in the cold war, the solution to the lack of technical talent was to provide massive scholarships and subsidies for American students in technical feilds (along with generally very low cost college for everyone).
This worked quite well, not only did this subsidized generation beat the soviets, but went on to spark a technology dependant economic boom.
So why would we not use the techniques that worked before?
The method of importing foreign talent means that our techical lead will be increasingly dependant on people who may leave at any time and who may have mixed loyalties to the USA. This is a short term solution to a long term challenge, and a solution that will likely make the challenge much larger in the future as the need for a highly technically skilled workforce is only going to increase in the next 100 years.
So High Schools should all convert to burger flipping 101?
Two things you might consider:
Since all these folks end up voting on some pretty big issues, it may be that schools should do a bit more than training factory/cubicle/service industry/___insert dominant business of the day here workers. (The American Schools system started as a way to train factory workers for assembly line jobs, after all, and has still not recovered...)
It takes a good bit of time to implement a new curriculum nationwide, so its a good bet that if curriculum was based on current business needs, by the time it was implemented business likely would have moved on.
Perhaps it would be ideal to teach students thinging and learning skills, so that they can adapt to ever changing market forces (and have some idea how to judge if the latest military adventure being pushed by the MIC is really a Good Idea(TM).
there is less chance the Census Bureau will be purchases by NewsCorp, and you find yourself being targetted for ads due to papers you have written, or of having your sophomoric essays on the wonders of Marx being turned over to your next employer for a reasonable fee.
Say for instance Turnitin is purchased, along with their database? They could develop quite detailed personality profiles on the users in their system, and sell them to the highest bidder.
Sure these things are currently prevented by their licensing agreements with schools, however large corporations routinely ignore the agreements they've made with educational institutions (see the example Blackboard, Inc. & Pearson Publication ignoring the agreements they made with the IMS Global Consortium, etc.) and there does not seem to be much in the way of federal oversight (nothing that a few million to the right CongressCritter couldn't stop).
And any web designer who didn't do it the right way has only themselves to blame, because the ADA was passed in 1990.
Who took accessibility out of the requirements before putting the job out to bid (or told the in-house developer not to bother with it as it would take too much time). Most web developers (who are worth the title) know about accessibilty, but it's a hard sell to bosses who just want to see a pretty screen.
Cells from the Blastocyst are totipotent, they can become any other cell. "Stem" cells from an adult are multipotent, the types of cells they can become are more limited.
There is also the issue of that ol'Hayflick limit, cells from an adult are 'older', they have a more limited number of times they can duplicate themselves before errors start showing up. Each time an adult cell divides, it's telomoric DNA gets shorter, and short telomeres lead to increases in copying errors (aka somatic mutations). Cells from the blastocyst ("embryonic cells") still make telomerase, which repairs the telomeres. Adult cells don't (unless they are cancerous, but we don't want them8-0).
This is one big problem with adult stem cells as cures for older folks, older folks have cells that have been duplicated many more times than younger adults, their 'stem cells'; if you grow their cells outside of their body to make new organ tissue, the resulting organ tissue is even 'older' (has been duplicated more times) than the patient's original organ tissue. Thus a new heart grown from an adult's stem cells will likely have a shorter lifespan than the person from whom the stem cells came.
TFA describes conditions somewhat eerily similar to "Wonderful Life", while the lesson seems lost on people who write things like "evolution in reverse".
Evolution doesn't go "forward" or "reverse", rather species adapt with the genes they've got to changing conditions. If conditions favor slime, then slime we get (and maybe some highly adapted life form will learn to make slimeaide--maybe it will make a good way to power SUVs when the awl peaks).
Anyway, when Greenland melts and sea levels rise 20 feet, it will be good to have some good hardy slime to eat up all the toxins and organic waste the flooded cities will release...
The Preamble "indicates the general purpose for which the people ordained and established the Constitution" [Jacobson v. Mass. 197 US 11 (1904)]. Conversly, if the Preamble is not law, then the Constitution has no standing at all: "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Further, general welfare is again mentioned as a specific duty in section 8 (right after common defence), to make it really clear. Note that each of the clauses in section 8 are followed by semi-colons, indicating that they are a list, among which is: "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
And in the 1770s, 'welfare' had a fairly specific meaning. "Happiness, Prosperity", thus anything generally beneficial, which is a good thing for a Govt. to be enabled to do. Unless of course it was reserved for the states or disallowed by the amendments. Thus while shutting down the New York Times might make 51% happy, it can't be done because it's prevented by an amendment.
Now if it can be shown that a program is not contributing to our general prosperity, then it follows that it should be shut down. Back when science was a priority of the US Govt., the US led the world in science, hands down, no question. Around the time when science began to be seen as a private benefit rather than a public good, and we began to reduce the per capita level of support at the federal level, the US lead in science began to slip.
It's pretty clear that the future will be dominated by nations who are leaders in science.
One might trot out the unmatched scientific leadership of all the little folks who have pulled themselves up on to the world wide web by their sweaty bootstraps, if one didn't know what the the N in NCSA stood for, that is.
Stem cells is one of the best places for the Federal govt. to fund the basic research, for private research to flourish in this area one would need to generate patents on human cells, human DNA, etc. That is a bad idea (you want to pay a license fee for using your DNA?). Especially in research involving human DNA, it is best to fund the research as a public good, for the general welfare, and place the results in the public domain.
Most of the people earning minimum wage aren't the primary providers for their family.
All of the people who are the primary providers who are earning min wage can't provide for their family (unless everyone else in the family who can work, does work). So you have fathers and mothers who slave away at mindless jobs, their kids grow up parentless, form gangs to find some kind of human contact, and end up costing society far more than providing a decent living wage would have cost.
An intelligent species would recognize that many jobs are a waste of time for intelligent beings, and develop technological solutions.
Instead we import an underclass even more desperate than our own underclass, and turn a blind eye to the long term costs to our advancement as a people.
Our present 'Washington leadership' is focused on keeping their position at the top of the heap, they don't want things to get better for the poor, they want to keep the poor right where they are. The rich like their bullet proof cars, their increasingly walled cities, their stark separation from everyone else, as it re-enforces their position as the elite.
So instead of leading the way to a better America for all Americans, they import the best and brightest from Mexico to mow our lawns, preventing change in Mexico, and keeping our poor 'in their place'. Which is right where the 'washington elite' wants them to stay.
It is important that low wage jobs exist, or it would be difficult to get that first job that lets you start climbing the ladder.
People move up the ladder by getting an education, taking a min wage job rather than going to college is a great way to get stuck at the bottom rung.
Not only that, but low minimum wages move us backward as a society, when the smart thing to do would be to build machines to do the jobs that no human wants to do. The choice of keeping a more or less permanent underclass to perform these tasks keeps us from moving forward into a time when no one will actually need to do a job they don't want to do.
It is a really primitive idea to think that it makes sense to have human beings perform mindless tasks for a wages that barely cover subsistance.
Libertarianism is the opiate of the upper classes.
We may have the proteins because they didn't stop us from making lots of babies and raising them. "Obesity", iow tending to accumulate fat is actually a survival trait in a world where food is scarce (as it was for the hunter-gatherers we were for most of the time we were evolving).
Thus the usefullness of these proteins may be of no use at all in the world we've created for ourselves, where some people tend to live long enough and/or eat enough food to have the effects of said to cause problems.
*One of the best arguments against "Intelligent Design" is that we are not particularly well designed at all, either the designer wasn't very good at it or was a sadist.
Dr. Li's team used genetically-engineered mice in which bone marrow cells were modified to carry a green fluorescent marker allowing researchers to easily track them.
Moreover, if you read the original article carefully, you will see that the ASCs are merely signaling the heart to rebuild itself more rapidly, not directly rebuilding the heart. So this therapy might work (if it worked in humans) to help people with basically healthy hearts who had a heart attack (cocaine abusers?), but how much will it help older, sicker, folks who's heart is more worn out?
This is the population where ESCs show more promise, as they appear to actually grow into new heart cells themselves.
There is no scientific reason not to be pursuing ESC work as aggressively as ASC work, just religious ones. In fact, since ESC is more likely to help older people (who are more likely to have heart problems), if treating disease were the priority, ESC makes even more sense, esp. for treating older people who tend to have more heart problems and also tend to have less ability for their own cells to regenerate.
Additionally, most Fundamentalists oppose human cloning, abortion, same-sex marriages, homosexuality, physician-assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research.
Perhaps you can find something on the web discussing fundamentalists who don't think there should be laws against stem cell research? What would be your politically correct term for the religious right? Crusaders?
Do you also accuse people of anti-Muslim boilerplate when they criticize Muslim Fundamentalists for imposing Sharia?
Maybe you missed the 'nuance', but "Fundamentalist" generally applies when members of a religious group try to impose their particular beliefs on everyone elese.
to say a mass of undifferentiated cells are not a human being. It is a clear scientific demarcation. A bit of cells from my arm are not a human being, a cancer cell (which has unique DNA) is not a human being. Fertilized eggs have no potential unless implanted into a mother's womb.
They are routinely discarded by fertility clinics, this is an established practice with established laws surronding it.
Various things are opposed by all sorts of fringe groups. The only group of anti-stem cell research advocates that has any large membership and ability buy votes are the ones who believe the fertilized egg has a soul. If not for this group, the research would proceed apace.
The only real opposition is religious, not scientific. Medical scientists are the ones best positioned to judge whether research has medical potential, not religious groups. The NIH assembles teams of expert researchers to judege whether a proposed avenue of research is worth spending money on, only with stem cells this process is poluted with arbitrary limits, which are based on purely religious beliefs.
At least be honest about your motivations: you want to impose your beliefs on the time of soul creation on eveyone else, and you don't care a bit if valuable research is blocked due to your imposition, and people die or lead needlessly limited lives because of it (which Christian Fundamentalists* rationalize by believing that a short life of pain is followed by eternity of pleasure in paradies--for those who prove themselves worthy by imposing their beliefs on anyone they can't convert).
then the need to fulfill the requirements of one's moral code overrules any artificial notion of "separation of church and state".
So also say the Mullahs. Anyone who doesn't know that the anti-stem cell crowd's real agenda is to establish their own version of Sharia law in the Uninted states hasn't been paying attention.
The religious rightists are killing real people with this "moral code" that blocks desperately needed medical research for cures for terrible diseases. It is not a secular moral code of any sort, it is simply a purely religious belief that a soul is created in the human egg cell when a human sperm cell enters it.
These cells are created and expired all the time in fertility clinics, the religious rightists would prefer that these cells be thrown in the trash rather be used to help cure disease.
There is no basis for the rightists assignation of human being status to these cells other than their particular religious belief in the timing of soul creation. Restricting federal funding based on this religious belief is the establishment of religion, anyone who has sworn to uphold the US Constitution should be dismissed for enforcing this religious belief in the United States.
The "innocent people" in the moral equation are the ones with diseases who are being denied cures due to the beliefs of the religious fundamentalists.
Slashdot Mirror
in the cold war, the solution to the lack of technical talent was to provide massive scholarships and subsidies for American students in technical feilds (along with generally very low cost college for everyone).
This worked quite well, not only did this subsidized generation beat the soviets, but went on to spark a technology dependant economic boom.
So why would we not use the techniques that worked before?
The method of importing foreign talent means that our techical lead will be increasingly dependant on people who may leave at any time and who may have mixed loyalties to the USA. This is a short term solution to a long term challenge, and a solution that will likely make the challenge much larger in the future as the need for a highly technically skilled workforce is only going to increase in the next 100 years.
Two things you might consider:
Perhaps it would be ideal to teach students thinging and learning skills, so that they can adapt to ever changing market forces (and have some idea how to judge if the latest military adventure being pushed by the MIC is really a Good Idea(TM).
like a fish needs a bicycle.
This has been irrefutably proven, back to basic biology with you!
By the way, dolphins already swim pretty good
You have to get permission from the State to leave.
I know, its not even the slightest bit funny anymore...
from their reactors. 'The motors' push a really really big ship through the water, which actually requires quite a bit of power.
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/nimitz/
there is less chance the Census Bureau will be purchases by NewsCorp, and you find yourself being targetted for ads due to papers you have written, or of having your sophomoric essays on the wonders of Marx being turned over to your next employer for a reasonable fee.
Say for instance Turnitin is purchased, along with their database? They could develop quite detailed personality profiles on the users in their system, and sell them to the highest bidder.
Sure these things are currently prevented by their licensing agreements with schools, however large corporations routinely ignore the agreements they've made with educational institutions (see the example Blackboard, Inc. & Pearson Publication ignoring the agreements they made with the IMS Global Consortium, etc.) and there does not seem to be much in the way of federal oversight (nothing that a few million to the right CongressCritter couldn't stop).
And any web designer who didn't do it the right way has only themselves to blame, because the ADA was passed in 1990.
Who took accessibility out of the requirements before putting the job out to bid (or told the in-house developer not to bother with it as it would take too much time). Most web developers (who are worth the title) know about accessibilty, but it's a hard sell to bosses who just want to see a pretty screen.
she's gotta wear shades...
Cells from the Blastocyst are totipotent, they can become any other cell. "Stem" cells from an adult are multipotent, the types of cells they can become are more limited.
There is also the issue of that ol'Hayflick limit, cells from an adult are 'older', they have a more limited number of times they can duplicate themselves before errors start showing up. Each time an adult cell divides, it's telomoric DNA gets shorter, and short telomeres lead to increases in copying errors (aka somatic mutations). Cells from the blastocyst ("embryonic cells") still make telomerase, which repairs the telomeres. Adult cells don't (unless they are cancerous, but we don't want them8-0).
This is one big problem with adult stem cells as cures for older folks, older folks have cells that have been duplicated many more times than younger adults, their 'stem cells'; if you grow their cells outside of their body to make new organ tissue, the resulting organ tissue is even 'older' (has been duplicated more times) than the patient's original organ tissue. Thus a new heart grown from an adult's stem cells will likely have a shorter lifespan than the person from whom the stem cells came.
promoting general increases in critical thinking and scientific reasoning in American education.
So that when Antartica's ice cap melts, Americans will at least be ready to understand why.
Would you like that term better than "reset".
TFA describes conditions somewhat eerily similar to "Wonderful Life", while the lesson seems lost on people who write things like "evolution in reverse".
Evolution doesn't go "forward" or "reverse", rather species adapt with the genes they've got to changing conditions. If conditions favor slime, then slime we get (and maybe some highly adapted life form will learn to make slimeaide--maybe it will make a good way to power SUVs when the awl peaks).
Anyway, when Greenland melts and sea levels rise 20 feet, it will be good to have some good hardy slime to eat up all the toxins and organic waste the flooded cities will release...
We get signal.
You CATS with mod points, its you!
You GET SIGNAL!
Your BASE p0wn3d by mod_php!
The Preamble "indicates the general purpose for which the people ordained and established the Constitution" [Jacobson v. Mass. 197 US 11 (1904)]. Conversly, if the Preamble is not law, then the Constitution has no standing at all: "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Further, general welfare is again mentioned as a specific duty in section 8 (right after common defence), to make it really clear. Note that each of the clauses in section 8 are followed by semi-colons, indicating that they are a list, among which is: "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
And in the 1770s, 'welfare' had a fairly specific meaning. "Happiness, Prosperity", thus anything generally beneficial, which is a good thing for a Govt. to be enabled to do. Unless of course it was reserved for the states or disallowed by the amendments. Thus while shutting down the New York Times might make 51% happy, it can't be done because it's prevented by an amendment.
Now if it can be shown that a program is not contributing to our general prosperity, then it follows that it should be shut down. Back when science was a priority of the US Govt., the US led the world in science, hands down, no question. Around the time when science began to be seen as a private benefit rather than a public good, and we began to reduce the per capita level of support at the federal level, the US lead in science began to slip.
It's pretty clear that the future will be dominated by nations who are leaders in science.
One might trot out the unmatched scientific leadership of all the little folks who have pulled themselves up on to the world wide web by their sweaty bootstraps, if one didn't know what the the N in NCSA stood for, that is.
Stem cells is one of the best places for the Federal govt. to fund the basic research, for private research to flourish in this area one would need to generate patents on human cells, human DNA, etc. That is a bad idea (you want to pay a license fee for using your DNA?). Especially in research involving human DNA, it is best to fund the research as a public good, for the general welfare, and place the results in the public domain.
Most of the people earning minimum wage aren't the primary providers for their family.
All of the people who are the primary providers who are earning min wage can't provide for their family (unless everyone else in the family who can work, does work). So you have fathers and mothers who slave away at mindless jobs, their kids grow up parentless, form gangs to find some kind of human contact, and end up costing society far more than providing a decent living wage would have cost.
An intelligent species would recognize that many jobs are a waste of time for intelligent beings, and develop technological solutions.
Instead we import an underclass even more desperate than our own underclass, and turn a blind eye to the long term costs to our advancement as a people.
Our present 'Washington leadership' is focused on keeping their position at the top of the heap, they don't want things to get better for the poor, they want to keep the poor right where they are. The rich like their bullet proof cars, their increasingly walled cities, their stark separation from everyone else, as it re-enforces their position as the elite.
So instead of leading the way to a better America for all Americans, they import the best and brightest from Mexico to mow our lawns, preventing change in Mexico, and keeping our poor 'in their place'. Which is right where the 'washington elite' wants them to stay.
It is important that low wage jobs exist, or it would be difficult to get that first job that lets you start climbing the ladder.
People move up the ladder by getting an education, taking a min wage job rather than going to college is a great way to get stuck at the bottom rung.
Not only that, but low minimum wages move us backward as a society, when the smart thing to do would be to build machines to do the jobs that no human wants to do. The choice of keeping a more or less permanent underclass to perform these tasks keeps us from moving forward into a time when no one will actually need to do a job they don't want to do.
It is a really primitive idea to think that it makes sense to have human beings perform mindless tasks for a wages that barely cover subsistance.
Libertarianism is the opiate of the upper classes.
nt
nt
We may have the proteins because they didn't stop us from making lots of babies and raising them. "Obesity", iow tending to accumulate fat is actually a survival trait in a world where food is scarce (as it was for the hunter-gatherers we were for most of the time we were evolving).
Thus the usefullness of these proteins may be of no use at all in the world we've created for ourselves, where some people tend to live long enough and/or eat enough food to have the effects of said to cause problems.
*One of the best arguments against "Intelligent Design" is that we are not particularly well designed at all, either the designer wasn't very good at it or was a sadist.
From TFA:
Dr. Li's team used genetically-engineered mice in which bone marrow cells were modified to carry a green fluorescent marker allowing researchers to easily track them.
From AFA (from last year:
Embryonic stem cells from mice can patch up damaged heart muscle in sheep.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8006
Moreover, if you read the original article carefully, you will see that the ASCs are merely signaling the heart to rebuild itself more rapidly, not directly rebuilding the heart. So this therapy might work (if it worked in humans) to help people with basically healthy hearts who had a heart attack (cocaine abusers?), but how much will it help older, sicker, folks who's heart is more worn out?
This is the population where ESCs show more promise, as they appear to actually grow into new heart cells themselves.
There is no scientific reason not to be pursuing ESC work as aggressively as ASC work, just religious ones. In fact, since ESC is more likely to help older people (who are more likely to have heart problems), if treating disease were the priority, ESC makes even more sense, esp. for treating older people who tend to have more heart problems and also tend to have less ability for their own cells to regenerate.
Perhaps you can find something on the web discussing fundamentalists who don't think there should be laws against stem cell research? What would be your politically correct term for the religious right? Crusaders?
Do you also accuse people of anti-Muslim boilerplate when they criticize Muslim Fundamentalists for imposing Sharia?
Maybe you missed the 'nuance', but "Fundamentalist" generally applies when members of a religious group try to impose their particular beliefs on everyone elese.
to say a mass of undifferentiated cells are not a human being. It is a clear scientific demarcation. A bit of cells from my arm are not a human being, a cancer cell (which has unique DNA) is not a human being. Fertilized eggs have no potential unless implanted into a mother's womb.
They are routinely discarded by fertility clinics, this is an established practice with established laws surronding it.
Various things are opposed by all sorts of fringe groups. The only group of anti-stem cell research advocates that has any large membership and ability buy votes are the ones who believe the fertilized egg has a soul. If not for this group, the research would proceed apace.
The only real opposition is religious, not scientific. Medical scientists are the ones best positioned to judge whether research has medical potential, not religious groups. The NIH assembles teams of expert researchers to judege whether a proposed avenue of research is worth spending money on, only with stem cells this process is poluted with arbitrary limits, which are based on purely religious beliefs.
At least be honest about your motivations: you want to impose your beliefs on the time of soul creation on eveyone else, and you don't care a bit if valuable research is blocked due to your imposition, and people die or lead needlessly limited lives because of it (which Christian Fundamentalists* rationalize by believing that a short life of pain is followed by eternity of pleasure in paradies--for those who prove themselves worthy by imposing their beliefs on anyone they can't convert).
then the need to fulfill the requirements of one's moral code overrules any artificial notion of "separation of church and state".
So also say the Mullahs. Anyone who doesn't know that the anti-stem cell crowd's real agenda is to establish their own version of Sharia law in the Uninted states hasn't been paying attention.
Not people.
The religious rightists are killing real people with this "moral code" that blocks desperately needed medical research for cures for terrible diseases. It is not a secular moral code of any sort, it is simply a purely religious belief that a soul is created in the human egg cell when a human sperm cell enters it.
These cells are created and expired all the time in fertility clinics, the religious rightists would prefer that these cells be thrown in the trash rather be used to help cure disease.
There is no basis for the rightists assignation of human being status to these cells other than their particular religious belief in the timing of soul creation. Restricting federal funding based on this religious belief is the establishment of religion, anyone who has sworn to uphold the US Constitution should be dismissed for enforcing this religious belief in the United States.
The "innocent people" in the moral equation are the ones with diseases who are being denied cures due to the beliefs of the religious fundamentalists.
who invented the need for the funding for the work:-).