I did a wubi install of ubuntu on my laptop, and it installed and ran ok and... incredible - all these volunteers have produced a great OS/desktop that installed nearly flawlessly or so what - it is the same as windows, so why should I care ?
which is the problem: if windows is your target, who cares if you are equal or even slighlty better.
I've been listening to the OS thing for several years, and the idea of switching a university, unless it is really poor, to OS to save money just doesn't make sense - as one poster pointed out, you'll pry excel out of finance profs dead hands. People will be glad to switch when OSS is truly better: I work at a small biotechnology company, with lots of computer savy scientists and enginers, and when I installed firefox 3 years ago *kazing* people did not have to be pursuaded - when software is good, people use it; that people don't use open office or the gimp or other oss is because it is not better then MS Note that I did not, repeat NOT say that thegimp or open office are not good: they are not better, and people will not switch untill OSS is better. Of course, a lot of oss does not seem to be better: for fancy things, thegimp and open office are not as good as photoshop or office (asbestos emacs vs vi gloves on...)
So... High schools have less money then universities, and the argument that they need direct training in Office as the workplace standard is less effective. I think one could also make a good argument that having serious parts of the software - the school web stie, school email, etc under the control of the students would work: kids respond to responsibility. High schools also need a lot of 3D cad type software, layout software for the student newspaper, etc etc - for my school district, and i live in a very affluent suburb of boston, the cost of InDesign for the middle school newspaper was a big deal.
But state gov seems like the real winner for OS: I live in Massachusetts, and we lost, big big time, when the minicomputer companies (DEC, WANG, Prime) went under, and people get the idea of not sending money to redmond, and keeping that money in state, and using the tax dollars to help start a linux industry after all, isn't stimulus the word of hte day ? but the important point is that Windows/MS will rapidly join the dustbin of history the day oss does something that windows can"t: after all, the reason we have pcs is not due to IBM or steve jobs, it is due to two professors who made visicalc, open source software that gave people a reason to buy a pc Not to mention fighting the last war - if it is all in the cloud, who cares ?
remembe AIX ? The goal on HPs part is to (1) wean people off of MS, and then swithc to a proprietary OS NO Business could possily resist the profit inherent in propietary software if they could possibly jam it down your throat
just today signed bill strengthing anti pay discrimmination law; I know, I know, it is a small step that still leaves the burden on the employee, but there will be a lot of little things like that the will help also - i think this is important- the POTUS, in toto, has a LOT of jobs at his disposale - not just direct appointees, but 2o and tertiary appointees that add up to the 10s of thousands; with obama, this will mean defunding of the right wing wackos and more money to the right people; the net effect is big and important
from the actual abstract written by the scientists: each person's gut microbial community varies in the [species present]..... However, there was a wide array of shared microbial genes among sampled individuals, comprising an extensive, identifiable 'core microbiome' at the gene, rather than at the organismal..level. Obesity is associated with...[changes]. These results demonstrate that a diversity of organismal assemblages can nonetheless yield a core microbiome at a functional level, and that deviations from this core are associated with different physiological states (obese compared with lean).
Part one means that althought the bacterial species present vary, the functional capacity of all the bacteria, put together is similar - if you compare hertz and avis, they have different numbers of different models, but the function - give renters a car - is similar.
The second part say that there are specific changes associated with obesity; it does not say if this is a cause [changes in bacteria change digestion leading to obesity] or an effect [overeating changes your gut ]
reading this thread, it is hard to understand why people think linux is better then windows for the avg users who are 90% of thw world It's not surprising that linux is no better: they made the classic mistake, play on some one else's turf: instead of copying windows (which is never going to work, in the sense of offereing a compelling advantage) the Open sorce community should try and figure out what application do people really wnat that we can keep off of windows ith copyleft or copyright ? once the answer to this question is known, windows will die a deserved death. untill then,linux will remain, in the desktop, the preserve of geeks, hobbyists and wierdos - the people who , 40 years ago, built crystal radios.
i have been looking a lot at netbooks online, at best buy and at staples and microcneter, and it is hard to even find a linux netbook - I seriously doubt this has caused any significant harm to MS But, be glad to see some actual sales data Anyway, the whole idea that linux is better or cheaper then MS is not true for the avg user,
re desktop adoption - nonsense
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
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· Score: 1
I'm a typical middle adopter used to wintel; i recnetly put ubuntu via wubi on my laptop. Sure it worked - but so what I don't care about the stallmann stuff; viruses are not a big deal, so *why would i care about ubuntu ?* to repeat basic 101 of computer biz yet again: people adopt new software cause it does something so far as i can see linux doesn't do anything i care about, and yelling at me that i should care about open source or virus or whatever is counter productive when there is a linux app that does osmething tht windows can't linux will conquer the desktop with ease (PS that app ain't open office and it ain't the gimp)
i just put ubuntu (wubi) on my wintel box, and....big deal; for a user like me, it is really no better, and probably worse, then windows. What is the connection to visi calc ? If if hadn't been for visicalc, pcs would still cost 8 grand each, would have a few Kb of memory, and if it existed at all,/. would be about porting PDP11 to RS400 That is, people buy machines to do something, and until linux does something different unique that windows can't it will never succeed for the avg person - perhaps this is all obvious to the avg user.
This is just an historical accident; 99.9% was what could be done with what people judged "reasonable" effort and cost a few years ago; unless you know whatyou are going to use the sequence for, you don't know what error rate is acceptable
There are medical test that rely on dna sequence, eg myriad makes a fortune from sequencing the gene that gives women hereditary breast cancer. I don't know what there claimed error rate would be, but that would show you what is acceptable in todays clinical market place.
As for the "de novo" rate, eg the difference between a child and its parents, or between two identical twins - I don't think this has been accurately measured, but I do believe that single base changes (eg AATTC to AAATTC) are not as comon as insertion or deletion of several bases..which goes to show that biology is ocmplicated beyond belief
on the overview side, for those of us who follow this, pacbio has been hyped beyond belief, and the production of actual data eagerly awaited; time will tell if single molecule sequencing is to be the wave of the future, helicos bioscience (HLCS) has had a very hard time selling its system, which has been on market for about a year now; for instance, one problem is "blinking" single molecules that are fluorescent can go into a "dark" state where they don't give a signal - which is kind of an obvious show stopper
both have lots of missing or hard to use, way in need of improvement features - just take the graphs in excel/calc. Can you do log scales that start stop at something other then a multiple of 10 ? (just in office 07). sizing of graphs in excel ? graphs with linked floating x axis (hint - if you are a programmer who want something that a bout a billion people will routinely use, adding multiple floating x axis to excel/calc is it)
all the comments about bloatware/"finished" software are a little off base - it is not that software gets finished, it is that it is harder to see what is important; take/code, we recently hve been getting lots of useless floating widgets, but login doesn't return you to where you were...
2 some librarys, think harvard,sustained by a 20 billion + endowment, buy everything, so all elsiveir has to do is say a years subscription = # librarys/cost * profit factor. And they have a pretty good idea of what # librarys is.
and of course, professors need to publish, so following Sturgeon's Law, see wikipedia, most of academic/science publications are not that important (empirical data: science citation index states that ~ half of all papers have one or fewer citations)
so there is this sort of game or collusion between the publishers, the funding agencys, the librarys and the academics to provide enough journals so that all the profs have some place to publish; there are a small number of journals - a handfull - that consistently have good quality stuff; most of the otheres just exist to make money for the publishers and jobs for the scientists (not to rant, but fusion power is another scam, just welfare for scientists, totally ludicrous)
Which crashed and burned after its leader, Ed Land, died. Part of this of course was the film/digital transition, but even so, the collapse of polaroid was spectecular. One thing apple employees might take particulare note of: polaroid employees had a lot of their pension in polaroid stock, and the CEOs afte Land screwed them royally beyond belief.
I just downloaded symphony, imho, a piece of crap if there ever was one. no rreason even to try it - just to give you a flavor of how bad it is, on the list of windows programs under the start menu is JUST symnphony - no choice of loading just the word or excel mimic when you starti it, you get several seconds of a license splash screen, then a choice of new word/powerpoitn/excell, then a slooow wait after you choose one Graphic (chart) in excel clone very limited....
Thats about as far as I got; decided it was a dog and bailed: and the final proof, Lotus symphony doesn't give you an uninstall option - you have to do the set program access and defaults thing
Does anyone have good statistics on where univeristys spend there money, eg, x% for instructional salary, y% for grounds, z% for research facilitys, etc. Trying to get a more quantitative handle on why costs going up faster then inflation - some people say its simply demand, others the labor intensive nature of education means cpi not good predictor.
Over the last 20 years, I have worked for several small biotech companies in the boston area, and all have had large (> 200 K) budgets for software. The take home lesson is that there are a lot of really bad programmers out there, and the only way to survive is to have someone you trust , who knows how to code, vet them.
My current company has a really sharp VP/programming (whatever his real title is, thats what he does) and he hires good people.
This may seem like chicken and egg advice, but it is all I have
For examples, scan through almost any story at www.thedailywtf.com
don't child porn creeps and ordinary privacy obsessed/. ers have a utility whihc automatically changes any file of type x so that the hash changes ?
I don't know anything about computing, but it can't be that hard to have a utility which automatically edits any.tif or.doc or.mp4 so that the MD5 hash is changed ?
I live in a ritzy town near boston, and the stuff that gets thrown out on trash day is unbelievable.... although not sure gears are high on the list The army has some second hand warehouses McMaster carr - as prev poster noted, they are fabulous; never out of stock and always next day - you don't need to worry about where you put that extra stuff: never order extra, let mcmaster be your stockroom Universitys sometimes have good stuff; in the 90s MIT had a whole building full of vacumn tube oscilliscopes; I don't remember gears and motors but they were probably their Garage auto repair shops - used starter motors, etc
CRA loans were not the problem, this has been studied again and again by the Fed Reserve The economist link is to a right wing wack harvard prof, almost a WTF (www.thedailywtf.com)
One myth about the current financial crises is that it is the fault of ordinary Americans, who imprudently took out loans they could to afford. This is simply not true. The current crises is not the fault of ordinary Americans. It is true that many Americans took out loans they could not afford. I don't know why people did this - some, with credit cards maxed out on vacations, took out a home loans , and instead of paying off the credit card, took another vacation. Others were optimistic, egged on by the relentless propaganda that home ownership is good. Others were, perhaps , elderly and confused, or lost their jobs, or had medical bills. I don't know how many people acted in different ways, but i do know this: every single solitary mortgage had to be approved. Every single mortgage had to be approved by underwriters and bankers. Now, if someone, asks for a loan they cannot possibly pay, who bears more responsibility: the person asking, or the banker who approves it. I further know that many ordinary Americans are suffering as a result of their actions, and of the actions of their neighbors.
Another myth about the current crisis is that rather then resulting from too little govt regulation, ti was the result of liberals messing with the free market, by forcing banks, with a law known as CRA, to make loans to poor or minority applicants. This question has been studied again and again by the Federal Reserve; suffice it to say, CRA loans were not the problem.
However, the question of who or why these loans were made is a red herring; it was not the approval of imprudent loans that has made the current crisis so severe. All the bankers who approved these loans are not actually the main culprits.
The people who bear direct responsibility for the current crises are people like Paulson; as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he and people like him are directly responsible for the current problems; that he is sending our tax dollars to his buddies to fix the problem is only icing on the cake of gall. Not only are people like pauslon responsible for our current problems, they acted from the basest of motives - greed. It was the desire on the part of people like Henry Paulson for larger paychecks that led to reckless behavior on the part of wall street; this reckless behavior generated large profits, justifying large salary's, but this same reckless behavior has gotten us to where we are today.
Another myth about the financial crisis is that it is incredibly complicate. While the technical details of loans may be complicated, the behavior and actions that led to this state are not at all complicated, and are similar to what we do every day.
As an example, this week, the wall street journal examined why AIG, one of the largest and most respected financial institutions in the world, suddenly collapsed. Turns out, they had a unit in london writing insurance; while it sounds complicated its just insurance - someone pays you some money, the premium, and you promise to pay back a lot more if they have a problem. And what did AIG do with the huge premiums they recieved ? they did not put any money aside for a reserve. LET me repeat that: they spent all the money on salarys. So when the mortgage market went south, all of sudden people said, hey, AIG owes, in theory, a gazillion dollars of insurance, and they don't have any money set aside to pay it. When people heard this, you had the famed loss of confidence, and AIG went bankrupt.
it is not correct to say that the ordinary american caused this problem with reckless borrowing; 1) every single solitary loan had to be approved by a bank - they are at least 50% at fault 2) the problem is not the nonperforming loans; the problem is the leverage on wall street which has magnifed the problem of non performing loans greatly 3) the problem is lax underwriting standards: how do you value a security over the 30 year life of the underlying loans if new underwriting standards, with no historical base, have been used that ordinary americans are at fault is as much a myth as the idea that CRA loans are the prolbem,( refuted by fed studies)
as a scientist in a small company full of scientists, excel is agreat practical tool, it is something the average biologist, who doesn't know a lot of math or programming, can use. all these other things - R maple matlab are $$ hard to learn (true if you already know excel) etc etc etc
anyone who blindly bashes excel for data analysis is a moron - like any tool excel has its place
there is something incongrous about someone who knows what scientific data analysis is, but doesn't understand why many scientists prefer to use excel, the (relatively) easy to use tool that they use every day.
yes, but none of what you say really says why an md has to know basic organic chem. For instantce, you say organic is necessary to understanding how drugs work. Nonsense; how drugs work is an incrredibly complex topic which is often not known by anyone (eg, one of the best known classes of drugs, ace inhiitors, are supposed to be ace inhibitors, but may act via cryptic non circulating renin) a doctor doesnt need any chemistry ; he needs to know how to access the computer program that lists allof the drugs and their uses and their interactions, cause their are so many drugs and side effects and interactions no one can know them all by this logic, computer programmng, how to do searches and search logic are more important the organic
as a (non md) researcher, i believe that there are, even in the pool of people who are MDs, very few who can do both clinical duty and research; this small group of exceptional people eat organic chemistry courses for breakfast, and then go on to one of the small number of spots in the MD-PhD programs ("Mud Fuds"), a program specifally designed to produce clinician researchers.
If you want clinical research, where you need both doctor (md) and doctor (phd) skills, it is probably best to have collaborations
Perhaps, in the near past (50 yeears ago) which is the time frame that formed the opinions of the now dead people who designed todays course work, there was a reaosn for an md to know organic chem, eg lab work (blood work, where they test your blood) was often done by the doctor - todays network of clinical labs didnt exist.
Today, there is very little need for most of hte basic science taugth to mds; even acid base and equivalent chemistry, used to figure out basic blood work, could probably be done more acurately by computer program then doctor
Slashdot Mirror
I did a wubi install of ubuntu on my laptop, and it installed and ran ok
and...
incredible - all these volunteers have produced a great OS/desktop that installed nearly flawlessly
or
so what - it is the same as windows, so why should I care ?
which is the problem: if windows is your target, who cares if you are equal or even slighlty better.
I've been listening to the OS thing for several years, and the idea of switching a university, unless it is really poor, to OS to save money just doesn't make sense - as one poster pointed out, you'll pry excel out of finance profs dead hands.
People will be glad to switch when OSS is truly better: I work at a small biotechnology company, with lots of computer savy scientists and enginers, and when I installed firefox 3 years ago *kazing* people did not have to be pursuaded - when software is good, people use it; that people don't use open office or the gimp or other oss is because it is not better then MS
Note that I did not, repeat NOT say that thegimp or open office are not good: they are not better, and people will not switch untill OSS is better.
Of course, a lot of oss does not seem to be better: for fancy things, thegimp and open office are not as good as photoshop or office (asbestos emacs vs vi gloves on...)
So...
High schools have less money then universities, and the argument that they need direct training in Office as the workplace standard is less effective.
I think one could also make a good argument that having serious parts of the software - the school web stie, school email, etc under the control of the students would work: kids respond to responsibility.
High schools also need a lot of 3D cad type software, layout software for the student newspaper, etc etc - for my school district, and i live in a very affluent suburb of boston, the cost of InDesign for the middle school newspaper was a big deal.
But state gov seems like the real winner for OS: I live in Massachusetts, and we lost, big big time, when the minicomputer companies (DEC, WANG, Prime) went under, and people get the idea of not sending money to redmond, and keeping that money in state, and using the tax dollars to help start a linux industry
after all, isn't stimulus the word of hte day ?
but the important point is that Windows/MS will rapidly join the dustbin of history the day oss does something that windows can"t: after all, the reason we have pcs is not due to IBM or steve jobs, it is due to two professors who made visicalc, open source software that gave people a reason to buy a pc
Not to mention fighting the last war - if it is all in the cloud, who cares ?
remembe AIX ?
The goal on HPs part is to (1) wean people off of MS, and then swithc to a proprietary OS
NO Business could possily resist the profit inherent in propietary software if they could possibly jam it down your throat
just today signed bill strengthing anti pay discrimmination law; I know, I know, it is a small step that still leaves the burden on the employee, but there will be a lot of little things like that the will help
also - i think this is important- the POTUS, in toto, has a LOT of jobs at his disposale - not just direct appointees, but 2o and tertiary appointees that add up to the 10s of thousands; with obama, this will mean defunding of the right wing wackos and more money to the right people; the net effect is big and important
from the actual abstract written by the scientists: ..level. ...[changes]. These results demonstrate that a diversity of organismal assemblages can nonetheless yield a core microbiome at a functional level, and that deviations from this core are associated with different physiological states (obese compared with lean).
each person's gut microbial community varies in the [species present]..... However, there was a wide array of shared microbial genes among sampled individuals, comprising an extensive, identifiable 'core microbiome' at the gene, rather than at the organismal
Obesity is associated with
Part one means that althought the bacterial species present vary, the functional capacity of all the bacteria, put together is similar - if you compare hertz and avis, they have different numbers of different models, but the function - give renters a car - is similar.
The second part say that there are specific changes associated with obesity; it does not say if this is a cause [changes in bacteria change digestion leading to obesity] or an effect [overeating changes your gut ]
reading this thread, it is hard to understand why people think linux is better then windows for the avg users who are 90% of thw world
It's not surprising that linux is no better: they made the classic mistake, play on some one else's turf: instead of copying windows (which is never going to work, in the sense of offereing a compelling advantage) the Open sorce community should try and figure out
what application do people really wnat that we can keep off of windows ith copyleft or copyright ?
once the answer to this question is known, windows will die a deserved death.
untill then,linux will remain, in the desktop, the preserve of geeks, hobbyists and wierdos - the people who , 40 years ago, built crystal radios.
i have been looking a lot at netbooks online, at best buy and at staples and microcneter, and it is hard to even find a linux netbook - I seriously doubt this has caused any significant harm to MS
But, be glad to see some actual sales data
Anyway, the whole idea that linux is better or cheaper then MS is not true for the avg user,
I'm a typical middle adopter used to wintel; i recnetly put ubuntu via wubi on my laptop.
Sure it worked - but so what
I don't care about the stallmann stuff; viruses are not a big deal, so
*why would i care about ubuntu ?*
to repeat basic 101 of computer biz yet again:
people adopt new software cause it does something
so far as i can see linux doesn't do anything i care about, and yelling at me that i should care about open source or virus or whatever is counter productive
when there is a linux app that does osmething tht windows can't linux will conquer the desktop with ease
(PS that app ain't open office and it ain't the gimp)
i just put ubuntu (wubi) on my wintel box, and....big deal; for a user like me, it is really no better, and probably worse, then windows. /. would be about porting PDP11 to RS400
What is the connection to visi calc ?
If if hadn't been for visicalc, pcs would still cost 8 grand each, would have a few Kb of memory, and if it existed at all,
That is, people buy machines to do something, and until linux does something different unique that windows can't it will never succeed for the avg person - perhaps this is all obvious to the avg user.
This is just an historical accident; 99.9% was what could be done with what people judged "reasonable" effort and cost a few years ago; unless you know whatyou are going to use the sequence for, you don't know what error rate is acceptable
There are medical test that rely on dna sequence, eg myriad makes a fortune from sequencing the gene that gives women hereditary breast cancer. I don't know what there claimed error rate would be, but that would show you what is acceptable in todays clinical market place.
As for the "de novo" rate, eg the difference between a child and its parents, or between two identical twins - I don't think this has been accurately measured, but I do believe that single base changes (eg AATTC to AAATTC) are not as comon as insertion or deletion of several bases..which goes to show that biology is ocmplicated beyond belief
on the overview side, for those of us who follow this, pacbio has been hyped beyond belief, and the production of actual data eagerly awaited; time will tell if single molecule sequencing is to be the wave of the future, helicos bioscience (HLCS) has had a very hard time selling its system, which has been on market for about a year now; for instance, one problem is "blinking" single molecules that are fluorescent can go into a "dark" state where they don't give a signal - which is kind of an obvious show stopper
both have lots of missing or hard to use, way in need of improvement features - just take the graphs in excel/calc. Can you do log scales that start stop at something other then a multiple of 10 ? (just in office 07).
sizing of graphs in excel ?
graphs with linked floating x axis (hint - if you are a programmer who want something that a bout a billion people will routinely use, adding multiple floating x axis to excel/calc is it)
all the comments about bloatware/"finished" software are a little off base - it is not that software gets finished, it is that it is harder to see what is important; take /code, we recently hve been getting lots of useless floating widgets, but login doesn't return you to where you were...
1
elsiver is a for profit company
2 ,sustained by a 20 billion + endowment, buy everything, so all elsiveir has to do is say a years subscription = # librarys/cost * profit factor. And they have a pretty good idea of what # librarys is.
some librarys, think harvard
and of course, professors need to publish, so following Sturgeon's Law, see wikipedia, most of academic/science publications are not that important (empirical data: science citation index states that ~ half of all papers have one or fewer citations)
so there is this sort of game or collusion between the publishers, the funding agencys, the librarys and the academics to provide enough journals so that all the profs have some place to publish; there are a small number of journals - a handfull - that consistently have good quality stuff; most of the otheres just exist to make money for the publishers and jobs for the scientists (not to rant, but fusion power is another scam, just welfare for scientists, totally ludicrous)
Which crashed and burned after its leader, Ed Land, died. Part of this of course was the film/digital transition, but even so, the collapse of polaroid was spectecular.
One thing apple employees might take particulare note of: polaroid employees had a lot of their pension in polaroid stock, and the CEOs afte Land screwed them royally beyond belief.
I just downloaded symphony, imho, a piece of crap if there ever was one. no rreason even to try it - just to give you a flavor of how bad it is, on the list of windows programs under the start menu is JUST symnphony - no choice of loading just the word or excel mimic
when you starti it, you get several seconds of a license splash screen, then a choice of new word/powerpoitn/excell, then a slooow wait after you choose one
Graphic (chart) in excel clone very limited....
Thats about as far as I got; decided it was a dog and bailed: and the final proof, Lotus symphony doesn't give you an uninstall option - you have to do the set program access and defaults thing
Does anyone have good statistics on where univeristys spend there money, eg, x% for instructional salary, y% for grounds, z% for research facilitys, etc.
Trying to get a more quantitative handle on why costs going up faster then inflation - some people say its simply demand, others the labor intensive nature of education means cpi not good predictor.
Over the last 20 years, I have worked for several small biotech companies in the boston area, and all have had large (> 200 K) budgets for software. The take home lesson is that there are a lot of really bad programmers out there, and the only way to survive is to have someone you trust , who knows how to code, vet them.
My current company has a really sharp VP/programming (whatever his real title is, thats what he does) and he hires good people.
This may seem like chicken and egg advice, but it is all I have
For examples, scan through almost any story at www.thedailywtf.com
don't child porn creeps and ordinary privacy obsessed /. ers have a utility whihc automatically changes any file of type x so that the hash changes ?
I don't know anything about computing, but it can't be that hard to have a utility which automatically edits any .tif or.doc or .mp4 so that the MD5 hash is changed ?
I live in a ritzy town near boston, and the stuff that gets thrown out on trash day is unbelievable....
although not sure gears are high on the list
The army has some second hand warehouses
McMaster carr - as prev poster noted, they are fabulous; never out of stock and always next day - you don't need to worry about where you put that extra stuff: never order extra, let mcmaster be your stockroom
Universitys sometimes have good stuff; in the 90s MIT had a whole building full of vacumn tube oscilliscopes; I don't remember gears and motors but they were probably their
Garage auto repair shops - used starter motors, etc
CRA loans were not the problem, this has been studied again and again by the Fed Reserve
The economist link is to a right wing wack harvard prof, almost a WTF (www.thedailywtf.com)
One myth about the current financial crises is that it is the fault of ordinary Americans, who imprudently took out loans they could to afford. This is simply not true.
The current crises is not the fault of ordinary Americans.
It is true that many Americans took out loans they could not afford. I don't know why people did this - some, with credit cards maxed out on vacations, took out a home loans , and instead of paying off the credit card, took another vacation. Others were optimistic, egged on by the relentless propaganda that home ownership is good. Others were, perhaps , elderly and confused, or lost their jobs, or had medical bills. I don't know how many people acted in different ways, but i do know this: every single solitary mortgage had to be approved. Every single mortgage had to be approved by underwriters and bankers. Now, if someone, asks for a loan they cannot possibly pay, who bears more responsibility: the person asking, or the banker who approves it.
I further know that many ordinary Americans are suffering as a result of their actions, and of the actions of their neighbors.
Another myth about the current crisis is that rather then resulting from too little govt regulation, ti was the result of liberals messing with the free market, by forcing banks, with a law known as CRA, to make loans to poor or minority applicants. This question has been studied again and again by the Federal Reserve; suffice it to say, CRA loans were not the problem.
However, the question of who or why these loans were made is a red herring; it was not the approval of imprudent loans that has made the current crisis so severe. All the bankers who approved these loans are not actually the main culprits.
The people who bear direct responsibility for the current crises are people like Paulson; as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he and people like him are directly responsible for the current problems; that he is sending our tax dollars to his buddies to fix the problem is only icing on the cake of gall. Not only are people like pauslon responsible for our current problems, they acted from the basest of motives - greed. It was the desire on the part of people like Henry Paulson for larger paychecks that led to reckless behavior on the part of wall street; this reckless behavior generated large profits, justifying large salary's, but this same reckless behavior has gotten us to where we are today.
Another myth about the financial crisis is that it is incredibly complicate. While the technical details of loans may be complicated, the behavior and actions that led to this state are not at all complicated, and are similar to what we do every day.
As an example, this week, the wall street journal examined why AIG, one of the largest and most respected financial institutions in the world, suddenly collapsed. Turns out, they had a unit in london writing insurance; while it sounds complicated its just insurance - someone pays you some money, the premium, and you promise to pay back a lot more if they have a problem. And what did AIG do with the huge premiums they recieved ? they did not put any money aside for a reserve.
LET me repeat that: they spent all the money on salarys. So when the mortgage market went south, all of sudden people said, hey, AIG owes, in theory, a gazillion dollars of insurance, and they don't have any money set aside to pay it.
When people heard this, you had the famed loss of confidence, and AIG went bankrupt.
it is not correct to say that the ordinary american caused this problem with reckless borrowing;
1) every single solitary loan had to be approved by a bank - they are at least 50% at fault
2) the problem is not the nonperforming loans; the problem is the leverage on wall street which has magnifed the problem of non performing loans greatly
3) the problem is lax underwriting standards: how do you value a security over the 30 year life of the underlying loans if new underwriting standards, with no historical base, have been used
that ordinary americans are at fault is as much a myth as the idea that CRA loans are the prolbem,( refuted by fed studies)
as a scientist in a small company full of scientists, excel is agreat practical tool, it is something the average biologist, who doesn't know a lot of math or programming, can use.
all these other things - R maple matlab are $$ hard to learn (true if you already know excel) etc etc etc
anyone who blindly bashes excel for data analysis is a moron - like any tool excel has its place
there is something incongrous about someone who knows what scientific data analysis is, but doesn't understand why many scientists prefer to use excel, the (relatively) easy to use tool that they use every day.
yes, but none of what you say really says why an md has to know basic organic chem. For instantce, you say organic is necessary to understanding how drugs work. Nonsense; how drugs work is an incrredibly complex topic which is often not known by anyone (eg, one of the best known classes of drugs, ace inhiitors, are supposed to be ace inhibitors, but may act via cryptic non circulating renin)
a doctor doesnt need any chemistry ; he needs to know how to access the computer program that lists allof the drugs and their uses and their interactions, cause their are so many drugs and side effects and interactions no one can know them all
by this logic, computer programmng, how to do searches and search logic are more important the organic
as a (non md) researcher, i believe that there are, even in the pool of people who are MDs, very few who can do both clinical duty and research; this small group of exceptional people eat organic chemistry courses for breakfast, and then go on to one of the small number of spots in the MD-PhD programs ("Mud Fuds"), a program specifally designed to produce clinician researchers.
If you want clinical research, where you need both doctor (md) and doctor (phd) skills, it is probably best to have collaborations
Perhaps, in the near past (50 yeears ago) which is the time frame that formed the opinions of the now dead people who designed todays course work, there was a reaosn for an md to know organic chem, eg lab work (blood work, where they test your blood) was often done by the doctor - todays network of clinical labs didnt exist.
Today, there is very little need for most of hte basic science taugth to mds; even acid base and equivalent chemistry, used to figure out basic blood work, could probably be done more acurately by computer program then doctor