I know you're being funny, but I'm not a horrible person to look at. I'm one of the "stealth nerds" - you have no idea until I start talking, and if I watch my words you'd still never know.
Heh, "stealth nerd," that's funny. Like a closet nerd that pokes his head out once in a while.
I agree UE enforced environmental laws, which is good. But you did not made a point on people sovereignty, here. The UE building process is destroying people sovereignty that exist in member states without ever recreating it at the UE level, and the goal is to enforce some policies. Some like environmental rules sounds good to me. Others, like neoliberalism, do not. The problem is that citizen cannot have their words on theses policies anymore
If you define sovereignty as citizens having absolute control over all the policies of their country, then there are no sovereign nations on Earth (except maybe Somalia). All nations that engage in trade agree to rules (e.g., via the WTO) to ensure no one abuses the system. Right now, for example, the US is accusing China of offering financial incentives to their auto industry for maximizing exports. That is strictly an internal Chinese policy that a third party (the WTO) will decide the legality of vis-a-vis how it impacts the American auto industry. And there are certainly Americans and Chinese that want to abolish the WTO and end all free-trade agreements because they impinge on sovereignty. But their governments have decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. The citizens of the member states of the EU are free to elect parliaments that will withdraw their country from the EU, but they don't because the benefits outweigh the costs.
There are modern european countries that are not part of the UE: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland. Their existence is not threatened by this situation. The UE is not the only way to organize collaboration between states.
Norway is self-sufficient because of their enormous and well-managed oil reserves, which are already traded as a fungible commodity via a global trade organization. Countries like the Netherlands rely on the EU to do the same for their resources, like natural gas, which cannot be sold easily on the global market (because it costs too much to transport), but which require European infrastructure to sell outside their borders. France and Germany sell electricity within the EU and Poland can entice companies to locate their manufacturing bases there because of cheap labor, but only with the assurances (e.g., of stability and workers' rights) that come along with being part of the EU. When the EU was formed, Switzerland had the notable advantage of not having been recently bombed back into the stone age, which they combined with their prowess as bankers to leverage into the modern economic center that it has become. Iceland is really not a great example of a country that is doing well outside of the EU... in fact, Iceland would arguably be better off on the Euro at this point... And I did not suggest that any country's existence was threatened, merely that the modern, prosperous Europe of the late 20th Century couldn't have happened with the EU.
I just think it is a bit glib to single out the EU as some horrible sacrifice of sovereignty that tramples peoples' rights. If anything, constructs like the schengen zone increase the freedom of European citizens.
Communications is a basic service provided by government. It's defined in the US constitution as well, as the Postal service.
There's no reason for private internet providers to exist.
Get rid of them, implement a government-designed system, like the roads. It would be far cheaper than building the highway system.
The best part of government ISP is that it has to follow constitutional freedom-of-speech rights, whereas a private ISP can shut down any message critical of the company, since private organizations don't have to follow the constitution.
Then, once it is working, the private sector will walk up, hat in hand, and ask if they can use the infrastructure because competition will drive prices down and provide better service to consumers. The Government will comply because they love private/public partnerships, and in 20 years we'll be right back where we are now, with private companies owning infrastructure paid for with public funds.
I can't speak for The Netherlands, but in the United States, there are certain things that "International Law" cannot do in the United States.
As a basic rule (there are no doubt exceptions), if Congress can't do it by law, the President and the Senate can't do it by treaty.
Unfortunately for us UE citizen, we completely wrecked people sovereignty when building UE. Many key policies are in the hands of the UE commission or the UE council, without much control left on what they do.
It is true that Brussels can impose laws on the EU, but it is hardly "wrecking sovereignty," particularly in the Netherlands which has benefited tremendously from environmental laws that regulate upstream pollution in other sovereign nations and the open borders that have lead to its current trade surplus. Without the EU, Germany and France could dump waste in the Rhine and the Maas at their borders and impose tariffs on Dutch goods and the Netherlands would just have to deal with it.
The Dutch government (and the other EU member states) voted to follow EU law (the EU Commission is not an unelected dictatorship) in this matter and therefore has to make sure that its own laws comply--if member states could cherry-pick which laws to follow, the EU would not function. And you can argue about the Euro all you like, but modern Europe simply wouldn't be possible without a governing body like the EU to regulate trade, enforce open borders, create uniform environmental policies, provide research funding, oversee oil and gas distribution, ensure fair use of airspace, launch satellites, etc. It has flaws, sure, and some of the silly regulations in the name of uniformity are, well, silly, but you can't seriously believe that tiny countries like the Benelux, Ireland, and Estonia would have been more prosperous on their own.
While not putting you down for this....I understand the lactose problem thing....but it did make me think of something the other day, what was bothering me as I study vegeterianism, and especially when looking into vegan-ism....how they are starting to almost come back around the 'curve' so to speak, and eating heavily processed foods?!?! I've seen them eating meat substitute things, that looked like they'd been in the lab and processed as much as HFCS imbibed Twinkies, or some other artifical foodstuff.
Idiots can be vegans too, you know. Not all vegans and vegetarians are condescending, self-satisfied, zealots that think they're better than you because they read the Omnivore's Dilemma. People that stuff their faces with over-processed "meat substitute" or can't give up cream cheese so settle for some sort of white vegetable paste that purports to be a "vegan substitute" are no better off than diabetes-waiting-to-happen people that stuff their faces full of Krusty Brand meat-flavored sandwiches and wash them down with 6,000 calories of high-fructose corn syrup.
I am mostly vegan (I wear leather and eat honey and a bit of hard cheese), but not so much by choice as by genetics. Lacking the temptation to eat meat and dairy (both of which make me very ill) and being generally wary of processed foods, the most highly processed food that enters my house is dried polenta. And I'm not a sickly-skinny dirty hippie (on the outside, anyway); I locked out a set of 170 kg raw dead-lifts just yesterday. I'm not trying to lecture or anything--just pointing out that there is a way to avoid animal products that isn't lazy or unhealthy.
Some day I am going to have to explain to my son how we managed to defeat a genocidal megalomaniac bend on world domination, narrowly avoid nuclear annihilation, and rebuild an entire continent in the 20th Century, but that in the 21st Century somehow pirates and terrorists are the biggest threat to Western Civilization. But my biggest fear is that he is growing up in a world where the bar for personal privacy, security, and liberty has been set alarmingly low.
Those of us who experienced privacy in the pre-WWW, pre-datamining era--the before time, the long-long-ago--still have a viscerally negative reaction when we learn about how Company X is collecting information on us in some new-and-intrusive way. Even when it's to protect us from pirates and terrorists, we at least object to it even though we have, thus far, just rolled over, muttering under our breath as a glorified hall monitor looks at pictures of our naked bodies before we are allowed to board an airplane. And we still get angry when we find out that a government is spying on us and listening in to our conversations--digitally encoded or otherwise.
People born after 2000 will have no memory of a smart-phone-free world by the time they are of voting age. They won't find it unsettling that you have to enter a credit card number before you can log into your iThing or that their toaster needs to know their birth date. Let's just hope that the elderly continue to have a disproportionate influence in electoral politics--at least until I die.
Imagine that corporations would send money to politicians, hiding it by claiming "privacy". Obviously, privacy is a right intended for natural persons (some formulations of human rights include a definition of privacy). Corporations do not need a right to privacy*. And it is easily exploited for blatant corruption.
You have it backwards; in the US wealthy people setup shell corporations that donate to "Super PACs" in a way that allows the donors to remain anonymous. That way billionaires can corrupt politics without the negative publicity that should come with donating millions to a political campaign. When ordinary people give to political campaigns, that information is (in theory) available to the public.
Home grown is not the same thing and not what is being discussed. I have a garden too and our tomatoes (organically grown for what it is worth) taste better than anything I can get from the grocery store if for no other reason than I can actually pick them when they are ripe. But that's a different issue. I'm merely talking about food in the grocery store with the label organic on it. Quite simply I've never seen any persuasive evidence that organic food from the grocery store is tastier or more nutritious than non-organic food and I've never met anyone who could tell the difference just by taste or appearance.
I think it is still germane to TFA in the sense that "organic" may have reached that tipping point where it devolves into yet another meaningless marketing label, particularly given the ever-changing regulatory standards within states/provinces/countries. There is an ocean of difference between in-season produce from local organic farmers and the "organic" lemon that came here on a boat from Argentina, but retailers learned quickly that people will pay more for the "organic" label, largely because the term is conflated with homegrown and/or local, which modern marketing encourages. They want you to think of picking tomatoes off the vine when they are as pungent as a pie cooling on a window sill in a cartoon. I see bottled water as a parallel to organic food labeling; put tap water in a bottle, serve it chilled, and charge five dollars a bottle. People think that it is "healthier" and perceive it as tasting better despite no evidence to support either.
I didn't mean to imply that manual labor is more virtuous or harder than mental labor. What I meant is that people who have had to do manual labor growing up--or really who had to work at all--have a different definition of "hard work" than those who had the luxury of spending their summers volunteering or interning to bolster their college applications. In my experience, the latter tend to adopt the notion that hard work = success, in contrast to people who dug ditches all summer for $4.00 and wind up blowing it all on gas and repairs for their POS car.
My parents were divorced and I came from a family of blue-collar workers and immigrant farmers. I hope that you are not suggesting that they sent me to public school because they didn't care or respect the need for education. My mom held down a job while attending night school and still managed to get me to school on time with my homework done. In the US, in the 80's and early 90's, our school years were constantly shortened to deal with budget cuts. It had nothing at all to do with the quality of education, it was all about screwing over poor kids and the "if you're poor it's because you didn't work hard enough" philosophy that Reagan popularized.
Theoretically all my "wasted" summer months were a big drag on my education, but I contend that the measure of the performance of a kid with respect to schooling is not a measure of future success, nor is it the most important aspect of a child's life. Summer Break offers opportunities to learn other useful life skills. When I was very young, I would spend Summer with my grandparents, who lived in another state (and who weren't poor). They sent me to a great summer camp, where I made friends, performed in skits, played field hockey, swam, etc. One summer I even went to baseball camp. Once I was 12 or so, I would work (under the table) all Summer and when I turned 14, I started working real jobs, with a paycheck. I'm sure I forgot a few proofs from Geometry or some SI units, but I learned so many other skills that are important to success (not the least of which is how much minimum wage sucks).
After many years of state college, I wound up studying at an ivy league university, surrounded by upper-class kids from private schools. Their teachers had PhDs and their schools boasted all kinds of fancy education models. They had all been pushed by their well-educated parents to succeed right from the womb. Many of them actually knew each other from way-back, because they had competed at the same "science competitions" (I still don't know what those are). None of them had jobs--instead they volunteered at soup kitchens, or whatever, because that is the sort of thing fancy-pants universities like on applications. All of them had better educations that I, and all of them retained far more of it. They could talk about literature and sound generally smart and educated. But they were also high-strung and sheltered. Not one of them had ever done a day of real manual labor. Their definition of "hard work" was wildly different from mine and they all expected "hard work" to translate into success automatically. I prefer my rich patchwork of life experience and realistic expectations to their sterile bubble of self-indulgence and I credit my long, budget-induced summers with much of what makes me unique.
The mundane definition of innovation is just something new or different. We ascribe our own meaning beyond that; you set the bar at game-changing, while I place more value on "newness." But I still contend that, even by the broad definition of "new or different," the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are not innovations because they were just better implementations of existing ideas and devices; not even that different from their predecessors.
I had some sort of Palm whatchamacallit before the iPhone came out. All the iPhone really did was replace the stylus with a finger and ditch the physical keyboard. Apple was essentially waiting for scientists and engineers to solve some problems with capacitive touch screens (some of which certainly involved actual innovation). Had Apple not accrued enough clout from the iPod to convince ATT to let a non-carrier phone on their network, we would be talking about the amazing, revolutionary $PHONE from $COMPANY because it was an inevitable next step.
Again, I'm not bashing Apple or their awesome line of products--but I think that if you are going to label any part of the revolution of the i-device innovative, it was the marketing, branding and aesthetics (see: Palm whatchamacallit). It does bother me a bit, though, how often I see the word "innovative" being used to describe "implementing the obvious in a profitable manner." It's like calling Stephanie Whatshername a creative genius because lonely cat ladies and pre-teen girls value cheesy love stories more than prose, character development, or compelling story arcs.
For some reason Nikon's WiFi adapter only works with the entry-level D3200 and the only cameras with built-in WiFi are the pro D4 an D5. But, from what I've seen, apps for controlling Nikons by USB tethering are popping up the Play store... just none from Nikon. I suppose I should dig up a micro-to-micro USB cable and give them a whirl!
In my opinion, an innovation is something that no one thought of before and that performs better than its predecessors. It is not a synonym for invention or discovery. Take graphene for example. People had been working with it in various forms (usually called "exfoliated graphite") for decades because it has all the interesting properties of graphite, but with an enormous surface-area to volume ratio. Theorists predicted interesting properties in single, isolated sheets of graphite, and there was some evidence to support it, but nothing really came of it. Then someone got the idea to use scotch tape to rip off a few layers of graphene from bulk graphite, which eventually lead to a Nobel prize. The innovation wasn't the scotch tape, or the graphene, or even using scotch tape to exfoliate a laminar material; it was using scotch tape to exfoliate graphite.
That one little innovation allowed all kinds of measurements that validated the intriguing properties of graphene and sparked a deluge of research across the physical sciences. Now, let's contrast it to something like the iPhone. Was that an innovation? I say no. Everyone had thought of the smartphone already--they were just waiting for the technology to catch up to expectation. People were using proto-iPads to keep track of stock trades decades before the iPod existed.
I think that in the business world, success is equivalent to money and innovation drives success, therefore anything that makes money is innovative. And since things that make money are generally popular, they use the word "innovation" to describe creating something that is popular, which essentially boils down to having the right idea or product and the right time.Thus Apple--which makes very popular, well-designed products--has become synonymous with innovation. I'm not knocking Apple; convincing people to enter their credit card information in order to use a device that they already bought is pure genius. But what have they done that is really de novo, that was more than just clever or marketed effectively?
Just last night I was stuck between taking a picture on my DSLR--archival quality, creamy bokeh, tack-sharp foreground, superb color saturation etc.--and having to walk up stairs, plug it into my computer, process the RAW file, and upload it versus snapping picture on my Android phone--blurry, washed out colors, throwaway quality, near-infinite depth of field, etc.--and having it pop up on the Internet almost instantly. So Nikon and Samsung are definitely on to something here, except that there is no way I would consider buying a PAS camera with Android built in because it is the worst of both worlds. Sure, you get more megapixels, but the effective f-stop is still f/55, the colors are less washed out, but still nowhere near a decent DSLR, you can't use a bounce flash, and you still have to drag around another brick in addition to your phone (assuming you use your phone to make phone calls). Plus you still need WiFi to upload the pictures. I think this Android/camera is a nice upgrade path for people who use PAS cameras because it eliminates the PC from the equation, but it is certainly no more interesting to actual photographers than any other PAS on the market. Modern (Nikon) DSLRs can be controlled from a PC via a USB tether. Just let me tether my DSLR to my Android phone. I can shoot RAW+JPEG, use the (fantastic) post-processing in the camera, upload the JPEG for instant-gratification and keep the RAW for later; problem solved.
a) The chances of your circumcision being botched leaving serious, permanent dysfunction are higher than the reduction in AIDS risk.
b) Your risk of AIDS is highly lifestyle dependent. The western world isn't Uganda, most people simply aren't at risk. Why can't people who chose risky lifestyles also choose to be circumcised, as adults? Why do we presume all babies are guilty...?
c) All the medical studies in favor of circumcision are written by people who make money from it. The only study you need is the observation that Europe isn't some aids infested den of rotting, cancerous dicks.
d) Masturbation with/without foreskin? Foreskin is best, no contest. Modern circumcision was actually started by the anti-masturbation movements in the 1900s to remove the pleasure from wanking (headed by Doctor Kellogg no less - the guy who invented cornflakes). Think about that before chopping.
Thank you! The existence of Europe (and possibly South America and Asia--not sure what their policies are) alone trivializes TFA. But a country full of fat people arguing for mandatory circumcision to save a few bucks on health care (while ensuring an extra $500 or so in medical costs for 1/2 of all births) is like pushing your car to work to save on gas. If you want to save money on healthcare, put a $5 flat tax on all fast food items like many states have done with cigarettes. This circumcision nonsense is the male mirror of the HPV vaccine/cervical cancer debate from a few years ago. Shockingly, the manufacturer of the vaccine thought it was absolutely crucial to vaccinate all girls... because it (might) lower their chances of getting cervical cancer... and save money or whatever... think of the children!
I had a coworker that raised a child into his 20s and is continuing to care for him in such a state that the child cannot even bathe itself as an adult. He holds the utmost care for his broken offspring, favoring it more than the others. Why, I'll never know.
I would imagine that I would love my son just as much if he were riddled with genetic diseases that hobbled his mind and life span and would probably do the same... It's like watching a friend pour money on his heroin-addicted adult son, who has no intentional of quitting, to try to get him clean enough to stand trial for dealing. His son will probably OD before he turns 40 and burn though his father's retirement savings. We all know it and make rational arguments to let his son face his own consequences, but we also understand that love makes bad decisions.
The majority of scientists you know are then idiots.
The republican party has fully embraced the far right christians. These are young earth crazies that are fine with destroying the earth as they believe the apocalypse is right around the corner. They have no interest in furthering knowledge beyond "God did it".
I think it is an oversimplification to simply say that scientists lean "left" or "right" as if they are monolithic policy positions. I am literally surrounded by scientists every day and it is fair to say that the vast majority are atheists or non-religious, but that is really where the left/right bias ends. Politically, science professors are just like everyone else; the older the get, the more conservative they get. The one glaring difference is that they are smarter than the average population and are painfully aware that right-wing Christian nut jobs have hi-jacked the GOP, complete with Conservative purity tests. Well-known professors who have voted republican their entire lives were taken of the short list for positions in the Bush White House because they gave money to Michael Dukakis--when he was running for governor. I know a few that still can't bring themselves to vote democrat, but who have stopped donating to the GOP because of the outright anti-science craziness espoused by some of the Tea Party Republicans in office. Two things all scientist pay attention to are the NIH/NSF budgets and Defense spending and everyone is nervous when bible-thumping crazies get on those committees.
I don't know what you're talking about, but I'd wager a guess there are more men in prison for rapes they did not commit than there are actual rapes which are "under-prosecuted".
Look up the statistics for yourself, as I did recently. Study after study shows that from 10-50%, which a shocking number at the higher end, of rape claims are intentionally fraudulent. That's not even counting "Assange rape" type accusations, but where the "victim" knowingly lied to fuck someone over. I've known people who have been accused of rape where I know they did nothing due to available timeframe and their claims - and they were later exonerated - while out on dates because the woman felt 'uncomfortable' or 'led' by the male. It happens all the fucking time; whether it's a symptom of a high rape rate and the women being predisposed to feeling sexually threatened by anyone male or they're socially conditioned to think all advances from men are rape, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if both are a factor.
Do you really think that male contempt for women is so high in the West that they'd dismiss rape claims out of hand? I'm sorry, but in almost every scenario I'm aware of, the instant male response to rape of an acquaintance is "let's get the torches and pitchforks". I am fairly certain predispositional response is fairly socially broad within the US, and it's universal amongst the police officers I know.
The big issue with rape reporting is that not enough is done. Victims don't report the legitimate rapes; that's how it works, psychologically, as I understand it. Fix that problem and the dismissal of rape reports 'out of hand' is likely to diminish due to the fact that the proportion of reported rapes isn't so heavily skewed in favor of false reports.
It's not like there is a huge number of innocent men serving 40 year sentences for beating the shit out of a women and raping her. The line between consensual and non-consensual sex is fuzzy at best and men bear some responsibility for putting themselves in situations where they tread dangerously close to that line.
I too had a friend accused of rape. Her dad found out that his prefect little angel banged five guys at once (well, in a short period of time), so she claimed rape--months after the fact--to exonerate herself. Her dad also happened to be the sheriff of our small town and my friend was screwed over by the good-ol-boy legal system and the local media. Maybe she was drunk, maybe they talked her in to it, or maybe she just wanted to bang five dudes at once. But at the end of the day, he and four guys invited a women they barely knew over to one of their houses, drank plenty of hard alcohol, and had some spur of the moment fun. A responsible person would have weighed the potential downside and waited until they were all sober to discuss and plan the whole thing before hand, which is the right thing to do when exploring kinks with strangers.
This is something that a lot of pro-choicers have to tell themselves so they feel better about themselves. By any reasonable definition a fetus is a human being, all of the arguments to the contrary to hold water, IMHO. "It's just a collection of cells!", yeah, well, so are you. "It doesn't even have a brain yet!", well, neither does someone in a persistent vegetative state, but it's still considered murder to put a bullet in their head.
I could never understand how someone can consider a zygote a "baby" and call it murder to take a pill to prevent it from turning into a baby or feel moral outrage about removing the feeding tube of a brain-dead women and then turn around and eat meat. "Oh look at me, I'm so pro-life that I think a ball of goo with some myocardial cells in the middle is a precious life. Now pass me that pork-stuffed chicken wrapped in a steak." Because clearly animals locked into high-density feed lots and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics before being killed in the prime of their lives, or chicks being ground into a chunky paste moments after being hatched for the crime of having a Y chromosome don't have real feelings, like clumps of human cells that haven't even developed a central nervous system. Though, I suppose we can't ask for intellectual honesty from people who characterize abortions after rape as "punishing the child for the rape."
Then I must belong to a third group. I think people should not only have the right to abort a fetus, but to euthanize their baby within three months of birth in special cases. I am a parent and I cannot imagine the horror of raising a kid with a horrible genetic disease that will limit its life to ten or twelve years of constant medical care and infant-like dependence. It happened to a friend of mine and, without going into details, it breaks my heart to watch him pour all this love into a child with a marginal-at-best quality of life that he knows has about a 1% chance of living past five and a 0.0000001% of making it to puberty. He and his wife are terrific people with so much love to offer but, as cold as this sounds, they basically have to wait for their kid to die before they can even think about having another one because they simply don't have the time or energy. Honestly, I doubt anyone--myself included--would be able to make the decision to euthanize a baby, no matter how diseased, and I doubt there are many (if any) physicians that would perform such a procedure. But I still think the option should be on the table, legally speaking (though I'm willing to compromise because I'm pretty sure I am in the minority.) Ditto for end-of-life euthanasia; if you're that close to death, you should be allowed to round up to corpse and save everyone the horrific experience of watching modern medicine delay the inevitable.
Also, the cut-off period for abortions are not arbitrary, they are (generally) based on whether or not the fetus can potentially survive outside the womb. The precise moment at which that happens is what can be debated reasonably.
FWIW, the talk was about a novel IR sensor. So there's at least that. TFA is a (typo-ridden—wtf is "florescence"?) Nature Blogs article, presumably from someone who was in the stands yesterday and thought it deserved a little bit of attention for being neat. I think most of the PR inflation, at least in this case, happened right here on Slashdot.
You're right; this is mostly a function of the "new and improved" Slashdot... I sort of went off on a semi-unrelated tirade against science journalism, in general. If they got this concept to work with actual NIR fluorophores, then that is at least interesting. Though it sort of proves my point that the "journalist" here totally missed what was interesting--i.e., people have stuffed fluorescent probes into red blood cells before--which is why you shouldn't blog about talks at ACS meetings unless, perhaps, you were involved in the actual research.
The idea that journalists should not cover findings reported at meetings because they're too stupid or the results are not ready for primetime is a little odd, specially in the heady days of the social web. The results are out on twitter - not because dumb journalists are writing about it but because scientists are tweeting about it, blogging it and so on.
You said stupid; I would use the word unqualified. And what does the social web have to do with centuries old traditions of scientific research? What, since everyone has an iPhone scientists should start having to worry about their "Klout score" or whatever? This is the same mentality that drives real-time Tweets about congresspeople taking votes--i.e., performing the most mundane part of their job--and that has ruined political journalism. I mean, what is the story here? "Scientists have good idea, prove concept, get funding." Wow, someone call Cronkite!
Here is the problem with so-called social medial. It is self-serving because it prioritizes being the first one to fill a web page with text regardless of the content of that text in an effort to fill not just the 24-hour news cycle, but the insatiable appetite of the Internet for real-time information. It creates so much noise that it becomes impossible for ordinary people--like myself--to separate out the signal of actual news. This is how social media should function; it is a nice example of how social media can add depth to news reporting and make people feel engaged.
There is nothing wrong with scientists blogging about their own results, on their own private blog--most of them are young and pre- or early-career and are understandably proud of their accomplishments. But blogging != reporting. And please don't take it personally--I have nothing against journalists and I sympathize with the tough transition Journalism is making from print to the Internet. If anyone is to blame here, it is the scientists themselves for indulging in the flattery of having someone write up something that just crossed the proof-of-principle threshold. (But they also have a lot of pressure put on them by the university to "Web 2.0, Social Media, exposure on the Internet, blah, blah.")
A more mature response might be to suggest that there should be more critical voices out there on the research as quickly as possible - so that by the time the research (slowly) reaches the printed page or is published online, it's had thorough external peer review. (Oh and journalists - good ones - we have many of those at Nature - do often provide a secondary peer review. Either questioning results or, more often, by choosing not to cover boring or incremental or simply wrong research that has reached the public domain).
The reporter has an undergrad degree in chemistry by the way, as you'll see if you google his name.
No, more critical voices are absolutely not what is needed; the scientific communities take care of that themselves, internally, as it should be. If I follow your logic, the added value of this type of reporting is that someone with an undergraduate degree can add a layer of "external peer review" on top of that provided by the panel of referees selected by journal editors (who are themselves active researchers), the attendees of scientific conferences, grant review panels, and internal reviews done the department/faculty at their university--i.e., literally their peers..? I am not dismissing all reporting of science as useless--quite the contrary. Every effort should be made to inform the public of how their tax dollars are spent--even people like Alan Alda, who are not journalists, do a tremendous public service by making people aware of the amazing accomplishments of modern scientific research. I am making the argument that social media and real-time over-reporting is detrimental to science in general for myriad reasons, not the least of which is
I guess we've reached the point where the "science media" can't even wait for papers to be published, let alone accumulate a few references, before they push a one-sided synopsis they gleaned from a couple of phone calls with real scientists to a blog...
For those of you who studied CS, Chemistry works a bit differently in that publishing papers is a far, far, faaaar greater hurdle than getting a talk accepted at a conference. Half of what you hear at a big, national meeting like ACS will never be published; less in reputable journals. The way things used to work, before "science journalists" started competing with each other to see who could "break a story" the fastest, is that a paper was peer reviewed and published and then it sat in a journal for a while. The second, and more important step, is other people citing that work as they try to reproduce/use/build on it. Only after it has garnered a fair number of citations will it be considered both interesting and relevant. (That is not to say that people fabricate results, just that some chemistry is more difficult to reproduce.)
Ten years ago, you framed the cover art if your paper made it on the cover of a journal. Your university might do a press release if you cured cancer or something. Now (American) universities have whole PR departments (the ever-expanding "administrative" part of university that sucks up your kid's tuition) that basically feed "news" about articles that will be published to "journalists" who then Google a couple of keywords to figure out who they should call for a comment--you know, two sources--after they speak with one of the authors. (But don't worry, their degree in Basic Science or Biology totally qualifies them to write about anything involving a lab coat.) Then they write up some non-information-containing fluff that doesn't even point the reader at the actual, published work (due to policies of the publishers). So what are we supposed to do with this information that is basically a summary of the BS you write in the Introduction about why your work is the bees knees? I mean, this "story" is a summary of the part of a yet-to-be-published paper that referees basically glance at to make sure they cited all the Big Names before they move on to the actual science. In reality, the researchers probably just proved the concept using green fluorescent dyes, as NIR dyes have low quantum yields and are not common because of some fundamental problems involved in fluorescence above 800 nm. But what I know from this story is that NIR light can pass through tissue (sort of; it's not like we're invisible at 1200 nm or something) and that some scientists did something with fluorescence in red blood cells.
I am all for publicizing the results of taxpayer money vis-a-vis university researchers, but this kind of hyperbolic nonsense that doesn't even link back to the actual published results just creates unrealistic expectations from laymen. "I read an article on using blood cells as sensors like two years ago, why do I still have to prick my finger to measure my glucose levels? Stupid scientists--what good are they?"
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with the outcome, just questioning the mechanism. My infant son not only has to go through the porno scanners, he needs his own f-ing passport! And there was a story on/. just yesterday about a new ruling that people talking on cell phones don't have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" against eavesdropping by law enforcement. But the last step before a government loses control is the a mass exodus of wealth, as rich people are closer to the power structures and can see calamity coming from further away than us ordinary folk. There is no way that the ultra-rich, the oligarchs, the dynastic families, the bankers--whatever you want to call them--will allow a government to destabilize while their money is parked in its economy (which is why many oil-rich African countries are broke). Right now the US government is seeing a huge influx of capital as people dump their money into treasury bonds to protect it from the unpredictable, volatile markets of the ongoing global recession, so I'm not too worried... yet. Once I see large-scale divestment from government bonds, I'm headed to South America to raise sheep.
This doesn't follow. Lots of common, everyday objects and activities have "potential for abuse" one could describe as "almost unlimited". Automatic weapons. Automobiles. Kitchen knives. Ball-point pens.
Is it really fair to compare these potential existential threats to the non-existential threat of the creeping invasion of privacy in the name of security? If someone abuses automatic weapons, it results in murder, but abusing LPRs is about abusing laws that were written before this technology existed to extract more fines from people. The former is obvious and elicits a sharp reaction from the media, while the latter just blends into all the other annoyances that we have come to accept in the Post 9/11 World. I would say LPRs are more like body scanners, which were installed at airports without any public comment and which are demonstrably useless at thwarting terrorists, but which justify the ever-increasing DHS/TSA budget.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're being funny, but I'm not a horrible person to look at. I'm one of the "stealth nerds" - you have no idea until I start talking, and if I watch my words you'd still never know.
Heh, "stealth nerd," that's funny. Like a closet nerd that pokes his head out once in a while.
I agree UE enforced environmental laws, which is good. But you did not made a point on people sovereignty, here. The UE building process is destroying people sovereignty that exist in member states without ever recreating it at the UE level, and the goal is to enforce some policies. Some like environmental rules sounds good to me. Others, like neoliberalism, do not. The problem is that citizen cannot have their words on theses policies anymore
If you define sovereignty as citizens having absolute control over all the policies of their country, then there are no sovereign nations on Earth (except maybe Somalia). All nations that engage in trade agree to rules (e.g., via the WTO) to ensure no one abuses the system. Right now, for example, the US is accusing China of offering financial incentives to their auto industry for maximizing exports. That is strictly an internal Chinese policy that a third party (the WTO) will decide the legality of vis-a-vis how it impacts the American auto industry. And there are certainly Americans and Chinese that want to abolish the WTO and end all free-trade agreements because they impinge on sovereignty. But their governments have decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. The citizens of the member states of the EU are free to elect parliaments that will withdraw their country from the EU, but they don't because the benefits outweigh the costs.
There are modern european countries that are not part of the UE: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland. Their existence is not threatened by this situation. The UE is not the only way to organize collaboration between states.
Norway is self-sufficient because of their enormous and well-managed oil reserves, which are already traded as a fungible commodity via a global trade organization. Countries like the Netherlands rely on the EU to do the same for their resources, like natural gas, which cannot be sold easily on the global market (because it costs too much to transport), but which require European infrastructure to sell outside their borders. France and Germany sell electricity within the EU and Poland can entice companies to locate their manufacturing bases there because of cheap labor, but only with the assurances (e.g., of stability and workers' rights) that come along with being part of the EU. When the EU was formed, Switzerland had the notable advantage of not having been recently bombed back into the stone age, which they combined with their prowess as bankers to leverage into the modern economic center that it has become. Iceland is really not a great example of a country that is doing well outside of the EU... in fact, Iceland would arguably be better off on the Euro at this point... And I did not suggest that any country's existence was threatened, merely that the modern, prosperous Europe of the late 20th Century couldn't have happened with the EU.
I just think it is a bit glib to single out the EU as some horrible sacrifice of sovereignty that tramples peoples' rights. If anything, constructs like the schengen zone increase the freedom of European citizens.
Communications is a basic service provided by government. It's defined in the US constitution as well, as the Postal service.
There's no reason for private internet providers to exist.
Get rid of them, implement a government-designed system, like the roads. It would be far cheaper than building the highway system.
The best part of government ISP is that it has to follow constitutional freedom-of-speech rights, whereas a private ISP can shut down any message critical of the company, since private organizations don't have to follow the constitution.
Then, once it is working, the private sector will walk up, hat in hand, and ask if they can use the infrastructure because competition will drive prices down and provide better service to consumers. The Government will comply because they love private/public partnerships, and in 20 years we'll be right back where we are now, with private companies owning infrastructure paid for with public funds.
I can't speak for The Netherlands, but in the United States, there are certain things that "International Law" cannot do in the United States.
As a basic rule (there are no doubt exceptions), if Congress can't do it by law, the President and the Senate can't do it by treaty.
Unfortunately for us UE citizen, we completely wrecked people sovereignty when building UE. Many key policies are in the hands of the UE commission or the UE council, without much control left on what they do.
It is true that Brussels can impose laws on the EU, but it is hardly "wrecking sovereignty," particularly in the Netherlands which has benefited tremendously from environmental laws that regulate upstream pollution in other sovereign nations and the open borders that have lead to its current trade surplus. Without the EU, Germany and France could dump waste in the Rhine and the Maas at their borders and impose tariffs on Dutch goods and the Netherlands would just have to deal with it.
The Dutch government (and the other EU member states) voted to follow EU law (the EU Commission is not an unelected dictatorship) in this matter and therefore has to make sure that its own laws comply--if member states could cherry-pick which laws to follow, the EU would not function. And you can argue about the Euro all you like, but modern Europe simply wouldn't be possible without a governing body like the EU to regulate trade, enforce open borders, create uniform environmental policies, provide research funding, oversee oil and gas distribution, ensure fair use of airspace, launch satellites, etc. It has flaws, sure, and some of the silly regulations in the name of uniformity are, well, silly, but you can't seriously believe that tiny countries like the Benelux, Ireland, and Estonia would have been more prosperous on their own.
While not putting you down for this....I understand the lactose problem thing....but it did make me think of something the other day, what was bothering me as I study vegeterianism, and especially when looking into vegan-ism....how they are starting to almost come back around the 'curve' so to speak, and eating heavily processed foods?!?! I've seen them eating meat substitute things, that looked like they'd been in the lab and processed as much as HFCS imbibed Twinkies, or some other artifical foodstuff.
Idiots can be vegans too, you know. Not all vegans and vegetarians are condescending, self-satisfied, zealots that think they're better than you because they read the Omnivore's Dilemma. People that stuff their faces with over-processed "meat substitute" or can't give up cream cheese so settle for some sort of white vegetable paste that purports to be a "vegan substitute" are no better off than diabetes-waiting-to-happen people that stuff their faces full of Krusty Brand meat-flavored sandwiches and wash them down with 6,000 calories of high-fructose corn syrup.
I am mostly vegan (I wear leather and eat honey and a bit of hard cheese), but not so much by choice as by genetics. Lacking the temptation to eat meat and dairy (both of which make me very ill) and being generally wary of processed foods, the most highly processed food that enters my house is dried polenta. And I'm not a sickly-skinny dirty hippie (on the outside, anyway); I locked out a set of 170 kg raw dead-lifts just yesterday. I'm not trying to lecture or anything--just pointing out that there is a way to avoid animal products that isn't lazy or unhealthy.
Some day I am going to have to explain to my son how we managed to defeat a genocidal megalomaniac bend on world domination, narrowly avoid nuclear annihilation, and rebuild an entire continent in the 20th Century, but that in the 21st Century somehow pirates and terrorists are the biggest threat to Western Civilization. But my biggest fear is that he is growing up in a world where the bar for personal privacy, security, and liberty has been set alarmingly low.
Those of us who experienced privacy in the pre-WWW, pre-datamining era--the before time, the long-long-ago--still have a viscerally negative reaction when we learn about how Company X is collecting information on us in some new-and-intrusive way. Even when it's to protect us from pirates and terrorists, we at least object to it even though we have, thus far, just rolled over, muttering under our breath as a glorified hall monitor looks at pictures of our naked bodies before we are allowed to board an airplane. And we still get angry when we find out that a government is spying on us and listening in to our conversations--digitally encoded or otherwise.
People born after 2000 will have no memory of a smart-phone-free world by the time they are of voting age. They won't find it unsettling that you have to enter a credit card number before you can log into your iThing or that their toaster needs to know their birth date. Let's just hope that the elderly continue to have a disproportionate influence in electoral politics--at least until I die.
Imagine that corporations would send money to politicians, hiding it by claiming "privacy". Obviously, privacy is a right intended for natural persons (some formulations of human rights include a definition of privacy). Corporations do not need a right to privacy*. And it is easily exploited for blatant corruption.
You have it backwards; in the US wealthy people setup shell corporations that donate to "Super PACs" in a way that allows the donors to remain anonymous. That way billionaires can corrupt politics without the negative publicity that should come with donating millions to a political campaign. When ordinary people give to political campaigns, that information is (in theory) available to the public.
Home grown is not the same thing and not what is being discussed. I have a garden too and our tomatoes (organically grown for what it is worth) taste better than anything I can get from the grocery store if for no other reason than I can actually pick them when they are ripe. But that's a different issue. I'm merely talking about food in the grocery store with the label organic on it. Quite simply I've never seen any persuasive evidence that organic food from the grocery store is tastier or more nutritious than non-organic food and I've never met anyone who could tell the difference just by taste or appearance.
I think it is still germane to TFA in the sense that "organic" may have reached that tipping point where it devolves into yet another meaningless marketing label, particularly given the ever-changing regulatory standards within states/provinces/countries. There is an ocean of difference between in-season produce from local organic farmers and the "organic" lemon that came here on a boat from Argentina, but retailers learned quickly that people will pay more for the "organic" label, largely because the term is conflated with homegrown and/or local, which modern marketing encourages. They want you to think of picking tomatoes off the vine when they are as pungent as a pie cooling on a window sill in a cartoon. I see bottled water as a parallel to organic food labeling; put tap water in a bottle, serve it chilled, and charge five dollars a bottle. People think that it is "healthier" and perceive it as tasting better despite no evidence to support either.
I didn't mean to imply that manual labor is more virtuous or harder than mental labor. What I meant is that people who have had to do manual labor growing up--or really who had to work at all--have a different definition of "hard work" than those who had the luxury of spending their summers volunteering or interning to bolster their college applications. In my experience, the latter tend to adopt the notion that hard work = success, in contrast to people who dug ditches all summer for $4.00 and wind up blowing it all on gas and repairs for their POS car.
My parents were divorced and I came from a family of blue-collar workers and immigrant farmers. I hope that you are not suggesting that they sent me to public school because they didn't care or respect the need for education. My mom held down a job while attending night school and still managed to get me to school on time with my homework done. In the US, in the 80's and early 90's, our school years were constantly shortened to deal with budget cuts. It had nothing at all to do with the quality of education, it was all about screwing over poor kids and the "if you're poor it's because you didn't work hard enough" philosophy that Reagan popularized.
Theoretically all my "wasted" summer months were a big drag on my education, but I contend that the measure of the performance of a kid with respect to schooling is not a measure of future success, nor is it the most important aspect of a child's life. Summer Break offers opportunities to learn other useful life skills. When I was very young, I would spend Summer with my grandparents, who lived in another state (and who weren't poor). They sent me to a great summer camp, where I made friends, performed in skits, played field hockey, swam, etc. One summer I even went to baseball camp. Once I was 12 or so, I would work (under the table) all Summer and when I turned 14, I started working real jobs, with a paycheck. I'm sure I forgot a few proofs from Geometry or some SI units, but I learned so many other skills that are important to success (not the least of which is how much minimum wage sucks).
After many years of state college, I wound up studying at an ivy league university, surrounded by upper-class kids from private schools. Their teachers had PhDs and their schools boasted all kinds of fancy education models. They had all been pushed by their well-educated parents to succeed right from the womb. Many of them actually knew each other from way-back, because they had competed at the same "science competitions" (I still don't know what those are). None of them had jobs--instead they volunteered at soup kitchens, or whatever, because that is the sort of thing fancy-pants universities like on applications. All of them had better educations that I, and all of them retained far more of it. They could talk about literature and sound generally smart and educated. But they were also high-strung and sheltered. Not one of them had ever done a day of real manual labor. Their definition of "hard work" was wildly different from mine and they all expected "hard work" to translate into success automatically. I prefer my rich patchwork of life experience and realistic expectations to their sterile bubble of self-indulgence and I credit my long, budget-induced summers with much of what makes me unique.
The mundane definition of innovation is just something new or different. We ascribe our own meaning beyond that; you set the bar at game-changing, while I place more value on "newness." But I still contend that, even by the broad definition of "new or different," the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are not innovations because they were just better implementations of existing ideas and devices; not even that different from their predecessors.
I had some sort of Palm whatchamacallit before the iPhone came out. All the iPhone really did was replace the stylus with a finger and ditch the physical keyboard. Apple was essentially waiting for scientists and engineers to solve some problems with capacitive touch screens (some of which certainly involved actual innovation). Had Apple not accrued enough clout from the iPod to convince ATT to let a non-carrier phone on their network, we would be talking about the amazing, revolutionary $PHONE from $COMPANY because it was an inevitable next step.
Again, I'm not bashing Apple or their awesome line of products--but I think that if you are going to label any part of the revolution of the i-device innovative, it was the marketing, branding and aesthetics (see: Palm whatchamacallit). It does bother me a bit, though, how often I see the word "innovative" being used to describe "implementing the obvious in a profitable manner." It's like calling Stephanie Whatshername a creative genius because lonely cat ladies and pre-teen girls value cheesy love stories more than prose, character development, or compelling story arcs.
For some reason Nikon's WiFi adapter only works with the entry-level D3200 and the only cameras with built-in WiFi are the pro D4 an D5. But, from what I've seen, apps for controlling Nikons by USB tethering are popping up the Play store... just none from Nikon. I suppose I should dig up a micro-to-micro USB cable and give them a whirl!
In my opinion, an innovation is something that no one thought of before and that performs better than its predecessors. It is not a synonym for invention or discovery. Take graphene for example. People had been working with it in various forms (usually called "exfoliated graphite") for decades because it has all the interesting properties of graphite, but with an enormous surface-area to volume ratio. Theorists predicted interesting properties in single, isolated sheets of graphite, and there was some evidence to support it, but nothing really came of it. Then someone got the idea to use scotch tape to rip off a few layers of graphene from bulk graphite, which eventually lead to a Nobel prize. The innovation wasn't the scotch tape, or the graphene, or even using scotch tape to exfoliate a laminar material; it was using scotch tape to exfoliate graphite.
That one little innovation allowed all kinds of measurements that validated the intriguing properties of graphene and sparked a deluge of research across the physical sciences. Now, let's contrast it to something like the iPhone. Was that an innovation? I say no. Everyone had thought of the smartphone already--they were just waiting for the technology to catch up to expectation. People were using proto-iPads to keep track of stock trades decades before the iPod existed.
I think that in the business world, success is equivalent to money and innovation drives success, therefore anything that makes money is innovative. And since things that make money are generally popular, they use the word "innovation" to describe creating something that is popular, which essentially boils down to having the right idea or product and the right time.Thus Apple--which makes very popular, well-designed products--has become synonymous with innovation. I'm not knocking Apple; convincing people to enter their credit card information in order to use a device that they already bought is pure genius. But what have they done that is really de novo, that was more than just clever or marketed effectively?
Just last night I was stuck between taking a picture on my DSLR--archival quality, creamy bokeh, tack-sharp foreground, superb color saturation etc.--and having to walk up stairs, plug it into my computer, process the RAW file, and upload it versus snapping picture on my Android phone--blurry, washed out colors, throwaway quality, near-infinite depth of field, etc.--and having it pop up on the Internet almost instantly. So Nikon and Samsung are definitely on to something here, except that there is no way I would consider buying a PAS camera with Android built in because it is the worst of both worlds. Sure, you get more megapixels, but the effective f-stop is still f/55, the colors are less washed out, but still nowhere near a decent DSLR, you can't use a bounce flash, and you still have to drag around another brick in addition to your phone (assuming you use your phone to make phone calls). Plus you still need WiFi to upload the pictures. I think this Android/camera is a nice upgrade path for people who use PAS cameras because it eliminates the PC from the equation, but it is certainly no more interesting to actual photographers than any other PAS on the market. Modern (Nikon) DSLRs can be controlled from a PC via a USB tether. Just let me tether my DSLR to my Android phone. I can shoot RAW+JPEG, use the (fantastic) post-processing in the camera, upload the JPEG for instant-gratification and keep the RAW for later; problem solved.
a) The chances of your circumcision being botched leaving serious, permanent dysfunction are higher than the reduction in AIDS risk.
b) Your risk of AIDS is highly lifestyle dependent. The western world isn't Uganda, most people simply aren't at risk. Why can't people who chose risky lifestyles also choose to be circumcised, as adults? Why do we presume all babies are guilty...?
c) All the medical studies in favor of circumcision are written by people who make money from it. The only study you need is the observation that Europe isn't some aids infested den of rotting, cancerous dicks.
d) Masturbation with/without foreskin? Foreskin is best, no contest. Modern circumcision was actually started by the anti-masturbation movements in the 1900s to remove the pleasure from wanking (headed by Doctor Kellogg no less - the guy who invented cornflakes). Think about that before chopping.
Thank you! The existence of Europe (and possibly South America and Asia--not sure what their policies are) alone trivializes TFA. But a country full of fat people arguing for mandatory circumcision to save a few bucks on health care (while ensuring an extra $500 or so in medical costs for 1/2 of all births) is like pushing your car to work to save on gas. If you want to save money on healthcare, put a $5 flat tax on all fast food items like many states have done with cigarettes. This circumcision nonsense is the male mirror of the HPV vaccine/cervical cancer debate from a few years ago. Shockingly, the manufacturer of the vaccine thought it was absolutely crucial to vaccinate all girls... because it (might) lower their chances of getting cervical cancer... and save money or whatever... think of the children!
I had a coworker that raised a child into his 20s and is continuing to care for him in such a state that the child cannot even bathe itself as an adult. He holds the utmost care for his broken offspring, favoring it more than the others. Why, I'll never know.
I would imagine that I would love my son just as much if he were riddled with genetic diseases that hobbled his mind and life span and would probably do the same... It's like watching a friend pour money on his heroin-addicted adult son, who has no intentional of quitting, to try to get him clean enough to stand trial for dealing. His son will probably OD before he turns 40 and burn though his father's retirement savings. We all know it and make rational arguments to let his son face his own consequences, but we also understand that love makes bad decisions.
The majority of scientists you know are then idiots.
The republican party has fully embraced the far right christians. These are young earth crazies that are fine with destroying the earth as they believe the apocalypse is right around the corner. They have no interest in furthering knowledge beyond "God did it".
I think it is an oversimplification to simply say that scientists lean "left" or "right" as if they are monolithic policy positions. I am literally surrounded by scientists every day and it is fair to say that the vast majority are atheists or non-religious, but that is really where the left/right bias ends. Politically, science professors are just like everyone else; the older the get, the more conservative they get. The one glaring difference is that they are smarter than the average population and are painfully aware that right-wing Christian nut jobs have hi-jacked the GOP, complete with Conservative purity tests. Well-known professors who have voted republican their entire lives were taken of the short list for positions in the Bush White House because they gave money to Michael Dukakis--when he was running for governor. I know a few that still can't bring themselves to vote democrat, but who have stopped donating to the GOP because of the outright anti-science craziness espoused by some of the Tea Party Republicans in office. Two things all scientist pay attention to are the NIH/NSF budgets and Defense spending and everyone is nervous when bible-thumping crazies get on those committees.
I don't know what you're talking about, but I'd wager a guess there are more men in prison for rapes they did not commit than there are actual rapes which are "under-prosecuted".
Look up the statistics for yourself, as I did recently. Study after study shows that from 10-50%, which a shocking number at the higher end, of rape claims are intentionally fraudulent. That's not even counting "Assange rape" type accusations, but where the "victim" knowingly lied to fuck someone over. I've known people who have been accused of rape where I know they did nothing due to available timeframe and their claims - and they were later exonerated - while out on dates because the woman felt 'uncomfortable' or 'led' by the male. It happens all the fucking time; whether it's a symptom of a high rape rate and the women being predisposed to feeling sexually threatened by anyone male or they're socially conditioned to think all advances from men are rape, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if both are a factor.
Do you really think that male contempt for women is so high in the West that they'd dismiss rape claims out of hand? I'm sorry, but in almost every scenario I'm aware of, the instant male response to rape of an acquaintance is "let's get the torches and pitchforks". I am fairly certain predispositional response is fairly socially broad within the US, and it's universal amongst the police officers I know.
The big issue with rape reporting is that not enough is done. Victims don't report the legitimate rapes; that's how it works, psychologically, as I understand it. Fix that problem and the dismissal of rape reports 'out of hand' is likely to diminish due to the fact that the proportion of reported rapes isn't so heavily skewed in favor of false reports.
It's not like there is a huge number of innocent men serving 40 year sentences for beating the shit out of a women and raping her. The line between consensual and non-consensual sex is fuzzy at best and men bear some responsibility for putting themselves in situations where they tread dangerously close to that line.
I too had a friend accused of rape. Her dad found out that his prefect little angel banged five guys at once (well, in a short period of time), so she claimed rape--months after the fact--to exonerate herself. Her dad also happened to be the sheriff of our small town and my friend was screwed over by the good-ol-boy legal system and the local media. Maybe she was drunk, maybe they talked her in to it, or maybe she just wanted to bang five dudes at once. But at the end of the day, he and four guys invited a women they barely knew over to one of their houses, drank plenty of hard alcohol, and had some spur of the moment fun. A responsible person would have weighed the potential downside and waited until they were all sober to discuss and plan the whole thing before hand, which is the right thing to do when exploring kinks with strangers.
This is something that a lot of pro-choicers have to tell themselves so they feel better about themselves. By any reasonable definition a fetus is a human being, all of the arguments to the contrary to hold water, IMHO. "It's just a collection of cells!", yeah, well, so are you. "It doesn't even have a brain yet!", well, neither does someone in a persistent vegetative state, but it's still considered murder to put a bullet in their head.
I could never understand how someone can consider a zygote a "baby" and call it murder to take a pill to prevent it from turning into a baby or feel moral outrage about removing the feeding tube of a brain-dead women and then turn around and eat meat. "Oh look at me, I'm so pro-life that I think a ball of goo with some myocardial cells in the middle is a precious life. Now pass me that pork-stuffed chicken wrapped in a steak." Because clearly animals locked into high-density feed lots and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics before being killed in the prime of their lives, or chicks being ground into a chunky paste moments after being hatched for the crime of having a Y chromosome don't have real feelings, like clumps of human cells that haven't even developed a central nervous system. Though, I suppose we can't ask for intellectual honesty from people who characterize abortions after rape as "punishing the child for the rape."
Then I must belong to a third group. I think people should not only have the right to abort a fetus, but to euthanize their baby within three months of birth in special cases. I am a parent and I cannot imagine the horror of raising a kid with a horrible genetic disease that will limit its life to ten or twelve years of constant medical care and infant-like dependence. It happened to a friend of mine and, without going into details, it breaks my heart to watch him pour all this love into a child with a marginal-at-best quality of life that he knows has about a 1% chance of living past five and a 0.0000001% of making it to puberty. He and his wife are terrific people with so much love to offer but, as cold as this sounds, they basically have to wait for their kid to die before they can even think about having another one because they simply don't have the time or energy. Honestly, I doubt anyone--myself included--would be able to make the decision to euthanize a baby, no matter how diseased, and I doubt there are many (if any) physicians that would perform such a procedure. But I still think the option should be on the table, legally speaking (though I'm willing to compromise because I'm pretty sure I am in the minority.) Ditto for end-of-life euthanasia; if you're that close to death, you should be allowed to round up to corpse and save everyone the horrific experience of watching modern medicine delay the inevitable.
Also, the cut-off period for abortions are not arbitrary, they are (generally) based on whether or not the fetus can potentially survive outside the womb. The precise moment at which that happens is what can be debated reasonably.
FWIW, the talk was about a novel IR sensor. So there's at least that. TFA is a (typo-ridden—wtf is "florescence"?) Nature Blogs article, presumably from someone who was in the stands yesterday and thought it deserved a little bit of attention for being neat. I think most of the PR inflation, at least in this case, happened right here on Slashdot.
You're right; this is mostly a function of the "new and improved" Slashdot... I sort of went off on a semi-unrelated tirade against science journalism, in general. If they got this concept to work with actual NIR fluorophores, then that is at least interesting. Though it sort of proves my point that the "journalist" here totally missed what was interesting--i.e., people have stuffed fluorescent probes into red blood cells before--which is why you shouldn't blog about talks at ACS meetings unless, perhaps, you were involved in the actual research.
The idea that journalists should not cover findings reported at meetings because they're too stupid or the results are not ready for primetime is a little odd, specially in the heady days of the social web. The results are out on twitter - not because dumb journalists are writing about it but because scientists are tweeting about it, blogging it and so on.
You said stupid; I would use the word unqualified. And what does the social web have to do with centuries old traditions of scientific research? What, since everyone has an iPhone scientists should start having to worry about their "Klout score" or whatever? This is the same mentality that drives real-time Tweets about congresspeople taking votes--i.e., performing the most mundane part of their job--and that has ruined political journalism. I mean, what is the story here? "Scientists have good idea, prove concept, get funding." Wow, someone call Cronkite!
Here is the problem with so-called social medial. It is self-serving because it prioritizes being the first one to fill a web page with text regardless of the content of that text in an effort to fill not just the 24-hour news cycle, but the insatiable appetite of the Internet for real-time information. It creates so much noise that it becomes impossible for ordinary people--like myself--to separate out the signal of actual news. This is how social media should function; it is a nice example of how social media can add depth to news reporting and make people feel engaged.
There is nothing wrong with scientists blogging about their own results, on their own private blog--most of them are young and pre- or early-career and are understandably proud of their accomplishments. But blogging != reporting. And please don't take it personally--I have nothing against journalists and I sympathize with the tough transition Journalism is making from print to the Internet. If anyone is to blame here, it is the scientists themselves for indulging in the flattery of having someone write up something that just crossed the proof-of-principle threshold. (But they also have a lot of pressure put on them by the university to "Web 2.0, Social Media, exposure on the Internet, blah, blah.")
A more mature response might be to suggest that there should be more critical voices out there on the research as quickly as possible - so that by the time the research (slowly) reaches the printed page or is published online, it's had thorough external peer review. (Oh and journalists - good ones - we have many of those at Nature - do often provide a secondary peer review. Either questioning results or, more often, by choosing not to cover boring or incremental or simply wrong research that has reached the public domain). The reporter has an undergrad degree in chemistry by the way, as you'll see if you google his name.
No, more critical voices are absolutely not what is needed; the scientific communities take care of that themselves, internally, as it should be. If I follow your logic, the added value of this type of reporting is that someone with an undergraduate degree can add a layer of "external peer review" on top of that provided by the panel of referees selected by journal editors (who are themselves active researchers), the attendees of scientific conferences, grant review panels, and internal reviews done the department/faculty at their university--i.e., literally their peers..? I am not dismissing all reporting of science as useless--quite the contrary. Every effort should be made to inform the public of how their tax dollars are spent--even people like Alan Alda, who are not journalists, do a tremendous public service by making people aware of the amazing accomplishments of modern scientific research. I am making the argument that social media and real-time over-reporting is detrimental to science in general for myriad reasons, not the least of which is
I guess we've reached the point where the "science media" can't even wait for papers to be published, let alone accumulate a few references, before they push a one-sided synopsis they gleaned from a couple of phone calls with real scientists to a blog...
For those of you who studied CS, Chemistry works a bit differently in that publishing papers is a far, far, faaaar greater hurdle than getting a talk accepted at a conference. Half of what you hear at a big, national meeting like ACS will never be published; less in reputable journals. The way things used to work, before "science journalists" started competing with each other to see who could "break a story" the fastest, is that a paper was peer reviewed and published and then it sat in a journal for a while. The second, and more important step, is other people citing that work as they try to reproduce/use/build on it. Only after it has garnered a fair number of citations will it be considered both interesting and relevant. (That is not to say that people fabricate results, just that some chemistry is more difficult to reproduce.)
Ten years ago, you framed the cover art if your paper made it on the cover of a journal. Your university might do a press release if you cured cancer or something. Now (American) universities have whole PR departments (the ever-expanding "administrative" part of university that sucks up your kid's tuition) that basically feed "news" about articles that will be published to "journalists" who then Google a couple of keywords to figure out who they should call for a comment--you know, two sources--after they speak with one of the authors. (But don't worry, their degree in Basic Science or Biology totally qualifies them to write about anything involving a lab coat.) Then they write up some non-information-containing fluff that doesn't even point the reader at the actual, published work (due to policies of the publishers). So what are we supposed to do with this information that is basically a summary of the BS you write in the Introduction about why your work is the bees knees? I mean, this "story" is a summary of the part of a yet-to-be-published paper that referees basically glance at to make sure they cited all the Big Names before they move on to the actual science. In reality, the researchers probably just proved the concept using green fluorescent dyes, as NIR dyes have low quantum yields and are not common because of some fundamental problems involved in fluorescence above 800 nm. But what I know from this story is that NIR light can pass through tissue (sort of; it's not like we're invisible at 1200 nm or something) and that some scientists did something with fluorescence in red blood cells.
I am all for publicizing the results of taxpayer money vis-a-vis university researchers, but this kind of hyperbolic nonsense that doesn't even link back to the actual published results just creates unrealistic expectations from laymen. "I read an article on using blood cells as sensors like two years ago, why do I still have to prick my finger to measure my glucose levels? Stupid scientists--what good are they?"
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with the outcome, just questioning the mechanism. My infant son not only has to go through the porno scanners, he needs his own f-ing passport! And there was a story on /. just yesterday about a new ruling that people talking on cell phones don't have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" against eavesdropping by law enforcement. But the last step before a government loses control is the a mass exodus of wealth, as rich people are closer to the power structures and can see calamity coming from further away than us ordinary folk. There is no way that the ultra-rich, the oligarchs, the dynastic families, the bankers--whatever you want to call them--will allow a government to destabilize while their money is parked in its economy (which is why many oil-rich African countries are broke). Right now the US government is seeing a huge influx of capital as people dump their money into treasury bonds to protect it from the unpredictable, volatile markets of the ongoing global recession, so I'm not too worried... yet. Once I see large-scale divestment from government bonds, I'm headed to South America to raise sheep.
This doesn't follow. Lots of common, everyday objects and activities have "potential for abuse" one could describe as "almost unlimited". Automatic weapons. Automobiles. Kitchen knives. Ball-point pens.
Is it really fair to compare these potential existential threats to the non-existential threat of the creeping invasion of privacy in the name of security? If someone abuses automatic weapons, it results in murder, but abusing LPRs is about abusing laws that were written before this technology existed to extract more fines from people. The former is obvious and elicits a sharp reaction from the media, while the latter just blends into all the other annoyances that we have come to accept in the Post 9/11 World. I would say LPRs are more like body scanners, which were installed at airports without any public comment and which are demonstrably useless at thwarting terrorists, but which justify the ever-increasing DHS/TSA budget.