Posts by Paul Kinsler 1054 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007
However, someone has to agree to supervise the PhD, and most very likely wouldn't want the drag of an insufficiently capable student. It's not like some supervising Professor X gets to pocket the fees.
"Opposite charge" would be better than "spin" ... at least for sufficiently general notions of charge (e.g. arguably dated usages such as where lepton number <-> lepton charge).
The problem with using "spin" is that - for the symmetry-based "spin", unless the object is spin zero, there is both a total spin and spin components; and the total spin is always positive, and the sign of the component is irrelevant to the particle/antiparticle determination.
Using "charge" in the generalized sense is also confusing, given that you might conflate/confuse it with (only) electrical charge; and not the specific implication of "oppositely charged to the normal (i.e. non-anti) version of the particle".
A most fun paper; I'm impressed. It's a shame there isn't (afaics) a public version.
But there is a notebook thing related to the paper at
https://zenodo.org/record/8116413
or perhaps better here
https://github.com/yaroslavsobolev/trajectoids/tree/v1.0
Or even this "colab" page...
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1XZ7Lf6pZu6nzEuqt_dUCHormeSbCCMlP#scrollTo=EgzSY__vVWVr
Earth orbit GNSS satellites broadcast their orbital parameters [1] at regular intervals as a matter of course; so it is reasonable to assume lunar ones would do likewise; so doing most of the hard work for your navigation device. Although perhaps lunar ones might need more frequent nav broadcasts, the constellation might need more ongoing orbit-management, and perhaps there might be a different scheme for orbit description, ... but the navigation device would not have to guess or estimate orbit-like trajectories; just compute them from what is provided.
[1] GPS, Gallileo, and BeiDou broadcast orbital parameter as an axis length, angles, eccentricities, and all that sort of thing; but Glonass broadcast positions, velocities, and accelerations, which you then have to integrate. See e.g. https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/GNSS_Book/ESA_GNSS-Book_TM-23_Vol_I.pdf
Nearly. It looks like latex to me. So the {} are used to group things together, so the several characters can be put into a single subscript. The $ signs are to delimit the math mode; since apparently they want ordinary-font elements, but need math-mode for subscripts.
If you used e.g. A$_ax$, without the braces, you would get "A"-subscript-"a", followed by an "x"; but with A$_{ax}$ you get "A"-subscript-"ax"
I still have an old laptop with a built-in modem (but actually a winmodem, ick), and it came with quite the variety of novelty connectors for different phone systems, I suppose they are still somewhere in box with old serial cables &etc.
Well, me too. I started with Slackware because that's the Linux I'd seen Bruce W using, and at that time (maybe 1993/4) there weren't a lot of alternatives.I think maybe I didn't get round to my own from-scratch install until '95-ish though...
When I did my physics PhD it was a standing joke that we should just say we did a bit of modelling...
...
... but whether it happened to be modelling of laser trapping systems, optical parametric oscillators, soliton propagation, or whatever else, should remain unsaid.
As a scientist, I never much minded the use of boffin: even though it generally seems overloaded with old fashioned and inaccurate stereotypes, I never really felt that it was being used in a negative way (especially around here), and so was (or would be) happy to let it pass.
Others may differ of course. Some (or perhaps many) nowadays do not seem to mind "geek" or "nerd"; although to me they were initially experienced as terms of insult or abuse, and the modern (arguably positive) usage doesn't sit very easily. But such is language.
IIUC, it is rather that it only generates pseudo-infomation; i.e. text or other content which might *seem* authoritative, but whose various constituent parts, if taken individually, might be true ... or not ... all according to some poorly characterized probabilities.
This sort of thing might be fine as a rough starting point, but it really does need to be checked and corrected in some way before it might be considered trustworthy.
And now I think about it, for things such as citations (whether of the the legal Hanbury vs Brown-Twiss type, or the academic W. Blackstone, Journal of Things 22 (1955) type), their content is rarely that explicit unless you check, so it is not clear to me how an ordinary ML training process can be reasonably be expected to "understand" any more about what citations are than the way they appear in the text. To fix this, I guess, you have to train the AI to also follow and ingest the cited material, and not just the citation-as-bare-text itself.
Indeed, it does nothing but make stuff up. As I understand it, if some fact was often present (or heavily weighted) in its training set, then GPT might indeed be likely to get it right (e.g. what is the capital of France?)....but unfortunately there are lots of obscure and rarely repeated facts, which will not leave such a marked footprint, so GPT instead ends up just generating something with a plausible linguistic structure.
At a slight tangent, here's an interesting read on AI that I just found down a rabbit hole:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7PumeYTDPfBTp3i7/the-waluigi-effect-mega-post
Hmm. I've heard these LLMs described as "stochastic parrots", i.e. they are like the proverbial infinite monkeys, but ones with language-appropriate statistical biases.
So they *might* reconstruct a source within some finite sample of runs; but they would not do so reliably, and could not do so to order.
In which case, what level of reproduction fidelity - and what reliability of obtaining such fidelity - would (or should, or might, ...) constitute legal grounds?
Are you sure? To me they have slightly different implications. I might test something in the lab, or on the production line, to see if (e.g.) it met the specs; but "trialed" to me implied that you have actually used it in its intended working environment, and measured performance there (e.g. "sea trials"). Thus a "trial" is a "test", but a test is not necessarily a trial.
I'm not sure about "Architected", however. I think it hints (or tries to) at perhaps a higher-level or more sophisticated attitude to design; but then it also suggests that its user it trying to use fancy-sounding words to impress. For me, I think this latter meaning would usually win out. Especially if "carefully architected foundations" and little else is said, as in the quote.
Just because you shouldn't *publish* based on a "quick hack prototype" doesn't mean that it wasn't a useful step in the process or working out the scope of the working version (or whatever you want to call it). Indeed, I have found that trying to write some initial code can even bring unforseen aspects of a problem to light.
And on the more general point, we need to remember that scientific codes cover a very wide range of approaches, from the short to the long, from stand-alone codes to ones that rely heavily on library functions, and ones that vary greatly in the rigour of their design.
One particular thing that does, in my experience, need to be borne in mind when tempted to criticise scientific code is that for a reasonable fraction (I might be inclined to suggest even most), their usage needs to be treated somewhat like chainsaw juggling. To use them, you need to understand what it does, why it does it, what it is intended to represent; and benchmark where possible against non-computational results; and in particular to always be ready stop and to question any and all output for signs of misbehaviour. These are not artifacts that are in anyway designed or intended to be used by the untrained, the uncritical, or the non-specialist.
Otherwise, for what it is worth, and also as a research scientist, I am broadly in agreement with LionelB's comments here.
In general, yes. But there may be some parts of the many various types of computation going on in a weather simulation that could benefit, and be done faster - e.g. Fourier transforms. But it's not so clear to me how much of an overall speedup this could give, ... you'd have to ask a weather simulator :-)
Well, FWIW, this particular member is a bit ambivalent about the whole thing, but I'm not going to get in a froth about it.
Even if I personally have no objection, if underrepresented groups really /are/ put off by the whole "boffin" thing, maybe it is best avoided.
Sometimes it is things like tone of voice, body language, and context that let you know whether something is an insult; in such cases the dictionary meaning of the word can be secondary or irrelevant. And words whose dictionary meaning is insulting can be used affectionately.
Somewhat at a tangent, but not entirely irrelevant: I recall being present at a dispute where in one phrase a swear word was deliberately omitted, but with sufficient emphasis, so that the target not only knew what had been meant, but even insisted that the missing word was actually used.
Of course, different people will have different opinions on these names. For myself, although "boffin" seems a bit old fashioned, it has never had particularly negative associations, which were largely along the lines of "some sort of sciencey type, who we don't really understand, but has done something clever" - and that may have just saved the day in some old war film or 50s scifi movie - and so I would not mind particularly being called a boffin.
On the other hand, I consider "geek" or "nerd" to be essentially terms of insult or abuse, specifically because of how those words were being used when I first heard them. I therefore am not particularly keen on their current widespread usage, but seeing as nowadays - at least in most media output - the implication seems not to be abusive in intent, I see little point in making a big issue of it. And I certainly meet people who say that for them "geek" or "nerd" have never had any negative associations, and who will happily identify as one.
Interesting. I notice that the one at KCL is a postgraduate degree (as it seems most professional doctorates are), and in the KCL case "Trainees spend three days a week on supervised clinical practice placements and two days a week are dedicated to teaching, study and research"; so apparently (there) it does seem to involve some research. On that basis, I'd be surprised if cohort in a given course numbered into the hundreds of students, as is typical of undergraduate courses, but I suppose it is possible.
By all means complain about publishers all you like; I am not defending them.
The author of the post wrote "doctorate" (which means PhD[1]), and they did not write (the generic) "degree", even if that was perhaps what they meant. I was replying to a post saying "doctorate"; and was not making a comment on the article, which I would have done in a new thread. Unfortunately, whilst at university, I studied physics rather than psychics, and so in this case was unable to guess that was *written* was not what was *meant*.
As regards "Electronic loans are limited to single-digit copies too" - please do note that I was careful to say "the availability of hardcopy texts is not the constraint".
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[1] As it happens, there are, in some institutions, the possibility of qualifications such as a "Doctor of Science" or the like, which might also reasonably be considered a "doctorate", but such tend to be quite exotic, and to be even more rarified than even a PhD. Not to mention those which have their own names for what is their equivalent to the PhD.
First, note that I was replying to a post which explicitly said "that you need to get your doctorate".
"200 people" do not take the same phd ("doctorate") course in any university context that I have seen. Do you even know what a doctorate is?
And even so, there is now this thing called electronic loans, so the availability of hardcopy texts is not the constraint.
I would not think that 1.6M£ is some sort of national coffee and biscuit budget, unless the nation is rather small, hates coffee and biscuits, or both.
E.g. if everyone spends an average of £1 a week on c+b, that's approx £50/year each, and so ...
It likely isn't enough, once you take into account non-salary employment expenses. But MAC SciTech is not a university, and likely they're already paying somebody to do a related, similar, or even exactly the same thing, and this extra support will part-fund that salary and/or pay for equipment or other expenses.
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