We have a KIA...

Not necessarily. Pre-industrial revolution most people lived in small enough communities that they would be recognised by many of the people they would meet in the street. The difference was that you would recognize the observers so it was a symmetric loss of privacy. With modern surveillance it is a one-way privacy loss: you have no idea who is doing the observing and yet they can look up all your details and track your every move which is a bit different from having the village gossip noticing your comings and goings.

People exhibiting responsible behaviour have no need of a system to watch them and enforce rules. They would not drive when they felt very tired because it would be dangerous to do so. The only reason for the insurance companies to want this is because they are not sure that you are a responsible person.

The problem is with a system like this is that it has to never give a false positive. Even if one time in a million it gives a false positive there will be thousands of people every year who will suddenly be unable to use their car for no good reason. It seems unlikely that the system is that accurate unless its threshold is set so high it triggers on the drivers snoring.

True but in most institutes unless you are an absolutely incredible researcher you have to have a reasonable level of teaching ability or you don't get tenure.

Experience of which industry? I'm a physics prof. Our grads work in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, IT, natural resources, academic and industrial research etc. in a diverse range of positions. University is supposed to give you deep understanding of a subject and a broad range of skills that are useful for a wide variety of positions both in academia and industry it is not a training scheme for job X. Being involved in research means that I can take the latest research results and bring them into lectures so the students learn about them and perhaps find ways to apply that knowledge wherever they end up. This is not only good for the student but good for society as a whole and someone from industry is unlikely to be able to do that.

Not entirely. Aristotle, Da Vinci etc were given leave to "explore". They were funded to do curiosity driven research as well as the "build a better widget" kind. Today's billionaires, very like governments, are focussed on getting better widgets rather than improving mankind's knowledge. The problem is that it can take 50-100 years before our new fundamental knowledge can be applied so by the time that they all wake up to find that applied science has slowed to a crawl it will be a long time before the damage can be undone.

You are completely missing the point. That's why I would want the blood test. It tells you that you will develop the disease BEFORE you have symptoms so you have several years to go travelling and visit family before your brain starts to shut down.

It's not so much "pending issues" I'd want to settle it's more a case of holidays. Having had a father who died of alzheimer's last year my mum was trapped at home with him for several years and got very few trips away. If my dad had known that he was going to develop the disease in a few years then they would likely have taken more holidays, visited family etc. a lot more because there was a limited window to do so. As it was it was about a one year window from diagnosis to my dad being too confused to travel.

This is not the sort of thing that you would do without knowing knowing that you were developing alzheimer's since, if you took all that travel at once, you'd be stuck at home for several years afterwards. So if there is still no cure when I get to the age to worry about alzheimer's I would certainly find a 3 year advance warning useful - it gives you time to visit the family and travel while you know what you are doing. It's also easier to put your affairs in order before you start to suffer from the symptoms since financial matters are hard enough to get right with your full mental faculties.

Understood but there is something very wrong with the safety culture in a company if one environment is very safe and the other kills thousands. Throwing enough resources at a problem can often fix it and if you have an appalling track record of safety in one area they may well be doing this to distract from their appalling record elsewhere. Would you take advice on how to improve a lecture from a school teacher with an appalling teaching record in the classroom? These are very different teaching environments which need difference teaching skills but there is enough similarity that any advice from someone who is really terrible in one area is highly suspect.

Great, so they have very safe labs but their production facilities kill thousands? This isn't a very convincing argument that we should be listening to them in matters of safety.

That might be a valid argument for an undergraduate course, it might even work for a theory research presentation but it is not possible to accurately show experimental data without being able to show slides. Even in the days before video projectors we used acetate slides created by heat transfer from a photocopy or laser printout. You cannot just sketch a data plot on a blackboard and expect anyone to take it seriously.

It seems the CTO of Dow is forgetting certain events which a company that Dow now owns caused a few years ago. If academic labs are 11 times more dangerous then somewhere we must have lost about 176,000 grad students which I think might have been noticed by now even if it were spread out over a few decades.

Besides academic labs are doing research which means that outcomes are not known and you are doing things which have not been done before. This is inherently more risky than repeating established procedures with minor variations. Even so I still don't see how academic labs can come anywhere close to the death toll from a single industrial accident, let alone 11 times it.

Yes because in the UK the exams are not written by the schools but written by a central exam board so that the standard is consistent across the country. The same happens here in Alberta, Canada. By redacting the questions the school is preventing the students from being able to get any marks for those questions. I the exam board produced a paper where sufficient questions were "objectionable" then every pupil at that school would automatically fail the exam.

While the exam board might be ok with it because it offers zero advantage to the students the school inspectors ought to be all over this since it is grossly unfair to the students and may prevent them getting into university. We already have laws which limit religious freedom when it comes to refusing medical treatment for children because it harms them and frankly we should have similar ones when it comes to science education for exactly the same reason.

Not that I know of but since I am an exacerbated physicist how about I try to explain our experiment with analogies and you can just imagine appropriate gestures to go with them? First though I should say that while SUSY is in trouble the article paints an overly pessimistic picture and gets a few things wrong.

The problem SUSY is trying to solve is that nature seems to be performing an amazing balancing act with the Higgs field. Now this is not just some ordinary balancing act that generates a few "oohs" and "aahs" from the audience like Idol Rock. According to the physics we know the chance of the Higgs boson having the mass is does is about one in 10^30. Those are about the same odds as some person winning a national lottery 5 times in a row and getting a lesser prize in the 6th week. By about the third or fourth win the "oohs" and "aahs" are replaced by a call to the serious fraud squad of the local police force with a request to figure out how the person is fixing the results of the lottery because the chance that this person is just "really lucky" are so astronomically small that nobody will believe it is just chance.

This is the situation we are in now with physics and the usual way nature solves balancing problems like this is with a symmetry that requires the balance be perfect. For example it is not just dumb luck that the electrical charge in the universe happens to cancel out so precisely - we were not just "really lucky" with our Big Bang! - there is a symmetry which gives conservation of electric charge which requires that the balance be exact. To solve the problem with the Higgs mass being so tiny the symmetry is called "Supersymmetry" - not because it flies around with a big S on its chest saving us from bad symmetries but because it is an extremely high level symmetry, perhaps even the highest possible in nature. In very simple terms you could describe it as a symmetry between force and matter.

This is also why I would disagree with the article when it says that the LHC must see supersymmtery or else it cannot solve our balance problem. This would be like saying that if you win the lottery twice that's ok but win it a third time and you are automatically guilty of a crime. Winning it 3 times in a row might be very, very unlikely but this is a continuous scale. 10TeV SUSY may be less natural than 1TeV but it is not so incredibly less likely that you know it cannot be right - sometimes 0.1% chances happen e.g. the angular size of the moon being almost exactly the same as the sun on Earth.

Supersymmetry is not a perfect symmetry because otherwise all the super-particles (which have fun names likes squarks, winos and sleptons) would then have the same mass as our Standard Model particles and we would have already seen them. So it has to be broken by some unknown mechanism which gives all the super particles higher masses which is why we have not yet seen them - our colliders do not yet have enough energy.

Another possibility is that the lightest super particle cannot decay. This would give us a high mass, stable particle which is an excellent candidate for dark matter. However this where the article is not correct in saying that the particle should have been seen by direct search experiments because one possibility is that it is a gravitino (a super partner of the graviton). This would mean that it only interacts via gravity and will not be seen in direct search experiments. This would be a real pain for physics because while we would know that we had produced them in the detector (because the other particles we can see will rebound from it) it will be very hard to prove that these were the Dark Matter astronomers see.

Probably out best chance to see supersymmetry, or indeed any new physics, will be the next three year run of the LHC. We will get almost twice the energy and about 5 times the luminosity. Certainly if we do not find supersymmetry or something else then the chances of us every seeing it with the LHC are dramatically lower after this point because increasing numbers of events at the same energy only slowing increase the regions you can search. So fingers crossed!

True but the rates of serious, life changing reactions to the vaccine are far, far smaller than the risk of serious, life changing complications from a disease like measles that can leave you blind brain damaged or 0.3% of the time dead. This horrible consequences of diseases is why we invented vaccines and why they were so widely adopted. The problem is that vaccines are now a victim of their own success because nobody gets measles now so there is no understanding of how horrible these diseases can be.

If we want to persuade people to get vaccinated educate them about what the disease the vaccine protects against will do to them. The choice is not whether or not they want to risk the vaccine the choice is whether they want to risk the disease or the vaccine. It's a lot easier to judge a relative risk like that than some nebulous promises that the vaccine is pretty safe.