Aighearach, you can check out my publication record at PubMed. Type in moffett jr and hit enter and you will see my publications. What is your experience in the area of academic writing? Please direct me to your publication record. When you feel the need to start insulting people, you have obviously lost the debate. You offered us no information, but you are quick to insult. Maybe you are the one who needs to do a little cogitation Aighearach.
It is bad engineering to try and make a one-size-fits-all-devices OS. There is no overlap between a smartphone with a 3" touchscreen and a 3 monitor SLI desktop gaming computer, or a high-end graphics workstation. There is no benefit to the consumer to mash it all into one OS. It may be easier for the company to manage one OS with updates, but that may not even pan out over time. We will see if this is the way of the future. It will leave a giant gap for hundreds of millions of existing desktop computers that a smart company could exploit. I don't want a free OS that generates revenue by other means (ads, app store, telemetry and tracking, etc). I just want to pay for a desktop OS and be done with it. I won't be switching from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10. No benefit, and lots of downsides.
Life sciences research is done by academics at universities, like where I work. They write technical articles, like I do. I was pointing out that in my field, neuroscience, and in fields that I also follow closely such as genetics and cancer, that I do not run into this issue at all in any of the mid level or top tier journals. So I don't see this as an issue at all. The examples given were not from the biomedical research, which makes up a huge proportion of the literature cited at PubMed. If this is a problem is psychology or other fields, I can't speak to that because I don't follow that literature.
Maybe you want to argue that biomedical research does not make up a large proportion of academic writing that is published in journals?
Actually, we would just need to shift NATO responsibilities to other countries, which would spread the wastefulness around. Diplomacy is a lot less expensive in blood and treasure. The US forward base polices are anathema to the rest of the world. If Russia or China had a similar forward deployment policy, it would probably lead to us attacking them for being so aggressive.
My credible deterrent would be about 1/3 of the spending we are doing right now. It would involve closing most overseas bases, killing stupid project like this "next gen bomber", and going back to diplomacy, rather than trying to destabilize much of the world. But I am sure that is not what you had in mind when you spoke of a "credible deterrent". No country is going to attack the US (just like Iraq was not going to in 2002). So the amount of deterrent needed is much less than we already have.
Didn't see a single research article quoted in the piece that pointed to a top tier journal article that used the "offensive" writing style. So I will ask again, could you point me to one of the offending articles? The quote from one supposed offender that was embedded in the article is not anything like a life science article from a top tier journal. I am beginning to think you don't have examples, and you are just assuming there must be lots of them based on someone else's writing. So, please, stop bringing my ability to "know the difference" into this discussion and show me at least one such article so I can understand your point.
I am a life scientist, and I don't see that much at all with top tier journals. Could you point me to an example of a top tier journal article in the life sciences that is intentionally opaque? I would be very interested to see what you are talking about because I usually only run into that with lower end journals and researchers who are not native English writers.
Not sure how much of the primary literature you read, I have to read it every day. Acronyms have become a nightmare, some articles I have read have a 1/4 of a page of listed acronyms in a footnote at the beginning. Single sentences can have up to 5 or 6 acronyms in them. So I would start by telling researchers to cool it with the acronyms. You can't write clearly in 3 and 4 letter codes. Nonetheless, some of these articles are extremely well written and very clear as long as you know the acronyms. I rarely run into poorly written or overly complicated articles in the better journals.
Great discussion. I don't want to over-complicate, but we would be remiss if we didn't bring up the fact that some "junk" DNA is not junk at all, even if it is "non-coding" (does not encode for a protein product). The original concept of genes is that they have "exons" and "introns", where the exons code for parts of a protein product, and the introns get snipped out during the process of generating RNA from DNA. But some of the so-called junk DNA generates different kinds of RNA rather than standard "messenger RNA" or mRNA. For example they have found what are called microRNAs, small nucleolar RNAs and others. These tend to modify how other RNAs function (messenger RNAs and transfer RNAs which link base pairs to amino acids in ribosomes) etc. So there are many levels of complexity and mutations can happen in any of these different DNA regions thus affecting not just protein structure (when an exon is mutated) but also how gene regulation occurs (e.g., when microRNA regions are mutated). It will be interesting to see in the future if more "junk" DNA turns out to be doing something unique.
Yes. Keeping the wording as simple as possible without sacrificing meaning is laudable. But some would argue that you may lose elegance when a more obscure word or phrase is more enlightening, but less well understood. So I suppose there is a balance that needs to be maintained between simplicity and sublime.
The long term changes in DNA didn't always get there in a straight line. So measuring over a shorter time would indicate a faster rate of change. But interesting nonetheless.
But doesn't that logic dictate that you must build nothing but weapons systems and capabilities of all types, and do nothing else because "you might have to use them"? Somehow that seems like a very poor reason for spending so much money on things that won't be used. When is an unusable weapons system under the chopping block by your account? How much un-usefulness is necessary to declare a weapon system nonessential?
Well, that may be true, but I have no way of confirming that because some excellent works that I have read were extremely dense and complicated since the subject matter required it. Albert Einstein never had to explain biology. He would have probably said it was too complicated for him to explain properly, because, to be honest, it is. Relativity, while not obvious to most people, is still a relatively simple concept (pun intended).
So you are probably right that more competent writers are better at making things understandable to more readers, but there is a limit to that when the subject gets really complicated by a huge number of tiny, interrelated details with complex regulatory cycles and dense layers of complexity from microscopic to macroscopic.
Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do. I have tended to stop using so many acronyms because sentences start to sound like code, rather than plain English. There has been a shift toward writing in as simple a way as possible considering the subject matter. It is tough to go into lots of details about a genome-wide association study and the mapped gene alterations in at-risk groups (single nucleotide polymorphisms and others) without getting a bit complicated though. Still, I think there is a move in the direction of clear writing that is understandable to the widest audience possible.
Agreed, virtually any use of public money would be better for the public than expensive weapon systems. But Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, GE and all the others make a very good living off of weapon systems, and the best part for them is that the systems don't get used in any real world situations, so it doesn't matter if they are actually more useful than current systems or not. It is just money in the bank for them, and less of taxpayer's money left for infrastructure, health care and education. But as long as the public doesn't get mad about it, things are never going to change.
We need new military hardware that won't be used? Who are we going to fight, Russia? Please. Not only is the public getting fleeced repeatedly with these useless weapons systems, some of the public apparently enjoy being ripped off and getting nothing for it. How about some repaired bridges?, how about a smart, renewable electric grid? How about funding our public schools? How about tuition free community colleges? How about Medicare for all? How about doing something more productive like going back to the moon, and then to Mars with some of those tax dollars? At least we'd get some good pics, videos and rock samples from that. You get nothing from an unneeded, unused, duplicate weapon systems.
Not a technology demonstrator, it is a classic boondoggle. Gen. Smedly Butler was right when he wrote that war is a racket. This is about money, and nothing else. The US taxpayer is getting fleeced over and over by these overpriced, unnecessary, unneeded weapons systems. But it is damn good for business, if you prefer your business to be focused on weaponry.
Agreed, but if they could get that money directly from the government, they would love it even more. Very few new drugs come out now, just modifications of old ones. The NIH does not do much basic research anymore, believe me, I spend a lot of time writing grants to the NIH. They want "translational medicine" meaning they want researchers to come up with treatments for diseases, rather than figuring out why the diseases happen in the first place. All of the recent funding we have gotten is to develop treatments.
There is a little bit of really good basic research being done by the NIH, but it is not the bulk of what the NIH funds now.
They understand science, they just want to fully monetize it like they want to monetize/privatize everything. Their "ignorance" is willful. People like Ridley know that what they are saying is pure bunk, but as long as enough "journalists" and government officials believe him (or just use his nonsense as cover), the corporations looking to make a buck will lobby the crap out of Congress to defund the NIH and give the money to pharmaceutical companies instead. Industry does not invent things, they monetize the inventions of others.
You may be talking about radiation hormesis, where low doses that are above background levels cause defense and repair mechanisms to kick in. So a test plant or animal might have a response that looks beneficial, even though it is happening because of a biological stressor. However, the studies that I have read on this don't ever talk about humans, they talk about bacteria, plants and insects and things like that. Plus, they are talking several times background radiation, not hundreds of times.
Agreed, but if you have watched any of the videos from the area where people are walking around with dosimeters that are showing substantial radiation levels miles from the plant, then obviously people were exposed, and because many cancers won't show up for 5, 10 or even 20 years, that we can expect more cases.
I was a big fan of nuclear power decades ago when I was a kid. Now as an adult biologist, I am not so much of a fan anymore.
By saying yes it causes cancer, and then dismissing that fact you just said nothing. Do you agree that more than enough radiation was released from the melted cores to cause cancer in the people exposed to enough of it? Do you also admit that people have greatly different levels of ability to repair their DNA based on their genetics? Therefore, some people almost certainly got exposed to enough radiation there, including plant workers trying to handle the crisis, got enough exposure.
For those interested, there is a vast amount of research you can look into at PubMed, like this article. The folks here at/. who dismiss radiation risks are not being realistic. There is a big difference between background radiation and a nuclear plant core meltdown in terms of isotopes and exposure levels.
Slashdot Mirror
Aighearach, you can check out my publication record at PubMed. Type in moffett jr and hit enter and you will see my publications. What is your experience in the area of academic writing? Please direct me to your publication record. When you feel the need to start insulting people, you have obviously lost the debate. You offered us no information, but you are quick to insult. Maybe you are the one who needs to do a little cogitation Aighearach.
Agreed. MS will probably lose more share to Apple.
It is bad engineering to try and make a one-size-fits-all-devices OS. There is no overlap between a smartphone with a 3" touchscreen and a 3 monitor SLI desktop gaming computer, or a high-end graphics workstation. There is no benefit to the consumer to mash it all into one OS. It may be easier for the company to manage one OS with updates, but that may not even pan out over time. We will see if this is the way of the future. It will leave a giant gap for hundreds of millions of existing desktop computers that a smart company could exploit. I don't want a free OS that generates revenue by other means (ads, app store, telemetry and tracking, etc). I just want to pay for a desktop OS and be done with it. I won't be switching from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10. No benefit, and lots of downsides.
Life sciences research is done by academics at universities, like where I work. They write technical articles, like I do. I was pointing out that in my field, neuroscience, and in fields that I also follow closely such as genetics and cancer, that I do not run into this issue at all in any of the mid level or top tier journals. So I don't see this as an issue at all. The examples given were not from the biomedical research, which makes up a huge proportion of the literature cited at PubMed. If this is a problem is psychology or other fields, I can't speak to that because I don't follow that literature.
Maybe you want to argue that biomedical research does not make up a large proportion of academic writing that is published in journals?
Actually, we would just need to shift NATO responsibilities to other countries, which would spread the wastefulness around. Diplomacy is a lot less expensive in blood and treasure. The US forward base polices are anathema to the rest of the world. If Russia or China had a similar forward deployment policy, it would probably lead to us attacking them for being so aggressive.
My credible deterrent would be about 1/3 of the spending we are doing right now. It would involve closing most overseas bases, killing stupid project like this "next gen bomber", and going back to diplomacy, rather than trying to destabilize much of the world. But I am sure that is not what you had in mind when you spoke of a "credible deterrent". No country is going to attack the US (just like Iraq was not going to in 2002). So the amount of deterrent needed is much less than we already have.
Didn't see a single research article quoted in the piece that pointed to a top tier journal article that used the "offensive" writing style. So I will ask again, could you point me to one of the offending articles? The quote from one supposed offender that was embedded in the article is not anything like a life science article from a top tier journal. I am beginning to think you don't have examples, and you are just assuming there must be lots of them based on someone else's writing. So, please, stop bringing my ability to "know the difference" into this discussion and show me at least one such article so I can understand your point.
I am a life scientist, and I don't see that much at all with top tier journals. Could you point me to an example of a top tier journal article in the life sciences that is intentionally opaque? I would be very interested to see what you are talking about because I usually only run into that with lower end journals and researchers who are not native English writers.
Not sure how much of the primary literature you read, I have to read it every day. Acronyms have become a nightmare, some articles I have read have a 1/4 of a page of listed acronyms in a footnote at the beginning. Single sentences can have up to 5 or 6 acronyms in them. So I would start by telling researchers to cool it with the acronyms. You can't write clearly in 3 and 4 letter codes. Nonetheless, some of these articles are extremely well written and very clear as long as you know the acronyms. I rarely run into poorly written or overly complicated articles in the better journals.
Great discussion. I don't want to over-complicate, but we would be remiss if we didn't bring up the fact that some "junk" DNA is not junk at all, even if it is "non-coding" (does not encode for a protein product). The original concept of genes is that they have "exons" and "introns", where the exons code for parts of a protein product, and the introns get snipped out during the process of generating RNA from DNA. But some of the so-called junk DNA generates different kinds of RNA rather than standard "messenger RNA" or mRNA. For example they have found what are called microRNAs, small nucleolar RNAs and others. These tend to modify how other RNAs function (messenger RNAs and transfer RNAs which link base pairs to amino acids in ribosomes) etc. So there are many levels of complexity and mutations can happen in any of these different DNA regions thus affecting not just protein structure (when an exon is mutated) but also how gene regulation occurs (e.g., when microRNA regions are mutated). It will be interesting to see in the future if more "junk" DNA turns out to be doing something unique.
http://phys.org/news/2010-10-j...
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2...
Yes. Keeping the wording as simple as possible without sacrificing meaning is laudable. But some would argue that you may lose elegance when a more obscure word or phrase is more enlightening, but less well understood. So I suppose there is a balance that needs to be maintained between simplicity and sublime.
The long term changes in DNA didn't always get there in a straight line. So measuring over a shorter time would indicate a faster rate of change. But interesting nonetheless.
But doesn't that logic dictate that you must build nothing but weapons systems and capabilities of all types, and do nothing else because "you might have to use them"? Somehow that seems like a very poor reason for spending so much money on things that won't be used. When is an unusable weapons system under the chopping block by your account? How much un-usefulness is necessary to declare a weapon system nonessential?
Well, that may be true, but I have no way of confirming that because some excellent works that I have read were extremely dense and complicated since the subject matter required it. Albert Einstein never had to explain biology. He would have probably said it was too complicated for him to explain properly, because, to be honest, it is. Relativity, while not obvious to most people, is still a relatively simple concept (pun intended).
So you are probably right that more competent writers are better at making things understandable to more readers, but there is a limit to that when the subject gets really complicated by a huge number of tiny, interrelated details with complex regulatory cycles and dense layers of complexity from microscopic to macroscopic.
Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do. I have tended to stop using so many acronyms because sentences start to sound like code, rather than plain English. There has been a shift toward writing in as simple a way as possible considering the subject matter. It is tough to go into lots of details about a genome-wide association study and the mapped gene alterations in at-risk groups (single nucleotide polymorphisms and others) without getting a bit complicated though. Still, I think there is a move in the direction of clear writing that is understandable to the widest audience possible.
Agreed, virtually any use of public money would be better for the public than expensive weapon systems. But Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, GE and all the others make a very good living off of weapon systems, and the best part for them is that the systems don't get used in any real world situations, so it doesn't matter if they are actually more useful than current systems or not. It is just money in the bank for them, and less of taxpayer's money left for infrastructure, health care and education. But as long as the public doesn't get mad about it, things are never going to change.
We need new military hardware that won't be used? Who are we going to fight, Russia? Please. Not only is the public getting fleeced repeatedly with these useless weapons systems, some of the public apparently enjoy being ripped off and getting nothing for it. How about some repaired bridges?, how about a smart, renewable electric grid? How about funding our public schools? How about tuition free community colleges? How about Medicare for all? How about doing something more productive like going back to the moon, and then to Mars with some of those tax dollars? At least we'd get some good pics, videos and rock samples from that. You get nothing from an unneeded, unused, duplicate weapon systems.
Not a technology demonstrator, it is a classic boondoggle. Gen. Smedly Butler was right when he wrote that war is a racket. This is about money, and nothing else. The US taxpayer is getting fleeced over and over by these overpriced, unnecessary, unneeded weapons systems. But it is damn good for business, if you prefer your business to be focused on weaponry.
Agreed, but if they could get that money directly from the government, they would love it even more. Very few new drugs come out now, just modifications of old ones. The NIH does not do much basic research anymore, believe me, I spend a lot of time writing grants to the NIH. They want "translational medicine" meaning they want researchers to come up with treatments for diseases, rather than figuring out why the diseases happen in the first place. All of the recent funding we have gotten is to develop treatments.
There is a little bit of really good basic research being done by the NIH, but it is not the bulk of what the NIH funds now.
They understand science, they just want to fully monetize it like they want to monetize/privatize everything. Their "ignorance" is willful. People like Ridley know that what they are saying is pure bunk, but as long as enough "journalists" and government officials believe him (or just use his nonsense as cover), the corporations looking to make a buck will lobby the crap out of Congress to defund the NIH and give the money to pharmaceutical companies instead. Industry does not invent things, they monetize the inventions of others.
You may be talking about radiation hormesis, where low doses that are above background levels cause defense and repair mechanisms to kick in. So a test plant or animal might have a response that looks beneficial, even though it is happening because of a biological stressor. However, the studies that I have read on this don't ever talk about humans, they talk about bacteria, plants and insects and things like that. Plus, they are talking several times background radiation, not hundreds of times.
Agreed, but if you have watched any of the videos from the area where people are walking around with dosimeters that are showing substantial radiation levels miles from the plant, then obviously people were exposed, and because many cancers won't show up for 5, 10 or even 20 years, that we can expect more cases.
I was a big fan of nuclear power decades ago when I was a kid. Now as an adult biologist, I am not so much of a fan anymore.
By saying yes it causes cancer, and then dismissing that fact you just said nothing. Do you agree that more than enough radiation was released from the melted cores to cause cancer in the people exposed to enough of it? Do you also admit that people have greatly different levels of ability to repair their DNA based on their genetics? Therefore, some people almost certainly got exposed to enough radiation there, including plant workers trying to handle the crisis, got enough exposure.
I knew what you meant, I was pointing out how you were not putting lots of thought or effort into your response.
For those interested, there is a vast amount of research you can look into at PubMed, like this article. The folks here at /. who dismiss radiation risks are not being realistic. There is a big difference between background radiation and a nuclear plant core meltdown in terms of isotopes and exposure levels.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...