birds than many other human activities.
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
Sure you can. But it will actually take some scientific analysis - a top of the head list of shows and your opinions won't give much of an answer. Some examples of what you would have to:
Identify the time period in question
Review a very broad sample of the TV shows in that period
Analyze them for their portrayal of science
Weight them for the popular opinion of the show
Use this to build a picture of how the public perception of science has changed over time.
And you would have to take care not to let your perception of the situation bias it. For example, just because you think a given show was popular does not mean that it actually was.
They are partly correct: This catastrophes in the history was both predictable and preventable. They built a city right next to the ocean, bellow sea level, in a major hurricane zone, on a sinking delta, and in the flood plain of one of the world's largest rivers. It is quite easy to predict that any such city will be flooded, and being a major city it was a major disaster. And it was preventable: they could have built the city somewhere else, and limited the use of the delta area to only stuff that had to be there.
I don't know about the majority of tin whiskers, but some of them sure are visible. Just do a Google image search for them. I do not know how common the problem will be in new electronics but some people have sure had trouble.
It is reasonable for an ISP to offer a service in which you pay for bandwidth used. I like having a high peak bandwidth on the rare occasion that I download a linux CD. But I don't do that very much so I don't want to pay to upgrade the internet because other people use 10Mbps 24/7 downloading music & HD movies. So I want a cheap service with a high peak rate, a quota of so many gigabits a month [I would have to check how many] and if I go over quota I would pay a sane amount extra. They should have a way to set what happens when you go over quota (e.g. limit spending to $10 or something). Other people should be able to pay more for an unlimited service that they can use 24/7 for a flat rate. We both pay for the load we put on the system.
The key problems are that:
1) The ISP should have to tell you what they say you are getting. If you connection is not unlimited at the max bandwidth they had better properly explain it before you buy the service. Many ISPs do not do this and it is a big problem. The free market won't work if you can't tell what you are buying.
2) ISPs oversell. They should be given a serious penalty when they fail to give the bandwidth they promised someone. This is not happening so they get away with not giving the service that they sold.
Saul Alinsky attempted to change that by organizing the share holders to demand that cooperations maintain good behavior. Sadly he died before really getting anywhere with that. Too bad, especially since he might well have managed it had he lived.
Knowing a large number of people that work at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) I can tell you that cutting the funding won't solve the problem. That would be a lot like trying to make a football team win games by cutting the legs off of a few team members. It just won't solve the problem. Yes, some projects should not be funded, just as other projects need more funding. And don't forget that many of the wasteful projects are ones that congress told them to work on.
Some of the problems:
1) They are a big name. Whenever something bad happens it is all over the news. When something good happens it might or might make the news, and it will never be as big of a news item as a minor bad thing. Fork lift accident at Oak Ridge? Nobody hears about it. At LANL it makes national news. This is a huge factor in everyone saying that LANL is so poorly run. They hear about every bad thing there, but very little about the problems elsewhere. On top of that the news tends to give only part of the story. We hear on the news that someone at LANL buys a sports car on a LANL credit card. What they don't bother mentioning is that the order was a paperwork mix-up when they were ordering something else that cost just as much but was legit business. They also don't tell us that as soon as they found out there was a mix-up they actually corrected the order, returned the car, and got the money back. We hear "your tax dollars wasted by LANL" when the real story was "LANL makes paperwork error and then fixes it."
2) Because of 1 they get micro-managed by the DOE and congress. Congress has no clue how to run a large, secure, scientific lab and the DOE is not much better.
3) Congress & the DOE will tell them to do something and not provide the funding for the proper things. Recently they switched the management contract to a different agency and decided to pay them a lot more to manage the lab. The idea was that paying more would bring in better management. Well, the cost of the contract went from about 10 million to 90 million. Then congress said that the labs budget would stay the same. The net result? A 80 million budget cut.
Are there problems at LANL? Yes. Will yelling about how bad things are fix it? No. Congress and the DOE need to get good management there and then give them the power and money to get the job done instead of giving them more rules to follow whenever something makes the news. Don't tell them that a forklift accident can't be allowed. Instead tell them that they have to have 30% fewer construction accidents than industry. Don't tell them that they can never loose a hard drive; tell them that they can never let weapons designs leak. Don't tell them how to run their security. Give them the money for good security and the ability to do it.
Perhaps they realize that they are part of a larger system of education with the joint goal of educating students in many areas. If instructors in all fields work together and help each other the schools will be far better than if each thinks their subject is so important that it should be taught to the exclusion of others. Also, all the subjects in school are inter-related and it is important that students realize this. By wanting to encourage other subjects in their class this teacher is doing the school a favor, not sabotaging their own subject. All grade school & high school teachers should encourage other subjects in their classes.
Actually, we do have the resources to rebuild them, and we don't need foreign investment to do it. In fact, the more of it we keep in nation the better off we will be. Following the example of Rome is a bad thing. However, those resources are going to other things, like the war in Iraq and the military. After the end of the cold war we needed to scale back our military spending to half or a quarter of what it was. We cut it back a little but not nearly enough, and the war has erased any good those cuts did.
If we got out of Iraq and started cutting military spending we could then have the money to fix our roads, even if we stopped deficit spending. This would take several years; you can't just turn off the military spending like a light, and the budget is complex enough that it would take a lot of planning and thought.
There is still time to do it. Sadly, it looks like this is not going to happen.
We should attach a generator to Hewlett and Packard; I bet they are more upset than you are.
This is a far cry form what David Packard wrote in The HP Way: How Bill and I Built Out Company. Actually, it is an OK book which discusses things like how they wanted to build technically superior products, not just more mass market junk like they do now.
I am glad that, unlike some administrators, you don't think that just watching a video of the class is a valid substitute for being there.
However, I think that you will find there is not much you can do to make the bad students do the right thing. In high school they constantly attempted to force students to learn when they did not want to and they seldom had good results. I would say that you should help the good students to the best of your ability and give the bad students the best encouragement, support, and advice that you can. After that let them sink or swim.
Lastly, not doing something to help good students simply because it could make it easier for slackers is wrong because it punishes the good students. Having said that, I do not know if having the podcasts out there will really help anyone or not. They would not have been much help to me except when I was sick, but some people may find them useful.
"You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink; you can take a student to school but you can't make him think."
-Unknown
Slashdot Mirror
While your argument has merit when reviewing the 19th and 20th centuries, it is missing a key point. The entire goal of mechanizing and automating work is to eliminate the need for human labor.
The only reason to have a human do a job is because either we can't make a machine do it, or we don't want to. And in the long run, the people paying for the work will choose whichever is the most cost effective.
So I find the argument that there will always be more work to be done is questionable. Maybe there will and maybe there won't.
Personally, I thing ignorant people *should* be learning about and experimenting with radiation detection equipment. The lack of understanding causes a huge amount of trouble, and this is how people learn. And telling people that they are too uneducated to ever understand this stuff is exactly why the public refuses to trust us when we say that they don't need to worry about Fukishema unless they are next door.
What they need to be told at the same time they start to measure radiation is Don't Panic. The governments radiation monitoring is very very conservative. If the government panics you might consider being a tad concerned. Yea, a few people will still panic - but you won't stop them no matter what you tell them. And the rest will actually start learning about this stuff.
So, in answer to this ask slashdot:
1) Unless the the reactor explodes yet again (and 10x larger than last time), don't worry. Your child will be in far more danger from more mundane problems, like cars, falling out a window, pollution, and electricity - and you can do something about those problems. They are more likely to drown in the clogged gutter than get irradiated by it. But when they are a little older they should love playing in it.
2) There are not consumer radiation detectors like there are smoke alarms. Unless you work at a reactor, you are normally worried about small leaks with long term exposure. Professionally, those are normally measured by dosimeters. If you ever work at a facility like Los Alamos National Lab, you will have to wear one. You probably could get one to monitor your child, but the money would be better spend mitigating other, more serious, risks - or invest it today and it will help pay for their college...
3) Low cost hand held radiation detectors that give a live readout should be available from educational scientific supply stores. As others have noted, they are not all that accurate, and you really should not panic without a sold understanding of what is going on. But my high school class had fun when the teacher handed them out. Shortly thereafter the students found the uranium ore that he had stashed in a storage cabinet.
4) Understanding the risks with radiation does take a lot of research. You need to get a good idea of atomic chemistry. Just a few things you need to understand are the different types of radiation (electro-magnetic, alpha, beta, gamma, neutron, etc), what damage each type does, ionizing radiation, how it does biologic damage, and the ability of your body to repair damage. One thing to look into is how radiation danger is often evaluated based on the Linear No Threshold Model, and how that hypothesis is strongly disputed for low levels (in my non-expert view, disproved).
5) Sources: you can start by checking Wikipedia and google, but as you know they are not always accurate - and they are prone to getting overrun by alarmists. I don't know how much the Wikipeida editors actually know about radiation, vs just think they now.
One source I like is Enginering Disasters: Lessons to be Learned, by Don Lawson. He has several chapters on radiation, along with a good discussion of the Linear No Threshold Model. Some of his points are not as well supported as I would like, but still worth considering.
Another source to consider is entry level collage physics text books. Some of them should cover the basics of nuclear chemistry and radiation. For this topic, previous editions are very cheap and just as good (or better) as long as they were published within the past 30-40 years.
In short, you are saying that the HFT people make it easier for the prospective long-term buyers and sellers to come together to make a trade - both in time and location.
In the case of HFT with holding times under a day I disagree with there being any value added (and the ones everyone is upset about are down in the sub-second range). The system of people posting buy and sell prices allows time for a buyer to come along after someone decides to sell. As for bringing they buyer and seller together, that is the job of the broker. It is what they are paid to do, and they were quite able to do it back before HFT. (though computers make the brokers job far easier, and I don't blame brokers for using them)
I never said that computers have to be involved in HFT. That simply depends what frequency is considered high frequency and if human reaction time can meet your definition.
Market making: you could define HFT as market making with holding times less than X second(s). I claim that HFTs are not doing something useful because of the extremely short time they hold the stock. Just about any long term trader will be OK waiting a few seconds for a transaction to occur - and many of them would be happy waiting far longer. So they don't need HFT to provide for transactions in the sub-second range.
If you slow down HFT enough it could become valuable as market making (and it will no longer be high frequency). How slow that has to be depends on how patient the long term investors are when they decide to buy and sell.
Personally I think that stock purchases and sails should be based on a solid analysis of the merits of the company combined with the finical needs of the investor. The result being that stocks don't change price very quickly, and most people are happy waiting hours or even few days for a trade to take place. Thus, there should be little need for market making. Though there would be room for market makers operating with daily to weekly holding times.
Sadly, I suspect that trading speed will keep increasing well into the VHF and the UHF range.
It works something like this:
1) Someone invests money, holding the stock for many years.
2) They decide to sell it
3) N high frequency traders buy it from them, on average making a bit of money.
4) Eventually another long term investor buys it. On average, for what the first guy sold it for plus what the HFT people made.
Thus, the money they skimmed off should have either gone to the first long term investor or kept by the second. They are both doing something useful. The HFT guys are not.
For example, it has almost exactly the same market cap as Wal-Mart; how does the energy usage of the two companies compare, both in terms of overall size, and things like greenness of the source?
While it might be interesting, comparing the power usage of Google and Wal-Mart is about as useful as the above comparison of Google to residences. Internet search & internet advertising are very different businesses from retail department stores & warehouses. Instead compare Google's power use to that of Microsoft, Yahoo, and other computing/data centre companies. If possible, account for the differences in what each company does. As for Wal-Mart, compare them to K-Mart, Kroger, and maybe even Amazon - they are all retail stores.
California is going broke - any responsible legislator should be trying to fix their budget. Which means decreasing spending or increasing income. There are limited options to do this by more efficient operation. But this mostly means increasing taxes or cutting services. However, If a tax increase goes to a public vote it will be voted down. And if a reduction in government services goes to a public vote it will be voted down.
What they should do is clearly bundle the tax with the services that it covers. Then the package could go to public vote. You both the tax and the services or neither of them. But sending the tax alone (or the services alone) to public vote results in the deficit problems that California is current suffering form.
Yea, I know that this will never happen - but I think it would a big improvement if it did.
One of the reasons people stay at NRAO is the work environment. No secrecy. Very minimal hassle with security. No dress code (except for PPE). Flexible hours. A relatively small amount of bureaucracy. Most supervisors respect their subordinates. Cool projects to work on. And 2 days of vacation per month (at least for the engineers). I am not saying that it is perfect - and there are exceptions to the above. But it is much better than many other work environments.
Yes - I imagine that NRAO / ESO / NAOJ / ALMA employes represent a full range of /. UIDs. But the question was asking if his username was selected due to his work on the project. I was suggesting that since it is an old UID the odds are that he got it before the project coated him with dust (yea, he could have changed username, but that is rare). Regardless, he answered the question.
Judging from his UID, probably before. There have been people on the project that long, but not many. Though it is fitting enough to make me wonder.
Despite what the summary says, we will still have to take antennas down the mountain to service them. We just won't have to take them down specifically to service the receiver.
For those of you wondering: Alma has 2 major work sites. The Array Operations Site (AOS) at 5000 meters elevation. This is a great spot for scientific observations, but also harsh work environment. So there is also an Operations Support Facility (OSF) at 3000m where the antennas are assembled and tested. The antenna transporters, of which are far more impressive than the Front End Service Vehicle, easily move the antennas to the high site. They will also move them around at the high site, much like the different configurations of the VLA (well, now the EVLA).
Actually, moving those antennas gets boring fast - and we want to keep it that way (yes, I am currently working there). The transporter goes at a few KPH - around a fast walk. Or 1st gear, if you insist on car analogies. Moving them around is only a big deal because of the cost in time, manpower, and down time of the antenna. It is about a 1/2 day trip to take an antenna 1-way, so the time adds up fast.
You can find more on the project at our webpage here: http://www.almaobservatory.org/
I appreciate the difficulty in running a school system. With all the complicated laws plus fear of lawsuits I would hesitate to try working for one.
/. as being anywhere near the height of intelligent discussion, but I hope that some of the comments here help you to improve your system.
I think that the big problem with the U.S. schools is that too many people look to the federal government to solve problems instead of their local school board. The result being an unwieldily mired in rules and crowned with the Leave The Children Behind Act.
It would be much better if people would concern themselves primarily with their own school district. When someone has a problem with how schools are run they should take it up with their school. Not only would they then be faced with exactly what the school is dealing with, but they would also have a far better chance of improving things. I think that community oversight of local schools combined with fewer high level rules would improve the quality of most schools. Yes, a few would fail, but that will always be the case.
Anyway, I don't see
Thank you for the notes!
But I have a very different prospective. The school I went to, Los Alamos High School, got involved in the internet in the early 90s (or late 80s? - before I was there). Not only did they have student email, but they it was on a student run server. And a few trusted students had the root password - and got a very good education by running the system. The computing instructor supervised the system. As the web caught the system grew (and was upgraded from an old Sun to an O200). By the late 90s it did email, web, and file sharing for the entire school.
They did not attempt to micro-manage what the students did. There was an acceptable use policy (typical illegal use, harassment, hardware theft, and the like). Some students had their accounts revoked for violating it. But there was no mas surveillance.
The system worked well until the teacher supervising it retired. By that time the internet was a big deal, and the upper administration wanted nothing to do with a server that they could not directly control. So they pulled the plug. From what I hear, the following students were worse off for it. I graduated well before then, so I don't really know. And I admit that legal issues today might necessitate changes in the system, but they could have kept something like it running.
The point is that you can run student email without Orwellian over site of what the students do. I find it sad that people feel the need for this level of control over what students do. And I think that it will ultimately be harmful, much in the same way as helicopter parenting.
The VLA is not being shut down, nor is it being replaced by some array in Chile. I work in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Socorro, NM, office, so I know.
They are currently completing substantial Enhancements to the VLA, so it is becoming known as the EVLA. There has been talk of completely renaming it, though I don't know if that will actually happen. Anyway, the enhancements amount to replacing all of the 70s electronics with modern stuff. The VLA dishes, transporters, and track are remaining pretty much the same. Though they are replacing any worn out components, like the azimuth bearings. The upgrades are a *huge* improvement, much like switching your scientific calculations from an old Timex PC to your favorite modern computer. You can expect the VLA to be around for quite some time to come, and it will be producing far better data than before.
The project in Chile is the Alma Project. For the past decade an international partnership of NRAO and other observatories has been building a millimeter wave telescope in Chile. It is a lot like the VLA. But it has more dishes (28 vs 66), smaller dishes (25m vs 12m & 8m), and operates at a higher frequency. Alma does not replace the VLA; it complements the VLA.
Now, like everyone else, NRAO is feeling the budget crunch. So far this has not resulted in the closure of any of the major NRAO instruments. Hopefully that will continue to be the case, although that depends on what the next next few years bring.
For more information on the VLA, ALMA, and other cool radio telescopes please check here.
Sandia National Labs has one of these towers (though it is not used for electric power generation). From what I hear (2nd & 3rd hand), if a bird goes into the central beam nothing comes out - the entire bird is vaporized (with maybe a dusting of ash left). Now, if you are wondering about bird deaths per MW I don't know. As others has stated, these things are probably kill fewer birds than many other human activities.
No, I don't think you can get much information on this trend from TV shows.
Sure you can. But it will actually take some scientific analysis - a top of the head list of shows and your opinions won't give much of an answer. Some examples of what you would have to:
And you would have to take care not to let your perception of the situation bias it. For example, just because you think a given show was popular does not mean that it actually was.
They are partly correct: This catastrophes in the history was both predictable and preventable. They built a city right next to the ocean, bellow sea level, in a major hurricane zone, on a sinking delta, and in the flood plain of one of the world's largest rivers. It is quite easy to predict that any such city will be flooded, and being a major city it was a major disaster. And it was preventable: they could have built the city somewhere else, and limited the use of the delta area to only stuff that had to be there.
I don't know about the majority of tin whiskers, but some of them sure are visible. Just do a Google image search for them. I do not know how common the problem will be in new electronics but some people have sure had trouble.
It is reasonable for an ISP to offer a service in which you pay for bandwidth used. I like having a high peak bandwidth on the rare occasion that I download a linux CD. But I don't do that very much so I don't want to pay to upgrade the internet because other people use 10Mbps 24/7 downloading music & HD movies. So I want a cheap service with a high peak rate, a quota of so many gigabits a month [I would have to check how many] and if I go over quota I would pay a sane amount extra. They should have a way to set what happens when you go over quota (e.g. limit spending to $10 or something). Other people should be able to pay more for an unlimited service that they can use 24/7 for a flat rate. We both pay for the load we put on the system.
The key problems are that:
1) The ISP should have to tell you what they say you are getting. If you connection is not unlimited at the max bandwidth they had better properly explain it before you buy the service. Many ISPs do not do this and it is a big problem. The free market won't work if you can't tell what you are buying.
2) ISPs oversell. They should be given a serious penalty when they fail to give the bandwidth they promised someone. This is not happening so they get away with not giving the service that they sold.
Saul Alinsky attempted to change that by organizing the share holders to demand that cooperations maintain good behavior. Sadly he died before really getting anywhere with that. Too bad, especially since he might well have managed it had he lived.
Knowing a large number of people that work at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) I can tell you that cutting the funding won't solve the problem. That would be a lot like trying to make a football team win games by cutting the legs off of a few team members. It just won't solve the problem. Yes, some projects should not be funded, just as other projects need more funding. And don't forget that many of the wasteful projects are ones that congress told them to work on. Some of the problems: 1) They are a big name. Whenever something bad happens it is all over the news. When something good happens it might or might make the news, and it will never be as big of a news item as a minor bad thing. Fork lift accident at Oak Ridge? Nobody hears about it. At LANL it makes national news. This is a huge factor in everyone saying that LANL is so poorly run. They hear about every bad thing there, but very little about the problems elsewhere. On top of that the news tends to give only part of the story. We hear on the news that someone at LANL buys a sports car on a LANL credit card. What they don't bother mentioning is that the order was a paperwork mix-up when they were ordering something else that cost just as much but was legit business. They also don't tell us that as soon as they found out there was a mix-up they actually corrected the order, returned the car, and got the money back. We hear "your tax dollars wasted by LANL" when the real story was "LANL makes paperwork error and then fixes it." 2) Because of 1 they get micro-managed by the DOE and congress. Congress has no clue how to run a large, secure, scientific lab and the DOE is not much better. 3) Congress & the DOE will tell them to do something and not provide the funding for the proper things. Recently they switched the management contract to a different agency and decided to pay them a lot more to manage the lab. The idea was that paying more would bring in better management. Well, the cost of the contract went from about 10 million to 90 million. Then congress said that the labs budget would stay the same. The net result? A 80 million budget cut. Are there problems at LANL? Yes. Will yelling about how bad things are fix it? No. Congress and the DOE need to get good management there and then give them the power and money to get the job done instead of giving them more rules to follow whenever something makes the news. Don't tell them that a forklift accident can't be allowed. Instead tell them that they have to have 30% fewer construction accidents than industry. Don't tell them that they can never loose a hard drive; tell them that they can never let weapons designs leak. Don't tell them how to run their security. Give them the money for good security and the ability to do it.
Perhaps they realize that they are part of a larger system of education with the joint goal of educating students in many areas. If instructors in all fields work together and help each other the schools will be far better than if each thinks their subject is so important that it should be taught to the exclusion of others. Also, all the subjects in school are inter-related and it is important that students realize this. By wanting to encourage other subjects in their class this teacher is doing the school a favor, not sabotaging their own subject. All grade school & high school teachers should encourage other subjects in their classes.
Actually, we do have the resources to rebuild them, and we don't need foreign investment to do it. In fact, the more of it we keep in nation the better off we will be. Following the example of Rome is a bad thing. However, those resources are going to other things, like the war in Iraq and the military. After the end of the cold war we needed to scale back our military spending to half or a quarter of what it was. We cut it back a little but not nearly enough, and the war has erased any good those cuts did. If we got out of Iraq and started cutting military spending we could then have the money to fix our roads, even if we stopped deficit spending. This would take several years; you can't just turn off the military spending like a light, and the budget is complex enough that it would take a lot of planning and thought. There is still time to do it. Sadly, it looks like this is not going to happen.
We should attach a generator to Hewlett and Packard; I bet they are more upset than you are. This is a far cry form what David Packard wrote in The HP Way: How Bill and I Built Out Company. Actually, it is an OK book which discusses things like how they wanted to build technically superior products, not just more mass market junk like they do now.
I am glad that, unlike some administrators, you don't think that just watching a video of the class is a valid substitute for being there.
However, I think that you will find there is not much you can do to make the bad students do the right thing. In high school they constantly attempted to force students to learn when they did not want to and they seldom had good results. I would say that you should help the good students to the best of your ability and give the bad students the best encouragement, support, and advice that you can. After that let them sink or swim.
Lastly, not doing something to help good students simply because it could make it easier for slackers is wrong because it punishes the good students. Having said that, I do not know if having the podcasts out there will really help anyone or not. They would not have been much help to me except when I was sick, but some people may find them useful.
"You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink; you can take a student to school but you can't make him think."
-Unknown