I work in neurobiology, particularly working with motor control and soft body biomechanics. Before this I worked in computational biochemistry, though my work was
Hm. I was taught both - that you make predictions, based on your hypothesis, which you then test, and that you generate null hypotheses, which you also test.
'"What’s simply untrue is that not only does Uber know about this, they’re actively encouraging these actions day-to-day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors," the contractor said.'
Okay, so it's implied that was is untrue is that Uberdoesn't know about this, but that's certainly not what was said...
(Which is not to dispute facts, mostly because I don't have facts to dispute. Though I would like them - I've enjoyed using Uber, but this would certainly encourage me to steer clear.)
I got enough feedback when I was young that I was unusually smart that I did eventually accept it in a provisional way as part of the social reality. (As in, it was a pretty consistent part of how people responded to me.) I also got a lot of very mixed feedback about it - from my standpoint, I did well in academics mostly because I enjoyed the topics. (All of them. Which mostly left me with the sense that I wasn't particularly good at anything.) But it took me quite a while to find a social group,* I was alternately told what a freak I was and then expected to perform on cue, and then there was my mother's complaints about how I failed her by not being the normal popular daughter she wanted. (My mother was also pretty epic when it came to incomprehensible judgements. I think my favorite, in retrospect, is how she told my I was a lazy procrastinator who would never manage to complete anything or amount to anything - just like Leonardo da Vinci. Wat?!) In school I had a few really great teachers - like the one who finally more or less forced my mother to put me into the gifted program - but even in the gifted program the material was often not challenging,** and I was stuck between being pretty bored and being able to skate by, and having total shit study skills. And then I was put into college when I was thirteen, and started off with twenty credit hours.
Being encouraged to work hard, and encouraged to try things that risk failure would have been really, really good for me. (Not that I didn't try things that risked failure - see again obnoxious kid - but it would have been useful to have a framework to see that as not being totally stupid.) I ended up being so weirded out by the whole "child prodigy" bullshit that after a somewhat wild ride (mostly for reasons not academically relevant) I ended up getting my undergrad degree in Chinese Language and Literature. And I think a lot of that was that it was the first subject I'd found where I could absolutely work my ass off... and get a 3.6. So I suppose I did eventually get to that focused hard work point, but some guidance and mentorship along the way might have been nice. (And some mentorship about what to do about things like math, where I was strongly self taught but had no idea what to do in a college setting would have been stellar.)
* Well, a "peer group", anyway. Say, not my dad's grad students. ** Okay, to be fair, most of it was okay, except I maxed out the math they offerred in the first year - my dad had been buying me college text books since I'd was fairly young - and math was a required subject, so I kept on having to take classes I'd already tested out of. And I was an obnoxious kid.
As I mentioned above, there are likely one or more optima for testosterone, with a loss of function correlated with not being on one of those optima. It's not likely (looking at other hormonal systems) that it's simply a linear relationship - both too much and too little are possible. (There is also a lot of room for changes on the level of receptor density or binding affinity - so a smaller amount of testosterone could conceivably have more effect.)
"Feminism, like so many other hate-focused idealisms, requires an enemy."
Spending a lot of time around feminists, I note a distinct lack of hate focused ideology. (There are boundary cases - Dworking and MacKinnon being the most obvious - but even they tend to be badly misquoted and taken out of context.) Apparently an awful lot of people have a vested interested in portraying feminism as such.
Bear in mind that it's unlikely that lower testosterone levels would be selected for merely because "the testosterone was no longer needed..." You'd expect to see a fitness cost before that happened.
(Mind you, this is assuming the effect is happening at the level of genetic selection - testosterone could conceivably change as a response to a changing environment, for instance.)
This, in turn, assumes that the effects of testosterone are consistant and linear, and that they are consistent across other variables, and that's not a safe assumption. First, there are likely one or more optima with testosterone levels, with some loss of function when not as those optima. Second, the effects are likely influenced strongly by other factors. For instance, oxytocin gets a lot of press as being the hug drug and all that, and its effects in terms of promoting social bonding and trust and so are get a lot of press. What gets less press is that while it promotes in-group bonding, it promotes out-group agression - high oxytocin levels are correlated by hostility towards strangers and the like.
I use my phone a lot for communicating with students in the lab - including a middling amount of coaching how to handle various command line operations* - and for a lesser amount remotely managing servers and the like. (No, it's not my first choice, but sometimes shit happens when I'm out running, or at lunch, or whatever. It's not uncommon that one of my students will take a picture of the error message and text it to me.)
Swype is great for communicating in English, but I miss my old G2 (or even my Samsung Galaxy Relay) pretty intensely when I'm doing anything administrative or gods help me writing code. (And Swype was actually easier to use on a smaller phone - I love my Nexus 5, but the screen width slows me down a bit.)...and really, the ability to do this kind of stuff is one of the reasons I was a fairly early smart phone adopter a decade ago. Hm, I could hang around the lab babysitting a build, or I could go hiking, and check the progress every time I get a clear signal.
* All of my students doing bench work are also in out Python club, and are increasingly comfortable working at the command line, but none came in with much of that sort of experience. They're adorably enthusiastic.
Not just willingness to learn, but active interest in continuing learning....and I've found a lack of that in older folks, true, but also in kids fresh out of uni.
I was a software engineer for most of a decade. Then I was a computational biochemist, and now I'm a neurobiologist.
My computer background opened an amazing number of doors for me when I decided to go into research. There aren't a lot of people who can deal with both computers and biology well. (Though, sadly, there are a lot of people who are equally half-assed in each, which predictably produces a full ass...)
I am not a physician. I am a neurobiologist. I work mostly on motor control. (And I teach neuroanatomy, though atm only at an undergraduate level.)
First things first. It's darned early days in all of this, and recovery from brain injuries is often fairly unpredictable. Even if she doesn't get significantly better - which may be fairly likely, and I don't have enough information to comment - what's hard now will likely become easier via repetition.
I'll generally agree with the comments that you're probably going to be better off dealing with specialists than trying to get a commerical EEG type device to serve in its place. Though down the road, it might make for an interesting project (and increasingly there are cool things being done with consumer hardware.) The expensive proprietary devices may or may not be optimal... but let everyone catch their breath first.
Where I think some research could benefit you all a lot is making sure she's seeing the right specialists. Getting in touch with the right people at your local academic hospital - which might, down the road, turn into your not so local academic hospital - is, long term, probably the most useful thing. As other people have mentioned, rest and support can be more useful than trying to fix everything right now. But if you're going nuts looking for options, see if you can start figuring out who, reasonably local, has a serious background in this type of injury, and see if you can get them to look over her MRIs. It can be pretty easy to end up sticking with a suboptimal doctor out of inertia. Asking questions and calling around can really end up being the thing that makes the difference in the long run. (And here I speak from personal experience from my own history of spine injury.)
If you'd like help navigating the process, drop me a note.
I was just at a symposoium where one of the PIs in whose lab a chunk of this work was conducted was presenting.
It is really promising. However, it's *seriously* early days yet, and spinal cord repair is not the same thing as brainstem. The problems are related, but I'd be pretty shocked if we were looking at any of this being done at brain stem levels in humans any time soon.
I can re-check the research, but IIRC, most folks even, after they've had some months to get used to their new situations prefer to live than to die. (It's easy to project what you think your preferencs would be... but you in the situation is not you watching it from outside. I haven't been through anything nearly this severe, but I dealt with a spine injury which I was told meant I would never live an active life again*... and mostly learned not to try and second guess future me.**)
* This turned out to be incorrect, but there were some years in there that were chock full of suck. ** Which doesn't mean I don't have a living will, but did influence how I wrote it.
And perhaps treat the women in tech as actual human beings? Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time. Neurobio is just so relaxing by comparison.
Last I head, the applicability of laws relating to whether transfer of medium for personal use had not been tested for ebooks. (Not, I'll admit, that I'd hold my breath for a good outcome in the current climate regarding such things.)
This was my stance for a while, though my workaround was to buy hardcopies of the book and then pirate a softcopy (mostly for reference books which I didn't want to haul around). And then I decided I didn't want to devote the space or weight to the hardcopies.
It's not ideal, but there are too many authors whose work I really like some of whose work is under DRM. (And it's all fine to rant at the authors, but until they're really quite popular they aren't really empowered to fight this on their own.) So I am very loud about preferring non-DRM'd books, and will buy them preferentially. And I do not share non-DRM'd book I have legally purchased... and seed torrents of those I pirated. It sucks, but it's the best compromise in my specs.
I keep having conversations with my students where I explain why they shouldn't pirate books, or at least should make sure that the authors are getting paid (for instance, buying a legal copy then pirating / cracking it if it has DRM to get a useful one.)...and yet I have a lot of trouble trying to work up enthusiasm for telling them not to pirate textbooks.* Particularly problematic, as I've shown a few how to torrent. (Heck, I've shown faculty members how to torrent.)
Well, yes, I did mean OSX, though in fact it's been true for both. (OTOH, in MacOS days, I was something of a Mac fan. It's a relative thing. I grew up on UNIX in an academic enviornment, and tended to favor Macs if the alternative was Windows.)
The command line is of course the least irritating part (almost non irritating, but often installation of common open source packages is somewhat more cumbersome that what I'm used to - it's gotten a lot better, though.) But it's the GUI that people tend to rhapsodize over... and I just don't get it.
More than a few minutes. The head of our lab is an Apple fan, so many of the lab machines are Macs and I end up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff. So, for some weeks at a time I'll be using them so several hours a few times a week... and then I'll go for months without. Of course, the less painful part of that is done remotely, which barely counts. (My first mini was a 512K Mac when they first came out. So I have fond memories*, and certainly maintained a preference for Macs through my Microsoft days, though I'll admit not being thrilled by many part of the business model.) And, of course, there are a lot of programming and analysis tools that we end up using on Macs - not even to mention helping my research students set of Python or whatever environments on their own machines - though they do tend to be open source tools and set up often seems cumbersome compared to working in a Linux environment.
What I haven't done is used them heavily as my main boxen for an extended period of time. And it's possible that might clinch it for me. Though one of my closest friends in the department made the experiment and ended up installing linux on her apple laptop after some months of trying to learn to love OSX, and we tend to have similar aesthetic tastes.
* Admittedly of things like my father convincing me to learn Modula 2 from German documentation because he thought it would be the next big thing and then I could teach him.
Well, no. At one point years ago my mother was trying to Lynx from a terminal window on her rather ancient Mac, and it ended poorly. (I never really did figure out what happened. She said the sysadmin told her she accidentally released a wild lynx on the server. I can only say what I was told.) She then went on to use Windows for some years (mostly because she could get me to get her software from the company store) and about seven years ago, when I was in town and showing her my new Lenovo tablet with an Ubuntu install got as far as Synaptic and said "I want that OS. I want it right now." So I posted a note to LJ, and within a few hours a friend produced an install CD, and the rest is history.
More helpful doesn't seem that unlikely, especially since it's not made explicit who exactly Microsoft is more helpful than. There's also always the question of what numbers he's using. Microsoft has been claiming to be more inexpensive for some time. They have numbers. There are certainly business who have moved over to OSS and had very different experiences. I don't even know that it's not true for organizations where the primary computer use is a desktop / laptop environment and users aren't particularly technical.
I'd like to think not - anyone have case studies? But that's the environment I understand the least. I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts. But they're my family. (Also, Synaptic is about the best thing ever for them.) But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use. And Windows irritated the ever living crap out of me even when I was working for Windows. So there's clearly something I'm not getting.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in neurobiology, particularly working with motor control and soft body biomechanics. Before this I worked in computational biochemistry, though my work was
Hm. I was taught both - that you make predictions, based on your hypothesis, which you then test, and that you generate null hypotheses, which you also test.
...and at a research institution in Ohio... I think we're going to have a moment of silence at lab meeting. And then start screaming.
'"What’s simply untrue is that not only does Uber know about this, they’re actively encouraging these actions day-to-day and, in doing so, are flat-out lying both to their customers, the media, and their investors," the contractor said.'
Okay, so it's implied that was is untrue is that Uberdoesn't know about this, but that's certainly not what was said...
(Which is not to dispute facts, mostly because I don't have facts to dispute. Though I would like them - I've enjoyed using Uber, but this would certainly encourage me to steer clear.)
I got enough feedback when I was young that I was unusually smart that I did eventually accept it in a provisional way as part of the social reality. (As in, it was a pretty consistent part of how people responded to me.) I also got a lot of very mixed feedback about it - from my standpoint, I did well in academics mostly because I enjoyed the topics. (All of them. Which mostly left me with the sense that I wasn't particularly good at anything.) But it took me quite a while to find a social group,* I was alternately told what a freak I was and then expected to perform on cue, and then there was my mother's complaints about how I failed her by not being the normal popular daughter she wanted. (My mother was also pretty epic when it came to incomprehensible judgements. I think my favorite, in retrospect, is how she told my I was a lazy procrastinator who would never manage to complete anything or amount to anything - just like Leonardo da Vinci. Wat?!) In school I had a few really great teachers - like the one who finally more or less forced my mother to put me into the gifted program - but even in the gifted program the material was often not challenging,** and I was stuck between being pretty bored and being able to skate by, and having total shit study skills. And then I was put into college when I was thirteen, and started off with twenty credit hours.
Being encouraged to work hard, and encouraged to try things that risk failure would have been really, really good for me. (Not that I didn't try things that risked failure - see again obnoxious kid - but it would have been useful to have a framework to see that as not being totally stupid.) I ended up being so weirded out by the whole "child prodigy" bullshit that after a somewhat wild ride (mostly for reasons not academically relevant) I ended up getting my undergrad degree in Chinese Language and Literature. And I think a lot of that was that it was the first subject I'd found where I could absolutely work my ass off... and get a 3.6. So I suppose I did eventually get to that focused hard work point, but some guidance and mentorship along the way might have been nice. (And some mentorship about what to do about things like math, where I was strongly self taught but had no idea what to do in a college setting would have been stellar.)
* Well, a "peer group", anyway. Say, not my dad's grad students.
** Okay, to be fair, most of it was okay, except I maxed out the math they offerred in the first year - my dad had been buying me college text books since I'd was fairly young - and math was a required subject, so I kept on having to take classes I'd already tested out of. And I was an obnoxious kid.
As I mentioned above, there are likely one or more optima for testosterone, with a loss of function correlated with not being on one of those optima. It's not likely (looking at other hormonal systems) that it's simply a linear relationship - both too much and too little are possible. (There is also a lot of room for changes on the level of receptor density or binding affinity - so a smaller amount of testosterone could conceivably have more effect.)
"Feminism, like so many other hate-focused idealisms, requires an enemy."
Spending a lot of time around feminists, I note a distinct lack of hate focused ideology. (There are boundary cases - Dworking and MacKinnon being the most obvious - but even they tend to be badly misquoted and taken out of context.) Apparently an awful lot of people have a vested interested in portraying feminism as such.
Bear in mind that it's unlikely that lower testosterone levels would be selected for merely because "the testosterone was no longer needed..." You'd expect to see a fitness cost before that happened.
(Mind you, this is assuming the effect is happening at the level of genetic selection - testosterone could conceivably change as a response to a changing environment, for instance.)
This, in turn, assumes that the effects of testosterone are consistant and linear, and that they are consistent across other variables, and that's not a safe assumption. First, there are likely one or more optima with testosterone levels, with some loss of function when not as those optima. Second, the effects are likely influenced strongly by other factors. For instance, oxytocin gets a lot of press as being the hug drug and all that, and its effects in terms of promoting social bonding and trust and so are get a lot of press. What gets less press is that while it promotes in-group bonding, it promotes out-group agression - high oxytocin levels are correlated by hostility towards strangers and the like.
I use my phone a lot for communicating with students in the lab - including a middling amount of coaching how to handle various command line operations* - and for a lesser amount remotely managing servers and the like. (No, it's not my first choice, but sometimes shit happens when I'm out running, or at lunch, or whatever. It's not uncommon that one of my students will take a picture of the error message and text it to me.)
Swype is great for communicating in English, but I miss my old G2 (or even my Samsung Galaxy Relay) pretty intensely when I'm doing anything administrative or gods help me writing code. (And Swype was actually easier to use on a smaller phone - I love my Nexus 5, but the screen width slows me down a bit.) ...and really, the ability to do this kind of stuff is one of the reasons I was a fairly early smart phone adopter a decade ago. Hm, I could hang around the lab babysitting a build, or I could go hiking, and check the progress every time I get a clear signal.
* All of my students doing bench work are also in out Python club, and are increasingly comfortable working at the command line, but none came in with much of that sort of experience. They're adorably enthusiastic.
Not just willingness to learn, but active interest in continuing learning. ...and I've found a lack of that in older folks, true, but also in kids fresh out of uni.
It also depends on the scientist.
I was a software engineer for most of a decade. Then I was a computational biochemist, and now I'm a neurobiologist.
My computer background opened an amazing number of doors for me when I decided to go into research. There aren't a lot of people who can deal with both computers and biology well. (Though, sadly, there are a lot of people who are equally half-assed in each, which predictably produces a full ass...)
I am not a physician. I am a neurobiologist. I work mostly on motor control. (And I teach neuroanatomy, though atm only at an undergraduate level.)
First things first. It's darned early days in all of this, and recovery from brain injuries is often fairly unpredictable. Even if she doesn't get significantly better - which may be fairly likely, and I don't have enough information to comment - what's hard now will likely become easier via repetition.
I'll generally agree with the comments that you're probably going to be better off dealing with specialists than trying to get a commerical EEG type device to serve in its place. Though down the road, it might make for an interesting project (and increasingly there are cool things being done with consumer hardware.) The expensive proprietary devices may or may not be optimal... but let everyone catch their breath first.
Where I think some research could benefit you all a lot is making sure she's seeing the right specialists. Getting in touch with the right people at your local academic hospital - which might, down the road, turn into your not so local academic hospital - is, long term, probably the most useful thing. As other people have mentioned, rest and support can be more useful than trying to fix everything right now. But if you're going nuts looking for options, see if you can start figuring out who, reasonably local, has a serious background in this type of injury, and see if you can get them to look over her MRIs. It can be pretty easy to end up sticking with a suboptimal doctor out of inertia. Asking questions and calling around can really end up being the thing that makes the difference in the long run. (And here I speak from personal experience from my own history of spine injury.)
If you'd like help navigating the process, drop me a note.
I was just at a symposoium where one of the PIs in whose lab a chunk of this work was conducted was presenting.
It is really promising. However, it's *seriously* early days yet, and spinal cord repair is not the same thing as brainstem. The problems are related, but I'd be pretty shocked if we were looking at any of this being done at brain stem levels in humans any time soon.
I can re-check the research, but IIRC, most folks even, after they've had some months to get used to their new situations prefer to live than to die. (It's easy to project what you think your preferencs would be... but you in the situation is not you watching it from outside. I haven't been through anything nearly this severe, but I dealt with a spine injury which I was told meant I would never live an active life again*... and mostly learned not to try and second guess future me.**)
* This turned out to be incorrect, but there were some years in there that were chock full of suck.
** Which doesn't mean I don't have a living will, but did influence how I wrote it.
And OMG, you might be in danger of getting pushed halfway back to *second*. Eesh.
And perhaps treat the women in tech as actual human beings? Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time. Neurobio is just so relaxing by comparison.
Like, say, men who make random generalizations about women?
"He." *snork*
Last I head, the applicability of laws relating to whether transfer of medium for personal use had not been tested for ebooks. (Not, I'll admit, that I'd hold my breath for a good outcome in the current climate regarding such things.)
The problem of course is that I do seed torrents.
This was my stance for a while, though my workaround was to buy hardcopies of the book and then pirate a softcopy (mostly for reference books which I didn't want to haul around). And then I decided I didn't want to devote the space or weight to the hardcopies.
It's not ideal, but there are too many authors whose work I really like some of whose work is under DRM. (And it's all fine to rant at the authors, but until they're really quite popular they aren't really empowered to fight this on their own.) So I am very loud about preferring non-DRM'd books, and will buy them preferentially. And I do not share non-DRM'd book I have legally purchased... and seed torrents of those I pirated. It sucks, but it's the best compromise in my specs.
Oh, and so not a "bro".
I keep having conversations with my students where I explain why they shouldn't pirate books, or at least should make sure that the authors are getting paid (for instance, buying a legal copy then pirating / cracking it if it has DRM to get a useful one.) ...and yet I have a lot of trouble trying to work up enthusiasm for telling them not to pirate textbooks.* Particularly problematic, as I've shown a few how to torrent. (Heck, I've shown faculty members how to torrent.)
* As opposed to professional reference books.
Well, yes, I did mean OSX, though in fact it's been true for both. (OTOH, in MacOS days, I was something of a Mac fan. It's a relative thing. I grew up on UNIX in an academic enviornment, and tended to favor Macs if the alternative was Windows.)
The command line is of course the least irritating part (almost non irritating, but often installation of common open source packages is somewhat more cumbersome that what I'm used to - it's gotten a lot better, though.) But it's the GUI that people tend to rhapsodize over... and I just don't get it.
More than a few minutes. The head of our lab is an Apple fan, so many of the lab machines are Macs and I end up doing a fair bit of server admin stuff. So, for some weeks at a time I'll be using them so several hours a few times a week... and then I'll go for months without. Of course, the less painful part of that is done remotely, which barely counts. (My first mini was a 512K Mac when they first came out. So I have fond memories*, and certainly maintained a preference for Macs through my Microsoft days, though I'll admit not being thrilled by many part of the business model.) And, of course, there are a lot of programming and analysis tools that we end up using on Macs - not even to mention helping my research students set of Python or whatever environments on their own machines - though they do tend to be open source tools and set up often seems cumbersome compared to working in a Linux environment.
What I haven't done is used them heavily as my main boxen for an extended period of time. And it's possible that might clinch it for me. Though one of my closest friends in the department made the experiment and ended up installing linux on her apple laptop after some months of trying to learn to love OSX, and we tend to have similar aesthetic tastes.
* Admittedly of things like my father convincing me to learn Modula 2 from German documentation because he thought it would be the next big thing and then I could teach him.
Well, no. At one point years ago my mother was trying to Lynx from a terminal window on her rather ancient Mac, and it ended poorly. (I never really did figure out what happened. She said the sysadmin told her she accidentally released a wild lynx on the server. I can only say what I was told.) She then went on to use Windows for some years (mostly because she could get me to get her software from the company store) and about seven years ago, when I was in town and showing her my new Lenovo tablet with an Ubuntu install got as far as Synaptic and said "I want that OS. I want it right now." So I posted a note to LJ, and within a few hours a friend produced an install CD, and the rest is history.
More helpful doesn't seem that unlikely, especially since it's not made explicit who exactly Microsoft is more helpful than. There's also always the question of what numbers he's using. Microsoft has been claiming to be more inexpensive for some time. They have numbers. There are certainly business who have moved over to OSS and had very different experiences. I don't even know that it's not true for organizations where the primary computer use is a desktop / laptop environment and users aren't particularly technical.
I'd like to think not - anyone have case studies? But that's the environment I understand the least. I moved most of my less technical family members onto Ubuntu years ago, and they're much happier with it - and my sister, who still describes herself as not a geek, is cheerfully working at the command line and modifying config files and hacking scripts. But they're my family. (Also, Synaptic is about the best thing ever for them.) But then, I still have a lot of friends who will tell me at length about how much better MacOS is, and I find it profoundly irritating to use. And Windows irritated the ever living crap out of me even when I was working for Windows. So there's clearly something I'm not getting.