Now how are you going to "properly vet" a mysterious black box, by which I mean anything other than open source software? Read the vendor's documentation so that you know they think it is secure? Try to hack it yourself?
I'll allow that there are a few private products with an established reputation for security solid enough that you'd consider taking their word even if the code hasn't been subject to public review.
Personally, I favor the following - vendors should be responsible for the security of any software they SELL. You can write anything you want, but if you charge money for it, you have to be liable if it doesn't work.
Would this tilt the field in favor of open-source software? Why, yes, so it would! How awful. Ah well.
Fine, fine, in the future I'll use a different example to illustrate what I mean here - that was copy and pasted from my post on the topic in about 2001.
That doesn't make amber, it just makes resin.
It also depends on what you mean by fossil - those 15 thousand year old samples are very chemically different from older fossils, although they are partially mineralized.
And the claim to have successfully extracted meaningful 15 mil. year old DNA has not stood up to independent verification - see the link to the literature in my other post. The one million year time frame assumes preservation of that sort - in the presence of nasty stuff it drops a great deal, I direct you to the same literature.
However, it is an entirely reasonable assumption as bones of an intermediary age show partial fossilization - the outer layers contain more silicon than the middle of the bone, which is still carbon. I don't recall the reference for this but if you dig around in the various talk.origins archives somebody has mentioned it.
The point is - if it's long enough for a glass window to melt into a puddle (yes, glass is a liquid), it's definitely long enough for some jello to do likewise.
So even if you've got a mummy instead of a fossil, over the time span in which fossils form DNA is completely chewed to bits - especially given the pressures and temperatures needed to turn tree resin into amber.
Okay, it's true, after some huge amount of time there would still be some tiny amount of uncorrupted DNA left.
However, it may or may not be chemically different from the corrupted DNA - which, before it degrades entirely, has a good chance of degrading into other nucleic acid bases (or into things that might be degradation products of other nucleic acid bases.)
The *information content* is gone.
Put another way, suppose I take three million dictionaries, written in a language you do not know, and I scramble 99% of the letters. There are going to be a certain number of words left unscrambled. However, there are going to be roughly the same number (probably more) words formed completely at random.
Even if this unknown language is somewhat similar to english, if you look through the contents of these dictionaries for things similar to english words you are far more likely to find english words formed out of random letters than you are to find true cognates.
Now, I don't know *exactly* where the theoretical limit for recovering this information is - but kinetics indicate it should be at about 1 million years. It might be 10 million - but it isn't 65!
You misunderstand. The problem is not - how can I sequence this genome? That's relatively easy.
The problem is - this genome has become a randomized mixture of silicates, how can I recover the original information content? Well, I can grab whatever random stuff is there - with some super science that lets me turn the silicon back into carbon and whatever - and if I do so than at some point I'll find one where the information content happens to be preserved - but I have no way of identifying it! The odds are so low that I'll find just as many where the apparent DNA content has been randomly altered to look like some modern animal and it will *look* correct.
If you did that, you'd find the random DNA that happened to be most similar to current living things. There's no reason to think it would be similar to dinosaur DNA.
The DNA in the dinosaur bone (or mosquito), if there is any, is now essentially random - it contains no information content.
Well, I didn't do the calculations myself: "However, kinetic calculations predict that small fragments of DNA (100-500 bp) will survive for no more than 10 kyr in temperate regions and for a maximum of 100 kyr at colder latitudes owing to hydrolytic damage (Poinar et al. 1996; Smith et al. 2001). Even under ideal conditions, amplifiable DNA is not thought to survive for longer than 1 Myr." - see reference below
As to your proposal, if I make enough random DNA out of monomers, eventually one of those artificial chains will form a complete dinosaur chromosome. How, exactly, do you propose that I identify this perfect chromosome from among the population in my (absolutely enormous) sample?
Emu are true birds, and related (albeit not terribly closely) to ostriches and rheas (which are not found in oceana) as well as kiwis and cassowaries (which are native to oceana). They are birds, not an independently evolved lineage of dinosaurs.
Since this comes up in every slashdot story on dinosaurs, no, Jurassic Park is not possible -
Fossilization occurs when carbon atoms are exchanged for silicon. There is a very high energy barrier to this chemical event - so it happens extremely slowly, over millions of years.
Nucleic acids, the building blocks of DNA, spontaneously decay (even in the absence of bacteria or degrading agents). The spontaneous decay of DNA is very slow by most standards - if kept under the proper conditions a DNA molecule can last for millennia. However, this spontaneous decay is a great deal faster than the exchange of carbon and silicon, especially when you consider that the carbon and silicon must exchange over the surface area of the sample (for example a bone several inches thick fossilizes very slowly from the outside in,) while the DNA is decaying continuously in the marrow. So, for a fossil millions of years old, even if you managed to recover something that looked like a nucleic acid base, it would be decayed to the point that the information content is completely gone.
As other insightful posters have already commented, this is, unfortunately, complete hype and an appointment with no substance to it, except POSSIBLY that he might influence decisions re: who is hired to do the actual work (see below).
This is unfortunate, because before he made good movies, Peter Jackson made awful movies which were FUN TO WATCH. The B movie tradition is strong even in his recent blockbusters.
Now, obviously, the Halo movie is going to be completely dreadful. If you were expecting maybe a good movie, I want some of your drugs.
The question is - will it be a guilty pleasure (as Jackson could make it,) or an unendurably tedious, pompous grind full of exposition and people staring at computer screens? Probably the later, but we can hope that Jackson might at the very least recruit other talented hacks and make an enjoyable popcorn movie out of this otherwise disaster.
When we hash out arcane and irrelevent semantic distinctions, are we practicing an art or a science?
Well, it's a science because it's obsessed with extremely fine details.
On the other hand, you could consider it an art because it expresses, in an indirect way, our contempt for all the remotely relevant things we could be talking about.
Okay, when you old geezers were teenagers, in the era of VAC20 motherboards, did you know how semi-conductors actually *work*? A few teenagers did, a few teenagers do today, but you didn't need to know that, so most people who messed with computers didn't. A lor of you went to college and learned the QM, metallurgy, whatever there, so that's okay.
Fast forward to when I was a teenager - could I assemble a circuit board from scratch, did I know machine code or assembly language? Mostly I knew higher level languages - it was sufficient for what I wanted to do. And there were an order of magnitude more teenagers in my generation messing with computers than in the generation before, and that was a good thing. After I went to college I learned most of what I would've needed to know to mess with computers 20 years prior, so it isn't as if the knowledge is being lost; furthermore, the total number of teenagers who knew how to sotter a board together was probably higher in 1995 than it was in 1985, even if it was a smaller proportion of the total teenagers who had computers.
Nowadays you have these kids and they know html, they know how to use mIRC even if they don't even know what raw IRC instructions even are - they know how to use all this stuff that prior generations painstakingly built for them. It's sufficient for their purposes, that's great. And kids today - an order of magnitude more of them are using computers than ten years ago. When they go to school, if they're serious about it, they'll learn C, they'll learn some assembly, they'll learn how to build circuitry, they'll learn how semiconductors work.
The next generation may start out talking to their computers, whatever - I won't pretend to be able to predict the direction computers will take over the next decade, b/c I can look back in time and see that the predictions I would've made would've been pretty lousy. But, whatever it is, the skill sets of the young people will be suited to what they want to do, the minimum skillset to achieve any given end will be simpler to obtain (which is GOOD), and if they want to understand how all this stuff really works they'll go to college and they'll learn it there.
There's a core group of teenagers today who know just as much as I did - and in fact I think that group is probably larger than the similar cohort ten years ago, but as a proportion of total users, even total *skilled* users, the percentage of people who really know what is going on is dropping like a rock, okay, that's true. But it is healthy and good - a sign of ongoing progress.
Other activities do require licenses - and libraries do not have them, in general.
HOWEVER, it remains true that you do not need permission or a license to be a library. I could start renting out the books in my home library TODAY, without getting permission or a license of any kind.
So that means that once I buy the book, I can't resell it to someone else, since they lack this permission?
There is absolutely no license, in any sense of the word, involved. The activity of purchasing books and placing them in libraries is unregulated - meaning - no license or permission is required to do it.
I read several of those (not all of them, obviously), and I see him thoroughly dismantling the claims made in other bad science stories, which is fine and laudible.
However, each one appears to be dedicated to one (or perhaps two) bad science stories, and to the bad science therein.
I see, at least in the several that I had read, no mention of any aystematic study of the overall trends - let alone of the sort of analysis that would justify his claims in the most recent article.
He begins by claiming - and at this point no one familiar with it will argue - that science journalism is in a sorry state. He provides ample evidence of this, should anyone be inclined to disagree, and it is persuasive, as far as that goes.
The article then descends into a completely unsupported, purely imaginary tirade against the humanities, romanticism, "cultural relatvism"(by which he means what exactly?) and the hatred of science.
He ascribes to each and every philosopher, the entire community of writers, artists and historians, and of course journalists, a heart full of secret malice arising from the repressed awareness that they have made a fundamental mistake in turning their back on reason and objectivity, which they reject absolutely.
Does he have any evidence to back this, shall I put it lightly, extreme claim? He seems to believe it follows logically from the existence of bad science journalism, and maybe some anecdotal experiences he may have had (but doesn't much discuss) with jouranlists (N=1?)
While we're making up sinister motivations, he couldn't get anyone in the humanities to sleep with him in college, so they all must hate science. Especially this particular "science communicator" woman, who, despite the fact that he is good-looking, has turned him down. I offer this up purely to demonstrate how ridiculous his assertions are.
The article contributes in some small way to the (already overwhelming) body of evidence for the low quality of science journalism, and promotes a reasonable, but not particularly enlightening, classification scheme for bad science stories.
But does he go through the articles he has collected as "specimens" in any systematic way? Does he actually check the educational background of the authors? Try to find real causal relationships?
No, just like the bad science journalism he lambasts, he presents THE REASON that bad science journalism exists and expects us to believe it's true.
At the very end there is a tantalizing mention of the process by which university press releases are converted into news articles, along with some unsubstantiated claims (which I do not think are true, but I'd like to see some hard numbers) about the qualifications of the individuals involved at various stages of the process. If he'd thoroughly investigated that, reported what he'd found, and then given some kind discussion of that finding, maybe this would be an article worth reading.
There are plenty of vocational training progams in computers out there, if that's what you want, get one of those degrees, and not a BS in Comp. Sci..
There are numerous jobs available in high end, research grade computing. There may not be as many as there are CS graduates (for one thing many essentially require an advanced degree, as well,) but they exist, and they make heavy use of the cutting edge stuff, particularly what I do, which is in Biology.
That said, if a particular employer would rather hire someone with a narrow base of vocational training than someone with a broad range of training in complicated and mathematically rich sub-disciplines, for many jobs he's a fool. For a high end position, you desperately need people with, to be blunt, the capacity to actually think, which you can call by the buzzword of choice.
Developing an understanding of more advanced, and not immediately intuitive, techniques in CS *can*, although there is no guarantee, trigger someone to develop the needed mental faculties to work at a higher level.
Finally, the vocational level work is being oursourced to India anyway. I don't think that CS departments in the US and Britain are doing anyone a dis-service by training them to do something more than that.
" It is interesting to note the similar lack of benefit on cardiovascular outcomes even in the largest individual trials, regardless of whether the natural form of vitamin E was used, as in the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation Study,13 or a synthetic form, as in the Heart Protection Study.15"
Bullshit! It's like doing a study of OpenBSD's security on a machine in a biege colored box and then having someone complain that it's irrelevent because *my* machine comes from Alienware and the case is l33t.
Go back to wherever it was that you read about synthetic vitamin E being inferior to natural forms of vitamin E, and ask yourself: is this person trying to sell me natural vitamin E?
If the answer is YES, they suffer from a conflict of interest.
If the answer is NO, they are still nitwits with no understanding of basic chemistry.
Better yet, post links to the medical literature! It isn't as if it's hard to do.
The actual evidence of *any* health benefit from dosing people with anti-oxidants (as opposed to fruits and vegetebles, which contain many other things besides anti-oxidants, for example fiber) is non-existent.
In fact, it essentially proves that anti-oxidants either provide no benefit, or are bad for you.
Vitamin E and beta-carotene are both quite potent anti-oxidants (free radical scavengers.) Others are more or less potent, but Vitamin E and BC are both potent enough that you would see an effect if there is one.
Beta Carotene actually makes lung cancer appreciably *more* lethal - there is a good chance that this is because it is an anti-oxidant, and that pro-oxidants fight cancer.
The evidence that bleeding yourself with leeches is actually good for you is *far* more compelling than anything that has ever been delivered for anti-oxidants.
I'm not talking about the administration. University administrations have, yes, always been about bringing in money.
However, there are degrees of such things - many shades between a commitment to institutional goals of wealth and power and the higher ideals that the institution (ostensibly) serves. In recent years, there has been a shift on the part of administrators toward one end of the spectrum.
This has happened in the past - I'm sure you've read David Noble's Digital Diploma Mills, if you've any serious interest in the topic (if not, read it.) Long story short - the correspondence school movement was a revolting farce, and modern institutions are engaging in similar practices.
The "people involved in the endeavor" are the instructors, the researchers and of course the students. We are in the best position to keep the administration of a University honest.
There was a period, from about 1945 to 1980, when University education was essentially affordable, even at priveleged private schools. Supporting yourself (eating, finding a place to live, etc.) was more of an issue than paying for the education itself.
So, no, higher education has not *always* been a for-profit activity. However, in the absence of popular activism and resistance, and insistence on education as a fundamental right, not to mention a devotion to higher principles among the people engaged in the educational endeavor itself, that is what it will become.
The larger an animal, the more likely we are to *NOTICE* that it went extinct anywhere humans went. Something similar could be happening to various species of salamanders.
Now, suppose that it is true.
Very few (no?) large animals survived the extinction that wiped out the large dinosaurs. Does this demonstrate that humans ate them?
Even if is true that many large animals died off around 10K BC, this is still perfectly consistent with the ice age, and not humans, killing them off.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted.
Now how are you going to "properly vet" a mysterious black box, by which I mean anything other than open source software? Read the vendor's documentation so that you know they think it is secure? Try to hack it yourself?
I'll allow that there are a few private products with an established reputation for security solid enough that you'd consider taking their word even if the code hasn't been subject to public review.
Personally, I favor the following - vendors should be responsible for the security of any software they SELL. You can write anything you want, but if you charge money for it, you have to be liable if it doesn't work.
Would this tilt the field in favor of open-source software? Why, yes, so it would! How awful. Ah well.
Fine, fine, in the future I'll use a different example to illustrate what I mean here - that was copy and pasted from my post on the topic in about 2001.
That doesn't make amber, it just makes resin.
It also depends on what you mean by fossil - those 15 thousand year old samples are very chemically different from older fossils, although they are partially mineralized.
And the claim to have successfully extracted meaningful 15 mil. year old DNA has not stood up to independent verification - see the link to the literature in my other post. The one million year time frame assumes preservation of that sort - in the presence of nasty stuff it drops a great deal, I direct you to the same literature.
That is more or less what we are assuming, yes.
However, it is an entirely reasonable assumption as bones of an intermediary age show partial fossilization - the outer layers contain more silicon than the middle of the bone, which is still carbon. I don't recall the reference for this but if you dig around in the various talk.origins archives somebody has mentioned it.
This is a creationist troll, and the story in question is long discredited. Someone want to point this out as mod abuse?
m lm l
Anyway, read this:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.ht
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/flesh.ht
The point is - if it's long enough for a glass window to melt into a puddle (yes, glass is a liquid), it's definitely long enough for some jello to do likewise.
So even if you've got a mummy instead of a fossil, over the time span in which fossils form DNA is completely chewed to bits - especially given the pressures and temperatures needed to turn tree resin into amber.
Okay, it's true, after some huge amount of time there would still be some tiny amount of uncorrupted DNA left.
However, it may or may not be chemically different from the corrupted DNA - which, before it degrades entirely, has a good chance of degrading into other nucleic acid bases (or into things that might be degradation products of other nucleic acid bases.)
The *information content* is gone.
Put another way, suppose I take three million dictionaries, written in a language you do not know, and I scramble 99% of the letters. There are going to be a certain number of words left unscrambled. However, there are going to be roughly the same number (probably more) words formed completely at random.
Even if this unknown language is somewhat similar to english, if you look through the contents of these dictionaries for things similar to english words you are far more likely to find english words formed out of random letters than you are to find true cognates.
Now, I don't know *exactly* where the theoretical limit for recovering this information is - but kinetics indicate it should be at about 1 million years. It might be 10 million - but it isn't 65!
You misunderstand. The problem is not - how can I sequence this genome? That's relatively easy.
The problem is - this genome has become a randomized mixture of silicates, how can I recover the original information content? Well, I can grab whatever random stuff is there - with some super science that lets me turn the silicon back into carbon and whatever - and if I do so than at some point I'll find one where the information content happens to be preserved - but I have no way of identifying it! The odds are so low that I'll find just as many where the apparent DNA content has been randomly altered to look like some modern animal and it will *look* correct.
Hence, impossible and not merely very hard.
If you did that, you'd find the random DNA that happened to be most similar to current living things. There's no reason to think it would be similar to dinosaur DNA.
The DNA in the dinosaur bone (or mosquito), if there is any, is now essentially random - it contains no information content.
Well, I didn't do the calculations myself:
n re=article&eissn=1471-2954&volume=272&issue=1558&s page=3
"However, kinetic calculations predict that
small fragments of DNA (100-500 bp) will survive for no
more than 10 kyr in temperate regions and for a maximum
of 100 kyr at colder latitudes owing to hydrolytic damage
(Poinar et al. 1996; Smith et al. 2001). Even under ideal
conditions, amplifiable DNA is not thought to survive for
longer than 1 Myr." - see reference below
As to your proposal, if I make enough random DNA out of monomers, eventually one of those artificial chains will form a complete dinosaur chromosome. How, exactly, do you propose that I identify this perfect chromosome from among the population in my (absolutely enormous) sample?
Reference:
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?ge
For what you *can* do with fossil DNA, read this:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/39/13783
And they independently evolved beaks?
Emu are true birds, and related (albeit not terribly closely) to ostriches and rheas (which are not found in oceana) as well as kiwis and cassowaries (which are native to oceana). They are birds, not an independently evolved lineage of dinosaurs.
Since this comes up in every slashdot story on dinosaurs, no, Jurassic Park is not possible -
Fossilization occurs when carbon atoms are exchanged for silicon. There is a very high energy barrier to this chemical event - so it happens extremely slowly, over millions of years.
Nucleic acids, the building blocks of DNA, spontaneously decay (even in the absence of bacteria or degrading agents). The spontaneous decay of DNA is very slow by most standards - if kept under the proper conditions a DNA molecule can last for millennia. However, this spontaneous decay is a great deal faster than the exchange of carbon and silicon, especially when you consider that the carbon and silicon must exchange over the surface area of the sample (for example a bone several inches thick fossilizes very slowly from the outside in,) while the DNA is decaying continuously in the marrow. So, for a fossil millions of years old, even if you managed to recover something that looked like a nucleic acid base, it would be decayed to the point that the information content is completely gone.
As other insightful posters have already commented, this is, unfortunately, complete hype and an appointment with no substance to it, except POSSIBLY that he might influence decisions re: who is hired to do the actual work (see below).
This is unfortunate, because before he made good movies, Peter Jackson made awful movies which were FUN TO WATCH. The B movie tradition is strong even in his recent blockbusters.
Now, obviously, the Halo movie is going to be completely dreadful. If you were expecting maybe a good movie, I want some of your drugs.
The question is - will it be a guilty pleasure (as Jackson could make it,) or an unendurably tedious, pompous grind full of exposition and people staring at computer screens? Probably the later, but we can hope that Jackson might at the very least recruit other talented hacks and make an enjoyable popcorn movie out of this otherwise disaster.
When we hash out arcane and irrelevent semantic distinctions, are we practicing an art or a science?
Well, it's a science because it's obsessed with extremely fine details.
On the other hand, you could consider it an art because it expresses, in an indirect way, our contempt for all the remotely relevant things we could be talking about.
Tough one.
How about sarcasm? Art or science?
Okay, when you old geezers were teenagers, in the era of VAC20 motherboards, did you know how semi-conductors actually *work*? A few teenagers did, a few teenagers do today, but you didn't need to know that, so most people who messed with computers didn't. A lor of you went to college and learned the QM, metallurgy, whatever there, so that's okay.
Fast forward to when I was a teenager - could I assemble a circuit board from scratch, did I know machine code or assembly language? Mostly I knew higher level languages - it was sufficient for what I wanted to do. And there were an order of magnitude more teenagers in my generation messing with computers than in the generation before, and that was a good thing. After I went to college I learned most of what I would've needed to know to mess with computers 20 years prior, so it isn't as if the knowledge is being lost; furthermore, the total number of teenagers who knew how to sotter a board together was probably higher in 1995 than it was in 1985, even if it was a smaller proportion of the total teenagers who had computers.
Nowadays you have these kids and they know html, they know how to use mIRC even if they don't even know what raw IRC instructions even are - they know how to use all this stuff that prior generations painstakingly built for them. It's sufficient for their purposes, that's great. And kids today - an order of magnitude more of them are using computers than ten years ago. When they go to school, if they're serious about it, they'll learn C, they'll learn some assembly, they'll learn how to build circuitry, they'll learn how semiconductors work.
The next generation may start out talking to their computers, whatever - I won't pretend to be able to predict the direction computers will take over the next decade, b/c I can look back in time and see that the predictions I would've made would've been pretty lousy. But, whatever it is, the skill sets of the young people will be suited to what they want to do, the minimum skillset to achieve any given end will be simpler to obtain (which is GOOD), and if they want to understand how all this stuff really works they'll go to college and they'll learn it there.
There's a core group of teenagers today who know just as much as I did - and in fact I think that group is probably larger than the similar cohort ten years ago, but as a proportion of total users, even total *skilled* users, the percentage of people who really know what is going on is dropping like a rock, okay, that's true. But it is healthy and good - a sign of ongoing progress.
Other activities do require licenses - and libraries do not have them, in general.
HOWEVER, it remains true that you do not need permission or a license to be a library. I could start renting out the books in my home library TODAY, without getting permission or a license of any kind.
So that means that once I buy the book, I can't resell it to someone else, since they lack this permission?
There is absolutely no license, in any sense of the word, involved. The activity of purchasing books and placing them in libraries is unregulated - meaning - no license or permission is required to do it.
I read several of those (not all of them, obviously), and I see him thoroughly dismantling the claims made in other bad science stories, which is fine and laudible.
However, each one appears to be dedicated to one (or perhaps two) bad science stories, and to the bad science therein.
I see, at least in the several that I had read, no mention of any aystematic study of the overall trends - let alone of the sort of analysis that would justify his claims in the most recent article.
So, again, care to post links?
An article ought to stand on it's own, even if it is a column.
That said, post links?
He begins by claiming - and at this point no one familiar with it will argue - that science journalism is in a sorry state. He provides ample evidence of this, should anyone be inclined to disagree, and it is persuasive, as far as that goes.
The article then descends into a completely unsupported, purely imaginary tirade against the humanities, romanticism, "cultural relatvism"(by which he means what exactly?) and the hatred of science.
He ascribes to each and every philosopher, the entire community of writers, artists and historians, and of course journalists, a heart full of secret malice arising from the repressed awareness that they have made a fundamental mistake in turning their back on reason and objectivity, which they reject absolutely.
Does he have any evidence to back this, shall I put it lightly, extreme claim? He seems to believe it follows logically from the existence of bad science journalism, and maybe some anecdotal experiences he may have had (but doesn't much discuss) with jouranlists (N=1?)
While we're making up sinister motivations, he couldn't get anyone in the humanities to sleep with him in college, so they all must hate science. Especially this particular "science communicator" woman, who, despite the fact that he is good-looking, has turned him down. I offer this up purely to demonstrate how ridiculous his assertions are.
The article contributes in some small way to the (already overwhelming) body of evidence for the low quality of science journalism, and promotes a reasonable, but not particularly enlightening, classification scheme for bad science stories.
But does he go through the articles he has collected as "specimens" in any systematic way? Does he actually check the educational background of the authors? Try to find real causal relationships?
No, just like the bad science journalism he lambasts, he presents THE REASON that bad science journalism exists and expects us to believe it's true.
At the very end there is a tantalizing mention of the process by which university press releases are converted into news articles, along with some unsubstantiated claims (which I do not think are true, but I'd like to see some hard numbers) about the qualifications of the individuals involved at various stages of the process. If he'd thoroughly investigated that, reported what he'd found, and then given some kind discussion of that finding, maybe this would be an article worth reading.
There are plenty of vocational training progams in computers out there, if that's what you want, get one of those degrees, and not a BS in Comp. Sci..
There are numerous jobs available in high end, research grade computing. There may not be as many as there are CS graduates (for one thing many essentially require an advanced degree, as well,) but they exist, and they make heavy use of the cutting edge stuff, particularly what I do, which is in Biology.
That said, if a particular employer would rather hire someone with a narrow base of vocational training than someone with a broad range of training in complicated and mathematically rich sub-disciplines, for many jobs he's a fool. For a high end position, you desperately need people with, to be blunt, the capacity to actually think, which you can call by the buzzword of choice.
Developing an understanding of more advanced, and not immediately intuitive, techniques in CS *can*, although there is no guarantee, trigger someone to develop the needed mental faculties to work at a higher level.
Finally, the vocational level work is being oursourced to India anyway. I don't think that CS departments in the US and Britain are doing anyone a dis-service by training them to do something more than that.
" It is interesting to note the similar lack of benefit on cardiovascular outcomes even in the largest individual trials, regardless of whether the natural form of vitamin E was used, as in the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation Study,13 or a synthetic form, as in the Heart Protection Study.15"
Bullshit! It's like doing a study of OpenBSD's security on a machine in a biege colored box and then having someone complain that it's irrelevent because *my* machine comes from Alienware and the case is l33t.
Go back to wherever it was that you read about synthetic vitamin E being inferior to natural forms of vitamin E, and ask yourself: is this person trying to sell me natural vitamin E?
If the answer is YES, they suffer from a conflict of interest.
If the answer is NO, they are still nitwits with no understanding of basic chemistry.
Better yet, post links to the medical literature! It isn't as if it's hard to do.
The actual evidence of *any* health benefit from dosing people with anti-oxidants (as opposed to fruits and vegetebles, which contain many other things besides anti-oxidants, for example fiber) is non-existent.
= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1603028 0&query_hl=5
In fact, it essentially proves that anti-oxidants either provide no benefit, or are bad for you.
Vitamin E and beta-carotene are both quite potent anti-oxidants (free radical scavengers.) Others are more or less potent, but Vitamin E and BC are both potent enough that you would see an effect if there is one.
Vitamin E has demonstrably no benefit in fighting heart disease. But thanks for playing!
Beta Carotene actually makes lung cancer appreciably *more* lethal - there is a good chance that this is because it is an anti-oxidant, and that pro-oxidants fight cancer.
READ THIS REVIEW BEFORE YOU ARGUE WITH ME:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
The evidence that bleeding yourself with leeches is actually good for you is *far* more compelling than anything that has ever been delivered for anti-oxidants.
I'm not talking about the administration. University administrations have, yes, always been about bringing in money.
However, there are degrees of such things - many shades between a commitment to institutional goals of wealth and power and the higher ideals that the institution (ostensibly) serves. In recent years, there has been a shift on the part of administrators toward one end of the spectrum.
This has happened in the past - I'm sure you've read David Noble's Digital Diploma Mills, if you've any serious interest in the topic (if not, read it.) Long story short - the correspondence school movement was a revolting farce, and modern institutions are engaging in similar practices.
The "people involved in the endeavor" are the instructors, the researchers and of course the students. We are in the best position to keep the administration of a University honest.
There was a period, from about 1945 to 1980, when University education was essentially affordable, even at priveleged private schools. Supporting yourself (eating, finding a place to live, etc.) was more of an issue than paying for the education itself.
So, no, higher education has not *always* been a for-profit activity. However, in the absence of popular activism and resistance, and insistence on education as a fundamental right, not to mention a devotion to higher principles among the people engaged in the educational endeavor itself, that is what it will become.
I don't find that at all convincing.
The larger an animal, the more likely we are to *NOTICE* that it went extinct anywhere humans went. Something similar could be happening to various species of salamanders.
Now, suppose that it is true.
Very few (no?) large animals survived the extinction that wiped out the large dinosaurs. Does this demonstrate that humans ate them?
Even if is true that many large animals died off around 10K BC, this is still perfectly consistent with the ice age, and not humans, killing them off.