This happened to me a couple months ago. My Facebook account was disabled, as well as my instagram account, since it was connected to the Facebook account. No explanation, and no possibility for appeal.
I had the account since it was only available to college students in like 2008. No idea what it could have been, I barely even used it lately.
I tried to make a new account a couple times with different email addresses, but it didn’t let me.
I guess I’m just banned from Meta for life, most likely due to a false positive from AI.
I work at NASA and I review SBIR proposals from time to time. Most proposals are pretty mediocre. Some are physically impossible.
Coherent writing and formatting helps. Clearly explaining what your tech is and what advantages it could offer the funding agency for the listed objectives in their particular topic. You'd be surprised how many companies don't actually make any clear objective case with facts and figures, or look at all from the organization's point of view. Also, keep in mind that the reviewers may not all be deep experts in every possible obscure tech. You don't want to force them to do a ton of research just to understand wtf you're talking about.
Even if you do everything right, you might not get selected for obvious reason. At least at NASA, there always seem to be managers with their own opinions that have some kind of mysterious influence in the background. Plenty of good proposals don't get awarded, so it doesn't necessarily mean there was something wrong with it.
I guess if one color pixel was significantly less efficient, and that color was also overrepresented on the display, then MAYBE changing to grayscale would require slightly less power to display the same intensity. But I don’t think that convoluted scenario probably isn’t what this person was thinking.
Every single example given under “In Chinese, affirmation is often compiled through negation:” sounds completely natural to me, as a midwestern American English speaker.
However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.
Option 1 isn’t really an option, unfortunately. There are no viable single launch options using it. So it’s really SLS x 2. But building and launching one SLS at a time is almost too much as it is. If that’s the only option, I think Artemis is dead and we should start over.
I think we use the same PPBE process at NASA. Many of the systems and procedures that NASA uses are are defense-derived. If it's anything like what we do, then it's a total mess and we mostly just go through the motions with it, knowing it doesn't actually reflect reality and it's kind of a waste of time for everybody.
However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.
Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.
I'm a NASA civil servant and I'm regularly involved with SBIR contracts. While there are definite wins that make the SBIR program feel totally worth it, those are probably exception.
A big factor, however, is that much the tech NASA needs to develop for space applications has no commercial viability outside of NASA. We're the only potential buyer. And since it wasn't directly motivated by a specific NASA program and funded by a NASA project dollars, it has little chance to continue development once the SBIR contract ends. For many technologies, SBIR funding is the only fundamental tech development funding they get at all.
How can a private company develop a technology only the government needs when the funding from the government is extremely irregular, inconsistent, and insufficient?
I guess they could have a bunch of irons in the fire so they have a decent shot of getting some funding for anything they can do to stay in business. Maybe some of them eventually turn into SBIR mills.
NASA was originally formed as NACA to research aeronautics technology and help advance our uncompetitive nascent aerospace industry.
Building spacecraft and space transportation systems like the shuttle came later and is a very different type of task.
Unfortunately, the more flamboyant manned space flight and science missions have gradually come to dominate NASA, and much of the fundamental tech research that made it possible in the first place has been deprioritized and defunded.
The mars probe unit problem was mismatched between different software programs. One was telemetry reported by the spacecraft to the ground, the other was software on the ground that used this telemetry to perform calculations that reported the results with the incorrect units.
Maybe the answer is that strong typing should somehow continue outside of the individual programs and be embedded in file formats as well?
I work at NASA in tech development and I have found that we have a lot of poor quality support service contracts. The faceless contracting companies supply staff that technically fill roles like providing IT support services, or supporting purchasing. More often than not they are so utterly unhelpful and unknowledgeable that it's actually easier and faster to do things myself, totally defeating the purpose. The contracting mechanism seems to add significant extra communication overhead to everything making things much more sluggish, bureaucratic, disconnected, and just plain unpleasant. I actually care very much if my work gets done.
Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.
Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.
If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.
Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".
There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.
Well, there still isn't. It's not really a new line, just an indirect connection via existing high speed lines that takes over 8 hours. I don't think that's gonna be very competitive with air travel which takes less than 2 hours.
Apparently the highest average speed rail line in the world averages 318 km/h and the straight line distance between Paris and Berlin (through Belgium and Luxembourg) is about 875 km, the time could be about 2.75 hours, which wouldn't be too bad.
In reality the lines wouldn't be able to go straight and you might want to avoid going through any countries other than France and Germany. The best case scenario would probably be a little over 3 hours, which still wouldn't be too bad.
They stated a hypothesis and asked if anyone had collected data that could support it. You responded by asking that person if they have any data. Perhaps you scored poorly on reading comprehension.