So now flight attendants are experts at recognizing "handmade explosive devices"? Isn't the definition of handmade that it looks like anything and nothing? And where is the explosive itself? A cell phone and "something with protruding wires" is hardly going to do any harm on its own.
Also the summary states that they left it behind meaning it had passed security at least once and had gone through a full flight without being detonated. And at now point those morons thought that if the purpose was to blow up an airport or a plane the terrorists would have done it already.
Yes, of course, because this will never go through the constitutional council which has already killed a number of laws proposed by Sarkozy's party. (Almost) Everybody knows it but on the other hand, presidential elections are next month so this might just gain him a few votes. There is nothing more than that, he is loosing in the polls and is desperate to strengthen his position before election day.
Most referendum in Switzerland usually end up with a score like that, accepted (or rejected) by 50 to 60% of voters, irrespective of the question asked. On rare occasions the score is much higher. For instance, on Sunday we also voted against two extra weeks of paid holidays (from four to six) by 67%.
It is most probably an evolutionary mechanism to reinforce group cohesion. Clearly we are better off as a group than as lone wolfs, especially some thousand years back. Those who don't collaborate, are egoistic in nature or are just plain aggressive benefit from the group without contributing so the group has a very good reason to get rid of them (or socially isolate them). You can find a more academic formulation in game theory to explain altruism and why egoistic behaviours don't take over a population over generations ultimately hurting the group/species.
However, I wouldn't assume that French support for the US rebellion was a matter of charity or pre-Revolutionary enlightenment. France and England had been trying to gouge each other's eyes out since... oh, shortly after 1066.
It took the unification of Germany to convince them they could get into the same bed together.
Completely true. But let's be realistic here, when was the last time a country went to war as a matter of charity or enlightenment again? Wars are waged for territories, resources or influence one way or the other. One party has an aggressive policy of resource gathering or conquest, diplomacy fails, it escalates and eventually provides a casus belli to one or the other party. Of course, to sell it to Joe Sixpack, it is faster to wrap it with religion or moral.
I have worked in Switzerland in the life sciences and there is plenty of private funding bodies or foundations that fund fundamental or applied research. There is certainly no shortage of rich families there. In my experience, it is rare that they fund a chair or a whole institute but it is relatively easy to get money for a PhD student or a postdoc. Companies are more difficult essentially because they always want to get something marketable out of their external funding and their grants come with all kind of annoying restrictions regarding IP and animal experimentation.
This article is completely misleading. What they developed is an ATP-dependent ratiometric dye. It is nice but it is not the first ratiometric dye. It is also not the first fluorescent ATP reporter. How will this stop scientists to use animals? It won't. It is just one more tool in an already vast existing array of tools to study cells using fluorescence imaging. This journalist is an idiot. Where are the cells going to come from? For most practical interesting cases, they are going to be "extracted" from animals. Also while ATP is indeed an important molecule, it is really naive to believe that monitoring ATP alone can tell you anything about the state of a cell, especially in vivo, except whether or not it has enough glucose and oxygen. If it was as simple as "expose them to the substance under investigation." to find something worthwhile, everybody would already do it using calcium reporters, NADH autofluorescence, glucose reporters or any other of the numerous similar tools already available on the market.
Osama did not crash a plane against the twin towers, he sent other people to do it for him. People running terrorist organisations are not crazy, just power hungry. Blow up a dirty bomb in the middle of NYC? Sure, they are not going to be anywhere near NYC when it happens and they can watch it on TV. Releasing a deadly flu virus which will wipe out 60% of mankind? When you are yourself an ageing man living in a vastly agricultural region with little to no modern infrastructures? No thanks.
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
It sounds like it is straight out of a South Park episode... More seriously, there is an interesting article about the brain and video games which touches on these issues in the last issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html (subscription needed).
Anyway, grants are reviewed by people in the same field as the applicant. When you are asked to review grants, you are normally at that stage in your career when you know most of the people in your field and can easily guess from whom the grant is coming.
and -could- help prevent some needless wastes of research money.
This type of projects is not particularly known to be cheap. Supercomputers are expensive and cost quite a bit just to have them powered and maintained (I heard 1 mio US$/yr electricity bill for a IBM Blue Gene). Plus all these projects are run by a large consortium. Most experienced scientists tend to think of them as expensive useless toys and I tend to agree for all the reasons the parent has mentioned. We are nowhere near understanding rodent physiology well enough to create a model that has any relevant predictive capacities. The proliferation of these projects is not explained by their success. Funding bodies like them because they can pretend that it will ultimately replace animal research. The whole simulation community likes them because it gives them access to the vast pool of life science funding. Also as far as I know, the Virtual Physiological Human thing in Europe is not a single project but a umbrella initiative divided in many disconnected projects which are probably more manageable (this is not to say that the EU does not have the same attraction for the BIG science projects).
I would tend to agree with you but it seems likely that Father Steve is not going to run Apple for several more decades. I wonder how much of this "closing" comes from his drive and if this culture is going to stay or be abandoned as he ultimately leaves the direction of the company to someone else. Time will tell.
In the life sciences, most research is funded by NIH or NSF [...]
If you are in the US. Europe, Japan, Korea, China, etc... probably account nowadays for more than half of publications and there is no such requirements that I know of for them.
Most science papers are put on free preprint servers such as the arXiv [arxiv.org] anyway.
While arXiv and the like are popular in maths and physics, that is unfortunately definitely not true for science at large. In most of the life sciences for instance, papers are published in peer-reviewed journals with a paywall and only there. There is only a handful of publishers operating most journals in large portfolios and forcing the university libraries to cough up big bucks for the access even if they do not receive the journals in print. For Joe Sixpacks, it is even worse as the publishers sometimes ask as much as 40$ or 50$ for reading a single article.
On the other hand, there are recent initiatives, like PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) and Frontiers (http://www.frontiersin.org/) which publish mostly online journals within a free-for-all access scheme. However, while anyone can read those articles, having them published costs quite a lot, around 2000€ roughly for both Frontiers and PLoS. So basically, while everyone can access those articles, only scientists from relatively rich institutions can actually publish in those journals. In all fairness, PLoS can offer the publication costs to some but still.
In all the PhD programs I had to deal with (in Europe), the institution sets a fixed length to the PhD. At the university where I did mine, the rule was 3 years from the day your research plan is accepted. That is you have to pass the defense within these 3 years. And you have to submit a research plan at most 1 year after starting as a postgrad. This sets the length at about 4 years total. A colleague of mine had to scramble asking for an extension when he received an e-mail from the administration informing him that he had to submit his thesis by the end of the week to comply with the regulations. Obtaining more than 6 months extension is extremely difficult to justify.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's publish it quickly, then get a tenured job and change topic before others find out it's all wrong!
So now flight attendants are experts at recognizing "handmade explosive devices"? Isn't the definition of handmade that it looks like anything and nothing? And where is the explosive itself? A cell phone and "something with protruding wires" is hardly going to do any harm on its own. Also the summary states that they left it behind meaning it had passed security at least once and had gone through a full flight without being detonated. And at now point those morons thought that if the purpose was to blow up an airport or a plane the terrorists would have done it already.
Yes, of course, because this will never go through the constitutional council which has already killed a number of laws proposed by Sarkozy's party. (Almost) Everybody knows it but on the other hand, presidential elections are next month so this might just gain him a few votes. There is nothing more than that, he is loosing in the polls and is desperate to strengthen his position before election day.
Most referendum in Switzerland usually end up with a score like that, accepted (or rejected) by 50 to 60% of voters, irrespective of the question asked. On rare occasions the score is much higher. For instance, on Sunday we also voted against two extra weeks of paid holidays (from four to six) by 67%.
It is most probably an evolutionary mechanism to reinforce group cohesion. Clearly we are better off as a group than as lone wolfs, especially some thousand years back. Those who don't collaborate, are egoistic in nature or are just plain aggressive benefit from the group without contributing so the group has a very good reason to get rid of them (or socially isolate them). You can find a more academic formulation in game theory to explain altruism and why egoistic behaviours don't take over a population over generations ultimately hurting the group/species.
Yeah, people are dicks.
However, I wouldn't assume that French support for the US rebellion was a matter of charity or pre-Revolutionary enlightenment. France and England had been trying to gouge each other's eyes out since... oh, shortly after 1066.
It took the unification of Germany to convince them they could get into the same bed together.
Completely true. But let's be realistic here, when was the last time a country went to war as a matter of charity or enlightenment again? Wars are waged for territories, resources or influence one way or the other. One party has an aggressive policy of resource gathering or conquest, diplomacy fails, it escalates and eventually provides a casus belli to one or the other party. Of course, to sell it to Joe Sixpack, it is faster to wrap it with religion or moral.
I have worked in Switzerland in the life sciences and there is plenty of private funding bodies or foundations that fund fundamental or applied research. There is certainly no shortage of rich families there. In my experience, it is rare that they fund a chair or a whole institute but it is relatively easy to get money for a PhD student or a postdoc. Companies are more difficult essentially because they always want to get something marketable out of their external funding and their grants come with all kind of annoying restrictions regarding IP and animal experimentation.
I signed without reading it, honest... So sorry folks! If only I had known before.
This article is completely misleading. What they developed is an ATP-dependent ratiometric dye. It is nice but it is not the first ratiometric dye. It is also not the first fluorescent ATP reporter. How will this stop scientists to use animals? It won't. It is just one more tool in an already vast existing array of tools to study cells using fluorescence imaging. This journalist is an idiot. Where are the cells going to come from? For most practical interesting cases, they are going to be "extracted" from animals. Also while ATP is indeed an important molecule, it is really naive to believe that monitoring ATP alone can tell you anything about the state of a cell, especially in vivo, except whether or not it has enough glucose and oxygen. If it was as simple as "expose them to the substance under investigation." to find something worthwhile, everybody would already do it using calcium reporters, NADH autofluorescence, glucose reporters or any other of the numerous similar tools already available on the market.
Osama did not crash a plane against the twin towers, he sent other people to do it for him. People running terrorist organisations are not crazy, just power hungry. Blow up a dirty bomb in the middle of NYC? Sure, they are not going to be anywhere near NYC when it happens and they can watch it on TV. Releasing a deadly flu virus which will wipe out 60% of mankind? When you are yourself an ageing man living in a vastly agricultural region with little to no modern infrastructures? No thanks.
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
It sounds like it is straight out of a South Park episode... More seriously, there is an interesting article about the brain and video games which touches on these issues in the last issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html (subscription needed).
José (yes I know him) is Spanish and works at the EPFL in Switzerland.
Anyway, grants are reviewed by people in the same field as the applicant. When you are asked to review grants, you are normally at that stage in your career when you know most of the people in your field and can easily guess from whom the grant is coming.
and -could- help prevent some needless wastes of research money.
This type of projects is not particularly known to be cheap. Supercomputers are expensive and cost quite a bit just to have them powered and maintained (I heard 1 mio US$/yr electricity bill for a IBM Blue Gene). Plus all these projects are run by a large consortium. Most experienced scientists tend to think of them as expensive useless toys and I tend to agree for all the reasons the parent has mentioned. We are nowhere near understanding rodent physiology well enough to create a model that has any relevant predictive capacities. The proliferation of these projects is not explained by their success. Funding bodies like them because they can pretend that it will ultimately replace animal research. The whole simulation community likes them because it gives them access to the vast pool of life science funding. Also as far as I know, the Virtual Physiological Human thing in Europe is not a single project but a umbrella initiative divided in many disconnected projects which are probably more manageable (this is not to say that the EU does not have the same attraction for the BIG science projects).
I am sure they are going to sale a lot of them. Even as a first hand customer this will limit the interest of the game.
And what about that one http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(11)00132-2? This debate is far from being settled.
I would tend to agree with you but it seems likely that Father Steve is not going to run Apple for several more decades. I wonder how much of this "closing" comes from his drive and if this culture is going to stay or be abandoned as he ultimately leaves the direction of the company to someone else. Time will tell.
Or FaceTime? Just kidding...
/. feels a bit like OS X Daily today.
It's a nice feat but there is still a long way to go before this thing matches what a real synapse do.
In the life sciences, most research is funded by NIH or NSF [...]
If you are in the US. Europe, Japan, Korea, China, etc... probably account nowadays for more than half of publications and there is no such requirements that I know of for them.
Most science papers are put on free preprint servers such as the arXiv [arxiv.org] anyway.
While arXiv and the like are popular in maths and physics, that is unfortunately definitely not true for science at large. In most of the life sciences for instance, papers are published in peer-reviewed journals with a paywall and only there. There is only a handful of publishers operating most journals in large portfolios and forcing the university libraries to cough up big bucks for the access even if they do not receive the journals in print. For Joe Sixpacks, it is even worse as the publishers sometimes ask as much as 40$ or 50$ for reading a single article.
On the other hand, there are recent initiatives, like PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) and Frontiers (http://www.frontiersin.org/) which publish mostly online journals within a free-for-all access scheme. However, while anyone can read those articles, having them published costs quite a lot, around 2000€ roughly for both Frontiers and PLoS. So basically, while everyone can access those articles, only scientists from relatively rich institutions can actually publish in those journals. In all fairness, PLoS can offer the publication costs to some but still.
In all the PhD programs I had to deal with (in Europe), the institution sets a fixed length to the PhD. At the university where I did mine, the rule was 3 years from the day your research plan is accepted. That is you have to pass the defense within these 3 years. And you have to submit a research plan at most 1 year after starting as a postgrad. This sets the length at about 4 years total. A colleague of mine had to scramble asking for an extension when he received an e-mail from the administration informing him that he had to submit his thesis by the end of the week to comply with the regulations. Obtaining more than 6 months extension is extremely difficult to justify.
they wouldn't let anything through that had even a hint of a problem
Funny thing is they let through the papers. That is possibly way more damaging than awarding a PhD.