The genetic engineering project is still ongoing but that's a solution (or potential solution) that will take a long time to deploy. Insecticides remain the best way of controlling mosquito populations, but insecticide resistance is an ever-growing problem. That's not too surprising when you think about the vast population size, coupled with the fact that in tropical regions some species of mosquito can go through over 20 generations a year. You spray the same chemical several times a year for a couple decades and evolution of resistance is going to happen. Unfortunately there have not been any new insecticides put into the field for a long time. Oh and DDT is still used, just rarely and heavily restricted. If you've got a severe outbreak of a mosquito-borne disease, especially when you've got resistance to other insecticides, then DDT might get used. DDT is nasty, but the local health organizations have to pick the lesser of two evils.
"If people were the main source of nourishment for mosquitoes, then yes. But they're not."
That depends on the mosquito species. Anopheles gambiae is the major carrier of the malaria pathogen and has a very strong preference for humans: if given the choice between livestock and humans, they pick humans 90% of the time. Aedes aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, dengue, and chickungunya, and also prefers humans. It appears that humans secrete comparatively elevated levels of L-lactic acid which for some species of mosquito is an attractant. For others L-lactic acid can have no effect or even be a repellant. There are many species (and over 40 genera according to some classifications!) so there are many different chemical cues that can affect mosquito host preferences and many different ecological niches for the different mosquito species to inhabit.
Bacteria have absolutely no problem making a protein the size of albumin. It is standard practice in biochemistry labs to have them make proteins of pretty much any size, I've personally worked on 150 kDa (or 150,000 g/mol if you like) proteins that I expressed in bacteria and I knew a postdoc who worked on a megadalton protein complex. Bacteria also have nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS), which are used to make things like antibiotics (in some cases to help bacteria A compete against bacteria B) and other small peptide compounds with unusual chemistries. These NRPS proteins are modular, but are a single polypeptide chain, and can be well over a megadalton in size. Even these large proteins are dwarfed by ribosomes, but ribosomes are composed of many different polypeptides and RNA.
"But most of those companies have thousands of owners, not just one. They're probably in your 401(k) or pension plan."
Most people aren't rich enough to have either a 401(k) or pension plan. Of those of us with some sort of retirement investments most are probably in mutual funds where ownership of shares in Company X is less than direct. People rich enough for it to make some financial sense to own stock in Company X directly rarely own more than a few hundred or a few thousand shares. How many shares of Company X do you have to own for the board of directors to have to listen to you? What percent ownership does a member of the board of directors have? On what other boards of directors do they sit, and how many such people would it take to effectively control the companies that control that 40% of the wealth? I hope that's an upcoming part two of the study.
Well here's what I found in a quick web search:
1. Pass HR 1489 (reinstates much of Glass-Steagall)
2. Use Congressional authority to investigate and prosecute criminal actions on Wall Street
3. Congress pass legislation to protect democracy by reversing the Citizen's United decision (although personally it looks like it would take either a constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court overruling themselves to correct this blot on the nation)
4. Congress pass the Buffett rule so that the rich and corporations pay their fair share, close corporate tax loopholes, ban hiding money offshore
5. Congress revamp the Securities and Exchange Commission
6. Limiting role of lobbyists
7. Disallow the revolving door of regulators working for the industries they regulate
8. Eliminate corporate "personhood"
That's paraphrased from occupywallst.org
But if you were to search around a bit longer you'd find other, related things, like auditing the Federal Reserve, reinstating a stock transfer tax like we had from 1914-1966, instituting regulations on the derivatives market, breaking up or nationalizing the "too big to fail" banks, push for a jobs bill (either President Obama's or something else), and you'll also find some un- or slightly-related stuff too, like ending "institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and hostility to immigrants" which was one thing I found.
"It is relatively rare today that a student is allowed to pursue pure research - the kind that has no direct application in a weapon ^h^h^h^h^h^h product."
Pure nonsense. I got my first job (undergraduate research assistant) in an academic lab back in 1997. I took a position in a different lab as an undergrad, then went to grad school. Two postdocs and 14 years later the majority of my work has been basic research. Even when I was working on a project with direct military funding I still have not done anything remotely related to weapons.
Yes it is absurd. So how much funding does your state university get from the state? It used to be that they got ~80%, but over the course of the last 20-30 years they have been favorite targets of state budget cuts. Now most state universities get 20-40% of their funds from the state, although some get far, far less. That enormous loss of funding has to be made up from somewhere and so tuition and fees are rising. Here at the University of Wisconsin we've recently taken a pair of quarter-billion dollar whacks to our state funding. Tuition naturally jumped up after each budget cut. If you want your state university to not have tuition and fees that are difficult for middle class families to afford, write your state representative and DEMAND that state taxes are increased to properly fund the university back at that 80% level. To get rid of those unsavory business practices throw out any politician who thinks running a university as a business is a good idea. The state boards of regents are political appointees and have lots of control over how universities are run. For example at the University of Wisconsin regents are appointed by the governor to seven year terms, and the regents control every appointment at the dean level and above. Your state may vary somewhat, but the results are entirely predictable (and lamentable) if your state leadership defunds the university and business apparatchiks take over the board of regents.
"So, is accent monitoring and neutralization a civil right violation, as the U.S. Depts. of Justice and Education suggest, or is it an 'innovation', as IBM argues?"
Provided the individual is easily understood an accent is utterly irrelevant save for some language classes. One of the best teachers I ever had was Mr. Tsang, my AP English teacher. Nearly 20 years later I still remember examining Shakespeare and Kafka in that class. If you had older siblings or friends who had taken his class he was always recommended. He also had a heavy Chinese accent; when he was in his teens he and his family fled from the Cultural Revolution in the PRC.
"Largely for state schools it's coming from reduced income from the states general budget."
Exactly right. The states typically pay for only 20-40% for flagship universities. Exceptions abound, for example when I was a grad student at the University of Oregon a few years back we didn't get 10% from the state, a situation similar to the University of Colorado's current 6.9% state funding. Also keep in mind that the 20-40% is for flagship universities, which make up a tiny percentage of state institutes of higher learning. The state university budget is a perennial favorite for the chopping block too. 20 years ago most states funded their state universities at about 50%. Every time the state whacks a university budget tuition goes up. Here at the University of Wisconsin we've recently had quarter billion dollar bites taken out of us twice, and both times tuition was increased by over 10%.
It's absurd for the government to hire its own scientists? How will we replace the government scientists employed by the NIH, NSF, FDA, USDA, DOE, DOD (uniformed services and civilians both), NOAA, NASA, EPA, and many other agencies? For that matter why must any scientist report solely to an academic institute? Are the tens of thousands of PhD's employed in research capacities in private enterprise not scientists?
"The effect of having a $5tn coin to borrow against would be more or less identical to issuing another $5tn in bonds. This is just a loophole of sorts the effect on the economy would be mostly the same, although it probably would make the price of platinum spike if they actually went through with trying to mint a $5tn coin."
Well personally I would make the coin out of tin, lead, or maybe even wood, but that's just me. Here's some questions though: if we mint say 100 coins each stamped $10 billion, then whenever we run into the debt limit the Treasury is given some of these coins and issues $10 billion of debt per coin: who has the coin, who keeps the coin, and is there ever a mechanism for destroying the $10 billion coin? If not $10 billion coins, then how small would such coins need to be to avoid an inflationary spike each time one or a small batch were made and/or turned into debt, and how might this be any different than any other time the Treasury sells debt? Other than the mechanics of it, how is this any different than simply ignoring the debt limit?
If only that were true. According to this article from Discover magazine and published in 2009 only 35% of Americans believe that humans evolved from mammals. What's nice about the Discover article is that it breaks the US down by region. New England and the Mid-Atlantic states lead in scientific literacy, and the south (East South Central of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi) brings up the rear. That Texas has decided to support scientific literacy in it's schools is a wonderful surprise. Texas is a trend setter when it comes to school districts purchasing new textbooks, so if the Texas Board of Education is lead by a person who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and evolution is garbage such as recent chair of the board Don McLeroy then that can easily reduce the quality of textbooks nationwide.
"A lot of companies would like to put money into R&D however the Scientific community tends to shun Private Enterprise as the evil daemon."
That's not the case. Or to clarify for some departments this is not the case, for instance engineering departments have long been heavily funded by private enterprise. In the life sciences it used to be that you didn't go after private money; there wasn't any as biotech's really only been around since the 1980's. However the competition for academia's traditional funding sources (federal agencies like the NIH and NSF) has gotten...untenable. NIH grants were designed for about a 30% success rate: about one applicant in three won a grant. So if you were competent you could keep your lab running by getting a grant on your first or second try and have overlapping grants. Rarely did someone get laid off or projects interrupted due to lack of funds. Now grant success rates are typically half what they were, and success rates in the single digits are increasingly common. Academic researchers are increasingly at risk of losing their jobs, projects get side tracked by the desperate and continual writing of grant proposals. This has been the trend over the course of my career starting in the late 90's and there is no end in sight. The traditional funding sources in the life sciences are no longer something you can depend on to keep your lab running, so you look elsewhere. There is pressure on academics to get patents on their discoveries, to form start up companies, and to form partnerships with private industry. This started before I did, and was merely uncommon by the time I entered grad school. Now it's everywhere and a decent patent is worth more to an assistant professor up for tenure than a Nature paper.
"Hell when was that great fairy tale melting pot supposed to have occurred? Immigrants would come to this country, settle in an immigrant enclave, and then move to other areas of the country with similar immigrants."
That would be the last couple hundred ears or so. My ancestors emigrated roughly late 1700's to roughly 1850. They came from Sweden, Bohemia (part of modern Czech Republic), and Hesse (and other parts of what is now Germany). Germans used to be an underclass in America. Later the Slavic peoples were an assortment of underclasses. My mixed German/Czech grandpa didn't want to be buried in the Czech cemetery because he wasn't a "bohunk" even though he was partially and also married a Czech. On my dad's side we're from Sweden with probable Finnish ancestry; this was looked down on by "pure" Swedish relatives as was evident from some of the really old folks (80+) at a family reunion I went to 20 years ago, despite the lot of them homesteading together in the wild west of Kansas in the 1860's. Today nobody gives a flying fuck if you're a Finn or a Swede. Nobody today cares if you're an American with German ancestry marrying a Czech, Pole, Brit, or what have you. You're "white." Being a socially marginal nerdlinger I haven't dated all that much, but in spite of that small sample size I've dated an African-American, a Fillipina, a Jew, and being a honky (gee, that used to mean "dumb Bohunk/Hungarian" and not generic Whitey) a small number of white women of different ancestry. My lily-white, conservative parents who are in their 60's and 70's and old enough to remember when the KKK commonly murdered people in the south for being black, were OK with all of them. Note: they don't live in New York or some other coastie location but rather in the heartland, Iowa.
The USA is still unquestionably racist. However the borders of honky/whiteness are far broader than they were 100 years ago and the social bar to dating or marrying outside of one's "race" while still present, is much lower than it used to be. Multiple friends' of mine are in mixed-race marriages and/or have mixed-race children. While not bubbling as hot as it should be the melting pot is very far from a fairy tale.
Cows were domesticated in the Neolithic, about 10,000 years ago. They were (and are) used for their meat, their hides, as beasts of burden, in sports, and yes, for their milk, which large swaths of the population can digest just fine. It's rare for children to not be able to digest milk, and as for adults there may be some drop off in the ability to digest milk but that is largely dependent on the genetic background. Scandinavians for instance have the highest proportion of adults able to digest lactose (over 80%) while in China it's rare.
Nobody's "playing" with DNA much less the "very foundation of life," whatever that is. What we have is minor changes, typically the incorporation of one or a small number of exogenous genes, made to the organisms and rigorous testing goes on long before you get a large scale field experiment that these criminals destroyed. Having worked as a scientist on both agricultural and medical projects I can tell you from experience that the techniques, the science, the ethics, and the governmental regulations have great similarity. It takes a bit more than a decade to go from identifying a target for disease X to getting something through a Phase III clinical trial and FDA approval. Similarly the DURPH-potato experiment had 10 years worth of R&D behind it.
There are roughly 12,000 approved prescription drugs listed in the FDA's Electronic Orange Book. The vast majority of those 2-4 drug combinations do not go through the same rigorous testing that a new drug goes through; there certainly are not Phase III trials for each possible two-drug combination. What testing I know of usually doesn't go past cell culture and if you have elderly relatives taking many different medications you come across unforeseen and undesirable drug interactions with some frequency.
"A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige."
Do I publish articles to stick on my CV? You bet your ass. Those articles are at-a-glance evidence that when I say I know how to do skill set X, I've really done it. It also says that I get stuff done rather than sitting on my ass all day long. Where do I publish? The best journal I can (fuck Elsevier though) since prestige matters. Everybody knows what Science and Nature are. Everyone in your field also knows what the solid 2nd tier journals are and if you've published just there, that's ok. If you publish only in "The Whoosit Journal of Whatsit," then you've got a problem.
Journal prestige aside, do I want people to read my papers? HELL YES! Does it matter if people read my papers? HELL YES! Why does it matter? If people read my papers it's because they're either interesting or relevant to their own work, or both. If they read my paper, they may cite it when they write up their own results or review article. Citation indexes exist, the most well known is probably google scholar. What the hell do you think journal prestige comes from if not from the citations the average paper published therein gets? The higher the rank of the journal, the pickier they are about what they let in, and the higher the expectations that it will get read, get cited, and influence people! Journal aside, if your paper has been out more than a year or two and nobody's cited it, your stuff doesn't fucking matter--expletive required. If your paper has been out five years and is still getting a half-dozen citations a year, you got a middling paper that fills in some important details in your field--good for you your research matters! If your paper has been out for five years and gets two dozen citations a year and you've got another half dozen just like it, then in your field you're a force to be reckoned with and everybody and their dog knows who you are. Even stepping out to related fields your name is familiar, and if you're out job hunting it's easy to check and see how influential you are by asking around your peers or checking citation indexes (google scholar again). If nobody cites your stuff, then nobody reads your stuff, and then your stuff might as well be published in "The Journal of Shit Nobody Cares About." Who wants to spend years doing shit nobody cares about? God damn right I want people to read my fucking work--expletives absolutely required.
Yes and no. Here they're using a simple count of the total number of scientific articles published, and yes China will soon eclipse the USA. However not all papers, and the journals they are published it, are created equal. For instance I recently submitted a paper to the "Journal of Medical Entomology." Sounds spiffy, like the first name that slips off of the tongues of science journalists everywhere, no? Nope, it has an impact factor of 2. That means that over the preceding two years the average article published in that journal was cited by another paper twice. In my view an impact factor of 2 puts that journal at the very floor of 2nd-tier journals. Not everyone on slashdot would agree and might want four citations per two years for their floor. There's subjectivity to it certainly. However impact factor of the journal is not everything; it's just the average number. There will always be articles cited more and cited less. I've got one paper in another journal that has been cited ~5x as often as the average paper published in that journal, and another article in a third journal that...hasn't done as well. Such a spread isn't all that unusual. So besides the number of articles you've published, and in what journals (with what impact factor) you've published in, you've got how many times your articles have been cited by other articles. There are different ways of trying to compute the importance of a researcher, but one of the most common ways is the H-index. It's a way to try and work out how significant a scientist you are, but it is controversial. It is calculated simply which makes it at least somewhat popular. Say I have five published papers, the first paper has been cited 15 times, #2 11, #3 4, #4 2, and #5 once. I have an H-index of three: I have three papers that have been cited at least three times. The flaw is that even at the low level you can have vast differences of scientific importance. If I had only three papers each of which had been cited three times my H-index score would still be three. Likewise, if I had five papers with #1 cited 100 times, #2 60 times, and freshly published #3,4, and 5 cited 0 times, I'd have an H-index of 2 despite the field clearly thinking my top two papers were pretty important. There are other indexes out there, but none are perfect, and there is no perfect way to measure scientific output. However currently if you want to do science professionally you must be able to read English. All the top journals are in English, just as once upon a time all the top organic chemistry journals were in German. That's a measure of supremacy in science, but while English is the language of science today, it has been otherwise in the past and will likely change in the future.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
Grad students for all practical purposes live in the laboratory...if you want to call that living anyway. At a moderate rate of 60 hours a week your lab hours count will be off by a couple orders of magnitude after the 6-7 years it takes to earn a Ph.D. Even if you intended to write "undergrads" you'd be giving them short shrift. Of the dozen or so undergrad lab mates I've had in the last 15 years the majority worked for several years in the same lab and were funded under one of the professor's grants. That's far more than a few dozen hours which even the laziest undergrad I've worked with accomplished inside of two months. Hell I've worked with four high school students through an apprenticeship program and three had over 500 hours in by the time their stint in the program was over.
However as you point out TFA is not informative as to the point of the study and how it was funded. Having had some small experience with research being reported by the media the odds are pretty good that the reporter and/or editor mangled the point of the research quite badly and if one wants to know why mice were being trained to distinguish wine you'd need to read the original research paper published in Chemical Senses. The last paragraph of the introduction of scientific paper usually tells you why the researchers are doing their thing, and quoting that paragraph:
"Most naturally occurring odors are complex blends of volatile compounds. The way in which they are perceived depends upon the interactions between mixture components at the level of olfactory receptors (Derby 2000) as well as the way that component signals are processed in the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex (Wilson and Stevenson 2003; Tabor et al. 2004). Because most of these inputs are irrelevant at any given moment, it should be more efficient to focus neural resources on a subset of the available information and ignore the rest (Luck 1998). However, to our knowledge, few papers have reported experimental evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination. In the present paper, we report behavioral evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination of mice. We found this evidence in the course of behavioral studies on the discrimination of liquor odors in mice using a Y-maze. Our initial interest was to assess if mice could discriminate different brands of liquors just by taking a sniff of them like an expert flavorist. Additionally, we also demonstrate that selective attention in the olfactory system of mice could be modified through their learning experiences."
Now as for how important and novel this is, it was published in 2008 and according to google scholar has been cited by other papers four times since. It's definitely not a huge paper but neither is it an embarrassment. If you've been doing science for more than 10 years chances are pretty good you'll have a paper with as low a citation rate as this.
As for weirdness, it pales compared to this: homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks. You can get the Ig Nobel-winning research paper here, complete with pictures of the deed. If you really want to.
To add onto this point state workers in Wisconsin have had two years of furloughs already, amounting to a 3% pay cut. This is after the state government reneged on a 3% pay raise, the first such raise in years, and state workers before these cuts received on average 4% less in total compensation than those privately employed according to the Economic Policy Institute. Now despite everything, the unions are agreeing to the proposed pay cuts. Governor Walker doesn't have a leg to stand on. Worse for him is that people are paying attention to his actions now and this will hurt his planned fire-sale of state-owned properties in no-bid contracts as described in the Budget Repair Bill.
"No, one or a few of Behe's claims may have been demolished, but I know many physicists, engineers and biologists that can not "demolish" the idea of IC, even in their own minds."
Irreducibly complex systems in biology were first predicted by H. J. Muller in 1918 to be a consequence of evolution. See talk.origins for a quick summary, or a review of Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" from 1997. There's a (lot of) reasons why Behe wasn't taken seriously back when "Darwin's Black Box" was published in 1996 and the criticism has only deepened since then. If you're interested in the evolution of the heart a quick search turns up many articles on pubmed, for instance I learned something new today: crocodilians have a four-chambered heart!
Well from rearing Aedes aegypti (yellow fever mosquito) under laboratory conditions, they're about 1:1. I'm just a biochemist and not an entomologist, but that's my observations. In the wild it seems to me that the females must risk more by feeding off warm-blooded animals, but there might be a compensating mechanism for balancing the sex ratio.
Heh. You can sex the pupae based off of size: the females are bigger than the males and you can get them with ~95% accuracy. There is a difference in 4th instar larvae as well but I can't spot it, according to my advisor it can be done but only by about two people on the friggin' planet.
"They were all male. Male mosquitos only feed on plant nectar."
Doh! I should have mentioned that. It's only the female mosquitoes that need and can take a blood meal. It's important for the development of the eggs; no blood meal means no eggs (except for a few species that I can't remember right now that can deposit a first batch of eggs without a blood meal). It's also trivially easy to identify and separate adult mosquitoes based on sex: a short time on ice or a chill plate renders them immobile and the male mosquitoes have very large and bushy antennae while female mosquitoes have much smaller, stick-like antennae. This difference is readily apparent to the unaided eye.
The mosquitoes were a lab strain that hasn't been exposed to malaria in decades. Bill Gates even said during his talk that the mosquitoes weren't carrying it.
Slashdot Mirror
The genetic engineering project is still ongoing but that's a solution (or potential solution) that will take a long time to deploy. Insecticides remain the best way of controlling mosquito populations, but insecticide resistance is an ever-growing problem. That's not too surprising when you think about the vast population size, coupled with the fact that in tropical regions some species of mosquito can go through over 20 generations a year. You spray the same chemical several times a year for a couple decades and evolution of resistance is going to happen. Unfortunately there have not been any new insecticides put into the field for a long time. Oh and DDT is still used, just rarely and heavily restricted. If you've got a severe outbreak of a mosquito-borne disease, especially when you've got resistance to other insecticides, then DDT might get used. DDT is nasty, but the local health organizations have to pick the lesser of two evils.
"If people were the main source of nourishment for mosquitoes, then yes. But they're not."
That depends on the mosquito species. Anopheles gambiae is the major carrier of the malaria pathogen and has a very strong preference for humans: if given the choice between livestock and humans, they pick humans 90% of the time. Aedes aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, dengue, and chickungunya, and also prefers humans. It appears that humans secrete comparatively elevated levels of L-lactic acid which for some species of mosquito is an attractant. For others L-lactic acid can have no effect or even be a repellant. There are many species (and over 40 genera according to some classifications!) so there are many different chemical cues that can affect mosquito host preferences and many different ecological niches for the different mosquito species to inhabit.
Bacteria have absolutely no problem making a protein the size of albumin. It is standard practice in biochemistry labs to have them make proteins of pretty much any size, I've personally worked on 150 kDa (or 150,000 g/mol if you like) proteins that I expressed in bacteria and I knew a postdoc who worked on a megadalton protein complex. Bacteria also have nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS), which are used to make things like antibiotics (in some cases to help bacteria A compete against bacteria B) and other small peptide compounds with unusual chemistries. These NRPS proteins are modular, but are a single polypeptide chain, and can be well over a megadalton in size. Even these large proteins are dwarfed by ribosomes, but ribosomes are composed of many different polypeptides and RNA.
"But most of those companies have thousands of owners, not just one. They're probably in your 401(k) or pension plan."
Most people aren't rich enough to have either a 401(k) or pension plan. Of those of us with some sort of retirement investments most are probably in mutual funds where ownership of shares in Company X is less than direct. People rich enough for it to make some financial sense to own stock in Company X directly rarely own more than a few hundred or a few thousand shares. How many shares of Company X do you have to own for the board of directors to have to listen to you? What percent ownership does a member of the board of directors have? On what other boards of directors do they sit, and how many such people would it take to effectively control the companies that control that 40% of the wealth? I hope that's an upcoming part two of the study.
Well here's what I found in a quick web search:
1. Pass HR 1489 (reinstates much of Glass-Steagall)
2. Use Congressional authority to investigate and prosecute criminal actions on Wall Street
3. Congress pass legislation to protect democracy by reversing the Citizen's United decision (although personally it looks like it would take either a constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court overruling themselves to correct this blot on the nation)
4. Congress pass the Buffett rule so that the rich and corporations pay their fair share, close corporate tax loopholes, ban hiding money offshore
5. Congress revamp the Securities and Exchange Commission
6. Limiting role of lobbyists
7. Disallow the revolving door of regulators working for the industries they regulate
8. Eliminate corporate "personhood"
That's paraphrased from occupywallst.org
But if you were to search around a bit longer you'd find other, related things, like auditing the Federal Reserve, reinstating a stock transfer tax like we had from 1914-1966, instituting regulations on the derivatives market, breaking up or nationalizing the "too big to fail" banks, push for a jobs bill (either President Obama's or something else), and you'll also find some un- or slightly-related stuff too, like ending "institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and hostility to immigrants" which was one thing I found.
"It is relatively rare today that a student is allowed to pursue pure research - the kind that has no direct application in a weapon ^h^h^h^h^h^h product."
Pure nonsense. I got my first job (undergraduate research assistant) in an academic lab back in 1997. I took a position in a different lab as an undergrad, then went to grad school. Two postdocs and 14 years later the majority of my work has been basic research. Even when I was working on a project with direct military funding I still have not done anything remotely related to weapons.
Yes it is absurd. So how much funding does your state university get from the state? It used to be that they got ~80%, but over the course of the last 20-30 years they have been favorite targets of state budget cuts. Now most state universities get 20-40% of their funds from the state, although some get far, far less. That enormous loss of funding has to be made up from somewhere and so tuition and fees are rising. Here at the University of Wisconsin we've recently taken a pair of quarter-billion dollar whacks to our state funding. Tuition naturally jumped up after each budget cut. If you want your state university to not have tuition and fees that are difficult for middle class families to afford, write your state representative and DEMAND that state taxes are increased to properly fund the university back at that 80% level. To get rid of those unsavory business practices throw out any politician who thinks running a university as a business is a good idea. The state boards of regents are political appointees and have lots of control over how universities are run. For example at the University of Wisconsin regents are appointed by the governor to seven year terms, and the regents control every appointment at the dean level and above. Your state may vary somewhat, but the results are entirely predictable (and lamentable) if your state leadership defunds the university and business apparatchiks take over the board of regents.
"So, is accent monitoring and neutralization a civil right violation, as the U.S. Depts. of Justice and Education suggest, or is it an 'innovation', as IBM argues?"
Provided the individual is easily understood an accent is utterly irrelevant save for some language classes. One of the best teachers I ever had was Mr. Tsang, my AP English teacher. Nearly 20 years later I still remember examining Shakespeare and Kafka in that class. If you had older siblings or friends who had taken his class he was always recommended. He also had a heavy Chinese accent; when he was in his teens he and his family fled from the Cultural Revolution in the PRC.
"Largely for state schools it's coming from reduced income from the states general budget."
Exactly right. The states typically pay for only 20-40% for flagship universities. Exceptions abound, for example when I was a grad student at the University of Oregon a few years back we didn't get 10% from the state, a situation similar to the University of Colorado's current 6.9% state funding. Also keep in mind that the 20-40% is for flagship universities, which make up a tiny percentage of state institutes of higher learning. The state university budget is a perennial favorite for the chopping block too. 20 years ago most states funded their state universities at about 50%. Every time the state whacks a university budget tuition goes up. Here at the University of Wisconsin we've recently had quarter billion dollar bites taken out of us twice, and both times tuition was increased by over 10%.
It's absurd for the government to hire its own scientists? How will we replace the government scientists employed by the NIH, NSF, FDA, USDA, DOE, DOD (uniformed services and civilians both), NOAA, NASA, EPA, and many other agencies? For that matter why must any scientist report solely to an academic institute? Are the tens of thousands of PhD's employed in research capacities in private enterprise not scientists?
"The effect of having a $5tn coin to borrow against would be more or less identical to issuing another $5tn in bonds. This is just a loophole of sorts the effect on the economy would be mostly the same, although it probably would make the price of platinum spike if they actually went through with trying to mint a $5tn coin."
Well personally I would make the coin out of tin, lead, or maybe even wood, but that's just me. Here's some questions though: if we mint say 100 coins each stamped $10 billion, then whenever we run into the debt limit the Treasury is given some of these coins and issues $10 billion of debt per coin: who has the coin, who keeps the coin, and is there ever a mechanism for destroying the $10 billion coin? If not $10 billion coins, then how small would such coins need to be to avoid an inflationary spike each time one or a small batch were made and/or turned into debt, and how might this be any different than any other time the Treasury sells debt? Other than the mechanics of it, how is this any different than simply ignoring the debt limit?
If only that were true. According to this article from Discover magazine and published in 2009 only 35% of Americans believe that humans evolved from mammals. What's nice about the Discover article is that it breaks the US down by region. New England and the Mid-Atlantic states lead in scientific literacy, and the south (East South Central of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi) brings up the rear. That Texas has decided to support scientific literacy in it's schools is a wonderful surprise. Texas is a trend setter when it comes to school districts purchasing new textbooks, so if the Texas Board of Education is lead by a person who thinks the world is 6,000 years old and evolution is garbage such as recent chair of the board Don McLeroy then that can easily reduce the quality of textbooks nationwide.
"A lot of companies would like to put money into R&D however the Scientific community tends to shun Private Enterprise as the evil daemon."
That's not the case. Or to clarify for some departments this is not the case, for instance engineering departments have long been heavily funded by private enterprise. In the life sciences it used to be that you didn't go after private money; there wasn't any as biotech's really only been around since the 1980's. However the competition for academia's traditional funding sources (federal agencies like the NIH and NSF) has gotten...untenable. NIH grants were designed for about a 30% success rate: about one applicant in three won a grant. So if you were competent you could keep your lab running by getting a grant on your first or second try and have overlapping grants. Rarely did someone get laid off or projects interrupted due to lack of funds. Now grant success rates are typically half what they were, and success rates in the single digits are increasingly common. Academic researchers are increasingly at risk of losing their jobs, projects get side tracked by the desperate and continual writing of grant proposals. This has been the trend over the course of my career starting in the late 90's and there is no end in sight. The traditional funding sources in the life sciences are no longer something you can depend on to keep your lab running, so you look elsewhere. There is pressure on academics to get patents on their discoveries, to form start up companies, and to form partnerships with private industry. This started before I did, and was merely uncommon by the time I entered grad school. Now it's everywhere and a decent patent is worth more to an assistant professor up for tenure than a Nature paper.
"Hell when was that great fairy tale melting pot supposed to have occurred? Immigrants would come to this country, settle in an immigrant enclave, and then move to other areas of the country with similar immigrants."
That would be the last couple hundred ears or so. My ancestors emigrated roughly late 1700's to roughly 1850. They came from Sweden, Bohemia (part of modern Czech Republic), and Hesse (and other parts of what is now Germany). Germans used to be an underclass in America. Later the Slavic peoples were an assortment of underclasses. My mixed German/Czech grandpa didn't want to be buried in the Czech cemetery because he wasn't a "bohunk" even though he was partially and also married a Czech. On my dad's side we're from Sweden with probable Finnish ancestry; this was looked down on by "pure" Swedish relatives as was evident from some of the really old folks (80+) at a family reunion I went to 20 years ago, despite the lot of them homesteading together in the wild west of Kansas in the 1860's. Today nobody gives a flying fuck if you're a Finn or a Swede. Nobody today cares if you're an American with German ancestry marrying a Czech, Pole, Brit, or what have you. You're "white." Being a socially marginal nerdlinger I haven't dated all that much, but in spite of that small sample size I've dated an African-American, a Fillipina, a Jew, and being a honky (gee, that used to mean "dumb Bohunk/Hungarian" and not generic Whitey) a small number of white women of different ancestry. My lily-white, conservative parents who are in their 60's and 70's and old enough to remember when the KKK commonly murdered people in the south for being black, were OK with all of them. Note: they don't live in New York or some other coastie location but rather in the heartland, Iowa.
The USA is still unquestionably racist. However the borders of honky/whiteness are far broader than they were 100 years ago and the social bar to dating or marrying outside of one's "race" while still present, is much lower than it used to be. Multiple friends' of mine are in mixed-race marriages and/or have mixed-race children. While not bubbling as hot as it should be the melting pot is very far from a fairy tale.
Is it as hard as donating your liver, or is only as hard as getting slapped with a fish?
Cows were domesticated in the Neolithic, about 10,000 years ago. They were (and are) used for their meat, their hides, as beasts of burden, in sports, and yes, for their milk, which large swaths of the population can digest just fine. It's rare for children to not be able to digest milk, and as for adults there may be some drop off in the ability to digest milk but that is largely dependent on the genetic background. Scandinavians for instance have the highest proportion of adults able to digest lactose (over 80%) while in China it's rare.
Nobody's "playing" with DNA much less the "very foundation of life," whatever that is. What we have is minor changes, typically the incorporation of one or a small number of exogenous genes, made to the organisms and rigorous testing goes on long before you get a large scale field experiment that these criminals destroyed. Having worked as a scientist on both agricultural and medical projects I can tell you from experience that the techniques, the science, the ethics, and the governmental regulations have great similarity. It takes a bit more than a decade to go from identifying a target for disease X to getting something through a Phase III clinical trial and FDA approval. Similarly the DURPH-potato experiment had 10 years worth of R&D behind it.
There are roughly 12,000 approved prescription drugs listed in the FDA's Electronic Orange Book. The vast majority of those 2-4 drug combinations do not go through the same rigorous testing that a new drug goes through; there certainly are not Phase III trials for each possible two-drug combination. What testing I know of usually doesn't go past cell culture and if you have elderly relatives taking many different medications you come across unforeseen and undesirable drug interactions with some frequency.
"A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige."
Do I publish articles to stick on my CV? You bet your ass. Those articles are at-a-glance evidence that when I say I know how to do skill set X, I've really done it. It also says that I get stuff done rather than sitting on my ass all day long. Where do I publish? The best journal I can (fuck Elsevier though) since prestige matters. Everybody knows what Science and Nature are. Everyone in your field also knows what the solid 2nd tier journals are and if you've published just there, that's ok. If you publish only in "The Whoosit Journal of Whatsit," then you've got a problem.
Journal prestige aside, do I want people to read my papers? HELL YES! Does it matter if people read my papers? HELL YES! Why does it matter? If people read my papers it's because they're either interesting or relevant to their own work, or both. If they read my paper, they may cite it when they write up their own results or review article. Citation indexes exist, the most well known is probably google scholar. What the hell do you think journal prestige comes from if not from the citations the average paper published therein gets? The higher the rank of the journal, the pickier they are about what they let in, and the higher the expectations that it will get read, get cited, and influence people! Journal aside, if your paper has been out more than a year or two and nobody's cited it, your stuff doesn't fucking matter--expletive required. If your paper has been out five years and is still getting a half-dozen citations a year, you got a middling paper that fills in some important details in your field--good for you your research matters! If your paper has been out for five years and gets two dozen citations a year and you've got another half dozen just like it, then in your field you're a force to be reckoned with and everybody and their dog knows who you are. Even stepping out to related fields your name is familiar, and if you're out job hunting it's easy to check and see how influential you are by asking around your peers or checking citation indexes (google scholar again). If nobody cites your stuff, then nobody reads your stuff, and then your stuff might as well be published in "The Journal of Shit Nobody Cares About." Who wants to spend years doing shit nobody cares about? God damn right I want people to read my fucking work--expletives absolutely required.
Yes and no. Here they're using a simple count of the total number of scientific articles published, and yes China will soon eclipse the USA. However not all papers, and the journals they are published it, are created equal. For instance I recently submitted a paper to the "Journal of Medical Entomology." Sounds spiffy, like the first name that slips off of the tongues of science journalists everywhere, no? Nope, it has an impact factor of 2. That means that over the preceding two years the average article published in that journal was cited by another paper twice. In my view an impact factor of 2 puts that journal at the very floor of 2nd-tier journals. Not everyone on slashdot would agree and might want four citations per two years for their floor. There's subjectivity to it certainly. However impact factor of the journal is not everything; it's just the average number. There will always be articles cited more and cited less. I've got one paper in another journal that has been cited ~5x as often as the average paper published in that journal, and another article in a third journal that...hasn't done as well. Such a spread isn't all that unusual. So besides the number of articles you've published, and in what journals (with what impact factor) you've published in, you've got how many times your articles have been cited by other articles. There are different ways of trying to compute the importance of a researcher, but one of the most common ways is the H-index. It's a way to try and work out how significant a scientist you are, but it is controversial. It is calculated simply which makes it at least somewhat popular. Say I have five published papers, the first paper has been cited 15 times, #2 11, #3 4, #4 2, and #5 once. I have an H-index of three: I have three papers that have been cited at least three times. The flaw is that even at the low level you can have vast differences of scientific importance. If I had only three papers each of which had been cited three times my H-index score would still be three. Likewise, if I had five papers with #1 cited 100 times, #2 60 times, and freshly published #3,4, and 5 cited 0 times, I'd have an H-index of 2 despite the field clearly thinking my top two papers were pretty important. There are other indexes out there, but none are perfect, and there is no perfect way to measure scientific output. However currently if you want to do science professionally you must be able to read English. All the top journals are in English, just as once upon a time all the top organic chemistry journals were in German. That's a measure of supremacy in science, but while English is the language of science today, it has been otherwise in the past and will likely change in the future.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
Grad students for all practical purposes live in the laboratory...if you want to call that living anyway. At a moderate rate of 60 hours a week your lab hours count will be off by a couple orders of magnitude after the 6-7 years it takes to earn a Ph.D. Even if you intended to write "undergrads" you'd be giving them short shrift. Of the dozen or so undergrad lab mates I've had in the last 15 years the majority worked for several years in the same lab and were funded under one of the professor's grants. That's far more than a few dozen hours which even the laziest undergrad I've worked with accomplished inside of two months. Hell I've worked with four high school students through an apprenticeship program and three had over 500 hours in by the time their stint in the program was over.
However as you point out TFA is not informative as to the point of the study and how it was funded. Having had some small experience with research being reported by the media the odds are pretty good that the reporter and/or editor mangled the point of the research quite badly and if one wants to know why mice were being trained to distinguish wine you'd need to read the original research paper published in Chemical Senses. The last paragraph of the introduction of scientific paper usually tells you why the researchers are doing their thing, and quoting that paragraph:
"Most naturally occurring odors are complex blends of volatile compounds. The way in which they are perceived depends upon the interactions between mixture components at the level of olfactory receptors (Derby 2000) as well as the way that component signals are processed in the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex (Wilson and Stevenson 2003; Tabor et al. 2004). Because most of these inputs are irrelevant at any given moment, it should be more efficient to focus neural resources on a subset of the available information and ignore the rest (Luck 1998). However, to our knowledge, few papers have reported experimental evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination. In the present paper, we report behavioral evidence for selective attention in odor discrimination of mice. We found this evidence in the course of behavioral studies on the discrimination of liquor odors in mice using a Y-maze. Our initial interest was to assess if mice could discriminate different brands of liquors just by taking a sniff of them like an expert flavorist. Additionally, we also demonstrate that selective attention in the olfactory system of mice could be modified through their learning experiences."
Now as for how important and novel this is, it was published in 2008 and according to google scholar has been cited by other papers four times since. It's definitely not a huge paper but neither is it an embarrassment. If you've been doing science for more than 10 years chances are pretty good you'll have a paper with as low a citation rate as this.
As for weirdness, it pales compared to this: homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks. You can get the Ig Nobel-winning research paper here, complete with pictures of the deed. If you really want to.
To add onto this point state workers in Wisconsin have had two years of furloughs already, amounting to a 3% pay cut. This is after the state government reneged on a 3% pay raise, the first such raise in years, and state workers before these cuts received on average 4% less in total compensation than those privately employed according to the Economic Policy Institute. Now despite everything, the unions are agreeing to the proposed pay cuts. Governor Walker doesn't have a leg to stand on. Worse for him is that people are paying attention to his actions now and this will hurt his planned fire-sale of state-owned properties in no-bid contracts as described in the Budget Repair Bill.
"No, one or a few of Behe's claims may have been demolished, but I know many physicists, engineers and biologists that can not "demolish" the idea of IC, even in their own minds."
Irreducibly complex systems in biology were first predicted by H. J. Muller in 1918 to be a consequence of evolution. See talk.origins for a quick summary, or a review of Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" from 1997. There's a (lot of) reasons why Behe wasn't taken seriously back when "Darwin's Black Box" was published in 1996 and the criticism has only deepened since then. If you're interested in the evolution of the heart a quick search turns up many articles on pubmed, for instance I learned something new today: crocodilians have a four-chambered heart!
Well from rearing Aedes aegypti (yellow fever mosquito) under laboratory conditions, they're about 1:1. I'm just a biochemist and not an entomologist, but that's my observations. In the wild it seems to me that the females must risk more by feeding off warm-blooded animals, but there might be a compensating mechanism for balancing the sex ratio.
Heh. You can sex the pupae based off of size: the females are bigger than the males and you can get them with ~95% accuracy. There is a difference in 4th instar larvae as well but I can't spot it, according to my advisor it can be done but only by about two people on the friggin' planet.
"They were all male. Male mosquitos only feed on plant nectar."
Doh! I should have mentioned that. It's only the female mosquitoes that need and can take a blood meal. It's important for the development of the eggs; no blood meal means no eggs (except for a few species that I can't remember right now that can deposit a first batch of eggs without a blood meal). It's also trivially easy to identify and separate adult mosquitoes based on sex: a short time on ice or a chill plate renders them immobile and the male mosquitoes have very large and bushy antennae while female mosquitoes have much smaller, stick-like antennae. This difference is readily apparent to the unaided eye.
The mosquitoes were a lab strain that hasn't been exposed to malaria in decades. Bill Gates even said during his talk that the mosquitoes weren't carrying it.