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Comment Better comments... (Score 1) 59

by ananyo (#46887499) Attached to: 13th Century Multiverse Theory Unearthed

Over at 'the other place' the guy who did some of the computer modelling for the project has chipped in with some insights that are a bit more interesting than those (dare I say it) here (there, I did).
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
eg Here's a thread from there:

T-A 18 hours ago | link

So the Economist's point is that a "research" project exploring an idea about the universe which has been known to be incorrect for centuries somehow proves the value of the humanities? Really?

14113 15 hours ago | link

Yes. It provides a lot of information about the history of science. Most importantly, Grosseteste was one of the first to use what we now think of as the scientific method, and (I believe) the first to suggest a 'big bang like' start to the universe.

He's essential in the history of science for introducing aristotalean traditions and ideas, to the scientific discourse at the time, as well as being one of the early founders of science. For that reason at least he's well worth studying, and especially his ideas, which are very close to what we have now. What the science researchers are doing is helping the historians formalise his ideas in todays language and notations so that their similarities can be seen with todays ideas.

Source: I worked on this project over last summer as a computer science student visualising his explanation for the start of the universe.

Submission + - 13th century multiverse unearthed (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Robert Grosseteste, an English scholar who lived from about 1175 to 1253, was the first thinker in northern Europe to try to develop unified physical laws to explain the origin and form of the geocentric medieval universe of heavens and Earth.
Tom McLeish, professor of physics and pro-vice-chancellor for research at Britain’s Durham University, and a multinational team of researchers found that Grosseteste’s physical laws were so rigorously defined that they could be re-expressed using modern mathematical and computing techniques—as the medieval scholar might have done if he had been able to use such methods. The thinking went that the translated equations could then be solved and the solutions explored.
The 'Ordered Universe Project' started six years ago and has now reported some of its findings. Only a small set of Grosseteste's parameters resulted in the “ordered” medieval universe he sought to explain, the researchers found; most resulted either in no spheres being created or a “disordered” cosmos of numerous spheres. Grosseteste, then, had created a medieval “multiverse”. De Luce suggests that the scholar realized his theories could result in universes with all manner of spheres, although he did not appear to realize the significance of this. A century later, philosophers Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme both considered the idea of multiple worlds and how they might exist simultaneously or in sequence.

Submission + - China will become the world's largest economy by the end of the year (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Until 1890 China was the world’s largest economy, before America surpassed it. By the end of 2014 China is on track to reclaim its crown. Comparing economic output is tricky: exchange rates get in the way. Simply converting GDP from renminbi to dollars at market rates may not reflect the true cost of living. Bread and beer may be cheaper in one country than another, for example. To account for these differences, economists make adjustments based on a comparable basket of goods and services across the globe, so-called purchasing-power parity (PPP). New data released on April 30th from the International Comparison Programme, a part of the UN, calculated the cost of living in 199 countries in 2011. On this basis, China’s PPP exchange rate is now higher than economists had previously estimated using data from the previous survey in 2005: a whopping 20% higher. So China, which had been forecast to overtake America in 2019 by the IMF, will be crowned the world's pre-eminent country by the end of this year. The American Century ends, and the Pacific Century begins.

Submission + - Rich now work longer hours than the poor (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Overall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure.
The reasons are complex but include rising income inequality but also the availability of more intellectually stimulating, well-remunerated work.

Submission + - Astronomers unveil the most Earth-like exoplanet yet (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In a paper just published in Science, Elisa Quintada, an astronomer at NASA, and her colleagues, describe the detection of a particularly special exoplanet. Kepler 186f appears to be the closest relative to Earth yet discovered. Located about 500 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, Kepler-186f has a radius between 0.97 and 1.25 that of Earth. And it orbits its parent star firmly inside the "habitable zone", in which temperatures are just right for liquid water.

Submission + - Paper microscope magnifies objects 2100 times and costs less than $1 (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: If ever a technology were ripe for disruption, it is the microscope. Microscopes are expensive and need to be serviced and maintained. Unfortunately, one important use of them is in poor-world laboratories and clinics, for identifying pathogens, and such places often have small budgets and lack suitably trained technicians.
Now Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University, has designed a microscope made almost entirely of paper, which is so cheap that the question of servicing it goes out of the window. Individual Foldscopes are printed on A4 sheets of paper (ideally polymer-coated for durability). A pattern of perforations on the sheet marks out the ’scope’s components, which are colour-coded in a way intended to assist the user in the task of assembly.
The Foldscope’s non-paper components, a poppy-seed-sized spherical lens made of borosilicate or corundum, a light-emitting diode (LED), a watch battery, a switch and some copper tape to complete the electrical circuit, are pressed into or bonded onto the paper. (The lenses are actually bits of abrasive grit intended to roll around in tumblers that smooth-off metal parts.) A high-resolution version of this costs less than a dollar, and offers a magnification of up to 2,100 times and a resolving power of less than a micron. A lower-spec version (up to 400x magnification) costs less than 60 cents.

Submission + - UN report reveals odds of being murdered country-by-country (economist.com) 4

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A new UN report (link to data) details comprehensive country-by-country murder rates. Safest is Singapore, with just one killing per 480,000 people in 2012. In the world’s most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime. The Economist includes an intriguing 'print only interactive' (see the PDF) and has some tongue-in-cheek tips on how to avoid being slain:
>First, don’t live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world.
Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. But note that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in the rich world, probably because there is less banditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japan and South Korea slightly over half of all murder victims are female.
Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places.

Submission + - Organ regenerated inside a living animal for the first time (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Scientists at Edinburgh University have successfully persuaded an organ to regenerate inside an animal. As they report in the journal Development, they have treated, in mice, an organ called the thymus, which is a part of the immune system that runs down in old age. Instead of adding stem cells they have stimulated their animals’ thymuses to make more of a protein called FOXN1. This is a transcription factor (a molecular switch that activates genes).
The scientists knew from earlier experiments that FOXN1 is important for the embryonic development of the thymus, and speculated that it might also rejuvenate the organ in older animals. They bred a special strain of mice whose FOXN1 production could be stimulated specifically in the thymus by tamoxifen, a drug more familiar as a treatment for breast cancer.
In one-year-olds, stimulating FOXN1 production in the thymus caused it to become 2.7 times bigger within a month. In two-year-olds the increase was 2.6 times. Moreover, when the researchers studied the enlarged thymuses microscopically, and compared them with those from untreated control animals of the same ages, they found that the organs’ internal structures had reverted to their youthful nature.

Submission + - 1930s immigrants to US who Americanized their names got income boost (economist.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Economists—most famously the Freakonomics duo, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner—have long worried that having the “wrong” name could set you back in the labour market. A number of studies show that having an “ethnic-sounding” name tends to disadvantage job applicants (though others suggest that names matter little).
Waves of migrants to America did not need economists to tell them that their name could be a disadvantage. Many changed their names to fit in. Almost a third of naturalising immigrants abandoned their first names by 1930 and acquired popular American names such as William, John or Charles. What was the impact? The authors draw on a sample of 3,400 male migrants who naturalised in New York in 1930.
The authors found that changing from a purely foreign name to a very common American name was associated with a 14% hike in earnings.

Submission + - How to prevent a plane from vanishing again (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In an age of big data—when our cellphones track our location and American spooks know what we ate for breakfast—it seems bizarre that a huge airliner with 239 people on board could vanish with barely a trace.The incident reveals numerous security lapses that are relatively easy to fix—and must be, to maintain public confidence in air travel.
The first is the continual tracking of commercial airliners. Prior to MH370’s disappearance, most people would have presumed that aeroplanes are in constant communication with ground stations for security reasons if not navigational ones. But there is no requirement that they maintain continuous contact. The aviation industry plans to upgrade its radar to a GPS-based system that would accomplish this, but the process has faced delays. It should be implemented immediately.
Second, MH370 “went dark” about 40 minutes after takeoff because two communications systems were mysteriously deactivated: the secondary radar (which identifies the aircraft, among other data, to radar screens) and ACARS, a system for sending status updates and messages.
There are good reasons why pilots should be able to disable equipment on board, the threat of fires being one of them. But in such cases, the aeroplane should automatically send out an alert that the system is being shut off, so that authorities are immediately aware of this, and know to track the aircraft with conventional radar (where it appears as a blip on a screen without the identifying information).

Submission + - New Stanford institute to target bad science (economist.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a “journal watch” to monitor scientific publishers’ work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre’s nerdishly valiant mission statement: “Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality.”'

Submission + - Why P-values cannot tell you if a hypothesis is correct (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume. Critically, they cannot tell you the odds that a hypothesis is correct. A feature in Nature looks at why, if a result looks too good to be true, it probably is, despite an impressive-seeming P value.

Submission + - Graphene conducts electricity ten times better than expected (nature.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Physicists have produced nanoribbons of graphene — the single-atom-thick carbon — that conduct electrons better than theory predicted even for the most idealized form of the material. The finding could help graphene realize its promise in high-end electronics, where researchers have long hoped it could outperform traditional materials such as silicon.
In graphene, electrons can move faster than in any other material at room temperature. But techniques that cut sheets of graphene into the narrow ribbons needed to form wires of a nano-scale circuit leave ragged edges, which disrupt the electron flow. Now a team led by physicist Walt de Heer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has made ribbons that conduct electric charges for more than 10 micrometres without meeting resistance — 1,000 times farther than in typical graphene nanoribbons. The ribbons made by de Heer's team in fact conduct electrons ten times better than standard theories of electron transport they should, say the authors.

Submission + - India to build world's largest solar plant (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: India has pledged to build the world’s most powerful solar plant. With a nominal capacity of 4,000 megawatts, comparable to that of four full-size nuclear reactors, the ‘ultra mega' project will be more than ten times larger than any other solar project built so far, and it will spread over 77 square kilometres of land — greater than the island of Manhattan.
Six state-owned companies have formed a joint venture to execute the project, which they say can be completed in seven years at a projected cost of US$4.4 billion. The proposed location is near Sambhar Salt Lake in the northern state of Rajasthan.

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