Berkeley is, if the (UK) Times Higher Education Supplement Rankings are to be believed, one of the top 10 universities in the world - and top three in engineering and technology. I'm pretty sure that constitutes "elite" standing. But in this article, it's treated as a "top-tier public university." Is it both?
American deer are plentiful not only because their natural predators got beat back, but in large part because of conservation efforts by hunters all around the country that has preserved plenty of natural habitat for them to flourish in. This is the meaning of 'conservation' - we are not trying to turn the world into a petting zoo, we like to eat venison.
Or as someone high-up in a sustainability organization once said to me after a beer or two, "Sustainable development is about your grandkids being able to shoot Bambi, too."
It's pretty sad when the 35 authors can take paper space acknowledge the culturally significant role that the observatory site has for the indigenous Hawaiians, but can't specifically acknowledge the people who took the data.
Uh, they can, and they did, but you'd have to read the remainder of the paragraph to discover that - and for some reason, they don't refer to me by my Slashdot username.
The author list for peer-reviewed stuff is mostly full members of the collaboration - folks with Ph.D's, folks doing their Ph.D's on collaboration stuff, folks who wrote the custom data warehouse software, and of course Saul Perlmutter. (It never hurts to have someone with a Nobel in your author list, right?) I'm not a Ph.D, and probably never will be, although I'd like to finish my MSc someday. I am on the broader authors list for occasional "Astronomer's Telegram" announcements we send out after taking spectra of a newly discovered thing and figuring out what type of SN it is, how far pre- or post-maximum it is, and how far away it is.
AC1:
The relation between light curve width and how bright SN are has been known since at least 1993 (Phillips, M., 1993, ApJ 413, L105). This was corrected for even in the original work that won the Nobel prize. So, the 'they aren't quite so standard candles' has been known for 20 years - what they are is 'standardizable' candles.
AC2:
I don't see the SuperNova Factory taking credit for discovering the relationship between light curve width and luminosity (the Phillips relation, which is indeed well-known, and made the discovery of Dark Energy with Type Ia supernovae possible).
Well... the Phillips Relationship is "well-known" in much the same way that these supernovae are "nearby" - to the people in that specific very narrow field of expertise. Yes, Wikipedia has an article on it, but I'd expect it to be unknown to the average adult walking down the street, the average amateur astronomer, the average Jeopardy contestant, the average undergraduate or first-year graduate astronomy student, or even the average science popularizer who isn't specifically dealing with supernovae. Just last month, I overheard one long-time amateur astronomer still telling tourists at the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station that all SNe Ia are the same mass and brightness!
But anyway, as the 2nd AC said, the newer/more interesting bit is the relationship to progenitor mass, and the continued trend toward SNe Ia coming from diverse progenitors - i.e. the more we look, the more "exceptions to the rule" we find. We're already to the point where it looks like most SNe Ia aren't from single, Chandrasekhar-mass progenitors as was long thought to be the "norm," and the paper discusses some models for progenitors of varying masses that meet with varying degrees of success in attempting to match the observational results. I suspect the computational / theoretical / modeling folks will also have fun with it all.
for me a redshift of 3 or 4 is very much low redshift. Come to that, redshifts of 300 are low redshift.
Just as long as you don't claim things are "nearby." Even at the redshifts we deal with (0.03-0.08), you can't get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
I thought "Further research is needed" was code for "we have seventeen more papers in the works, all of which will cite this one and each of the others, thus inflating our g-index and h-index numbers."
I don't think it's going to make a difference. In fact, I'm not quite sure whether the dark energy research that got the Nobel was strictly limited to type Ia supernovae - it was before my time, and since they were using high-Z (very distant) supernovae, they might have wanted more massive type II ones, or something.
For about a decade, people have accepted that some SNe Ia are "over the limit" (under arrest!) and have developed "double-degenerate" models of colliding white dwarf stars. As sky surveys discover more and more, it's started to become apparent that there are also some "under the limit." This project has studied hundreds of supernovae over the last decade, and looked pretty closely at how they evolve over time. The reassuring part of the paper is that even though these supernovae are nowhere near all the same mass blowing up every time, they're still within a reasonably sensible range (0.9 to 1.4 solar masses) and that by watching what brightness they reach at their peaks, and how quickly they decline in brightness, and looking at their spectral curves (all of which are among the things that this particular collaboration looks at), astrophysicists can calculate their masses, and thus make any necessary adjustments to compensate for that. And by the standards of astrophysicists and cosmologists, the math required to "standardize" progenitors of different masses is probably considered "easy." Of course, these are the same people who think "nearby" means 0.4-1.0 billion light years away...
Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist of any kind. I got involved in astronomy a decade ago, and took a few classes 5 years ago, but my roles are overwhelmingly technical or operations, and when it comes to science, I am always the "village idiot" surrounded by PhD's. I'm not the guy who'll give a lecture about what the telescope's pointing at - I'm the guy who'll fix the telescope so it points at it in the first place. I'll take data - in this particular case, over a 10-year project, I'll probably rank #1 or #2 in terms of amount of time spent taking data - but I don't do the analysis or write the papers. My background was in things like systems administration, spamfighting, web development, etc., as one would expect of someone with my user number here.
Our current-generation workhorse instruments here at the telescope spit out tens of gigabytes per night as it is. The new camera we've been commissioning produces something like two gigabytes per exposure. And oh, yes, that data has to be archived, reduced, analyzed, etc., using things like IRAF or IDL. (Not my job.)
This, or at least some of these... although I can think of some you've missed. (PlaysForSure? Windows phones that couldn't be upgraded to new OS versions?)
The whole anti-trust mess could have been, should have been, a moment for Microsoft to really change course and do things differently and better. Timing-wise, it happened around the same time Steve Jobs returned to Apple and started killing off beige rectangular computers, and around the time Linux was starting to hit its stride and be seen as a viable alternative to commercial UNIXes. But other than ditching DOS-based Windows with all its vulnerabilities for VMS-based Windows which has turned out to somehow have plenty of them as well, and some of the time managing to arrive at a version that works reasonably well (2000, XP, 7)... I just haven't seen it.
Sure, Microsoft made people hate them and their products back in the day, but for the last 15 years it's been much more a problem of just failing to give people reasons to like the company or its products enough to perceive them as sensible options to whatever else is out there.
Well, gosh... considering my laptop contains stuff from my
(But that said, I'm about to rearrange some stuff on the drive so that if any representative of one government asks to access the machine, I log into the account that contains their stuff, and don't in the process give them trivially easy access to any stuff, passwords, etc. related to the work I do for the others...)
Miss enough payments, and all the circuitry inside your computer, your car, the home theater you got from Rent-A-Center, or whatever... *poof*
Of course, it'll put a lot of repo-men out of work...
Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.
I'd be very interested in knowing where this train came from and was going to, 'cos it sounds like it must not have been going where the perfectly good existing pipeline goes, or where any of the proposed bits would go.
Had to do this with MySpace once - their signup process accepted email address containing a + and their deletion process didn't.
After falsifying all the profile information and adjusting the age, my account left several publicly-visible comments about "Tom" and Rupert Murdoch...
*poof*
While not professional drivers Walker and the driver were on a race team together and did plenty of circuit races. The guy driving has a GT3 so is more than familiar with the class of cars in question. Each had many more hours logged racing than any pilot would have flying before being able to get his flight license. It's easy to blame the driver, and it could rightly end up that way. However, the question of whether the car malfunctioned or should not be considered street legal should also be asked.
Among other questions. I have a friend/colleague at NASA JPL who has a Cayenne, takes it to Porsche Owners Club "track days" in the area, is actually a driving instructor for POC. He's had it almost a year, and so far the only troubles have been an engine fire on the track (some fluid overflow is positioned on top of the engine, whoops) and whatever has caused the car to currently be undergoing "open transmission surgery." I asked him about the crash, and he said he doesn't at all run in the same circles as Walker or Rodas, but that Rodas is enough of a professional that the idea of a car getting away from him is very surprising, and there will probably also have to be autopsies (gruesome, given the state of the bodies post-fire) to see whether someone had a medical emergency resulting in the loss of control.
So you've got a very highly tuned car, known for being a bit "finicky" and not immune to various parts failing, driven by a highly trained driver who's also not immune to various parts of him failing. I think I'll wait for the official report of the investigation.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
