This is probably going to be modded flamebait, but I'm going to share my observations anyway.
There is generally a large percentage of foreign students in graduate programs in general in the U.S. (e.g. 3 or 4 or so of 12 in my biophysics graduate program). However, I've found that the percentage of foreign students increases the more...easy the graduate school is to get in to. I have friends attending less selective graduate programs, and they have many more peers that are foreign students, mostly because there are many more graduate schools in the U.S. than in foreign countries, meaning the competition to get into graduate school is overall much lower in the U.S.
Don't believe the hype industries put out--the U.S. already produces far more science/engineering PhDs than it can reasonably employ. This is in large part due to the sheer number of graduate programs. Foreign students are simply taking advantage of this fact to become trained in a field that would be difficult ot get into in their home country.
Can anyone explain to me the huge discrepancy between the length of patents and the length of copyrights?
1) Copyrighted works (I'm referring to intellectual property here) generally make artistic/societal contributions, rather than the tangible (e.g. physically manufactured) results of patented products
2) The production of patented (physical) products requires a much larger initial investment in capital than most copyrighted works (which speaks to the argument that "we need this to make back our investment!")
3) The cost of production for copyrighted works is also dramatically smaller than that of production of patented physical products
So why, exactly, do patents last for 17 years in the U.S., while copyrights last almost indefinitely (life of the author plus 70 years)? If we look at the purpose of these programs in terms of granting a monopoly to a given individual for the public interest, is this even remotely logical?
I can't speak about the specifics of this vaccine, but one of my initial concerns would be that it would destroy the usefulness of the antibody-based HIV test--the one that is most commonly used to screen for HIV.
This has been one of the controversies with tuberculosis for quite awhile (where antibody-based tests are also the most efficient), where being vaccinated with a partially effective vaccine you essentially destroy the ability to easily see if you are infected or not (I believe more sensitive tests, like PCR-based tests, are required).
If this is going to be another TB vaccine, you can leave me out. I'd rather know easily if I had HIV.
For those of you who are claiming the whole "fast food"/laziness/etc angle is the real cause and the fructose/carb stuff is BS, read this article and some of the other articles Lustig has been cited in.
The first important thread which he tries to stress in his research is that individuals (and "unhealthy" food choices/lack of exercise) have only limited culpability in the obesity epidemic. Many of these children with childhood obesity have been put on increased exercise programs/low calorie diets--and the shocking finding is that these only have limited effect.
This is because of complicated endocrine changes that happen in obese people. The bodies of already obese children (and adults), when put on a lower-calorie diet, actually initiate a starvation response which DECREASES their resting energy expenditure (causing laziness and fatigue/etc) and increases the efficiency with which the body extracts calories from food. These changes often compensate for the decreased caloric intake/exercise resulting in an absolute weight loss plateau. Try as they might, people at this plateau find it nearly impossible to lose further amounts of weight.
The second important point is that it seems these endocrine changes can be blamed to a large degree on our increasingly "insulinogenic" diet, since it causes insulin resistance and effectively makes us resistant to leptin (the "I'm full" hormone). While eating unhealthily (junk food/fast food) contributes to this partially, an equally large contribution is due to the increased prevalence of HIGHLY PROCESSED foods that are low in fiber and high in simple carbohydrates--pasta made from white flour, bread, white rice, fruit juices with and without high fructose corn syrup, cereals with corn syrup, etc.
If you note the foods I've mentioned here, you'll notice that even somewhat "healthy" modern diets (no fast food or junk food) would still contain high proportions of these "unhealthy" carbohydrates.
Yet, many of these are foods have been eaten by humans for a long time, without an obesity epidemic--how does this happen? The answer is that, today, they are processed in ways that skews their nutrient content to make foods that are nutritionally different from the foods which we have evolved to subsist on.
To make an exaggerated analogy, it's as if the foods we eat have been silently poisoned without our knowledge. Next time you're at the grocery store, look at the amount of sugar/high fructose corn syrup in the "savory" processed foods and "health foods" that are sold there. It's very eye-opening.
From a biological perspective, this article doesn't seem to make sense whatsoever (maybe something is lost in translation?).
My understanding is that there is a single protease encoded by the HIV genome which is essential for viral production...and that it is an ASPARTYL protease ("aspartyl" being a term used to classify a particular class of proteases). "Serin-protease" makes no sense, it's not a specific name of any enzyme--it's like saying "enzyme that binds glucose".
If these are inhibitors of the the HIV protease I'm thinking of (the one actually called "HIV protease), there's nothing new about this--HIV protease inhibitors were among the first drugs used to treat the disease and have been around for close to 20 years now....
The only thing that makes sense to me is if they're suggesting this is a common natural substance that inviduals can take to prevent HIV infection. Even if this is true, it's IDIOTIC--having millions of people take a protease inhibitor as a prophylactic regimen is the most surefire way of generating HIV virus RESISTANT to the drug.
If they're really looking for a market of people who would latch on to technology, they just have to market to research scientists. Journal articles are always available in PDF, but it's just not physically reasonable to read several ~10 page articles on a flickering screen--meaning that I and everyone I know have piles about 6" high of printed journal articles on their desk. I would love to replace all that with a simple device that could display/store PDFs.
For the endocrinology classes I teach at the med school here, the most popular reference for both the students taking the class and the guest lecturers seems to be Wikipedia...I've even regularly seen physicians use the Wikipedia article as a refresher on a subject.
Sounds a lot like the biotech company I used to work for. When the IT department decided to switch a lot of the servers to linux and thus canceled the site license for MS software, we were immediately "accused" of "licensing incompliance". I believe it took a great deal of haranguing with salespeople to get their agents to back off...
The only problem is that stem-cell research is a relatively small field (handfuls of people), and this institute funds research only in CA. When you add the fact that the University of California is the entity responsible for most biological research in the state, you necessitate that some of the "experts" judging the proposals are faculty at some UC institution. It's unavoidable. Is it biased? Yes...just about the only thing I believe they can reasonably do is to ban members on the board and their direct collaborators from receiving funding.
Granted, they made an improvement on existing methods used to interpret cryo-EM data, but "looking inside a virus" has definitely been done before, and for more important viruses.
I think it's interesting that the author chose to abandon engineering outright and switch to a liberal-arts major.
As a physical science majo r (chemistry) I suffered some of the same problems, but dramatically lower in degree. The experience was similar for other pure sciences: physics, mathematics, etc. The difference was (apparently),by virtue of a curriculum which has been around longer, the teaching in pure-sciences majors is more standardized, so you are dramatically less likely to have professors or textbooks that are totally incompetent (many of them were actually quite good).
The ironic thing is that most of the "pure sciences" majors I know are now employed in what are thought of as "traditional engineering" fields: physicists in mechanical and structural engineering, mathematicians in computer science, chemists in chemical engineering, and so on. Maybe the problem with engineering is that it's considered a separate subject matter at all...in a lot of ways it makes more sense to have engineering fields as a subset of pure sciences rather than distinct fields of their own.
Speaking as one who has read his share of "questionable" papers in the life sciences (and also knowing the questionable analysis the authors of this "paper" used) I have to say I would not be SURPRISED if a significant number of papers were "wrong".
That being said, one has to understand what I mean by "wrong". Rarely is it the case that papers are blatantly incorrect; usually the case is that the data were misinterpreted, or that the authors attempted to make a broader generalization of their results that is not supported by their data (the latter is the most common situation).
In journals (especially big ones: Science, Nature, Cell, NEJM, JAMA, etc), authors are usually under pressure to show an interesting "story" of their research (these are big deal publications, after all). Reviewers press for things with "broader biological significance" than "the factor X is involved in modulation of this pathway under condition Y"--usually they go more for things like "the factor X is a critical regulator involved all biology, ever". So authors read further into their results, and shoot out grand theories and models and "universal paradigms". If nothing else, it makes for compelling literature.
But the truth is, most of the time, the results and immediate conclusions made ARE well-reasoned and reliable. It's just the "broader significance" that tends to be overestimated or poorly backed up.
One point that I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is that RF frequency radiation (low GHz range) is already known to interact with "matter", at least on some level. Low GHz RF waves are roughly the right frequency for spin-spin transitions of hydrogen (and other element) nuclei, and are the basis for the "MRI" imagers used in hospitals and NMR spectrometers used by chemists. These machines commonly have a number of safety provisions regarding exposure to their RF fields; granted, this is probably due to the previously noted "heating" effects produced by the powerful instruments.
The only thing that has yet to be established is how nuclear spin transitions could possibly cause cellular damage....
Although I know that this data is not sufficient to be indicative of a trend, I believe enough of what I hear from CS professionals to believe it is.
I think all this reflects is that the skill set of CS is simply becoming more common. A lot of the demand nowadays is not people who just have CS experience...it's CS and engineering/physics, or CS and biology (bioinformatics), and so on....and for those sort of things, you don't need a rigorous "CS" program, just good background in the tools relevant to your area.
Either the kid study was horrible, or the sensationalist British press' explanation of it was. They simply compared performance of children with computers at home vs those without....apparently ignoring the other factors that go along with those characteristics. This says nothing about the ability of information technology to enhance the learning process. Perhaps those children with computers at home were more economically affluent in other ways and thus more mentally lazy and distracted by other entertainment items.
Knowing a number of close friends that have worked in congressmen/senators' offices, I can tell you that writing/calling your congressmen will do.....NOTHING. They get ridiculous numbers of emails/calls a day (in addition to the normal spam and telemarketing no doubt), and just end up feeding it off on some intern who sends out cookie-cutter replies. No one in Washington or the state capitol wants to listen to you.
Nonetheless, it is an excellent example of how the press can so grossly distort a story as to render it utterly unrecognizeable. I'm a researcher in the area, and I had no idea what they were referring to until I saw in fine print the reference to the article..."morse code" is a ridiculously strained analogy. It's definitely like a form of language, but most people wouldn't understand that it's the "pulsed" nature of morse code that they're trying to stress in analogy.
Contrary to the belief of some on this forum, this "major pathway" is already relatively well understood (it helps to refer to the actual research article published in the refereed journal when trying to understand these things). The pathway the article refers to is the NF-kB transcription factor pathway, which has been known about for roughly a decade, and was already known to control key aspects of cellular immunity. The novel part is the idea that these different "temporal oscillations" of this transcription factor cause different genes to be expressed...and this isn't even that novel. The professor in the lab next to mine published a similar paper in science 2 years ago (Science 298, 1241 (2002))
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I never knew watching the guys wash your car counted as a performance. I suppose I'm more of a performing arts snob than I thought....
This is probably going to be modded flamebait, but I'm going to share my observations anyway. There is generally a large percentage of foreign students in graduate programs in general in the U.S. (e.g. 3 or 4 or so of 12 in my biophysics graduate program). However, I've found that the percentage of foreign students increases the more...easy the graduate school is to get in to. I have friends attending less selective graduate programs, and they have many more peers that are foreign students, mostly because there are many more graduate schools in the U.S. than in foreign countries, meaning the competition to get into graduate school is overall much lower in the U.S. Don't believe the hype industries put out--the U.S. already produces far more science/engineering PhDs than it can reasonably employ. This is in large part due to the sheer number of graduate programs. Foreign students are simply taking advantage of this fact to become trained in a field that would be difficult ot get into in their home country.
Can anyone explain to me the huge discrepancy between the length of patents and the length of copyrights?
1) Copyrighted works (I'm referring to intellectual property here) generally make artistic/societal contributions, rather than the tangible (e.g. physically manufactured) results of patented products
2) The production of patented (physical) products requires a much larger initial investment in capital than most copyrighted works (which speaks to the argument that "we need this to make back our investment!")
3) The cost of production for copyrighted works is also dramatically smaller than that of production of patented physical products
So why, exactly, do patents last for 17 years in the U.S., while copyrights last almost indefinitely (life of the author plus 70 years)? If we look at the purpose of these programs in terms of granting a monopoly to a given individual for the public interest, is this even remotely logical?
I can't speak about the specifics of this vaccine, but one of my initial concerns would be that it would destroy the usefulness of the antibody-based HIV test--the one that is most commonly used to screen for HIV.
This has been one of the controversies with tuberculosis for quite awhile (where antibody-based tests are also the most efficient), where being vaccinated with a partially effective vaccine you essentially destroy the ability to easily see if you are infected or not (I believe more sensitive tests, like PCR-based tests, are required).
If this is going to be another TB vaccine, you can leave me out. I'd rather know easily if I had HIV.
For those of you who are claiming the whole "fast food"/laziness/etc angle is the real cause and the fructose/carb stuff is BS, read this article and some of the other articles Lustig has been cited in.
The first important thread which he tries to stress in his research is that individuals (and "unhealthy" food choices/lack of exercise) have only limited culpability in the obesity epidemic. Many of these children with childhood obesity have been put on increased exercise programs/low calorie diets--and the shocking finding is that these only have limited effect.
This is because of complicated endocrine changes that happen in obese people. The bodies of already obese children (and adults), when put on a lower-calorie diet, actually initiate a starvation response which DECREASES their resting energy expenditure (causing laziness and fatigue/etc) and increases the efficiency with which the body extracts calories from food. These changes often compensate for the decreased caloric intake/exercise resulting in an absolute weight loss plateau. Try as they might, people at this plateau find it nearly impossible to lose further amounts of weight.
The second important point is that it seems these endocrine changes can be blamed to a large degree on our increasingly "insulinogenic" diet, since it causes insulin resistance and effectively makes us resistant to leptin (the "I'm full" hormone). While eating unhealthily (junk food/fast food) contributes to this partially, an equally large contribution is due to the increased prevalence of HIGHLY PROCESSED foods that are low in fiber and high in simple carbohydrates--pasta made from white flour, bread, white rice, fruit juices with and without high fructose corn syrup, cereals with corn syrup, etc.
If you note the foods I've mentioned here, you'll notice that even somewhat "healthy" modern diets (no fast food or junk food) would still contain high proportions of these "unhealthy" carbohydrates.
Yet, many of these are foods have been eaten by humans for a long time, without an obesity epidemic--how does this happen? The answer is that, today, they are processed in ways that skews their nutrient content to make foods that are nutritionally different from the foods which we have evolved to subsist on.
To make an exaggerated analogy, it's as if the foods we eat have been silently poisoned without our knowledge. Next time you're at the grocery store, look at the amount of sugar/high fructose corn syrup in the "savory" processed foods and "health foods" that are sold there. It's very eye-opening.
From a biological perspective, this article doesn't seem to make sense whatsoever (maybe something is lost in translation?). My understanding is that there is a single protease encoded by the HIV genome which is essential for viral production...and that it is an ASPARTYL protease ("aspartyl" being a term used to classify a particular class of proteases). "Serin-protease" makes no sense, it's not a specific name of any enzyme--it's like saying "enzyme that binds glucose". If these are inhibitors of the the HIV protease I'm thinking of (the one actually called "HIV protease), there's nothing new about this--HIV protease inhibitors were among the first drugs used to treat the disease and have been around for close to 20 years now.... The only thing that makes sense to me is if they're suggesting this is a common natural substance that inviduals can take to prevent HIV infection. Even if this is true, it's IDIOTIC--having millions of people take a protease inhibitor as a prophylactic regimen is the most surefire way of generating HIV virus RESISTANT to the drug.
If they're really looking for a market of people who would latch on to technology, they just have to market to research scientists. Journal articles are always available in PDF, but it's just not physically reasonable to read several ~10 page articles on a flickering screen--meaning that I and everyone I know have piles about 6" high of printed journal articles on their desk. I would love to replace all that with a simple device that could display/store PDFs.
For the endocrinology classes I teach at the med school here, the most popular reference for both the students taking the class and the guest lecturers seems to be Wikipedia...I've even regularly seen physicians use the Wikipedia article as a refresher on a subject.
Sounds a lot like the biotech company I used to work for. When the IT department decided to switch a lot of the servers to linux and thus canceled the site license for MS software, we were immediately "accused" of "licensing incompliance". I believe it took a great deal of haranguing with salespeople to get their agents to back off...
See PNAS, vol. 103, no 20, p7753-7758. VERY interesting work.
The only problem is that stem-cell research is a relatively small field (handfuls of people), and this institute funds research only in CA. When you add the fact that the University of California is the entity responsible for most biological research in the state, you necessitate that some of the "experts" judging the proposals are faculty at some UC institution. It's unavoidable. Is it biased? Yes...just about the only thing I believe they can reasonably do is to ban members on the board and their direct collaborators from receiving funding.
Granted, they made an improvement on existing methods used to interpret cryo-EM data, but "looking inside a virus" has definitely been done before, and for more important viruses.
I think it's interesting that the author chose to abandon engineering outright and switch to a liberal-arts major. As a physical science majo r (chemistry) I suffered some of the same problems, but dramatically lower in degree. The experience was similar for other pure sciences: physics, mathematics, etc. The difference was (apparently),by virtue of a curriculum which has been around longer, the teaching in pure-sciences majors is more standardized, so you are dramatically less likely to have professors or textbooks that are totally incompetent (many of them were actually quite good). The ironic thing is that most of the "pure sciences" majors I know are now employed in what are thought of as "traditional engineering" fields: physicists in mechanical and structural engineering, mathematicians in computer science, chemists in chemical engineering, and so on. Maybe the problem with engineering is that it's considered a separate subject matter at all...in a lot of ways it makes more sense to have engineering fields as a subset of pure sciences rather than distinct fields of their own.
Speaking as one who has read his share of "questionable" papers in the life sciences (and also knowing the questionable analysis the authors of this "paper" used) I have to say I would not be SURPRISED if a significant number of papers were "wrong". That being said, one has to understand what I mean by "wrong". Rarely is it the case that papers are blatantly incorrect; usually the case is that the data were misinterpreted, or that the authors attempted to make a broader generalization of their results that is not supported by their data (the latter is the most common situation). In journals (especially big ones: Science, Nature, Cell, NEJM, JAMA, etc), authors are usually under pressure to show an interesting "story" of their research (these are big deal publications, after all). Reviewers press for things with "broader biological significance" than "the factor X is involved in modulation of this pathway under condition Y"--usually they go more for things like "the factor X is a critical regulator involved all biology, ever". So authors read further into their results, and shoot out grand theories and models and "universal paradigms". If nothing else, it makes for compelling literature. But the truth is, most of the time, the results and immediate conclusions made ARE well-reasoned and reliable. It's just the "broader significance" that tends to be overestimated or poorly backed up.
One point that I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is that RF frequency radiation (low GHz range) is already known to interact with "matter", at least on some level. Low GHz RF waves are roughly the right frequency for spin-spin transitions of hydrogen (and other element) nuclei, and are the basis for the "MRI" imagers used in hospitals and NMR spectrometers used by chemists. These machines commonly have a number of safety provisions regarding exposure to their RF fields; granted, this is probably due to the previously noted "heating" effects produced by the powerful instruments.
The only thing that has yet to be established is how nuclear spin transitions could possibly cause cellular damage....
Although I know that this data is not sufficient to be indicative of a trend, I believe enough of what I hear from CS professionals to believe it is.
I think all this reflects is that the skill set of CS is simply becoming more common. A lot of the demand nowadays is not people who just have CS experience...it's CS and engineering/physics, or CS and biology (bioinformatics), and so on....and for those sort of things, you don't need a rigorous "CS" program, just good background in the tools relevant to your area.
Either the kid study was horrible, or the sensationalist British press' explanation of it was. They simply compared performance of children with computers at home vs those without....apparently ignoring the other factors that go along with those characteristics. This says nothing about the ability of information technology to enhance the learning process. Perhaps those children with computers at home were more economically affluent in other ways and thus more mentally lazy and distracted by other entertainment items.
Knowing a number of close friends that have worked in congressmen/senators' offices, I can tell you that writing/calling your congressmen will do.....NOTHING. They get ridiculous numbers of emails/calls a day (in addition to the normal spam and telemarketing no doubt), and just end up feeding it off on some intern who sends out cookie-cutter replies. No one in Washington or the state capitol wants to listen to you.
It DOES refer to a scholarly article, but that's in the fine print. Try Science vol 306, p704 (2004)
It actually refers to an intelligent, scholarly article. Try Science vol 306, p704 (2004)
Nonetheless, it is an excellent example of how the press can so grossly distort a story as to render it utterly unrecognizeable. I'm a researcher in the area, and I had no idea what they were referring to until I saw in fine print the reference to the article..."morse code" is a ridiculously strained analogy. It's definitely like a form of language, but most people wouldn't understand that it's the "pulsed" nature of morse code that they're trying to stress in analogy.
Contrary to the belief of some on this forum, this "major pathway" is already relatively well understood (it helps to refer to the actual research article published in the refereed journal when trying to understand these things). The pathway the article refers to is the NF-kB transcription factor pathway, which has been known about for roughly a decade, and was already known to control key aspects of cellular immunity. The novel part is the idea that these different "temporal oscillations" of this transcription factor cause different genes to be expressed...and this isn't even that novel. The professor in the lab next to mine published a similar paper in science 2 years ago (Science 298, 1241 (2002))