As a molecular biologist, this is 100% the correct answer. The reason isn't that scientific discovery is inherently surprising, or that journalists are sensationalist (both statements are true to an extent) -- it's that you NEED to publish something that is framed as novel/surprising to keep your job. So the "surprise" starts at the source, when the scientists communicate their findings to the journals.
What I've done is whitelist people on my contacts. I've told them not to call unless they really need to get my attention. That way, if I hear my ringer go off, I know I *really* need to answer. It solves the spam issue, but if someone is stranded and using a phone number I haven't listed, that will be an issue.
There are entire fields dedicated to studying the psychological and neurophysiological differences between men and women. Denying that there may be biological differences with regard to behavior between the two sexes because it's not politically correct in the current climate is ignorant and unscientific.
However, I think Damore pinned too much emphasis on the nature argument; it didn't help that the media went berserk on that point because it makes for a more controversial headline.
Beyond the controversy, there are many competing hypotheses that could explain why women aren't represented in tech beyond oppression and discrimination.
The major points in this issue ought to be: why is it necessary to discriminate against certain groups to promote others? Are there alternative explanations as to why there isn't gender parity in tech, when there is in e.g. chemistry, medicine, stats, and some engineering fields? To what extent should a hiring process go to correct real or perceived imbalances in the workplace?
This is very reminiscent of the Ivy League debate going on right now, where Asians are claiming that there is discrimination against them for being too successful.
The article was published in Nature Communications - Nature Publishing Group's open access journal. Nature itself is a journal that has 3-4x the impact factor of Nature Communications. This probably doesn't matter to most people but it is a way to gauge how novel/impactful the research was perceived by the scientific community.
"The categories laid out in his will -- physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace -- have remained the basis of the awards, and a prize for economics was added in 1968. So, what gives? Why only those five original fields?"
The summary/article forgot about the literature category.
This is an excellent ploy to freely tag compromising images that would otherwise be unidentifiable (i.e. from the neck down). What will Facebook do with their person-matched database of embarrassing pictures? Sell to the highest bidder? Keep in mind, once those pictures are uploaded and flagged by a person, they are going to sit in Facebook's servers until the end of time... to combat revenge porn of course.
My friends all got jobs, relocated across the country/world, and then started having families. My coworkers are now all representative of what my other friends did, and they're all too busy raising young kids. I don't have the local co-op option like I did 15 years ago.
During my Ph.D. program we had a series of guest lecturers on special topics rotate through, and this venerable senior M.D. came in to lecture about relationships between obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
I felt compelled to ask: "Surely, out of the thousands+ of patients you've seen with type 2 diabetes, haven't some of them decided to become more athletic? The benefits on insulin sensitivity and blood sugar balance are well-established [as he had talked about during the lecture]."
The Dr. looked at me like I just asked him if he had ever treated a unicorn. "It's hard," he said, as if it were an impossibility.
Overall, I think the lardasses are that way not because of imprecision with the calorie, but a lack of willpower, or some other deeply-ingrained psychological problem.
Kinases do much more than just spur protein synthesis. They are among the primary signaling enzymes in the body, involved in turning on and off a multitude of cellular processes by attaching phosphate groups to various targets. Some enzymes simply don't function without being triggered by a kinase. The summary just irks me when it's misleading or wrong
Not sure why this was voted down as this was exactly what I was thinking.
A 20 or 30 year old represents a large investment of resources in society. Also, a young adult is far more productive than a child. If children as a group or adults as a group magically vanished from society, society would be come to a halt if you lost the adults, whereas losing children would be a much smaller waste of time and money.
I work as a biochemist in a research-intensive hospital. Practically speaking, what this means is that I do science in buildings that are adjacent to patient care buildings. Depending on the day, I may wander through the actual hospital, but ~98% of the time I am in a research-only building and avoid patients altogether.
The university, medical school, and hospital are all affiliated, and their policy on flu vaccination had been that it was required for anyone who had direct patient contact. A couple of years ago, this policy was revised to make the flu policy mandatory for anyone who worked in a patient care building (regardless of direct contact). This past year (2014) everyone here received a flurry of rather harshly worded emails saying that flu vaccination would soon become mandatory for all employees, students, and faculty regardless of where they worked or what their position was, so long as they were affiliated with the hospital.
These emails were threatening enough that my boss (a principal investigator scientist) got the vaccine for the first time in his life. Coincidentally, like my boss, I have never received a flu vaccine because I am skeptical about how much it would benefit me or "the herd", and I intentionally avoided receiving the vaccine. For the record, I am pro-vaccine when it comes to things like MMR, polio, and HPV.
Did I lose my job? Funnily enough, the end of 2014 had a major flu outbreak in the hospital. Dozens if not hundreds of people contracted the flu, the majority of whom were vaccinated against it. Oddly have not received any more emails about their new vaccination policy...
Say what you want about how flu vaccines still help by knocking down the common strains or sometimes reducing the severity of an outbreak. I liken flu vaccination (or vaccination against any genetically labile virus) to the same situation we have with antibiotic resistance: the more you select against the common strains, which is clearly an imperfect process, the higher the likelihood that some nastier and resistant form of it will appear.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's not just uneducated dimwits who are skeptical about vaccination, and that each vaccine needs to be evaluated independently based on its merits. As a scientist myself, I trust my judgment over the government's as to what I put into my or my kids' bodies, but at the same time I appreciate the argument for protecting others through vaccination.
I'd be willing to bet money on it. I'm all for high school science fairs, but the way the media (and, in turn, Slashdot) sensationalize results like this is incredibly depressing. Real science is real hard.
I agree that the title is misleading. The reason that this paper is in one of the highest-impact scientific journals is not because it suddenly dawned on scientists that cancer is pervasive and just a fact of how cells work, but because they found tumors in early (in evolutionary terms) species that had never been discovered before.
Scientists have known since the dawn of knowing what cancer was that this was an intrinsic property of life. When the error-checking machinery is error-prone, things can get out of control.
There's an extension for Chrome that will translate all of this confusing "cloud" nonsense for all of us into something clear and accurate: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
Knowing that you could be putting in 70-80 hours a week, and potentially stumble across some major discovery (imagine: cure a kind of cancer discovery). That discovery would be published by your boss, who, adding to his life's work, would cumulatively take most of the public credit for the work. Meanwhile, it doesn't matter if you had some amazing insight or designed the actual experiment to solve the problem.
Look at Nobel laureates and their age and their contributions. How many nameless people enabled them to win that award?
All you can hope for is that you publish a couple papers in top journals that will enable to you to get a solid job in industry, or jump onto the tenure track treadmill, so that one day you can be in a position of exploiting others' work and creativity, potentially in a field completely unrelated to your PhD.
The young have no power to change, and the old have no reason to give up their advantageous position.
Slashdot Mirror
As a molecular biologist, this is 100% the correct answer. The reason isn't that scientific discovery is inherently surprising, or that journalists are sensationalist (both statements are true to an extent) -- it's that you NEED to publish something that is framed as novel/surprising to keep your job. So the "surprise" starts at the source, when the scientists communicate their findings to the journals.
What I've done is whitelist people on my contacts. I've told them not to call unless they really need to get my attention. That way, if I hear my ringer go off, I know I *really* need to answer. It solves the spam issue, but if someone is stranded and using a phone number I haven't listed, that will be an issue.
As a scientist myself:
There are entire fields dedicated to studying the psychological and neurophysiological differences between men and women. Denying that there may be biological differences with regard to behavior between the two sexes because it's not politically correct in the current climate is ignorant and unscientific.
However, I think Damore pinned too much emphasis on the nature argument; it didn't help that the media went berserk on that point because it makes for a more controversial headline.
Beyond the controversy, there are many competing hypotheses that could explain why women aren't represented in tech beyond oppression and discrimination.
The major points in this issue ought to be: why is it necessary to discriminate against certain groups to promote others? Are there alternative explanations as to why there isn't gender parity in tech, when there is in e.g. chemistry, medicine, stats, and some engineering fields? To what extent should a hiring process go to correct real or perceived imbalances in the workplace?
This is very reminiscent of the Ivy League debate going on right now, where Asians are claiming that there is discrimination against them for being too successful.
The article was published in Nature Communications - Nature Publishing Group's open access journal. Nature itself is a journal that has 3-4x the impact factor of Nature Communications. This probably doesn't matter to most people but it is a way to gauge how novel/impactful the research was perceived by the scientific community.
"The categories laid out in his will -- physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace -- have remained the basis of the awards, and a prize for economics was added in 1968. So, what gives? Why only those five original fields?"
The summary/article forgot about the literature category.
You could say the same thing to Apple and its stagnating product lineup
This is an excellent ploy to freely tag compromising images that would otherwise be unidentifiable (i.e. from the neck down). What will Facebook do with their person-matched database of embarrassing pictures? Sell to the highest bidder? Keep in mind, once those pictures are uploaded and flagged by a person, they are going to sit in Facebook's servers until the end of time... to combat revenge porn of course.
My friends all got jobs, relocated across the country/world, and then started having families. My coworkers are now all representative of what my other friends did, and they're all too busy raising young kids. I don't have the local co-op option like I did 15 years ago.
The one weird trick: don't eat anything.
RDA for a semi-active 30 year old 6' tall/200 lb male is ~ 2500 kcal.
2500 kcal * 14 days / ~3500 kcal/lb = 10 lbs.
It's on the internet AND it's true!
What I took away from this is that people who use Bing get cancer.
I'm imagining people with massive student loan debts throwing themselves in front of cars now...
During my Ph.D. program we had a series of guest lecturers on special topics rotate through, and this venerable senior M.D. came in to lecture about relationships between obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
I felt compelled to ask: "Surely, out of the thousands+ of patients you've seen with type 2 diabetes, haven't some of them decided to become more athletic? The benefits on insulin sensitivity and blood sugar balance are well-established [as he had talked about during the lecture]."
The Dr. looked at me like I just asked him if he had ever treated a unicorn. "It's hard," he said, as if it were an impossibility.
Overall, I think the lardasses are that way not because of imprecision with the calorie, but a lack of willpower, or some other deeply-ingrained psychological problem.
How many people see 7 + 9 and immediately think 8, because 7-1? 6 + 7 and immediately think 3, because 6 - 3? 18, 13, didn't even do the math
They call us geniuses
Dear Genius,
You might want to not do your math again and see if you come up with a different answer.
Sincerely,
They
Kinases do much more than just spur protein synthesis. They are among the primary signaling enzymes in the body, involved in turning on and off a multitude of cellular processes by attaching phosphate groups to various targets. Some enzymes simply don't function without being triggered by a kinase. The summary just irks me when it's misleading or wrong
Not sure why this was voted down as this was exactly what I was thinking.
A 20 or 30 year old represents a large investment of resources in society. Also, a young adult is far more productive than a child. If children as a group or adults as a group magically vanished from society, society would be come to a halt if you lost the adults, whereas losing children would be a much smaller waste of time and money.
With the equality of outcomes and not equality of opportunity
Wanted to toss in my anecdotal experience here.
I work as a biochemist in a research-intensive hospital. Practically speaking, what this means is that I do science in buildings that are adjacent to patient care buildings. Depending on the day, I may wander through the actual hospital, but ~98% of the time I am in a research-only building and avoid patients altogether.
The university, medical school, and hospital are all affiliated, and their policy on flu vaccination had been that it was required for anyone who had direct patient contact. A couple of years ago, this policy was revised to make the flu policy mandatory for anyone who worked in a patient care building (regardless of direct contact). This past year (2014) everyone here received a flurry of rather harshly worded emails saying that flu vaccination would soon become mandatory for all employees, students, and faculty regardless of where they worked or what their position was, so long as they were affiliated with the hospital.
These emails were threatening enough that my boss (a principal investigator scientist) got the vaccine for the first time in his life. Coincidentally, like my boss, I have never received a flu vaccine because I am skeptical about how much it would benefit me or "the herd", and I intentionally avoided receiving the vaccine. For the record, I am pro-vaccine when it comes to things like MMR, polio, and HPV.
Did I lose my job? Funnily enough, the end of 2014 had a major flu outbreak in the hospital. Dozens if not hundreds of people contracted the flu, the majority of whom were vaccinated against it. Oddly have not received any more emails about their new vaccination policy...
Say what you want about how flu vaccines still help by knocking down the common strains or sometimes reducing the severity of an outbreak. I liken flu vaccination (or vaccination against any genetically labile virus) to the same situation we have with antibiotic resistance: the more you select against the common strains, which is clearly an imperfect process, the higher the likelihood that some nastier and resistant form of it will appear.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's not just uneducated dimwits who are skeptical about vaccination, and that each vaccine needs to be evaluated independently based on its merits. As a scientist myself, I trust my judgment over the government's as to what I put into my or my kids' bodies, but at the same time I appreciate the argument for protecting others through vaccination.
Lest we forget what this country was founded upon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
"Water, fire, air and dirt
****ing magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all mother****ers lying, and getting me pissed"
I'd be willing to bet money on it. I'm all for high school science fairs, but the way the media (and, in turn, Slashdot) sensationalize results like this is incredibly depressing. Real science is real hard.
I agree that the title is misleading. The reason that this paper is in one of the highest-impact scientific journals is not because it suddenly dawned on scientists that cancer is pervasive and just a fact of how cells work, but because they found tumors in early (in evolutionary terms) species that had never been discovered before.
Scientists have known since the dawn of knowing what cancer was that this was an intrinsic property of life. When the error-checking machinery is error-prone, things can get out of control.
There's an extension for Chrome that will translate all of this confusing "cloud" nonsense for all of us into something clear and accurate: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
To maintain consistency, BroTech was rebranded as D**kTech
Knowing that you could be putting in 70-80 hours a week, and potentially stumble across some major discovery (imagine: cure a kind of cancer discovery). That discovery would be published by your boss, who, adding to his life's work, would cumulatively take most of the public credit for the work. Meanwhile, it doesn't matter if you had some amazing insight or designed the actual experiment to solve the problem.
Look at Nobel laureates and their age and their contributions. How many nameless people enabled them to win that award?
All you can hope for is that you publish a couple papers in top journals that will enable to you to get a solid job in industry, or jump onto the tenure track treadmill, so that one day you can be in a position of exploiting others' work and creativity, potentially in a field completely unrelated to your PhD.
The young have no power to change, and the old have no reason to give up their advantageous position.
Maybe the other 3 billion will use a near limitless supply of knowledge for something other than watching cat videos.