Sheila Kaplan has been on this since federal child provacy laws were relaxed to permit it in 2011. She launched Education New York's National Opt-out Campaign to alert parents to their rights under FERPA to restrict third-party access to their children's information and encourage them to review their school's annual FERPA notification at the beginning of the school year. Here's her website: http://www.educationnewyork.com/about.html
Stripped of the invective, AC is 100% correct - did you actually READ any of the articles above?
In either story?
The fact that the Gates Foundation can do more-or-less whatever it wants (Karl Rove is an even more egregious example) and deduct that from their taxes is a minor problem. The real problem is that they're using their combination of leveraged money and free P.R. from fools like you to take over vast quantities of [b]our tax dollars[/b] and redirect that money into their coffers and the coffers of their allies like Pearson Education, Murdoch, etc.
This is cool, but as I read it here (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it's no substitute for doing a real experiment. I'm going to launch into a long explanatory diatribe - models like this one can be VERY useful for hypothesis generation, or to try and understand seemingly disconnected results that (very often) arise in a biological experiment. They are especially useful when you have some hypothesis/theory of how a complex system is governed and you need to generate some prediction which you can experimentally test based on your theory.
But not a substitute for the real experiment, no way no how. Why? Because living things aren't designed, and they don't respect your modularity, abstract data typing, etc. etc.
For example, suppose your bacterium starts making some huge amount of a membrane protein (a common thing you do in the lab, for reasons outside the scope of this example). What's going to happen?
Well, that protein is going to try and fold up in the membrane, but as you make more and more of it, the protein is going to fail to get there. Other proteins destined for the membrane are going to experience the same problem. Are you going to update every single module that contains something membrane bound, to reflect this? As they accumulate in the membrane, the membrane curvature is going to change, and this in turn is going to change the relative concentrations of various lipids on each leaf of the membrane, which alters the chemistry of everything that interacts with the membrane in any way (a whole bunch more modules.)
Even if you have those effects covered, they're going to have indirect (and non-linear) effects on the concentration of various ions in the cytosol (all of which, just for starters, interact with the inner membrane with different affinities), the excess protein is going to start accumulating in inclusion bodies which are going to start taking up physical space inside the cell. These two changes alter the likelihood of interaction and the energy of interaction of every single other thing going on in the cell (!). So good luck with that.
That's just one example. The same thing would happen if you sheared the DNA, or heat shocked the cell, or put the cell in an environment of rapidly changing nutrient concentrations. To put all that in CS terms - the actual cell isn't object oriented, there's all sorts of cross-talk between the different components (because they're physical objects in a little tiny soap bubble, they're bumping into each other) and no abstraction layer or anything of that kind.
To be quite honest, I am of the opinion that a living cell is an irreducible system, and the only way you'd get a real substitute for experiments on actual cells would be JUST MAYBE if you ran a molecular dynamics simulation on all 10^14 or so atoms; and if you did so with a much better physics engine than we have now.
There are a lot of reasons to be physically present at a "brick and mortar" university with an instsructor in the room with you.
To the extent that universities want to break from this model, it isn't about education at all. It isn't even about making an education cheaper; it's about extracting money from suckers.
So, good for Khan Academy for doing what they're doing and giving it away for free. All the bottom feeders (including Bill Gates) who want to charge money for this stuff have nothing useful to offer and are just trying to game the system in one or another way for a buck.
The pressure to do this is NOT coming from the federal government, it's coming from the companies that sell the cloud services!
So instead of having the federal government just maintain an emergency backup infrastructure itself, these private companies (Amazon etc.) WANT the federal government to buy electronic services from them! And the feds come back and say, "well, in order to make that workable we'd need guaranteed access in an emergency and bleah-de-bleah." Privatization of emergency services is an unmitigated disaster and we just shouldn't do it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/30/comment.hurricanekatrina
The obvious solution is: How about No? But it's the federal government that needs to say that to the cloud-computing vendors, not the other way around!
You're accusing her of doing a hatchet job, but you're clearly not reading any of the links, which discuss the details of the partnerships extensively.
Your accusation - that she has a "conspiracy theory" *is* a hatchet job. What makes it a conspiracy theory? None of this is particularly secret; these people don't all have to be in the room at once, plotting. The accusation is that the Gates foundation's supposed charity does significant harm, based on an ideological commitment to corporatism, and she's assembled scads of material to document that assertion.
If you can't see anything but paranoia, that's something that you're reading into it, not a criticism of the substance; which, again, you appear not to have even read.
The way that the trust is organized doesn't protect from conflict of interest; and that's a concern. But the real issue is the awful things they enduce other charitable actors to do with other-people's-money.
No, that's not what it says; in fact, that is the OPPOSITE of what it says.
STAKEHOLDERS (not Shareholders) is occupy-wallstreet-speak for the people who have some vested interest in the outcome - employees, customers, people in malaria-infested countries, doctors, etc.
Third world DOCTORS - the recipients of Bill's so-called generosity - are the ones complaining.
In fact, no, that is not it either. Plenty of money is going to corrupt African dictatorships.
But money is being directed AWAY from public health infrastructure, and the people who are complaining about it (I know: too much to ask for you to read the article) are doctors and public health workers in the African countries.
A couple of people have raised this issue, and it relies on a fundamental mis-understanding of how the universe works on a molecular scale.
Suppose that I have my colander and I wash some vegetables in it. Gunk can get stuck in the holes and it has to be washed off, which requires a fair amount of work because I have to break the interaction between the gunk and the surface. That's your macroscopic intuition about how filters and such work.
But your macroscopic intuition will lead you astray in this case. The individual holes in graphene do not work that way; yes, occasionally, molecules of one kind or another will spend some time stuck to the graphene (a useful phenomenon in other circumstances - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_liquid_chromatography) but, on the scale of atoms, they are effectively in a high-powered washing machine ALL THE TIME.
So you see those oil bubbles wiggling around? Given that amount of constant wiggle, are you worried about having them "stuck" anywhere? That's thermal vibration from being at room temperature. Those milk bubbles are over 1,000 water molecules across, so each of those "wiggles" is 10 or 100 times the size of an individual graphene pore; are you worried about anything another 1000x smaller being "stuck" anywhere? It would be like worrying about gunk stuck in your colander while your colander was sitting in a fire-hose 24/7.
Anyway- to cut to the chase: obviously you could have you take the graphene and you run the sea water *past* it at high pressure. Occasionally some gunk gets in there but it washes away sooner or later; and nothing spends any appreciable amount of time stuck in an individual graphene hole.
In the 1990s, there was still demand for biology PhDs in the private sector, which has significantly dried up since. It's not GONE, but it's greatly reduced. That's why the emergency-of-people-whining (because couldn't get professorships, had to work in industry) is now an emergency-of-people-in-serious-trouble (because can't get JOBS AT ALL.) For the balance, I'll be using the terms Pharma, Biotech and Industry interchangeably - they're not exactly the same thing but the basic argument applies whether the company is making drugs or medical devices or developing new diagnostic biomarkers or whatever they do employing PhDs in the life sciences.
On top of this, the research that the biotech companies are doing is mostly me-too research which doesn't benefit the public. In spite of this, industry is continuing to milk the public of their subsidy from patent protection on products that were ~50% developed at public expense anyway. The solution to this is a fairly simple reallocation: * End patent protections for medical technologies. Because of capitalism, and markets, and other realities which sensible people accept, this will drive prices through the floor. * Take the savings to the rest of the economy, and raise people's taxes (should be balance-sheet-neutral on average for the general population) * Give the extra tax revenue to the NIH, and expand the NIH mission to include drug development, medical device development, etc. as needed to bring such to market.
To be blunt, I do not respect the opinion of people who defend drug patents at this point, especially since such people are generally ideologically committed (as opposed to persuaded on relative merits, no the same thing), to "capitalism". The commitment of "capitalists" to intellectual property protection (instead of market competition) shows them to be craven, deceptive and fraudulent: they're really committed to oligarchy and to the preservation of privilege, not to the market as an instrument of efficient allocation of economic resources. Such people are deeply shameful and depraved - they are not worthy of respect out of any need to promote ideological balance.
Now a days, with drug expenditures being a larger share of GNP, and pharmaceutical R&D being a smaller share of GNP, the cost:benefit relationship is even more drastic. To put it another way - biotechnology patents, generally speaking, do not meet the constitutional test of being beneficial to the public or of promoting the useful arts. So they should be done away with, and the public sector (which is far more efficient at funding scientific research than the private sector, due primarily to the better information available to the people making decisions) should simply assume that function, producing a significant cost savings for the general public as well as accelerating the pace of research and finding useful employment for our best and brightest.
Nobel prizes aren't grants, they don't fund projects. The prize is cash money you get to keep yourself; although I think most people donate it to charity. Unfortunately, google is swamped with discussion of what Obama did with his, but Smoot donated his(http://phys.org/news93885786.html), which I understand to be typical.
I accidentally posted this anonymously farther down, but in fact Bill Gates has done tremendous harm with his so-called "philanthropy"; his real contribution is "leveraged philanthropy", where you use philanthropic donations to control something so that you make more money. This is true with his vaccine so-called "charity" - which forces poor nations to spend money from other sources on expensive foreign vaccines, rather than on development of local vaccine manufacturing or of general public health infrastructure, and thus actually degrades the quality of 3rd world health care while making Bill Gates his "charitable" money back and then some. This is true of his education so-called "charity" - which forces poor school districts to spend money from other sources on high-tech gadgets and expensive consulting services, which are sold by Bill Gates' various partners, but which are actually worse than no services at all.
The Gates' foundation has announced a partnership with Pearson (for profit-education company) to develop and market materials aligned to the common core. These are the materials that your school district must agree to purchase (this particular test cost $32 million state wide) in order to qualify for Race to the Top. http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-19/news/31369375_1_answer-silly-question-pineapple
So, Bill Gates is using a small amount of his "charitable" money to force public money in much larger amounts, to be wasted on this crap.
Truth1: Chemistry reporting is as bad as all other science reporting. Truth2: The Chemical industry is as unconcerned with "externalities" as any other business.
Reporters will get you to panic even if they don't have a good reason; the reason that reporters are capable of spreading panic easily is because chemical manufacturers will poison you in order to make a buck. So, from a certain standpoint, the response of the general public is rational - they don't trust the chemical industry, and they shouldn't, so why not err on the side of caution when dealing with certified professional liars (marketing, PR and advertising people). Particulates are bad for you; the chemical industry (and domestic manufacturing generally) denies this, but they're lying. Vaccines are not harmful; but they are a big emerging profit center for pharma. If vaccines were harmful (again, they aren't), would pharma lie about it? Damn straight they'd lie through their teeth. So it becomes a double problem - it's difficult to educate the public about what is safe (vaccines are safe), and at the same time it's difficult to get robust action on what isn't safe (airborne particulates are not safe; neither are most chlorinated organics, heavy metals, etc.)
The military-industrial complex would much prefer to operate with no oversight at all.
We have a perverse system where such oversight is acceptable only if it does not compromise security (rather than the other way around.)
So by screwing this up on purpose, the military can plead security concerns and never publish anything at all, because any public oversight whatsoever will be too risky.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence? Well, malice exists, even though incompetence is so powerful it can explain anything.
China's solar companies are doing well because they get *tremendous* subsidies, as is always the case for nascent, high tech industry.
if it weren't for massive government subsidies - paying for R&D costs directly, and providing a huge protected market mainly through the defense department - then the computer revolution which drove the 1990s boom WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.
All you free market fantasists need to get that into your thick skulls - or, you could go love on Ayn Rand's island! Please do, so that we can run our country like sane people. In 10 years, when solar power is viable, it will be the Chinese who are reaping the benefits because free market fanatics in the US aren't willing to make the basic investments required.
However, I wouldn't discount the possibility of a prosecutor doing" the wrong thing, institutionally". The kind of places with an excess of bored civil rights attorneys also have an excess of activist/liberal DAs. So if the Oberlin DA gets such a case he, ight push it just to lose.
I exaggerate very slightly; a slight majority of all new wealth is in the hands of the top 1% of the population. The top 0.1% probably only has about half of that, so a quarter of the newly created wealth. Anyway, the details vary slightly from source to source because it depends on whether you are talking net wealth, financial wealth, income, etc. etc. Also it depends on who you lump together, which is a judgement call. It gets "worse" the closer you get to Bill.
More information than you probably care to know about the topic can be found here: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Let's look at table 5a. End of 2001, the S&P500 was at 1,148.08. End of 2007, it was at 1,468.36. The S&P 500 isn't a bad proxy for the total value of the entire stock market.
So, quick guestimate, 2001->2007, richest 1% went from 33.5% OF 1,148 to 38.3% of 1,468, that's 385 to 562 -> a gain of 178. That's more than half of the total 320 point gain.
So, counting just the stock market (thus not housing bubbles), roughly 55% of the new wealth created between 2001 and 2007 was in the hands of the top 1% of the population.
No, it has been between Rich and Poor, although the Poor are getting stomped, as much as the Rich might want us all to believe otherwise. If you look at the last 20 years, the vast majority if the *new wealth* which has been created has been concentrated in the hands of the top 0.1% of the population. That's where all the money has gone, not towards social security, not towards Cadillac health insurance for people with jobs in manufacturing. Where is the money to provide pensions and health-care to the share of the population who doesn't have it? It's sitting in Bill f-ing Gates bank account, that's where it is.
There's a plate with 12 cookies on it, a rich guy, a teacher and a regular working Joe.
The rich guy takes 11 of the cookies, leans over to Joe, and says "I'd watch out, I think the teacher is trying to steal your cookie."
But first, let me get this out of the way: it is absolutely true that most people want CS degrees in order to get jobs that you could do equally well with a 2 year associate's degree in Information Technology, and even better with a high school diploma and a bunch of experience.
HOWEVER, the students are probably better off on the job market with 4 year CS degrees. Looking at things from the perspective of a potential employer, there are two reasons the CS degree has a leg up: 1) All else being equal, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor">the student capable of learning Calculus is probably more competent at everything else as well<a>. It's far from a guarantee, but on average, this will be true. The CS degree is valuable precisely <b>because</b> many people can't do calculus. 2) The 4 year CS graduate is, on average, from a more privileged background, or, if they're not from a privileged background, they've got an honorary promotion into the privileged class and 4 years in College will teach you how children of privilege (or, "entitled little shits" as we are popularly known) are supposed to behave. The people doing the hiring are, almost without exception, entitled little shits themselves who would rather hire their own kind. More sophisticated types will dress this up as item #1 above.
You see a very similar dichotomy in medical school admissions, with regards to organic chemistry. In theory, there are a number of situations in which an MD might benefit from knowing ochem, but realistically, it isn't going to come up. Furthermore, ochem is taught as if all of the undergrad biochemistry majors were going to move on to careers in basic research. That said, would the colleges be doing their students a service in dumbing down their ochem curriculum? No, they would not, because the medical schools want students who can pass ochem, for basically the same reason.
Medical Schools are in a position to be very selective in their admissions. Therefore, they can require (and they do) those students who can pass the ochem courses which are designed to prepare a student for a career in original basic research. This means that ochem is a hoop-to-jump-through for most of the students who would take it. This doesn't mean <b>any</b> of the students would be better served by dumbing it down! If you did, the medical schools would demand upper division molecular biology, which would then fill up with premed students, who don't need the subject material and are just looking for the certification that they are elite; this is happening to some extent already.
Likewise, really good programming jobs are scarce, so employers are in a position to demand candidates who <b>can</b> do calculus even for jobs that don't need it. Associates degrees (and more) in Information Technology and variants thereof already exist. But people with professional aspirations get CS degrees instead precisely <b>because</b> they are more exclusive and difficult. If you dumb down the CS curricula (or if community colleges start offering CS degrees), employers start to demand master's degrees; this is happening to some extent already.
1) Donate $1 million to the "Me Foundation". 2) The "Me Foundation" gets another $1 million in matching federal money to do their good work (education, medicine for the poor, whatever) 3) Given a near-total lack of oversight, the "Me Foundation" spends this $2 million on bullshit services provided by their for-profit vendor, "Me Incorporated LLC." 4) "Me Incorporated LLC" only spend about $200,000 to provide these bullshit services. 5) $800,000 of profit, on "leveraged philanthropy."
Gates and Buffett are profiteering scum, and their so-called philanthropy is a travesty. Their educational initiatives are an outright scam (as outlined above), and even their much-ballyhooed HIV work is a travesty, which diverts - sorry, "leverages" - public money away from cheap and effective interventions.
In fact, this appears to be a biochemically-interesting but seriously overhyped discovery.
AFAICT, this organism still uses the same genetic code, the same nucleotide bases, the same ribose sugars, the same everything - only this organism performs a chemical modification of the phosphate backbone, substituting in arsenic. This is only moderately different from the chemical modifications that we make to our own DNA, RNA and proteins (methylation, for example.)
That's not a particularly shocking substitution, from a chemical standpoint, and doesn't really say anything about the viability of an organism with an actually *alien* biochemistry. Now, if you look at the periodic table, you'll see that Arsenic is right below Phosphorous - so in a sense, this is a bit like the much more exciting Carbon -> Silicon change which might get you talking rocks on lava worlds breathing vaporized sand and other badass shit. But it's only a tiny bit similar to that, because the role that Phosphorous plays in biology is much different than that of Carbon. Carbon is what everything is made-out-of, Phosphorous is stuck onto the ends of things in order to provide high-energy bonds which can be exploited as an energy currency.
I would bet that this organism does this as a defense against viruses - which, generally speaking, will not have arsenic-DNA or arsenic-RNA, and so would not be able to infect this organism.
A minor point of clarification - while you are right on the science, you are wrong on the terminology.
A mutation that doesn't change the resultant amino acid is called a "synonymous" mutation (sometimes also "silent" although that is archaic deprecated terminology.)
A mutation that changes the amino acid is "non-synonymous".
These considerations apply only to the coding regions of genes.
Slashdot Mirror
You thought wrong:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/05/the_outrage_of_the_week.html
Sheila Kaplan has been on this since federal child provacy laws were relaxed to permit it in 2011. She launched Education New York's National Opt-out Campaign to alert parents to their rights under FERPA to restrict third-party access to their children's information and encourage them to review their school's annual FERPA notification at the beginning of the
school year. Here's her website:
http://www.educationnewyork.com/about.html
and a parent information page
http://educationnewyork.com/optoutnow
Stripped of the invective, AC is 100% correct - did you actually READ any of the articles above?
In either story?
The fact that the Gates Foundation can do more-or-less whatever it wants (Karl Rove is an even more egregious example) and deduct that from their taxes is a minor problem. The real problem is that they're using their combination of leveraged money and free P.R. from fools like you to take over vast quantities of [b]our tax dollars[/b] and redirect that money into their coffers and the coffers of their allies like Pearson Education, Murdoch, etc.
This is cool, but as I read it here (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it's no substitute for doing a real experiment. I'm going to launch into a long explanatory diatribe - models like this one can be VERY useful for hypothesis generation, or to try and understand seemingly disconnected results that (very often) arise in a biological experiment. They are especially useful when you have some hypothesis/theory of how a complex system is governed and you need to generate some prediction which you can experimentally test based on your theory.
But not a substitute for the real experiment, no way no how. Why? Because living things aren't designed, and they don't respect your modularity, abstract data typing, etc. etc.
For example, suppose your bacterium starts making some huge amount of a membrane protein (a common thing you do in the lab, for reasons outside the scope of this example). What's going to happen?
Well, that protein is going to try and fold up in the membrane, but as you make more and more of it, the protein is going to fail to get there. Other proteins destined for the membrane are going to experience the same problem. Are you going to update every single module that contains something membrane bound, to reflect this? As they accumulate in the membrane, the membrane curvature is going to change, and this in turn is going to change the relative concentrations of various lipids on each leaf of the membrane, which alters the chemistry of everything that interacts with the membrane in any way (a whole bunch more modules.)
Even if you have those effects covered, they're going to have indirect (and non-linear) effects on the concentration of various ions in the cytosol (all of which, just for starters, interact with the inner membrane with different affinities), the excess protein is going to start accumulating in inclusion bodies which are going to start taking up physical space inside the cell. These two changes alter the likelihood of interaction and the energy of interaction of every single other thing going on in the cell (!). So good luck with that.
That's just one example. The same thing would happen if you sheared the DNA, or heat shocked the cell, or put the cell in an environment of rapidly changing nutrient concentrations. To put all that in CS terms - the actual cell isn't object oriented, there's all sorts of cross-talk between the different components (because they're physical objects in a little tiny soap bubble, they're bumping into each other) and no abstraction layer or anything of that kind.
To be quite honest, I am of the opinion that a living cell is an irreducible system, and the only way you'd get a real substitute for experiments on actual cells would be JUST MAYBE if you ran a molecular dynamics simulation on all 10^14 or so atoms; and if you did so with a much better physics engine than we have now.
There are a lot of reasons to be physically present at a "brick and mortar" university with an instsructor in the room with you.
To the extent that universities want to break from this model, it isn't about education at all. It isn't even about making an education cheaper; it's about extracting money from suckers.
So, good for Khan Academy for doing what they're doing and giving it away for free. All the bottom feeders (including Bill Gates) who want to charge money for this stuff have nothing useful to offer and are just trying to game the system in one or another way for a buck.
The pressure to do this is NOT coming from the federal government, it's coming from the companies that sell the cloud services!
So instead of having the federal government just maintain an emergency backup infrastructure itself, these private companies (Amazon etc.) WANT the federal government to buy electronic services from them! And the feds come back and say, "well, in order to make that workable we'd need guaranteed access in an emergency and bleah-de-bleah." Privatization of emergency services is an unmitigated disaster and we just shouldn't do it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/30/comment.hurricanekatrina
The obvious solution is: How about No? But it's the federal government that needs to say that to the cloud-computing vendors, not the other way around!
You're accusing her of doing a hatchet job, but you're clearly not reading any of the links, which discuss the details of the partnerships extensively.
Your accusation - that she has a "conspiracy theory" *is* a hatchet job. What makes it a conspiracy theory? None of this is particularly secret; these people don't all have to be in the room at once, plotting. The accusation is that the Gates foundation's supposed charity does significant harm, based on an ideological commitment to corporatism, and she's assembled scads of material to document that assertion.
If you can't see anything but paranoia, that's something that you're reading into it, not a criticism of the substance; which, again, you appear not to have even read.
The way that the trust is organized doesn't protect from conflict of interest; and that's a concern. But the real issue is the awful things they enduce other charitable actors to do with other-people's-money.
Oh, please, that's just complete bullshit.
I'm assuming you didn't actually read the article? Perhaps you read the careful research in the primary source:
http://www.ghwatch.org/sites/www.ghwatch.org/files/D3_0.pdf
Pharmaceutical companies make third world dictatorships look like Finland.
No, that's not what it says; in fact, that is the OPPOSITE of what it says.
STAKEHOLDERS (not Shareholders) is occupy-wallstreet-speak for the people who have some vested interest in the outcome - employees, customers, people in malaria-infested countries, doctors, etc.
Third world DOCTORS - the recipients of Bill's so-called generosity - are the ones complaining.
In fact, no, that is not it either. Plenty of money is going to corrupt African dictatorships.
But money is being directed AWAY from public health infrastructure, and the people who are complaining about it (I know: too much to ask for you to read the article) are doctors and public health workers in the African countries.
A couple of people have raised this issue, and it relies on a fundamental mis-understanding of how the universe works on a molecular scale.
Suppose that I have my colander and I wash some vegetables in it. Gunk can get stuck in the holes and it has to be washed off, which requires a fair amount of work because I have to break the interaction between the gunk and the surface. That's your macroscopic intuition about how filters and such work.
But your macroscopic intuition will lead you astray in this case. The individual holes in graphene do not work that way; yes, occasionally, molecules of one kind or another will spend some time stuck to the graphene (a useful phenomenon in other circumstances - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_liquid_chromatography) but, on the scale of atoms, they are effectively in a high-powered washing machine ALL THE TIME.
Can't find quite the movie I want... this'll do:
http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/brownian-motion-observed-in-milk/
So you see those oil bubbles wiggling around? Given that amount of constant wiggle, are you worried about having them "stuck" anywhere? That's thermal vibration from being at room temperature. Those milk bubbles are over 1,000 water molecules across, so each of those "wiggles" is 10 or 100 times the size of an individual graphene pore; are you worried about anything another 1000x smaller being "stuck" anywhere? It would be like worrying about gunk stuck in your colander while your colander was sitting in a fire-hose 24/7.
Anyway- to cut to the chase:
obviously you could have you take the graphene and you run the sea water *past* it at high pressure. Occasionally some gunk gets in there but it washes away sooner or later; and nothing spends any appreciable amount of time stuck in an individual graphene hole.
In the 1990s, there was still demand for biology PhDs in the private sector, which has significantly dried up since. It's not GONE, but it's greatly reduced. That's why the emergency-of-people-whining (because couldn't get professorships, had to work in industry) is now an emergency-of-people-in-serious-trouble (because can't get JOBS AT ALL.) For the balance, I'll be using the terms Pharma, Biotech and Industry interchangeably - they're not exactly the same thing but the basic argument applies whether the company is making drugs or medical devices or developing new diagnostic biomarkers or whatever they do employing PhDs in the life sciences.
On top of this, the research that the biotech companies are doing is mostly me-too research which doesn't benefit the public. In spite of this, industry is continuing to milk the public of their subsidy from patent protection on products that were ~50% developed at public expense anyway. The solution to this is a fairly simple reallocation:
* End patent protections for medical technologies. Because of capitalism, and markets, and other realities which sensible people accept, this will drive prices through the floor.
* Take the savings to the rest of the economy, and raise people's taxes (should be balance-sheet-neutral on average for the general population)
* Give the extra tax revenue to the NIH, and expand the NIH mission to include drug development, medical device development, etc. as needed to bring such to market.
To be blunt, I do not respect the opinion of people who defend drug patents at this point, especially since such people are generally ideologically committed (as opposed to persuaded on relative merits, no the same thing), to "capitalism". The commitment of "capitalists" to intellectual property protection (instead of market competition) shows them to be craven, deceptive and fraudulent: they're really committed to oligarchy and to the preservation of privilege, not to the market as an instrument of efficient allocation of economic resources. Such people are deeply shameful and depraved - they are not worthy of respect out of any need to promote ideological balance.
Anyway, even during the 90s, the price paid by the public for patented medical treatments was not really justified given the amount that the Pharma industry spent on R&D:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-releases-report-on-prescription-drug-research/
Now a days, with drug expenditures being a larger share of GNP, and pharmaceutical R&D being a smaller share of GNP, the cost:benefit relationship is even more drastic. To put it another way - biotechnology patents, generally speaking, do not meet the constitutional test of being beneficial to the public or of promoting the useful arts. So they should be done away with, and the public sector (which is far more efficient at funding scientific research than the private sector, due primarily to the better information available to the people making decisions) should simply assume that function, producing a significant cost savings for the general public as well as accelerating the pace of research and finding useful employment for our best and brightest.
Nobel prizes aren't grants, they don't fund projects. The prize is cash money you get to keep yourself; although I think most people donate it to charity. Unfortunately, google is swamped with discussion of what Obama did with his, but Smoot donated his(http://phys.org/news93885786.html), which I understand to be typical.
In fact, no.
I accidentally posted this anonymously farther down, but in fact Bill Gates has done tremendous harm with his so-called "philanthropy"; his real contribution is "leveraged philanthropy", where you use philanthropic donations to control something so that you make more money. This is true with his vaccine so-called "charity" - which forces poor nations to spend money from other sources on expensive foreign vaccines, rather than on development of local vaccine manufacturing or of general public health infrastructure, and thus actually degrades the quality of 3rd world health care while making Bill Gates his "charitable" money back and then some. This is true of his education so-called "charity" - which forces poor school districts to spend money from other sources on high-tech gadgets and expensive consulting services, which are sold by Bill Gates' various partners, but which are actually worse than no services at all.
The Gates' foundation has announced a partnership with Pearson (for profit-education company) to develop and market materials aligned to the common core. These are the materials that your school district must agree to purchase (this particular test cost $32 million state wide) in order to qualify for Race to the Top.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-19/news/31369375_1_answer-silly-question-pineapple
So, Bill Gates is using a small amount of his "charitable" money to force public money in much larger amounts, to be wasted on this crap.
Bill Gates wants to fit teachers with galvanic bracelets:
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/06/09/just-when-you-thought-it-couldnt-get-crazier/
Bill Gates needs vaccines to be a "profit center" for his pharmaceutical buddies. I spelled this out above but read the comments.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/10/what-bill-gates-says-about-drug-companies-2/
Oh, hey, Bill Gates is using his agricultural charity to force the 3rd world to buy Monsanto's crops:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto
Truth1: Chemistry reporting is as bad as all other science reporting.
Truth2: The Chemical industry is as unconcerned with "externalities" as any other business.
Reporters will get you to panic even if they don't have a good reason; the reason that reporters are capable of spreading panic easily is because chemical manufacturers will poison you in order to make a buck. So, from a certain standpoint, the response of the general public is rational - they don't trust the chemical industry, and they shouldn't, so why not err on the side of caution when dealing with certified professional liars (marketing, PR and advertising people). Particulates are bad for you; the chemical industry (and domestic manufacturing generally) denies this, but they're lying. Vaccines are not harmful; but they are a big emerging profit center for pharma. If vaccines were harmful (again, they aren't), would pharma lie about it? Damn straight they'd lie through their teeth. So it becomes a double problem - it's difficult to educate the public about what is safe (vaccines are safe), and at the same time it's difficult to get robust action on what isn't safe (airborne particulates are not safe; neither are most chlorinated organics, heavy metals, etc.)
The military-industrial complex would much prefer to operate with no oversight at all.
We have a perverse system where such oversight is acceptable only if it does not compromise security (rather than the other way around.)
So by screwing this up on purpose, the military can plead security concerns and never publish anything at all, because any public oversight whatsoever will be too risky.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence? Well, malice exists, even though incompetence is so powerful it can explain anything.
Actually, no.
China's solar companies are doing well because they get *tremendous* subsidies, as is always the case for nascent, high tech industry.
if it weren't for massive government subsidies - paying for R&D costs directly, and providing a huge protected market mainly through the defense department - then the computer revolution which drove the 1990s boom WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.
All you free market fantasists need to get that into your thick skulls - or, you could go love on Ayn Rand's island! Please do, so that we can run our country like sane people. In 10 years, when solar power is viable, it will be the Chinese who are reaping the benefits because free market fanatics in the US aren't willing to make the basic investments required.
Mod parent up.
However, I wouldn't discount the possibility of a prosecutor doing" the wrong thing, institutionally". The kind of places with an excess of bored civil rights attorneys also have an excess of activist/liberal DAs. So if the Oberlin DA gets such a case he, ight push it just to lose.
Wikipedia has a very good article, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies
With many relevant sources.
Or you could listen to the Governor of Wisconsin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tr6zX1Z6sI
Although, in this case, he didn't actually do it.
I exaggerate very slightly; a slight majority of all new wealth is in the hands of the top 1% of the population. The top 0.1% probably only has about half of that, so a quarter of the newly created wealth. Anyway, the details vary slightly from source to source because it depends on whether you are talking net wealth, financial wealth, income, etc. etc. Also it depends on who you lump together, which is a judgement call. It gets "worse" the closer you get to Bill.
More information than you probably care to know about the topic can be found here:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Let's look at table 5a. End of 2001, the S&P500 was at 1,148.08. End of 2007, it was at 1,468.36. The S&P 500 isn't a bad proxy for the total value of the entire stock market.
So, quick guestimate, 2001->2007, richest 1% went from 33.5% OF 1,148 to 38.3% of 1,468, that's 385 to 562 -> a gain of 178. That's more than half of the total 320 point gain.
So, counting just the stock market (thus not housing bubbles), roughly 55% of the new wealth created between 2001 and 2007 was in the hands of the top 1% of the population.
No, it has been between Rich and Poor, although the Poor are getting stomped, as much as the Rich might want us all to believe otherwise. If you look at the last 20 years, the vast majority if the *new wealth* which has been created has been concentrated in the hands of the top 0.1% of the population. That's where all the money has gone, not towards social security, not towards Cadillac health insurance for people with jobs in manufacturing. Where is the money to provide pensions and health-care to the share of the population who doesn't have it? It's sitting in Bill f-ing Gates bank account, that's where it is.
There's a plate with 12 cookies on it, a rich guy, a teacher and a regular working Joe.
The rich guy takes 11 of the cookies, leans over to Joe, and says "I'd watch out, I think the teacher is trying to steal your cookie."
But first, let me get this out of the way: it is absolutely true that most people want CS degrees in order to get jobs that you could do equally well with a 2 year associate's degree in Information Technology, and even better with a high school diploma and a bunch of experience.
HOWEVER, the students are probably better off on the job market with 4 year CS degrees. Looking at things from the perspective of a potential employer, there are two reasons the CS degree has a leg up:
1) All else being equal, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor">the student capable of learning Calculus is probably more competent at everything else as well<a>. It's far from a guarantee, but on average, this will be true. The CS degree is valuable precisely <b>because</b> many people can't do calculus.
2) The 4 year CS graduate is, on average, from a more privileged background, or, if they're not from a privileged background, they've got an honorary promotion into the privileged class and 4 years in College will teach you how children of privilege (or, "entitled little shits" as we are popularly known) are supposed to behave. The people doing the hiring are, almost without exception, entitled little shits themselves who would rather hire their own kind. More sophisticated types will dress this up as item #1 above.
You see a very similar dichotomy in medical school admissions, with regards to organic chemistry. In theory, there are a number of situations in which an MD might benefit from knowing ochem, but realistically, it isn't going to come up. Furthermore, ochem is taught as if all of the undergrad biochemistry majors were going to move on to careers in basic research. That said, would the colleges be doing their students a service in dumbing down their ochem curriculum? No, they would not, because the medical schools want students who can pass ochem, for basically the same reason.
Medical Schools are in a position to be very selective in their admissions. Therefore, they can require (and they do) those students who can pass the ochem courses which are designed to prepare a student for a career in original basic research. This means that ochem is a hoop-to-jump-through for most of the students who would take it. This doesn't mean <b>any</b> of the students would be better served by dumbing it down! If you did, the medical schools would demand upper division molecular biology, which would then fill up with premed students, who don't need the subject material and are just looking for the certification that they are elite; this is happening to some extent already.
Likewise, really good programming jobs are scarce, so employers are in a position to demand candidates who <b>can</b> do calculus even for jobs that don't need it. Associates degrees (and more) in Information Technology and variants thereof already exist. But people with professional aspirations get CS degrees instead precisely <b>because</b> they are more exclusive and difficult. If you dumb down the CS curricula (or if community colleges start offering CS degrees), employers start to demand master's degrees; this is happening to some extent already.
Allow me to explain.
1) Donate $1 million to the "Me Foundation".
2) The "Me Foundation" gets another $1 million in matching federal money to do their good work (education, medicine for the poor, whatever)
3) Given a near-total lack of oversight, the "Me Foundation" spends this $2 million on bullshit services provided by their for-profit vendor, "Me Incorporated LLC."
4) "Me Incorporated LLC" only spend about $200,000 to provide these bullshit services.
5) $800,000 of profit, on "leveraged philanthropy."
Gates and Buffett are profiteering scum, and their so-called philanthropy is a travesty. Their educational initiatives are an outright scam (as outlined above), and even their much-ballyhooed HIV work is a travesty, which diverts - sorry, "leverages" - public money away from cheap and effective interventions.
Yes, it is still carbon-based.
In fact, this appears to be a biochemically-interesting but seriously overhyped discovery.
AFAICT, this organism still uses the same genetic code, the same nucleotide bases, the same ribose sugars, the same everything - only this organism performs a chemical modification of the phosphate backbone, substituting in arsenic. This is only moderately different from the chemical modifications that we make to our own DNA, RNA and proteins (methylation, for example.)
That's not a particularly shocking substitution, from a chemical standpoint, and doesn't really say anything about the viability of an organism with an actually *alien* biochemistry. Now, if you look at the periodic table, you'll see that Arsenic is right below Phosphorous - so in a sense, this is a bit like the much more exciting Carbon -> Silicon change which might get you talking rocks on lava worlds breathing vaporized sand and other badass shit. But it's only a tiny bit similar to that, because the role that Phosphorous plays in biology is much different than that of Carbon. Carbon is what everything is made-out-of, Phosphorous is stuck onto the ends of things in order to provide high-energy bonds which can be exploited as an energy currency.
I would bet that this organism does this as a defense against viruses - which, generally speaking, will not have arsenic-DNA or arsenic-RNA, and so would not be able to infect this organism.
A minor point of clarification - while you are right on the science, you are wrong on the terminology.
A mutation that doesn't change the resultant amino acid is called a "synonymous" mutation (sometimes also "silent" although that is archaic deprecated terminology.)
A mutation that changes the amino acid is "non-synonymous".
These considerations apply only to the coding regions of genes.