I can't speak to the second point, but I know that converting a modern office tower to residential space is difficult because apartments need to have windows. Modern office buildings, designed after artificial lighting and HVAC reduced the need to use windows for light and ventilation, have large square footprints, so there is a lot of "dark" interior space without access to windows that is difficult to develop into functional residential units. Older office buildings that were designed with narrower or "L"-shaped footprints are easier to convert.

This New York Times article has a nice discussion of the challenges: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

It's not just about the overall radioactivity of the sample. It's about the relative concentration of different radionuclides. Some radionuclides bioaccumulate strongly, while others do not. That's why you want mass spectrometry. Not to measure the radioactivity of the sample, but to see if the radioactivity is coming from radionuclides that pose a bioaccumulation hazard or others that do not. That information helps determine the "acceptable" level of radioactivity for release into the environment.

Haha this is not commercial incentive at all. In the situation you propose (which is more or less accurate), the scientist is rewarded for using public resources to produce scientific results (papers published) that are useful to other scientists and to the public. Isn't that what we want?

This is much different than using public resources to produce private commercial profits without benefit to the public. The scientist in your case is only rewarded if they publish (make public) their work. This is how it is supposed to work.

I think the problem here is that you are making arguments by analogy between two different, very complicated enterprises. There are a few superficial similarities between the two activities, but they are complicated and different enough that any argument by superficial analogy is going to be badly flawed, as is yours. For most government contracting, effort is back-loaded on a project. That is, most of the effort occurs only after a contact is rewarded and money is committed. Also, production costs are larger than proposal costs and there is opportunity for very large financial upside for successful projects, which underwrites the costs of failed projects. All of these characteristics are inverted for JWST-type research. The "compensation" (publication of a paper) comes only at the very end, and is not large enough to offset much failure. There is very little carryover profit in science; the reward for success is reputation and the privilege to keep doing science. For JWST, there is large effort front loading. You need to 1) Develop a grant; 2) Collect the data (this is the only place the JWST is being used); 3) analyze the data; 4) publish the paper. Most of the work occurs during steps 1 and 2 before any government support, but compensation/reward only comes at step 4.

I don't think you should find it offensive that scientists get some special treatment in their areas of expertise. Scientists typically train for over a decade to earn the qualifications they need to competently perform research and use equipment like JWST. Are you mildly offended that only doctors are allowed to practice medicine or that that only licensed engineers are allowed to design bridges? If not, then you should not be offended that scientists (who typically train for longer than any of the foregoing professions but earn much less in salary) get special access to scientific resources.

Scientists receive no income from their publications in major journals. Typically, they pay the journal to have their work published after it has been reviewed for rigor by other scientists (who volunteer their time to do the review). So there is no financial incentive to publish research. Publishing is only about communicating new science and getting credit for the work.

I think you are correct that scientists are after recognition, but that does not fall under the commercial incentives this thread is purportedly about.

I also think that you are correct that there ARE worrisome commercial incentives in other fields, but we're not talking about other fields, we're talking about astronomy that uses JWST.

To the contrary, it is entirely different. You are trying to draw a comparison between volunteer efforts in free time (programmers contributing to open source) and primary occupation (scientists doing science).

Most programmers who contribute to open source do so in their free time. So if their open source project blows up, it definitely sucks but they can still pay rent and put food on the table. This is in part what enables the amazing altruism that characterizes much of open source. For nearly all scientists, research is their primary occupation. So if their research program blows up, they need to find a new line of work.

I will note that many professional scientists also volunteer to benefit society in their free time by doing things like running science education and outreach programs, public science talks/demos, etc. That would be the more accurate parallel with professional programmers who volunteer their time to open source.

One thing that puzzles me about this argument is the claim of commercial benefit. How do you think these astronomers are going to commercialize results from JWST? It is a telescope that peers out into deep space. If we were talking about chemistry or materials science I could see the argument, but there is very little commercial potential for infrared images of deep space.

JWST isn't just spitting out raw data on autopilot like some kind of chart recorder in space. It's being precisely targeted in space and time based on the recommendations and hypotheses of scientists who spend decades developing the experience and reputation they need to make good use of the resource. Without scientists volunteering their time to write proposals about what to measure with JWST, the instrument is useless. So a limited period of exclusivity can be viewed as a way of rewarding the scientists who front-loaded effort into developing plans for how to use the telescope, with the full expectation that the results they produce will be freely accessible to the public.

I think there is a misconception here. Your comment seems to suggest that anyone can walk up to JWST and out pops useful data upon request. This is not the case. The scientists who collect data on JWST first have to spend, typically, months developing a specific plan about where to point the telescope and what to record. There is intense competition to use the telescope, so you have to put months of work in to even submit a proposal and there is no guarantee your proposal will be accepted. Without a community of scientists developing these proposals, JWST is essentially worthless because nobody would know what to do with it. So, a limited period of exclusivity is a kind of compensation for investing the time and effort in developing a proposal that wasn't guaranteed to be accepted.

It's much different from open source software. Science and open source are in some ways similar: people do both because they love it, believe in it, and want to move us forward. But there are also major differences.

Scientists who pay mind to the competitive aspect of their field very rarely (but not never) have an ulterior commercial motive. They are just trying to survive. A scientist's whole career depends on their publication record. Reputable journals won't publish work that has already been published. Otherwise there would lots of duplicate work and less motivation to do new, harder, groundbreaking science. So, if someone "beats you to the punch," you can't publish. If you can't publish, you can't successfully compete for research funding. If you can't successfully compete for research funding, your career as an active scientist is over.

Another distinction between open source and science is that you can meaningfully contribute to open source software in your free time with a laptop and an internet connection. This is not possible in modern science. To do work that pushes the boundaries, you need expensive things like lasers, supercomputers, graduate students, and space telescopes. Nobody is going to give a weekend warrior with some spare time access to this stuff because it is too precious. If you want access, you need to compete for it. To successfully compete for it, you need a credible publication record. And here we are again where we began.

I will wrap up with the matter of publicly funded stuff being publicly available. I agree that this should be the case. However, it is important to appreciate that science goes nowhere without good questions. It is really hard to come up with good questions, which are generally formatted as a research proposal. I think it is reasonable to give the scientist who came up with the research proposal that motivated data collection of JWST some period of limited exclusivity on the data (6 months? 1 year?) so that they are able to develop publications and get credit for their work. The truth is that much of the scientific work has already been done by the time the telescope is collecting data. What movies like "Don't Look Up" or "Contact" don't show you is that before the astronomers go to the telescope to sit in the dark before screens full of data appear, they (or their PI) spent months carefully developing a plan/proposal for where they were going to point the telescope and what they were going to measure. Without that plan, the telescope is not very useful.

"Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outrage"

Is it a large building? A lot of buildings use this arrangement because alternating the location of the men's and women's bathrooms minimizes the average distance-to-bathroom. For example, if the men's bathroom on my floor is on the north side and I work on the south side, going up one floor to the south-side bathroom there would be faster than going to the north-side bathroom on the other end of my floor.

Mark is already rich. At this point, he's doing it out of narcissism or some other non-financial reason.

"screeners will stop passengers for additional security if they match certain pieces of known intelligence" = carte blanche for profiling by race, religion, ethnicity, etc., especially when the pieces of intelligence are known only to the screeners.

Vaccines and antibiotics are fundamentally different (flu shots and other vaccines are not part of the superbug problem), but the mindset remains the same.