Mount Sinai/NYU in NYC has had this policy for years. I was a graduate student there and it bothered me to no end that I had to have my bag searched just to go to classes.
I haven't been at NIH in several years, but I remember that, although IDs were issued, there was usually no one to check them. At Mt Sinai you had to get finger-printed and drug tested just to be *admitted* to the graduate school, and you weren't allowed in the research buildings if you didn't have your ID out and visible.
---
"You are welcome to your belief that 4-5 cells do not constitue life, however, I'm sure you will feel different if you find your set to have a child and then it's lost during gestation. Those 4 or 5 cells become as real as any person and the loss felt is terrible. I pray your family never has to deal with that. "
---
You wouldn't KNOW if you lost a 4-5 cells embryo... we're talking 2.5 days after fertilization. In fact, if you're married and "trying" for a baby, you've probably lost a whole bunch. Does that mean you're a murderer, because these clumps of cells died during your quest to produce an heir?
Not only is a 4-5 day embryo not a real human (it has, if it's lucky, a 25% percent chance of reaching the parturition stage), but every single person who uses artificial fertility techniques wastes 20-odd embryos *each cycle*. Are you also up for baning fertility treatments?
I'm sure everyone remembers that ass who stood up in front of the Senate and asked which one of his two former-adopted-embryos-now-children should be killed. Well, he overlooked the fact that he and his wife originally adopted THREE embryos. One of those embryos is no longer "alive." I'd argue that this is far more immoral than stem cell research (which I wholeheatedly support), because the cells harvested for research at least have the potential to help millions of living, breathing, productive people. The millions of embryos hanging out in fertility centers' liquid nitrogen tanks aren't going to do anyone any good... they're basically rotting where they are. And thanks to Bush's decision, they will continue rotting.
First, what was mapped was the genome, not the genes. If you use a book as a metaphor, what Celera and the HGP did by sequencing the genome was put all the individual letters in order. Identifying the actual genes (the stretches of the genome that code for proteins) is like putting in punctuation... right now we have very little idea where the periods and commas and paragraphs are. However, based on our understanding of genetics, computer models have been developed to guess where the punctuation should go, thus leading to the estimate of the number of genes. And it *does* appear that humans have only ~30,000 genes... the difference between us and, say, a fruit fly, is that our genes can be spliced in a number of ways, so that each individual gene can, on average, produce 3 or more different proteins. So while we don't have many more actual genes than a nematode (worm), we make 3x more proteins, which are the actual workhorses of the body.
Genaissance's work looks at individual differences in the letters of genes... these individual differences may or may not mean anything to the proteins produced. Their work doesn't nullify the significance of Celera and the HGP's work, which was meant to define the norm. The availability of sequenced and annotated mouse and human genomes is an incredible boon to almost every scientist, reducing what used to be years of bench work to an afternoon sitting in front of a computer screen. Genaissance's work, on the other hand, is of more limited use, and is mainly aimed at those who design human drugs.
I have serious trouble believing that journals are struggling for money. Publishers pay/only/ for the direct print-onto-paper process: peer reviewers aren't paid (it's a privilege for the reviewers) and scientists are charged for having their articles printed (some journals charge per page, some just charge for color figures). For example, the most recent paper my lab published cost $10,000 for figures and reprints. Journals are getting paid by both the contributors and the subscribers (and subscriptions can be several hundred or thousand dollars a year)... how EXACTLY are they managing to lose money during this process?
I think the idea of a free public archive is a great one, but the boycott suggested won't work simply because the majority of scientists can't afford to snub the best journals. Except for a few Nobel winners, scientists depend on publishing (the old publish-or-perish adage is very true) for grant money and job promotions, and even scientists who are already tenurred need to publish in order to hang on to their lab space.
Remember the story about how Palm's Graffiti was making people forget how to write regularly? This is the same sort of spoof. People have had datebooks and address books for/years/; PDAs are merely electronic versions of these.
And if you need any more proof, there's the well-known "Flynn effect", which refers to the fact that IQ scores have risen significantly over the past century (mostly, but not entirely, explained by better nutrition and medical care).
The problem with Zip drives is that they inevitably go south, and usually when you need them most. In the last year I've had five drives get the click of death, and each one took a zip disk full of info with it.
As for CDRWs, 1) the drives are expensive, and 2) it takes too damn long to copy things onto them. Floppies are still the most attractive for quick-and-dirty file transport, as in moving a paper from one computer to another. Unfortunately, most floppy disks are crap, and now a certain computer manufacturer is making their computers sans floppy drives.
So there is a real need for something floppy-like. Personally, if I'm transferring something from a home computer to a work computer, I use email. But this clearly isn't an option for students who need to move material to a university computer lab.
Ideally, college has very little to do with being trained for a job. Rather, it's the way society passes on to you, as an individual, what society as a collective has learned from the past. When you begin college you're on the brink of adulthood (in the psychological, not legal, sense), and so are the other thousand-or-so people you'll be spending the next four years with. You 've been shaped by your parents and peers and experiences, but you're still maleable. The purpose of a university education is to expose you to complex philosophical, historical, and psychological issues that will shape the way you approach every subsequent experience. You read Lao Tzu to learn alternate ways of viewing the world; you study the memoirs of Auschwitz survivors in order to prevent history from repeating; you take a genetics course so that you can make an intelligent contribution to how your country approaches the advances offered by the biotech industry. You don't go there to learn C++.
A hot job market is nothing to be spit at, but there's no substitute for what college offers to the 18-year-old. Some people clearly feel that it's a waste of four years--four years during which they could be working and making money and getting on with their lives--but the truth is that if you have the opportunity to go to college and live in a dorm and eat crappy dining hall food and write papers on arcane subjects, you have to be pretty stupid not to jump at it, because you're never going to have a chance like that again (whereas you have the next 50 years to work). You can always choose to do college later in life, but when you have a family, when you're 15 or 20 years older than all the other students, when you're also working full-time, and when your personality is set in stone, the experience isn't the same.
On a more general note, I fear for the country that doesn't urge its young to get a liberal arts education, because that country will have to reinvent the wheel with each generation. Culture with a capital "C" sets us apart from all other species--it offers the collected wisdom of hundreds of generations, rather than the knowledge of only the living--and universities are the best mechanism for passing this wisdom on to a new generation. Without people who have learned from the mistakes and triumphs of previous generations, we're really no better than a school of goldfish swimming round and round in a really big pond.
Older biology research buildings (at both the NIH campus and at research universities) have rooms with one or two lab benches. Researchers have 1 or more rooms along a hallway, according to their status. Usually there are 3-4 technicians/students per room, and if they're lucky, each has a desk with a computer. This is an ok setup, but tends to be isolating.
More recently, people discovered that if you stick several research teams in one gigantic space, it encourages collaboration. Newer buildings are built with gigantic (hallway-length) rooms with 10-15 lab benches, and 1-3 researchers, with all their associated technicians and students, share the space (each researcher has their own benches).
Having worked in both situations, the new collaboration-friendly spaces are MUCH better. It's a bit noisier--there are generally multiple radios playing--but it really does what it's supposed to. It makes it much easier to share information, learn new techniques, or borrow reagents when you run out. It also tends to be more fun when you're working, unless you're trying to get some serious writing done (there are smaller rooms for that).
I would guess that the computer-world situation is similar: when you have many people working on separate-but-similar projects, it improves productivity and creativity to stick them in a large space that encourages them to work together. And when you have people who need to do very focused work (like hard-core coding), you need to provide smaller quiet retreat spaces.
Instead of paying individuals, why not reduce the price of any resulting drugs? People have already shown that they're willing to donate unused CPU time for free as long as the goal is an interesting one (seti@home, etc.)... why not use this willingness to reduce the price of any drugs the public helps to develop? Not that I would mind someone paying me for computing power, but I think individual payments should be reserved for less noble goals, particularly when you're talking about something like cancer treatments (hair loss drugs might be another matter).
I realize this is now thoroughly off-topic, but I'll say it anyway. I've now read several posts under this article that basically say 'I hope [Bush/Gore] doesn't get elected because the country will fail and the world will explode and life as we know it will end, so I'm going to vote third-party even though I realize that they won't win.'
YOU IDIOTS.
Yes, one way to protest the main party candidates is to vote third-party. But it's also a really good way to ensure that the party you/really/ don't like will win because you just threw away your vote. If you're going to protest the main parties, do it in a way that won't deprive you of the chance to vote for the president (i.e. before and during the primaries). And if you think that one vote among so many doesn't matter, consider this story: The 18,000-person town I grew up in had a vote about whether the elementary school should be given more money to build desperately-needed classrooms, and my mother was very busy that day and forgot about the town meeting. The side she supported lost by one vote.
parasol records has a bunch of indie band cds for about $10US. sarge is my favorite group on their distribution list (i think they record on mud records, but parasol does the distribution).
Clearly, both the private sector and the government have decided that network and keystroke monitering is necessary and legal. What about at academic institutions? Universities have traditionally been bastions of freedom, so I wonder how this trend toward privacy invasion is playing out in academia. Can someone in a university IT department shed some light on this?
Take, for example, the biomedical sciences. Ten years ago, maybe it still made sense to have people memorize everything. Things were still manageable then. But now--particularly with the near completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and the unimaginable amount of information we'll cull from this--there's simply too much to memorize. Having the [insert your field's arcane facts here] available won't make things easier; what it will do is require a deeper level of understanding from students.
This work was done, and published, by Dr. Carter Bancroft at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The girl may have worked in his lab, but the work is his. When the media covers contests like this, they make it seem as if the kids are the ones who thought up all these fantastic ideas. Really, the kids are nothing more than lab technicians (I know, because a Westinghouse student was in my thesis lab)--they do some work, but no actual thinking. It's good that they have a chance to pursue their interest in science, but what they do shouldn't be mistaken for genius.
Potential geek chicks may, during their school years, gravitate toward fields where they see other women working. At this point, these are fields like the sciences, which are pretty good outlets for people who are geeks at heart. Science (biology, physics, etc) allows for exploration and encourages obsession, and is also approaching gender ratio equality (if not actual gender equality). Graduate schools, at least in the biological sciences, currently have more female than male students.
Many people choose their career by identifying early on an adult who they can picture themselves being in 15 or 20 years. Boys can find plenty of male mentors in the tech field, but there just aren't many women in technology for girls to look up to (as opposed to the sciences). So if our goal is to increase the number of geek chicks, women in the tech fields have to be very active as mentors for girls.
The idea of companies patenting genes that they have "discovered" bothers me for two very different reasons. The first is moral--I don't think it's right that someone should hold a patent on a unique sequence of DNA found in nature. I can't really make an argument for this because it's just a gut reaction.
The second objection I have to this is much stronger. Basic scientific research can only evolve if it occurs in an open source environment, where discoveries are shared almost as soon as they are made. This happens necessarily in university environments, and is the primary reason for the research conferences that scientists are always running around to attend. We publish, we share data, we examine each other's grants, and we share reagents. Our work is validated when--and only when--someone else replicates it. Lewis Thomas made a very powerful argument for this in one of his arguments: we can only evolve if we share with each other. Although I'm not a CS person, my feeling is that open source software operates the same way.
In the field of life sciences--which is really a very young science--the sequencing of the human genome is a giant step, and will represent a gigantic change in every subset of the field. But here comes Ventner's company, announcing that they plan to finish the sequence before the NIH group (and what/really/ bothers me is that their advantage occurs because the NIH puts their data up on the web as soon as it's available, while Celera uses the NIH data without sharing their own--this means that Celera is using data paid for by taxpayers to support their own patents). If Celera wins, they will hold onto the full sequence for as long as they want to... they claim they'll make it available to scientists once they've decided what to patent, but I frankly don't trust that. If NIH wins, the sequence is available immediately, for free, to every single person everywhere... just as it should be.
I have no problem with someone patenting a novel process, like PCR, because that's the way biotech needs to work, and that's how patents were meant to be used. But with/information/ like the human genome sequence... that's something that has to be in the public domain.
i read peoples' stories about high school, and it makes me wonder what would have happened to me if i had been at a different school. yes, i was miserable. but the difference was that my courses were challenging, my teachers took an interest in encouraging intelligent students, and when i became really, really depressed, four separate teachers called my parents and said 'do something'. and this was a public school.
i don't know why my school was so good (although the town was a relatively wealthy one), and i also don't know why so many schools are so bad. but the fact that there are some schools that get it right gives me hope that, eventually, they all will. the key is to (1) identify what works, and (2) convince people that it's worth paying for.
"Anyway, how accurate are they with this gene manipulation. I would also imagine that intelligence, like skin colour isn't specific to one gene but of several genes. This would increase the possibilty for error. Its no longer a slip of the knife but now a drug which isn't as well targeted. "
Whenever you do a genetic manipulation, what you have to remember is that your aim is to effect eventual protein production. And what makes this study really interesting is that Tsien was able to effect memory by altering one SUBUNIT of the NMDA receptor. And NR2B isn't even the main subunit: the NR is made up of NR1 (mandatory), and one other subunit (NR2B or other choices). So it's pretty neat that you can get a cognitive effect through this one little change.
In the past few days I've been trying to figure out what got me through high school. It was the teachers. If every troubled student could find one teacher to respect them, to listen to them, to say "hi" to them each day, I think we'd lose fewer students.
The premise is that if you have someone who respects you, you're going to begin respecting yourself. And if you respect both yourself and your teacher, you develop a sense of responsibility, and you're not as willing to use your life as a bargaining chip--you value yourself, and you don't want to let the people who value you down.
This doesn't take the responsibility off parents, because parents are still *the* crucial element, but--let's face it--the hallmark of the teenage years is conflict with parents. Sometimes you need the attention of someone who isn't as intimately involved as parents are, and the people in the best position are generally teachers.
I would never go back to visit my high school classmates, but four years after leaving my high school I still visit the teachers who meant the most to me. They talked to me every day, challenged me when I needed it, and, when I was really in trouble, 4 separate people called my parents. And even though that was embarrassing, it means a lot to someone as lonely as I was to be noticed by the people who I respected.
That's what got me through, and I hope that students in trouble can seek out a teacher that they respect--most of the good teachers will do almost anything for their students. I know those teachers are out there, and they're not only in private schools. My entire experience was in public schools.
It's interesting hearing the guy perspective on this, and I think it explains why the people shooting their classmates are guys (although the future could prove me wrong). As an outcast girl, I was never slammed against lockers, spit on, punched, hit with rocks, or "accidentally" pushed over. I was just whispered about (there were rumors that I was on drugs, or that I was part of a cult) and shunned, so that I eventually spent my lunches working in the darkroom or on the computers because I had no one to eat lunch with. And isn't that one of the worst things? At lunch, the entire school can see whether you're cool enough to have people to eat lunch with, or whether you're like me, and you have to find an empty table if you want to sit down. If I had been ignored, that would have been one thing--I could have handled that. But it was the active dislike of the other students that upset me so much because I had never done anything to them. I was miserable and suicidal and all that. It sucked, and I still shudder when I think back--I can't believe I survived it, and it took me several years to work through all the shit--but now I'm happy and I'm doing well.
But here's my point. When girls get shunned, it's not physical, just psychological, so our responses are all psychological. When guys are shunned, the torture takes a very physical form, and the logical thing to do is respond in kind. So, quite frankly, it only makes sense that if outcast kids have access to guns, that's how they're going to respond (obviously they wouldn't have much luck with only their fists).
I don't think any of us/.ers are very shocked that this happened. The people who are shocked are the people who *did* the teasing when they were in high school, and they can't possibly imagine that something THEY DID could have this result. G*d forbid they take the blame. I've heard some of the self-proclaimed Littleton jocks saying "Of course we made fun of them--they asked for it dressing and acting like that. If they don't want to be teased, they should be like everyone else"... and therein lies the problem.
To any high school students out there, stick with your individuality, because it will get you much further in life than whatever the popular people have going for them right now. Also, college is much better: you're actually *rewarded* for being smart and different.
The first thing I thought of when I heard about the shootings was, 'Someone finally went after the jocks.' I know it's bad, I know it's definitely not PC, and I'm not saying the shootings were right because they weren't, but the jocks and their female equivalents were, without a doubt, the worst part of high school. And after hearing the responses of self-proclaimed Columbine HS jocks, my knee-jerk response was confirmed. No *wonder* the two kids went after them. Christ. I'd be tempted to too.
Of course, the difference is I never did, but I think that the people who don't take their anger out on others end up taking it out on themselves, and why should that be any more acceptable? Why don't we get this sort of media coverage each time a depressed student kills him- or herself?
Not that the media coverage helps things. When you're a depressed teenager, you don't want to think about living any longer--you *can't* imagine living any longer. And so the best route seems to be going out in a blaze of glory, either by killing yourself (THEN your family will be sorry they didn't realized something was wrong) or by shooting everyone who made you miserable. And if you *really* want a blaze of glory, killing other people seems the way to go, because look how much attention these other teenage murderers got.
The media coverage tends to be very inflammatory, picking up on the little things and ignoring the bigger problems... just like the politicians do. And that leads the people in charge--parents and school administrators and the like--to make "easy fixes" that, in the end, usually fuck things up even more. If you tell the disenfranchised kids that they can't wear black coats any more, then you've taken away a means of expressing themselves (and of at least fitting in with one little group). If you tell them they can't listen to certain types of music, or they can't play certain computer games or use the internet, then you've taken away other outlets of expressing individuality. If you threaten to read a teenager's diary or whatever else to find out whether they're homicidal, then you've taken away the final outlet. And then how do we expect students to express themselves, their pain? The only way left is through drastic physical action--killing themselves or someone else. But the people in charge pick on these things because they are easy to control and fix. So they shouldn't be shocked when, after ignoring the major problems and removing means to express individuality, these sorts of killings only become more common.
Slashdot Mirror
Mount Sinai/NYU in NYC has had this policy for years. I was a graduate student there and it bothered me to no end that I had to have my bag searched just to go to classes.
I haven't been at NIH in several years, but I remember that, although IDs were issued, there was usually no one to check them. At Mt Sinai you had to get finger-printed and drug tested just to be *admitted* to the graduate school, and you weren't allowed in the research buildings if you didn't have your ID out and visible.
---
... we're talking 2.5 days after fertilization. In fact, if you're married and "trying" for a baby, you've probably lost a whole bunch. Does that mean you're a murderer, because these clumps of cells died during your quest to produce an heir?
... they're basically rotting where they are. And thanks to Bush's decision, they will continue rotting.
"You are welcome to your belief that 4-5 cells do not constitue life, however, I'm sure you will feel different if you find your set to have a child and then it's lost during gestation. Those 4 or 5 cells become as real as any person and the loss felt is terrible. I pray your family never has to deal with that. "
---
You wouldn't KNOW if you lost a 4-5 cells embryo
Not only is a 4-5 day embryo not a real human (it has, if it's lucky, a 25% percent chance of reaching the parturition stage), but every single person who uses artificial fertility techniques wastes 20-odd embryos *each cycle*. Are you also up for baning fertility treatments?
I'm sure everyone remembers that ass who stood up in front of the Senate and asked which one of his two former-adopted-embryos-now-children should be killed. Well, he overlooked the fact that he and his wife originally adopted THREE embryos. One of those embryos is no longer "alive." I'd argue that this is far more immoral than stem cell research (which I wholeheatedly support), because the cells harvested for research at least have the potential to help millions of living, breathing, productive people. The millions of embryos hanging out in fertility centers' liquid nitrogen tanks aren't going to do anyone any good
First, what was mapped was the genome, not the genes. If you use a book as a metaphor, what Celera and the HGP did by sequencing the genome was put all the individual letters in order. Identifying the actual genes (the stretches of the genome that code for proteins) is like putting in punctuation ... right now we have very little idea where the periods and commas and paragraphs are. However, based on our understanding of genetics, computer models have been developed to guess where the punctuation should go, thus leading to the estimate of the number of genes. And it *does* appear that humans have only ~30,000 genes ... the difference between us and, say, a fruit fly, is that our genes can be spliced in a number of ways, so that each individual gene can, on average, produce 3 or more different proteins. So while we don't have many more actual genes than a nematode (worm), we make 3x more proteins, which are the actual workhorses of the body.
... these individual differences may or may not mean anything to the proteins produced. Their work doesn't nullify the significance of Celera and the HGP's work, which was meant to define the norm. The availability of sequenced and annotated mouse and human genomes is an incredible boon to almost every scientist, reducing what used to be years of bench work to an afternoon sitting in front of a computer screen. Genaissance's work, on the other hand, is of more limited use, and is mainly aimed at those who design human drugs.
Genaissance's work looks at individual differences in the letters of genes
I have serious trouble believing that journals are struggling for money. Publishers pay /only/ for the direct print-onto-paper process: peer reviewers aren't paid (it's a privilege for the reviewers) and scientists are charged for having their articles printed (some journals charge per page, some just charge for color figures). For example, the most recent paper my lab published cost $10,000 for figures and reprints. Journals are getting paid by both the contributors and the subscribers (and subscriptions can be several hundred or thousand dollars a year) ... how EXACTLY are they managing to lose money during this process?
I think the idea of a free public archive is a great one, but the boycott suggested won't work simply because the majority of scientists can't afford to snub the best journals. Except for a few Nobel winners, scientists depend on publishing (the old publish-or-perish adage is very true) for grant money and job promotions, and even scientists who are already tenurred need to publish in order to hang on to their lab space.
Sign the petition at http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org.
They're hoping to develop a comprehensive, free online database of scientific articles.
Remember the story about how Palm's Graffiti was making people forget how to write regularly? This is the same sort of spoof. People have had datebooks and address books for /years/; PDAs are merely electronic versions of these.
And if you need any more proof, there's the well-known "Flynn effect", which refers to the fact that IQ scores have risen significantly over the past century (mostly, but not entirely, explained by better nutrition and medical care).
when I accessed the cnet story, avenuea.com tried to place a cookie.
The problem with Zip drives is that they inevitably go south, and usually when you need them most. In the last year I've had five drives get the click of death, and each one took a zip disk full of info with it.
As for CDRWs, 1) the drives are expensive, and 2) it takes too damn long to copy things onto them. Floppies are still the most attractive for quick-and-dirty file transport, as in moving a paper from one computer to another. Unfortunately, most floppy disks are crap, and now a certain computer manufacturer is making their computers sans floppy drives.
So there is a real need for something floppy-like. Personally, if I'm transferring something from a home computer to a work computer, I use email. But this clearly isn't an option for students who need to move material to a university computer lab.
Ideally, college has very little to do with being trained for a job. Rather, it's the way society passes on to you, as an individual, what society as a collective has learned from the past. When you begin college you're on the brink of adulthood (in the psychological, not legal, sense), and so are the other thousand-or-so people you'll be spending the next four years with. You 've been shaped by your parents and peers and experiences, but you're still maleable. The purpose of a university education is to expose you to complex philosophical, historical, and psychological issues that will shape the way you approach every subsequent experience. You read Lao Tzu to learn alternate ways of viewing the world; you study the memoirs of Auschwitz survivors in order to prevent history from repeating; you take a genetics course so that you can make an intelligent contribution to how your country approaches the advances offered by the biotech industry. You don't go there to learn C++.
A hot job market is nothing to be spit at, but there's no substitute for what college offers to the 18-year-old. Some people clearly feel that it's a waste of four years--four years during which they could be working and making money and getting on with their lives--but the truth is that if you have the opportunity to go to college and live in a dorm and eat crappy dining hall food and write papers on arcane subjects, you have to be pretty stupid not to jump at it, because you're never going to have a chance like that again (whereas you have the next 50 years to work). You can always choose to do college later in life, but when you have a family, when you're 15 or 20 years older than all the other students, when you're also working full-time, and when your personality is set in stone, the experience isn't the same.
On a more general note, I fear for the country that doesn't urge its young to get a liberal arts education, because that country will have to reinvent the wheel with each generation. Culture with a capital "C" sets us apart from all other species--it offers the collected wisdom of hundreds of generations, rather than the knowledge of only the living--and universities are the best mechanism for passing this wisdom on to a new generation. Without people who have learned from the mistakes and triumphs of previous generations, we're really no better than a school of goldfish swimming round and round in a really big pond.
Older biology research buildings (at both the NIH campus and at research universities) have rooms with one or two lab benches. Researchers have 1 or more rooms along a hallway, according to their status. Usually there are 3-4 technicians/students per room, and if they're lucky, each has a desk with a computer. This is an ok setup, but tends to be isolating.
More recently, people discovered that if you stick several research teams in one gigantic space, it encourages collaboration. Newer buildings are built with gigantic (hallway-length) rooms with 10-15 lab benches, and 1-3 researchers, with all their associated technicians and students, share the space (each researcher has their own benches).
Having worked in both situations, the new collaboration-friendly spaces are MUCH better. It's a bit noisier--there are generally multiple radios playing--but it really does what it's supposed to. It makes it much easier to share information, learn new techniques, or borrow reagents when you run out. It also tends to be more fun when you're working, unless you're trying to get some serious writing done (there are smaller rooms for that).
I would guess that the computer-world situation is similar: when you have many people working on separate-but-similar projects, it improves productivity and creativity to stick them in a large space that encourages them to work together. And when you have people who need to do very focused work (like hard-core coding), you need to provide smaller quiet retreat spaces.
Instead of paying individuals, why not reduce the price of any resulting drugs? People have already shown that they're willing to donate unused CPU time for free as long as the goal is an interesting one (seti@home, etc.) ... why not use this willingness to reduce the price of any drugs the public helps to develop? Not that I would mind someone paying me for computing power, but I think individual payments should be reserved for less noble goals, particularly when you're talking about something like cancer treatments (hair loss drugs might be another matter).
I realize this is now thoroughly off-topic, but I'll say it anyway. I've now read several posts under this article that basically say 'I hope [Bush/Gore] doesn't get elected because the country will fail and the world will explode and life as we know it will end, so I'm going to vote third-party even though I realize that they won't win.'
/really/ don't like will win because you just threw away your vote. If you're going to protest the main parties, do it in a way that won't deprive you of the chance to vote for the president (i.e. before and during the primaries). And if you think that one vote among so many doesn't matter, consider this story: The 18,000-person town I grew up in had a vote about whether the elementary school should be given more money to build desperately-needed classrooms, and my mother was very busy that day and forgot about the town meeting. The side she supported lost by one vote.
YOU IDIOTS.
Yes, one way to protest the main party candidates is to vote third-party. But it's also a really good way to ensure that the party you
parasol records has a bunch of indie band cds for about $10US. sarge is my favorite group on their distribution list (i think they record on mud records, but parasol does the distribution).
Clearly, both the private sector and the government have decided that network and keystroke monitering is necessary and legal. What about at academic institutions? Universities have traditionally been bastions of freedom, so I wonder how this trend toward privacy invasion is playing out in academia. Can someone in a university IT department shed some light on this?
Take, for example, the biomedical sciences. Ten years ago, maybe it still made sense to have people memorize everything. Things were still manageable then. But now--particularly with the near completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and the unimaginable amount of information we'll cull from this--there's simply too much to memorize. Having the [insert your field's arcane facts here] available won't make things easier; what it will do is require a deeper level of understanding from students.
This work was done, and published, by Dr. Carter Bancroft at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The girl may have worked in his lab, but the work is his. When the media covers contests like this, they make it seem as if the kids are the ones who thought up all these fantastic ideas. Really, the kids are nothing more than lab technicians (I know, because a Westinghouse student was in my thesis lab)--they do some work, but no actual thinking. It's good that they have a chance to pursue their interest in science, but what they do shouldn't be mistaken for genius.
Potential geek chicks may, during their school years, gravitate toward fields where they see other women working. At this point, these are fields like the sciences, which are pretty good outlets for people who are geeks at heart. Science (biology, physics, etc) allows for exploration and encourages obsession, and is also approaching gender ratio equality (if not actual gender equality). Graduate schools, at least in the biological sciences, currently have more female than male students.
Many people choose their career by identifying early on an adult who they can picture themselves being in 15 or 20 years. Boys can find plenty of male mentors in the tech field, but there just aren't many women in technology for girls to look up to (as opposed to the sciences). So if our goal is to increase the number of geek chicks, women in the tech fields have to be very active as mentors for girls.
The second objection I have to this is much stronger. Basic scientific research can only evolve if it occurs in an open source environment, where discoveries are shared almost as soon as they are made. This happens necessarily in university environments, and is the primary reason for the research conferences that scientists are always running around to attend. We publish, we share data, we examine each other's grants, and we share reagents. Our work is validated when--and only when--someone else replicates it. Lewis Thomas made a very powerful argument for this in one of his arguments: we can only evolve if we share with each other. Although I'm not a CS person, my feeling is that open source software operates the same way.
In the field of life sciences--which is really a very young science--the sequencing of the human genome is a giant step, and will represent a gigantic change in every subset of the field. But here comes Ventner's company, announcing that they plan to finish the sequence before the NIH group (and what
I have no problem with someone patenting a novel process, like PCR, because that's the way biotech needs to work, and that's how patents were meant to be used. But with
i don't know why my school was so good (although the town was a relatively wealthy one), and i also don't know why so many schools are so bad. but the fact that there are some schools that get it right gives me hope that, eventually, they all will. the key is to (1) identify what works, and (2) convince people that it's worth paying for.
"Anyway, how accurate are they with this gene manipulation. I would also imagine that intelligence, like skin colour isn't specific to one gene but of several genes. This would increase the possibilty for error. Its no longer a slip of the knife but now a drug which isn't as well targeted. "
Whenever you do a genetic manipulation, what you have to remember is that your aim is to effect eventual protein production. And what makes this study really interesting is that Tsien was able to effect memory by altering one SUBUNIT of the NMDA receptor. And NR2B isn't even the main subunit: the NR is made up of NR1 (mandatory), and one other subunit (NR2B or other choices). So it's pretty neat that you can get a cognitive effect through this one little change.
Frankly, I think my life is already motivated by a fear of boredom.
In the past few days I've been trying to figure out what got me through high school. It was the teachers. If every troubled student could find one teacher to respect them, to listen to them, to say "hi" to them each day, I think we'd lose fewer students.
The premise is that if you have someone who respects you, you're going to begin respecting yourself. And if you respect both yourself and your teacher, you develop a sense of responsibility, and you're not as willing to use your life as a bargaining chip--you value yourself, and you don't want to let the people who value you down.
This doesn't take the responsibility off parents, because parents are still *the* crucial element, but--let's face it--the hallmark of the teenage years is conflict with parents. Sometimes you need the attention of someone who isn't as intimately involved as parents are, and the people in the best position are generally teachers.
I would never go back to visit my high school classmates, but four years after leaving my high school I still visit the teachers who meant the most to me. They talked to me every day, challenged me when I needed it, and, when I was really in trouble, 4 separate people called my parents. And even though that was embarrassing, it means a lot to someone as lonely as I was to be noticed by the people who I respected.
That's what got me through, and I hope that students in trouble can seek out a teacher that they respect--most of the good teachers will do almost anything for their students. I know those teachers are out there, and they're not only in private schools. My entire experience was in public schools.
It's interesting hearing the guy perspective on this, and I think it explains why the people shooting their classmates are guys (although the future could prove me wrong). As an outcast girl, I was never slammed against lockers, spit on, punched, hit with rocks, or "accidentally" pushed over. I was just whispered about (there were rumors that I was on drugs, or that I was part of a cult) and shunned, so that I eventually spent my lunches working in the darkroom or on the computers because I had no one to eat lunch with. And isn't that one of the worst things? At lunch, the entire school can see whether you're cool enough to have people to eat lunch with, or whether you're like me, and you have to find an empty table if you want to sit down. If I had been ignored, that would have been one thing--I could have handled that. But it was the active dislike of the other students that upset me so much because I had never done anything to them. I was miserable and suicidal and all that. It sucked, and I still shudder when I think back--I can't believe I survived it, and it took me several years to work through all the shit--but now I'm happy and I'm doing well.
/.ers are very shocked that this happened. The people who are shocked are the people who *did* the teasing when they were in high school, and they can't possibly imagine that something THEY DID could have this result. G*d forbid they take the blame. I've heard some of the self-proclaimed Littleton jocks saying "Of course we made fun of them--they asked for it dressing and acting like that. If they don't want to be teased, they should be like everyone else" ... and therein lies the problem.
But here's my point. When girls get shunned, it's not physical, just psychological, so our responses are all psychological. When guys are shunned, the torture takes a very physical form, and the logical thing to do is respond in kind. So, quite frankly, it only makes sense that if outcast kids have access to guns, that's how they're going to respond (obviously they wouldn't have much luck with only their fists).
I don't think any of us
To any high school students out there, stick with your individuality, because it will get you much further in life than whatever the popular people have going for them right now. Also, college is much better: you're actually *rewarded* for being smart and different.
The first thing I thought of when I heard about the shootings was, 'Someone finally went after the jocks.' I know it's bad, I know it's definitely not PC, and I'm not saying the shootings were right because they weren't, but the jocks and their female equivalents were, without a doubt, the worst part of high school. And after hearing the responses of self-proclaimed Columbine HS jocks, my knee-jerk response was confirmed. No *wonder* the two kids went after them. Christ. I'd be tempted to too.
... just like the politicians do. And that leads the people in charge--parents and school administrators and the like--to make "easy fixes" that, in the end, usually fuck things up even more. If you tell the disenfranchised kids that they can't wear black coats any more, then you've taken away a means of expressing themselves (and of at least fitting in with one little group). If you tell them they can't listen to certain types of music, or they can't play certain computer games or use the internet, then you've taken away other outlets of expressing individuality. If you threaten to read a teenager's diary or whatever else to find out whether they're homicidal, then you've taken away the final outlet. And then how do we expect students to express themselves, their pain? The only way left is through drastic physical action--killing themselves or someone else. But the people in charge pick on these things because they are easy to control and fix. So they shouldn't be shocked when, after ignoring the major problems and removing means to express individuality, these sorts of killings only become more common.
Of course, the difference is I never did, but I think that the people who don't take their anger out on others end up taking it out on themselves, and why should that be any more acceptable? Why don't we get this sort of media coverage each time a depressed student kills him- or herself?
Not that the media coverage helps things. When you're a depressed teenager, you don't want to think about living any longer--you *can't* imagine living any longer. And so the best route seems to be going out in a blaze of glory, either by killing yourself (THEN your family will be sorry they didn't realized something was wrong) or by shooting everyone who made you miserable. And if you *really* want a blaze of glory, killing other people seems the way to go, because look how much attention these other teenage murderers got.
The media coverage tends to be very inflammatory, picking up on the little things and ignoring the bigger problems