QT:{{”
He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel’s work, for introducing the term “mutation”, and for developing a mutation theory of evolution.
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Posts Tagged ‘quote’
Hugo de Vries – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
May 23, 2016A Disabilities Program That ‘Got Out of Hand’
May 17, 2016QT:{{"
“By 1992, half of Dalton’s students entering fourth grade had already received remedial help. Several Dalton teachers describe their classrooms as being overrun by specialists. One teacher, who had half her class diagnosed with learning problems, says she simply gave up arguing with the specialists and used the Fisher Landau program for her entire class.
Other teachers battled back, refusing to let the specialists in their rooms. When teachers gathered, they joked about how long it would be before the entire primary school was diagnosed with learning disabilities. Jeannie Wang, a former Dalton kindergarten teacher, said: "If you dig hard enough in any kid, you’ll find a problem. If you want to have something to write down, you’ll find something to write down."
Then, in fall 1992, it abruptly ended. The kindergarten teachers revolted and refused to use the screening test, saying too many children were being given harmful and unreliable labels. Naomi Hill, the new primary school principal with a different educational philosophy, dismantled much of the Fisher Landau program.
Instantly, learning disabilities at Dalton plummeted. This year, half a dozen kindergartners are getting extra help from specialists; about 15 percent in first through third grades receive help.
That such a major shift could occur twice in one place in a decade is a stunning commentary on how subjective the identification of learning disabilities can be and how little is known about them. Did It Help?
Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars Mrs. Landau paid the universities, no one today can say with objective certainty whether the remedial program actually helped Dalton students. "We can’t answer that question," said Steven Peverly, one of three Columbia researchers who worked four years on the project. "In the field of education there’s this problem with research. People don’t think about setting up controls. It’s not like science."”
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Why Aren’t There More Scientists? A One-Word Explanation
May 8, 2016Q: Why Aren’t There More Scientists? A: Money
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/29/why-we-dont-produce-more-scientists-a-one-word-explanation/ Breakdown of how a field’s $6M in NSF #funding is apportioned HT @gnat
QT:{{”
“Every year Congress gives the National Science Foundation roughly 7.3 billion dollars. That sum hasn’t changed much (in real terms) for decades. The Defense Department gets $573 billion. But $7.3 billion isn’t bad. “It sounds like a lot of money,” says Jahren, even if it’s spread across biology, geology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, and some computer science.
Divided 50 times—assuming one paleobiologist in every state—that works out to $120,000 per grant. In fact, Jahren counted between 30 and 40 grants per year, for an average of $165,000. Assuming some of those scientists hire assistants, she figures there are “about 100 [government] funded paleobiologists in America.””
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The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace – WSJ
May 6, 2016QT:{{”
Among the installations is a “lunch button” kiosk, which matches up employees with common interests to have lunch together that day. And there is a “conversation portal”—a two-way videoconferencing system attached to the end of a long cafe table—to help “spark informal conversation” among diners from offices around the world, Mr. Rose says. Another is a “conversational balance table” where an animated floral display provides instant feedback on whether someone is hogging a conversation.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323798104578455081218505870
Bacteria on the Brain – The New Yorker
May 2, 2016Bacteria on the #Brain
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/bacteria-on-the-brainNice #bioethics discussion of greater allowance for risk in innovative treatment vs research
QT:{{”
…Schrot sent an e-mail to Robert Nelson, a pediatric ethicist and oncologist at the F.D.A., describing the procedure and asking for advice. Nelson replied quickly. “If the product”—Enterobacter—“you plan to use is available to you,” he wrote, in part, “I would suggest you proceed under the strategy of innovative treatment rather than research.”
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Who’s downloading pirated papers?
May 2, 2016QT:{{”
“Bill Hart-Davidson, MSU’s associate dean for graduate education, suggests that the likely answer is “text-mining,” the use of computer programs to analyze large collections of documents to generate data. When I called Hart-Davidson, I suggested that the East Lansing Sci-Hub scraper might be someone from his own research team. But he laughed and said that he had no idea who it was. But he understands why the scraper goes to Sci-Hub even though MSU subscribes to the downloaded ” “}}
Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone freely available data on @scihub usage
http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.q447c
AstraZeneca launches project to sequence 2 million genomes
April 29, 2016AstraZeneca…proj. to seq. 2M
http://www.nature.com/news/astrazeneca-launches-project-to-sequence-2-million-genomes-1.19797 Ironic @JCVenter Qt: Think carefully before you just dump your genome on the Internet
For complete irony, compare this qt w/ commentary on @JCVenter’s original personal
sequencehttp://www.WashingtonPost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/06/AR2007090602362.htmlhttps://twitter.com/markgerstein/status/726064243695583232
QT:{{”
“Human Longevity’s databases are kept locked behind layers of security. “If I were advising a younger Craig Venter, I’d say, ‘Think carefully before you just dump your genome on the Internet’,” Venter says. “The levels of prediction are getting much more interesting.” “}}
‘Enchanted Objects’ By David Rose – Business Insider
April 22, 2016QT:{{”
“I have a recurring nightmare. It is years into the future. All the wonderful everyday objects we once treasured have disappeared, gobbled up by an unstoppable interface: a slim slab of black glass. Books, calculators, clocks, compasses, maps, musical instruments, pencils, and paintbrushes, all are gone. The artifacts, tools, toys, and appliances we love and rely on today have converged into this slice of shiny glass, its face filled with tiny, inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives. … In my nightmare, the cold, black slab has re-architected everything — our living and working spaces, our schools, airports, even bars and restaurants. We interact with screens 90 percent of our waking hours. The result is a colder, more isolated, less humane world. Perhaps it is more efficient, but we are less happy.”
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http://www.businessinsider.com/enchanted-objects-by-david-rose-2014-8
In Scrap-Metal Market, Buyers Have to Tell ‘Darth’ From ‘Vader’
April 18, 2016In #Scrap…Market, Buyers Have to Tell Darth From Vader
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-scrap-metal-market-buyers-have-to-tell-darth-from-vader-1459263473 Elmo for intact electric motors & Shelmo for shredded ones
QT:{{”
““I like a little double entendre,” says Mr. Goodman, recalling how he made up “Elmo” so that U.S. traders could sell recycled electric motors to China, and “Shelmo” for shredded electric motors. “You should have heard the chuckles when I proposed that.”
The result reads like absurdist poetry but helps buyers distinguish Cocoa (shredded wire containing at least 99% copper but no more than 0.25% tin) from Cobra (shredded wire with minimum 97% copper and not more than 0.5% aluminum). Zorba is a mix of eight metals.”
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A Radical Attempt to Save the Reefs and Forests
April 18, 2016An…Attempt to Save the Reefs & Forests
http://NewYorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests Engineering the #chestnut tree to express OxO, a defense against its blight
QT:{{”
“Powell attended graduate school in the nineteen-eighties, around the same time as Gates, and, like her, he was fascinated by molecular biology. When he got a job at the forestry school, in 1990, he started thinking about how new molecular techniques could be used to help the chestnut. Powell had studied how the fungus attacked the tree, and he knew that its key weapon was oxalic acid. (Many foods contain oxalic acid—it’s what gives spinach its bitter taste—but in high doses it’s also fatal to humans.) One day, he was leafing through abstracts of recent scientific papers when a finding popped out at him. Someone had inserted into a tomato plant a gene that produces oxalate oxidase, or OxO, an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid.
“I thought, Wow, that would disarm the fungus,” he recalled.
Years of experimentation ensued. The gene can be found in many grain crops; Powell and his research team chose a version from wheat. First they inserted the wheat gene into poplar trees, because poplars are easy to work with. Then they had to figure out how to work with chestnut tissue, because no one had really done that before. Meanwhile, the gene couldn’t just be inserted on its own; it needed a “promoter,” which is a sort of genetic on-off switch. The first promoter Powell tried didn’t work. The trees—really tiny
seedlings—didn’t produce enough OxO to fight off the fungus. “They just died more slowly,” Powell told me. The second promoter was also a dud. Finally, after two and a half decades, Powell succeeded in getting all the pieces in place. The result is a chestnut that is blight-resistant and—except for the presence of one wheat gene and one so-called “marker gene”—identical to the original Castanea dentata.”
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