These numbers have paper trails which would require large conspiracy among civil servants who have really no reason to care about fudging numbers... and if they had this conspiracy operating why would they reveal this at all? It would require an oversight investigation of some sort beforehand.
Besides (not) being told "this is how we're counting", there are incentives that align with functional overstatement.
A weak example is keeping people on payroll who may not have active contracts. There's no reason to purge them if they're eligible to resume working (within the allowed period, which may be, say, 12-18 months), but it's not strictly fair to count them as being employed in the same way as a traditional 12 month FT hire.
Last year, we purged over a thousand people from payroll who hadn't officially separated. Unusual, but not abnormal. Who would call that a conspiracy?
I think it's convenient to lie in aggregate, especially when "job creation" and high payroll counts loosely correspond to economic growth and if not eligible voters, then at least tax revenues.
I know that the status quo in science journalism is to desperately find ways to excite people about research but this headline boils down to “scientists use computer to help with research” and the actual story is “company discovers new magnet”.
coined 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young (1915-2002) and used in title of his book, "The Rise of the Meritocracy"; from merit (n.) + -cracy. Related: Meritocratic.
[Young's book] imagined an elite that got its position not from ancestry, but from test scores and effort. For him, meritocracy was a negative term; his spoof was a warning about the negative consequences of assigning social status based on formal educational qualifications, and showed how excluding from leadership anyone who couldn't jump through the educational hoops would create a new form of discrimination. And that's exactly what has happened. [Lani Guinier, interview, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015] "
If you have a heat source with a temperature of 2500C, then the theoretical maximum efficiency of conversion is around 89% assuming you have a heat sink available that can stay below 30C. (1.0 - (30+273)/(2500+273) = 0.89). All heat engines will be worse than this because of practicalities, but a real steam turbine system can be around 47% efficient and a combined cycle can be 60% efficient, using a cooler "hot" end than 2500C.
For photovoltaic cells there are other factors which limits this further. For a single p-n junction the limit is around 33% for normal sunlight[1], though it's too early in the morning for me to calculate it at the proposed ~2700K temperature. By stacking junctions you can get higher but then other things kick in[2].
Which is the problem of the idea. Any kind of thermal engine, such as a stirling engine, would beat this idea in efficiency with those kinds of temperatures.
