3,010 research outputs found
Professionalism in science
In everyday speech, the word âprofessionalâ has an
ambiguous ring, applied to one who follows, by way of
profession, what is ordinarily regarded as a pastime (e.g.,
a sport), or disparagingly applied to one who âmakes a
tradeâ of politics and the like. In this sense it is contrasted
with âamateurâ, one who does something, literally, for the
love of it, without remuneration. The latter is generally
regarded as superior to the former; remuneration being
considered as likely to irremeably invest the activity with
self-interest, resulting in the task at hand being merely
accomplished with the minimally sufficient expertise and
skill to obtain the offered remuneration, whereas the
amateur strives to do whatever task is at hand as well as
he or she possibly can, â excellence for its own sakeâ
The regulation of scientific work
Government research councils, national science
foundations and the like have become ubiquitous. The
first one seems to have been the US National Science
Foundation (NSF), created in 1950; the similarly named
organization with an equivalent function in Switzerland
was established in 1952; the UK Science Research
Council was formed in 1965; and so forth. The mode of
operation of these organizations was to issue âcalls for
proposalsâ (i.e., general invitations to scientists to submit
project proposals) and then disburse funds according to
an assessment of proposals received. The main effect
seems to have been a general stifling of innovative ideas,
since the final decisions whether to fund a given project
are made by a committee, which, almost axiomatically,
favours the most conservative ideas
Quantification of the number of adsorbed bacteria on an optical waveguide
A simple method is presented for determining the number of bacteria adsorbed on
a planar optical waveguide from measurements of a single effective refractive
index. It requires only knowledge of the shape and mean size of the bacteria
Exact density-functional potentials for time-dependent quasiparticles
We calculate the exact Kohn-Sham potential that describes, within
time-dependent density-functional theory, the propagation of an electron
quasiparticle wavepacket of non-zero crystal momentum added to a ground-state
model semiconductor. The potential is observed to have a highly nonlocal
functional dependence on the charge density, in both space and time, giving
rise to features entirely lacking in local or adiabatic approximations. The
dependence of the non-equilibrium part of the Kohn-Sham electric field on the
local current and charge density is identified as a key element of the correct
Kohn-Sham functional.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Ergonomic Chair Design by Fusing Qualitative and Quantitative Criteria using Interactive Genetic Algorithms
This paper emphasizes the necessity of formally bringing qualitative and
quantitative criteria of ergonomic design together, and provides a novel
complementary design framework with this aim. Within this framework, different
design criteria are viewed as optimization objectives; and design solutions are
iteratively improved through the cooperative efforts of computer and user. The
framework is rooted in multi-objective optimization, genetic algorithms and
interactive user evaluation. Three different algorithms based on the framework
are developed, and tested with an ergonomic chair design problem. The parallel
and multi-objective approaches show promising results in fitness convergence,
design diversity and user satisfaction metrics
OWLS: A Versatile Technique for Sensing with Bioarrays
Optical waveguide lightmode spectroscopy (OWLS) is introduced as a precision technique capable of yielding detailed information on the structure of biological thin films, and on the kinetics of binding events between biopolymers. Unlike previous methods, it can be applied in situ
under conditions closely approximating those of a living organism, without the need to label any of the molecules
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