Unless the prizes change the way researchers are taught, throwing money at the problem isn't going to help. Scientists are taught how to make small incremental advances as students. It's a whole different ballgame when you're trying to solve something big.
When you elevate mediocrity to the stature of greatness, you lose the ability to discover and nurture greatness. There are some discoveries mediocre scientists will never make because they require too much of a leap from the known into the unknown. You can throw as many mediocre scientists as you'd like at that problem; it will never be solved until someone great comes along because it requires a new way of looking at things.
The alternative is that we all patent our basic discoveries and prevent anyone else from building upon or using them without paying a fee. I don't really like that alternative. You couldn't have built things like the web on that sort of model; too many inventions are involved and too many people would be seeking remuneration for them.
I thought Web 3.0 was supposed to be the Semantic Web. So now Web 3.0 is going to be like Web 2.0 but with more gatekeeping? Does that make the Semantic Web Web 4.0?
What do you do, follow me around and make jabs at my posts?:)
Anyway, as I said, the acronyms intrinsically mean little. What I did while I earned them means quite a bit. Aside from the fact that I've gained a great deal of knowledge and have refined my ability to generate ideas (so it means a lot to me), the tangible evidence of my knowledge (my work, publications, and awards) has also made me very desired on the job market (so it means a lot to employers), if perhaps not to the academic elite.
The book you posted seems interesting. The ironic thing is that you may be preaching to the choir, for I also think the current model of university education is outdated and inefficient - something I'm actively trying to change, though perhaps not in the same way you envision.
I was valedictorian of my undergraduate college. My time there wasn't challenging at all, and I often had to fill in the gaps my formal education left on my own. Following my graduation, I applied to several of the ivies - and some other good schools in my area - to do my Ph. D. I wanted a challenge. I was prepared to do a lot of work if it was required of me. I wanted to become the best researcher I could be, studying interesting problems under the best researchers in the field.
I was rejected from all of them (except Columbia, which would only accept me as an MS student in their engineering program, while I wanted to do scientific research). I am now in another easy school for my Ph. D., still not being challenged. I applied again after publishing some things and getting an MS after the first year of my Ph. D., with the same outcome. Since I can't imagine going through another Ph. D., my graduation from my current program is likely the endpoint of my formal education - and from start to finish, it has been inadequate, despite my wishes.
My point is that you presume that a choice always exists in the matter; that everyone who needs a challenge will receive one. Admission to a highly competitive school is not a sure thing, even with exceptional credentials, and there are many variables you cannot control in the process (I've heard that the existence of close ties between your professors and those in the school you're applying to is a particularly important one). Yes, perhaps I could have gotten in if I had decided to pursue my Ph. D. in, say, computer graphics, instead of the study of algorithms, or perhaps I could have gained admission to a competitive school on the other side of the country had I looked, but there's only so much you can ask someone to sacrifice when your dream schools are all right here, doing the work you want to do, and they won't take you.
That said, neither my BS or MS, nor my Ph. D. when I attain it, are worthless. The universities may not be prestigious and the degrees alone may not mean much, but what I've done while attaining them has given them worth beyond their stature.
At some point in the future, we can hope that this will occur while a thinker is still alive. It's not right that Galileo was persecuted throughout his life and only honored for his work posthumously. But I guess it's a start.
I don't think it has anything to do with textbooks. You remember people like Einstein, Newton, and von Neumann because of their ideas. You won't find new ideas in a textbook. Einstein himself said that reading too much ceases to be productive past a certain age (I forget the exact quote).
The important thing is to gather enough background knowledge to be able to come up with new ideas. That can be a lot or that can be a little, and it likely varies by person. It doesn't require absolute mastery of every nook in a field or combination of fields.
A lightning strike is also a one-time event, but that doesn't stop people from taking special precautions when a thunderstorm rolls around. The mere possibility that they will be spied on is enough to change people's behavior.
Particularly GBM, which seems to be the tumor they tested this on. The survival rates for that type are currently abysmal, and anything that raises them is welcome,.1% having side effects or not.
I still look forward to the day when I can have a BCI system interpret melodies and images running through my head, such that creating new works becomes a simple matter of imagining them, without having to go through the drudgery of writing the music or painting the picture.
Google also acquired many of their recent products, including Google Earth. If these big companies want to buy all of this stuff and release it to the public for free, however, I'm not going to complain:)
That's why I always thought the most successful treatments would be the ones that somehow exerted selective pressure to favor the weaker cells - those most vulnerable to a particular treatment, for example.
Failing that, an "ensemble method" is probably the way to go, since cells that survive that would have to be immune to the intersection of every treatment you're throwing at them.
Another idea that avoids the selectivity problem is to use things that cause cancerous cells to differentiate, rather than killing them off - that's what makes ATRA such a great therapy for acute promyelocytic leukemia, for example. Those sorts of things should probably become easier to find with advances in genetics and more targeted therapies. Other things that don't kill cancer cells but render them harmless, like angiogenesis inhibitors or telomerase antagonists, also offer promise, since either the cells are immune but can't complete the steps required for proliferation or they're not immune and are affected by the treatment (the problem is that cells sometimes have more than one way to do these things...).
If the school stops receiving income, that money is going to run out very quickly. Relying on fixed savings is not a fiscally responsible or sustainable model.
Schools do get income from other sources - endowments, grants, alumni donations - but it doesn't scale with the number of students they bring in and it isn't sufficient to fund the university's operations, else they would not require tuition.
The majority of universities are non-profit organizations. They're not charging tuition to rip students off. They're charging it because they need the funding for their continued existence and growth.
And the more universities exist, the more educated the population becomes, the more scientific research gets done, and ultimately, the more society benefits.
As someone who is looking to one day start a university, I would be personally interested in knowing how you propose to fund one without charging tuition.
Being given nothing for 7 hours a day - and being prevented from filling that time with your own productive work - will make you want to scream out of simple boredom after only a few weeks. I would often struggle just to stay awake. It sounds great, but it was awful.
True story: I went through the Google interview process for months, answering every question they threw at me correctly, but failed in one of the last round interviews because I couldn't recite the CYK algorithm from memory. It really hurt my view of the company and its hiring process - I don't think what they're looking for is actual programming ability.
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Unless the prizes change the way researchers are taught, throwing money at the problem isn't going to help. Scientists are taught how to make small incremental advances as students. It's a whole different ballgame when you're trying to solve something big.
But not at the expense of the former!
When you elevate mediocrity to the stature of greatness, you lose the ability to discover and nurture greatness. There are some discoveries mediocre scientists will never make because they require too much of a leap from the known into the unknown. You can throw as many mediocre scientists as you'd like at that problem; it will never be solved until someone great comes along because it requires a new way of looking at things.
The alternative is that we all patent our basic discoveries and prevent anyone else from building upon or using them without paying a fee. I don't really like that alternative. You couldn't have built things like the web on that sort of model; too many inventions are involved and too many people would be seeking remuneration for them.
I thought Web 3.0 was supposed to be the Semantic Web. So now Web 3.0 is going to be like Web 2.0 but with more gatekeeping? Does that make the Semantic Web Web 4.0?
I hate buzzwords.
What do you do, follow me around and make jabs at my posts? :)
Anyway, as I said, the acronyms intrinsically mean little. What I did while I earned them means quite a bit. Aside from the fact that I've gained a great deal of knowledge and have refined my ability to generate ideas (so it means a lot to me), the tangible evidence of my knowledge (my work, publications, and awards) has also made me very desired on the job market (so it means a lot to employers), if perhaps not to the academic elite.
The book you posted seems interesting. The ironic thing is that you may be preaching to the choir, for I also think the current model of university education is outdated and inefficient - something I'm actively trying to change, though perhaps not in the same way you envision.
I was valedictorian of my undergraduate college. My time there wasn't challenging at all, and I often had to fill in the gaps my formal education left on my own. Following my graduation, I applied to several of the ivies - and some other good schools in my area - to do my Ph. D. I wanted a challenge. I was prepared to do a lot of work if it was required of me. I wanted to become the best researcher I could be, studying interesting problems under the best researchers in the field.
I was rejected from all of them (except Columbia, which would only accept me as an MS student in their engineering program, while I wanted to do scientific research). I am now in another easy school for my Ph. D., still not being challenged. I applied again after publishing some things and getting an MS after the first year of my Ph. D., with the same outcome. Since I can't imagine going through another Ph. D., my graduation from my current program is likely the endpoint of my formal education - and from start to finish, it has been inadequate, despite my wishes.
My point is that you presume that a choice always exists in the matter; that everyone who needs a challenge will receive one. Admission to a highly competitive school is not a sure thing, even with exceptional credentials, and there are many variables you cannot control in the process (I've heard that the existence of close ties between your professors and those in the school you're applying to is a particularly important one). Yes, perhaps I could have gotten in if I had decided to pursue my Ph. D. in, say, computer graphics, instead of the study of algorithms, or perhaps I could have gained admission to a competitive school on the other side of the country had I looked, but there's only so much you can ask someone to sacrifice when your dream schools are all right here, doing the work you want to do, and they won't take you.
That said, neither my BS or MS, nor my Ph. D. when I attain it, are worthless. The universities may not be prestigious and the degrees alone may not mean much, but what I've done while attaining them has given them worth beyond their stature.
At some point in the future, we can hope that this will occur while a thinker is still alive. It's not right that Galileo was persecuted throughout his life and only honored for his work posthumously. But I guess it's a start.
I don't think it has anything to do with textbooks. You remember people like Einstein, Newton, and von Neumann because of their ideas. You won't find new ideas in a textbook. Einstein himself said that reading too much ceases to be productive past a certain age (I forget the exact quote).
The important thing is to gather enough background knowledge to be able to come up with new ideas. That can be a lot or that can be a little, and it likely varies by person. It doesn't require absolute mastery of every nook in a field or combination of fields.
I think so.
The pings can't travel faster than light speed either. The warning would arrive just as the GRB did.
Like it or not, there's nothing we can do to detect it early unless we suddenly figure FTL out. We won't know it until it's about to hit us.
The first rule of research is that more research is always needed. You don't see too many papers that end with "Yep, that's everything" :)
A lightning strike is also a one-time event, but that doesn't stop people from taking special precautions when a thunderstorm rolls around. The mere possibility that they will be spied on is enough to change people's behavior.
Particularly GBM, which seems to be the tumor they tested this on. The survival rates for that type are currently abysmal, and anything that raises them is welcome, .1% having side effects or not.
Thinking up ideas is not a competition :)
I still look forward to the day when I can have a BCI system interpret melodies and images running through my head, such that creating new works becomes a simple matter of imagining them, without having to go through the drudgery of writing the music or painting the picture.
Google also acquired many of their recent products, including Google Earth. If these big companies want to buy all of this stuff and release it to the public for free, however, I'm not going to complain :)
I understand your concern, but the value of the science doesn't depend on the journal it's submitted to and probably shouldn't be evaluated as such.
That's why I always thought the most successful treatments would be the ones that somehow exerted selective pressure to favor the weaker cells - those most vulnerable to a particular treatment, for example.
Failing that, an "ensemble method" is probably the way to go, since cells that survive that would have to be immune to the intersection of every treatment you're throwing at them.
Another idea that avoids the selectivity problem is to use things that cause cancerous cells to differentiate, rather than killing them off - that's what makes ATRA such a great therapy for acute promyelocytic leukemia, for example. Those sorts of things should probably become easier to find with advances in genetics and more targeted therapies. Other things that don't kill cancer cells but render them harmless, like angiogenesis inhibitors or telomerase antagonists, also offer promise, since either the cells are immune but can't complete the steps required for proliferation or they're not immune and are affected by the treatment (the problem is that cells sometimes have more than one way to do these things...).
(Disclaimer: IANAO)
You must be new here :)
I've noticed that they don't actually make much on their own anymore. They seem to much prefer acquisitions at this point.
If the school stops receiving income, that money is going to run out very quickly. Relying on fixed savings is not a fiscally responsible or sustainable model.
Schools do get income from other sources - endowments, grants, alumni donations - but it doesn't scale with the number of students they bring in and it isn't sufficient to fund the university's operations, else they would not require tuition.
The majority of universities are non-profit organizations. They're not charging tuition to rip students off. They're charging it because they need the funding for their continued existence and growth.
And the more universities exist, the more educated the population becomes, the more scientific research gets done, and ultimately, the more society benefits.
As someone who is looking to one day start a university, I would be personally interested in knowing how you propose to fund one without charging tuition.
You missed the part where I said I did it for 3 months? You must have skipped the boring part :)
Being given nothing for 7 hours a day - and being prevented from filling that time with your own productive work - will make you want to scream out of simple boredom after only a few weeks. I would often struggle just to stay awake. It sounds great, but it was awful.
True story: I went through the Google interview process for months, answering every question they threw at me correctly, but failed in one of the last round interviews because I couldn't recite the CYK algorithm from memory. It really hurt my view of the company and its hiring process - I don't think what they're looking for is actual programming ability.
I have one rule on process: it isn't a substitute for talent.
The firm that realizes that is golden in my book.