rflrob

86 ms·

361.
Driving students into science is a fool's errand(nature.com)
55 points by rflrob 13y ago|58 comments
362.
by rflrob 13y ago
“Criminals attempt to victimize our customers in various ways and we’ve found the vast majority of attacks are through […] and the reuse of passwords on third-party sites—none of which are helped by very long passwords.” I'd actually disagr
363.
by rflrob 13y ago
It's right there on the page: "It's not the kind of code one is proud of." By releasing it as CRAP, you're acknowledging that the code is imperfect, reducing the perceived barrier. If academics feel like you can only release code if it's p
364.
No Miranda rights for now for Bombing suspect(politico.com)
8 points by rflrob 14y ago|1 comments
365.
by rflrob 14y ago
Extrapolating back to when the genome size was 1 probably doesn't make sense, but what this approach might be able to do is suggest the smallest functional genome size, about 10,000bp based on my reading of the graph. It's also worth pointi
366.
by rflrob 14y ago
There is also always the possibility of being a lab tech in an academic lab for 2-3 years to boost his application. It typically pays better than grad school, and the close interaction with grad students will give him a better idea of whet
367.
by rflrob 14y ago
> the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think Richard Feynman would do in your situation? At the risk of getting downvoted for a silly comment, there's the Feynman Flowchart: http://onionesquereality.wordpres
368.
My father, Aaron Swartz, and Assigning Blame for Suicide(michaeleisen.org)
9 points by rflrob 14y ago|1 comments
369.
by rflrob 14y ago
Strings in python are much easier to deal with, so if your program is going to do almost anything with them, Matlab is a royal pain.
370.
by rflrob 14y ago
There's one other function of journals that few people seem to be bringing up or addressing: that of filtering the flood of research. Hundreds of papers per week are published a week in "biology" across dozens of journals, but in most weeks
371.
by rflrob 14y ago
> The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side. As it turns out, there's not just your side and the other side. There's also the side
372.
by rflrob 14y ago
Furthermore, more conscientious students are more likely to grin and bear it, thus giving the A students a lower rate of reporting.
373.
by rflrob 14y ago
The problem there is that you don't know how bad the other option would have been.
374.
by rflrob 14y ago
Or when your not-yet-tenured PI thinks you have something really exciting, and wants to publish in $(BIG_NAME_JOURNAL) to improve her tenure prospects? To be fair, the OP is in a Communications and Journalism grad program, so there may not
375.
by rflrob 14y ago
My read is that while non-metallic guns are currently illegal, the existing ban doesn't cover the magazines themselves.
376.
Claims of diatoms in a meteorite are almost certainly wrong(slate.com)
1 points by rflrob 14y ago|0 comments
377.
by rflrob 14y ago
The Red Rain cell claims (even with a question mark to indicate tentativeness) seem particularly bold. It's not difficult to imagine circular structures forming abiotically, and given that there are much likelier explanations for the red r
378.
by rflrob 14y ago
To some extent, they are though. Most peer reviewers are not paid for their time; instead, they are largely federally-funded academics. The journals have an incredible racket: they don't pay for their raw inputs, and they get a lot of the
379.
by rflrob 14y ago
The real concern is not whether college degree holders, as a class, do better, but whether a 17-19 year old would do better by entering that class. What those statistics don't include is something for recent grads. Ideally, you'd want to l
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by rflrob 14y ago
As a scientist who teaches Python to other scientists in the summers, I wonder if what we instead need to do is just get a sufficient mass of new Python 3 programmers, and let them drag the rest over. Many fields long ago accepted that pr
381.
by rflrob 14y ago
How does that mean choosing food on ethical fronds is crap? Anyone can adjust their food buying preferences based on knowledge about what went into bringing that food to your table (anything from the factory farming, mistreatment of labor,
382.
You'll have to pry this dollar bill from my cold dead hands(bloomberg.com)
2 points by rflrob 14y ago|0 comments
383.
by rflrob 14y ago
"NASA estimates that a return human mission to Mars would take three years. During that time astronauts might receive more than seven times the radiation dose they get during six months on the ISS." Maybe I'm misunderstanding (I.e. the dose
384.
by rflrob 14y ago
I'm not---and never have been---a journalist, but this piece is assuming that journalists are, by and large, happy with the state of reportage today. Yes, it would be great if you could exhaustively fact check every piece, or carefully and
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by rflrob 14y ago
Is there a reason to catch all those exceptions? If you're just sys.exit()ing anyways, why sacrifice all the traceback info?
386.
On Coding, Writing Structure, and Cottage-cheese hating ninjas(new.websnark.com)
1 points by rflrob 14y ago|0 comments
387.
by rflrob 14y ago
Looks like a really cool product, but as a note to the marketing department: the product itself looks just a little bit too much like an iPhone. I got confused for a moment, and thought the device was an iPhone with a picture of the dead
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by rflrob 14y ago
> I think it's fine for people to desire quieter neighborhoods in this era of high population density. I don't think that the people in all of those examples were pursuing change for the financial gain. It's fine for people to desire se
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by rflrob 14y ago
I think the problem is that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to hazy, individual, non-standard assessments of impact, of which the calculated "Impact Factor" of journals that people publish in is one factor. My boss (and Public Library of S
390.
by rflrob 14y ago
Not all states push creationism on the curriculum, and some states, like California, are both economically productive enough and populous enough to be their own nations. Despite that, California has some of the worst average educational a

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