You need to dig into the numbers for this, but that is not true: they happen in >20% of strands of RNA.
This is more RNA substitutions than you would expect given a *uniform* level of transcriptional error. However, if there are regions where proofreading is relatively poor (and this is probably the case), and you apply a multiple-hypothesis correction across all the many MB which are considered here, then you would expect among the millions of base pairs examined to find some with an error rate >20%, which is what is actually reported. There are also systematic errors in these sequencing machines to contend with.
Probably there is some editing in there as well, but I'm very skeptical that this accounts for most of what is reported. The fraction of the substitutions found at significantly greater than 20% frequency in a majority of patients are probably editing events, but returning to my original point: this hardly upends the central dogma.
This is not nearly as earth-shattering as the journo makes out.
When DNA is copied to make new DNA, you get a certain number of copying errors, called mutations - most of them harmless. I assume everyone knows about those.
When DNA is copied to make a temporary-working-copy RNA, you get a larger number of these copying errors because, in general, they are one-shot non-critical deals. The need for stringency is much lower, the selective advantage for stringency is not so great, so it comes as no surprise that the level of proof-reading is also reduced.
Now, it's also possible that there are mechanisms by which these RNA molecules can be purposefully edited. As mentioned in the article, significant post-transcriptional editing (including in eukaryotes the readaction of big chunks, which are called "Introns".) But this finding doesn't speak much to that, although the rate is a *sconch* higher than I might expect for random errors. Even so, this doesn't shake the central dogma of molecular biology in any meaningful way, as for example Reverse Transcriptases did.
However, I propose a third option, that the blacklist is automatically maintained.
That is, they classify web-pages: offensive, Y/N? And then their index automatically tags terms strongly associated with offensive web-pages, which are automatically blacklisted. This is how you'd get "white power" (present on many offensive webpages), but not "black power" (present mainly in scholarly articles, let's be blunt). This is why you'd get "futanari" and not "hermaphrodite", this is why "schoolgirl" is offensive, etc.
Because this is an important question for serious people, but has no bearing on why various cranks (Intelligent Design people, climate change "skeptics", Time Cube, etc.) may have trouble getting their work in print. Papers by such people generally don't end up in the peer review phase - they aren't sent out for evaluation by the journal, so peer review doesn't matter.
That said, peer review provides substantially the same benefit as those "shoplifters will be prosecuted" signs you see in department stores.
Shoplifters are very seldom if ever actually prosecuted - but the threat, even the vaguest menace - of public scrutiny has an impact on behavior. I'm not talking about scientific fraud (which peer review will seldom catch,) but about quality of reasoning, doing the needed controls, etc. We may have a system that rewards good research little-better than an unbiased coin, but the <b>perception</b> that it works, or that it might work for you, motivates people to do the work needed to survive peer-review.
Whether it's true or not is, of course, important - both to society at large and for the (longer term) viability of the careers of the scientists in question - but can scientists publish and have careers, even if they are wrong?
Absolutely, and they *should* be able to do so. If anything, the current system over-emphasizes being right over doing the important experiments which are absolutely requisite to scientific progress; even if the results come out inconclusive, you have to try different things.
If you have to be right in order to publish and in order to perservere with the endeavor, science becomes impossible.
Note that I'm impugning a lot into the parent comment, and I apologize if I read more hostility into it than was intended.
Planck's constant (h) increased in value this morning to roughly 50 joule-seconds, sending the DJIA to a 95% confidence interval between 0 and 15,000, and increasing the wavelength of a penny moving at a brisk walk to a value on the order of it's own diameter, so that macroscopic, every day objects behave as waves instead of billiard balls. Tennis players in central park (whose velocity could not be determined as of this printing) may have been alarmed to find tennis balls which hit their rackets were defracted and created interference patterns on the fence behind, instead of going into the opposing court.
...or does DARPA not already have a MASSIVE amount of researchers under their wing?
Yes, but there's been a recent policy shift.
DARPA has, for the past several years, been trying to refocus away from academic research and more into "applied" (meaning, basically, private-sector) research.
This has not worked out so well, in a number of respects (both practical and pseudo-political) so DARPA is now moving back towards a more academia-friendly approach.
This applies to everyone who wants to get a tattoo of anything.
Basically - if you are the sort of person who *worries* that you'll look silly when you're old, don't get tattoos, because they'll make you look silly *now*.
If you take a healthier and more mellow approach to the human condition entire, then you accept: when I am old, I will look silly. I might as well be a silly-looking old man with "thunder on thunder" tattoos on my thumbs.
Finally, I guarantee with absolute certainty that grandpas with tattoos will be thought-cooler by their grandkids that grandpas without, on average over a large sample. If you can find an equation to fit to that, tattoo it full-facial just to drive the point across.
Since I may be the only trashy biologist in attendance, may I suggest getting price's equation: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/1/a/f1a89bf0a1591b77f40a81aeb0d74e91.png
Easiest to get it as a tramp stamp. However, in the likely event your are a dude, you get double trash points for tattooing it on the little Mr. Price.
Computer programmers are people with their own carbon footprints, $FLATULENCE_JOKE. So, people have raised objections to the underlying efficiency argument, I tend to agree with the people who estimate that the energy savings would be less than 10-fold, but it's not like I've looked at the diagnostic output of their servers.
Labor costs money, right? So if you assume that $X million worth of servers and electricity are cheaper than $X million worth of programmer time to reimplement the whole mess in C, then it's probably minimizing the carbon footprint to leave it alone. This ought to be a very simple business decision.
There are certainly cases where this is not true, but for most purposes, dollars spent on computer programming go directly to carbon footprint. I'm a Socialist, certainly not a free market fanatic by any stretch, but when it comes to spending millions on highly specialized, skilled labor to reduce carbon footprint, I doubt that it's worth it unless the electricity you save costs more than the specialized labor.
Mod parent down for "idiot calling someone else stupid."
CastrTroy is saying, and he is 100% correct, that the *average* tuition in the *city of Pittsburgh* is not 40K, as indeed it isn't - since you want to get the facts straight, U. Pitt has ~18K undergrads, while Carnegie Mellon has ~6K.
That said, I disagree that this is bad policy. University students are (on average) priveleged, pay little rent/property tax, and use a lot of services. Waive the tax for scholarship students (or make the University pay it.) For poor students borrowing hundreds of $K to attend Carnegie Mellon - your bad decisions cannot drive policy.
No, this is the same people / same industry lobbyists / same secretive, greed-crazed financial companies who control our health insurance *already*.
If we had a system of publically accountable, transparent entities running health insurance (as we do with health *care*, thank you very much the hospitals are mostly fine,) then it would be crazy to propose a federal takeover. But the groups presently running the insurance scam in this country are the same financial institutions responsible for all the worst excesses of the commerce department.
How is this any different from any of the dozens of copycat sci-fi novels, except that a chunk of the cash will go to Asimov's estate? So who cares?
That said, am I the only one who thought that Reichart's Renshai novels (in which the Norse are intrinsically Good, the Italians are intrinsically Neutral, and the Arabs are intrinsically Evil) were racist and weird? Read them as a teenager, they were fun in places, but boy. Lots of fantasy/sci-fi authors have weird crank politics (Asimov being unusual in his rationality - or at least that I agree with him,) I'm not sure if Reichart's *expressly* an Ayn Rand-type crank, but that's the only thing that I think might really harm his legacy.
No, this is a "public-private partnership" at it's finest. McMaster university *is* a public institution funded by the government.
So if the *government* had handled this issue, they would've done so efficiently and at a fraction of the private cost!
You see the same thing in Education (a very parallel situation, where the massive money being spent to "fix" education is mostly being wasted on consultants who don't know shit), in the Prison Industry, in Energy, and since we're talking Canada can I say health care? The public option is highly efficient, the private option at least *may* benefit from competition, but public-private partnerships are utterly corrupt and wasteful. So-called "libertarians" who think that offering private groups contracts to handle public services will be more efficient are as ideological and out-of-touch with reality as any Stalinist.
"Public-private partnerships" are so-called because "chronyistic corruption" (which is what they used to be called) do not focus group well.
Mod parent up! Although, I think the grandparent may have been sarcastic? It's not obvious if so.
Censorship is almost always *officially* about national security, but 99.9% of the time they're actually trying to suppress information which is embarassing or damaging to some particular junta.
The point of the book is that the post-WWII industrial landscape was not shaped by efficiency or technical concerns (both of which would have been better served by letting people who knew what they were doing run the factories,) but by the prejudices and political goals of factory managers, who were just as pointy-haired back in the day.
The same thing is happening today in IT. Managers view themselves as being somehow under the thumb of any employee that they cannot completely dominate, so they try to deskill their labor force as much as they can, regardless of whether this is actually more efficient or even profitable.
Snytax and tpyos aside, the parent remains correct: most car accidents are not fatal, but it remains true that it only takes one bad car accident to kill you.
A legitimate *ecological* argument can be made in favor of nuclear power.
Waste disposal and even disasters are really safety/medical concerns and not ecological concerns. The ecosphere tolerates Trenobyl-style disasters much better than it can tolerate changes in climate, although of course neither is actually much of a risk to life on earth as a whole. *People*, on the other hand, individually die from cancer, but can accomodiate to climatic shifts, especially gradual ones, far better than can frogs.
For myself, there are two ways you could balance these concerns, one of them is moral and the other is economic.
Economic: for the forseeable future, I think it is clear that the cost to securely dispose of nuclear waste is going to exceed the cost to burn (burn and remediate? Not sure) an equivalent amount of carbon. The only reason that this plant is a good deal for the TVA is because the feds intervene to externalize a lot of the real costs, while the purchased electricity that is being replaced is being purchased from some non-market enron-esque scam. I don't think nuclear power makes sense economically.
Moral: The moral course of action is to scale back our consumption and economic output as needed to avoid the negative consequences of either fossil fuels *or* nuclear power. Let's put that aside for the moment.
If the real moral course of action is not achievable, the question becomes - is it more moral to accomodate to circumstances by burning fossil fuel (which almost certainly has negative ecoligical impacts, which causes diffuse harm,) or to use nuclear power (which, in the real world, has a high probability of a waste disposal accident of some kind, and raises our vulnerability to terrorism/violence?)
Nuclear power does have a certain moral advantage here - because we in the US will ourselves suffer whatever consequences may arise, rather than foisting most of the consequences off on Bangladesh.
So, we have to evaluate: (the marginal risk of disaster * loss of life in a disaster) / nuclear kWhr vs. (marginal increase in environmental damage * loss of life to environmental damage) / fossil fuel kWhr
This is the sort of thing that *ought* to be carefully studied by environmental scientists, public health and security experts, free from conflicts of interest. I would guess that the marginal damage of burning more fossil fuel is small concerning how much we now burn, and that the marginal risk of a disaster is relatively high given the current status of our nuclear waste disposal network, so fossil fuel is the better choice.
It almost always takes longer to explain what you said than it did to originally say it. Ordinarily, I don't respond to stuff like this, but to clarify:
First, there are only two people I'm discussing here - one is a *competent hack*, the other is a fool. I wouldn't call either of them a genius, but you can hardly accuse me of placing everyone into two categories simply because I put two people in two categories. For that matter, one of those categories is somewhere on a continuum between the only two categories you claim I recognize.
I certainly ascribe cynical motives to Gladwell. I'm universally critical of Gladwell, I can't stand the man. I'm not exactly gushing praise of Anderson but I'm not criticizing him either, in particular I rather like his writing on this topic. He's not the most *original* voice on the subject, but I give him credit for communicating other people's ideas clearly and effectively (which is what a "competent hack" does). Again, you're complaining that I have a "binary" opinion? It's true that I don't have a lot good to say about this entire story - but given the trite subject matter, you've got to expect a cynical response.
I agree that there's a certain school of discourse that boils down to: "so and so is over-rated" and contributes nothing else. I don't much care for it most of the time - but when an overrated *in*competent hack gets a lot of play criticizing someone who says something he doesn't like, it becomes relevant.
I agree that it's more important to be interesting than to be right. I dispute that Gladwell is actually interesting - or that what he says contains ideas of sufficient merit to be worth disproving. Tipping point, for example, was not an interesting read. It was painfully stupid. Mainly, it was not "competent" hackwork, it was overburdened and contrived - bad ideas, poorly communicated, are not a worthwhile contribution. But, lest I be accused of cynicism: Lawrence Lessig and Steven Levitt both have interesting things to say. I suspect that they are also wrong more often than they are right but their writing contains enough ideas (often, original ideas) to be interesting, and both make a good faith effort to express those ideas simply, clearly and succinctly.
Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people, not precisely stupid, but so shallow and lacking in insight that he makes Chris Anderson, who is simply a hack, look brilliant by comparison. Gladwell, lest we forget, specializes in gushing soft journalism pieces on people whom he has designated as "great". He's what I call a Mensa bottom feeder - he produces work for people who like to think about how smart they are, which is not how actually-smart people spend their time.
Gladwell wouldn't know what to do with an actual idea if he had one (I envisage a dog with a great piece of artwork, sort of chewing on it.) Now, Anderson's piece is competent hackery, which is better than most people could do I don't mean this critically, but something about it intersects with the sort of faux-highbrow pablum that Gladwell thinks he understands. This is very threatning to Gladwell - going back to the dog analogy, it's like he's got some glimpse of a world of ideas and there's a threat to him there that he can't really understand. Gladwell is getting good money to stick his nose up Bill Gates' behind and there's an army of other dogs willing to do that for free. So he lashes out in a rage, and since he can dimly percieve Anderson (but not the more interesting and provocative people whose work Anderson has extended), Anderson becomes his target.
Again, I have nothing against a competent hack. But I do have some real criticism for Anderson - seriously, you admire Gladwell?
One of my sibling posters makes a valid point - that new technologies enable the authorities to infringe on our rights in ways that were impossible in prior generations. That is exactly why those rights should *not* be layed out in specific, technological terms (printing presses, "digital" communications, etc.)
Instead, the constitution should give general rights, to be interpreted as broadly as possible in new circumstances when new circumstances arise.
For example: * The right to communicate with anyone, on any topic, at any time, by any means,
- without interference by the government, private parties employed by the government, or parties providing services of utility in communication, except at the request of the recipient of the communication,
- without monitering or systematic record-keeping by the same, except under full transparency with due process of law,
Did you read the parent? Perl was not invented from whole cloth either, it was based on awk and C. Even most constructed spoken languages, Esperanto for example was based on modern derivatives of Latin. Was Esperanto not therefore "invented"?
Parent is kinda flamebait, and it's exactly the opposite of my experience.
Scientists (I am one) who also write some of their own code, have much better things to do with our time than to try and make the software efficient. When we figure out what we want done, we hand it over to professional programmers who, if the cost:benefit analysis works out, will parallelize or optimize it as they're told is needed. Even lousy programmers are expensive, and hardware is cheap.
I 100% agree with the end of his statement - was it 10, 15 years ago scientific computing was still done in fortran FOR A REASON - the optimizing compiler didn't completely suck? Some scientific computing is still done in FORTRAN but that's been purely a legacy thing since the optimizing compilers for C caught up. I'm sure someone clever will find some way to get an interpreted language to figure out what depends on what and parallelize your code for you. This is a very hard problem to do perfectly, but sensible people will quickly realize that's okay. For some cases, I can beat an optimizing compiler by writing assembly - am I ever going to do that? Hell no.
Now, this may result in additional good coding practices which will be required of us so that the optimizing compiler can make easier sense of our code. Might it be lower overhead to create an optimization friendly programming language, which I suspect will end up amounting to making such practices an explicit requirement? Probably not, but it depends on how closely these new programming languages adhere to existing languages (I haven't looked at either example discussed in the article.)
As someone who works in a university lab (I only do computational stuff now, but the lab still does experimental work), I thought I'd throw my two cents in. The differences between private biotech and public biomedical are not really that similar to the differences between academic CS and a software development shop, so most of the background that's been given is kinda irrelevant.
First, there is a large reporting bias. People in the private sector have some greater tendency (we can argue about how large) to cover stuff up. In academia, the system of incentives discourages coverups much more thoroughly; also, there's a cultural difference between people who choose to be university professors and those who choose to go private, although obviously individual people vary tremendously.
Second, in the academic sector you do actual experiments. Meaning, you don't know how things are going to work until you try it, and most people are doing different experiments. In most corporate research facilities, everyone does the same experiment on slightly different subjects or whatever. This does have a big impact on safety, industry is somewhat discouraged from having 500 people do the same unsafe experiment, but in a university you could have 500 people doing 300 experiments of which 75 are unsafe.
Finally, there is a culture of disregard for safety precautions at the University level. In Industry, many of the safety rules are stupid - but following stupid rules is 90% of the job so people follow the rules. In the academic sector, when the fire department tells us we can't pour urea and ethanol down the drain because those are *dangerous chemicals*, it breeds resentment against the rules themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to dig into the numbers for this, but that is not true: they happen in >20% of strands of RNA.
This is more RNA substitutions than you would expect given a *uniform* level of transcriptional error. However, if there are regions where proofreading is relatively poor (and this is probably the case), and you apply a multiple-hypothesis correction across all the many MB which are considered here, then you would expect among the millions of base pairs examined to find some with an error rate >20%, which is what is actually reported. There are also systematic errors in these sequencing machines to contend with.
Probably there is some editing in there as well, but I'm very skeptical that this accounts for most of what is reported. The fraction of the substitutions found at significantly greater than 20% frequency in a majority of patients are probably editing events, but returning to my original point: this hardly upends the central dogma.
This is not nearly as earth-shattering as the journo makes out.
When DNA is copied to make new DNA, you get a certain number of copying errors, called mutations - most of them harmless. I assume everyone knows about those.
When DNA is copied to make a temporary-working-copy RNA, you get a larger number of these copying errors because, in general, they are one-shot non-critical deals. The need for stringency is much lower, the selective advantage for stringency is not so great, so it comes as no surprise that the level of proof-reading is also reduced.
Now, it's also possible that there are mechanisms by which these RNA molecules can be purposefully edited. As mentioned in the article, significant post-transcriptional editing (including in eukaryotes the readaction of big chunks, which are called "Introns".) But this finding doesn't speak much to that, although the rate is a *sconch* higher than I might expect for random errors. Even so, this doesn't shake the central dogma of molecular biology in any meaningful way, as for example Reverse Transcriptases did.
I doubt the second - very processor intensive.
However, I propose a third option, that the blacklist is automatically maintained.
That is, they classify web-pages: offensive, Y/N? And then their index automatically tags terms strongly associated with offensive web-pages, which are automatically blacklisted. This is how you'd get "white power" (present on many offensive webpages), but not "black power" (present mainly in scholarly articles, let's be blunt). This is why you'd get "futanari" and not "hermaphrodite", this is why "schoolgirl" is offensive, etc.
Because this is an important question for serious people, but has no bearing on why various cranks (Intelligent Design people, climate change "skeptics", Time Cube, etc.) may have trouble getting their work in print. Papers by such people generally don't end up in the peer review phase - they aren't sent out for evaluation by the journal, so peer review doesn't matter.
That said, peer review provides substantially the same benefit as those "shoplifters will be prosecuted" signs you see in department stores.
Shoplifters are very seldom if ever actually prosecuted - but the threat, even the vaguest menace - of public scrutiny has an impact on behavior. I'm not talking about scientific fraud (which peer review will seldom catch,) but about quality of reasoning, doing the needed controls, etc. We may have a system that rewards good research little-better than an unbiased coin, but the <b>perception</b> that it works, or that it might work for you, motivates people to do the work needed to survive peer-review.
Whether it's true or not is, of course, important - both to society at large and for the (longer term) viability of the careers of the scientists in question - but can scientists publish and have careers, even if they are wrong?
Absolutely, and they *should* be able to do so. If anything, the current system over-emphasizes being right over doing the important experiments which are absolutely requisite to scientific progress; even if the results come out inconclusive, you have to try different things.
If you have to be right in order to publish and in order to perservere with the endeavor, science becomes impossible.
Note that I'm impugning a lot into the parent comment, and I apologize if I read more hostility into it than was intended.
Duplicate joke for a duplicate claim:
Planck's constant (h) increased in value this morning to roughly 50 joule-seconds, sending the DJIA to a 95% confidence interval between 0 and 15,000, and increasing the wavelength of a penny moving at a brisk walk to a value on the order of it's own diameter, so that macroscopic, every day objects behave as waves instead of billiard balls. Tennis players in central park (whose velocity could not be determined as of this printing) may have been alarmed to find tennis balls which hit their rackets were defracted and created interference patterns on the fence behind, instead of going into the opposing court.
...or does DARPA not already have a MASSIVE amount of researchers under their wing?
Yes, but there's been a recent policy shift.
DARPA has, for the past several years, been trying to refocus away from academic research and more into "applied" (meaning, basically, private-sector) research.
This has not worked out so well, in a number of respects (both practical and pseudo-political) so DARPA is now moving back towards a more academia-friendly approach.
This applies to everyone who wants to get a tattoo of anything.
Basically - if you are the sort of person who *worries* that you'll look silly when you're old, don't get tattoos, because they'll make you look silly *now*.
If you take a healthier and more mellow approach to the human condition entire, then you accept: when I am old, I will look silly. I might as well be a silly-looking old man with "thunder on thunder" tattoos on my thumbs.
Finally, I guarantee with absolute certainty that grandpas with tattoos will be thought-cooler by their grandkids that grandpas without, on average over a large sample. If you can find an equation to fit to that, tattoo it full-facial just to drive the point across.
Since I may be the only trashy biologist in attendance, may I suggest getting price's equation: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/1/a/f1a89bf0a1591b77f40a81aeb0d74e91.png
Easiest to get it as a tramp stamp. However, in the likely event your are a dude, you get double trash points for tattooing it on the little Mr. Price.
Computer programmers are people with their own carbon footprints, $FLATULENCE_JOKE. So, people have raised objections to the underlying efficiency argument, I tend to agree with the people who estimate that the energy savings would be less than 10-fold, but it's not like I've looked at the diagnostic output of their servers.
Labor costs money, right? So if you assume that $X million worth of servers and electricity are cheaper than $X million worth of programmer time to reimplement the whole mess in C, then it's probably minimizing the carbon footprint to leave it alone. This ought to be a very simple business decision.
There are certainly cases where this is not true, but for most purposes, dollars spent on computer programming go directly to carbon footprint. I'm a Socialist, certainly not a free market fanatic by any stretch, but when it comes to spending millions on highly specialized, skilled labor to reduce carbon footprint, I doubt that it's worth it unless the electricity you save costs more than the specialized labor.
Mod parent down for "idiot calling someone else stupid."
CastrTroy is saying, and he is 100% correct, that the *average* tuition in the *city of Pittsburgh* is not 40K, as indeed it isn't - since you want to get the facts straight, U. Pitt has ~18K undergrads, while Carnegie Mellon has ~6K.
That said, I disagree that this is bad policy. University students are (on average) priveleged, pay little rent/property tax, and use a lot of services. Waive the tax for scholarship students (or make the University pay it.) For poor students borrowing hundreds of $K to attend Carnegie Mellon - your bad decisions cannot drive policy.
No, this is the same people / same industry lobbyists / same secretive, greed-crazed financial companies who control our health insurance *already*.
If we had a system of publically accountable, transparent entities running health insurance (as we do with health *care*, thank you very much the hospitals are mostly fine,) then it would be crazy to propose a federal takeover. But the groups presently running the insurance scam in this country are the same financial institutions responsible for all the worst excesses of the commerce department.
How is this any different from any of the dozens of copycat sci-fi novels, except that a chunk of the cash will go to Asimov's estate? So who cares?
That said, am I the only one who thought that Reichart's Renshai novels (in which the Norse are intrinsically Good, the Italians are intrinsically Neutral, and the Arabs are intrinsically Evil) were racist and weird? Read them as a teenager, they were fun in places, but boy. Lots of fantasy/sci-fi authors have weird crank politics (Asimov being unusual in his rationality - or at least that I agree with him,) I'm not sure if Reichart's *expressly* an Ayn Rand-type crank, but that's the only thing that I think might really harm his legacy.
No, this is a "public-private partnership" at it's finest. McMaster university *is* a public institution funded by the government.
So if the *government* had handled this issue, they would've done so efficiently and at a fraction of the private cost!
You see the same thing in Education (a very parallel situation, where the massive money being spent to "fix" education is mostly being wasted on consultants who don't know shit), in the Prison Industry, in Energy, and since we're talking Canada can I say health care? The public option is highly efficient, the private option at least *may* benefit from competition, but public-private partnerships are utterly corrupt and wasteful. So-called "libertarians" who think that offering private groups contracts to handle public services will be more efficient are as ideological and out-of-touch with reality as any Stalinist.
"Public-private partnerships" are so-called because "chronyistic corruption" (which is what they used to be called) do not focus group well.
Mod parent up! Although, I think the grandparent may have been sarcastic? It's not obvious if so.
Censorship is almost always *officially* about national security, but 99.9% of the time they're actually trying to suppress information which is embarassing or damaging to some particular junta.
by David F. Noble.
The point of the book is that the post-WWII industrial landscape was not shaped by efficiency or technical concerns (both of which would have been better served by letting people who knew what they were doing run the factories,) but by the prejudices and political goals of factory managers, who were just as pointy-haired back in the day.
The same thing is happening today in IT. Managers view themselves as being somehow under the thumb of any employee that they cannot completely dominate, so they try to deskill their labor force as much as they can, regardless of whether this is actually more efficient or even profitable.
Snytax and tpyos aside, the parent remains correct: most car accidents are not fatal, but it remains true that it only takes one bad car accident to kill you.
A legitimate *ecological* argument can be made in favor of nuclear power.
Waste disposal and even disasters are really safety/medical concerns and not ecological concerns. The ecosphere tolerates Trenobyl-style disasters much better than it can tolerate changes in climate, although of course neither is actually much of a risk to life on earth as a whole. *People*, on the other hand, individually die from cancer, but can accomodiate to climatic shifts, especially gradual ones, far better than can frogs.
For myself, there are two ways you could balance these concerns, one of them is moral and the other is economic.
Economic: for the forseeable future, I think it is clear that the cost to securely dispose of nuclear waste is going to exceed the cost to burn (burn and remediate? Not sure) an equivalent amount of carbon. The only reason that this plant is a good deal for the TVA is because the feds intervene to externalize a lot of the real costs, while the purchased electricity that is being replaced is being purchased from some non-market enron-esque scam. I don't think nuclear power makes sense economically.
Moral: The moral course of action is to scale back our consumption and economic output as needed to avoid the negative consequences of either fossil fuels *or* nuclear power. Let's put that aside for the moment.
If the real moral course of action is not achievable, the question becomes - is it more moral to accomodate to circumstances by burning fossil fuel (which almost certainly has negative ecoligical impacts, which causes diffuse harm,) or to use nuclear power (which, in the real world, has a high probability of a waste disposal accident of some kind, and raises our vulnerability to terrorism/violence?)
Nuclear power does have a certain moral advantage here - because we in the US will ourselves suffer whatever consequences may arise, rather than foisting most of the consequences off on Bangladesh.
So, we have to evaluate:
(the marginal risk of disaster * loss of life in a disaster) / nuclear kWhr
vs.
(marginal increase in environmental damage * loss of life to environmental damage) / fossil fuel kWhr
This is the sort of thing that *ought* to be carefully studied by environmental scientists, public health and security experts, free from conflicts of interest. I would guess that the marginal damage of burning more fossil fuel is small concerning how much we now burn, and that the marginal risk of a disaster is relatively high given the current status of our nuclear waste disposal network, so fossil fuel is the better choice.
It almost always takes longer to explain what you said than it did to originally say it. Ordinarily, I don't respond to stuff like this, but to clarify:
First, there are only two people I'm discussing here - one is a *competent hack*, the other is a fool. I wouldn't call either of them a genius, but you can hardly accuse me of placing everyone into two categories simply because I put two people in two categories. For that matter, one of those categories is somewhere on a continuum between the only two categories you claim I recognize.
I certainly ascribe cynical motives to Gladwell. I'm universally critical of Gladwell, I can't stand the man. I'm not exactly gushing praise of Anderson but I'm not criticizing him either, in particular I rather like his writing on this topic. He's not the most *original* voice on the subject, but I give him credit for communicating other people's ideas clearly and effectively (which is what a "competent hack" does). Again, you're complaining that I have a "binary" opinion? It's true that I don't have a lot good to say about this entire story - but given the trite subject matter, you've got to expect a cynical response.
I agree that there's a certain school of discourse that boils down to: "so and so is over-rated" and contributes nothing else. I don't much care for it most of the time - but when an overrated *in*competent hack gets a lot of play criticizing someone who says something he doesn't like, it becomes relevant.
I agree that it's more important to be interesting than to be right. I dispute that Gladwell is actually interesting - or that what he says contains ideas of sufficient merit to be worth disproving. Tipping point, for example, was not an interesting read. It was painfully stupid. Mainly, it was not "competent" hackwork, it was overburdened and contrived - bad ideas, poorly communicated, are not a worthwhile contribution. But, lest I be accused of cynicism: Lawrence Lessig and Steven Levitt both have interesting things to say. I suspect that they are also wrong more often than they are right but their writing contains enough ideas (often, original ideas) to be interesting, and both make a good faith effort to express those ideas simply, clearly and succinctly.
Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people, not precisely stupid, but so shallow and lacking in insight that he makes Chris Anderson, who is simply a hack, look brilliant by comparison. Gladwell, lest we forget, specializes in gushing soft journalism pieces on people whom he has designated as "great". He's what I call a Mensa bottom feeder - he produces work for people who like to think about how smart they are, which is not how actually-smart people spend their time.
Gladwell wouldn't know what to do with an actual idea if he had one (I envisage a dog with a great piece of artwork, sort of chewing on it.) Now, Anderson's piece is competent hackery, which is better than most people could do I don't mean this critically, but something about it intersects with the sort of faux-highbrow pablum that Gladwell thinks he understands. This is very threatning to Gladwell - going back to the dog analogy, it's like he's got some glimpse of a world of ideas and there's a threat to him there that he can't really understand. Gladwell is getting good money to stick his nose up Bill Gates' behind and there's an army of other dogs willing to do that for free. So he lashes out in a rage, and since he can dimly percieve Anderson (but not the more interesting and provocative people whose work Anderson has extended), Anderson becomes his target.
Again, I have nothing against a competent hack. But I do have some real criticism for Anderson - seriously, you admire Gladwell?
One of my sibling posters makes a valid point - that new technologies enable the authorities to infringe on our rights in ways that were impossible in prior generations. That is exactly why those rights should *not* be layed out in specific, technological terms (printing presses, "digital" communications, etc.)
Instead, the constitution should give general rights, to be interpreted as broadly as possible in new circumstances when new circumstances arise.
For example:
* The right to communicate with anyone, on any topic, at any time, by any means,
- without interference by the government, private parties employed by the government, or parties providing services of utility in communication, except at the request of the recipient of the communication,
- without monitering or systematic record-keeping by the same, except under full transparency with due process of law,
And so forth.
Did you read the parent? Perl was not invented from whole cloth either, it was based on awk and C. Even most constructed spoken languages, Esperanto for example was based on modern derivatives of Latin. Was Esperanto not therefore "invented"?
I'm replying to erase the bad mod I just made, clicked in the wrong place.
I don't like the new moderation UI. Meant to mod you up.
I suspect that there may be technical differences between the results but it's a valid point.
Parent is kinda flamebait, and it's exactly the opposite of my experience.
Scientists (I am one) who also write some of their own code, have much better things to do with our time than to try and make the software efficient. When we figure out what we want done, we hand it over to professional programmers who, if the cost:benefit analysis works out, will parallelize or optimize it as they're told is needed. Even lousy programmers are expensive, and hardware is cheap.
I 100% agree with the end of his statement - was it 10, 15 years ago scientific computing was still done in fortran FOR A REASON - the optimizing compiler didn't completely suck? Some scientific computing is still done in FORTRAN but that's been purely a legacy thing since the optimizing compilers for C caught up. I'm sure someone clever will find some way to get an interpreted language to figure out what depends on what and parallelize your code for you. This is a very hard problem to do perfectly, but sensible people will quickly realize that's okay. For some cases, I can beat an optimizing compiler by writing assembly - am I ever going to do that? Hell no.
Now, this may result in additional good coding practices which will be required of us so that the optimizing compiler can make easier sense of our code. Might it be lower overhead to create an optimization friendly programming language, which I suspect will end up amounting to making such practices an explicit requirement? Probably not, but it depends on how closely these new programming languages adhere to existing languages (I haven't looked at either example discussed in the article.)
You know what, I don't think I'm going to use modern English, either.
Don't you know that early modern English was invented to have something standard into which the bible could be translated? For shame!
As a devoted secularist, I'll just burn all my shakespeare and rushdie after I delete all my perl code.
As someone who works in a university lab (I only do computational stuff now, but the lab still does experimental work), I thought I'd throw my two cents in. The differences between private biotech and public biomedical are not really that similar to the differences between academic CS and a software development shop, so most of the background that's been given is kinda irrelevant.
First, there is a large reporting bias. People in the private sector have some greater tendency (we can argue about how large) to cover stuff up. In academia, the system of incentives discourages coverups much more thoroughly; also, there's a cultural difference between people who choose to be university professors and those who choose to go private, although obviously individual people vary tremendously.
Second, in the academic sector you do actual experiments. Meaning, you don't know how things are going to work until you try it, and most people are doing different experiments. In most corporate research facilities, everyone does the same experiment on slightly different subjects or whatever. This does have a big impact on safety, industry is somewhat discouraged from having 500 people do the same unsafe experiment, but in a university you could have 500 people doing 300 experiments of which 75 are unsafe.
Finally, there is a culture of disregard for safety precautions at the University level. In Industry, many of the safety rules are stupid - but following stupid rules is 90% of the job so people follow the rules. In the academic sector, when the fire department tells us we can't pour urea and ethanol down the drain because those are *dangerous chemicals*, it breeds resentment against the rules themselves.