I don't think it's possible to be successful without being excellent in more than one field. There is always someone out there who knows a bit more than you, has better resources than you, or can work harder than you. The certain way you can distinguish yourself from competition is by being good at more than one thing.
I'm a PhD scientist many years removed now from school. I'm reminded daily that I have spent more time learning about business and biology than I spent on my Physics PhD. If becoming an expert takes ~5 years of focused work, you can become an expert in a lot of fields.
Colorimetric sensor arrays are not new by any stretch of the imagination. There are several companies that make and sell them, many using "nanostructures" to boost something (usually the markup). We've been through food freshness, fruit ripeness, coffee roast detection, wine quality... Some of these are worth the $0.05 sensor and $1.00 labor required to package with the food, and some are not, but detecting these things is not a problem.
More and more, I'm seeing academic scientists demonstrate a lack of understanding of what real world problems and opportunities are. Someone in the academic grant backed research machine needs to have an eye on what's happened prior to recently published literature (and maybe look at what happens outside the literature too). 15 years seems to be the horizon of forgetfullness.
That's exactly what we're trying to do at my company for exactly that reason.
I am a manager, and I need to talk to way too many people every day. I hate repeating the same conversation over and over. And I really hate when people feel like they're out of the loop because they didn't get a chance to be in on an important conversation. Still, we're a small company, need to move fast, and simply can't schedule absolutely everything that needs to happen.
The solution is that the management needs to be out in the open and accessible at most times. A couple conference rooms with doors are all we need; most conversations I have shouldn't be hidden.
I'm also the technical lead at my company. The folks I manage under no circumstances want to work the way I have to. They want solid blocks of time with no interruptions. I want them to have that too!
I'm also the founder of my company. That is why these things can happen here and why our business folks understand the value of the technical team's culture.
When novels became popular and widely available in the 1800s, they were absolutely considered disruptive wastes of time.
Each of these things are different; it's not helpful to list the trivial differences. Smart phones are different than video games were different than TV is different than radio is different than comics were different than novels...
The author of TFA states that psychological trends in teens today haven't been seen since just after the Great Depression. She then notes that teens today came of age in the Great Recession. After letting that obvious connection go without discussion she turns to describe how smart phones have caused this.
It seems wrong to look at psychological trends that can be seen in other times of acute financial stress and not address the role of recent acute financial stress. She does question whether the link of depression to screen time is a cause or an effect: it's no known whether unhappy people use phones more or phone use leads to more unhappy people. It is clear that her data shows that teenagers who had smartphones, but entered high school before 2012, don't follow these psychological trends.
Seed funding for new startups is down. No need to qualify for Silicon Valley. This isn't a geographically isolated problem, or a problem with a single field. It's a national pattern that is also present in biotech, hardware, services, etc.
This is very significant. Generally, small businesses growing into medium and large business drive the economic growth of the country and account for most of the new job creation. Last year, we were already at a 30 year low for population adjusted rates of small business creation (last time it was this bad was stagflation in the 70s).
Did you read the article? The author never uses the words "fake journal," but he talks a lot about peer review. Two of the journals that did a real peer review of his "paper" didn't reject it. Editors passing peer review comments through without reading them, and reviewers doing a (very) cursory read of the paper are not uncommon issues in scientific publishing in real journals.
Think for a minute about what "real" and "fake" mean when we're talking about journals. Two journals here got real reviews from scientists and didn't reject a clearly bad paper. That happens at real journals, even good journals. It's probably not what you think it is. Look at the editorial boards of some of these journals, go ahead and check to see if some of those professors list the journal affiliation on their CV. This is not a couple of scammers from outside of the scientific community.
I'm not saying "science" is fake; I am a scientist. Nor do I want MORE public mistrust of science. I'm saying the pressures that result in these fake journals getting scientists to work for them, submit papers, pay high fees, and put forth low quality work are also driving most real scientific journals, and absolutely impact what we chose to work on (get funded to work on). To ignore that is dangerous.
Maybe you should read the article. The author is pretty clear that peer review practices are his focus here.
The author actually got back four reviews. Two reviewers didn't catch that this was a joke, two did. The editor who handled the two reviews that caught the joke passed them right back to the author with a request to revise. Those aren't dog's doing this, those are scientists.
You can call these journals "fake" or just acknowledge that low end journal editors and reviewers generally don't execute at a high level. In either case, these journals do have scientists working for them as editors and reviewers, but the expected outcomes don't align with what the process promises.
The view that "peer review is bullshit" is a simplified version of a commonly held view among professional scientists (I am one). It is unfortunate that anti-science political forces also have this type of view, but "science" does have some serious problems, and many of us think that peer review as it is used now is largely to blame.
There is a strong argument that prestige publishing style peer review (i.e. Science and Nature) has been detrimental to scientific progress. The root of the argument is that peer review went wrong when the purpose went from trying to determine whether the research was right to whether it was prestigious enough to match the impact factor of the journal. This is a transition that happened relatively recently, only in the last 30 years or so. Unfortunately, most people in science have now locked their career advancement on to increasing their publication impact factor, so it is very difficult to change even when many agree that it's leading to distortion of data, hype, falsification, poor scientific discipline, encouraging predatory publishing practices (as here), etc... More importantly, for me, the idea that scientists should be optimizing research projects to gather citations is not well aligned with what we should be doing: answering fundamental scientific questions and improving the world.
If you dig in to some of what the author of this "sting" operation has written over the last 4 years, you'll see some of the arguments about this. The real discussion is much more nuanced and scientific than "peer review is bullshit," but that blunt approach is appropriate for Slashdot.
The Hollywood Reporter has done a series of good articles on this... worth searching through what's been reported over the last year, it's amazing. There's a mysteriously killed Chinese billionaire, a Silicon Valley inventor giving away his IP because he thinks it's worthless (and it was worthless until the Oscar won by the guys using it), and a ton of extremely shady lawyers.
Both Perlman and LaSalle have been screwed over here, and they both deserve some of the blame for this. Neither one appears to have understood how to commercialize the technology. They were good friends, but they were not able to separate the ups and downs of friendship from their business relationship.
Is he making a concerted effort to reach outside of his bubble? Do you really feel like those words belong to this situation? Does this look like reaching out, really?
If you're bringing your bubble (and your rules) with you to visit where other people are, you're not making a real effort to get outside your bubble. That's exactly why he's being criticized here. The level of PR control over the interaction is the problem.
I love politics, and think more people should be involved. To do that well requires that you have real interactions with people. There are plenty of things he could do that would get him real life experience and serve a political purpose: Buy a farm and try to run it well. Be quirky maybe, and lead a fleet of electric bikes across the country. Hike the Appalachian trail. Join a search and rescue team... or just Rotary or Kiwanis. He's volunteered a bit around the Bay Area at Boy's and Girl's Club, I think, just go visit one of those in each state for a few days.
Roaming the country with a team of handlers is not helpful.
I'm pretty darned self-actualized at work. I have a very challenging and intellectually rewarding job (I'm a scientist with my own small business). I chose this after trying out a string of jobs that paid much better and came with more professional recognition, but didn't make me feel like I was actually useful. While at those other jobs I spent a lot of time on hobbies like gardening, cooking, and fiddling around with projects in my garage. I don't find I have the need or the desire to do that right now, because I don't need my social life to make me feel like I'm accomplishing something.
Choosing the correct career and job for yourself at the current particular moment is much more helpful than having the right hobbies. It makes balancing work and life easier (because social responsibilities are real) and is a must if you want to raise kids, work, and maintain your sanity simultaneously.
I wish this person had logged in to respond to my comment.
There is a difference between academic collaboration, that carries with it added resources and funding, and making a decision to change the tooling in your lab. When AFMs are standard in biology labs, then it's an acceptable biology tool. Right now, they're an acceptable tool for an engineer or physicist to use when helping a biologist. That's very good, but we're not all the way there.
Another way to look at this is that there are no collaborators for ELISA or western blot on the team. Those are standard tools. When the same is true of these new techniques, the culture will have been switched.
It's our responsibility as physicists to maintain our reputations. That's generally done by covering our ears, closing our eyes and saying "LA LA LA LA" really loud whenever anyone starts talking about complex and interesting problems in the other sciences. (It's either that, or claim to have "already solved that problem 50 years ago.") I forgot to do that once, and now I work with biologists every day.
I'm a physicist working on tools that quantitatively measure biologic interactions. A common use for my tools is for a pharma company to take a set of molecules that they have determined through modeling will interact (inhibit activity, enhance activity, etc.) with a target protein and we measure whether that actually happens directly at the molecular level.
So why hasn't this been done before?
Biology is not just complex, it's also very often overgeneralized and poorly understood. It's dogma (literally) in biology that a cell using a particular sequence of DNA to build a protein will always build the same protein. This is not true. Two "identical" proteins are almost certainly chemically different. Biology to date has dealt with collections and statistical averages of protein function and genetic activity. The measurements used to work in biology, to date, use simplified environments (gels, buffers, simplified model organisms) and reporting methods that interfere with the molecular function of the biological system (fluorescence, dye binding), but these methods and approaches have been necessary to make progress.
At this point, most biologists either have forgotten, or never appreciated, that these systems are measuring secondary effects and generalizations of true biological function. Convincing them that a quantitative, direct, math-and-physics based approach to biology can produce helpful information is an enormous cultural challenge. When presented with data showing that a correlative measurement (i.e. fluorescence) disagrees with a direct physics based measurement (i.e. an electronic biosensor), biologists will tend to believe the secondary measurement over the direct measurement.
As direct measurement tools and simulations become more widely used, there will need to be a change in the way biologists think about their measurements, and that's not going to be a comfortable thing for them. There is an opportunity for folks in computational and physical science to lead the way and show them that our approaches to problem solving are valid and helpful.
This is a real non-sequitur you're bringing up, and it seems a lot like advertising copy rather than a real argument.
There is a history in California higher education journalism of comparing the amount spent per inmate against the amount spent per UC student. It used to be that the state spent more per student than per inmate. Then the combined expenditure of the state and the student was more than the amount spent per inmate, Then the total amount spent per student at UC from all sources was less than the amount the state spent per inmate. This is an extension of that argument using a school that spends much more per student than UC. The "list cost" as you say of attending Harvard is high, and is an appropriate metric for comparison here, particularly when you have an understanding of the history of the argument.
If you want to get into a debate over how various universities cater to diverse economic classes, this may not be the place for that discussion. Step one in that debate really should be finding some third party data. I know you're actually right that Harvard is affordable (on average only about $1k more per year than a UC), but you're referencing marketing material, not data, and touting it makes you less credible.
Or, you know, things going underneath the car like debris, potholes, rocks, curbs... have you ever seen the aftermath of a car accident? Things can get really screwed up.
If they can turn this idea into a battery (they haven't yet), then that would get them to proof of concept.
If that battery works for more than a few days without a re-fill, that might allow this scheme to work from a practical point of view.
If the electrolyte can be made to not be toxic, then they might avoid environmental issues.
If I had to guess, this is an SBIR shop, and not a legit company (they're going to be selling research papers to grant managers, not batteries to consumers).
Anyone who has owned a Surface knows that the keyboard is not an issue. If you need one, you get one. In general, all these minor complaints mask the fact that the Surface is a great business oriented laptop, it's great for graphics, documents, meetings... with one large longstanding problem.
THE issue with the Surface line is power. Does the power button work for more than a year? Does the charger connector still snap into place? Is the battery crap? Can you tell the difference between any of these problems? Without power the thing doesn't work at all. I've taken apart old laptops to recover data, and fix bad power connectors, but that's not a real option with the way the Surface is constructed.
Keyboards!? That's a trivial issue. This is like complaining about the color of your Tesla while the battery is on fire.
I've studied olfaction, and this just doesn't seem right. This olfactory bulb argument seems like a straw man that no one in the field has been using since... the 19th century. Digging in to the article a bit, it seems the authors of the actual study agree with me, and are using different odors for humans to balance out some of our... differences. Their main point (which is right) is that the human sense of smell is much better than most people realize, and that you can be trained to follow a scent trail, distinguish similar odors, and notice the cognitive effects scent has on you. Anyone who has experimentally studied olfaction for a few years will notice themselves gaining these abilities (it goes away quickly when you're not smelling things professionally several hours a day).
So why is this summary so wrong?
First off, humans only have 400 different olfactory receptors, it doesn't matter if genetics say you should have 1000, you only get 400 (genotype =/= phenotype). Second, you have less "sensor" surface area than other mammals in real terms, not scaled for size. Third, you lack the ability to concentrate scent molecules by varying your rate of breathing like other mammals (this can be overcome by varying breathing through your mouth and nose, but other mammals don't have to do this).
If you read the details on the money he's offering (called the "90/10 Rule"), it's 50% to 90% of the cost to build new software and 50% to 75% of the cost to maintain it, with theoretically the rest to be provided by your state...?
I appreciate that they're trying to get something going, and they're working within some insane limits put on them by contradictory mandates, but this is not a proposal to get quality work done. Implying this is a good deal does not help his credibility. This is a proposal for charity work (which is fine... just don't pretend this is a deal VCs are going to jump on).
It's a hard world, but real quality work requires a financial return of a multiple of the cost to make something, not a fraction of the cost to make something.
I think you can blame those guys. It's not "just" responding to an RFP. Because of my work title, I get marketing and sales calls from the business end of these companies all the time (they want to convince me I need to put out an RFP, and that they can help write it). Trying to game the sales/business process isn't new, and could be considered firmly American. Where they lose me are the arguments that engineering labor is a commodity and that my business culture is less important than labor cost.
Now, keep in mind that I have never asked for anything from them. They come to me and my business partners making these arguments early and often to get us thinking about engineering a certain way. Enough effort like this can shift the standards in a field. They have made a concerted effort to set the standard for software to treat most programmers as commodities. Ultimately this is the problem. The standards they set for the field culturally and economically are not in the best interests of either the workers or the owners.
Also, they make it harder for me to get my PhD scientists H1-Bs when they need them.
This topic comes up pretty regularly, and it always amazes me that there is not an appreciation that nearly everyone in science and engineering has to work through unknowns in development on a schedule, and we've all adapted.
I work on developing a product that integrates a lot of different fields. I work with various engineers, physicists, biologists, chemists, and programmers. All of them have tasks that are impossible to estimate time and cost for with 100% certainty. That's an unreasonable bar to set. Many of them have tasks that may simply be impossible with current levels of technology.
We work out a schedule and budget, because otherwise we can't move forward on development, or understand when the amount of resources required to finish the project will be more than the end value of the end product. We have some basic research grants and the government requires a schedule, budget, and regular reports for blue sky research as well. We produce some lab equipment for pharmaceutical companies. Those guys have scheduling and budgeting challenges that make a lot of engineering projects look easy.
My team trusts that I will only change requirements for good reason, and will adjust resources and schedule to reflect reality as we progress. This adjustment for reality works the other way too. I trust them to understand that there are finite resources and time available to attempt a project, and if something isn't working out, it's getting cut.
Man, I thought this was a pretty simple concept, obviously I was wrong. My post comes from my experiences biking to work, and then deciding that other things were more important, so I stopped. These are really simple things like picking my kids up from school, or being able to meet at a client's business. Yes, I absolutely could have found other people to handle those things, but it was more important to me to be able to rely upon myself alone in those situations than it was to bike to work.
The point of TFA was that biking lowers stress. I think that accepting stress into your life reduces your ability to bike.
My comments have to do with why I no longer bike to work.
My point (and it's borne out by many of these responses) is that a stress free life allows biking to work, not the other way around. You clearly don't understand what I'm talking about, but that's great for you, enjoy it!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's possible to be successful without being excellent in more than one field. There is always someone out there who knows a bit more than you, has better resources than you, or can work harder than you. The certain way you can distinguish yourself from competition is by being good at more than one thing.
I'm a PhD scientist many years removed now from school. I'm reminded daily that I have spent more time learning about business and biology than I spent on my Physics PhD. If becoming an expert takes ~5 years of focused work, you can become an expert in a lot of fields.
I am a scientist, and I work on chemical sensors.
Colorimetric sensor arrays are not new by any stretch of the imagination. There are several companies that make and sell them, many using "nanostructures" to boost something (usually the markup). We've been through food freshness, fruit ripeness, coffee roast detection, wine quality... Some of these are worth the $0.05 sensor and $1.00 labor required to package with the food, and some are not, but detecting these things is not a problem.
More and more, I'm seeing academic scientists demonstrate a lack of understanding of what real world problems and opportunities are. Someone in the academic grant backed research machine needs to have an eye on what's happened prior to recently published literature (and maybe look at what happens outside the literature too). 15 years seems to be the horizon of forgetfullness.
That's exactly what we're trying to do at my company for exactly that reason.
I am a manager, and I need to talk to way too many people every day. I hate repeating the same conversation over and over. And I really hate when people feel like they're out of the loop because they didn't get a chance to be in on an important conversation. Still, we're a small company, need to move fast, and simply can't schedule absolutely everything that needs to happen.
The solution is that the management needs to be out in the open and accessible at most times. A couple conference rooms with doors are all we need; most conversations I have shouldn't be hidden.
I'm also the technical lead at my company. The folks I manage under no circumstances want to work the way I have to. They want solid blocks of time with no interruptions. I want them to have that too!
I'm also the founder of my company. That is why these things can happen here and why our business folks understand the value of the technical team's culture.
When novels became popular and widely available in the 1800s, they were absolutely considered disruptive wastes of time.
Each of these things are different; it's not helpful to list the trivial differences. Smart phones are different than video games were different than TV is different than radio is different than comics were different than novels...
The author of TFA states that psychological trends in teens today haven't been seen since just after the Great Depression. She then notes that teens today came of age in the Great Recession. After letting that obvious connection go without discussion she turns to describe how smart phones have caused this.
It seems wrong to look at psychological trends that can be seen in other times of acute financial stress and not address the role of recent acute financial stress. She does question whether the link of depression to screen time is a cause or an effect: it's no known whether unhappy people use phones more or phone use leads to more unhappy people. It is clear that her data shows that teenagers who had smartphones, but entered high school before 2012, don't follow these psychological trends.
Seed funding for new startups is down. No need to qualify for Silicon Valley. This isn't a geographically isolated problem, or a problem with a single field. It's a national pattern that is also present in biotech, hardware, services, etc.
This is very significant. Generally, small businesses growing into medium and large business drive the economic growth of the country and account for most of the new job creation. Last year, we were already at a 30 year low for population adjusted rates of small business creation (last time it was this bad was stagflation in the 70s).
Something is broken.
Did you read the article? The author never uses the words "fake journal," but he talks a lot about peer review. Two of the journals that did a real peer review of his "paper" didn't reject it. Editors passing peer review comments through without reading them, and reviewers doing a (very) cursory read of the paper are not uncommon issues in scientific publishing in real journals.
Think for a minute about what "real" and "fake" mean when we're talking about journals. Two journals here got real reviews from scientists and didn't reject a clearly bad paper. That happens at real journals, even good journals. It's probably not what you think it is. Look at the editorial boards of some of these journals, go ahead and check to see if some of those professors list the journal affiliation on their CV. This is not a couple of scammers from outside of the scientific community.
I'm not saying "science" is fake; I am a scientist. Nor do I want MORE public mistrust of science. I'm saying the pressures that result in these fake journals getting scientists to work for them, submit papers, pay high fees, and put forth low quality work are also driving most real scientific journals, and absolutely impact what we chose to work on (get funded to work on). To ignore that is dangerous.
Maybe you should read the article. The author is pretty clear that peer review practices are his focus here.
The author actually got back four reviews. Two reviewers didn't catch that this was a joke, two did. The editor who handled the two reviews that caught the joke passed them right back to the author with a request to revise. Those aren't dog's doing this, those are scientists.
You can call these journals "fake" or just acknowledge that low end journal editors and reviewers generally don't execute at a high level. In either case, these journals do have scientists working for them as editors and reviewers, but the expected outcomes don't align with what the process promises.
The view that "peer review is bullshit" is a simplified version of a commonly held view among professional scientists (I am one). It is unfortunate that anti-science political forces also have this type of view, but "science" does have some serious problems, and many of us think that peer review as it is used now is largely to blame.
There is a strong argument that prestige publishing style peer review (i.e. Science and Nature) has been detrimental to scientific progress. The root of the argument is that peer review went wrong when the purpose went from trying to determine whether the research was right to whether it was prestigious enough to match the impact factor of the journal. This is a transition that happened relatively recently, only in the last 30 years or so. Unfortunately, most people in science have now locked their career advancement on to increasing their publication impact factor, so it is very difficult to change even when many agree that it's leading to distortion of data, hype, falsification, poor scientific discipline, encouraging predatory publishing practices (as here), etc... More importantly, for me, the idea that scientists should be optimizing research projects to gather citations is not well aligned with what we should be doing: answering fundamental scientific questions and improving the world.
If you dig in to some of what the author of this "sting" operation has written over the last 4 years, you'll see some of the arguments about this. The real discussion is much more nuanced and scientific than "peer review is bullshit," but that blunt approach is appropriate for Slashdot.
The Hollywood Reporter has done a series of good articles on this... worth searching through what's been reported over the last year, it's amazing. There's a mysteriously killed Chinese billionaire, a Silicon Valley inventor giving away his IP because he thinks it's worthless (and it was worthless until the Oscar won by the guys using it), and a ton of extremely shady lawyers.
Both Perlman and LaSalle have been screwed over here, and they both deserve some of the blame for this. Neither one appears to have understood how to commercialize the technology. They were good friends, but they were not able to separate the ups and downs of friendship from their business relationship.
Is he making a concerted effort to reach outside of his bubble? Do you really feel like those words belong to this situation? Does this look like reaching out, really?
If you're bringing your bubble (and your rules) with you to visit where other people are, you're not making a real effort to get outside your bubble. That's exactly why he's being criticized here. The level of PR control over the interaction is the problem.
I love politics, and think more people should be involved. To do that well requires that you have real interactions with people. There are plenty of things he could do that would get him real life experience and serve a political purpose: Buy a farm and try to run it well. Be quirky maybe, and lead a fleet of electric bikes across the country. Hike the Appalachian trail. Join a search and rescue team... or just Rotary or Kiwanis. He's volunteered a bit around the Bay Area at Boy's and Girl's Club, I think, just go visit one of those in each state for a few days.
Roaming the country with a team of handlers is not helpful.
I'm pretty darned self-actualized at work. I have a very challenging and intellectually rewarding job (I'm a scientist with my own small business). I chose this after trying out a string of jobs that paid much better and came with more professional recognition, but didn't make me feel like I was actually useful. While at those other jobs I spent a lot of time on hobbies like gardening, cooking, and fiddling around with projects in my garage. I don't find I have the need or the desire to do that right now, because I don't need my social life to make me feel like I'm accomplishing something.
Choosing the correct career and job for yourself at the current particular moment is much more helpful than having the right hobbies. It makes balancing work and life easier (because social responsibilities are real) and is a must if you want to raise kids, work, and maintain your sanity simultaneously.
Trailer parks are not new in Mountain View. There are several within a few blocks of Google. Trailers can run seven figures... because land.
I wish this person had logged in to respond to my comment.
There is a difference between academic collaboration, that carries with it added resources and funding, and making a decision to change the tooling in your lab. When AFMs are standard in biology labs, then it's an acceptable biology tool. Right now, they're an acceptable tool for an engineer or physicist to use when helping a biologist. That's very good, but we're not all the way there.
Another way to look at this is that there are no collaborators for ELISA or western blot on the team. Those are standard tools. When the same is true of these new techniques, the culture will have been switched.
Also... The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology
That's a good one!
It's our responsibility as physicists to maintain our reputations. That's generally done by covering our ears, closing our eyes and saying "LA LA LA LA" really loud whenever anyone starts talking about complex and interesting problems in the other sciences. (It's either that, or claim to have "already solved that problem 50 years ago.") I forgot to do that once, and now I work with biologists every day.
I'm a physicist working on tools that quantitatively measure biologic interactions. A common use for my tools is for a pharma company to take a set of molecules that they have determined through modeling will interact (inhibit activity, enhance activity, etc.) with a target protein and we measure whether that actually happens directly at the molecular level.
So why hasn't this been done before?
Biology is not just complex, it's also very often overgeneralized and poorly understood. It's dogma (literally) in biology that a cell using a particular sequence of DNA to build a protein will always build the same protein. This is not true. Two "identical" proteins are almost certainly chemically different. Biology to date has dealt with collections and statistical averages of protein function and genetic activity. The measurements used to work in biology, to date, use simplified environments (gels, buffers, simplified model organisms) and reporting methods that interfere with the molecular function of the biological system (fluorescence, dye binding), but these methods and approaches have been necessary to make progress.
At this point, most biologists either have forgotten, or never appreciated, that these systems are measuring secondary effects and generalizations of true biological function. Convincing them that a quantitative, direct, math-and-physics based approach to biology can produce helpful information is an enormous cultural challenge. When presented with data showing that a correlative measurement (i.e. fluorescence) disagrees with a direct physics based measurement (i.e. an electronic biosensor), biologists will tend to believe the secondary measurement over the direct measurement.
As direct measurement tools and simulations become more widely used, there will need to be a change in the way biologists think about their measurements, and that's not going to be a comfortable thing for them. There is an opportunity for folks in computational and physical science to lead the way and show them that our approaches to problem solving are valid and helpful.
This is a real non-sequitur you're bringing up, and it seems a lot like advertising copy rather than a real argument.
There is a history in California higher education journalism of comparing the amount spent per inmate against the amount spent per UC student. It used to be that the state spent more per student than per inmate. Then the combined expenditure of the state and the student was more than the amount spent per inmate, Then the total amount spent per student at UC from all sources was less than the amount the state spent per inmate. This is an extension of that argument using a school that spends much more per student than UC. The "list cost" as you say of attending Harvard is high, and is an appropriate metric for comparison here, particularly when you have an understanding of the history of the argument.
If you want to get into a debate over how various universities cater to diverse economic classes, this may not be the place for that discussion. Step one in that debate really should be finding some third party data. I know you're actually right that Harvard is affordable (on average only about $1k more per year than a UC), but you're referencing marketing material, not data, and touting it makes you less credible.
Or, you know, things going underneath the car like debris, potholes, rocks, curbs... have you ever seen the aftermath of a car accident? Things can get really screwed up.
If they can turn this idea into a battery (they haven't yet), then that would get them to proof of concept.
If that battery works for more than a few days without a re-fill, that might allow this scheme to work from a practical point of view.
If the electrolyte can be made to not be toxic, then they might avoid environmental issues.
If I had to guess, this is an SBIR shop, and not a legit company (they're going to be selling research papers to grant managers, not batteries to consumers).
Anyone who has owned a Surface knows that the keyboard is not an issue. If you need one, you get one. In general, all these minor complaints mask the fact that the Surface is a great business oriented laptop, it's great for graphics, documents, meetings... with one large longstanding problem.
THE issue with the Surface line is power. Does the power button work for more than a year? Does the charger connector still snap into place? Is the battery crap? Can you tell the difference between any of these problems? Without power the thing doesn't work at all. I've taken apart old laptops to recover data, and fix bad power connectors, but that's not a real option with the way the Surface is constructed.
Keyboards!? That's a trivial issue. This is like complaining about the color of your Tesla while the battery is on fire.
I've studied olfaction, and this just doesn't seem right. This olfactory bulb argument seems like a straw man that no one in the field has been using since... the 19th century. Digging in to the article a bit, it seems the authors of the actual study agree with me, and are using different odors for humans to balance out some of our... differences. Their main point (which is right) is that the human sense of smell is much better than most people realize, and that you can be trained to follow a scent trail, distinguish similar odors, and notice the cognitive effects scent has on you. Anyone who has experimentally studied olfaction for a few years will notice themselves gaining these abilities (it goes away quickly when you're not smelling things professionally several hours a day).
So why is this summary so wrong?
First off, humans only have 400 different olfactory receptors, it doesn't matter if genetics say you should have 1000, you only get 400 (genotype =/= phenotype). Second, you have less "sensor" surface area than other mammals in real terms, not scaled for size. Third, you lack the ability to concentrate scent molecules by varying your rate of breathing like other mammals (this can be overcome by varying breathing through your mouth and nose, but other mammals don't have to do this).
If you read the details on the money he's offering (called the "90/10 Rule"), it's 50% to 90% of the cost to build new software and 50% to 75% of the cost to maintain it, with theoretically the rest to be provided by your state...?
I appreciate that they're trying to get something going, and they're working within some insane limits put on them by contradictory mandates, but this is not a proposal to get quality work done. Implying this is a good deal does not help his credibility. This is a proposal for charity work (which is fine... just don't pretend this is a deal VCs are going to jump on).
It's a hard world, but real quality work requires a financial return of a multiple of the cost to make something, not a fraction of the cost to make something.
I think you can blame those guys. It's not "just" responding to an RFP. Because of my work title, I get marketing and sales calls from the business end of these companies all the time (they want to convince me I need to put out an RFP, and that they can help write it). Trying to game the sales/business process isn't new, and could be considered firmly American. Where they lose me are the arguments that engineering labor is a commodity and that my business culture is less important than labor cost.
Now, keep in mind that I have never asked for anything from them. They come to me and my business partners making these arguments early and often to get us thinking about engineering a certain way. Enough effort like this can shift the standards in a field. They have made a concerted effort to set the standard for software to treat most programmers as commodities. Ultimately this is the problem. The standards they set for the field culturally and economically are not in the best interests of either the workers or the owners.
Also, they make it harder for me to get my PhD scientists H1-Bs when they need them.
This topic comes up pretty regularly, and it always amazes me that there is not an appreciation that nearly everyone in science and engineering has to work through unknowns in development on a schedule, and we've all adapted.
I work on developing a product that integrates a lot of different fields. I work with various engineers, physicists, biologists, chemists, and programmers. All of them have tasks that are impossible to estimate time and cost for with 100% certainty. That's an unreasonable bar to set. Many of them have tasks that may simply be impossible with current levels of technology.
We work out a schedule and budget, because otherwise we can't move forward on development, or understand when the amount of resources required to finish the project will be more than the end value of the end product. We have some basic research grants and the government requires a schedule, budget, and regular reports for blue sky research as well. We produce some lab equipment for pharmaceutical companies. Those guys have scheduling and budgeting challenges that make a lot of engineering projects look easy.
My team trusts that I will only change requirements for good reason, and will adjust resources and schedule to reflect reality as we progress. This adjustment for reality works the other way too. I trust them to understand that there are finite resources and time available to attempt a project, and if something isn't working out, it's getting cut.
Man, I thought this was a pretty simple concept, obviously I was wrong. My post comes from my experiences biking to work, and then deciding that other things were more important, so I stopped. These are really simple things like picking my kids up from school, or being able to meet at a client's business. Yes, I absolutely could have found other people to handle those things, but it was more important to me to be able to rely upon myself alone in those situations than it was to bike to work.
The point of TFA was that biking lowers stress. I think that accepting stress into your life reduces your ability to bike.
I have biked to work, it was great.
My comments have to do with why I no longer bike to work.
My point (and it's borne out by many of these responses) is that a stress free life allows biking to work, not the other way around. You clearly don't understand what I'm talking about, but that's great for you, enjoy it!