the depth of his knowledge in relevant subjects, including some of the bizarre stuff cited by pseudoscientific creationists might be too shallow
That's my worry. These guys have their own shibboleths and arguments that they've been practicing for years, all of which sound like absolute gibberish to trained scientists. I once got into an argument with an otherwise very smart creationist in college, and I had no idea how to respond when he started talking about the depth of dust on the moon as an argument against an old earth. It's complete nonsense (which I easily confirmed afterwards with 10 seconds of Googling), but there's not an intuitive comeback if you haven't studied the subject.
Unfortunately it's a lot easier to poke at small gaps or inconsistencies in a theory or field of study from the sidelines than to learn it comprehensively and/or do original research, which is why we'll always have creationists, AIDS denialists, and other clowns I won't mention. The good news is that the biological sciences are moving along very quickly, while creationism - by necessity - stays in one place. When the phrase "intelligent design" was first popularized, the only genomes we had sequenced were tiny viruses. Now we're getting new data faster than we can analyze it, and we're starting to be able to track the molecular events associated with millions of years of evolution across multiple families. The bad news is that it's difficult to fit all of this into a primary school curriculum.
Others have already addressed the many problems with your tired rant, which is basically a carbon copy of the same crap that gets posted every time there's an article remotely related to the American space program, but I'll just focus on this bit of ignorance:
America invented the 20th century between 1950 and 1970, during a time when the average wage doubled. Since then, the average wage has dropped over 20% during the greatest increase in productivity in the history of man.
The high wages between 1950 and 1970 were partly the result of America being the dominant economic power at a time when most of the rest of the world was either dirt poor to begin with, or crippled by war. China was still a nation of peasants and had just spent the previous 35 years in constant civil war, when it wasn't being ravaged by Japan. India had only just become an independent nation. Today, thanks to the mixed blessing of global capitalism, these two nations have hundreds of millions of middle-class citizens whose lives would have been utterly miserable in that same time period. You're basically blaming Americans for the fact that we were spectacularly lucky* for a few decades before the rest of the world started to catch up.
(* Not to imply that America won WWII because of luck - just that our postwar status was unusually advantageous.)
Since pretty much all research in his field includes some federal component, that's a three year exile from his entire career, and about as close as you can get to a career death sentence.
And since pretty much any prospective employer is going to find out about this, even the privately-funded research groups will treat him like he's radioactive.
It's not. After this no one will touch him; his career as a researcher is over. For professors, three years of no federal grants is generally enough to kill the entire lab, and a three-year lapse in publishing is enough to kill any career on its own, with the possible exception of the most hard-boiled tenure.
True, but he attempted (?) to defraud the federal government out of several million dollars. If you tried that with Medicaid, you'd go to jail. On the other hand, considering that our jails are already packed full and seem to encourage rather than prevent recidivism, there is a strong case to be made that simply destroying this asswipe's scientific career is a more effective and efficient punishment than locking him up with "blue-collar" criminals at the cost of $20,000-plus per year. It sure does seem unfair to the poor losers who got stuck with mandatory minimum sentences for petty drug crimes, though.
"Iowa State University assistant professor Dong-Pyou Han" may not have the money for fancy lawyers but "Iowa State AIDS research project" or the "Iowa State University" most probably have some on they payrolls.
Correct, and ISU would much rather see headlines that say "ISU researcher barred from seeking federal grants for three years" than "ISU researcher sentenced to five years in jail for fraud."
I'm not sure why people don't actually go to jail for this, other than the fact that the NIH can't actually bring charges to court, only apply sanctions w.r.t. grant applications; criminal charges would require that the DOJ get involved. For what it's worth, most scientists I know (myself included) think that the NIH is far too lenient with scientists found guilty of willful fraud. I would make it a lifetime ban.
As an addendum to this, the anti-immune drugs themselves can kill the patient. "Least difficult to acquire" is also relative; the demand still exceeds the supply.
Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process.
This gets tricky in some fields, however. I work in a field where generating the data is a notoriously difficult and haphazard process, subject to many non-experimental variables, such that the use of a different pipette or stock solution can make the difference - or even just the speed of the researcher's manual labor. Temperature and humidity play a role too, and these are not as precisely calibrated as one might like. So if an experiment is performed at 8pm on a Saturday night by a grad student in Colorado, there is no guarantee that a postdoc in Singapore will be able to do the same thing based on reading the paper. (Actually, from past experience, there's no guarantee that the original experimenter will be able to reproduce it either!) But the data may be just as good, and they're difficult to fake, and they're deposited in a public database. Since everyone in the field is accustomed to the complexities of the process and we have decent archival policies, this problem is accepted as a fact of life.
I am quite certain that some of my (published) results from grad school would be difficult at best to reproduce exactly. I stand by my data - and am happy to share them - but it is always troubling to wonder if someone else in a different environment would have reached different conclusions.
On several occasions I have tried to get data from researchers. Most of them guard their data jealously
I should note that this almost certainly violates the terms of publication for most journals, and possibly the terms of their research grants as well. I actually had one professor complain to me that it was "his" data and I had no right to it - conveniently ignoring the fact that he (like me) was being funded by taxpayers (albeit in different countries). My views on this subject aren't particularly radical - I do think scientists should be allowed to keep data private until they publish (or give up) - but any academic researcher with this kind of attitude needs to find a new job.
For some projects the NIH has gone even further and said that data need to be publicly archived immediately, regardless of publication plans. This is problematic for most fields, but at least the funding agencies are being militant about this.
We let a bunch of 1 percenters, who themselves barely know how or care to read, sponsor draconian copyright laws to stop eeryone from copying all that stuff, just on the off chance that they might copy a bunch of songs or movies that are outmoded within two years. And the commercial scienrific pulishers are some of the worst.
Commercial scientific publishers do indeed tend to be bottom-feeders, but if I'm understanding the article correct, they're not the root cause here - the issue is not that articles are being lost, it's that the underlying data used to generate them are lost. The journals can't help with that, because they're in the publication business, not the data archival business. We're talking about some grad student's lab notebook that contains the raw numbers used to generate a box plot, which then gets thrown out by mistake the next time the lab moves, or when the professor retires, etc.
Many fields (genomics, structural biology) have mandatory data-deposition policies that ensure that the raw data is available to everyone, without charge (except for patents on commercial uses, but that's a separate rant). The problem here tends to be that we're usually archiving derived data, which is still a lot better than nothing at all, but limits the types of analyses that can be done.
greatest humanitarian stories in history??? Do you remember just how many TENS OF MILLIONS of people died [paulbogdanor.com] during the communist takeover and resulting purges? Or the famines?
I think the GP was referring to the post-1980 era, which really was a great humanitarian story, especially compared to the 30 years preceding it. The Economist magazine uses phrases like this all the time, and there's never any question about what they're referring to.
I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.
Strictly speaking, this is correct, but there certainly are serious scientists arguing for peer review taking place after publication, not before - under this scheme, we would simply post our raw manuscripts online (i.e. arXiv or similar server). But the ultimate goal is to have more peer review, not less, with the participation of the entire scientific community.
a way to fix this by his own term is to stop contributing... bravo ??? Shouldn't he contribute more instead...that would be better instead of the "fuck it, I quit" attitude
Schekman is the editor-in-chief of eLife, a new open-access biomedical journal (so it's a bit personal for him - not that I disagree with his message). Previously he was the editor of PNAS, one of the better publications by non-profit publishers.
its not easy to think of better quantifiable metrics
As someone else pointed out below, the actual impact of the research should be more important. I work in a methods development group where we tend to get very high citation counts for our most important papers, even though they're published in specialty journals. But we have it much easier than most basic researchers. The "high-impact" label is often self-fulfilling, because other scientists are more likely to notice and cite your work if it appears in one of these journals. I for one would love to be able to post a manuscript on arXiv and have that be the end of it, and have peer review done through some kind of long-term process (comment system, etc.). But I need to advance my career just like everyone else, which means occasionally publishing with companies I loathe.
I can think of many solutions to this but all of them would essentially require collective action on the part of the entire academic research community and the funding agencies. This seems unlikely to happen, although the larger funding agencies (public and private) have been notably effective in forcing the publishers to allow papers to become open-access after a relatively short period of exclusivity (typically 6-12 months). It's not ideal, but at least it's progress.
If I publish a paper in Nature that receives no citations, what good is it to the scientific community and why should I get rewarded for that? If I publish a paper in PLOS One that gets hundreds of citations, isn't that more important than the publisher I chose?
Yes, but the problem is that it's much easier to get hundreds of citations (especially in the short term, which may be more important for grant applications or job searches) if you publish in Nature than if you publish in PLoS One. And the effects are broader: since high-profile papers are even more important for junior scientists (Science/Nature/Cell publications are essentially mandatory for tenure-track positions at big research universities), labs with a track record of high-profile publications will have an easier time attracting the smartest and most ambitious postdocs, etc. It is a truly lamentable situation but not easily solved.
it's about the fact that the university who decides whether you get tenure or post-tenure promotions still does so partially on the basis of how many publications you have in peer-reviewed journals, and how high the impact factor of those journals is.
And the agencies that fund your research make their decisions based on the same information, although they are more impressed by actual productivity than by publication in elite journals.
Professors with tenure are free from the absolute "publish or perish" mentality that requires them to churn out as many papers in high-impact journals as possible, regardless of ethical consideration
Uh, no, they're not. Tenure and funding are totally separate; if you have tenure but can't get money to pay for your research (for which the competition is increasingly intense), the university will still give you an office and class assignments but they're not going to pay for lab supplies, postdocs, research technicians, etc. And continued funding requires a track record of publishing high-impact articles. Getting rid of tenure would only make this worse, since professors would be continually scrambling to prove their worth to the university.
Would the quality of the predictions go up if they used a more accurate (and thus computationally complex) model of the forcefield? AFAIK DE Shaw Research [deshawresearch.com] is building their "Anton" line of supercomputers for the simulation of molecular dynamics.
True, but they've almost entirely been using simple forcefields (with some of their own improvements); the supercomputer is so they can run the MD simulations for orders of magnitude longer.
Those who oppose euthanasia are people who either (a) have dogmatic reasons for doing so (e.g., religion), or (b) have never witnessed a loved one go through a protracted and painful terminal illness.
How about (c) have serious ethical reservations about abuses of assisted "suicide" once it becomes legal and socially acceptable?
As a general principle, I agree that anyone who has a chronic and excruciatingly painful medical condition should be allowed to swallow a bottle of barbituates if they're fully capable of reaching that decision of their own free will. But the legal and ethical ramifications go far beyond that, and it's not simply a matter of self-determination. Just look at one of Adams's quotes: "If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago." Classy. I can't be the only person who read that and thought, "gee, Scott, I don't want you making these decisions either."
Several hundred years ago, gravity was a similar looking, insurmountable barrier, and that has proven to be be trivial to 'get around' provided you are willing to make the proper engineering choices.
I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Several hundred years ago, we at least had the example of birds and insects as proof that gravity was not an insurmountable obstacle. We also had plenty of experience making objects briefly shoot upwards, we just didn't know how to keep them there. As a result, it really was just an engineering problem - first the development of lighter-than-air craft, then aerodynamic design and continuously operating combustion engines. But we have no such examples of real-world strategies for overcoming the speed of light.
is not something that can be done with a civilization that does not even want to invest the money to educate their own children. And this would only happen if we knew, for certain, that the destination worlds were inhabitable.
Well, I can probably come up with some scenarios that would be sufficiently motivating for a generation ship to be built - but they basically all involve imminent global catastrophe and decades of authoritarian government, central planning, and slave labor (or close to it). After all, Russia went from a peasant economy to building surprisingly durable space stations in well under a century; it's very impressive if you try not to think about the 10 million or so who died in the process. My guess is that complete societal collapse would be the more likely outcome, of course.
A much more optimistic scenario is that we figure out fusion energy, extend the human lifespan, develop really excellent A.I. and industrial automation, and Elon Musk actually figures out how to make a cheap, re-usable launcher. The economics of space travel then start to be much different - it's still not going to be profitable, but if we had technology that advanced it could become close enough to break-even that some lunatic will happily flush a few trillion dollars a year down the toilet for the glory of sending people to Alpha Centauri. It's awfully difficult to imagine us getting anywhere close to this state in our lifetime, but that doesn't mean it will still be impossible in a few hundred years.
Of course we may find that there are insurmountable practical obstacles to developing such technologies - fusion being the most likely dead end. But past experience suggests that we may figure out enough other awesome tricks instead that it may be irrelevant. (Or we'll all die in a nuclear holocaust, but I'm trying to hold on to my youthful optimism.)
If we're postulating that in the next few centuries we come up with energy sources that could accelerate us to something like 20% of c, then I'd say we probably have the tech to build the shielding.
I'm going to further postulate that if we somehow manage to devise such technology, we've probably also significantly extended the human lifespan, and therefore the institutional attention span, and we'll be able to start thinking about robotic precursor missions well before we start flinging people across interstellar space. Which means that we can take our time finding someplace really worth traveling to. Right now even the robotic missions sound insane because the duration would be longer than most modern nations have existed in their current forms. It's hard to get people, even very intelligent and curious people, to invest their lives in something they won't be able to see through to the end. But if we could start sending out probes now, and I'd get to see the results by the time I retire - that's something I could be a part of. (Getting on a generation ship that won't arrive until my great-grandchildren have already died - not so much.)
The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians
An optimist - and for these purposes, I qualify - might look and think, "isn't it wonderful that the only reason any of this crap is relevant is that we have a global communications network that can transmit any information at the speed of light to billions of people?" The same optimist would probably point out that in 100 years, virtually no one will remember who Snooki or the Kardashian sisters were, outside of a few obsessively geeky historians of pop culture.
Meanwhile, thanks to the same global communications network, I have access to a vast trove of scientific research, millions upon millions of lines of open-source code, instant answers to my programming questions, and whatever out-of-copyright works have been digitized. Oh, and I can access all this on a computer that fits in my pocket and is significantly more powerful than anything I used as a child.
Orgoanic chemistry is looked at as a weed out class.
Yup. As someone who both attended classes with and later taught pre-meds, I had an immediate gut reaction to the article title: "maybe because so many pre-med students are retards?" Seriously, after seeing some of the people who wanted to be doctors, I've never been able to fully trust the medical profession. Like some of the other posters, I thought orgo was relatively easy, and I've always felt that anyone who found it an impossible obstacle had no business making decisions about other people's health.
In medical research the prevailing attitude is also against independent replication.
I wouldn't say there's an attitude against independent replication, but there isn't policy and funding in place to support it. High-profile fields typically have multiple competing labs trying to answer the same questions, but once one of them publishes a result, the others will drop the question and move on to whatever is their next best chance for a high-impact paper. Replicating someone else's result can be time-consuming and expensive, and there's no incentive (at least compared to fishing for something more interesting).
This situation makes it impossible to be confident in any of the recent literature and makes me wonder if it is not just all a waste of time right now anyway.
Depends which literature you're looking at. I work in structural biology, which is mostly fairly reliable - and since data deposition is required for most publications, we have a mechanism for verifying the analysis (it's awfully difficult to convincingly fake the data). A fair amount of crap gets published anyway, but it's not really all that difficult to detect. But I would be automatically suspicious of any paper which relied exclusively on Western blots as evidence for a mechanism, and those are much more work to validate.
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the depth of his knowledge in relevant subjects, including some of the bizarre stuff cited by pseudoscientific creationists might be too shallow
That's my worry. These guys have their own shibboleths and arguments that they've been practicing for years, all of which sound like absolute gibberish to trained scientists. I once got into an argument with an otherwise very smart creationist in college, and I had no idea how to respond when he started talking about the depth of dust on the moon as an argument against an old earth. It's complete nonsense (which I easily confirmed afterwards with 10 seconds of Googling), but there's not an intuitive comeback if you haven't studied the subject.
Unfortunately it's a lot easier to poke at small gaps or inconsistencies in a theory or field of study from the sidelines than to learn it comprehensively and/or do original research, which is why we'll always have creationists, AIDS denialists, and other clowns I won't mention. The good news is that the biological sciences are moving along very quickly, while creationism - by necessity - stays in one place. When the phrase "intelligent design" was first popularized, the only genomes we had sequenced were tiny viruses. Now we're getting new data faster than we can analyze it, and we're starting to be able to track the molecular events associated with millions of years of evolution across multiple families. The bad news is that it's difficult to fit all of this into a primary school curriculum.
Others have already addressed the many problems with your tired rant, which is basically a carbon copy of the same crap that gets posted every time there's an article remotely related to the American space program, but I'll just focus on this bit of ignorance:
America invented the 20th century between 1950 and 1970, during a time when the average wage doubled. Since then, the average wage has dropped over 20% during the greatest increase in productivity in the history of man.
The high wages between 1950 and 1970 were partly the result of America being the dominant economic power at a time when most of the rest of the world was either dirt poor to begin with, or crippled by war. China was still a nation of peasants and had just spent the previous 35 years in constant civil war, when it wasn't being ravaged by Japan. India had only just become an independent nation. Today, thanks to the mixed blessing of global capitalism, these two nations have hundreds of millions of middle-class citizens whose lives would have been utterly miserable in that same time period. You're basically blaming Americans for the fact that we were spectacularly lucky* for a few decades before the rest of the world started to catch up.
(* Not to imply that America won WWII because of luck - just that our postwar status was unusually advantageous.)
Since pretty much all research in his field includes some federal component, that's a three year exile from his entire career, and about as close as you can get to a career death sentence.
And since pretty much any prospective employer is going to find out about this, even the privately-funded research groups will treat him like he's radioactive.
It's not. After this no one will touch him; his career as a researcher is over. For professors, three years of no federal grants is generally enough to kill the entire lab, and a three-year lapse in publishing is enough to kill any career on its own, with the possible exception of the most hard-boiled tenure.
True, but he attempted (?) to defraud the federal government out of several million dollars. If you tried that with Medicaid, you'd go to jail. On the other hand, considering that our jails are already packed full and seem to encourage rather than prevent recidivism, there is a strong case to be made that simply destroying this asswipe's scientific career is a more effective and efficient punishment than locking him up with "blue-collar" criminals at the cost of $20,000-plus per year. It sure does seem unfair to the poor losers who got stuck with mandatory minimum sentences for petty drug crimes, though.
"Iowa State University assistant professor Dong-Pyou Han" may not have the money for fancy lawyers but "Iowa State AIDS research project" or the "Iowa State University" most probably have some on they payrolls.
Correct, and ISU would much rather see headlines that say "ISU researcher barred from seeking federal grants for three years" than "ISU researcher sentenced to five years in jail for fraud."
I'm not sure why people don't actually go to jail for this, other than the fact that the NIH can't actually bring charges to court, only apply sanctions w.r.t. grant applications; criminal charges would require that the DOJ get involved. For what it's worth, most scientists I know (myself included) think that the NIH is far too lenient with scientists found guilty of willful fraud. I would make it a lifetime ban.
As an addendum to this, the anti-immune drugs themselves can kill the patient. "Least difficult to acquire" is also relative; the demand still exceeds the supply.
Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process.
This gets tricky in some fields, however. I work in a field where generating the data is a notoriously difficult and haphazard process, subject to many non-experimental variables, such that the use of a different pipette or stock solution can make the difference - or even just the speed of the researcher's manual labor. Temperature and humidity play a role too, and these are not as precisely calibrated as one might like. So if an experiment is performed at 8pm on a Saturday night by a grad student in Colorado, there is no guarantee that a postdoc in Singapore will be able to do the same thing based on reading the paper. (Actually, from past experience, there's no guarantee that the original experimenter will be able to reproduce it either!) But the data may be just as good, and they're difficult to fake, and they're deposited in a public database. Since everyone in the field is accustomed to the complexities of the process and we have decent archival policies, this problem is accepted as a fact of life.
I am quite certain that some of my (published) results from grad school would be difficult at best to reproduce exactly. I stand by my data - and am happy to share them - but it is always troubling to wonder if someone else in a different environment would have reached different conclusions.
On several occasions I have tried to get data from researchers. Most of them guard their data jealously
I should note that this almost certainly violates the terms of publication for most journals, and possibly the terms of their research grants as well. I actually had one professor complain to me that it was "his" data and I had no right to it - conveniently ignoring the fact that he (like me) was being funded by taxpayers (albeit in different countries). My views on this subject aren't particularly radical - I do think scientists should be allowed to keep data private until they publish (or give up) - but any academic researcher with this kind of attitude needs to find a new job.
For some projects the NIH has gone even further and said that data need to be publicly archived immediately, regardless of publication plans. This is problematic for most fields, but at least the funding agencies are being militant about this.
We let a bunch of 1 percenters, who themselves barely know how or care to read, sponsor draconian copyright laws to stop eeryone from copying all that stuff, just on the off chance that they might copy a bunch of songs or movies that are outmoded within two years. And the commercial scienrific pulishers are some of the worst.
Commercial scientific publishers do indeed tend to be bottom-feeders, but if I'm understanding the article correct, they're not the root cause here - the issue is not that articles are being lost, it's that the underlying data used to generate them are lost. The journals can't help with that, because they're in the publication business, not the data archival business. We're talking about some grad student's lab notebook that contains the raw numbers used to generate a box plot, which then gets thrown out by mistake the next time the lab moves, or when the professor retires, etc.
Many fields (genomics, structural biology) have mandatory data-deposition policies that ensure that the raw data is available to everyone, without charge (except for patents on commercial uses, but that's a separate rant). The problem here tends to be that we're usually archiving derived data, which is still a lot better than nothing at all, but limits the types of analyses that can be done.
greatest humanitarian stories in history??? Do you remember just how many TENS OF MILLIONS of people died [paulbogdanor.com] during the communist takeover and resulting purges? Or the famines?
I think the GP was referring to the post-1980 era, which really was a great humanitarian story, especially compared to the 30 years preceding it. The Economist magazine uses phrases like this all the time, and there's never any question about what they're referring to.
I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.
Strictly speaking, this is correct, but there certainly are serious scientists arguing for peer review taking place after publication, not before - under this scheme, we would simply post our raw manuscripts online (i.e. arXiv or similar server). But the ultimate goal is to have more peer review, not less, with the participation of the entire scientific community.
a way to fix this by his own term is to stop contributing ... bravo ??? Shouldn't he contribute more instead...that would be better instead of the "fuck it, I quit" attitude
Schekman is the editor-in-chief of eLife, a new open-access biomedical journal (so it's a bit personal for him - not that I disagree with his message). Previously he was the editor of PNAS, one of the better publications by non-profit publishers.
its not easy to think of better quantifiable metrics
As someone else pointed out below, the actual impact of the research should be more important. I work in a methods development group where we tend to get very high citation counts for our most important papers, even though they're published in specialty journals. But we have it much easier than most basic researchers. The "high-impact" label is often self-fulfilling, because other scientists are more likely to notice and cite your work if it appears in one of these journals. I for one would love to be able to post a manuscript on arXiv and have that be the end of it, and have peer review done through some kind of long-term process (comment system, etc.). But I need to advance my career just like everyone else, which means occasionally publishing with companies I loathe.
I can think of many solutions to this but all of them would essentially require collective action on the part of the entire academic research community and the funding agencies. This seems unlikely to happen, although the larger funding agencies (public and private) have been notably effective in forcing the publishers to allow papers to become open-access after a relatively short period of exclusivity (typically 6-12 months). It's not ideal, but at least it's progress.
If I publish a paper in Nature that receives no citations, what good is it to the scientific community and why should I get rewarded for that? If I publish a paper in PLOS One that gets hundreds of citations, isn't that more important than the publisher I chose?
Yes, but the problem is that it's much easier to get hundreds of citations (especially in the short term, which may be more important for grant applications or job searches) if you publish in Nature than if you publish in PLoS One. And the effects are broader: since high-profile papers are even more important for junior scientists (Science/Nature/Cell publications are essentially mandatory for tenure-track positions at big research universities), labs with a track record of high-profile publications will have an easier time attracting the smartest and most ambitious postdocs, etc. It is a truly lamentable situation but not easily solved.
it's about the fact that the university who decides whether you get tenure or post-tenure promotions still does so partially on the basis of how many publications you have in peer-reviewed journals, and how high the impact factor of those journals is.
And the agencies that fund your research make their decisions based on the same information, although they are more impressed by actual productivity than by publication in elite journals.
Professors with tenure are free from the absolute "publish or perish" mentality that requires them to churn out as many papers in high-impact journals as possible, regardless of ethical consideration
Uh, no, they're not. Tenure and funding are totally separate; if you have tenure but can't get money to pay for your research (for which the competition is increasingly intense), the university will still give you an office and class assignments but they're not going to pay for lab supplies, postdocs, research technicians, etc. And continued funding requires a track record of publishing high-impact articles. Getting rid of tenure would only make this worse, since professors would be continually scrambling to prove their worth to the university.
Would the quality of the predictions go up if they used a more accurate (and thus computationally complex) model of the forcefield? AFAIK DE Shaw Research [deshawresearch.com] is building their "Anton" line of supercomputers for the simulation of molecular dynamics.
True, but they've almost entirely been using simple forcefields (with some of their own improvements); the supercomputer is so they can run the MD simulations for orders of magnitude longer.
Those who oppose euthanasia are people who either (a) have dogmatic reasons for doing so (e.g., religion), or (b) have never witnessed a loved one go through a protracted and painful terminal illness.
How about (c) have serious ethical reservations about abuses of assisted "suicide" once it becomes legal and socially acceptable?
As a general principle, I agree that anyone who has a chronic and excruciatingly painful medical condition should be allowed to swallow a bottle of barbituates if they're fully capable of reaching that decision of their own free will. But the legal and ethical ramifications go far beyond that, and it's not simply a matter of self-determination. Just look at one of Adams's quotes: "If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago." Classy. I can't be the only person who read that and thought, "gee, Scott, I don't want you making these decisions either."
Several hundred years ago, gravity was a similar looking, insurmountable barrier, and that has proven to be be trivial to 'get around' provided you are willing to make the proper engineering choices.
I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Several hundred years ago, we at least had the example of birds and insects as proof that gravity was not an insurmountable obstacle. We also had plenty of experience making objects briefly shoot upwards, we just didn't know how to keep them there. As a result, it really was just an engineering problem - first the development of lighter-than-air craft, then aerodynamic design and continuously operating combustion engines. But we have no such examples of real-world strategies for overcoming the speed of light.
is not something that can be done with a civilization that does not even want to invest the money to educate their own children. And this would only happen if we knew, for certain, that the destination worlds were inhabitable.
Well, I can probably come up with some scenarios that would be sufficiently motivating for a generation ship to be built - but they basically all involve imminent global catastrophe and decades of authoritarian government, central planning, and slave labor (or close to it). After all, Russia went from a peasant economy to building surprisingly durable space stations in well under a century; it's very impressive if you try not to think about the 10 million or so who died in the process. My guess is that complete societal collapse would be the more likely outcome, of course.
A much more optimistic scenario is that we figure out fusion energy, extend the human lifespan, develop really excellent A.I. and industrial automation, and Elon Musk actually figures out how to make a cheap, re-usable launcher. The economics of space travel then start to be much different - it's still not going to be profitable, but if we had technology that advanced it could become close enough to break-even that some lunatic will happily flush a few trillion dollars a year down the toilet for the glory of sending people to Alpha Centauri. It's awfully difficult to imagine us getting anywhere close to this state in our lifetime, but that doesn't mean it will still be impossible in a few hundred years.
Of course we may find that there are insurmountable practical obstacles to developing such technologies - fusion being the most likely dead end. But past experience suggests that we may figure out enough other awesome tricks instead that it may be irrelevant. (Or we'll all die in a nuclear holocaust, but I'm trying to hold on to my youthful optimism.)
If we're postulating that in the next few centuries we come up with energy sources that could accelerate us to something like 20% of c, then I'd say we probably have the tech to build the shielding.
I'm going to further postulate that if we somehow manage to devise such technology, we've probably also significantly extended the human lifespan, and therefore the institutional attention span, and we'll be able to start thinking about robotic precursor missions well before we start flinging people across interstellar space. Which means that we can take our time finding someplace really worth traveling to. Right now even the robotic missions sound insane because the duration would be longer than most modern nations have existed in their current forms. It's hard to get people, even very intelligent and curious people, to invest their lives in something they won't be able to see through to the end. But if we could start sending out probes now, and I'd get to see the results by the time I retire - that's something I could be a part of. (Getting on a generation ship that won't arrive until my great-grandchildren have already died - not so much.)
The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians
An optimist - and for these purposes, I qualify - might look and think, "isn't it wonderful that the only reason any of this crap is relevant is that we have a global communications network that can transmit any information at the speed of light to billions of people?" The same optimist would probably point out that in 100 years, virtually no one will remember who Snooki or the Kardashian sisters were, outside of a few obsessively geeky historians of pop culture.
Meanwhile, thanks to the same global communications network, I have access to a vast trove of scientific research, millions upon millions of lines of open-source code, instant answers to my programming questions, and whatever out-of-copyright works have been digitized. Oh, and I can access all this on a computer that fits in my pocket and is significantly more powerful than anything I used as a child.
Orgoanic chemistry is looked at as a weed out class.
Yup. As someone who both attended classes with and later taught pre-meds, I had an immediate gut reaction to the article title: "maybe because so many pre-med students are retards?" Seriously, after seeing some of the people who wanted to be doctors, I've never been able to fully trust the medical profession. Like some of the other posters, I thought orgo was relatively easy, and I've always felt that anyone who found it an impossible obstacle had no business making decisions about other people's health.
In medical research the prevailing attitude is also against independent replication.
I wouldn't say there's an attitude against independent replication, but there isn't policy and funding in place to support it. High-profile fields typically have multiple competing labs trying to answer the same questions, but once one of them publishes a result, the others will drop the question and move on to whatever is their next best chance for a high-impact paper. Replicating someone else's result can be time-consuming and expensive, and there's no incentive (at least compared to fishing for something more interesting).
This situation makes it impossible to be confident in any of the recent literature and makes me wonder if it is not just all a waste of time right now anyway.
Depends which literature you're looking at. I work in structural biology, which is mostly fairly reliable - and since data deposition is required for most publications, we have a mechanism for verifying the analysis (it's awfully difficult to convincingly fake the data). A fair amount of crap gets published anyway, but it's not really all that difficult to detect. But I would be automatically suspicious of any paper which relied exclusively on Western blots as evidence for a mechanism, and those are much more work to validate.
The fact that you are defending the abomination that is Obamacare, says all that needs to be said about you and your beliefs
You're not reading what I wrote. I am not defending (or attacking) Obamacare; I am simply noting that the polls do not actually support your position.