Elevation from GPS alone is accurate to about +/- 15 meters, which isn't great but good enough to save lives.

Meanwhile my phone not only has a GPS that can read position and elevation but also has enough storage to recall a detailed street map of every city in the world, its only a few gigs of information... so why can't they just do this as an app already for small planes?

That's because banking executives prevent ordinary citizens from making controlled descents into financial ruin... oh wait never mind, they don't do that either.

Apparently the bar associations actually spend a pretty significant amount lobbying against tort reforms. Such reforms would affect their freedom to operate, which is arguably excessive... just look at the Great American Pants Suit (Pearson v Chung), a loose-canon lawyer can basically bankrupt anyone they care to.

I am skeptical of the article's claim.

When an editor reads a paper and feels that the author is misinformed or making incorrect assumptions, they may respond by requesting the author to cite certain papers, with the intention that by forcing the author to read the papers, they will become better informed and correct their erroneous assumptions.

Meanwhile, the author, not believing themselves to be wrong, refuses to acknowledge the suggested references and considers the material "superfluous" to the work. As we know from research on wrongness, the party in the wrong will rather assume the other is either ignorant or evil before actually considering the evidence. The article suggests that "junior faculty are most targeted" for this superfluous citation pressure, which is sufficient but not a necessary argument, as junior faculty are also not as well read nor as experienced as their senior peers (who are also more likely to be journal editors).

Corruption tends to run deep, rather than broad. Which businesses game the SEO metrics the hardest? The ones selling false product (fake viagra, make money at home...). The researchers that are caught fabricating data--turns out they fabricated *everything* in the last 20 years of publication. The corporations that game the economy--they game it so hard they go from being worth billions to being worth nothing when we finally discover their entire operation is a house of cards from the basement to the roof. Most people have a decent sense of morality, which is why society gets a long okay for the most part in spite of the relative lack of close oversight.

Returning to the article, with nearly 500 individual responses naming journals, they have broad disagreement about which journals are responsible (most journals only being named once). I claim that if this form of corruption were being practiced, there would be a relatively small number of journals that would be readily named by many people (and those would also be most likely pseudo-scientific garbage or anti-scientific propaganda).

Leap seconds are not stupid, basing a time scale on the rotation rate of an unstable object is stupid.

In 2010 China produced 130,000 tons of neodymium. The next largest producer was India with 2700 tons and then Brazil 550 tons.

Source, USGS report: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2011-raree.pdf

China produces 97% of rare-earths and is using significant export restrictions to create artificial scarcity to drive up the price and gain political power: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/concern-as-china-clamps-down-on-rare-earth-exports-1855387.html

Rare-earths (which are not particularly rare) must be extracted from, e.g., Bastnäsite by leeching with acid (e.g. hydrochloric is used in the USA productions but in China they just cook it in sulfuric acid) followed by a solvent extraction and various other steps. The Bastnäsite contains a mix of various rare-earths including thorium, which is radioactive. Thats not necessarily a problem but it does need to be managed. EPA shut down the Molycorp mine at Mountain Pass due to accidental discharge of radioactive waste.

The current designs for wind-turbines and electric cars rely heavily on neodymium magnets, without which they would operate at a fraction of the efficiency. Neodymium extraction is extremely toxic, and for the past decade or more nearly all of it is done in China where the environmental side effects and worker safety issues are largely ignored.

We need to develop methods of neodymium extraction that are safe and inexpensive to compete with China. Or, to develop new types of generators and motors that don't need permanent magnets, e.g., switched reluctance motors (which are very non-linear and difficult to control but it is possible).

Green tech is also not necessarily helping our economy (in the US at least), solar panel installation is a growing industry but not solar panel production. China dominates the market in green technology manufacturing, in part due to their forward-looking strategies such as subsidies for domestic polysilicon production and the export restrictions on rare-earth materials.

There are already "tool lending libraries" in many cities (well at least they are in several cities near where I live), they are managed by the library system and allow residents to check out all sorts of things including drills, nailguns, post-hole diggers, etc. There are a great many tools that a person might benefit from using but would be wasteful to outright buy.

A 3D printer, shopbot or CNC milling machine would be the equivalent of a reference section in the tool library--big tools you can use on site but can't take home. Its a fairly logical extension, although in practice the amount of skill required to use these tools properly and successfully isn't trivial and it remains to be seen how much benefit they could actually provide to the general public. Makerspaces tend to be frequented by rather geeky folk.

Depends what you mean by "cheap" and what you mean by "taxpayer". Where I live red-light camera tickets are about $500 and 90% of them are issued for rolling on a right turn (which was made into policy because they were not making enough money issuing tickets otherwise)

Using a bike or walking won't be anonymous for long either, as they are now rolling out face recognition and gait recognition software as well. These are already commercially available for security systems and undoubtedly already in use on the street in some places.

Since local government can't get their act together to raise taxes by legitimate means they have increasingly turned to devices such as these to raise revenue for the city (and for the corporations that run them).