There are most definitely other problems, many of which are overlooked during all the hand-wringing of "we don't have enough (US) scientists".
A) Over the past 5 years, there are a huge increase in federal funding for basic research. Unfortunately, most of the money went to fund a few large-scale projects run by well-investigators--we're talking about guys who are already at the peak of the funding heap and don't really have to worry about their salary and their entire labs' salary and jobs depending on whether the grant submission scores in the top 9% (probably be funded), or outside of the top 12-15% (probably not funded). What I'm saying, long-windedly, is that much of the recent increase in NIH money made a few large-scale, high-profile projects even larger, at the very same time that young invenstigators were seeing a precipituous drop in the percent of acceptance for the smaller new investigator grants.
b) 6 years of grad school, a doctorate, and then you find out that you really aren't paid any better than losers straight from Party U--and THEY probably get health care. Raise your hand if you're ready to quit yet, since your first grant is going to be rejected anyway.
c) it never fucking ends. You can be president of the school and a nobel prize winner and so important that they've decided to make you the first human cloned, and your grant STILL only has a 10-18% chance of being funded.
So, um, I can't remember how this pertains to the patent thing. The key to remember, however, is that the Pharmas tend not to do the most productive basic research, so many of the potential drugs arise from federally-funded work a universities, where people are pursuing utterly novel stuff. It's good for the rest of us to provide a mechanism for the school to approach a biotech and offer that novel product in exchange for any possible royalties.
The only bad patents are patents on genes or part of the genome. Those are fucking stupid and people should be beaten.
I think that part of how hard people are willing to work depends on the extent to which they are allowed to determine their schedule. For example, I'm a night person. If I had to work a typical 9-5 job, I would spend the first 3 hours feeling miserable and being generally useless, leaving me with lunch + 4 hours of productivity to get anything done. However, as a scientist in a university lab, I have complete control over my schedule--the time I spend in the lab is based solely on what the experiment dictates. Not only can I choose to work during my most productive and brain-friendly hours, but I can also choose to crunch several experiments into a few 80-hour work weeks, and then really slack off for a week or two. Obviously this wouldn't work in the corporate world, but this sort of flexibility has allowed me to be far more productive than I would be with a strict schedule, and it also keeps me happy. The downside is that, for this type of schedule to work, you (or your employees) have to be fairly self-motivated, and have to have a stake in the succesful completion of tasks (for me, it's journal publications). In terms of sheer hours, I doubt that my European colleagues work less than I do--and I know that most of my Asian colleagues work longer hours--but the key to keeping us sane during those long work weeks is having control over our schedules.
One word: Provigil. It's FDA-approved for narcolepsy, but many doctors will prescribe it if you have chronic insomnia. I got my rx when I pointed out to my doc that, if there was nothing that could put me to sleep, I might as well take something that would keep me awake. It's been a wonder drug for me: no side effects, and I don't have to be terrified of falling asleep while driving to work in the morning. It's as close to normal as I've been in a decade.
It's not just the low pay that turns people off, it's the lack of PhD-level jobs. Who wants to spend 4 years in college, 6 years in graduate school, and 5 years as a post-doc just to discover that there are no jobs available? The reality is that graduate students in the sciences are trained for positions that don't exist: in the biosciences, a mere 10-15% of people who graduate with a PhD ultimately find a tenure-track position. Some go into industry (although it's a lot easier to find an industry job with a Master's--a PhD is generally a liability), some get yet another degree (JD, MD, or MBA), and some leave science altogether. Even the lucky ones who get a tenure-track position (each job opening generates 300-500 applications) have less than a 20% chance of getting a grant funded. You get a few tries with the grants, but eventually no grant = no job.
The tight job market, long hours, and low pay (I make less as a postdoctoral associate than my little brother made straight out of college, but work 60-70 hours/week) are bitter pills to swallow after you've given over the entirety of your 20s to schooling, and that's why so many of our PhD graduates are foreign--the Americans know that you can make more, work less, and have more job options if you do something that's not science.
For anyone who's interested in where these numbers came from, they're based on meta-studies released by NIH and NSF.
Re:Education Sucks in the US? That's news to me!
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Improving Education?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I also had a great public school education. My teachers taught me the basics and then taught me to think for myself. I can't believe that the only good public schools in the country are in my hometown, which leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily the schools themselves (except in the case of extremely poor areas that have trouble attracting qualified teachers).
What makes the schools I went to successful? It's not the amount of money spent per student (on the high end of average, and property taxes remain relatively low). It also isn't any sort of technology being used as a stand-in for good teaching. The important things are that the schools: 1) pay a fair salary and attract bright and interested teachers, and 2) are populated by children from highly intellectual families (probably one of the things that initially attracted the qualified teachers). My hometown is about 25 min outside Boston, and is largely composed of Boston professionals and university professors--groups that place a very high premium on scholastic success. Parents take a real interest in how their kids do in school and, in my experience, expect learning and schoolwork to happen inside *and* outside the classroom.
Don't be so damn quick to blame American schools and schoolteachers... a good public education can be had, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. It does, however, require parental involvement, high expectations, and hard work.
The problem with no Access for Mac is when you have files that you have to switch back and forth from PC to Mac, and that need to be subjected and re-subjected to Access analysis over and over. For example: my genechip (microarray) data is analyzed by a PC-only program, and we need to use Access to line up the numbers with the gene names and information. However, all my home computers are Macs, and when I have hours and hours of mindless data sorting to do (which is what most of microarray analysis is), I like to bring it home and do it in front of the TV. Unfortunately, there's no way to compare lists (unless I want to spend to time to also learn a Mac-only db program on top of all the time I spent learning Access), or to do so in a PC-Mac compatible way. In fact, the lack of Access for Mac has had me pulling my hair out--and wasting countless hours parked in front of a PC--for the last 4 months.
Perhaps because bills are lighter and easier to carry around? I hate coins--they're comparatively heavy, noisy when in your pockets, take up space, and can't be stored in a wallet (especially a thin wallet meant to go in form-fitting girl pants) nearly as easily as bills can be. All the change I get ends up in one of two places: my car, to use for parking meters, or a jar in my bedroom, to eventually be returned to the back for paper money.
I disagree. Perhaps this is true for some (the majority?) of schools, but there are schools out there where the professors are there to *teach*. If you come in willing to learn and to respond to critiques, they will do their very best to turn you into a smarter person. This is probably more true to small liberal arts schools than for universities (for whom undergrads are generally viewed as a source of income), but such places out are there.
This definitely holds true in the biological sciences (disclaimer: female, getting a PhD in Neuroscience, so a little biased on the whole topic). For a number of years--at least a decade--women have outnumbered men in biosci doctoral programs. This is certainly true in my class: 23 entering students, 18 of whom were female. Same thing holds true at the post-doc level. However, at the tenured level, men outnumber women, even if you look at the youngest faculty, who should represent the first wave of people graduating from female-dominated doctoral programs. Obviously this isn't because women aren't smart enough--they all made it into and through grad school. The question is whether women aren't getting tenured positions because of sexism--it is still very much an old boys' network at the level of those who make the tenure decisions--or because women are more likely to take time off to have kids. While both probably contribute, my personal experience tells me that it's mainly sexism: the majority of female scientists who I know, tenured or un-tenured, don't have kids, and those who want kids have made the decision to wait until they get tenure. I think that what it comes down to is this: when you have two equally qualified job candidates, you're more likely to hire the one that most reminds you of you. Because hiring and tenure committees are still male-dominated, the male candidate benefits from this. However, as the number of women who are tenured increases, I expect this will become less of a factor.
That said, the guy from Harvard is an ass. This gestalt probably does a lot to explain why there are so few tenured women at Harvard.
What proponents of high-tech IDs tend to overlook is the importance of having people involved. A few years ago, I worked in a hospital/research center in NYC that had very tight security (for example, everyone was finger-printed before being issued an ID). The ID itself would presumably not be impossible for someone--especially someone motivated--to fake, but the security guards were another matter. They lived at the entrance to the building, and they pretty much recognized everyone who worked there. If they didn't recognize you, they stopped you, checked your ID, and called up to wherever you said you were going. This isn't a system that would work for a bulding accessible to the general public, but the majority of government buildings are only frequented by the people who work there... for these buildings, attentive security guards are at least as important as fancy IDs.
Re:neurogenesis
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Flying By Brain
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The parent certainly wasn't modded "5" for accuracy. Neurons are terminally differentiated and therefore CANNOT divide (or "reproduce," as the parent called it). In fact, if you stimulate an adult neuron with "divide" signals, you often get an apoptotic neuron. Neural STEM CELLS can divide, and some of them hang out near the ventricles in the adult brain and continue to produce neurons throughout life--newly born neurons have even been observed in damaged areas of Alzheimers' brains.
As far as the Wired article is concerned, this sounds pretty cool, but I never trust the popular press for scientific accuracy. The peer-reviewed paper will be worth reading.
I'm a little unclear as to why this was modded "Funny." Dude, by adopting a pet you make a committment. I volunteered at a shelter for a while, and the most universally loathed people were the ones who brought their happy healthy pets in, complaining that they had to get rid of the cat/dog because of the arrival of Baby. Point A: Plan ahead. Don't get a pet if you're just going to throw it away when you sprog. Point B: It's really not THAT hard to have both children and pets in the same house. I was raised with a brother, 4-5 cats, and 3 dogs, and everyone did just fine.
That would be great... except that income taxes will never, ever, EVER be lowered. Taxes have been increasing steadily in the US since they were introduced (at a rate of about 2%). Just because there are fewer people drawing unemployment doesn't mean the government will let us keep our money.
I tried Sprint, got zero reception in my condo (unless I stuck my head out the window). Tried AT&T, reception is good = no more landline, cheaper phone bills. Figure out where you spend the most time on the phone (i.e. home, work, traveling), and then find the carrier that gives you the best reception in that spot. There are huge differences between carriers.
I'm not sure what kind of science you're talking about, but Macs are extremely popular in the life sciences, and many of the apps my lab uses--Vector NTI, Sequencer, etc.--most certainly do run on Macs. At my university, both the neurobiology and the biochemistry departments use macs, and in the labs, PCs tend to be in the minority. Our bioinformatics group is split about 50:50, but the head of the group has fallen in love with his new TiBook and is trying to switch everyone over. So if you're right that only a fraction of science software runs on Macs, it's clearly the important fraction.
I've noticed that, regardless of the real speed limit, the majority of people will drive a certain speed that is generally safe enough for the road and conditions. Generally, these speeds are 10-20 miles above what the speed limit is (again, depending on conditions). It's important to remember that speed limits are set to be safe for 85% of people (i.e. 84% will be comfortable and safe driving above the speed limit), and then cities/states usually subtract another 5 mph from the "safe" speed so that they can make money from speeding tickets, because the posted speed is now ridiculously slow for 84% of the population. The solution is to post speed suggestions, rather than speed limits, and to let people travel at whatever speed conditions allow for. Of course, there are always going to be idiots who drive dangerously. To catch these people, police should determine the average speed people (in general) choose to travel under different conditions, and then only ticket those going, say, 2 or 3 standard deviations above normal.
[I have two cats and a bunch of computers in my one bedroom apartment. Cats don't bother cables. I'll support the parent, a second cat could improve things.]
I have FIVE cats, and one of them still chews on cables. Some of them just enjoy the activity. My solution was to wrap everything in electrical tape--cats apparently dislike the taste, because that totally stopped the chewing. Also, unlike double-sided tape, electrical tape won't attract dust and fur.
----- DerekLyons wrote: There are two related uses for the information; First to weed out horses that are 'sub par' early on in their training process. Secondly to identify potential studs and dams that may be visually indistinquishable or 'sub par', yet have valuable breeding characteristics. -----
Any trainer or jockey worth his or her salt can function at least as well as this GPS system... those guys have excellent timers in their heads. And they also have something that technology doesn't have: the ability to determine whether a particular horse has the *desire* to win. In this case, I'd pick human opinions over tech data any day.
Great. So even more kids can grow up to discover that, despite 25+ years of school, 80-hour work weeks, and endless financial hardship, they can't actually get a job because universities mostly only want to hire adjunct professors.
And people wonder why we have trouble attracting students to a career in science.
>Science does make money for schools. When we get a grant for doing science, the department and/or the university gets a cut. So if a lab gets a $600,000 grant, they'll probably actually get to see only $200,000-$300,000 of it or so, depending (greatly) on the university. For instance, in the grant administration booklet for my university it looks like 49% of a grant goes directly to the university for "Facilities and Administration.">
Scientific grants are responsible for several million dollars in annual revenue at large research universities. However, while overhead is computed as a percentage of a grant, it's not actually taken out of the grant money that a researcher receives. If a grant is for $500,000 over five years, the researcher will receive $100,000 a year, and, on top of that, the funding agency will give the school about $49,000 annually to cover overhead costs such as electricity, lab space, etc.
>Somehow the PhD program elevates the undergrad program?
Having done my undergrad at a mid-ranked small liberal arts college and my PhD at a large, private, well-ranked university, I find that awfully hard to believe. Sure, large universities draw high-profile professors and have lots of research projects and neat facilities. However, those high profile profs really don't want to teach and, even if they did, they wouldn't be able to pick a single student out of most of their over-sized classes. If the undergrads at my PhD university want to do research, they generally become slaves to a grad student or post-doc, and their "project" is doing someone else's research. At my college, the profs knew who I was (and I'm still in touch with many 6 years out), were there BECAUSE they wanted to teach, and every student who wanted to do research had to come up with their own project--there was no one to piggy-back off of. When I was applying to grad school, this gave me a huge advantage (plus, all those recommendation letters from profs who actually knew who I was). You couldn't pay me to be an undergrad at my PhD institution.
------ kevlar wrote: On the contrary. Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties? How will this encourage research? Money drives the world for a reason. Now I admit that $3500 to test for a certain gene is quite steep, but we do not know how much money was put-forth to determine the offending genes. -----------
This breast cancer gene--like most of the genes that have been discovered and researched to the point where we can understand the biological role that they play--was discovered mainly using public research funds. That's big Pharma's dirty little secret: university researchers, supported by public institutions like the National Institutes of Health, do most of the basic research leading to understanding of genes, function, and drug discovery. Towards the end of this process, which can take a decade or more and tends to meander based on the individual researcher's interest, the researcher may apply for a patent on the discovery. However, the researcher knows that he/she cannot take the discovery beyond this stage--someone else needs to find a commercial use, do the patient testing, apply to the FDA, etc. So the researcher sets up a small company that is then usually acquired by a larger Pharma co. The Pharma then turns the discovery into a commercial product. This costs money, yes, and sometimes a lot of money if drug tests are involved, but the main point is that the company is commercializing a discovery *paid for by public funds*.
In Myriad's case, production of the test would have been relatively cheap--no Phase I/II/III trials that drugs require. So they're not operating on much of a discovery loss and, based on the way the test is conducted, I can swear to you that it doesn't cost them anywhere near $3500 per sample, even when you include all the overhead costs that go into a lab. They're making a killing.
One of the things I *hated* about my high school science classes (and some of my college classes) was that everything we did had been done before. Some of this was ok--looking at things through a microscope, for example--but when we had to do experiments in which we knew what the outcome would be, it seemed utterly pointless.
And then I took an Advanced Biology course. Our teacher found out that the town needed someone to survey a particular stream that ran through the town--look at the organisms present, measure turbidity, etc. She offered up our class, and that's what we did during most of our lab days (along with a fair number of our after-school hours) that year. At the end we wrote up a report and presented it to the town, and they used it to determine what sorts of development could be allowed in areas near the stream. It was pretty damn cool. I'm not saying that that class was the only reason that I'm currently in a PhD program for biological sciences, but it was definitely the first of a select few career-defining experiences.
My point here is that while repetition is the mainstay of real world science, it's not what should be used to pique interests. To the teachers out there: don't just order lab books full of tried, true and deathly boring experiments that have been done by a hundred previous classes. Come up with something that might actually make a difference--no matter how small its eventual impact on the world as a whole, its impact on budding scientists is massive.
You don't even necessarily need a small car. My '99 V6 VW Passat sedan--which has a TON of room--has a nifty trip counter that measures average MPG. I regularly get 25 city/33+ highway. Granted, many of the little cars will top this (and if they don't, they should), but my Passat has both space and power.
And perhaps this is due to Whedon's shifting attention, but...
IMHO, Buffy has fallen into the same trap that the X-Files did. Both shows used to be bitingly funny--even though there were deep dark moments (especially in Buffy), there were always enough off-handed humorous remarks so that the shows weren't truly depressing week after week. The beauty was that in the same episode where Angel turned evil and tortured Giles (and etc.), there were still lines that made me laugh out loud. However, in the past season or two (and a bit longer for the X-Files), it's as if the writers have been trying far too hard to make a point or develop plot or something... I'm someone who enjoys a good wallow in misery sometimes, but ultimately tv is about entertainment.
And, of course, "Angel" has fallen prey to the baby-trap that killed off "Mad About You."
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There are most definitely other problems, many of which are overlooked during all the hand-wringing of "we don't have enough (US) scientists".
A) Over the past 5 years, there are a huge increase in federal funding for basic research. Unfortunately, most of the money went to fund a few large-scale projects run by well-investigators--we're talking about guys who are already at the peak of the funding heap and don't really have to worry about their salary and their entire labs' salary and jobs depending on whether the grant submission scores in the top 9% (probably be funded), or outside of the top 12-15% (probably not funded). What I'm saying, long-windedly, is that much of the recent increase in NIH money made a few large-scale, high-profile projects even larger, at the very same time that young invenstigators were seeing a precipituous drop in the percent of acceptance for the smaller new investigator grants.
b) 6 years of grad school, a doctorate, and then you find out that you really aren't paid any better than losers straight from Party U--and THEY probably get health care. Raise your hand if you're ready to quit yet, since your first grant is going to be rejected anyway.
c) it never fucking ends. You can be president of the school and a nobel prize winner and so important that they've decided to make you the first human cloned, and your grant STILL only has a 10-18% chance of being funded.
So, um, I can't remember how this pertains to the patent thing. The key to remember, however, is that the Pharmas tend not to do the most productive basic research, so many of the potential drugs arise from federally-funded work a universities, where people are pursuing utterly novel stuff. It's good for the rest of us to provide a mechanism for the school to approach a biotech and offer that novel product in exchange for any possible royalties.
The only bad patents are patents on genes or part of the genome. Those are fucking stupid and people should be beaten.
I think that part of how hard people are willing to work depends on the extent to which they are allowed to determine their schedule. For example, I'm a night person. If I had to work a typical 9-5 job, I would spend the first 3 hours feeling miserable and being generally useless, leaving me with lunch + 4 hours of productivity to get anything done. However, as a scientist in a university lab, I have complete control over my schedule--the time I spend in the lab is based solely on what the experiment dictates. Not only can I choose to work during my most productive and brain-friendly hours, but I can also choose to crunch several experiments into a few 80-hour work weeks, and then really slack off for a week or two. Obviously this wouldn't work in the corporate world, but this sort of flexibility has allowed me to be far more productive than I would be with a strict schedule, and it also keeps me happy. The downside is that, for this type of schedule to work, you (or your employees) have to be fairly self-motivated, and have to have a stake in the succesful completion of tasks (for me, it's journal publications). In terms of sheer hours, I doubt that my European colleagues work less than I do--and I know that most of my Asian colleagues work longer hours--but the key to keeping us sane during those long work weeks is having control over our schedules.
One word: Provigil. It's FDA-approved for narcolepsy, but many doctors will prescribe it if you have chronic insomnia. I got my rx when I pointed out to my doc that, if there was nothing that could put me to sleep, I might as well take something that would keep me awake. It's been a wonder drug for me: no side effects, and I don't have to be terrified of falling asleep while driving to work in the morning. It's as close to normal as I've been in a decade.
It's not just the low pay that turns people off, it's the lack of PhD-level jobs. Who wants to spend 4 years in college, 6 years in graduate school, and 5 years as a post-doc just to discover that there are no jobs available? The reality is that graduate students in the sciences are trained for positions that don't exist: in the biosciences, a mere 10-15% of people who graduate with a PhD ultimately find a tenure-track position. Some go into industry (although it's a lot easier to find an industry job with a Master's--a PhD is generally a liability), some get yet another degree (JD, MD, or MBA), and some leave science altogether. Even the lucky ones who get a tenure-track position (each job opening generates 300-500 applications) have less than a 20% chance of getting a grant funded. You get a few tries with the grants, but eventually no grant = no job.
The tight job market, long hours, and low pay (I make less as a postdoctoral associate than my little brother made straight out of college, but work 60-70 hours/week) are bitter pills to swallow after you've given over the entirety of your 20s to schooling, and that's why so many of our PhD graduates are foreign--the Americans know that you can make more, work less, and have more job options if you do something that's not science.
For anyone who's interested in where these numbers came from, they're based on meta-studies released by NIH and NSF.
I also had a great public school education. My teachers taught me the basics and then taught me to think for myself. I can't believe that the only good public schools in the country are in my hometown, which leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily the schools themselves (except in the case of extremely poor areas that have trouble attracting qualified teachers).
... a good public education can be had, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. It does, however, require parental involvement, high expectations, and hard work.
What makes the schools I went to successful? It's not the amount of money spent per student (on the high end of average, and property taxes remain relatively low). It also isn't any sort of technology being used as a stand-in for good teaching. The important things are that the schools: 1) pay a fair salary and attract bright and interested teachers, and 2) are populated by children from highly intellectual families (probably one of the things that initially attracted the qualified teachers). My hometown is about 25 min outside Boston, and is largely composed of Boston professionals and university professors--groups that place a very high premium on scholastic success. Parents take a real interest in how their kids do in school and, in my experience, expect learning and schoolwork to happen inside *and* outside the classroom.
Don't be so damn quick to blame American schools and schoolteachers
The problem with no Access for Mac is when you have files that you have to switch back and forth from PC to Mac, and that need to be subjected and re-subjected to Access analysis over and over. For example: my genechip (microarray) data is analyzed by a PC-only program, and we need to use Access to line up the numbers with the gene names and information. However, all my home computers are Macs, and when I have hours and hours of mindless data sorting to do (which is what most of microarray analysis is), I like to bring it home and do it in front of the TV. Unfortunately, there's no way to compare lists (unless I want to spend to time to also learn a Mac-only db program on top of all the time I spent learning Access), or to do so in a PC-Mac compatible way. In fact, the lack of Access for Mac has had me pulling my hair out--and wasting countless hours parked in front of a PC--for the last 4 months.
Perhaps because bills are lighter and easier to carry around? I hate coins--they're comparatively heavy, noisy when in your pockets, take up space, and can't be stored in a wallet (especially a thin wallet meant to go in form-fitting girl pants) nearly as easily as bills can be. All the change I get ends up in one of two places: my car, to use for parking meters, or a jar in my bedroom, to eventually be returned to the back for paper money.
I disagree. Perhaps this is true for some (the majority?) of schools, but there are schools out there where the professors are there to *teach*. If you come in willing to learn and to respond to critiques, they will do their very best to turn you into a smarter person. This is probably more true to small liberal arts schools than for universities (for whom undergrads are generally viewed as a source of income), but such places out are there.
This definitely holds true in the biological sciences (disclaimer: female, getting a PhD in Neuroscience, so a little biased on the whole topic). For a number of years--at least a decade--women have outnumbered men in biosci doctoral programs. This is certainly true in my class: 23 entering students, 18 of whom were female. Same thing holds true at the post-doc level. However, at the tenured level, men outnumber women, even if you look at the youngest faculty, who should represent the first wave of people graduating from female-dominated doctoral programs. Obviously this isn't because women aren't smart enough--they all made it into and through grad school. The question is whether women aren't getting tenured positions because of sexism--it is still very much an old boys' network at the level of those who make the tenure decisions--or because women are more likely to take time off to have kids. While both probably contribute, my personal experience tells me that it's mainly sexism: the majority of female scientists who I know, tenured or un-tenured, don't have kids, and those who want kids have made the decision to wait until they get tenure. I think that what it comes down to is this: when you have two equally qualified job candidates, you're more likely to hire the one that most reminds you of you. Because hiring and tenure committees are still male-dominated, the male candidate benefits from this. However, as the number of women who are tenured increases, I expect this will become less of a factor.
That said, the guy from Harvard is an ass. This gestalt probably does a lot to explain why there are so few tenured women at Harvard.
What proponents of high-tech IDs tend to overlook is the importance of having people involved. A few years ago, I worked in a hospital/research center in NYC that had very tight security (for example, everyone was finger-printed before being issued an ID). The ID itself would presumably not be impossible for someone--especially someone motivated--to fake, but the security guards were another matter. They lived at the entrance to the building, and they pretty much recognized everyone who worked there. If they didn't recognize you, they stopped you, checked your ID, and called up to wherever you said you were going. This isn't a system that would work for a bulding accessible to the general public, but the majority of government buildings are only frequented by the people who work there ... for these buildings, attentive security guards are at least as important as fancy IDs.
The parent certainly wasn't modded "5" for accuracy. Neurons are terminally differentiated and therefore CANNOT divide (or "reproduce," as the parent called it). In fact, if you stimulate an adult neuron with "divide" signals, you often get an apoptotic neuron. Neural STEM CELLS can divide, and some of them hang out near the ventricles in the adult brain and continue to produce neurons throughout life--newly born neurons have even been observed in damaged areas of Alzheimers' brains.
As far as the Wired article is concerned, this sounds pretty cool, but I never trust the popular press for scientific accuracy. The peer-reviewed paper will be worth reading.
I'm a little unclear as to why this was modded "Funny." Dude, by adopting a pet you make a committment. I volunteered at a shelter for a while, and the most universally loathed people were the ones who brought their happy healthy pets in, complaining that they had to get rid of the cat/dog because of the arrival of Baby. Point A: Plan ahead. Don't get a pet if you're just going to throw it away when you sprog. Point B: It's really not THAT hard to have both children and pets in the same house. I was raised with a brother, 4-5 cats, and 3 dogs, and everyone did just fine.
That would be great ... except that income taxes will never, ever, EVER be lowered. Taxes have been increasing steadily in the US since they were introduced (at a rate of about 2%). Just because there are fewer people drawing unemployment doesn't mean the government will let us keep our money.
I tried Sprint, got zero reception in my condo (unless I stuck my head out the window). Tried AT&T, reception is good = no more landline, cheaper phone bills. Figure out where you spend the most time on the phone (i.e. home, work, traveling), and then find the carrier that gives you the best reception in that spot. There are huge differences between carriers.
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I'm not sure what kind of science you're talking about, but Macs are extremely popular in the life sciences, and many of the apps my lab uses--Vector NTI, Sequencer, etc.--most certainly do run on Macs. At my university, both the neurobiology and the biochemistry departments use macs, and in the labs, PCs tend to be in the minority. Our bioinformatics group is split about 50:50, but the head of the group has fallen in love with his new TiBook and is trying to switch everyone over. So if you're right that only a fraction of science software runs on Macs, it's clearly the important fraction.
I've noticed that, regardless of the real speed limit, the majority of people will drive a certain speed that is generally safe enough for the road and conditions. Generally, these speeds are 10-20 miles above what the speed limit is (again, depending on conditions). It's important to remember that speed limits are set to be safe for 85% of people (i.e. 84% will be comfortable and safe driving above the speed limit), and then cities/states usually subtract another 5 mph from the "safe" speed so that they can make money from speeding tickets, because the posted speed is now ridiculously slow for 84% of the population. The solution is to post speed suggestions, rather than speed limits, and to let people travel at whatever speed conditions allow for. Of course, there are always going to be idiots who drive dangerously. To catch these people, police should determine the average speed people (in general) choose to travel under different conditions, and then only ticket those going, say, 2 or 3 standard deviations above normal.
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If only I were dictator
[I have two cats and a bunch of computers in my one bedroom apartment. Cats don't bother cables. I'll support the parent, a second cat could improve things.]
I have FIVE cats, and one of them still chews on cables. Some of them just enjoy the activity. My solution was to wrap everything in electrical tape--cats apparently dislike the taste, because that totally stopped the chewing. Also, unlike double-sided tape, electrical tape won't attract dust and fur.
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... those guys have excellent timers in their heads. And they also have something that technology doesn't have: the ability to determine whether a particular horse has the *desire* to win. In this case, I'd pick human opinions over tech data any day.
DerekLyons wrote:
There are two related uses for the information; First to weed out horses that are 'sub par' early on in their training process. Secondly to identify potential studs and dams that may be visually indistinquishable or 'sub par', yet have valuable breeding characteristics.
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Any trainer or jockey worth his or her salt can function at least as well as this GPS system
Great. So even more kids can grow up to discover that, despite 25+ years of school, 80-hour work weeks, and endless financial hardship, they can't actually get a job because universities mostly only want to hire adjunct professors.
And people wonder why we have trouble attracting students to a career in science.
>Science does make money for schools. When we get a grant for doing science, the department and/or the university gets a cut. So if a lab gets a $600,000 grant, they'll probably actually get to see only $200,000-$300,000 of it or so, depending (greatly) on the university. For instance, in the grant administration booklet for my university it looks like 49% of a grant goes directly to the university for "Facilities and Administration.">
Scientific grants are responsible for several million dollars in annual revenue at large research universities. However, while overhead is computed as a percentage of a grant, it's not actually taken out of the grant money that a researcher receives. If a grant is for $500,000 over five years, the researcher will receive $100,000 a year, and, on top of that, the funding agency will give the school about $49,000 annually to cover overhead costs such as electricity, lab space, etc.
>Somehow the PhD program elevates the undergrad program?
Having done my undergrad at a mid-ranked small liberal arts college and my PhD at a large, private, well-ranked university, I find that awfully hard to believe. Sure, large universities draw high-profile professors and have lots of research projects and neat facilities. However, those high profile profs really don't want to teach and, even if they did, they wouldn't be able to pick a single student out of most of their over-sized classes. If the undergrads at my PhD university want to do research, they generally become slaves to a grad student or post-doc, and their "project" is doing someone else's research. At my college, the profs knew who I was (and I'm still in touch with many 6 years out), were there BECAUSE they wanted to teach, and every student who wanted to do research had to come up with their own project--there was no one to piggy-back off of. When I was applying to grad school, this gave me a huge advantage (plus, all those recommendation letters from profs who actually knew who I was). You couldn't pay me to be an undergrad at my PhD institution.
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kevlar wrote:
On the contrary. Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties? How will this encourage research? Money drives the world for a reason. Now I admit that $3500 to test for a certain gene is quite steep, but we do not know how much money was put-forth to determine the offending genes.
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This breast cancer gene--like most of the genes that have been discovered and researched to the point where we can understand the biological role that they play--was discovered mainly using public research funds. That's big Pharma's dirty little secret: university researchers, supported by public institutions like the National Institutes of Health, do most of the basic research leading to understanding of genes, function, and drug discovery. Towards the end of this process, which can take a decade or more and tends to meander based on the individual researcher's interest, the researcher may apply for a patent on the discovery. However, the researcher knows that he/she cannot take the discovery beyond this stage--someone else needs to find a commercial use, do the patient testing, apply to the FDA, etc. So the researcher sets up a small company that is then usually acquired by a larger Pharma co. The Pharma then turns the discovery into a commercial product. This costs money, yes, and sometimes a lot of money if drug tests are involved, but the main point is that the company is commercializing a discovery *paid for by public funds*.
In Myriad's case, production of the test would have been relatively cheap--no Phase I/II/III trials that drugs require. So they're not operating on much of a discovery loss and, based on the way the test is conducted, I can swear to you that it doesn't cost them anywhere near $3500 per sample, even when you include all the overhead costs that go into a lab. They're making a killing.
One of the things I *hated* about my high school science classes (and some of my college classes) was that everything we did had been done before. Some of this was ok--looking at things through a microscope, for example--but when we had to do experiments in which we knew what the outcome would be, it seemed utterly pointless.
And then I took an Advanced Biology course. Our teacher found out that the town needed someone to survey a particular stream that ran through the town--look at the organisms present, measure turbidity, etc. She offered up our class, and that's what we did during most of our lab days (along with a fair number of our after-school hours) that year. At the end we wrote up a report and presented it to the town, and they used it to determine what sorts of development could be allowed in areas near the stream. It was pretty damn cool. I'm not saying that that class was the only reason that I'm currently in a PhD program for biological sciences, but it was definitely the first of a select few career-defining experiences.
My point here is that while repetition is the mainstay of real world science, it's not what should be used to pique interests. To the teachers out there: don't just order lab books full of tried, true and deathly boring experiments that have been done by a hundred previous classes. Come up with something that might actually make a difference--no matter how small its eventual impact on the world as a whole, its impact on budding scientists is massive.
You don't even necessarily need a small car. My '99 V6 VW Passat sedan--which has a TON of room--has a nifty trip counter that measures average MPG. I regularly get 25 city/33+ highway. Granted, many of the little cars will top this (and if they don't, they should), but my Passat has both space and power.
*k
And perhaps this is due to Whedon's shifting attention, but ...
... I'm someone who enjoys a good wallow in misery sometimes, but ultimately tv is about entertainment.
IMHO, Buffy has fallen into the same trap that the X-Files did. Both shows used to be bitingly funny--even though there were deep dark moments (especially in Buffy), there were always enough off-handed humorous remarks so that the shows weren't truly depressing week after week. The beauty was that in the same episode where Angel turned evil and tortured Giles (and etc.), there were still lines that made me laugh out loud. However, in the past season or two (and a bit longer for the X-Files), it's as if the writers have been trying far too hard to make a point or develop plot or something
And, of course, "Angel" has fallen prey to the baby-trap that killed off "Mad About You."