Recent content by gleem

Yes. The sensitivity and efficiency are independent of the decay rate, which is responsible for the variability in the rate of the radiation arrival at the detector. Geiger counters are particularly susceptible to large fluctuations in their reading at low decay rates.

I think some get the impression that the actual difference between successive decays is relatively constant and for high decay rates that is essentially true, but for very low count rates, it is very noticeably not true and an important consideration when performing a survey.

Yeah, I kinda did too, but focusing on the commonality of the two, only monitoring the actual end of the processes, they are comparable.

Top Men!

If you have ever monitored the decay of a radioactive isotope with a long half-life, you would note that the time between successive decays varies dramatically compared to the average. The decay rate is approximated by a Poisson distribution, which, for low decay rates, is extremely skewed...

Sounds like some AI have anterograde amnesia.

We argue against AI's creativity because we see how it functions. We argue for human creativity, but we do not know how it functions. So they must be different? In one of my previous posts, I gave a reference to a study that showed LLM could understand human emotions better than humans in a...

AI and LLM in particular are amazing. Beginning with ChatGPT3 making a splash on the web, detractors argued that it was just auto-complete. It was desired to emulate human neural networks, a guess of how we think they work. It worked pretty well without any specific reasoning capability. It...

MIT with Oak Ridge National Lab has released a report that found that 11.7% of US jobs are currently vulnerable to being replaced by AI. They have developed a simulation tool called the Iceberg Index to give a snapshot looking at the current layoff and role-changing information, the tip of the...

You should add AI to your toolbox, also. Getting back to employment, the American Institute of Physics has extensive information on the employment and careers of physicists in the US here. In particular, below are a few of their reports: Impacts of Restrictions on Federal Grant Funding in...

Accolades continue to come in for Google's Gemini 3 LLM. The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, says Both Musk and Altman sent congratulations to Google. However, AI tech Bloggers, while noting that Gemini is a vast improvement over other LLMs, hold their judgment until the full effect on end...

Perhaps I would, but a great mathematician (Hardy) would not, and did not.

In post #29, I noted that AI is better than humans in identifying emotions. Google just released Gemini 3, which has been noted to be significantly better than ChatGPT-5 releasted just this past August. In a study to see how it compares to current models concerning self-harm and...

While helping people online with homework like PF is valuable, it is cumbersome. The people must present their whole spiel, misunderstanding and all, in one fell swoop. In reading the post, the advisor might have liked to halt it at the point where the person was beginning to go astray and...

A recent study found that AI models can detect human emotional states under different circumstances. On average, all models performed about 50% better than humans. It was also determined that most responses were not merely taken from the web but appeared to be original. Since...