oh, and a bit of toxic light sensitive polymer that costs a few hundred dollars per liter and needs to be processed in a clean room...
Sarcasm aside, using paper to both drive the capillary action and do some basic separation in a microfluidic style device is a pretty neat idea. Sometimes researchers are so caught up in the cutting edge stuff that they forget the old methods which just work. Harvard professors aren't always turning to cheap pregnancy tests for inspiration. The photoresist could be replaced with some kind of ink and these things could be printed out pretty easily.
Shop classes are an amazingly good idea, and it's really too bad they've largely gone away. I've heard an argument for bringing them back from a number of conservative family members. Your overall argument that Republicans should be trying to guide the discussion of where infrastructure is improved is very good.
I think the reason we see fewer Americans interested in science is that we don't encourage those kids who are good at building things. If you're a good mechanic or machinist, it takes a surprisingly small amount of additional work to be a good scientist. Conversely, if you're simply good at math, it does not mean you have the personality to build and follow through on an experiment.
I don't know that computer programming will ever be a generally popular high school class, but shop was at my high school. The one area all us geeks and jocks got along in high school was shop. There's always respect for good workmanship.
A modern shop class would require good computers and software, and having access to the internet would be very helpful as well.
It would cost ~$100M to put a basic CNC mill in every high school in the country (20000 schools x $5000 hobby style CNC mills)... maybe double that to include a decent computer setup and software. The more important costs would probably be room space and teacher salary, which is where you really lose most of the Republicans.
Generally speaking, research grants are not technically awarded to the faculty (or student), but are awarded to the University and distributed from there. This gets around the "I don't technically work for the University" argument.
There are many different IP policies out there. If what is being offered you is really that bad, then go somewhere else. There are a few schools that don't screw over students (any more than they screw over the faculty). You've already noticed that as a student, you are very low on the University food chain, and that in general these rights are vastly expanded as you move up to postdoctoral researcher and professor. It's still not all roses though.
If you're worried about your non-research work, talk to your department. Professors deal with this all the time, and they'll tell you what to do to separate the university supported work from the personal work. It's usually not that hard.
If you really intend to commercialize your research, protect prior research or work in industry while also doing university research, you really should talk with a lawyer.
Chemical Engineers are fascinating to me. My wife is a ChemE, and got her PhD from one of the labs which did this work, but her specialization is cancer therapeutics and protein modification. To have that scientific breadth in the same lab seems crazy to me.
The actual paper can be found at Nature Nano, it's a few months old at this point. For all of you jealous researchers who claim to have already done this, it has all the usual citations. If you're lucky (and published), maybe you got one!
Most people here are programmers (broadly speaking). They like Cryptonomicon, it's about programmers. I found it long-winded and sub-par.
I'm a physicist. I (and other physicists I know who have read it) *loved* the Baroque cycle, even though it's far longer than Cryptonomicon. It's about physicists!
Keeping to this theme, Anathem is about intellectuals. If you live in the ivory tower (as I do) you'll probably understand right away why all the made up words are in there and find it entertaining.
I'm not sure how this applies to his earlier works. My wife is also a scientist and finds Snow Crash and Diamond Age unreadable, but likes his more recent work.
Testing well, not wanting to work as an engineer or scientist (good luck landing a good research position if that rumor starts getting around)... if you're lucky you have a future medical doctor on your hands.
My sister was the same way: intuitively good at science, but socially programmed to not like it (is this more common in women?). It looks like she's going to study medicine. After having multiple family members, then friends, then professors tell her that she was good at scientific thinking she gradually veered towards a field she could both enjoy and excel in. I think forcing her to study a hard science would have been a big mistake.
Just tell her that everyone changes their major (more or less true) and to take her time deciding what to do with her life.
I'm not sure a simple call to the patent office gets everything straitened out. There's a difference between being legally right and having the resources to use your legal rights in this case. Lawyers are expensive.
I'm not complaining about an employer getting all of the rights to an employees ideas. If you want to give that up, it's your business.
I am complaining about companies like I.V. patenting things they have no intention of using, particularly when their ideas are culled from the scientific literature. The New Yorker article from a few months ago linked to elsewhere makes it clear that's what they're doing. It means that working scientists have to hire lawyers to use our own work (I actually do own some of my own work, and it would be nice to do something with it).
These guys think that they're helping... but the people who do the work (I'm thinking of some poor grad student in a lab somewhere) to make a working device go to the patent office and discover that they don't have rights to their own work. It's wonderful.
If you don't (or can't) use a patent, at least make it free. A couple hours "brainstorming" should not trump a few years of hard work.
There is no substitute for teamwork. I don't work in a biologically clean environment, but I do sometimes work in a vacuum clean environment which requires that I avoid touching anything that isn't cleaned to go into a UHV chamber. Having a teammate to work in the "dirty" environment in the rest of the lab makes things much, much easier.
The progress of research is never perfectly predicable, and you're always going to find some surprise which needs immediate attention. Having another person there means you don't have to prepare in advance every possible command you may need a computer to run, plus a person can do things like answer the phone and sign for deliveries. It's also good practice for later in your scientific career when you'll have to train and trust your own students/interns/employees.
CTO often implies oversight of science as well as technology. This would be a very bad thing. The person in charge of IT, who makes technology recommendations to the FCC, and who advises the president on the future of computer technology should not be the same person who is in charge of the NIH, NSF and is advising the president on things like particle physics (and visa versa).
System administrators and physicists know the answer to that question. Do politicians? Anyone not knowing what a CTO is may find that it's "an executive position whose holder is focused on scientific and technical issues within an organization." Wikipedia also calls "Chief Science Officer" a synonym for CTO. So business people obviously don't know the difference.
The CTO has replaced the "Chief Scientist" in the boardroom. It could replace the National Science Adviser in the White House.
Would this be the same position as National Science Adviser? If it's a different position, who would be under whom? AAAS is pushing for a cabinet level scientist position. Bill Joy would be an insulting pick for that office. His fundamental misunderstanding of basic things like chemistry and physics (evident in his fear of grey goo) would be crippling. We already have enough charlatans in nanotechnology getting loads of money off of scaring the crap out of an uneducated public. Putting a guy like him in charge of the NSF funding would be disastrous to serious science.
It's a method of distributing power away from the central government. It's ultimately up to the local voter registrar to make the list of eligible voters living in their district. From a very cynical point of view, imagine if the kind of purges (or illegal additions to the voter rolls) which are sometimes seen on a local scale were done on a national scale from a controlling centralized office? What safeguards do you have the Netherlands to ensure that the central government cannot purge the voter rolls of... say, anyone with a foreign passport?
Of course, it's naive of me to think that the central government and parties here don't abuse the voter lists (and the registrars), and have some sort of control over them; but at least there is the appearance of a separation of powers.
Nationalized health care will apply the same to everyone... just like taxes, right?
If you think a nationalized health care system won't lead to taxes on unhealthy behavior, whether that's smoking cigarettes (already have that one) or eating mayonnaise, you haven't taken a critical look at the way our government operates. You can build up all the indignant rage you want, when it comes time to pass the budget 10 years from now, another "chemical being pushed on the American consumer" will find it's way onto a list of special taxes, and we'll all find out that ground beef now carries a $0.50/lb health tax. Revenue streams are never ignored.
At a lab I used to work at, we had problems with IT shutting down communication between various instruments we had because they used "non-standard" ports (they looked like viruses to an automated snooper).
After fighting that for a few years, we just took the whole lab off of the network (no access to school network or internet). We put in a server (managed by the IT people, with all the encryption and security they wanted) which was connected to the school network (and the internet) and to which we could upload data from the lab. Laptops could still be used to access e-mail and the internet, but could not run experiments.
I imagine if you came to your IT people with a plan for good physical security, an explanation of what you're working on and a plan to isolate yourself from any patient data, they would be happy to help you. They're there to make your life easier, not harder.
Perhaps the greatest company in the world. McMaster has a huge inventory, reasonable prices, quick delivery and an easy to use website. If you want gears, machinable material, welding supplies, or anything else a kinetic sculptor would need, you should find it there.
If medical journals are publishing bad research, that's a problem with medicine. Real science doesn't take three years to peer review and real science is usually (iteratively) correct. Medical research is more similar to social science these days than physical science. The reliance on large samples of different people to smear out inconsistencies in data is a mark of poor understanding of the system they're studying. It's fine to use this method, but it needs to be differentiated from science in general.
If it's truly the case that most medical research is wrong, then medical doctors need to sit down with economists, psychologists and other social scientists who understand how to properly evaluate and weight human data.
It's just the way it is. From my (academic) point of view, it's very nice that one of the major nanotech companies was founded by an academic, is run by academics and treats their academic research partners well.
We've been through ~20 years of unsuccessful carbon nanotube startups and failed projects from large corporations, it's time for us to produce something useful. Frankly, there are a few more patent trolls that need to be bought out before we're able to do that.
If you want, you can get nanotubes (in multiple forms, including buckypaper) from Unidym. This is the company which was founded by Richard Smalley. They've spent the last decade basically buying up patents and companies working with carbon nanotubes (in addition to doing their own research). If the Florida State guys have anything which isn't already covered by a Unidym patent, they'll just get bought up, or brought in, or something like that. Unidym seems to like collecting academic research partners.
It's also less efficient at producing chemical energy than a solar cell, saltwater and some silver wire. Photosynthesis has a limitation in that it can't lead to the degradation of DNA or destroy the other components of the cell. Chlorophyll only lasts a few months before it's turned to mush by dissipating too much light as heat. The newest inorganic catalysts start with what chlorophyll does, then get rid of the limitations.
I'll add my voice to those complaining of rampant idiocy here.
This can be done, has been done, for decades (for much, much longer by plants). It's a very good idea, and more people should be trying it. It would be nice if those people had enough scientific know-how to understand why inorganic catalysts are a good idea (biocatalysts break down very easily, cost energy to remake, are not as efficient).
The basic test is: Is your complicated bio system more or less efficient than sticking a wire from a cheap solar cell into some solution and generating fuel electrochemically? Catalysis is still thermodynamic, so you're going to take an efficiency hit at each stage of that complicated process.
My favorite part of their website is where they talk about the "intense" light energy needed to split an oxygen off of CO2. It's a good thing we're not exposing ourselves to this "intense" light radiation!
Slashdot Mirror
paper and tape, that's all!
oh, and a bit of toxic light sensitive polymer that costs a few hundred dollars per liter and needs to be processed in a clean room...
Sarcasm aside, using paper to both drive the capillary action and do some basic separation in a microfluidic style device is a pretty neat idea. Sometimes researchers are so caught up in the cutting edge stuff that they forget the old methods which just work. Harvard professors aren't always turning to cheap pregnancy tests for inspiration. The photoresist could be replaced with some kind of ink and these things could be printed out pretty easily.
Shop classes are an amazingly good idea, and it's really too bad they've largely gone away. I've heard an argument for bringing them back from a number of conservative family members. Your overall argument that Republicans should be trying to guide the discussion of where infrastructure is improved is very good.
I think the reason we see fewer Americans interested in science is that we don't encourage those kids who are good at building things. If you're a good mechanic or machinist, it takes a surprisingly small amount of additional work to be a good scientist. Conversely, if you're simply good at math, it does not mean you have the personality to build and follow through on an experiment.
I don't know that computer programming will ever be a generally popular high school class, but shop was at my high school. The one area all us geeks and jocks got along in high school was shop. There's always respect for good workmanship.
A modern shop class would require good computers and software, and having access to the internet would be very helpful as well.
It would cost ~$100M to put a basic CNC mill in every high school in the country (20000 schools x $5000 hobby style CNC mills) ... maybe double that to include a decent computer setup and software. The more important costs would probably be room space and teacher salary, which is where you really lose most of the Republicans.
Generally speaking, research grants are not technically awarded to the faculty (or student), but are awarded to the University and distributed from there. This gets around the "I don't technically work for the University" argument.
There are many different IP policies out there. If what is being offered you is really that bad, then go somewhere else. There are a few schools that don't screw over students (any more than they screw over the faculty). You've already noticed that as a student, you are very low on the University food chain, and that in general these rights are vastly expanded as you move up to postdoctoral researcher and professor. It's still not all roses though.
If you're worried about your non-research work, talk to your department. Professors deal with this all the time, and they'll tell you what to do to separate the university supported work from the personal work. It's usually not that hard.
If you really intend to commercialize your research, protect prior research or work in industry while also doing university research, you really should talk with a lawyer.
This is Rancho Bernardo? That's not exactly the inner city. Maybe charge $2 more per seat at the football games and have a properly funded Calc class.
Chemical Engineers are fascinating to me. My wife is a ChemE, and got her PhD from one of the labs which did this work, but her specialization is cancer therapeutics and protein modification. To have that scientific breadth in the same lab seems crazy to me.
The actual paper can be found at Nature Nano, it's a few months old at this point. For all of you jealous researchers who claim to have already done this, it has all the usual citations. If you're lucky (and published), maybe you got one!
Most people here are programmers (broadly speaking). They like Cryptonomicon, it's about programmers. I found it long-winded and sub-par.
I'm a physicist. I (and other physicists I know who have read it) *loved* the Baroque cycle, even though it's far longer than Cryptonomicon. It's about physicists!
Keeping to this theme, Anathem is about intellectuals. If you live in the ivory tower (as I do) you'll probably understand right away why all the made up words are in there and find it entertaining.
I'm not sure how this applies to his earlier works. My wife is also a scientist and finds Snow Crash and Diamond Age unreadable, but likes his more recent work.
Testing well, not wanting to work as an engineer or scientist (good luck landing a good research position if that rumor starts getting around)... if you're lucky you have a future medical doctor on your hands.
My sister was the same way: intuitively good at science, but socially programmed to not like it (is this more common in women?). It looks like she's going to study medicine. After having multiple family members, then friends, then professors tell her that she was good at scientific thinking she gradually veered towards a field she could both enjoy and excel in. I think forcing her to study a hard science would have been a big mistake.
Just tell her that everyone changes their major (more or less true) and to take her time deciding what to do with her life.
I'm not sure a simple call to the patent office gets everything straitened out. There's a difference between being legally right and having the resources to use your legal rights in this case. Lawyers are expensive.
I'm not complaining about an employer getting all of the rights to an employees ideas. If you want to give that up, it's your business.
I am complaining about companies like I.V. patenting things they have no intention of using, particularly when their ideas are culled from the scientific literature. The New Yorker article from a few months ago linked to elsewhere makes it clear that's what they're doing. It means that working scientists have to hire lawyers to use our own work (I actually do own some of my own work, and it would be nice to do something with it).
These guys think that they're helping... but the people who do the work (I'm thinking of some poor grad student in a lab somewhere) to make a working device go to the patent office and discover that they don't have rights to their own work. It's wonderful.
If you don't (or can't) use a patent, at least make it free. A couple hours "brainstorming" should not trump a few years of hard work.
There is no substitute for teamwork. I don't work in a biologically clean environment, but I do sometimes work in a vacuum clean environment which requires that I avoid touching anything that isn't cleaned to go into a UHV chamber. Having a teammate to work in the "dirty" environment in the rest of the lab makes things much, much easier.
The progress of research is never perfectly predicable, and you're always going to find some surprise which needs immediate attention. Having another person there means you don't have to prepare in advance every possible command you may need a computer to run, plus a person can do things like answer the phone and sign for deliveries. It's also good practice for later in your scientific career when you'll have to train and trust your own students/interns/employees.
CTO often implies oversight of science as well as technology. This would be a very bad thing. The person in charge of IT, who makes technology recommendations to the FCC, and who advises the president on the future of computer technology should not be the same person who is in charge of the NIH, NSF and is advising the president on things like particle physics (and visa versa).
System administrators and physicists know the answer to that question. Do politicians? Anyone not knowing what a CTO is may find that it's "an executive position whose holder is focused on scientific and technical issues within an organization." Wikipedia also calls "Chief Science Officer" a synonym for CTO. So business people obviously don't know the difference.
The CTO has replaced the "Chief Scientist" in the boardroom. It could replace the National Science Adviser in the White House.
Would this be the same position as National Science Adviser? If it's a different position, who would be under whom? AAAS is pushing for a cabinet level scientist position. Bill Joy would be an insulting pick for that office. His fundamental misunderstanding of basic things like chemistry and physics (evident in his fear of grey goo) would be crippling. We already have enough charlatans in nanotechnology getting loads of money off of scaring the crap out of an uneducated public. Putting a guy like him in charge of the NSF funding would be disastrous to serious science.
It's a method of distributing power away from the central government. It's ultimately up to the local voter registrar to make the list of eligible voters living in their district. From a very cynical point of view, imagine if the kind of purges (or illegal additions to the voter rolls) which are sometimes seen on a local scale were done on a national scale from a controlling centralized office? What safeguards do you have the Netherlands to ensure that the central government cannot purge the voter rolls of... say, anyone with a foreign passport?
Of course, it's naive of me to think that the central government and parties here don't abuse the voter lists (and the registrars), and have some sort of control over them; but at least there is the appearance of a separation of powers.
Nationalized health care will apply the same to everyone... just like taxes, right?
If you think a nationalized health care system won't lead to taxes on unhealthy behavior, whether that's smoking cigarettes (already have that one) or eating mayonnaise, you haven't taken a critical look at the way our government operates. You can build up all the indignant rage you want, when it comes time to pass the budget 10 years from now, another "chemical being pushed on the American consumer" will find it's way onto a list of special taxes, and we'll all find out that ground beef now carries a $0.50/lb health tax. Revenue streams are never ignored.
At a lab I used to work at, we had problems with IT shutting down communication between various instruments we had because they used "non-standard" ports (they looked like viruses to an automated snooper).
After fighting that for a few years, we just took the whole lab off of the network (no access to school network or internet). We put in a server (managed by the IT people, with all the encryption and security they wanted) which was connected to the school network (and the internet) and to which we could upload data from the lab. Laptops could still be used to access e-mail and the internet, but could not run experiments.
I imagine if you came to your IT people with a plan for good physical security, an explanation of what you're working on and a plan to isolate yourself from any patient data, they would be happy to help you. They're there to make your life easier, not harder.
Perhaps the greatest company in the world. McMaster has a huge inventory, reasonable prices, quick delivery and an easy to use website. If you want gears, machinable material, welding supplies, or anything else a kinetic sculptor would need, you should find it there.
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
If medical journals are publishing bad research, that's a problem with medicine. Real science doesn't take three years to peer review and real science is usually (iteratively) correct. Medical research is more similar to social science these days than physical science. The reliance on large samples of different people to smear out inconsistencies in data is a mark of poor understanding of the system they're studying. It's fine to use this method, but it needs to be differentiated from science in general.
If it's truly the case that most medical research is wrong, then medical doctors need to sit down with economists, psychologists and other social scientists who understand how to properly evaluate and weight human data.
George Soros and a failed hedge fund investor. With those guys backing Linux, it's bound to succeed, right?
It's just the way it is. From my (academic) point of view, it's very nice that one of the major nanotech companies was founded by an academic, is run by academics and treats their academic research partners well.
We've been through ~20 years of unsuccessful carbon nanotube startups and failed projects from large corporations, it's time for us to produce something useful. Frankly, there are a few more patent trolls that need to be bought out before we're able to do that.
If you want, you can get nanotubes (in multiple forms, including buckypaper) from Unidym. This is the company which was founded by Richard Smalley. They've spent the last decade basically buying up patents and companies working with carbon nanotubes (in addition to doing their own research). If the Florida State guys have anything which isn't already covered by a Unidym patent, they'll just get bought up, or brought in, or something like that. Unidym seems to like collecting academic research partners.
It's also less efficient at producing chemical energy than a solar cell, saltwater and some silver wire. Photosynthesis has a limitation in that it can't lead to the degradation of DNA or destroy the other components of the cell. Chlorophyll only lasts a few months before it's turned to mush by dissipating too much light as heat. The newest inorganic catalysts start with what chlorophyll does, then get rid of the limitations.
I'll add my voice to those complaining of rampant idiocy here.
This can be done, has been done, for decades (for much, much longer by plants). It's a very good idea, and more people should be trying it. It would be nice if those people had enough scientific know-how to understand why inorganic catalysts are a good idea (biocatalysts break down very easily, cost energy to remake, are not as efficient).
The basic test is: Is your complicated bio system more or less efficient than sticking a wire from a cheap solar cell into some solution and generating fuel electrochemically? Catalysis is still thermodynamic, so you're going to take an efficiency hit at each stage of that complicated process.
My favorite part of their website is where they talk about the "intense" light energy needed to split an oxygen off of CO2. It's a good thing we're not exposing ourselves to this "intense" light radiation!