> many people seem to think bees are on the edge of extinction.
There are 20000 species of bees. Europe has a 10% of the bee diversity with 1965 species present. Only in the European Union, a 9.1% of those have a status of endangered and another 5% are near endangered, this means that more than 100 species have troubles to survive, just in Europe.
Is a fact, not a just a though, that Ammobates dusmeti, Nomada siciliensis or Andrena labiatula, among other, are critically endangered.
But the real problem is that for the majority of all European species of bees (EU + rest of Europe) we just don't know what is happening. A 56% of the European bees are tagged as "Data Deficient". Even worse, there are 300 species of bees that are endemic (not found anywhere out of Europe). Most of them in the Mediterranean.
About trends on population, we know that 150 species are in a declining state and 13 are growing. For the rest, a solid 79% of the European species, we don't even know if they are increasing or decreasing its population in the last decades.
I used to run in a stretch of road on the outskirts, grass fields on both sides, from a certain sunny week every year, you could see quite a number of dead bees on the sidewalk, like 1 or 2 every 2 metres for 400 metres. Something that never noticed anywhere else
That's where you are supposed to see them, kind of, no big surprise here. It may sound surprising to some, given that bees travel by air, but they aren't good at crossing roads. When returning home after collecting the nectar they fly low and get literally hit by cars. So, apparently that place where you were running had a colony of bees on one side of the road, and their preferred food on the other, so a lot of bees were commuting daily over that dangerous place.
and then the whole phenominon moves up the food chain to crows, specificaly young crows that discover that they can get easy pickings along
certain stretches of roads,only to become road kill themselves,see it each year about this time
anapolis valley to HRM
> Participants were instructed in their respective native languages to estimate roughly how much time it took
If they really want to claim that the “language you speak” changes your perception of time, then they should have avoided the confounding variable of translation discrepancies in experiment instruction.
For example, design some simple UI which does not need to be explained.
Yes, on the logical level, the quoted passage is redundant: for the reason you indicate, either "a reader does not steal" or "a thief does not read" suffices by itself -- at least if stealing a book one time makes you a thief (as opposed to thieves' being defined as people who steal habitually).
> the story from France of the second-grader who, asked what 2x3 equals, replied "3x2", knowing only that multiplication was commutative.
This is a classic joke making fun of the issues with French education based on the Bourbaki [1] school of mathematics, see [2] for more discussion. Different issues than the USA, but also bad in my opinion.
[2] is excellent satire because I honestly can’t tell if it is a parody of physicists with a contempt for mathematics (e.g. Feynman), or if the author truly believes it.
It's not satirical. It's a very well known opinion piece by one of the most famous former Soviet mathematicians.
FWIW, I understand where he's coming from but I fundamentally disagree (not in the least because for me, computer science applications of mathematics are much more interesting than physics ones, and these can be incredibly abstract).
> Detaching any science (or other knowledge-gathering-activity) from reality may well turn it into teology :/
The problem I have with that argument is how historically unsupported it is. Some of the most abstract branches of mathematics, completely devoid of any real world connection, have become insanely useful later on.
Nobody thought that number theory had any value before cryptography showed that it did.
And it was Hilbert's push to put mathematics on an abstract and axiomatic foundation that led the way to discovering what "computation" is (and what its limits are) and therefore to the birth of computer science.
Did you get that phrase backwards? It's hard for me to see how [2] could be interpreted as being about "physicists with a contempt for mathematics"; it's actually about mathematicians with a contempt for physics.
Vladimir Arnold was a well-known pure mathematician with a deep interest in physics. If you read his math books (many of them are good), he constantly uses examples from physics to explain math concepts.
“arXiv will not consider removal for reasons such as journal similarity detection, nor failure to obtain consent from co-authors, as these do not invalidate the license applied by the submitter”
The submitter can mark the paper as “withdrawn” but it will remain available
DMCA takedown, then? Or not applicable because the data is not part of the publication? Tables 17 and 18 in the Appendix could probably be removed as they seem to verbatim copy course descriptions, as well as, maybe, Figure 4.
> Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors to collect the assignment and exam questions that made up the dataset that was the subject of the paper.
> DMCA takedown, then? Or not applicable because the data is not part of the publication?
Legally, you are allowed to refuse to comply with DMCA take down notices. If you do, you are increasing your risk of being sued for copyright infringement, and increasing the potential damages if you lose – but, if you decide (in any individual case) that is a risk worth taking, you are free to take that risk. If MIT tried to issue a DMCA takedown to arXiv over this, arXiv might decide that defending their own policies is worth the risk of being sued by MIT.
> Tables 17 and 18 in the Appendix could probably be removed as they seem to verbatim copy course descriptions, as well as, maybe, Figure 4.
Probably a sufficiently small extract from the source material, that it would fall under fair use? (Lack of acknowledgement of the specific source may be an issue; but that can be remedied by adding an acknowledgement, rather than removal.)
For the tables there's very little transformation, and a huge chunk of verbatim text. I don't see how there is any gain versus just publishing the course numbers and titles.
> Generally, material is considered unpublished if it was not intended for public distribution or if only a few copies were created and distribution was limited.
> The law distinguishes between published and unpublished material and the courts often afford more copyright protection to unpublished material when an asserted fair use is challenged.
> Rather, courts evaluate fair use cases based on four factors, no one of which is determinative in and of itself:
2) > Courts give more protection to works that are “closer to the core of copyright protection,” such as unpublished
4) > The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work: This factor assesses how, and to what extent, the use damages the existing and potential market for the original.
Publication of the (possibly) previously unpublished copyrighted work in figure 4 fully and completely destroys its value. I don't know if a fair use claim can overcome such an impact, though that is up to a court to determine.
> For the tables there's very little transformation, and a huge chunk of verbatim text.
IANAL either–but how is the copyright owner (MIT presumably) harmed by the reproduction of these course descriptions? It isn't like they harm the commercial value of the courses in any way; the course is the actual product here, the description is just sales and marketing collateral, and has minimal value apart from the product it is selling.
Furthermore, given the fact the paper was coauthored by MIT employees – arXiv could argue that MIT (through its employees acting as its agents) had granted them an implied license to reproduce it. Which is the other issue – even if this isn't fair use, MIT may have agreed to license it through its agents. You can still be bound by the actions of your employees, even if those actions violated your own internal policies–especially in dealings with third parties who had no reason to suspect there was any such violation.
> I don't see how there is any gain versus just publishing the course numbers and titles.
"Algebra I" and "Algebra II" don't mean much – what topics do they actually cover? A one sentence/paragraph course description adds a lot, because they tell you what topics are actually covered. Yes, someone could probably look it up on the MIT website – but it saves the reader a lot of effort doing that. Especially if someone is reading this 20 years from now, by which time the content of MIT courses may have changed a lot (despite having the same title), and finding what their content was 20 years ago may require a lot of research effort (if the reader even thinks to do that).
> Publication of the (possibly) previously unpublished copyrighted work in figure 4 fully and completely destroys its value
Figure 4 is likely not the "work", rather a small quote from a much larger work. How does a small quote from a work (even if allegedly unpublished) "fully and completely destroys its value"?
Re: the course descriptions. Yes, I can see a judge buying that defense. And yes, we don't know what license to use exists for MIT faculty. I could also see a judge buying that the research article here doesn't need to publish the course descriptions in order to make its point at all.
> IANAL either, but figure 4 is likely not the "work", rather a small quote from a much larger work. How does a small quote from a work (even if allegedly unpublished) "fully and completely destroys its value"?
Exams are often composites of multiple independent works. Said exams being recomposited periodically (i.e. using a database of questions to create an exam). The argument here is that the individual question is itself a complete work (equivalent to an independent chapter in a book of works on a topic). And here it is not just on its lonesome, but with its answer, too.
> Exams are often composites of multiple independent works.
If figure 4 came from an exam. For all we know, figure 4 actually came from course notes, assignments, etc. Whether or not issuing those to students counts as "publication", they are easily available to future students in a way that past exam questions are often not, hence their publication does far less damage to their value.
Also, MIT says that "Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors" – for all we know, figure 4 is from one of those instructors for which he did have that permission.
Yep, those sorts of possibilities is what the "(possibly)" in my earlier post was for.
Based on a quick search it seems the figure 4 question and answer have to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_decision_process , which seem to be used in computer science. Iddo Drori is an associate professor of CS, so it seems quite likely it's his own question.
Keep in mind that this can make signing into some devices tricky. On devices which do not support webauthn (nintendo switch) it will prompt you to acknowledge the code sent to another device which does support webauthn.
You can't authenticate some Roku channels as well, such as PhotoView for Google Photos.
Yes, we are relics of a bygone era. I really enjoyed my HP48 as a child.
I don't think anything since had the same ability to rapidly script operations.
<< 1/ SWAP 1/ + 1/ >> 'PAR STO
.... and 11 keystokes later, I had an operation for computing parallel resistors with one keystoke.
The HP48 series was the peak of good design. Unfortunately, in 2022, it feels obsolete. Each new calculator took away as much as it gave. Added were faster processors and more functionality, but the level of design, polish, and attention to detail just wasn't there any more.
In 1990, when these came out, engineers used calculators a lot. In 2022, most engineering work is done with a computer, so perhaps there wasn't market share to sustain HP. Even for my computer, I still wouldn't mind a modern "numeric keypad" that had the whole HP48's worth of operations: one-touch access to most math operations would be nice. Ideally, it'd have Bluetooth and be Python-friendly too.
My ultimate device:
- HP48-style microswitch keyboard
- RPN entry
- Modern CAS and plotting
- Able to use both Python (or Julia or similar) and RPN locally, with integration between the two
- Touchscreen for plots. High-resolution high-fidelity display.
- Bluetooth + USB + 802.11 (and, perhaps, a few GPIO pins). Can take an external keyboard, monitor, mouse, stream in data, stream out data, or talk to a computer. It should be able to output results or keystroke as a USB HID.
As far as Graphing RPN Calculators go, yes. There's SwissMicros[0], who do a more modern HP-41CX and HP-42, but nothing to replace the HP-48/49/50 series.
One key feature of 1Password is the use of a secret key in addition to a master password.
See page 10 [1] which explains how the secret key provides extra entropy (which makes it much harder to brute force a user who choses a weak password). Also see Story 1 on page 11 [1].
Sure. But watching a bird fly is a key step towards making a 747 too.
The energy that came out of the fusion reaction was more than the energy in the laser beam that ignited it. But the energy that went into the laser was about 100 times more than the energy that came out, so we've gone from -99.5% efficiency to -98.5% or something like that. Is that a key step? I suppose. Is it major progress? Maybe. Does it get us substantially closer to practical fusion? No. Not by a long shot.
The headline is deliberately designed to be more controversial than the article body is... perhaps so that one might, say, bait you into clicking it? :)
It's not overly pedantic to expect headlines to not be the exact opposite of a true statement. Contradicting the first sentence with the second sentence doesn't make the first sentence any more true.
I'm not saying it can't happen, but those fuel pellets are awfully expensive to make.
Even if you fix all the other issues (laser efficiency, actually generating all the energy that was released - the blanket needs to absorb and produce more power than was put in and therefore will not be as efficient, waste disposal and fuel pellet replacement), the pellets themselves sound like they take MejaJoules to even make, in the form of extraction transportation, refinement, and housing.
Gold is a rare earth, diamond is not as rare as it once was but even CVD methods take 1000 deg f Temps, hydrogen is relatively cheap but still costly to produce and store.
Perhaps there is another combination of materials that are cheaper to produce/manufacture, but this is the first and largest question to be answered, energy ratio and mechanics questions aside.
Until then, it's far from inevitable that this can be done, the hidden costs are probably many order of magnitude higher than directly estimated.
It might. I think most people expect tokomaks to be more practical, but generating power from inertial confinement is at least theoretically possible. It might even be reasonably cost-effective if someone can figure out how to manufacture the hohlraums/fuel capsules cheaply.
Is that relevant? I think the point is that ignition has been demonstrated. That gives people confidence that it is possible and can only accelerate research.
That thermonuclear ignition can be technologically achieved has, unfortunately, already been demonstrated. It has not yet been demonstrated in a way that seems to be leading to practical power production, and that goes for this result, too.
Lawrence Livermore director Kim Budil is being misleading in saying that this is necessary first step. Ignition will be a necessary step along the path to practical fusion power generation (if it can be achieved), but it is far from clear that inertial fusion is on that path.
Since then, many people seem to think bees are on the edge of extinction.
In fact, there are more bees now than ever before [2]
[1] https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20130819,00.htm...
[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/05/16/honeybee-populations-...