And let us also hope that financial backers and investors don't pass on the idea of investing in said research without the potential payout of a full term patent.
Maybe you missed the identities of the plaintiffs: geneticists and cancer patients. And some of the friends-of-the-court on the side of the plaintiffs: "the American Medical Association, the March of Dimes and the American Society for Human Genetics" as listed in TFA.
In other words, the people who actually do the work, the people who apply the work, and the people who benefit from the work all wanted the patent (and in general, want all gene patents) overturned. Look, when investors, scientists, physicians, and patients can all agree and work together, that's great. But if investors are on one side and scientists, physicians, and patients are on the other... who do you think is going to do more to actually do the research and put it into practice?
Sometimes going to war is the best of several bad options. It can never be any better than that, but it can indeed be a moral decision.
Note that I'm not saying this applies to our current wars, just that it does happen from time to time. And when it does, it is also a moral decision to try to reduce the attendant horror as much as possible.
He's graduating now, so that means at the end of his second year he couldn't figure out why a string named string was a problem,
You don't know what language he started out with.
and today he's not smart enough to create multiple online personalities so that these old posts don't trace back to him.
"I think employers trawling old web forums to dig up any dirt they can find is just peachy keen, and anyone who doesn't go along with the status quo by constant paranoid identity-hopping is an idiot!"
I agree with others who state that they only hire the best people they can find. If this is the only thing I know about the person (besides the resume), then he will end up in the reject list.
If you know this about him at all -- and if you think that it has anything at all to do with whether or not he's "one of the best people [you] can find" today, not two years ago -- then you are not someone who should be making hiring decisions.
4. Once you get the chance, I can't emphasize this strongly enough: PROVE TO ME THAT YOU REALLY WANT THE JOB. Think outside the box. Be willing to go the extra mile. Don't sit in your chair playing Solitaire waiting for me to tell you what to do next. Show initiative.
5. Paradigmatically optimize your buzzword bingo networking for best-of-breed stakeholder value. As long as you're at least six sigmas of agile quality empowerment ahead of the guy who plays Solitaire, you'll be the mission-critical go-to guy team player!
Keeping our systems secure, and breaking into the other guys' systems, are damn near the same job. It is a good thing to have the people responsible for both working together, and maybe trading jobs occasionally. There is no American computer security and Russian computer security and Chinese computer security: there is only computer security, and systems which are more or less secure. The NSA has historically been about the only government agency that really seems to get this, and it would be a real mistake to break it up.
What Rutan is doing is impressive, but it is nowhere near what "the big boys with their big design committees" were doing fifty years ago. SpaceShips One and Two are piggybacking on decades of NASA and other government space research. This is a good thing; it's exactly how technology transfer is supposed to work. Just understand it for what it is.
Traits such as the submission to authority are part of the deep underlying reptile brain.
That's a pretty dubious statement, since most reptiles don't have much in the way of social structure. "Submission to authority" implies that there's an authority to submit to. Say it's part of the primitive primate brain, and it becomes a little more believable.
Devore's Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences is probably the best one-volume, undergrad-level intro to statistics out there. Get a copy (I think it's on the sixth or seventh edition now; you can pick up a fifth edition for cheap) and work your way through that, and you'll have a pretty good idea of where all those formulae come from and how they're used. Get a copy of R and check out the "Devore*" packages in the package list too. If you want to learn more after that, I recommend Kutner et al.'s Applied Linear Statistical Models for applications, and Casella and Berger's Statistical Inference for theory.
The Wikipedia stats pages are pretty good for most things, but many of them are written with the assumption of a lot of background knowledge. If you open up a page on a particular stats subject and you comprehend it, great; if not, be prepared to do a lot of digging outside of Wikipedia, because trying to figure out the subject from the links to other WP pages is an exercise in circularity.
Bayesian statistics are a tool, preferably one of many in the statistician's toolbox; one of my many beefs with TFA is that it presents the conflict between Bayesians and "frequentists" as something new and vital, rather than a largely settled argument. People who insist that one approach or the other is the One True are thankfully pretty rare these days.
In any case, no matter what flavor of analysis you're talking about, the simple fact is that statistics is a hard subject to learn; there are only so many years in a human lifetime. It's not impossible to learn enough statistics to call oneself a statistician, and also (for example) learn enough cell biology to call oneself a cell biologist -- it's just damned difficult. As a bioinformaticist, coming mainly from the math/CS/stats side of things, I know a hell of a lot more biology than most people do, but when I work with biologists I'm constantly reminded of how much I don't know. And they have the same experience from the other side.
Underneath the article headline, you will find something called a "summary." In this fascinating and useful bit of information, you will find the following:
"That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' game habits, but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to receive a PlayStation or not."
Unless you have some specific critique of the study methodology -- specifically, some indication of bias in the assignment of children to treatment vs. control groups -- what's your point?
Most cell lines suffer telomere deterioriation as they age, i.e. as the cells in the line reproduce; cell lines which can halt this process before the telomeres are completely lost become "immortal" and are therefore cancerous. So in other words, cancer is the exact opposite of a "biological age limitation" -- it's the result of cells escaping the limitations of age.
I think it's more along the lines of "All aboard the Occident Express! Visit the exotic lands of the Far West! See quaint native peoples living their traditional lifestyles for your amusement and tourist yuan!"
The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet
No, they weren't. AOL and CompuServe, and most of the other online services (not sure about MSN) ran their own proprietary networks, using non-IP protocols.
and all included access to the World Wide Web.
Eventually, yes, but they didn't start out doing that. They all wanted to be The Future Of Online Services, and hoped the internet would go away quietly, or at least stay restricted to educational and government use.
The existence of this project seems to demonstrate that a lot of people didn't learn anything from the Space Shuttle.
The problem with the Shuttle was not that it had wings. The problem with the Shuttle was that it was designed (and redesigned, and redesigned...) to be all things to all people. I guarantee you, if the Saturn V had been built the way the Shuttle was, it would have cost ten times as nuch and been lucky to get a tenth of the way to the Moon.
The lesson to be learned from the Shuttle is not "don't build spaceplanes," but rather "don't try to build one single vehicle for every mission that NASA, the Air Force, commercial operators, and my cousin's dog might possibly want to perform in space."
And discrimination is illegal based on race but that doesn't stop racial discrimination does it?
There is demonstrably less racial discrimination now, at least in business and governmental dealings, than there was before various civil rights laws prohibiting were passed. Of course it's not a perfect solution, but it's better than it was, and we can continue to make it better still.
Discrimination in a lot of forms was illegal during segregation, yet you would hardly consider it discrimination free.
If by "segregation" you mean the Jim Crow era, that was a period when discrimination was mandated by law. Do you really think that we're going to pass laws requiring that people with certain alleles of certain genes use separate bathrooms, or sit at the back of the bus?
People in the sequencing biz talk about the "thousand dollar genome" as kind of the magic number, and the consensus is that we can expect to get there in five years or so. At that point, yes, it will be a routine part of everyone's medical record. As for discrimination, the best we can do is guard against it; the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is a very good start. There is no way in hell that we are going to turn our backs on the enormous medical potential of cheap, nearly universal sequencing because of fears cobbled together -- as most anti-genetics rants seem to be -- out of massive ignorance and half-remembered ideas picked up from Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, and Gattaca.
Genetic discrimination is a worry, of course, but the risk of it is far outweighed by the benefits which understanding the role of genetics in human health offers. And the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is actually a pretty good law.
As for the medical usefulness of genetics... warfarin (Coumadin) is one of the most widely used clot-busting drugs in the world, and IIRC this has now been incorporated into the dosage guidelines. It isn't quite the same as actually curing a genetic disease, of course, but it is an important advance which has the potential to save a lot of lives.
And desertion by members of the armed services in time of war is punishable by death, and yet somehow George W. Bush was never court-martialed, convicted, and appropriately sentenced. Sometimes the system works, sometimes it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Does.it.allow.you.to.do.useful.things.without.typing.a.classpath.fifteen.layers.deep?
If.so.it.might.be.exactly.what.is.needed.to.make.Java.an.appealing.language.for.programmers.with.fresh.ideas. Else.it.won't.do.the.trick.
And let us also hope that financial backers and investors don't pass on the idea of investing in said research without the potential payout of a full term patent.
Maybe you missed the identities of the plaintiffs: geneticists and cancer patients. And some of the friends-of-the-court on the side of the plaintiffs: "the American Medical Association, the March of Dimes and the American Society for Human Genetics" as listed in TFA.
In other words, the people who actually do the work, the people who apply the work, and the people who benefit from the work all wanted the patent (and in general, want all gene patents) overturned. Look, when investors, scientists, physicians, and patients can all agree and work together, that's great. But if investors are on one side and scientists, physicians, and patients are on the other ... who do you think is going to do more to actually do the research and put it into practice?
Please explain the morality of war to me.
Sometimes going to war is the best of several bad options. It can never be any better than that, but it can indeed be a moral decision.
Note that I'm not saying this applies to our current wars, just that it does happen from time to time. And when it does, it is also a moral decision to try to reduce the attendant horror as much as possible.
He's graduating now, so that means at the end of his second year he couldn't figure out why a string named string was a problem,
You don't know what language he started out with.
and today he's not smart enough to create multiple online personalities so that these old posts don't trace back to him.
"I think employers trawling old web forums to dig up any dirt they can find is just peachy keen, and anyone who doesn't go along with the status quo by constant paranoid identity-hopping is an idiot!"
I agree with others who state that they only hire the best people they can find. If this is the only thing I know about the person (besides the resume), then he will end up in the reject list.
If you know this about him at all -- and if you think that it has anything at all to do with whether or not he's "one of the best people [you] can find" today, not two years ago -- then you are not someone who should be making hiring decisions.
4. Once you get the chance, I can't emphasize this strongly enough: PROVE TO ME THAT YOU REALLY WANT THE JOB. Think outside the box. Be willing to go the extra mile. Don't sit in your chair playing Solitaire waiting for me to tell you what to do next. Show initiative.
5. Paradigmatically optimize your buzzword bingo networking for best-of-breed stakeholder value. As long as you're at least six sigmas of agile quality empowerment ahead of the guy who plays Solitaire, you'll be the mission-critical go-to guy team player!
Keeping our systems secure, and breaking into the other guys' systems, are damn near the same job. It is a good thing to have the people responsible for both working together, and maybe trading jobs occasionally. There is no American computer security and Russian computer security and Chinese computer security: there is only computer security, and systems which are more or less secure. The NSA has historically been about the only government agency that really seems to get this, and it would be a real mistake to break it up.
Nah, the cherry will be popped when it actually gets up into space. This is more like a first kiss, with no tongue.
What Rutan is doing is impressive, but it is nowhere near what "the big boys with their big design committees" were doing fifty years ago. SpaceShips One and Two are piggybacking on decades of NASA and other government space research. This is a good thing; it's exactly how technology transfer is supposed to work. Just understand it for what it is.
Traits such as the submission to authority are part of the deep underlying reptile brain.
That's a pretty dubious statement, since most reptiles don't have much in the way of social structure. "Submission to authority" implies that there's an authority to submit to. Say it's part of the primitive primate brain, and it becomes a little more believable.
Never heard of "Hollywood Accounting" before, have you? Hint: it's not limited to Hollywood.
Ah, never mind. Keep on slurping that Kool-Aid.
they always think that management are hiding profits in some secret bank account.
Are you seriously claiming they're wrong about this?
Devore's Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences is probably the best one-volume, undergrad-level intro to statistics out there. Get a copy (I think it's on the sixth or seventh edition now; you can pick up a fifth edition for cheap) and work your way through that, and you'll have a pretty good idea of where all those formulae come from and how they're used. Get a copy of R and check out the "Devore*" packages in the package list too. If you want to learn more after that, I recommend Kutner et al.'s Applied Linear Statistical Models for applications, and Casella and Berger's Statistical Inference for theory.
The Wikipedia stats pages are pretty good for most things, but many of them are written with the assumption of a lot of background knowledge. If you open up a page on a particular stats subject and you comprehend it, great; if not, be prepared to do a lot of digging outside of Wikipedia, because trying to figure out the subject from the links to other WP pages is an exercise in circularity.
Bayesian statistics are a tool, preferably one of many in the statistician's toolbox; one of my many beefs with TFA is that it presents the conflict between Bayesians and "frequentists" as something new and vital, rather than a largely settled argument. People who insist that one approach or the other is the One True are thankfully pretty rare these days.
In any case, no matter what flavor of analysis you're talking about, the simple fact is that statistics is a hard subject to learn; there are only so many years in a human lifetime. It's not impossible to learn enough statistics to call oneself a statistician, and also (for example) learn enough cell biology to call oneself a cell biologist -- it's just damned difficult. As a bioinformaticist, coming mainly from the math/CS/stats side of things, I know a hell of a lot more biology than most people do, but when I work with biologists I'm constantly reminded of how much I don't know. And they have the same experience from the other side.
Underneath the article headline, you will find something called a "summary." In this fascinating and useful bit of information, you will find the following:
"That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' game habits, but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to receive a PlayStation or not."
Unless you have some specific critique of the study methodology -- specifically, some indication of bias in the assignment of children to treatment vs. control groups -- what's your point?
Are you capable of reading the article summary? Not even the actual story. The summary. That's all it would take.
Cancer is actually a biological age limitation.
Most cell lines suffer telomere deterioriation as they age, i.e. as the cells in the line reproduce; cell lines which can halt this process before the telomeres are completely lost become "immortal" and are therefore cancerous. So in other words, cancer is the exact opposite of a "biological age limitation" -- it's the result of cells escaping the limitations of age.
I think it's more along the lines of "All aboard the Occident Express! Visit the exotic lands of the Far West! See quaint native peoples living their traditional lifestyles for your amusement and tourist yuan!"
The "Walled Gardens" of the 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, The Microsoft Network, etc) were just value-added content layers on top of services provided by the Internet
No, they weren't. AOL and CompuServe, and most of the other online services (not sure about MSN) ran their own proprietary networks, using non-IP protocols.
and all included access to the World Wide Web.
Eventually, yes, but they didn't start out doing that. They all wanted to be The Future Of Online Services, and hoped the internet would go away quietly, or at least stay restricted to educational and government use.
The existence of this project seems to demonstrate that a lot of people didn't learn anything from the Space Shuttle.
The problem with the Shuttle was not that it had wings. The problem with the Shuttle was that it was designed (and redesigned, and redesigned ...) to be all things to all people. I guarantee you, if the Saturn V had been built the way the Shuttle was, it would have cost ten times as nuch and been lucky to get a tenth of the way to the Moon.
The lesson to be learned from the Shuttle is not "don't build spaceplanes," but rather "don't try to build one single vehicle for every mission that NASA, the Air Force, commercial operators, and my cousin's dog might possibly want to perform in space."
And discrimination is illegal based on race but that doesn't stop racial discrimination does it?
There is demonstrably less racial discrimination now, at least in business and governmental dealings, than there was before various civil rights laws prohibiting were passed. Of course it's not a perfect solution, but it's better than it was, and we can continue to make it better still.
Discrimination in a lot of forms was illegal during segregation, yet you would hardly consider it discrimination free.
If by "segregation" you mean the Jim Crow era, that was a period when discrimination was mandated by law. Do you really think that we're going to pass laws requiring that people with certain alleles of certain genes use separate bathrooms, or sit at the back of the bus?
People in the sequencing biz talk about the "thousand dollar genome" as kind of the magic number, and the consensus is that we can expect to get there in five years or so. At that point, yes, it will be a routine part of everyone's medical record. As for discrimination, the best we can do is guard against it; the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is a very good start. There is no way in hell that we are going to turn our backs on the enormous medical potential of cheap, nearly universal sequencing because of fears cobbled together -- as most anti-genetics rants seem to be -- out of massive ignorance and half-remembered ideas picked up from Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, and Gattaca.
Genetic discrimination is a worry, of course, but the risk of it is far outweighed by the benefits which understanding the role of genetics in human health offers. And the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is actually a pretty good law.
As for the medical usefulness of genetics ... warfarin (Coumadin) is one of the most widely used clot-busting drugs in the world, and IIRC this has now been incorporated into the dosage guidelines. It isn't quite the same as actually curing a genetic disease, of course, but it is an important advance which has the potential to save a lot of lives.
And desertion by members of the armed services in time of war is punishable by death, and yet somehow George W. Bush was never court-martialed, convicted, and appropriately sentenced. Sometimes the system works, sometimes it doesn't.
Yeah, that's actually a pretty good test. Google's version is odd but comprehensible, while Babelfish's is a bunch of ... well ... babble.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buzzword+bingo&search_type=&aq=2&oq=buzzwor seems appropriate here.