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Education

Submission + - German science minister stripped of her PhD (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a move likely to have major political implications, the University of Düsseldorf has revoked the doctoral degree of Germany’s science and education minister, Annette Schavan. The commitee investigating allegations of plagiarism came to the conclusion that she "systematically and deliberately claimed as her own intellectual achievements which she had in fact not produced herself". Schavan wants to appeal the decision in court and has not resigned from her post so far.

Comment Re:Funny that this questions comes up now (Score 1) 470

by hweimer (#42812039) Attached to: Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?

This however is a full mathematical description of how to get from the Schroedinger equation back to Hamilton mechanics. I.e. it exemplifies the correspondence principle. Care to show me some papers that can do the same?

Start with any introductory material on the theory of decoherence, such as the book by Joos and Zeh.

Comment Re:Funny that this questions comes up now (Score 1) 470

by hweimer (#42807575) Attached to: Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?

Anyhow, this dude from down under found a pretty astounding approach to the correspondence principle [wikipedia.org] (i.e. how QM gives rise) to classical mechanics in a mathematical framework originally developed by Steven Weinberg. Something the latter astoundingly overlooked. The talkback page on this math can be found here [wikipedia.org]. The article itself meanwhile has been deleted. Please note: Not because the math is wrong, but because the citation record has been deemed to be too low by the editors.

I like Wikipedia-bashing as much as everyone else, but in this case there is hardly anything to complain about. The Weinberg paper talks about nonlinear extensions to QM, which are widely believed to be nonexistent. So this guy found a statement on an obscure theory almost everyone believes to be wrong anyway, and you expect this to be notable enough for a Wikipedia article?

Comment Re:This ain't the first time ... (Score 1) 470

by hweimer (#42806873) Attached to: Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?

We have no falsifiable, measurable, or experimentally verifiable explanation for gravity, spacetime, or other fundamental forces.

Semiclassical gravity, i.e., couple the metric to the expectation values of the energy-momentum tensor. Granted, it's not pretty, but it contains all the physics we know and is not refuted by a single experiment.

Comment Re:The real problem (Score 1) 321

by hweimer (#42128299) Attached to: Virus Eats School District's Homework

While it's true that OSX has way less malware than Windows, the main cause of malware infections is the users who click anything that's offered to them without thinking.

No. Any system that can be botched more or less accidentally is a complete failure. While GNU/Linux and to a lesser extent OS X are far from perfect, they make it considerably harder to run untrusted code, simply because this is an operation typically not needed during daily use.
Government

Submission + - 130,000 Scientists Warn Against EU Research Budget Cuts (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by
hweimer
hweimer writes: "In leading up to the European Union summit deciding on its future budget, 130,000 scientists (including 44 Nobel laureates) are warning against cuts on the research budget. In 2006, EU research funding was already slashed by 30%, much more than cuts to sectors such as agriculture or infrastructure development. If you are a scientist, there is still time to join the open letter to the EU member states governments."
Government

Submission + - How Airport Security Is Killing Us (businessweek.com)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: This week marks the beginning of the busiest travel time of the year. For millions of Americans, the misery of holiday travel is made considerably worse by a government agency ostensibly designed to make our journeys more secure. Created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Transportation Security Administration has largely outlived its usefulness, as the threat of a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland continues to recede. These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road.

According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion. Mueller and Stewart estimate that government spending on homeland security over the 2002-11 period accounted for around $580 billion of that total.

If Americans really care about saving lives this Thanksgiving travel season, for goodness’ sake, don’t beef up airport security any further. Slashing the TSA will ensure that more people live to spend future holidays with loved ones.

Comment Re:Yes, it WAS about GPL, in a roundabout way. (Score 1) 394

by hweimer (#41990733) Attached to: Red Hat Developer Demands Competitor's Source Code

It depends how they do it. If they've done it by making their additions a binary kernel module, they've not (clearly) broken the GPL.

I think you have a hard time proving in court that your product is not a derivative work when it's just a piece of binary waste once you take away the GPLed portions.

Lots of vendors ship binary only kernel modules. Can you imagine how screwed up things would get if the courts ruled right now that binary kernel modules are considered as GPL tainted when loaded into a GPL piece of software?

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted
0

Not very much, apparently.

Comment Re:is it shipping to customers ? (Score 1) 394

by hweimer (#41990171) Attached to: Red Hat Developer Demands Competitor's Source Code

This is a very different case than Oracle v Google. Google was distributing their own implementation of the Java API, without using Oracle's code. Here, however, RTS is shipping a copy of the Linux kernel. Their defense seems to be that they are somehow exempt from the requirements under GPLv2 because they ship their modifications as a module, but I'm a bit skeptical whether this would actually hold up in court.

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 143

by hweimer (#41967481) Attached to: Supersymmetry Theory Dealt a Blow

There is no single experiment ruling out such a model.

There are conceptual problems. Such as where did the space come from in your model? Or is space curved by your quantum effects (such as a non-zero vacuum energy)?

Spacetime itself does not have to come from somewhere as an emergent concept. It could just be there as it's currently the case with either GR or QFT. Spacetime could get curved via the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor. No mathemetical ambiguities, no contradiction to experiments, and fully consistent with both GR and the SM. However, I would hardly call this a "unified" description of all forces. Nevertheless, arguing against such a description of nature on purely aesthetic grounds is a bit shaky, IMO.

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 143

by hweimer (#41965247) Attached to: Supersymmetry Theory Dealt a Blow

The fundamental problem with the standard model is gravity. In terms of particle interactions, they have it covered via the Higgs particle and gravitinos. But the standard model doesn't have curvature of space.

But you can do quantum field theory in curved spacetime, i.e., without quantizing the gravitational field. There is no single experiment ruling out such a model. So I don't think gravity is a problem for the SM, it's rather our desire to find a unified description of all forces in nature. But of course, nobody knows whether such a unified theory will be correct in the end.

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