697 research outputs found
Testing Tenure: Let the Market Decide
Tenure debates and disputes are often irresolvable because of the complex and multivariate nature of contractual relationships between faculty and administration, and the nuanced and varying beliefs about tenure held by the professoriate. The Ceci et al. study leads this commentator to suggest a simple solution - allow individual institutions to define the parameters of tenure according to their unique core values
Robust quantum memory via quantum control
2001 OSA Technical Digest Series (Optica Publishing Group, 2001), paper PA2
A Stochastic Process Approach of the Drake Equation Parameters
The number N of detectable (i.e. communicating) extraterrestrial
civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy is usually done by using the Drake
equation. This equation was established in 1961 by Frank Drake and was the
first step to quantifying the SETI field. Practically, this equation is rather
a simple algebraic expression and its simplistic nature leaves it open to
frequent re-expression An additional problem of the Drake equation is the
time-independence of its terms, which for example excludes the effects of the
physico-chemical history of the galaxy. Recently, it has been demonstrated that
the main shortcoming of the Drake equation is its lack of temporal structure,
i.e., it fails to take into account various evolutionary processes. In
particular, the Drake equation doesn't provides any error estimation about the
measured quantity. Here, we propose a first treatment of these evolutionary
aspects by constructing a simple stochastic process which will be able to
provide both a temporal structure to the Drake equation (i.e. introduce time in
the Drake formula in order to obtain something like N(t)) and a first standard
error measure.Comment: 22 pages, 0 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in the
International Journal of Astrobiolog
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