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Why the Fuck?

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: Why the Fuck?

#511

Post by joe5150 »

nirvana wrote: post #443
joe5150 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I agree that it can be a pain to edit a document or watch a video or, god forbid, write a computer program on a netbook, I can't help but feel that it would be more difficult on an iPod Shuffle.

It's a shame you chose to ignore my point and make a response that is this dishonest. An iPod touch is a great device for editing documents, watching videos, or even creating videos.

More dishonest than pretending that an iPod shuffle, which has no screen (and at one time no buttons!) and is functionally tethered to a real PC, is some kind of entry-level computer/grand charitable effort by Apple to make a computer "for the rest of us"? Or that an iPod Touch, which is not significantly cheaper than many laptops, can substitute as a real computer for anybody with more than the most casual, consumption-driven computer needs? Calling it a "great device" for the things you listed is very, very generous. Acting as though a $300 laptop is not also a "great device" for those things is just ridiculous.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#512

Post by theorique »

bhickey wrote: post #368
theorique wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to be professors?

Being a grad student and wanting to be a professor is like being 6'2" and wanting to play in the NBA.

Presumably some grad students are the equivalent Shaq or Kevin Garnett, though.

After all, professors are all drawn from the ranks of former graduate students who finished their degrees...

Re: Why the Fuck?

#514

Post by vobios »

ihnorton wrote: post #269
jiggy2011 wrote: post #11

I don't have a degree in medical sciences so I have no idea where I would start.

Some suggestions: Help build better tools for researchers. * Julia (julialang.org) is very promising and could use talented developers to help build the ecosystem. * Numba ( http://numba.pydata.org/ ) looks amazing and should build on the existing strength of SciPy. Contribute to open-source projects related to medical research; a few favorites in the imaging space: * PLUS ( https://www.assembla.com/spaces/plus/wiki…

Nice roundup of some bio-medical open-source projects.

As someone who works at an academic lab, though, I think you are being a bit pessimistic regarding the pay scale.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#515

Post by karmel »

raganwald wrote: post #102

My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…

Don't give up yet! I studied linguistics in undergrad; learned to program in order to build websites; spent several years as a software engineer; and then decided I could only complain for so long that no one had cured type 1 diabetes (which I, like Scott Hanselman, suffer from) before putting my best foot forward. I am now getting my PhD in Bioinformatics, knee-deep in immune cells after not having taken a real bio class since middle school.

For all of the people in this thread or reading this thread who wish more people would address "big problems"-- I totally agree. So get in there! The problems of biology are indeed fantastically hard to solve, but that's part of what makes them worthwhile. And don't worry-- the natural world is so vast and ill-understood that biologists are very patient as long as you are trying to learn; the good ones recognize that there may be an infinity of things you don't understand, but the things they don't understand sum to infinity minus one, so we're all in the same boat.

Cheers, and hope this discussion encourages a few people to pursue the biggest problems they can!

Re: Why the Fuck?

#517

Post by timonv »

Obesity isn't a problem, it's an effect. People eat crap and don't work out and the media doesn't help.

Whether problems are 'real' is a point of perception. Obesity and the high rate of diabetes are only a problem in ignorance of the cause. That's yours to fill in. The same goes for the banking crisis, political scams and the facade we call democracy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/).

I totally agree we should be addressing real issues in our society, however, addressing effects is like duct taping a drain - temporary.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#518

Post by mw1 »

raganwald wrote: post #102

My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…

Hypocrisy is not always an empty criticism, but you have picked an example that is. Someone who smokes saying "smoking is bad for you" is not a serious hypocrisy -- it could actually be informed wisdom, and they are just stating a fact. Someone in a position of power or influence who smokes on a regular basis, yet would form laws or prosecute/punish others for doing so, is a much better example of when hypocrisy is not at all an empty criticism.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#519

Post by OGinparadise »

moultano wrote: post #211

Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets useful results. I'm working on this because I believe it to be the most important thing within range of my skills and experience. People at Facebook are working to allow Scott Hanselman to be able to find friends of friends with diabetes to ask for advice.

Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets useful results

Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets lots of ads, useful to our bottom line.

Sorry Google, but I'm telling like it is.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#520

Post by tel »

ramanujan wrote: post #507
tel wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't disagree with most of your points here, I want to know more about your opinions on efficacy testing. It is definitely a strange corner of the FDA mandate and seems most justified by their marketing restriction power---the principle that marketing medical claims should be done from a position of earned, valid authority. But it's definitely the most expensive and difficult to test component of FDA regulat…

So, regarding efficacy testing, I think the costs/benefits have to be assessed in full context. If you go back to the time before the FDA, it was a time of incredible wonder drugs and useless patent medicines. Kind of like the Internet: the price of being able to put up a domain name in 10 minutes with no centralized check for accuracy means information proliferates and the web/market/search sorts it out. And we kind…

To take the internet domain registration metaphor further, it also requires a centralized value authority (google) in order to be navigable. In some sense, Google's primary task is spam filtering---analogous to efficacy guarantees---which enable efficient information gathering.

I don't argue that the FDA is an efficient structure for doing efficacy testing, I just think punting the value discovery/marketing process to vague distributed processes isn't a good answer.

I think the supplement market is a great example as well. Many low value treatments saturate the market and the responsibility for making decisions is democratized and difficult. Canonical sources of efficacy information might not be needed as barriers to entry, but reputation, trust, and canonization are valuable heuristics in decision making processes and this leads to power.

If Google doesn't link you, you die.

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