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Not being a nine-year-old girl forging lead hand tools in a communist sweatshop tops my list.

After that, challenging work is the idyllic and romantic answer. But damn, that compensation sure is alluring.

The girl "does not have to show that [the sperm bank] was negligent, only that the sperm it provided was unsafe and caused injury"

I thought the notion of biological products like this as defective was an interesting idea. I'd never considered it before, and thought it might pique others' interest as well.

Half that may not be enough. Don't that you'll be in charge of all business expenses and more tax (if in the US, you'll have to pay an extra ~7 percent right off the bat to cover the half of social security your employer pays on your behalf).

Also, a lot more of your time will be taken up by non-billable hours.

Scala can't scale! (kidding)

First, some terminology, w/ an attempt to keep it simple:

1) gene - sequence of DNA that can be used to make proteins 2) enzyme - protein that acts as a catalyst (hence, the relation to metabolism)

Without having yet read TFA (in /Science/), the meat of the article to me is this bit:

1) "They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes and proteins involved in metabolism in other species..."

Adam knows what DNA makes up the proteins that are enzymes for yeast metabolism (start here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/gquery?term=yeast and you can probably find such information if you know what to look for)

Then, they selected some proteins involved in metabolism in other species (also probably able to find that on NCBI). I don't know how far away in the evolutionary family tree they might have gone with these "other species."

2) "Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes, which scientists think exist, but which haven't been linked to any parent genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may code for the orphan enzyme."

Here it explained that it's not really a hypothesis. Well, it is in the sense that the hypothesis is 'X gene codes for the orphan enzyme.' Then it could test it having been programmed to do laboratory work (presumably) to do so.

I say "it's not really a hypothesis" because I would have considered the hypothesis of the broader experiment to be something along the lines of 'Proteins/Enzymes for whom we don't know which genes code may be coding for metabolism." Then the experiment is "find all such proteins and test them."

3) "Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges, incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers."

I don't know anything about the lab work, but before this part happens I gather: a) Adam knows what genes it's looking at (it found them, after all) b) It looks at those genes being turned into proteins (following the Central Dogma - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biol...) c) Using thermodynamics or some aspect of chemistry, it can determine if those proteins play a role in metabolism.

Hope that helps. I'm still very much a novice at this myself.

I get the feeling I shouldn't bother clicking if Twitter is in the title. Yet, why do I fall for it every time?

"North Westall, a fifth grader, got 27 3s this marking period"

I'm glad they're giving a more realistic report and showing specifically what needs improving.

"while the top grade of 4 celebrates 'meeting standards with distinction.'"

However, meeting "standards with distinction" to me means you haven't met much. Of the standardized testing I've done (which admittedly was many moons ago), getting a perfect score wasn't saying much. It was truly a lowest-common-denominator type of standard. For our future's sake, I hope this is no longer the case.

However, if this comment is representative of what's happening:

"What happened was the high-performing students said, 'I don’t have to work that hard' and they all stopped trying"

Then I fear there's no hope in such a system. This was happening even among the best of the best in my high school, where we often joked about "points per minute" to see how well you could do on tests or assignments in the shortest amount of time.

And I hate to say it, but what Dr. Guskey points out about the traditional way of grading:

"'The dilemma with that system is you really don’t know whether anybody has learned anything,; Dr. Guskey said of grading on a curve. 'They could all have done miserably, just some less miserably than others.'"

Is even more true of the standards as I've seen them. You only get a chance to show you can excel at mediocrity.

There is some discussion in the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10...) from 2005.

Here is some stuff about it on WebMD (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/important-sleep-h...). This one does not outright link it to death, but many things which help death come knocking.

I thought this was well known, so sorry about the lack of links in the first assertion. Is that why I'm gaining negative marks, or are you shooting the messenger for the news you don't like?

If you do not sleep enough, your life will be shorter!

Almost. I wouldn't keep the extra cruft of vendor, plugin, app and controllers for the simpler divisions of object (say those that are just 1 model, controller, and views), but I've often wondered about that in Rails.