I am female and I agree strongly. I want nothing more than a town hall marriage followed, a couple of weeks later, by a BBQ. I hate getting dressed up and I think that a whole bunch of people, BBQ, maybe a volleyball net and kids running around is the best way to celebrate just about anything.
No, silly, the liberals are all off weeding their organic gardens with gardening gloves made by disadvantaged youths from developing countries. They wouldn't be so crass as to shop at a store owned by a corporation which only employs part time workers so as to avoid giving them health insurance.
Besides, using the self check out supports the union workers who make the self check out as well as those who install them and maintain them.
My point was that there are some direct and immediate advantages to the consumer in the self check out, something which your previous post suggested did not exist. Sorry if my response appeared flippant.
As a matter of fact, when there is a single line at the register and it gets really long, I do sometimes try to find the manager and ask if they could open another register. There isn't a self check out in West Philly.
You know how you get to the line of registers and there's only one person working and a line that extends back into the store?
Wouldn't that self check out option be nice right about then?
I work in a physics department. Women are definitely a minority. However, I am not in favor of quotas to correct this imbalance. I'm not in favor of quotas period.
I was generally in favor of title IX because I didn't enjoy getting the crappy leftover equipment from the men's ice hockey team. I remember a teammate who was given a football helmet and ended up getting a puck to the face because the bars across it were too widely spaced.
I've been in science for a while now and have definitely experienced such fun things as sexual harassment, discrimination based on being female and all sorts of fun. This ranged from the classic, "Are you planning on getting pregnant and dropping out of science" to the unwelcome heavy hand on my knee and more.
I do not think that quotas are the answer to these problems.
I'm not sure what the answer to these problems is. Perhaps time will solve them.
I wonder how much your typing differs from keyboard to keyboard. I'd love to figure out which differences are due solely to the muscles and remain static whatever you use to input and which are variable based on using the laptop keyboard/desktop keyboard or the work computer/home computer.
Point taken. I reread the article and while I initially had some doubts about the conflicting stories, I think you're right, especially with additional witnesses backing up this guy's story.
I also showed the story to my boyfriend, a longtime Philly resident, and he told me about having his camera smashed by a policeman's nightstick when he was taking pictures of a raid on an underground party in the 1980s. He was completely unsurprised by this story.
I'm always torn about how I feel about the police. On one hand, there seems to be a great amount of corruption and abuse of power, on the other hand, I am down with the idea of having law enforcement.
Of course the same police officers are likely to be giving testimony at the trial, and if nothing else, are going to have their names listed as arresting officers.
Reading the article, this guy and the police have apparently completely different stories about what was happening that night. I'd like to hear a more complete story before getting really upset.
I live in West Philly (yes, where Fresh Prince was born and raised) and this city has been having an incredible upswing in the number of people murdered. I'd rather see the police working on this problem than arresting someone for taking a picture.
I also found the NYTimes article painful to read. At first I thought they were running a piece on the histone code, something that has been discussed for years now, not this more recent discovery of a system of arranging nucleosomes. Science writing and reporting becomes more and more fluffy as time passes. I know that biology and medical writing for the layman is awful and misleading, but I'm not so much aware of how bad writing for the layman is in fields that are not my own: comp sci, physics, maths, and so on. If it is as bad, then we should all go with our pitchforks and torches and demand that the monster be delivered to us so we can fix the problem.
The only way this code was hidden was that we didn't know about it before. It took a whole bunch of yeast work and number crunching to see it.
Starting in middle school I got permission from my parents to forge their signatures to any forms that needed signing. They were tired of signing all the stuff and figured I was responsible enough to do it myself. Fortunately, I was a fairly good kid, so I wasn't trying to pull anything on them.
I didn't turn 18 until I was just starting college, so I never had the chance to try to use the no-longer a minor technique. I wish you had had the time/cash/resources to take on the school board.
Dear anonymous troll,
I'll be back in a year.
There are a reasonable number of US citizens living and working all over the world. About 14 million.
My teacher is a dual citizen of Brazil and the US. She pays her taxes in the US. The reciprocity of visa charges is not something just practiced by "third world shithole[s]." I believe that pretty much all the countries in the EU do it as well.
kisses,
ch
I am in the process of applying for a visa to work in a european union country. They require that I pay a fee of $100 because their citizens are required to pay the same fee to the US when they apply for a similar visa.
I think that Mexican guest workers implanted with RFID chips will result in US citizen guest workers being implanted with RFID chips. And I think that this will make US citizens cranky.
I'm learning a language right now and my teacher was telling my class with great glee how US citizens at the border/airports of her country are waiting in enormous lines to get fingerprinted because citizens of her country are required to do the same at US borders and airports.
The name of the photographer seemed familiar to me, so I did a little google. She and I went to jr. high school together in western mass. small world. she was one of a very few people i thought well of from that era. i hope this doesn't backfire on her and make her life miserable along with "botmaster"
My impression of the E-rate thang was that it was designed to help schools get cut-rate communications materials and not buy equipment unless it was relevant to connectivity. It included funds for wiring and for internet service.
The other thing that I remember is that this deal was put into place in return for the us government giving the telecom industry huge breaks on establishing universal service - basically getting everyone hooked up with phone service. The telecom industry made out like bandits on this one - the government funded lots of hardware and construction costs for them, and until the e-rate plan came into effect, they didn't have to repay these loans in any way. And in fact these same telecom giants whined like little babies about having to do something in return.
My memory may be a little shaky on this stuff, but I'd recommend checking it out a little further before directing all the mud at the schools who were jerks about the e-rate plan.
Those who abused this plan should be severely spanked, but I'm sure that there are some schools who actually did benefit from this program.
Yeah, I know the double-edged sword of giving out passwords to journal subscriptions. But at a certain point, if I'm in lab and really, really need to take a look at a journal article - like I need the materials/methods section to do an experiment, or if I'm writing a paper and I don't know if I should be citing a particular reference without reading it more carefully - I'm more tempted by the expediency of getting it now now now, rather than waiting and going to the library to photocopy it. This assumes that the library actually has a subscription. I know I'm treading heavily into a very small version of the ends justifying the means - for me, in my tunnel vision of the world, the ends are me doing science and the means are me doing naughty naughty things. At the same time, if I step back, the ends of making all this stuff available to people for free or for some nominal cost, definitely justify the means of me not giving out that password, or getting that password from a friend. As a graduate student who is motivated by
free food
science
it is sometimes hard to remember the larger-scale ends and means.
Thanks on the username. I'm a total geek, what can I say. Used to run 2D gels with chloroquine in them; now, my little sister is in Africa doing cost benefit analysis on that new malaria drug. Funny how the world seems to be small.
Mike Eisen and Pat Brown were both pioneers in recognizing the need for PLOS and the concept of non-commercial scientific publications. I've hung out with Mike a good few times, and he's a great guy - I had the opportunity to work in his lab, but wasn't able to due to personal circumstances. This is definitely a huge regret on my part.
The cost of subscriptions to scientific journals are immense and foolish - even from the standpoint of someone who get free access from their institution. I'm often tempted to just give out passwords willy-nilly to anyone who needs them. It strikes me that the majority of publications in my field are owned by a very small number of companies who are not at all inclined to be competitive.
That said, after my free paper subscription to PLOS biology ended, I haven't really looked at the site since. I guess the first few faltering steps have to be taken before it becomes more established and I automatically check it out every month like I look at the Cell/JBC/MCB/Nature/Science/EMBO/PNAS crowd.
I was asked to judge an essay contest for high school students sponsored by my place of work. Out of the 20 or so essays I read, I easily found plagiarism in six by doing a few google searches. Other essays were more difficult to prove plagiarised, but still made me suspicious - I didn't have time to do any in depth searches because I had other work to do.
These essays were obviously read by the student's teachers. Some students from the same class obviously prepared their essays together. Did the teachers just not care? Do they realize that next year those judging the competition will not take their students seriously. I was put off by the experience, and don't really want to judge again next year. When I was that age, we didn't have online sources for this kind of thing. I guess I'm naive to be surprised by the sheer percentage of kids cheating. I know there have been articles recently that cite studies that have found extremely high percentages of kids cheat, I just figured that these numbers applied to a kid's entire academic career - I can see someone cheating once or twice in the period of time from kindergarten to the end of high school, or until the end of college. Apparently, I was underestimating the problem.
The way my undergraduate university dealt with this was to have an honour code. We signed an agreement on our first day of school that we wouldn't cheat, and if we did, if we were discovered, if we knew that someone else cheated, and we didn't do anything, there were clear penalties. The code was clear and as far as I know, the implementation was fair. There was a case of a fraternity getting copies of an exam before it was given, and those involved were punished.
I indirectly caught someone cheating once when I found their class notes in the bathroom while they were taking an exam. I knew that it was early in the exam period. I didn't follow the honour code, but just took the notebook, kept it for a few days and then dropped it off with the professor, not telling them when or where I'd found it. I felt bad for the student, but I figured that when they went to the bathroom and found it missing, and then had it returned to them several days later by the professor, they would be freaked out enough. Yeah, that was probably mean, but I could have been meaner.
I've been guilty of something like this before. I used to work for the National Institutes of Health down in Maryland. The building I worked in was a danger to your health and had constant problems with the heating/cooling systems, not to mention the frequent floods.
Every time we had a flooding problem we would call up maintenance and the first question they'd ask was, "Is this in a patient area?" because this building was also a hospital. The first few times we told them truthfully that it was just a lab, and they would show up a day or two later - never mind the fact that we had a quarter inch of yellow water on the floor. Finally we just started telling them that it was a patient area or that we did clinical samples and couldn't do our work in these conditions.
I always felt a little guilty, but sometimes, especially if you can't get help, you have to not tolerate any downtime. Then again, I didn't try to be an arsewipe when I talked to the guys in maintenance - I was apologetic.
I'm sorry if I and many of my colleagues are exceptions to your rule. I think that your analysis is relevant to many fields, but it is sadly not relevant to many other fields. Research science, especially in the more competitive areas of bioscience, involves a huge amount of time and work. I do know people in my field who work 40 hours a week, but they will not become successful scientists.
Yes, I make mistakes sometimes. But generally, I plan my time in lab according to my energy and attentiveness. I spend the hours that I'm not with it doing tasks that don't require a great deal of attention to detail.
We call it graduate school. If I don't work six/seven days a week on my project for 10-15 hours a day, then my competitor will. When my competitor publishes what I was working on, my work becomes completely useless. And, before you say something about a graduate degree being pointless, I'll point out that I'm in the biosciences, and the degree is necessary in my field.
I think that the things I remember most about my brushes with science education are the explosions, the electric shocks, the fires, the horrific smells and the giant messes.
More seriously, I think that science education in public schools at the grade school level is appalling. In high school, the teachers are at minimum expected to have a college degree in the subject that they teach. I remember one woman telling us that she hated science, so we wouldn't be doing too many science units.
For instance, this morning, a piece of glassware broke for no apparent reason and I lost about three weeks of work and somewhere more than $1000 dollars of reagents. Right now technology (this computer, the web browser, etc.) is definitely reducing my stress level by distracting me from my pain. My stress level would be further reduced if I could punch in the monitor screen.
Slashdot Mirror
What about porphyrins?
photosynthesis, oxygen transport, electron transfer, and so on.
I guess this is a case of "your favorite molecule sucks."
I am female and I agree strongly. I want nothing more than a town hall marriage followed, a couple of weeks later, by a BBQ. I hate getting dressed up and I think that a whole bunch of people, BBQ, maybe a volleyball net and kids running around is the best way to celebrate just about anything.
No, silly, the liberals are all off weeding their organic gardens with gardening gloves made by disadvantaged youths from developing countries. They wouldn't be so crass as to shop at a store owned by a corporation which only employs part time workers so as to avoid giving them health insurance. Besides, using the self check out supports the union workers who make the self check out as well as those who install them and maintain them. My point was that there are some direct and immediate advantages to the consumer in the self check out, something which your previous post suggested did not exist. Sorry if my response appeared flippant. As a matter of fact, when there is a single line at the register and it gets really long, I do sometimes try to find the manager and ask if they could open another register. There isn't a self check out in West Philly.
You know how you get to the line of registers and there's only one person working and a line that extends back into the store? Wouldn't that self check out option be nice right about then?
I work in a physics department. Women are definitely a minority. However, I am not in favor of quotas to correct this imbalance. I'm not in favor of quotas period. I was generally in favor of title IX because I didn't enjoy getting the crappy leftover equipment from the men's ice hockey team. I remember a teammate who was given a football helmet and ended up getting a puck to the face because the bars across it were too widely spaced. I've been in science for a while now and have definitely experienced such fun things as sexual harassment, discrimination based on being female and all sorts of fun. This ranged from the classic, "Are you planning on getting pregnant and dropping out of science" to the unwelcome heavy hand on my knee and more. I do not think that quotas are the answer to these problems. I'm not sure what the answer to these problems is. Perhaps time will solve them.
I wonder how much your typing differs from keyboard to keyboard. I'd love to figure out which differences are due solely to the muscles and remain static whatever you use to input and which are variable based on using the laptop keyboard/desktop keyboard or the work computer/home computer.
I also showed the story to my boyfriend, a longtime Philly resident, and he told me about having his camera smashed by a policeman's nightstick when he was taking pictures of a raid on an underground party in the 1980s. He was completely unsurprised by this story.
I'm always torn about how I feel about the police. On one hand, there seems to be a great amount of corruption and abuse of power, on the other hand, I am down with the idea of having law enforcement.
Reading the article, this guy and the police have apparently completely different stories about what was happening that night. I'd like to hear a more complete story before getting really upset.
I live in West Philly (yes, where Fresh Prince was born and raised) and this city has been having an incredible upswing in the number of people murdered. I'd rather see the police working on this problem than arresting someone for taking a picture.
The only way this code was hidden was that we didn't know about it before. It took a whole bunch of yeast work and number crunching to see it.
I didn't turn 18 until I was just starting college, so I never had the chance to try to use the no-longer a minor technique. I wish you had had the time/cash/resources to take on the school board.
Dear anonymous troll, I'll be back in a year. There are a reasonable number of US citizens living and working all over the world. About 14 million. My teacher is a dual citizen of Brazil and the US. She pays her taxes in the US. The reciprocity of visa charges is not something just practiced by "third world shithole[s]." I believe that pretty much all the countries in the EU do it as well. kisses, ch
I think that Mexican guest workers implanted with RFID chips will result in US citizen guest workers being implanted with RFID chips. And I think that this will make US citizens cranky.
I'm learning a language right now and my teacher was telling my class with great glee how US citizens at the border/airports of her country are waiting in enormous lines to get fingerprinted because citizens of her country are required to do the same at US borders and airports.
The name of the photographer seemed familiar to me, so I did a little google. She and I went to jr. high school together in western mass. small world. she was one of a very few people i thought well of from that era. i hope this doesn't backfire on her and make her life miserable along with "botmaster"
I think we'd all be a little happier if the whereabouts of all those dangerous gardeners and farmers were known.
I also misread the title of this discussion and was momentarily confused. Especially since I just had my annual gyn exam.
The other thing that I remember is that this deal was put into place in return for the us government giving the telecom industry huge breaks on establishing universal service - basically getting everyone hooked up with phone service. The telecom industry made out like bandits on this one - the government funded lots of hardware and construction costs for them, and until the e-rate plan came into effect, they didn't have to repay these loans in any way. And in fact these same telecom giants whined like little babies about having to do something in return.
My memory may be a little shaky on this stuff, but I'd recommend checking it out a little further before directing all the mud at the schools who were jerks about the e-rate plan.
Those who abused this plan should be severely spanked, but I'm sure that there are some schools who actually did benefit from this program.
- free food
- science
it is sometimes hard to remember the larger-scale ends and means.Thanks on the username. I'm a total geek, what can I say. Used to run 2D gels with chloroquine in them; now, my little sister is in Africa doing cost benefit analysis on that new malaria drug. Funny how the world seems to be small.
The cost of subscriptions to scientific journals are immense and foolish - even from the standpoint of someone who get free access from their institution. I'm often tempted to just give out passwords willy-nilly to anyone who needs them. It strikes me that the majority of publications in my field are owned by a very small number of companies who are not at all inclined to be competitive.
That said, after my free paper subscription to PLOS biology ended, I haven't really looked at the site since. I guess the first few faltering steps have to be taken before it becomes more established and I automatically check it out every month like I look at the Cell/JBC/MCB/Nature/Science/EMBO/PNAS crowd.
These essays were obviously read by the student's teachers. Some students from the same class obviously prepared their essays together. Did the teachers just not care? Do they realize that next year those judging the competition will not take their students seriously. I was put off by the experience, and don't really want to judge again next year. When I was that age, we didn't have online sources for this kind of thing. I guess I'm naive to be surprised by the sheer percentage of kids cheating. I know there have been articles recently that cite studies that have found extremely high percentages of kids cheat, I just figured that these numbers applied to a kid's entire academic career - I can see someone cheating once or twice in the period of time from kindergarten to the end of high school, or until the end of college. Apparently, I was underestimating the problem.
The way my undergraduate university dealt with this was to have an honour code. We signed an agreement on our first day of school that we wouldn't cheat, and if we did, if we were discovered, if we knew that someone else cheated, and we didn't do anything, there were clear penalties. The code was clear and as far as I know, the implementation was fair. There was a case of a fraternity getting copies of an exam before it was given, and those involved were punished.
I indirectly caught someone cheating once when I found their class notes in the bathroom while they were taking an exam. I knew that it was early in the exam period. I didn't follow the honour code, but just took the notebook, kept it for a few days and then dropped it off with the professor, not telling them when or where I'd found it. I felt bad for the student, but I figured that when they went to the bathroom and found it missing, and then had it returned to them several days later by the professor, they would be freaked out enough. Yeah, that was probably mean, but I could have been meaner.
Every time we had a flooding problem we would call up maintenance and the first question they'd ask was, "Is this in a patient area?" because this building was also a hospital. The first few times we told them truthfully that it was just a lab, and they would show up a day or two later - never mind the fact that we had a quarter inch of yellow water on the floor. Finally we just started telling them that it was a patient area or that we did clinical samples and couldn't do our work in these conditions.
I always felt a little guilty, but sometimes, especially if you can't get help, you have to not tolerate any downtime. Then again, I didn't try to be an arsewipe when I talked to the guys in maintenance - I was apologetic.
Yes, I make mistakes sometimes. But generally, I plan my time in lab according to my energy and attentiveness. I spend the hours that I'm not with it doing tasks that don't require a great deal of attention to detail.
We call it graduate school. If I don't work six/seven days a week on my project for 10-15 hours a day, then my competitor will. When my competitor publishes what I was working on, my work becomes completely useless.
And, before you say something about a graduate degree being pointless, I'll point out that I'm in the biosciences, and the degree is necessary in my field.
More seriously, I think that science education in public schools at the grade school level is appalling. In high school, the teachers are at minimum expected to have a college degree in the subject that they teach. I remember one woman telling us that she hated science, so we wouldn't be doing too many science units.
Soap bubbles are way cool.
However, lighting up your shoes in the cabin is foolish. I just wonder if he couldn't have found a more discrete method of detonation...
Yay technology.
Yay stress.