Oops, I see now a second too late you were talking about the construction paper comment. Good thing I didn't make that comment too "snarky" or I would have looked even more dumb...
We talked about the nobel for work on telomeres yesterday. Maybe slashdot editors have decided to string the nobel topics out. Just one a day, otherwise we'll get too excited.
+1. It blows my mind how terrible the software is. Bioedit has some powerful tools in it, but finding out whether or not it has a tool you haven't used before, and then figuring out how to use it often takes hours. But it's really the little things that it does to you when you are worn down from trying to make it do new things that really goes above and beyond, to that realm of "Oh my god, whoever made this was an evil genius."
For instance if you tell it to line the similar parts of two sequences it asks you if you want to save the statistics. Then while you're annoyed with that, it resizes the window to almost fullscreen. You go to close it, and it closes the window behind it, usually the page for the genomic sequence.
I would generalize it to any young coder should consider bio-related software. For instance imaging software for microscopy is also terrible in my experience. Imaris is useful for pulling together multiple microscope images over time to make a 3d movie. Importing multiple files to stitch together, the version we have invariably puts what should be the last frame as the second frame. I'm told the more current version fixes that, but as far as I can tell the solution is that the new version doesn't even attempt to put the movies together.
I don't know, I have often posted negative reviews on newegg along the lines of "product was not free" or "This manufacturer hasn't yet sent me a thousand dollars." I've never had a manufacturer remedy my problem, stingy bastards.
Who gets to choose which countries can be trusted?
Whoever is strong enough to say which countries can have it and which ones can't. It just so happens that most of us here live in the coalition that is saying Iran can't have nukes, and we trust ourselves a lot more than we trust Iran. So there's a bias there, yes, but don't take that to mean that the west and Iran should have equal right to nukes.
Have you spoken with anyone from Nagasaki about this question?
No, but you realize some things have changed since that happened. Namely, every single person in either government at the time has retired or more often died, the entire mindset of both governments has undergone several dramatic changes, and we are now allies rather than enemies. The implication that because the US used nukes a long time ago it shouldn't be trusted with them now is pretty absurd. Another way of looking at it is we've had them that long and not used them, wheras Iran hasn't proven they can be trusted with nukes.
Call it crazy, but anyone having any nukes is crazy. No one should. Ideally no one would.
Just fly larger aircraft. An airbus A340 seats up to 800 and will do the same trip in 75 fewer minutes.
You've assumed time for security screening will be the same. You've assumed delays will be the same. You've assumed the ticket cost will be the same.
All three assumptions are only true if the train is managed -extremely- poorly. Given that this is California, that might be the case, but they are still huge assumptions.
At least not in our lifetimes. Between all of the NIMBY's and environmental impact statements, this will be delayed in the courts for decades
But we have SOOOO much money in the state budget, we'll be able to buy them all off!
Note that this is bitter bitter sarcasm. As the state is laying people off left and right and performing slash and burn on it's education system among other things, it's good to know that the governator is still willing to reach for the pie in the sky.
...isn't prudent to get the cancer cells into some ecosystem or bioreactor, apply various factors and study them there instead of this Nazi like trial and error research involving those animals?
I should stop right there. You Godwin'd. Also, Nazis tested on HUMANS, not animals, which was the problem.
Ignoring that, research on anti-cancer drugs usually starts on cultured cancer cells. Once you identify something new that can kill your cells the way you want it to, you need to take it into a whole organism though, to be sure that it will 1. kill only or at least preferentially cancer cells rather than just every cell equally, and 2. to see how inefficient the drug makes it into the cancer cells in a whole organism.
The reason they start off with cultured cells is that it is so much simpler and cheaper than an organism, but you have to go to whole organisms because the end goal is to treat whole organisms, not cells in a dish.
After that safety and efficiency testing, then you can test on humans. Going right from cultured cells to humans would be, in fact, doing what the nazis did and would be universally considered unethical and dangerous.
Also inside organisms they are able to highlight and target cancer with some agent and see exactly where the cancer cells are using that PET scanner technique, but unable to use the same path to deliver treatment to those areas. It seams to me that this cancer 'industry' is trying to do prolonged and expensive healing, but not to cure.
What you're referring to is a method of identifying how effective cancer treatments are, for the aforementioned purposes of identifying if potential cancer treatments work in organisms. It's not a end, it's a means to an end.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but medical advances will never change our schoolyard ditties especially the ones intended to boost our self confidence rather than convey actual medical information.
Given the success rate of promising cancer treatments, it is a good bet that this won't pan out. That would also be true if it was something the industry could sell for a hundred times that: there's a low success rate for drugs in early stages of testing. If this treatment goes nowhere, we shouldn't assume the industry killed it to make more money, it is much much more likely that the results genuinely showed it didn't work.
I'm not trying to defend big pharma, I'm just saying we should avoid this circular logic of "Pharmaceuticals will try to kill this because it's so cheap" and then a few months later when it actually doesn't pan out, we say "Yup, pharmaceuticals killed it because it wasn't profitable." We should avoid that for two reasons, one is that even though big pharma does plenty of evil things, falsely accusing them of things doesn't help. The second is there's already a high likelyhood that when it doesn't pan out, quack doctors are going to be giving this to desperate cancer patients as "the miracle cure for cancer that the pharmecutical companies don't want you to know about so they can keep you sick and dependent on much much more expensive treatments."
In addition to these results being only in vitro, here comes a sad reminder of the state of this ehm 'research', it looks like they know little about the mechanisms of cancer, this is the cave man trial and error approach still, lots of animals have to die horrible death for them to dig something up, but fingers crossed they finally drawn the winning ticket in this cancer beating lottery.
Considering that the discovery that tumors have stem cells is extremely new and not 100% certain anyway, I'd say it isn't "sad," it's "lucky."
And don't put that just on stem cell research, most drugs out there are discovered through trial and error rather than "Oh hey, you know what would be great for treating this disease? This small molecule."
Not to mention to shield investors from losing everything they own if the corporation fails ("corporate veil").
I don't see how that requires them to have the same rights as people.
This story, for example. How does AT&T's ability to say "This data that shows how we overcharge some customers is personally private" protect their investors if AT&T were to go bankrupt?
Im all for freedom of information, but are they planning on publishing floor plans of private buildings too? That could be a severe security risk in some cases.
It seems to me they're only going to be doing this for public buildings,and only the areas where the public is welcome. Why would they publish the interiors of non-public buildings? If you need security clearance to get into an area, you probably aren't going to have to look online for a map of the place. They're not going to be mapping the private rooms of the whitehouse, because if you're in those areas you undoubtedly know the place.
I'd expect a big use of this would be airports, which your first reaction would be security yes. But dollars to doughnuts they're going to map out just the terminals since those are the only maps people are going to care about. They wouldn't map out the secure areas or maintenece since the only people who would care about that are people who are authorized to go there and presumably know their way around. And the airports wouldn't let them.
Actually, I'll be suprised if the airports don't claim some security issue to prevent these guys from making this product, while they themselves try to think up ways to sell their maps.
I don't believe you DO need to find the bathroom: Googlebladder tells me you have a mostly empty bladder. Then again, it is still in beta, and I don't have an invite to googlecolon.
The tag doesn't come in handy though because there's nothing else. Pilot studies obviously aren't perfect, neither are copying what other successful nations are doing. But what else is there? You think you have a way to fix education, you research it... then you go straight to trying it at a national level? No, that would be rash based just on a theory.
What is the alternative to doing what other countries are doing or trying something on a limited basis?
Because so few people share your opinion. The question you should be asking yourself is WHY do so few people share your opinion?
The answer might have something to do with your failure to explain to others why you think the DOE is broken beyond repair. Another one might be that throwing out something as big as the DOE and THEN deciding what to replace it with is usually the worst way to do anything.
Implementing solutions willy-nilly without considering what the problems are won't help, and will probably hurt.
I don't think anyone is implementing solutions willy-nilly, again these are based off of studies. There is consideration of the problem. It sounds like there was with the homework solution too: other school systems which are doing better have more homework. That to me constitutes a pretty large-scale pilot study.
And I'm not entirely convinced the homework solution is an open and shut case of a failed reform. Some experts undoubtedly think we still need more homework, I'm sure we don't do as much as the Japanese. Other experts obviously say we give too much homework.
Again it comes down to there are as many different opinions as to what the big problems with education are and how to fix them as there are people studying education. Waiting until everyone agrees what's wrong and how to fix it before we try anything else will lead to public school dying entirely. Extending the school year sounds logical to me, there's evidence to support it. It won't solve the problem entirely, but neither will any other single solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I see now a second too late you were talking about the construction paper comment. Good thing I didn't make that comment too "snarky" or I would have looked even more dumb...
South Park is computer generated.
Talking about team america, which was BY the southpark guys but was done with puppets.
We talked about the nobel for work on telomeres yesterday. Maybe slashdot editors have decided to string the nobel topics out. Just one a day, otherwise we'll get too excited.
+1. It blows my mind how terrible the software is. Bioedit has some powerful tools in it, but finding out whether or not it has a tool you haven't used before, and then figuring out how to use it often takes hours. But it's really the little things that it does to you when you are worn down from trying to make it do new things that really goes above and beyond, to that realm of "Oh my god, whoever made this was an evil genius."
For instance if you tell it to line the similar parts of two sequences it asks you if you want to save the statistics. Then while you're annoyed with that, it resizes the window to almost fullscreen. You go to close it, and it closes the window behind it, usually the page for the genomic sequence.
I would generalize it to any young coder should consider bio-related software. For instance imaging software for microscopy is also terrible in my experience. Imaris is useful for pulling together multiple microscope images over time to make a 3d movie. Importing multiple files to stitch together, the version we have invariably puts what should be the last frame as the second frame. I'm told the more current version fixes that, but as far as I can tell the solution is that the new version doesn't even attempt to put the movies together.
I don't know, I have often posted negative reviews on newegg along the lines of "product was not free" or "This manufacturer hasn't yet sent me a thousand dollars." I've never had a manufacturer remedy my problem, stingy bastards.
Who gets to choose which countries can be trusted?
Whoever is strong enough to say which countries can have it and which ones can't. It just so happens that most of us here live in the coalition that is saying Iran can't have nukes, and we trust ourselves a lot more than we trust Iran. So there's a bias there, yes, but don't take that to mean that the west and Iran should have equal right to nukes.
Have you spoken with anyone from Nagasaki about this question?
No, but you realize some things have changed since that happened. Namely, every single person in either government at the time has retired or more often died, the entire mindset of both governments has undergone several dramatic changes, and we are now allies rather than enemies. The implication that because the US used nukes a long time ago it shouldn't be trusted with them now is pretty absurd. Another way of looking at it is we've had them that long and not used them, wheras Iran hasn't proven they can be trusted with nukes.
Call it crazy, but anyone having any nukes is crazy. No one should. Ideally no one would.
Just fly larger aircraft. An airbus A340 seats up to 800 and will do the same trip in 75 fewer minutes.
You've assumed time for security screening will be the same. You've assumed delays will be the same. You've assumed the ticket cost will be the same.
All three assumptions are only true if the train is managed -extremely- poorly. Given that this is California, that might be the case, but they are still huge assumptions.
At least not in our lifetimes. Between all of the NIMBY's and environmental impact statements, this will be delayed in the courts for decades
But we have SOOOO much money in the state budget, we'll be able to buy them all off!
Note that this is bitter bitter sarcasm. As the state is laying people off left and right and performing slash and burn on it's education system among other things, it's good to know that the governator is still willing to reach for the pie in the sky.
But hopefully with a little more variety in the art...
...isn't prudent to get the cancer cells into some ecosystem or bioreactor, apply various factors and study them there instead of this Nazi like trial and error research involving those animals?
I should stop right there. You Godwin'd. Also, Nazis tested on HUMANS, not animals, which was the problem.
Ignoring that, research on anti-cancer drugs usually starts on cultured cancer cells. Once you identify something new that can kill your cells the way you want it to, you need to take it into a whole organism though, to be sure that it will 1. kill only or at least preferentially cancer cells rather than just every cell equally, and 2. to see how inefficient the drug makes it into the cancer cells in a whole organism.
The reason they start off with cultured cells is that it is so much simpler and cheaper than an organism, but you have to go to whole organisms because the end goal is to treat whole organisms, not cells in a dish.
After that safety and efficiency testing, then you can test on humans. Going right from cultured cells to humans would be, in fact, doing what the nazis did and would be universally considered unethical and dangerous.
Also inside organisms they are able to highlight and target cancer with some agent and see exactly where the cancer cells are using that PET scanner technique, but unable to use the same path to deliver treatment to those areas. It seams to me that this cancer 'industry' is trying to do prolonged and expensive healing, but not to cure.
What you're referring to is a method of identifying how effective cancer treatments are, for the aforementioned purposes of identifying if potential cancer treatments work in organisms. It's not a end, it's a means to an end.
That's all well and good, but if this company's product works, it will market it using well-endowed young female sales representatives...
SOLD!
Glass bones would probably work out slightly better than already shattered bones.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but medical advances will never change our schoolyard ditties especially the ones intended to boost our self confidence rather than convey actual medical information.
What is this "article" you speak of? "reading?" What's the point of this thread? Where am I? Why aren't I wearing pants? Where is the porn?
Why am I being modded down rather than up?
Given the success rate of promising cancer treatments, it is a good bet that this won't pan out. That would also be true if it was something the industry could sell for a hundred times that: there's a low success rate for drugs in early stages of testing. If this treatment goes nowhere, we shouldn't assume the industry killed it to make more money, it is much much more likely that the results genuinely showed it didn't work.
I'm not trying to defend big pharma, I'm just saying we should avoid this circular logic of "Pharmaceuticals will try to kill this because it's so cheap" and then a few months later when it actually doesn't pan out, we say "Yup, pharmaceuticals killed it because it wasn't profitable." We should avoid that for two reasons, one is that even though big pharma does plenty of evil things, falsely accusing them of things doesn't help. The second is there's already a high likelyhood that when it doesn't pan out, quack doctors are going to be giving this to desperate cancer patients as "the miracle cure for cancer that the pharmecutical companies don't want you to know about so they can keep you sick and dependent on much much more expensive treatments."
In addition to these results being only in vitro, here comes a sad reminder of the state of this ehm 'research', it looks like they know little about the mechanisms of cancer, this is the cave man trial and error approach still, lots of animals have to die horrible death for them to dig something up, but fingers crossed they finally drawn the winning ticket in this cancer beating lottery.
Considering that the discovery that tumors have stem cells is extremely new and not 100% certain anyway, I'd say it isn't "sad," it's "lucky."
And don't put that just on stem cell research, most drugs out there are discovered through trial and error rather than "Oh hey, you know what would be great for treating this disease? This small molecule."
Not to mention to shield investors from losing everything they own if the corporation fails ("corporate veil").
I don't see how that requires them to have the same rights as people.
This story, for example. How does AT&T's ability to say "This data that shows how we overcharge some customers is personally private" protect their investors if AT&T were to go bankrupt?
With a massive reign of terror?
More specifically, terrorizing overpaid CEOs and executive boards with the guillotine.
People who live in California but not in Los Angeles resent the way everyone seems to assume all of California is Los Angeles.
People FROM Los Angeles on the other hand resent the implication that LA is not its own continent.
Im all for freedom of information, but are they planning on publishing floor plans of private buildings too? That could be a severe security risk in some cases.
It seems to me they're only going to be doing this for public buildings,and only the areas where the public is welcome. Why would they publish the interiors of non-public buildings? If you need security clearance to get into an area, you probably aren't going to have to look online for a map of the place. They're not going to be mapping the private rooms of the whitehouse, because if you're in those areas you undoubtedly know the place.
I'd expect a big use of this would be airports, which your first reaction would be security yes. But dollars to doughnuts they're going to map out just the terminals since those are the only maps people are going to care about. They wouldn't map out the secure areas or maintenece since the only people who would care about that are people who are authorized to go there and presumably know their way around. And the airports wouldn't let them.
Actually, I'll be suprised if the airports don't claim some security issue to prevent these guys from making this product, while they themselves try to think up ways to sell their maps.
I don't believe you DO need to find the bathroom: Googlebladder tells me you have a mostly empty bladder. Then again, it is still in beta, and I don't have an invite to googlecolon.
The tag doesn't come in handy though because there's nothing else. Pilot studies obviously aren't perfect, neither are copying what other successful nations are doing. But what else is there? You think you have a way to fix education, you research it... then you go straight to trying it at a national level? No, that would be rash based just on a theory.
What is the alternative to doing what other countries are doing or trying something on a limited basis?
Of course, that's not ever going to happen.
Because so few people share your opinion. The question you should be asking yourself is WHY do so few people share your opinion?
The answer might have something to do with your failure to explain to others why you think the DOE is broken beyond repair. Another one might be that throwing out something as big as the DOE and THEN deciding what to replace it with is usually the worst way to do anything.
Implementing solutions willy-nilly without considering what the problems are won't help, and will probably hurt.
I don't think anyone is implementing solutions willy-nilly, again these are based off of studies. There is consideration of the problem. It sounds like there was with the homework solution too: other school systems which are doing better have more homework. That to me constitutes a pretty large-scale pilot study.
And I'm not entirely convinced the homework solution is an open and shut case of a failed reform. Some experts undoubtedly think we still need more homework, I'm sure we don't do as much as the Japanese. Other experts obviously say we give too much homework.
Again it comes down to there are as many different opinions as to what the big problems with education are and how to fix them as there are people studying education. Waiting until everyone agrees what's wrong and how to fix it before we try anything else will lead to public school dying entirely. Extending the school year sounds logical to me, there's evidence to support it. It won't solve the problem entirely, but neither will any other single solution.
BTW, as a fellow science grad student, it's good to hear that this is better than at least ONE job out there in the real world.