WWWWH

Sincerely, I wouldn't worry about it. This is a powerfully written, emotive, bombshell. Anyone who is genuinely worrying about apposite word choice and non-native syntax is missing the wood for the trees.

It’s doable already. I do this with some low priority emails and marketing newsletters—-a gmail filter sends to a custom email address of my rss reader. It’s useful for getting low priority stuff out of my inbox.

Because print magazines have a mix of content of different lengths and different purposes. A short article presenting an unusual stat providing a different perspective on a current topic doesn’t appear completely unreasonable.

I have a DPT-RP1 and use it for reading (and annotating) PDFs. It's excellent provided you accept its limitations. It really is a single use device for reading PDFs. That said, I also use it for handwritten notes (easy to export as PDF) and for presenting on-line (convert slides to PDF, use the screen viewer and you can do live annotations--great for remote lecturing).

A streaming marathon vs an actual marathon...

I use emacsforosx and am perfectly happy with it. Seriously man, don’t worry about it just go for it. If you find out that you really need something that doesn’t have then you can always compile yourself. It’ll be trivial to transfer your set up, so don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.

Quite right. And the Nobel laureate in question is a structural biologist--so his expertise is directly relevant.

I don't think it's off topic :) This is a really useful and I suspect under-rated feature. There was a similar feature in an older version of the Livescribe digital pen software. You could search for any text string, without having run the handwriting to text function. This was incredibly useful as you could search for terms not in the dictionary (so for example in my lab book I could search for gene names that handwriting to text would routinely scramble).

Sadly they removed it, and I've never seen anything similar again (with the exception of the DTP-RP1 example you mention).

This and how stable are the active ingredients to oxygen? Are they stored under inert gas in the blister pack?

I’m a big fan of all of these. Clayden is very gentle (or maybe that’s just Org being easy...). But Atkins gets hard quite fast—-the chat from first years is that beginners will find it a bit tough. I’d generally recommend the cut down Atkins to start (Elements of...) or if you prefer pop Sci The Second Law was great as an UG trying to wrap my head around this. Creation Revisited also rocks.

It’s jargon. I think of it as animations are a subset of builds.

Yes, yes, yes! This is such a good idea. Working at a University, I’ve often thought this would be the ideal way of advertising seminars. I suspect the problem is chicken and egg, the technological barrier is just a little too high for this to be implemented when RSS readers are not widely used.

Tinderbox if you’re on a Mac.

I don't know the specific detail of OP's position, but (all?) post-docs in the UK are members of the same pension scheme as all other academics in their institution. Your fundamental point is quite right--short-term contracts are a lousy and difficult game to play into middle-age.

Interesting, was this when the High school (Glasgow High) was closed? I’m not clear on the dates, but the secondary must of reopened in the early 70s.

Looks good; I'll be doing the same thing and passing this on to the students.

I tend to disagree. Everyone has to do even the simplest of tasks for the first time and reinventing the wheel is often a waste of effort.

If you think that everyone just knows how to do this, take a close look at your last set of reviewer comments; were all of them pithy, accurate and demonstrating a close understanding of your work?

> Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed?

Well, I'd stand behind the assertion that it is a reasonable approximation to our ability to understand and modify a biological system. But, I'll happily concede that this is not the only game in town. Your point about tissue engineering is well made, this is highly exciting and should provide some real benefits. But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here; so while I really hope that we see some rapid initial progress, long term exponential growth here is going to be just as difficult as it is elsewhere in biology.

Your point about sequencing is a good one, but this is the only area of biological research clearly improving exponentially...

Without being too argumentative, I'd put the odds of increases in computer power leading to biological breakthroughs at much less than 100%! I'd be surprised if it was as much as 5-10%.

What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? I can think of a few where more power would be nice to have, but none where that power would be transformative.

The possible exception is the example you mention---DNA sequencing--but the problem there is that the rate of growth of sequence information is greater than More's rate; slightly ironically, this field really needs computer scientists to help develop new algorithms much more than it needs computers...

Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.

Now, I know you weren't talking about drugs as such, but they are a reasonable proxy for our ability to understand a biological system and then intervene. And the state of the industries that try and do this, strongly suggests that we haven't got a clue.

Just to lay the pessimism on a little thicker, we may even be lucky to stay where we are, given the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Never mind immortality, I'd be happy to know that we still have working antibiotics when I roll up to hip replacement age!

edit: My grammer sucks.

Absolutely, although I guess that the advantage of this is if you want to play with someone else's analysis you don't have to install the same analysis software.

I guess I'll be sticking with org mode though and trying Tangle (http://worrydream.com/Tangle/) as suggested elsewhere on this page.

OK, this is interesting but as best I can tell he's talking about splitting profitable from unprofitable courses. But there is another way of drawing the line between the functions of modern unis. The offer is;

+ undergraduate education

+ postgraduate education (including research degrees)

+ scientific and engineering research

+ research and scholarship in the humanities

+ nationally televised sports (subset of US only)

+ We provide accommodation

+ A social experience for late teens / early twenties

+ We set and assess exams (could split again here)

+ We provide accreditation (our courses are worthwhile as we say they are; this is complex, though, and depends on course, jurisdiction, much more)

+ We provided a branded experience ("I went to M...")

Now it is unlikely that universities that offer much of this will ever split out the functions (Vince Cable suggested it in the UK and didn't get very far). What do you reckon on the chances of some nimble new entrants taking away some of this business from the incumbents?

[edited to try and get the list to work]

I always enjoyed Peter Medawar's response: "No, and if I do it by accident, I'll be very sorry"

"Correlation does not equal causation. Another possible explanation: She was a monster at predicting project success and worked her way onto projects that were going to succeed with or without her."

Fair point, but what would you pay for knowing in advance what projects are going to succeed and by inference which may fail...

Looks like the original, open access, paper can be found here:

http://mbio.asm.org/content/2/1/e00005-11.full

I'd guess the obvious first question is, is this a sequencing artifact? I wouldn't like to judge, but it looks like they are alive to the possibility (different isolates etc.)

Good point, I'd missed that.

All the same, I'm not sure how she was on the tenure track given that no UK academic appointed (or promoted!) after 20 November 1987 has tenure. Perhaps there is a more complex story with her date of appointment, or perhaps, given that Science is a US publication, she is simplifying a tenure track equivalent UK position for a US audience.

Reference for the legislation: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/40/part/IV/crosshea...

But this is a side issue (my fault, I started it!), I'd agree with your basic point that tenure is a problem. Just, it's not the only problem and it wasn't the problem in this case.

Er, she worked in the UK where tenure was abolished in the late 80's.

Is it not a little off to claim tl;dr and then call her lazy?