I get so tired of the kind of hyperbole that opens this article. If an untrained person deliberately dives into 28F water mostly they get cold and quickly get out. How do I know this? Am I a physiologist? No. Am I survival expert? No. I took a trip to Antarctica and the tour operator let passengers dive into the water, swim to a nearby platform and get out. The group of braves souls was about a dozen in number and aged from mid-teens to mid-50's. I even have pictures.
Yes, if you unexpectedly fall into freezing water you can involuntarily inhale and drown. Diving in, swimming a few strokes and climbing out is nowhere near invariably fatal.
I did it. Can confirm. My legs stopped working and it was a sensation like I’ve never felt before, but literally everyone was fine. And everyone did it.
I am an Extra class licensee in the US and while I have a lot of respect for the Ham community, deeply entrenched thinking places the future of amateur radio in jeopardy. If we only allow CW and SSB phone as truly open and accessible operating modes a whole world of technical innovation and integration will be lost. While the letter of the FCC rules might exclude some of the more recent digital modes listed, the traffic is not encrypted. With all the strong encryption out there in the world, it's hard to buy amateur radio as a threat to national security unless we're worried that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to take up arms against the republic.
To me it sounds like some operators have sour grapes because they can't immediately listen to everybody's traffic. In short I support Ham moving forward and not becoming even more antiquated than it is.
I do think the headline of the article is poorly written as I don't think this is about spectrum allocation in any way.
The article is rather badly written, but the actual petition for rulemaking is broadly reasonable. The proposed language change to 97.309 is as follows:
An amateur station transmitting a RTTY or data emission using a digital code specified in this paragraph may use any technique whose technical characteristics have been documented publicly, and the protocol used can be be monitored, in it’s entirety, by 3rd parties, with freely available open source software, for the purpose of facilitating communications
As I see it, the essential goal is to close the loophole whereby theoretically-open but practically-closed protocols can be used on amateur frequencies.
There is a broader debate in amateur radio about the use of automated data stations and the possible increase in the bandwidth limit, both of which represent delicate balances. There's clearly a cohort of geriatrics who want to keep double sideband voice and ban data, but there are also genuine issues with the behaviour of some data mode users.
A significant number of WSJT users are now transmitting at high power, creating significant issues with interference. WinLink is an absolute nuisance - it has always been illegal in the UK and I really can't see how it's legal in the US.
My father worked for Aerojet General in the early 60's. I have clear memories as a child of hearing thunderous booms while the northern California sky was a cloudless deep blue. I remember the sound as loud but by no means intolerable. I do not know how far the flights were occurring from where our house was in Sacramento.
Stunningly in NYC there is not a single medical library that offers journal access open to the general public. The only publicly accessible medical library has been described to me as primarily a "historical" library without journal access.
Columbia and NYU's medical libraries are only open to medical school students and faculty. No undergraduates. No alumni. The New York Public Library has surprisingly good online access but is missing a number of important journals and current issues are often delayed by agreement for several months.
If in this nation's largest city, current healthcare knowledge is bulkheaded from public access there is a serious problem. Whatever the publisher's rights these knowledge and information asymmetries must not be allowed to continue.
Aren't these journal articles, like all formal publications, a matter of public record? I don't know where the United States' libraries of record are, but you should be able to go to one of them and ask to see a copy of anything at all published ever in the US.
I guess the Library of Congress is the closest thing. They are open to the public and have a huge collection but it's not everything ever published in the US. I'm not sure if you can walk in and request to see a medical journal.
I wish municipal public libraries would provide access to scientific journals.
You don't necessarily have to be at a medical library to have access to the same online journal content that a medical library has. I'd look for a high-quality general-purpose library at a public university that offers on-site access to electronic subscriptions to the public.
NYU and Columbia are both private universities of course. Does NYC even have a large top-tier public university? Hmm.
NYPL gives you access to more online paywalled journal subscriptions than nearly any other public library in the country though, you're lucky for that.
(If you're looking for print archives of journals, medical libraries are at the forefront of getting rid of historical print journal collections, because the usage of them was so tiny. The vast majority of medical researchers simply don't use historical print journal collections anymore, and there are non-trivial costs associated with keeping tons of bound journals getting almost no use...)
I am not arguing with your basic assertion that in America as a whole public access to paywalled academic research is a problem. I agree. (Apparently not just America, as OP is about Germany, where universities are collectively trying to _do_ something about it in a way we aren't really here).
The shift to electronic instead of print content doesn't help -- it's easier to simply give the public access to the physical environment to access stacks of bound journals (if you want to; or are required to give the public _some_ access as a federal depository library, sometimes easier to give them _all_ access), than it is to give them on-site access to electronic subscriptions (which you gotta get your vendors to agree is allowed, and then provide technological support for).
There are ways that the "digital revolution" has actually _hurt_ access to information, ironically.
It is a problem. But some (not all) university libraries, especially public university libraries, are trying. For instance, specifically insisting on public on-site access being included in their licenses from vendors. It's worth looking around and not assuming it's got to be a _medical_ library to get access to the online content. If you can't find it in NYC, it's probably even worse other places (although NYC's lack of major _public_ university probably doesn't help).
And then there's always sci-hub...
I certainly agree in principle that it ALL ought to just be in the commons, and not something only available through the richest universities (whether or not they then "share" it).
You are right. NYPL is about the best public library one could hope for and much is available from home login. City College is one option to look at but I don't think they have a medical library. I am an NYU alum and had extensive conversations with the alumni office and library and both confirmed that access to med school library resources was a non-starter. I guess its a big issue for me because people need information to make informed healthcare decisions and so much medical research has a component of public funding. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
Sometimes 'alumni access' (that you can use from anywhere with alumni credentials) is less than the total online licensed resource access for current students/faculty -- because the university generally needs to pay extra for "alumni access" to particular licensed resources.
But sometimes the total licensed resource access is available for _on-site_ public users, even if not alumni, because that may be included in the licenses.
I know you can't enter the medical library, but have you checked if you can get access to the resources you need on-site at another NYU library, that may allow the public to walk-in and use licensed resources from on-site workstations?
There may be resources licensed only to the medical library you can't get access to there -- but there may not be. Sometimes the particular people you are talking to asking questions don't understand the total licensing landscape of the university, especially if you are talking to people at the alumni office rather than librarians (but even every librarian may not, if you're not talking to someone whose job is centered on online resources; it gets terribly complicated, and libraries haven't always been great at keeping track of it and keeping it sane; the vendors' demands and irrational and enormously expensive contracts don't really help).
Have you tried accessing the publications via the on-campus computers in the normal undergraduate libraries? I don't think you need to be in a medical building to have access to the online medical journals.
I guarantee anyone enrolled or alumni with credentials at Columbia and NYU can log into just about any journal on the school network on campus or with the school proxy anywhere in the world.
Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative. It's like having people without CS knowledge read through your source code and saying "Boom. Open source." By the time you explain someone the necessary conceptual ideas to understand these dense papers, you will be basically giving them a B.S. in biology.
The real crime with these journals is that it can cost thousands to have the privilege of your paper published. That's thousands that could have been spent on more reagents, equipment, or salaries to do even more science. Instead, you pay the toll troll, and you lost another x% of your grant earmarked by the government to do science.
You're stretching the definition of laymen here - often people with plenty of expertise, such as GP's, don't have access to the latest research, or have to make do with the access of interns. For examples, see https://whoneedsaccess.org
> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.
You're right. We should lock up all knowledge to only those are who are not laymen. Want to learn CS, go to school. Clearly the only way to learn is to be taught. /s
> Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too technical to be informative.
This is probably the single most offensive thing I've read on this site.
I am a college dropout layperson who got a 0.0 GPA in my last semester enrolled in a liberal arts college who went on to replicate complicated experiments in sports science from these so-called "too technical to be informative" journals. A decade or so later, and now I run a fairly successful (30+ people employed) small business primarily because of the fact that I based my work on early publications I was lucky enough to get access through from students at the local public university.
With Sci-Hub, many terrible steps have been cut out of the process, and Elbakyan deserves Nobel Prize consideration for her work.
Meanwhile, your gatekeeping comments are elitist and only serve to increase inequality in all forms in this country (and the developing world, where academic freedom is truly useful to break paradigms).
Open source software need not be 100% understandable for it to be useful. We do business with as many vendors as possible that open source their code and work not because I am interested in validating their work, but because of the signal it sends that they feel comfortable and open enough to share their core products.
I hope you rethink your positions on these matters, because they're pretty offensive.
Being a layman in more fields than I am an expert, and having a habit of reading journal articles in various fields when the mainstream press reports on their findings, I have to disagree.
Of course, I can't (usually) read a journal article in a field in which I am a layman and understand it well enough to attempt to replicate its findings, critique its methodology, or make a follow-on contribution to the field. That's not the only value one might extract from a journal article.
What I can do is figure out if the mainstream press reporting on the article actually matches what the researchers found. The most common issue I see in mainstream press reporting is over-broad conclusions like "X is a cure for cancer" instead of "X is a 10% more effective treatment for Y type of cancer". Correlation reported as causation when the research did not draw such a conclusion is also annoyingly common.
what about the hundreds of thousands of doctors in their own practices that would like to keep current? I can tell you with the absolute certainty of experience that alumni do not retain such privileges at all schools. And when they do, it can be limited to in person access: not possible when you live hours or more away from your almer mater.
The world isn't made up of just laymen and students. There's also professionals. In some cases employers will pay, or individuals can pay, but journal payment schemes aren't really set up for this.
Motion smoothing TVs have to please two very different viewers. Motion smoothing is great for for sports. Football and basketball, auto racing are good examples. When a pass is thrown downfield and the camera whip pans to follow it, motion smoothing helps the picture stay coherent and prevents ugly artifacts and fans presumably enjoy the game they are watching more.
For movie fans it's a different story. People want a certain filmic softness to motion pictures. Motion smoothing makes a lot of content look like it was shot with very deep focus. The soap opera effect. Early video cameras were not super versatile in terms of depth of field.
I guess my question for the engineers here is this. It there a way to encode a content type code within the signal or the sideband (if that's the right term) that sets could use to automatically optimize their settings. It's not like sports fans ever say, "hey I love those artifacts", or movie buffs "hey, I want it to look like Search for Tomorrow".
I observed a total knee replacement surgery where the surgeons were not using their preferred system due to the fact that the patient already had one knee replacement and the doctors felt the same system should be used on both sides. The representative from the implant company was in the OR for a couple of good reasons. The first was that every system uses different jigs and guides to aid in the resection of the bone and placement of the appliance, the representative helped the doctors understand how to use the system. The second reason was that the surgeons needed to have access to a range of component sizes to make sure they could place a correctly sized implant. Using the same system on both knees also helped ensure that the geometry of both knees would be consistent.
At the time I was pretty stunned that the rep was talking the docs through the operation but the procedure was successful and I learned that when new devices are introduced it is very often the company that trains surgeons in its use.
In my experience of this sort of situation, the reps are there to yell ‘stop’ when the orthopod tries to smack something fragile with a hammer.
Each sub speciality has its traits and orthopaedics is no exception.
The practical takeaway here underscores the advice in Auerbach's authoritative text Wilderness Medicine. If a person interacts with potentially rabid animals and that interaction results in even the smallest scratch or contact with saliva the victim should undergo rabies treatment and if possible have the animal undergo necroscopy.
The odds of surviving rabies once it becomes symptomatic are negligible. They can throw the hail Mary from the 5 yard line in a snowstorm but the chances of winning the game with it are slim.
Commenting on cycling is always fraught but here are a couple of observations. The population of NYC is 10x that of the city of Copenhagen. The population density of Manhattan is approximately 6x that of Copenhagen (corrected from earlier mistake). Solutions that work in small European cities do not necessarily scale in a manner that would be useful in other international metropolitan cities. Cycling advocates often point to successes in Northern European cities that represent entire different transportation landscapes from other larger cities around the world.
If anything, a higher-density city should be more amenable to bicycles. Standard passenger cars are tremendously wasteful of physical space. You can fit half a dozen bikes in the road space that a car in the city requires (meaning, including following distance). Then there's the amount of space they take up when they're idle, and the extra space for them to maneuver past each other safely.
The mass of automobile usage has completely warped our civic spacetime in this country. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with cars per se -- they have important uses -- but they certainly don't help with density of all things.
Amenable means open and responsive to suggestion; easily persuaded or controlled. NYC is none of those things. Yes cars take physical space but I think you underestimate the diverse needs and populations that drive the use of cars vs. bikes. Commuters from Westchester county are not going to ride bikes. Frail elderly people and de-conditioned office dwellers are not going to ride bikes.
Comparisons with Northern European cities simply do not make sense however much people would like to force fit them
Not sure why the overall population matters here. Bicycle trips typically do not cover large distances in cities, that's what public transport is for.
And when it comes to density, Paris has twice the density of NYC and still has cycling infrastructure that is in a whole different league than that of NYC. NYC could in fact do much much better.
Population size matters as does density because there are more people that need to fit in a smaller footprint. The original post states that other cities should employ Copenhagen like solutions but the room simply does not exist in NYC no matter how much we would wish it so.
But the population of Manhattan is within a stone's throw of Paris overall and the density is significantly greater in Manhattan. Overall population and density matter as the equate to more diverse needs in the population and more users in any transit space.
Apologies, Wikipedia list km2 first for one and mi2 for the other. I still land in the middle though with Manhattan being 6 and change more dense than Copenhagen. I apologize for my haste and error.
It’s true that Manhattan is considerably denser than Copenhagen. Manhattan probably needs more/different transportation infrastructure than Copenhagen does to cope effectively with the density: more public transit, less automobiles.
The population density of Copenhagen is comparable to the density of Queens.
There is also a significant cultural difference. In the US, the biggest bike commuters are high school and college students. In some countries, bicycles are used by a broad swath of the public.
You are just not making any sense. There is a whole lot of car infrastructure and cars in NYC but little to no bike infrastructure despite the population density.
Then look at Paris? It's not as good as Copenhagen, but way better than anything in the US. It's a little bit less dense than Manhattan by population, but by removing cars, and with the wider space in between the buildings you can have a more successful bike town.
Europe's historically much higher petrol prices have created a long standing culture of smaller cars as well as smaller trucks competing for the same space. Massive Suburban's are among the most common car service vehicles in Manhattan.
The implicit subtitle of this article is: In Smartphone Cameras.
The modern smartphone certainly adds computational strength that likely exceeds the image processing sophistication of even pro-level DSLRs. After all the performance gap between desktop and mobile CPUs is quite narrow at this point. The author rightly implies that the form factor of the phone creates an inherent set of limitations.
Outside the phone realm there are fewer and somewhat different limitations to deal with and that is where really interesting things are happening in photography today. Modern sensors have made great strides towards closing the gap between film and digital in terms of dynamic range. Full frame sensors with a large number of pixels allow for far greater resolution in images. Looking on DXO mark on how far sensors have come in the last decade is amazing. When I look at images created on my Nikon D200s they were very good and acceptable for a broad range of applications. Compared to the images from my D850, however, there is a quantum difference. Shooting RAW files gives me unprecedented creative control over the final image using a laptop instead of expansive requirements of a full darkroom. While, I shoot Nikon other companies like Sony, and Canon are more or less in the same place. We have reached the point where output from a DSLR sized body compares very favorably to a medium format sensor.
While computational adjuncts to image acquisition, whether in the form of phone software or Adobe like products, will play an increasingly important role in photography, there are still areas where hardware such as sensors, lenses, and physical stabilizers will improve.
Certainly true (I'm the author). As a photographer I look forward to more interesting techniques in the non-smartphone world too but ultimately I think what will advance them is also code, not a major advance in optics or sensor tech.
It's kind of a lame argument in a way (mine, that is) because code underlies just about everything these days. But I do think we've mostly tapped out the physical side of things, barring clever new constructions like the L16 and successfully wrangling hyper-sensitive, hyper-noisy sensors.
Anyway it's exciting no matter which one is advancing the art. Consumers are winning (as with a consolidation in mirrorless form factor, which is another piece I'm working on). Thanks for reading!
I agree that at this point everything is computational. And you are right that consumers are winning big time. I'm pretty serious about photography and there are far fewer situations that arise where I think, "crud, I've only got my phone". My hope is that there is still room to squeeze low light, low noise performance out of future sensors. Again, great article, a good read!!!
> We have reached the point where output from a DSLR sized body compares very favorably to a medium format sensor.
I think at this point it's mostly a price issue. Medium format cameras are essentially the same size (Hasselblad x1d) as a top of the line DSLR, but their dynamic range is still miles above in my opinion. The only problem is that these cameras cost usually a minimum of $7k
Yes, if you unexpectedly fall into freezing water you can involuntarily inhale and drown. Diving in, swimming a few strokes and climbing out is nowhere near invariably fatal.
All the intrepid divers I saw survived unscathed.