It points out that wikipedia is a reference source as media is a reference source, the implied comparison to an excyclopedia is misleading.
That solves the debate, doesn't it? Instead of expecting wikipedia to be authoritative, think of it as a public access broadcasting channel.
Like others have said, if your keywords are common, there's little you can do to narrow your search.
What really bugs me, though, is the lack of proper name handling. Scholar seems to interpret searches quite literally, whereas pubmed, for example, translates queries.
Try the following searches to see what I mean:
Pubmed will find all three references for "WG Gunn" in a search for "gunn W", and a 1/3 instances of WG Gunn in a search for "William Gunn", however, it chokes on "WG Gunn".
Scholar finds only 2/3 instances of "WG Gunn" in a search for exactly that, but never "wg gunn" in a search for "william gunn", and searching for "w gunn" turns up nothing for "wg gunn", however, there are results for wj gunn and ws gunn.
It's tricky, but necessary, for a scholarly database to get this right. "w gunn" should turn up "w gunn" as well every record where the first name starts with g, including both the ones with and without a middle initial. "william gunn" should turn up the set of results included in "w gunn", "william gunn", and "wg gunn". "wg gunn" should also turn up every record of "wg gunn" in addition to the set of results where the first name begins with w, the second name begins with g and the last name is gunn. "Gunn WG" should be identical to "WG Gunn".
When doing name searches, if in doubt, include the result. People are more likely to be put out if their articles don't turn up where they should than if they do turn up where they shouldn't. I mean, the whole point of publishing is to get your work out there so other people can read it, right?
There is a problem, specifically that a common name will return too many hits. "Smith B" turns up over 4000 hits on
pubmed and 4 on Scholar, whereas "b smith" turns up 39000 on Scholar and nothing on pubmed (the query gets translated unless you specify that it's an author search) but too many results is never as bad as too little in an author search, because you can further narrow using date ranges, initials, and keywords.
I tried this, and I heard about 50 crappy songs, some of which still haunt me with their crappiness. I found nothing I actually did like. That's not how I find out about music, anyways. Either I hear a band on internet radio, at a music festival, or out somewhere, or, when I want to explore a genre, Audioscrobbler.
Being blindly exposed to a bunch of crap just isn't going to work.
Try it.
This is entirely hearsay, but I heard that some cable companies find it difficult or expensive to filter out the TV signal from the cable modem signal without degrading the internet connection. Almost everyone who signs up for a cable modem already has cable tv service, anyways, so usually it doesn't matter. What do you think would happen if you called and told them you'd like to cancel your cable TV, but continue your internet service.
You should try it. Maybe they'll offer you a deal to keep you paying for channels you're getting anyways.
Peer review isn't done by editors, but editorial review is. Before your submission to a major scientific publisher makes it to peer review, it has to make it past editorial review, which is essentially a triage step to limit the burden placed upon peer-reviewers. If a journal sends its reviewers too much crap, no one will want to review for it anymore.
While I think that from a financial standpoint, libraries would save money publishing articles themselves, they don't have the editorial ability of a major publishing house. It's the kind of thing that doesn't de-centralize well, either, because you need a limited amount of "restriction points" to effectively filter out the crap from the submission stream. That then enables people who produce material that makes it past the editorial and peer-review filter to claim that as an accomplishment when applying for grant and tenure.
Here's the analogy for the slashdot crowd: it's like article submissions are electrons. You want to get a certain current by using editors as resistors(and believe me, they do resist). Now what happens to current as you add more resistors in parallel?
The solution to all of this would be for libraries to require all submissions in some kind of markup like LaTeX(to enable Semantic Web goodness- in the biological and medical fields, submission as MS Word files is not uncommon), not produce a printed version at all, and publish the citations with abstracts in a central index, similar to Pubmed. Now, instead of an article in Science or Nature having more weight than an article in the eskimo journal of snow science, an article would be ranked by the number of views, and by the number of non-self citations it receives from subsequent articles.
However, there are two problems with this. One is that it would take a longer time for an article's worth to be evaluated that way than with a dedicated staff of editors working on it, where the value accrues immediately upon publication(though this is all debatable). The other, more serious, problem is how to find important, relevant work with no one filtering out the crap for you. Imagine slashdot with all submissions accepted, and no moderation or comment threading, just one long stream of post after post after frist psot! So maybe moderated comments would be enabled on the citation indices, and you'd have something like the grand thing we have here, with a mix of people acting selfishly and altruistically. That's not that different from the system we have today, I don't guess. Who's going to decide which articles make the front page? A small pool of people who are expert in their field? Editors?
I subscribe to some RSS feeds of pubmed search queries for keywords important to me, and each query is updated with several articles each day. This is for articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals(again, many of which editorially triage articles before selecting ones to send out for review).
Keeping up with the reading of this pre-selected set is a big task already. It would be more than a full-time job to read an unfiltered set, then moderate or comment upon each. I know some fields are even busier than mine.
So, I would love to see the current system change as much as anyone else, but I don't have the time or funding to put my efforts where my mouth is, nor does anyone else who wants to actually do research instead of just read about it. The editors are doing a hard job, and much as I hate them sometimes, I respect what they're doing.
Of course, Google Scholar does need to improve their handling of author names and journals titles, and that's one of my biggest complaints, but that shouldn't be hard for them to do. You can do a filetype: search in regular google, already, so I'm sure firstinitial: and lastname: operators aren't far off. Similarly, I'm sure they can find a way to link all the variants of a journal's title.
It sure would be a shame for Thompson's currently superior product to be superceded by a inferior one with a better interface, and when you think of it, when you already have the content, shouldn't designing the interface be easier?
Scopus and WoS are currently targeted to library and information science people, who are really the middlemen in the article-finding transaction, whereas GS is designed for the enduser. That's the reason they've been able to get away with having such crufty old interfaces for so long, but now that endusers know that easier to use interfaces, though imperfect, do exist, you just can't get away with it any longer. And really, if they can improve their content faster than Thompson can spruce up their interface, then "The battle goes to the swift", my friend.
Aha! I didn't think there was going to be one of you guys reading this.
Here's where you're failing with respect to Google Scholar: Your crufty old interface(s).
Really. Just as Google Maps has superceded Mapquest, pretty much entirely due to their superior interface, Google Scholar is going to make WoS irrelevant as a literature search tool. All they have to do is implement a slick citation navigation system(tree-based or some such, for which the technology already exists, check out the TouchGraph applet) and it's done.
Currently each different database is better for a different use, but that wont last, so don't kid yourself. Modernize your interface or become irrelevant.
"That being said, Google Scholar does need a bit more polishing, but I still use it a lot. However, until you can grab citation info into Endnote or Bibtex, it don't see it replacing anything soon."
Have you heard of Connotea? You can grab bibliographical info from Pubmed, HubMed, and many other indices directly into your Connotea list, and output in.RIS, so you can import into RefMan or whatever. The eventual goal is to move totally away from Thompson ISI and their crufty old products, but until someone comes out with a Journal Style formatting package, we're stuck with RefMan's heinous old interface, at least for now.
So if you click through any search result, you can grab the citation info, and then pass that on to EndNote or whatever, but hopefully we'll soon not even need to do that. Give Connotea a try, you may find it more useful for at least making the list.
What I'd like to see is better cooperation with dx.doi.org and more OpenURL support, but I guess that is mostly up to the libraries. I'm going to try to talk my school into registering their resolver with Google, so it knows which library I get my access from, and hopefully Open Access continues to spread.
Since it's really all about the interface, now we need good forward and backward citation navigation. Tree based approaches, like the one they use at Hubmed, is nice, but the implementation is still a little rough. I would think Google, with their AJAX skillz, could do something much nicer, ala Google Maps.
Yes! Anyone who's ever used one of the academic interfaces knows this! They may have a good database, but the UI is terrible! Same thing with Thompson ISI Reference managers. I've switched to Connotea and just import into Refman to compile the reference list. When they come out with a comprehensive Journal Style template package for Connotea(or simply for LaTeX), then I'll never have to use that crufty product ever again.
It's all about the interface. That can't be stressed enough.
Good point. I didn't know that brain scans were so standardized; It always comes across as such fuzzy science to me.
Sorry, some people are grammar nazis, some people are stats nazis. I happen to be both. I'll try to behave in the future.
It is hard to properly explain the importance of technical issues, whether statistical or methodological, without spending more time than you can really justify on a slashdot comment, so I should relax, I suppose.
The background to this (why I took out my frustrations on the first imprecisely worded post I could find) is that I've been trying to convince my labmates of the importance of proper statistics, as opposed to the "I'll just do it three times and take the average" kinda mentality. I'm trying to get them to see that the degree of variability is something that must be determined experimentally.
Did you see the little sentence saying they've already gotten $42 million from the bill and melinda gates foundation? They damn well better do something with all that.
Will thisurbanlegendneverdie?
Just go here. And toss 'em a couple bucks while you're at it for the harm reduction program. You never know who you could end up helping.
"They used controls..."
Wow, they used controls? Those naughty researchers, always trying to trick people.
"the range of values in the control subjects was almost as large as the range in the mdma users. Ie...the range found in mdma users was normal."
So if I have a set of data consisting of values from 190-200 and a set of data consisting of values from 0-10, there's no difference, because the spread is the same?
"the range found in the controls was also just ridiculus. Something like 15 or 20 times greater for the highest level in the control than the lowest." So if I were do do a study and find that the normal levels of a metabolite were between 1 and 20 nM, then my study must be flawed, right?
I could go on, but let me stop here and say that I understand what you're trying to say, but you'd do better talking in terms of standard deviations and confidence intervals, not "ranges".
Sorry for the snarkiness, I know you mean well, but I hate to see someone attempt to criticize something,eapecially something that needs criticism, and do it in such a incoherent and babbling fashion. You're not helping the cause, friend, so thanks for the help, but no thanks. Here's you $0.02 back, go back to stats 101 and try again.
Webster is such a great source for definition of computer terms.
Main Entry: cracker
Pronunciation: 'kra-k&r
Function: noun
1 chiefly dialect : a bragging liar : BOASTER
2 : something that makes a cracking or snapping noise: as a : FIRECRACKER b : the snapping end of a whiplash : SNAPPER c : a paper holder for a party favor that pops when the ends are pulled sharply
3 plural : NUTCRACKER
4 : a dry thin crispy baked bread product that may be leavened or unleavened
5 a usually disparaging : a poor usually Southern white b capitalized : a native or resident of Florida or Georgia -- used as a nickname
6 : the equipment in which cracking (as of petroleum) is carried out
BTW, since no one will get the joke: I'm a from a small rural southern town.
Your concern that there may be some effects down the line that we don't know about is a valid one, but only in that you don't have a good understanding of what it is that a gene does. The list of possible things that can happen when a gene is inserted into an organism is pretty small, actually. It can either do nothing, which is the most common action, since there is so much DNA, in eukaryotes, that's unused for the purposes of gene expression. The next thing it can do is get made into the exact RNA molecule you designed it to give rise to, which can only do the specific function that that one RNA molecule is designed to do. The list here is limited, too, to either working inside the cell itself, or being made into a protein, which then contributes to the structure of the cell, or feeds back onto the gene expression of the cell, or has some catalytic function, meaning it operates to build a specific molecule or break a certain one down. You're not going to create poison pollen, for example, unless you deliberately add a gene which makes a toxic protein be produced in pollen.
There is a possibility that the inserted DNA inserts itself in the middle of a existing gene. If this happens, the gene that gets the insertion either stops being produced, or a modified version is produced. When this happens you could interrupt genes that defend against cancer, and the result would be that you end up with cancer cells. This does in fact happen, and people who do these experiments see, every time they do them, a spectrum from the best to the worst that could happen. The way it works is this: You have a million cells. Your technique introduces your gene into 50% of them. If you don't target the gene to any location, the gene inserts into random places, so given 20000 genes, you'd expect to see each one disrupted, more or less once, considering that there are large stretches of DNA that doesn't contain any genes at all. So when you culture the cells, you end up with a mixed bag of cells. As you culture the cells, you get to see if any of them have become cancer cells, you get to see if any of them die, and you get to see which ones make the protein you were hoping they would make. And that's the three things which can happen. You create a dead cell, a cancer cell, or a cell which makes the gene you wanted it to make. That gene only has one function, and that's the function you've designed it to have. Even if you interrupt a gene and cause a fusion protein to be created, the scope of that fusion protein is limited to doing or not doing the original function of the protein, or it may interfere with other proteins causing only the enhancement or prevention of that protein's one function. We aren't creating genes out of nothing, we're taking genes that exist and modifying them, so we can only create a litmited set of actions, related to ones that already exist. In that respect, the danger from a modified organism getting into the wild is exactly the danger from non-native existing organisms getting into the wild.
I know it sounds weird, but when you understand the fault-tolerant mechanisms organisms have evolved, you understand that there is a limited scope any possible modification can have, no matter what happens. I don't know if you could engineer a disaster by releasing genetically modified organisms any worse than you could by malicious use of organisms that already exist.
I can understand you were worried for your own safety, and I've never been in that situation myself, but it's just hard for me to imagine standing by and watching something like that happen to somebody, and not trying to expose the bastards somehow.
How have the father and stepmother been doing? You can't do something like that to your own son without paying the consequences somehow.
It's the @nature.com email addresses that got my attention.
I've heard so much fluff about folksonomies and social this-and-that that I'm well sick of it, but you're right. It's a serious article. I've come to reliably expect real content from dlib; They do a good job. The article at Burningbird.com is a great one, too.
There seems to be a divide between people who do official tree-based classification and the tag-based classifiers. The tree people say flat namespaces aren't rich enough to provide context and, without a central authority, the system is open to abuse, while the tag people say you can't possibly expect to know the structure beforehand, so you need tag-based "set" classification.
I'm reminded of a story about a university which, engaged in a grounds beautification project, wanted to fix the problem of no one using the sidewalks, instead cutting across lawns and making unsightly dirt through the manicured lawns. Instead of replanting grass where the trails had been worn through the lawn, then fencing off the area, which would have created even more of an eyesore, they tore up all the sidewalks instead and planted grass where the sidewalks were. 1 year later, they went back and made winding sidewalks where the dirt trails which had been worn into the grass from foottraffic, and landscaped around those.
I wish the two sides wouldn't be so opposed, because it seems obvious to me that the two need each other. Tree people are right that unguided mass action is no substitute for the action of an experienced editor, while tag folksonomists are right that you can't set the structure beforehand, and expect people to adhere to it as things change. It's clear to me that the tags are creating the categories that the future, managed, tree-based classifications will need to use.
In the meantime, what would be wrong with del.icio.us and their like publishing a set of "best practices" for tagging? I know they want things to evolve organically, but surely they could at least issue guidelines on the use of underscores and plus signs, for example, and make recommendations on how to make tags useful for others(akin to good password recommendations, except ones people actually follow).
Here are some suggestions from my own experience:
If you're going to use the tag, "Blog" or "web" or "research", or something generic like that, include at least one more tag.
Look to see which one of the various ways you could tag something is used by most people.
Provide an example of a two level tag system, where you tag something with a broad general tag, then one or more specific tags. For example: if you're tagging pictures you took of a gigantic live oak, you could tag the picture, "tree" and "live oak". It would address the criticism that tag classification doesn't scale.
It's not unlike the dynamic between open and closed source software, really. If you have nothing but closed source stuff, there will always be needs that aren't met because there's no market. With nothing but open-source, you'd have everyone writing their own personal version of every app out there, and nothing would work together, unless, of course, people decided on ad-hoc "best practices". The introduction of tabs in the next version of IE in the face of Firefox's growing market share is about as clear evidence as you can get of this dynamic. There was something missing from the closed system, so the open system came up with the fix, and it's being integrated back into the closed system, which most people will continue to use.
I feel like I should be emailing this to the respective people, not burying it in a slashdot comment, but what the hey.
You're right to be worried about the consequences.
However, DNA manipulation is something that's been studied to the point that it's pretty well cookbook, now. The antibiotic resistance genes commonly used confer resistance to ampicillin, hygromycin, or neomycin. It requires a separate gene to confer resistance to each class of antibiotic. There's not one gene that confers resistance to all antibiotics, known or to be invented. Also, there's some logic to which resistances are used. Often, the genes confer resistance to an antibiotic that would never be used in humans. When's the last time you've gone to the doctor and gotten a dose of hygromycin?
There's only a limited, set, list of things that you can accomplish by integrating a exogenous gene into the chromosome. When you actually do the experiment, you get all of these things happening because you create a population of the organisms, and you select among those for the most normal. In the process, you see the spectrum from the best to the worst that could happen. So the people who do it, do know the risks pretty well. There's a lot of FUD in the statement, "We don't know what the complications could be." No one ever could, but the people who do it get to see the range of things that could happen, therefore they know the risks pretty well, and certainly better than the average protestor.
I could go through a list of every misgiving anyone has to genetic modification of organisms and explain to them how the possibility they're worried about has been recognized and explain to them what is being done about it. Unfortunately, misgivings usually come from ignorance of the basic science. That's not to disparage anyone, it's just that the science is so complex nowadays, you have to have a good science background and spend a lot of time keeping up with it, just to understand it. The stuff I disagree with is the herbicide production by second generation seeds. That just seems wrong to me, because you end up keeping subsistence farmers beholden to this corporation for the next years crop.
So, my point is, you should change the we in your last paragraph to I. Just because you don't know the implications and are justifiably worried, that doesn't mean that no one understands the implications. It's a complex subject, for sure, but before rioting about possible complications that they don't really understand, I wish the protestors would get someone to explain the science to them, what the risks really are, and how likely they are. Then, I think, unless they're really motivated by something other than the potential complications they're always going on about, they'll clear out of the way and just let us do our jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
about your sig....what was he doing in your past to begin with?
It points out that wikipedia is a reference source as media is a reference source, the implied comparison to an excyclopedia is misleading. That solves the debate, doesn't it? Instead of expecting wikipedia to be authoritative, think of it as a public access broadcasting channel.
Gunn's extension: Any mention of Godwin's law explicitly is equivalent to invoking Godwin's law. Nice try.
Or they could just start shooting civilians who "look suspicious". It would be terrible if they started doing that. Oh, wait....
What really bugs me, though, is the lack of proper name handling. Scholar seems to interpret searches quite literally, whereas pubmed, for example, translates queries. Try the following searches to see what I mean:
Gunn WG
Gunn WG
Gunn W
W Gunn
Pubmed will find all three references for "WG Gunn" in a search for "gunn W", and a 1/3 instances of WG Gunn in a search for "William Gunn", however, it chokes on "WG Gunn". Scholar finds only 2/3 instances of "WG Gunn" in a search for exactly that, but never "wg gunn" in a search for "william gunn", and searching for "w gunn" turns up nothing for "wg gunn", however, there are results for wj gunn and ws gunn.
It's tricky, but necessary, for a scholarly database to get this right. "w gunn" should turn up "w gunn" as well every record where the first name starts with g, including both the ones with and without a middle initial. "william gunn" should turn up the set of results included in "w gunn", "william gunn", and "wg gunn". "wg gunn" should also turn up every record of "wg gunn" in addition to the set of results where the first name begins with w, the second name begins with g and the last name is gunn. "Gunn WG" should be identical to "WG Gunn".
When doing name searches, if in doubt, include the result. People are more likely to be put out if their articles don't turn up where they should than if they do turn up where they shouldn't. I mean, the whole point of publishing is to get your work out there so other people can read it, right?
There is a problem, specifically that a common name will return too many hits. "Smith B" turns up over 4000 hits on pubmed and 4 on Scholar, whereas "b smith" turns up 39000 on Scholar and nothing on pubmed (the query gets translated unless you specify that it's an author search) but too many results is never as bad as too little in an author search, because you can further narrow using date ranges, initials, and keywords.
Being blindly exposed to a bunch of crap just isn't going to work.
And the UI sucks pretty hard, too.
Try it. This is entirely hearsay, but I heard that some cable companies find it difficult or expensive to filter out the TV signal from the cable modem signal without degrading the internet connection. Almost everyone who signs up for a cable modem already has cable tv service, anyways, so usually it doesn't matter. What do you think would happen if you called and told them you'd like to cancel your cable TV, but continue your internet service. You should try it. Maybe they'll offer you a deal to keep you paying for channels you're getting anyways.
Subject: Senators Comment: We've had them locked up for four years now. That caused me a little confusion, at first.
While I think that from a financial standpoint, libraries would save money publishing articles themselves, they don't have the editorial ability of a major publishing house. It's the kind of thing that doesn't de-centralize well, either, because you need a limited amount of "restriction points" to effectively filter out the crap from the submission stream. That then enables people who produce material that makes it past the editorial and peer-review filter to claim that as an accomplishment when applying for grant and tenure.
Here's the analogy for the slashdot crowd: it's like article submissions are electrons. You want to get a certain current by using editors as resistors(and believe me, they do resist). Now what happens to current as you add more resistors in parallel?
The solution to all of this would be for libraries to require all submissions in some kind of markup like LaTeX(to enable Semantic Web goodness- in the biological and medical fields, submission as MS Word files is not uncommon), not produce a printed version at all, and publish the citations with abstracts in a central index, similar to Pubmed. Now, instead of an article in Science or Nature having more weight than an article in the eskimo journal of snow science, an article would be ranked by the number of views, and by the number of non-self citations it receives from subsequent articles.
However, there are two problems with this. One is that it would take a longer time for an article's worth to be evaluated that way than with a dedicated staff of editors working on it, where the value accrues immediately upon publication(though this is all debatable). The other, more serious, problem is how to find important, relevant work with no one filtering out the crap for you. Imagine slashdot with all submissions accepted, and no moderation or comment threading, just one long stream of post after post after frist psot! So maybe moderated comments would be enabled on the citation indices, and you'd have something like the grand thing we have here, with a mix of people acting selfishly and altruistically. That's not that different from the system we have today, I don't guess. Who's going to decide which articles make the front page? A small pool of people who are expert in their field? Editors?
I subscribe to some RSS feeds of pubmed search queries for keywords important to me, and each query is updated with several articles each day. This is for articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals(again, many of which editorially triage articles before selecting ones to send out for review).
Keeping up with the reading of this pre-selected set is a big task already. It would be more than a full-time job to read an unfiltered set, then moderate or comment upon each. I know some fields are even busier than mine.
So, I would love to see the current system change as much as anyone else, but I don't have the time or funding to put my efforts where my mouth is, nor does anyone else who wants to actually do research instead of just read about it. The editors are doing a hard job, and much as I hate them sometimes, I respect what they're doing.
It sure would be a shame for Thompson's currently superior product to be superceded by a inferior one with a better interface, and when you think of it, when you already have the content, shouldn't designing the interface be easier?
Scopus and WoS are currently targeted to library and information science people, who are really the middlemen in the article-finding transaction, whereas GS is designed for the enduser. That's the reason they've been able to get away with having such crufty old interfaces for so long, but now that endusers know that easier to use interfaces, though imperfect, do exist, you just can't get away with it any longer. And really, if they can improve their content faster than Thompson can spruce up their interface, then "The battle goes to the swift", my friend.
Here's where you're failing with respect to Google Scholar: Your crufty old interface(s).
Really. Just as Google Maps has superceded Mapquest, pretty much entirely due to their superior interface, Google Scholar is going to make WoS irrelevant as a literature search tool. All they have to do is implement a slick citation navigation system(tree-based or some such, for which the technology already exists, check out the TouchGraph applet) and it's done.
Currently each different database is better for a different use, but that wont last, so don't kid yourself. Modernize your interface or become irrelevant.
Have you heard of Connotea? You can grab bibliographical info from Pubmed, HubMed, and many other indices directly into your Connotea list, and output in .RIS, so you can import into RefMan or whatever. The eventual goal is to move totally away from Thompson ISI and their crufty old products, but until someone comes out with a Journal Style formatting package, we're stuck with RefMan's heinous old interface, at least for now.
So if you click through any search result, you can grab the citation info, and then pass that on to EndNote or whatever, but hopefully we'll soon not even need to do that. Give Connotea a try, you may find it more useful for at least making the list.
What I'd like to see is better cooperation with dx.doi.org and more OpenURL support, but I guess that is mostly up to the libraries. I'm going to try to talk my school into registering their resolver with Google, so it knows which library I get my access from, and hopefully Open Access continues to spread.
Since it's really all about the interface, now we need good forward and backward citation navigation. Tree based approaches, like the one they use at Hubmed, is nice, but the implementation is still a little rough. I would think Google, with their AJAX skillz, could do something much nicer, ala Google Maps.
It's all about the interface. That can't be stressed enough.
Good point. I didn't know that brain scans were so standardized; It always comes across as such fuzzy science to me. Sorry, some people are grammar nazis, some people are stats nazis. I happen to be both. I'll try to behave in the future. It is hard to properly explain the importance of technical issues, whether statistical or methodological, without spending more time than you can really justify on a slashdot comment, so I should relax, I suppose. The background to this (why I took out my frustrations on the first imprecisely worded post I could find) is that I've been trying to convince my labmates of the importance of proper statistics, as opposed to the "I'll just do it three times and take the average" kinda mentality. I'm trying to get them to see that the degree of variability is something that must be determined experimentally.
Did you see the little sentence saying they've already gotten $42 million from the bill and melinda gates foundation? They damn well better do something with all that.
Will this urban legend never die? Just go here. And toss 'em a couple bucks while you're at it for the harm reduction program. You never know who you could end up helping.
"They used controls..."
Wow, they used controls? Those naughty researchers, always trying to trick people.
"the range of values in the control subjects was almost as large as the range in the mdma users. Ie...the range found in mdma users was normal."
So if I have a set of data consisting of values from 190-200 and a set of data consisting of values from 0-10, there's no difference, because the spread is the same?
"the range found in the controls was also just ridiculus. Something like 15 or 20 times greater for the highest level in the control than the lowest."
So if I were do do a study and find that the normal levels of a metabolite were between 1 and 20 nM, then my study must be flawed, right?
I could go on, but let me stop here and say that I understand what you're trying to say, but you'd do better talking in terms of standard deviations and confidence intervals, not "ranges".
Sorry for the snarkiness, I know you mean well, but I hate to see someone attempt to criticize something,eapecially something that needs criticism, and do it in such a incoherent and babbling fashion. You're not helping the cause, friend, so thanks for the help, but no thanks. Here's you $0.02 back, go back to stats 101 and try again.
Webster is such a great source for definition of computer terms. Main Entry: cracker Pronunciation: 'kra-k&r Function: noun 1 chiefly dialect : a bragging liar : BOASTER 2 : something that makes a cracking or snapping noise: as a : FIRECRACKER b : the snapping end of a whiplash : SNAPPER c : a paper holder for a party favor that pops when the ends are pulled sharply 3 plural : NUTCRACKER 4 : a dry thin crispy baked bread product that may be leavened or unleavened 5 a usually disparaging : a poor usually Southern white b capitalized : a native or resident of Florida or Georgia -- used as a nickname 6 : the equipment in which cracking (as of petroleum) is carried out BTW, since no one will get the joke: I'm a from a small rural southern town.
I can't believe the graph doesn't show how long it takes for the increased activity to fall off! It would show the "attention span" of /.
So it's real, eh? cool. I never knew if it really happened or if it was just a story.
There is a possibility that the inserted DNA inserts itself in the middle of a existing gene. If this happens, the gene that gets the insertion either stops being produced, or a modified version is produced. When this happens you could interrupt genes that defend against cancer, and the result would be that you end up with cancer cells. This does in fact happen, and people who do these experiments see, every time they do them, a spectrum from the best to the worst that could happen. The way it works is this: You have a million cells. Your technique introduces your gene into 50% of them. If you don't target the gene to any location, the gene inserts into random places, so given 20000 genes, you'd expect to see each one disrupted, more or less once, considering that there are large stretches of DNA that doesn't contain any genes at all. So when you culture the cells, you end up with a mixed bag of cells. As you culture the cells, you get to see if any of them have become cancer cells, you get to see if any of them die, and you get to see which ones make the protein you were hoping they would make. And that's the three things which can happen. You create a dead cell, a cancer cell, or a cell which makes the gene you wanted it to make. That gene only has one function, and that's the function you've designed it to have. Even if you interrupt a gene and cause a fusion protein to be created, the scope of that fusion protein is limited to doing or not doing the original function of the protein, or it may interfere with other proteins causing only the enhancement or prevention of that protein's one function. We aren't creating genes out of nothing, we're taking genes that exist and modifying them, so we can only create a litmited set of actions, related to ones that already exist. In that respect, the danger from a modified organism getting into the wild is exactly the danger from non-native existing organisms getting into the wild.
I know it sounds weird, but when you understand the fault-tolerant mechanisms organisms have evolved, you understand that there is a limited scope any possible modification can have, no matter what happens. I don't know if you could engineer a disaster by releasing genetically modified organisms any worse than you could by malicious use of organisms that already exist.
How have the father and stepmother been doing? You can't do something like that to your own son without paying the consequences somehow.
hence the +4 funny rating on his comment.
I've heard so much fluff about folksonomies and social this-and-that that I'm well sick of it, but you're right. It's a serious article. I've come to reliably expect real content from dlib; They do a good job. The article at Burningbird.com is a great one, too. There seems to be a divide between people who do official tree-based classification and the tag-based classifiers. The tree people say flat namespaces aren't rich enough to provide context and, without a central authority, the system is open to abuse, while the tag people say you can't possibly expect to know the structure beforehand, so you need tag-based "set" classification.
I'm reminded of a story about a university which, engaged in a grounds beautification project, wanted to fix the problem of no one using the sidewalks, instead cutting across lawns and making unsightly dirt through the manicured lawns. Instead of replanting grass where the trails had been worn through the lawn, then fencing off the area, which would have created even more of an eyesore, they tore up all the sidewalks instead and planted grass where the sidewalks were. 1 year later, they went back and made winding sidewalks where the dirt trails which had been worn into the grass from foottraffic, and landscaped around those.
I wish the two sides wouldn't be so opposed, because it seems obvious to me that the two need each other. Tree people are right that unguided mass action is no substitute for the action of an experienced editor, while tag folksonomists are right that you can't set the structure beforehand, and expect people to adhere to it as things change. It's clear to me that the tags are creating the categories that the future, managed, tree-based classifications will need to use.
In the meantime, what would be wrong with del.icio.us and their like publishing a set of "best practices" for tagging? I know they want things to evolve organically, but surely they could at least issue guidelines on the use of underscores and plus signs, for example, and make recommendations on how to make tags useful for others(akin to good password recommendations, except ones people actually follow).
Here are some suggestions from my own experience:
It's not unlike the dynamic between open and closed source software, really. If you have nothing but closed source stuff, there will always be needs that aren't met because there's no market. With nothing but open-source, you'd have everyone writing their own personal version of every app out there, and nothing would work together, unless, of course, people decided on ad-hoc "best practices". The introduction of tabs in the next version of IE in the face of Firefox's growing market share is about as clear evidence as you can get of this dynamic. There was something missing from the closed system, so the open system came up with the fix, and it's being integrated back into the closed system, which most people will continue to use.I feel like I should be emailing this to the respective people, not burying it in a slashdot comment, but what the hey.
You're right to be worried about the consequences.
However, DNA manipulation is something that's been studied to the point that it's pretty well cookbook, now. The antibiotic resistance genes commonly used confer resistance to ampicillin, hygromycin, or neomycin. It requires a separate gene to confer resistance to each class of antibiotic. There's not one gene that confers resistance to all antibiotics, known or to be invented. Also, there's some logic to which resistances are used. Often, the genes confer resistance to an antibiotic that would never be used in humans. When's the last time you've gone to the doctor and gotten a dose of hygromycin?
There's only a limited, set, list of things that you can accomplish by integrating a exogenous gene into the chromosome. When you actually do the experiment, you get all of these things happening because you create a population of the organisms, and you select among those for the most normal. In the process, you see the spectrum from the best to the worst that could happen. So the people who do it, do know the risks pretty well. There's a lot of FUD in the statement, "We don't know what the complications could be." No one ever could, but the people who do it get to see the range of things that could happen, therefore they know the risks pretty well, and certainly better than the average protestor.
I could go through a list of every misgiving anyone has to genetic modification of organisms and explain to them how the possibility they're worried about has been recognized and explain to them what is being done about it. Unfortunately, misgivings usually come from ignorance of the basic science. That's not to disparage anyone, it's just that the science is so complex nowadays, you have to have a good science background and spend a lot of time keeping up with it, just to understand it. The stuff I disagree with is the herbicide production by second generation seeds. That just seems wrong to me, because you end up keeping subsistence farmers beholden to this corporation for the next years crop.
So, my point is, you should change the we in your last paragraph to I. Just because you don't know the implications and are justifiably worried, that doesn't mean that no one understands the implications. It's a complex subject, for sure, but before rioting about possible complications that they don't really understand, I wish the protestors would get someone to explain the science to them, what the risks really are, and how likely they are. Then, I think, unless they're really motivated by something other than the potential complications they're always going on about, they'll clear out of the way and just let us do our jobs.