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Submission + - Physical sciences contribute 22% of economy (universityworldnews.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: According to a report published in Australit — http://www.science.org.au/scie... — physical sciences, including core disciplines of physics, chemistry, earth sciences and the mathematical sciences have contributed around 22% of the Australian economy The direct contribution of the advanced physical and mathematical sciences is equal to 11% of the economy while additional and flow-on benefits add another 11%, bringing the total benefits to almost A$300 billion a year The report also notes that this estimate is likely to be conservative, and sets out several other areas of benefit that are harder to measure The report carefully considered the pathways by which the advanced physical and mathematical sciences yielded economic benefits and the Australian community’s continuing commitment to the advanced physical and mathematical sciences would be needed to ensure that the benefits from what is essentially a global scientific enterprise will continue to accrue to the Australian economy The economists who prepared the report conducted industry consultations to determine the importance of the physical sciences to Australia’s 506 industry classes. They outline the economic contribution of the sciences to the top 10 industry groups in an appendix to the report There are three distinct sources of useful knowledge, the report says: the core disciplines of mathematics, physics and chemistry can provide useful knowledge individually and it takes banking as an example: "“Part of the banking industry relies on complex mathematically based models that support risk and investment decisions, but on no other science input. We estimate that 3.6% of Australia’s economic output is produced from inputs that embody useful knowledge from a single core discipline” The economists also estimate that 7.3% of Australia’s economic output is produced from inputs that embody useful knowledge from multiple disciplines. So the multidisciplinary nature of science means that the total impact of science is greater than the sum of the contributions of the individual sciences

Submission + - Arizona Senator Proposes Law to Require Mandatory Church Attendance

Submitted by Pikoro
Pikoro writes: Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R), during a committee meeting, put forth a proposal to submit a law requiring mandatory church attendance.

Allen explained that without a "moral rebirth" in the country, more people may feel the need to carry a weapon.
"I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America," she said.

It's a sad sign of the times when Senators have forgotten that one of the founding pillars of the United States is separation of church and state.

Submission + - Rebuilding the PDP-8...with a Raspberry Pi (hackaday.io)

Submitted by braindrainbahrain
braindrainbahrain writes: Hacker Oscarv wanted a PDP-8 mini computer. But a buying a real PDP-8 was horribly expensive and out of the question. So Oscarv did the next best thing: use a Raspberry Pi as the computing engine and interface it to a replica PDP-8 front panel, complete with boatloads of fully functional switches and LEDs.

Submission + - US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How to Make a Hydrogen Bomb 3

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, another product of American ingenuity, that easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NYT that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. “They wanted to eviscerate the book,” says Ford. “My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’ ” For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.

Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford’s book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book “contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb.” “Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions,” says Ford, “it would destroy the book.”

Submission + - Southern California Edison Lays off 500 workers- replaces with H1B Visa workers. (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Maxo-Texas
Maxo-Texas writes: California Edison workers are being laid off and replaced with Infosys H1B visa workers. They will be required to train their Infosys replacements in order to receive their severance pay and they will be required to sign NDA's in order to receive their full payment.

This violates the premise of H1B visa's-- that the workers are needed to fill jobs for which employees cannot be found. The story is being widely reported on conservative talk radio as well so this event may actually bridge the political gap and bring about bipartisan corrections to the H1B programs

Full details:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Submission + - Jupiter destroyed 'super-Earths' in our early solar system (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If Jupiter and Saturn hadn’t formed where they did—and at the sizes they did—as the disk of dust and gas around our sun coalesced, then our solar system would be a very different and possibly more hostile place, new research suggests. Computer models reveal that in the solar system’s first 3 million years or so, gravitational interactions with Jupiter, Saturn, and the gas in the protoplanetary disk would have driven super-Earth–sized planets closer to the sun and into increasingly elliptical orbits. In such paths, a cascade of collisions would have blasted any orbs present there into ever smaller bits, which in turn would have been slowed by the interplanetary equivalent of atmospheric drag and eventually plunged into the sun. As Jupiter retreated from its closest approach to the sun, it left behind the mostly rocky remnants that later coalesced into our solar system’s inner planets, including Earth.

Submission + - MuseScore 2.0 Released (musescore.org)

Submitted by rDouglass
rDouglass writes: MuseScore, the open source desktop application for music notation, has released MuseScore 2.0 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This release represents the culmination of four years of development, including technical contributions from over 400 people. In addition to a completely new UI, top features include linked parts (good for pieces with many instruments), guitar tablature, flexible chord symbols, and fret diagrams. The program integrates directly with the MuseScore.com online library of scores, and music written with the application can be displayed and played using the MuseScore mobile app.

Comment Re:Today's youth collapsed the Roman Empire! (Score 2) 353

"... this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality"

- Plato on writing in the Phaedrus dialogue

Submission + - Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting in US

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: CNN reports that when asked how to offset the influence of big money in politics, President Barack Obama suggested it's time to make voting a requirement. "Other countries have mandatory voting," said Obama "It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly. "The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups. There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls." At least 26 countries have compulsory voting, according to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison. Less than 37% of eligible voters actually voted in the 2014 midterm elections, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts. That means about 144 million Americans — more than the population of Russia — skipped out. Critics of mandatory voting have questioned the practicality of passing and enforcing such a requirement; others say that freedom also means the freedom not to do something.

Submission + - LaTeX is Dead

Submitted by Jace Harker
Jace Harker writes: For decades, LaTeX was the tool of choice for writing scientific articles. But LaTeX's strength and weakness is its focus on the "page" as a unit of content. In today's web-centric world, is LaTeX still useful? Or will it be replaced by other, better writing systems?

Submission + - Elon Musk On Autonomous Cars: Could Human Drivers Eventually Be Outlawed? (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the highlights of the opening keynote at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose (GTC), was NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang's special guest, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk and the "fireside chat" the two participated in. With NVIDIA's focus on deep learning and machine vision technologies for cars, much of the talk centered around autonomous vehicles and the notion that someday they may be so reliable, that they're actually safer on the road than cars operated by humans. Think about it. Is the idea of a vehicle that recognizes distance, velocity, weather conditions and real-time changes, faster than a human can, all that far-fetched? In the interview shot here, Musk even thinks we may get to a day when human drivers could be outlawed in favor of an all autonomous driving society.
Science

Speaking a Second Language May Change How You See the World 274

Posted by Soulskill from the i-can-see-clearly-now,-der-regen-ist-weg dept.
sciencehabit writes: Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study (abstract). The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible.

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