Category Archives: Politics

This

Posted on by

THIS is why we invest in science. This.

There is no way you could’ve predicted beforehand that investing in NASA would have led to the creation of this specific innovation in life-saving technology. But it’s a rock-solid guarantee that investing in science always leads to innovations that have far-ranging and critical benefits to our lives.

This is true of all science. There is no way to know, ahead of time, what discoveries will be made in basic research, whether applied research will yield a useable result, or what other applications other smart people will find from such discoveries. The principle of unintended consequences isn’t always a negative.

Science research is an investment. Short-changing is short-sighted.

Follow That Law!

Posted on by

Justices Back Mayo Clinic Argument on Patents

In his opinion for the court in the case, Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, No. 10-1150, Justice Breyer started with first principles.

“Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2[sic]; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity,” he wrote.
…
In general, Justice Breyer wrote, an inventor must do more than “recite a law of nature and then add the instruction ‘apply the law.’ ”

“Einstein, we assume, could not have patented his famous law by claiming a process consisting of simply telling linear accelerator operators to refer to the law to determine how much energy an amount of mass has produced (or vice versa),” he wrote.

I wonder if some savvy lawyer would interpret the specific mention of linear accelerators to mean that cyclotrons are to be treated differently…

A Modest Proposal

Posted on by

Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal

[T]o make it entirely fair, Eternal Copyright should be retroactively applied so that current generations may benefit from their ancestors’ works rather than allowing strangers to rip your inheritance off. Indeed, by what right do Disney and the BBC get to adapt Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sherlock without paying the descendants of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, and Arthur Conan Doyle?
Of course, there will be some odd effects. For example, the entire Jewish race will do rather well from their eternal copyright in much of the Bible, and Shakespeare’s next of kin will receive quite the windfall from the royalties in the thousands of performances and adaptations of his plays – money well earned, I think we can all agree.

Are We Really That Surprised?

Posted on by

U.S. State Science Standards Are “Mediocre to Awful”

“A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).

Danger, Will Robinson!

Posted on by

TSA discovery prompts New York bomb scare – six hours later

Short version: TSA confiscates some pipes (not the smoking kind) even though they were determined not to be a threat. Forgets about them. Next shift sees them and goes WTF? and calls the bomb squad. But no evacuation ensues.

Several law enforcement sources told CNN the objects were determined to be homeopathic medical devices.

If it was a homeopathic bomb, then it would have beed diluted of all explosive materials, making it (homeopathically) the most dangerous explosive device EVAR!

via

Just Giving it Away

Posted on by

One the heels of my recent discussion of the value of information trading (as opposed to deception) to research, I read about a push for even more access to this information: Scientists, Share Secrets or Lose Funding: Stodden and Arbesman

Many people assume that scientists the world over freely exchange not only the results of their experiments but also the detailed data, statistical tools and computer instructions they employed to arrive at those results. This is the kind of information that other scientists need in order to replicate the studies. The truth is, open exchange of such information is not common, making verification of published findings all but impossible and creating a credibility crisis in computational science.
…
Inadequate sharing is common to all scientific domains that use computers in their research today (most of science), and it hampers transparency.
By making the underlying data and computer code conveniently available, scientists could open a new era of innovation and growth. In October, the White House released a memorandum titled “Accelerating Technology Transfer and Commercialization of Federal Research in Support of High-Growth Businesses,” which outlines ways for federal funding agencies to improve the rate of technology transfer from government-financed laboratories to the private business sector.

I’m not a fan of this proposal.

The problem is, as I previously discussed, that the data and analysis techniques have value. They represent an investment in time a lab has made, and forcing that information to be given away means that any other lab can catch up in research, extract information from the data or apply the analysis tools to other data, all without a similar amount of investment.

The lab that did the work should get the credit for discovery, not only for the recognition and prestige but also to help in their competition for funding. Without overhauling the funding system, this proposal would be asking labs to handicap themselves in their quest for future funding.

Technology transfer is not that same thing as forced sharing of data and analysis tools, so I’m not sure what connection the authors were trying to make. The technology transfer they mention is from federal agencies to the private sector — this would apply to me, for example, if I helped discover or build something but our lab was not in a position to exploit the work, e.g. commercial development of a product, which is something that’s not part of our mission. But the government gets something back from that — it’s not just us giving it away to a business.

Taking a Non-Leap of Faith?

Posted on by

Time running out for ‘leap second’ that has kept us in step with our slowing planet

[T]hat [next] change could be the last of its kind for the leap second and for our fiddling with time. Telecommunications organisations and financial groups say the continual adding of leap seconds to computers increases the chances of errors being made. Precisely timed money transactions could go astray or vehicles could be sent tens of metres out of position if they are a second out in their measurement of time. Hence the bid to ban the leap second.

But there’s this – a nit at which I must pick

“However, these new, highly accurate atomic clocks also revealed that the Earth’s rotation is slowing down because of movements within the core of the Earth.

“The rate of change is not constant, however; it fluctuates over the years. Indeed, sometimes it does not slow down at all.”

Any change in mass distribution will contribute to a change in rotation rate because angular momentum will be conserved, but a really big term in all of this is the tidal braking from our interaction with the moon. The other contributions add noise to this, which is why the rotation speed can level off or even increase temporarily.

But since moment of inertia depends on R^2, changes in the core must involve a lot more mass relative to changes on the surface of the earth (from weather patterns and water location, for example) to contribute.

 

I had linked to an article about the problems with leap seconds some months ago, and the author came and gave a talk at the Observatory this past fall. Hearing details of some of the potential problems was interesting — the issue is that programmers generally don’t think about leap seconds, so how a system will respond is dicey, and as more and more systems rely on automation the odds of a dangerous failure increases.

There are systems that simply shut down at leap-second insertion time rather than deal with the unknown response of the computer code. But leap seconds are inserted at midnight UTC. Most of Europe is partying, without much business going on, or planes in the air. But it’s 4 PM in California, and in the morning in Asia. There’s potential for some serious complications.

The bottom line is that most people don’t care about leap seconds. Dropping them will impact astronomers, and mildly offend our sensibilities when noon on the solstices does not have the sun line up overhead — assuming you are at a longitude where this currently happens. But that’s just it: most of us aren’t. We accept time zones as a compromise between precise astronomical time and coordination and scheduling of our lives. It won’t surprise me if leap seconds are deemed more trouble than they are worth.