I'm looking at running an intro to CS/programming short course for biologists (graduate students) at my university. I may drop you an email at some point to pick your brains, if that's OK?
3,113 karma · joined August 3, 2011
https://holehouse.wustl.edu
On the other, and I speak from experience, we really don't fully understand what goes on in terms of gene expression regulation. We have ideas which generally work in vitro, mostly in vivo with model organisms (drosophila, yeast, etc) but relatively little basic research looking at fundamental mechanisms of regulation is done in higher eukaryotes. The upshot is that we may have ideas of what's happening, but those ideas may be one of several possible explanations which lead to similar outcomes. Moreoever, the impact of gene therapy in terms of a long term cellular (and immune) response is poorly understood.
I'd be intrigued to see what longitudinal data have been generated to show Glybera's safety over the kinds of timeframe relevant here.
I know this kind of defeats the purpose, but some people/companies may still want to print these things out, or at least have them on file where they have a static copy (as in it won't change automatically), so having control over what that pdf looks like might be useful.
Just a minor point though, love the design.
I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I'm not sure historical context gives a perfect mechanism to categorize racism or banter, but it does give a lot of weight, certainly.
I think this is totally accurate, but I worry this subtly is lost on some people, and especially kids. I'm English, and lived in Scotland between the age of 10 and 14, and the genuine anti-English victimization I received both at school and out and about was ridiculous. It never bothered me, perhaps because I don't really consider myself, "English" having (at that point) never lived there, but I remember being genuinely shocked. I expect it's much the same a French child would experience coming to school at that age in the UK.
Kids see their parents or comedians mock the English/French, but don't necessarily distinguish between, "banter" and genuine disdain. Hopefully those kids grow up to identify that difference, although some of the experiences I had would suggest this may not always be the case.
I wonder if anyone else is motivated to get an iPhone because of this? It's a kind of bizarre situation, but one I'm so glad I identified before buying a phone.
[EDIT] - any reason for the downvote? I'm totally fine with being wrong, or have I just completely missed something?
The reason I brought it up was because when you select Ruby, one of the motivational messages opens with, "Twitter uses Ruby to power 400M incredible tweets every day."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/04/twitter-drops-ruby...
I mean, I guess I can just dive in, and maybe that's the best approach, but is there a strategy anyone would recommend for reading the Linux source in terms of it making sense as a combined unit of code (as opposed to a collection of algorithms, if that makes sense)?
I'm yet to read the paper, but the comment highlighted in the thread from Wednesday raises some points[1]. For ease of access I'll re-replicate it here;
"This is just a PCR study. No evidence that the foreign human DNA even entered host cells, much less that it was expressed. Probably shows only that minute quantities of foreign human DNA can hang around a host body for a while. Most likely explanation is that it gets bound up in the extracellular matrix. Being that the DNA is of human origin, it would not trigger an immune response, but rather, it would just be slowly degraded like the host's own DNA when it is released from dead cells (part of the normal, perpetual turnover of cells). DNA is hardy stuff; people have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal bones. Study co-author J. Lee Nelson's comments are ridiculous hype. He should be ashamed of himself. That those comments were published in this newspaper uncritically is also an embarrassment. This work was published in PLoS ONE. PLoS ONE articles are peer reviewed only for the validity of the methods used, not for the importance of the subject matter or the validity of the conclusions drawn. This is where you can publish all sorts of meaningless crap."
I disagree with the extremity of the commentor's view on PLoS ONE articles, and feel they should perhaps have noticed that Dr. Nelson is a lady, not a dude, but still something worth considering.
[1] - http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-women-brai... , comment 2
"Our experiments soon proved that exokernelizing our fuzzy Knesis keyboards was more effective than making autonomous them, as previous work suggested. Our experiments soon proved that microkernelizing our PDP 11s was more effective than exokernelizing them, as previous work suggested. We note that other researchers have tried and failed to enable this functionality."
alarm @ 8:00 --> get up at 8:00
alarm @ 7:45 + snooze --> painfully lose 15 minutes of good quality sleep and hate every second of it.
Why is that even a thing?
I can't believe this just happened.
No dishwasher?
I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to grasp how an example of a bad dishwasher user interface is a barrier to all dishwashers (at least in terms of UI - clearly you may have environment reasons).
I feel like self taught developers who are serious just learn this by intuition because, frankly, if you're writing software where it matters then very quickly it becomes an obvious concern. If your self taught and it doesn't matter then it doesn't matter!
With a formal background you may or may not use it, but I'd say the only difference is knowing the formal notation makes talking about it with other programmers who also know that notation easier, but even then it's not like algorithmic complexity is (at it's heart) at particularly difficult concept when directly applied to a project. I always found it much harder as an abstract idea rather than when working with a specific algorithm.
Maybe that's a totally superficial assessment, but in terms of the quality of facilities, research going on and the interaction I had with professors they were awesome. I don't think this is surprising though - the US is a lot bigger (and I visited a lot of the top universities) so you'd expect there to be more high quality institutions, because there are simply a lot more students/faculty.
This is why I find the UK occupying a lot of the top ten to be someone dubious. No slight against the British academic world, but four out of the top six when adjusted for funds and population just seems ridiculous.
Clearly there is a need to capture certain metrics and display that as quantitative information, and the difference between, say, the top 10 and the 90-100 is probably relevant, but the difference within the top ~20 is so minimal its largely irrelevant.
It really galls me when people make decisions about undergraduate or graduate schools (or, probably employees, although this is a position I'm yet to be in) based on these kinds of rankings. Clearly it should factor to some extent (i.e. Harvard vs. Jeremey's University of Rubishville[1]) but there are MANY much more important factors to consider.
The irony is that the rankings are 50% opinion based, which basically amounts to identifying where people think are prestigious. I wonder what people use to identify which the prestigious universities are - they can't possible go and visit them all, but if only there were some kind of online ranking they could use to get an idea...
[1] When I went to undergraduate, this was the fictional university my younger brother suggested he might end up going to.
Having installed Bumblebee, I can just use use optirun to provide CUDA enhancement just by initializing VMD using
$ optirun VMD
It's just that easy, and while it is a bit hacky, if you live on the command line it's not a major issue (especially when combined with aliases).
[Edit - This is, perhaps, an extreme view, and The Sun is in no way alone in using this modus operandi. However, as a Brit I feel an impulsive need to warn those who didn't grow up with The Sun!]
1 - [http://resume.github.com/css/resume.css] 2 - [http://www.holehouse.org/CV.html]