Organic is, in fact, the only one you absolutely CAN memorize. Unlike the math-based chemistry classes where you have to learn principles, which the pre-meds struggle mightily with, the memorization-heavy organic chemistry is the one that is considered to be similar enough to medical school that it is used as a weed-out.
As a fellow chemist -- one that has done research and teaching in physical and organic realms -- I assure you this is not necessarily true. A good organic course will yield a maximum grade of maybe 70% for students who are impeccable memorizers but not problem solvers. (I'd say it'd be about 50% for a good phys chem course, because plug-and-chug formulas can certainly be crammed.)
For example, syntheses are a lot like chess. They require memorizing a variety of transformations, but the potential applications of those finite transformations are nearly limitless. There's just no way to memorize them. You need to understand the rules of the game, then be both logical and creative to succeed.
I used to share your perspective, beginning my academic carerr as a phys-chem believer. In the end, I realized that if courses in organic can be aced by memorization, that simply means that whoever delivered the course fucked up. There is a heckofa lot more too it than that.
Organic chemsitry is not a fascinating subject in its ownright. And even though it falls in the purview of physics -- like, uh, everything -- it is best understood apart from physics, as a unique lense. Just as biology is not best understood as complicated chemistry, but rather as a completely different perspective.
It demonstrates the raw power of abstraction. For example, ask an experienced organic chemist to propose a synthesis of any arbitrary molecule. A good one will normally be able to come up with something plausible in minutes, and refine it to something practical in hours. A physical chemist, let alone a physicist, even with the incredible computing resources for the complex quantum mechanical calculations required wouldn't be able to tell you how to make it if you gave her months! Guarenteed.
That is the power of organic chemistry. It teaches you how a handful of simplifications, fuzzy rules, and fictional symbols can give you incredibly unique and practical skills. This is not unlike treating the human body as a group of organs, cells, cellular machines, etc., rather than subatomic particles. Of course it's all physics, but viewing systems through appropriate paradigms can yield incredible results.
If people see "orgo" as just a test of rote memorization, their professors should be ashamed -- they've missed it point.
The other problem with lawyers is that they come from an adversarial profession. They tend to think in terms of winning and losing, rather than mutual benefit. Courts are in the business of slicing up the pie, not making the pie bigger, and certainly not planting some wheat and apple trees so more pies can be made in the future.
Exactly. Someone once said that the whole trouble with having lawyers in charge is that lawyers are paid to arbitrarily pick a position, then argue for that position come hell, highwater, or new information. They don't typically have any incentive (or even the opportunity) to pick the right position -- they go with the view they've been paid to represent.
Scientists, engineers, and practically everyone else are instead expected to come to the right answer based on the objectively best evidence available. And if that evidence changes, so should the position. The lawyer-approach wouldn't cure a patient or get an airplane off the ground, why does anyone expect it to be suited to running a government?
Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?
Because small bookstores are part of what makes Paris the most visited city in the world? (You don't think tourism is a failed industry, do you?) Because literature is a huge part of the cultural heritage of France and remains a national past-time? Because if Amazon is the only bookseller in the world in a decade or so, they will do what monopolies are known to do: screw over the authors, focus on mass-appeal crap, enforce DRM? (Just look at the music industry for examples of this, and imagine how bad it would be if it was even more centralized!)
I'm not French but one of the reasons I love France is because nearly every French citizen I've met would be able to produce these answers and talk intelligently about this bill. On Slashdot, and in North America, we seem to be collectively drunk on the free-market, short-term kool-aid.
If scientists want to restore integrity to their field(s) -- and I applaud their efforts to do so -- why aren't they using an experimental approach to do so? I think they should try several things and collect data to find out what actually works.
Of course, like real science, each group tends to only focus on one approach with the hope that their results will emerge as the best amongst the competition. You're not referring to "scientists" as some kind of monolothic entity, are you?
I've seen hundreds of researchers work to try to come up with a car-ready inexpensive fuel cell that's, if not safe, at least not going to level a block during a fender-bender. The conclusion I came to long ago was that the big car makers pursue fuel cells to avoid explaining why they've not pursued (or actively stalled) the development of electric vehicles. The fact is that electric cars have a much, much greater potential to replace internal combustion engines than fuel cells for the near future.
Even just the fact that infrastructure is basically in place for widespread transportation of electricity and not even on the radar for hydrogen gives electric a huge edge!
I'm not saying the technology might not prove itself within a few decades, but if half of the fuel-cell resources were placed into improving batteries, electric vehicles would be damn near ubiquitous by now. Would anyone argue that the existing automakers really wanted that?
This is the hard discipline that the vast majority of private enterprises have to adhere to, but which no government with a European welfare state seems capable of.
Strange, isn't it. Almost as if governments and corporations are not the exact same thing.
Austerity makes zero sense when applied to governments. How many times does this need to be proven? How many gutted middle classes and depressions does it take? "Tightening the belt" on a countrywide scale is a feel good, self flagellating piece of fiction that simply does not work.
But don't let me take away your smug sense of superiority over nearly all of Europe. Romney 2012!
In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful? In my experience, sciences grows more expensive, less funded, more hyped, less understood, and overall less heeded.
College has become far more about the degree than the experience, sadly. You can meet scores of graduates that have shining transcripts and dismal educations. And this is one of the reason the cost is so obscene -- as Thomas Frank said, "An annual pass to Disneyland would also cost $54,000 if society believed that what it took to make you eligible for success was a great many hours spent absorbing the subtle lessons of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage."
Until there is prestige associated with online learning, an online education will never be as valuable or acceptable as a brick-and-mortar degree mill experience. However, to those who actually want to learn and to do, access to high quality education experiences from anywhere in the world is fantastic and will only continue to improve with better technology and pedagogy. Though it's no surprising that the breakthrough course was in a geeky subject that attracts genuine curiosity.
My university's model is to attract as many international students as possible and charge them 3x the 'domestic' tuition rate, which is already high for Canada. Better yet is a privately-owned college they've licensed our 'brand' to, which allows them to do the same but with dirt-low entrance requirements and higher yet tuition!
Even my previous institute, a very small liberal arts university on the opposite coast, was showing shades of the same. What else do we expect with burgeoning human resources departments and shrinking public funding?
I'm midway through a graduate program and here are the things I wish I was told before I started:
-- Your supervisor choice is of prime importance. They will dictate your research projects, your lifestyle, and most importantly, your opportunities to continue on. They write your reference letter, after all, and decide your approach to publishing. Pick a good one! Visit several, talk to their students (over beer preferably) - really, you cannot investigate this question too much.
-- Be ambitious about learning about different school's grad-payment policies. Do they require you to TA? Do you want to? Do they have minimum funding guarantees? If you bring in an external scholarship, do they dock your pay or match the funds? Of course it's not about the money but in Canada, I know firsthand that some graduate students will make fully twice what other students make and neither are well compensated.
-- Pick a school for its department rather than overall reputation. The supervisor choice is first priority but the second criterion should be the department, as departmental policy and reputation will shape your life in many ways.
-- Wherever you go, adopt the following policy: If I feel productive, I work. If I don't feel productive, I do not try to. There will be pressure to always be in the lab or in front of your computer, but the reality is that no human can work eighteen hour days for weeks on an end. So if you can't focus or your research is at an impasse, get out there and do something fun. It won't set you back academically and in the longterm, you'll be happier and healthier!
With that said, don't let the naysayers get you down. There are good people in academia and always room for a few more. Good luck!
That's great work, you've shown that complex, data-based mathematical modelling by NASA scientists is just like someone drawing a line between points and cheering when it later turns out to match some data. And you did so with a cartoon!
I'm sure NASA will be pleased to learn that they can forget all that tiresome building of models and instead base all future rocketry on connecting-the-dots. I thank you, good sir.
The prediction can be result of pure chance in a possibly erratic research study
While that may be true, consider the approach this paper used, roughly:
--Warming up to that point was modelled and divided into sources, including effects of aerosols, solar activity, CO2 increases, etc.
--Specific events were used to compare predictions to reality, for example the Mount Agung eruption in 1963, and those results were used to refine the model.
--Energy usage and CO2 emission rates, among other factors, were predicted for coming decades.
--Based on those predictions, the effects of the resultant CO2 were fed into the model and surface temperature increases were predicted (having to base predictions upon other predictions).
It's a given that any reasonable model is designed to agree well with previous known events, as this one absolutely did. The fact that it further agrees well with over 30 years of future results makes the list of past and future successful predictions so large that clearly the model has at least something going for it. In other words, this is certainly not one erratic research study that got lucky.
What's really scary is how so much of the talking points that are put forth by denialists today are addressed in this paper - from over three decades ago. Volcanoes, solar flares, natural temperature cycles, etc etc. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence for humankind's ability to collectively discuss, understand, and address complex problems!
--There is no global DDT ban - it's perfectly legal in Africa, and if it's use was reduced there it's due to other reasons (see below).
--Less use in DDT is largely attributed to it's diminishing effects, not Silent Spring. Not only that, it can give rise to cross-resistance and render other insecticides less efficacious.
--DDT was increasingly being linked to health problems in humans.
The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!
it's not difficult to not be affected by what you see
This seems to be a common notion on slashdot, maybe due to a mix of disdain for the softer sciences and some arrogance about the ability of intelligence to triumph over everything else.
I'll just point out that there exists an entire industry dedicated to 'affect you' by what you see (or otherwise sense). It's called 'marketing' and it's extremely effective and therefore extremely profitable. Would we really be so incredibly saturated in advertisements 24/7 if human beings could easily be unaffected by it?
And PS - That bit about letting 'them' die for some sort of evolutionary goal is despicable.
...but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic...
Make sure you distinguish between the claims that are made by the researchers and the claims that are made by human resources/technology transfer/publicity departments. Anyone who has ever seen that particular machine in action will attest to its ability to transform modest scientific claims into ones would make a late-night infomercial host blush.
Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.
Better to let in as many as possible and let the actual material decide who really has the needed ability and passion.
Video games have been about making money since the beginning.
Well, so what? You could say something similar about music, film, and literature. Fine - that doesn't mean that the increasingly focus-tested, mass-appeal garbage we're getting in all of these media isn't worse than it used to be.
Find me any 1950's equivalents to Justin Bieber, like Elvis for example, and I will guarantee they will have more artistic merit than the Biebs.
This is amazing and one more nail in the coffin of our long-held dogma of genes being passed down from two parents, expressed but otherwise unaltered, then passed down to our children, all with just a little bit of mixing and mutation. From epigenetic modifications, to massive variances of stomach flora even between relatives, now to food's ability to affect our very gene expression... we've got some serious reconsidering to do about what makes us who we are.
Maybe you or the average geek can't be expected to know this, but this idea is not at at all new. The concept that an author is not the authority on his/her own work has been common, even accepted, in literary analysis for decades. It's sometimes called the 'intentional fallacy'. Calling the author a 'medium' is just the article's way of making an old idea seem new and sexy.
But even if you wouldn't go as far as saying that the interpretor sets the meaning, maybe we could all agree that going back and modifying a work that you've made is a shitty thing to do if that work already holds meaning for millions of people. As is pointed out in TFA, this is exactly what Lucas did that started this debate
Side note - literary analysis can have practical ramifications after all! Who knew?
The front page of the 'texting toy' website begins with 'It sounds 2good2btru - but it's 4real!' and ends with my stomach contents, evacuated onto the floor. Shame on TheGeicoE for subjecting us to that.
The library cost a hefty $81 million, but the alternative was expanding the old library's capacity - and that was estimated at $67 million. So for $14 million, the university gets a brand new library with all the prestige and sex appeal of this new, high-tech approach with lower operating costs to boot. And anyway, the library's namesakes donated $25million, an amount that was probably increased by the prospect of the donator's getting to slap their name all over this exciting new building. What I'm saying is that this was a no-brainer for the university in terms of cost/benefit.
Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Organic is, in fact, the only one you absolutely CAN memorize. Unlike the math-based chemistry classes where you have to learn principles, which the pre-meds struggle mightily with, the memorization-heavy organic chemistry is the one that is considered to be similar enough to medical school that it is used as a weed-out.
As a fellow chemist -- one that has done research and teaching in physical and organic realms -- I assure you this is not necessarily true. A good organic course will yield a maximum grade of maybe 70% for students who are impeccable memorizers but not problem solvers. (I'd say it'd be about 50% for a good phys chem course, because plug-and-chug formulas can certainly be crammed.)
For example, syntheses are a lot like chess. They require memorizing a variety of transformations, but the potential applications of those finite transformations are nearly limitless. There's just no way to memorize them. You need to understand the rules of the game, then be both logical and creative to succeed.
I used to share your perspective, beginning my academic carerr as a phys-chem believer. In the end, I realized that if courses in organic can be aced by memorization, that simply means that whoever delivered the course fucked up. There is a heckofa lot more too it than that.
Organic chemsitry is not a fascinating subject in its ownright. And even though it falls in the purview of physics -- like, uh, everything -- it is best understood apart from physics, as a unique lense. Just as biology is not best understood as complicated chemistry, but rather as a completely different perspective.
It demonstrates the raw power of abstraction. For example, ask an experienced organic chemist to propose a synthesis of any arbitrary molecule. A good one will normally be able to come up with something plausible in minutes, and refine it to something practical in hours. A physical chemist, let alone a physicist, even with the incredible computing resources for the complex quantum mechanical calculations required wouldn't be able to tell you how to make it if you gave her months! Guarenteed.
That is the power of organic chemistry. It teaches you how a handful of simplifications, fuzzy rules, and fictional symbols can give you incredibly unique and practical skills. This is not unlike treating the human body as a group of organs, cells, cellular machines, etc., rather than subatomic particles. Of course it's all physics, but viewing systems through appropriate paradigms can yield incredible results.
If people see "orgo" as just a test of rote memorization, their professors should be ashamed -- they've missed it point.
The other problem with lawyers is that they come from an adversarial profession. They tend to think in terms of winning and losing, rather than mutual benefit. Courts are in the business of slicing up the pie, not making the pie bigger, and certainly not planting some wheat and apple trees so more pies can be made in the future.
Exactly. Someone once said that the whole trouble with having lawyers in charge is that lawyers are paid to arbitrarily pick a position, then argue for that position come hell, highwater, or new information. They don't typically have any incentive (or even the opportunity) to pick the right position -- they go with the view they've been paid to represent.
Scientists, engineers, and practically everyone else are instead expected to come to the right answer based on the objectively best evidence available. And if that evidence changes, so should the position. The lawyer-approach wouldn't cure a patient or get an airplane off the ground, why does anyone expect it to be suited to running a government?
Why prop up an obsolete and failed industry at the expence of taxpayers, consumers and competitors?
Because small bookstores are part of what makes Paris the most visited city in the world? (You don't think tourism is a failed industry, do you?) Because literature is a huge part of the cultural heritage of France and remains a national past-time? Because if Amazon is the only bookseller in the world in a decade or so, they will do what monopolies are known to do: screw over the authors, focus on mass-appeal crap, enforce DRM? (Just look at the music industry for examples of this, and imagine how bad it would be if it was even more centralized!)
I'm not French but one of the reasons I love France is because nearly every French citizen I've met would be able to produce these answers and talk intelligently about this bill. On Slashdot, and in North America, we seem to be collectively drunk on the free-market, short-term kool-aid.
If scientists want to restore integrity to their field(s) -- and I applaud their efforts to do so -- why aren't they using an experimental approach to do so? I think they should try several things and collect data to find out what actually works.
That's exactly what's happening. Different groups of scientists, journalists, university-groups and so forth are trying to implement a variety of systems.
Of course, like real science, each group tends to only focus on one approach with the hope that their results will emerge as the best amongst the competition. You're not referring to "scientists" as some kind of monolothic entity, are you?
I've seen hundreds of researchers work to try to come up with a car-ready inexpensive fuel cell that's, if not safe, at least not going to level a block during a fender-bender. The conclusion I came to long ago was that the big car makers pursue fuel cells to avoid explaining why they've not pursued (or actively stalled) the development of electric vehicles. The fact is that electric cars have a much, much greater potential to replace internal combustion engines than fuel cells for the near future.
Even just the fact that infrastructure is basically in place for widespread transportation of electricity and not even on the radar for hydrogen gives electric a huge edge!
I'm not saying the technology might not prove itself within a few decades, but if half of the fuel-cell resources were placed into improving batteries, electric vehicles would be damn near ubiquitous by now. Would anyone argue that the existing automakers really wanted that?
This is the hard discipline that the vast majority of private enterprises have to adhere to, but which no government with a European welfare state seems capable of.
Strange, isn't it. Almost as if governments and corporations are not the exact same thing.
Austerity makes zero sense when applied to governments. How many times does this need to be proven? How many gutted middle classes and depressions does it take? "Tightening the belt" on a countrywide scale is a feel good, self flagellating piece of fiction that simply does not work.
But don't let me take away your smug sense of superiority over nearly all of Europe. Romney 2012!
In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful? In my experience, sciences grows more expensive, less funded, more hyped, less understood, and overall less heeded.
College has become far more about the degree than the experience, sadly. You can meet scores of graduates that have shining transcripts and dismal educations. And this is one of the reason the cost is so obscene -- as Thomas Frank said, "An annual pass to Disneyland would also cost $54,000 if society believed that what it took to make you eligible for success was a great many hours spent absorbing the subtle lessons of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage."
Until there is prestige associated with online learning, an online education will never be as valuable or acceptable as a brick-and-mortar degree mill experience. However, to those who actually want to learn and to do, access to high quality education experiences from anywhere in the world is fantastic and will only continue to improve with better technology and pedagogy. Though it's no surprising that the breakthrough course was in a geeky subject that attracts genuine curiosity.
My university's model is to attract as many international students as possible and charge them 3x the 'domestic' tuition rate, which is already high for Canada. Better yet is a privately-owned college they've licensed our 'brand' to, which allows them to do the same but with dirt-low entrance requirements and higher yet tuition!
Even my previous institute, a very small liberal arts university on the opposite coast, was showing shades of the same. What else do we expect with burgeoning human resources departments and shrinking public funding?
I'm midway through a graduate program and here are the things I wish I was told before I started:
With that said, don't let the naysayers get you down. There are good people in academia and always room for a few more. Good luck!
That's great work, you've shown that complex, data-based mathematical modelling by NASA scientists is just like someone drawing a line between points and cheering when it later turns out to match some data. And you did so with a cartoon!
I'm sure NASA will be pleased to learn that they can forget all that tiresome building of models and instead base all future rocketry on connecting-the-dots. I thank you, good sir.
The prediction can be result of pure chance in a possibly erratic research study
While that may be true, consider the approach this paper used, roughly:
It's a given that any reasonable model is designed to agree well with previous known events, as this one absolutely did. The fact that it further agrees well with over 30 years of future results makes the list of past and future successful predictions so large that clearly the model has at least something going for it. In other words, this is certainly not one erratic research study that got lucky.
What's really scary is how so much of the talking points that are put forth by denialists today are addressed in this paper - from over three decades ago. Volcanoes, solar flares, natural temperature cycles, etc etc. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence for humankind's ability to collectively discuss, understand, and address complex problems!
The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!
it's not difficult to not be affected by what you see
This seems to be a common notion on slashdot, maybe due to a mix of disdain for the softer sciences and some arrogance about the ability of intelligence to triumph over everything else.
I'll just point out that there exists an entire industry dedicated to 'affect you' by what you see (or otherwise sense). It's called 'marketing' and it's extremely effective and therefore extremely profitable. Would we really be so incredibly saturated in advertisements 24/7 if human beings could easily be unaffected by it?
And PS - That bit about letting 'them' die for some sort of evolutionary goal is despicable.
Specially designed to inspire shareholder confidence if you're a believer, or to lower his tax bracket if you're a cynic.
...but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic...
Make sure you distinguish between the claims that are made by the researchers and the claims that are made by human resources/technology transfer/publicity departments. Anyone who has ever seen that particular machine in action will attest to its ability to transform modest scientific claims into ones would make a late-night infomercial host blush.
Some universities in my country have too many freshmen so they deliberately try to make half of them drop out.
Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.
Better to let in as many as possible and let the actual material decide who really has the needed ability and passion.
Video games have been about making money since the beginning.
Well, so what? You could say something similar about music, film, and literature. Fine - that doesn't mean that the increasingly focus-tested, mass-appeal garbage we're getting in all of these media isn't worse than it used to be.
Find me any 1950's equivalents to Justin Bieber, like Elvis for example, and I will guarantee they will have more artistic merit than the Biebs.
This is amazing and one more nail in the coffin of our long-held dogma of genes being passed down from two parents, expressed but otherwise unaltered, then passed down to our children, all with just a little bit of mixing and mutation. From epigenetic modifications, to massive variances of stomach flora even between relatives, now to food's ability to affect our very gene expression... we've got some serious reconsidering to do about what makes us who we are.
Very cool.
Maybe you or the average geek can't be expected to know this, but this idea is not at at all new. The concept that an author is not the authority on his/her own work has been common, even accepted, in literary analysis for decades. It's sometimes called the 'intentional fallacy'. Calling the author a 'medium' is just the article's way of making an old idea seem new and sexy.
But even if you wouldn't go as far as saying that the interpretor sets the meaning, maybe we could all agree that going back and modifying a work that you've made is a shitty thing to do if that work already holds meaning for millions of people. As is pointed out in TFA, this is exactly what Lucas did that started this debate
Side note - literary analysis can have practical ramifications after all! Who knew?
The front page of the 'texting toy' website begins with 'It sounds 2good2btru - but it's 4real!' and ends with my stomach contents, evacuated onto the floor. Shame on TheGeicoE for subjecting us to that.
Many children inherit their childhood home.
You did say vacation, right?
The library cost a hefty $81 million, but the alternative was expanding the old library's capacity - and that was estimated at $67 million. So for $14 million, the university gets a brand new library with all the prestige and sex appeal of this new, high-tech approach with lower operating costs to boot. And anyway, the library's namesakes donated $25million, an amount that was probably increased by the prospect of the donator's getting to slap their name all over this exciting new building. What I'm saying is that this was a no-brainer for the university in terms of cost/benefit.
Now, whether you want to trade a building full of beautiful old books which you can peruse at your own convenience, and staffed with generally knowledgeable bibliophiles, for a mechanized building with 5-minute delay times on book requests and far fewer human employees... that's not so straightforward I hope.