Trying to make sure I have the fourteen papers I explicitly cite during my presentation down for this Friday. Nervous, but I've been getting some helpful (semi-backhanded compliments) like "the difference between your presentation now and last month is night and day."

Selected slides:

(Yes there is data, just none for Aim 2 from the summer unless today's last experiment works)

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

<Click post, click user history>

Reddit's finest in charge of that subreddit indeed.

My (side) grant got funded! It's for Rett's syndrome, which isn't exactly Alzheimer's, but on my end it'll mean me following a very similar pipeline, except with Rett's in place of Alzheimer's mice.

I also had a somewhat embarrassing experience in class last week: I presented on a scientific paper for class, picked by a teacher who also happens to be the co-PI on afformentioned grant, my de facto neuro-minded advisor, and head of an institute.

We got to the end of the discussion and she asked me straight if I believed the authors' work. I hesitantly said yes... thinking that I didn't see any specific problems with the core hypothesis, which was supported by a decently-validated knockout mouse. As a class, we'd already discussed a few side issues at that point with regards to some of the biochemical methods, but it was hard to argue with the behavioral and imaging data.

Then she pointed out that the authors never checked if the cell type in question even expressed their gene of interest. And in fact other labs had checked from a few different angles and found an absence of signal in their data. And in fact I'd been at a group meeting in this PI's lab a year prior where they'd specifically pulled up these absence-of-signal figures and discussed their controversy, but hadn't latched on to that information because I was still in my in-over-my-head phase of barely understanding the gross types of questions people in neuroscience even like to go after.

So PI laughed at me, and I felt a bit dumb, and after they found me in their lab and shared a few more of their thoughts. And now I'm trying to re-organize my mental check-list of things to look for in papers before I believe their conclusions.

Anyways, here's some neurons:

https://gfycat.com/WhiteSillyBlackcrappie

Last Friday was very exciting. I saw a <thing I'd been looking for> in my data and now we have at least two drug targets to do follow-up work on. Now I'm entering the realm of staining with antibodies and I'm learning just how few good antibodies there are compared to how many proteins I find interesting.

After a day of investigation, I met with a guy to discuss plans for a new project. He sat me down with another member in his lab and then they both explained a rather in-depth project... that was 15 days until show-time... that another post-doc in the lab had begun with them... before leaving for a new position... and had apparently been talking about me doing the work for...

Neither I nor my PI had heard anything about this before, so I'm not sure what's exactly going to be happening there.

Why did you go to grad school?

I was interested in medicine and engineering biology. This gives a few different career options, but after a fair bit of time working in a lab. After briefly considering the doctor route, I decided research was the right direction for me. I'm still not 100% set on research for life, but a PhD opens a lot of doors that a BA in biology only nudges a crack.

My other option was computing, but the current state of the bay area leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I saw those 1.3k enrollment numbers in CS and recognized that competition is only going up in an industry with eyes mainly for recent graduates. CS / IT pays well but plateaus quickly. Biology tends to have a lot more breadth in its sectors and depth to its careers.

When did you go to grad school?

Last year - now.

What is a good reason to go to grad school?

You are passionate about pursuing a research question. You enjoy independence and open projects. You want to ask questions that might not be answered on a private company's dime.

What is a bad reason to go to grad school?

You want to continue education. You want to make more money. You want to boost your resume.

What is the best state of mind to start grad school?

Excitement, you will only become more jaded after day 0. Also have an idea of fields / questions you would like to pursue, but don't expect to stick to them if they turn out not so great.

What obvious and not so obvious things should I look for when choosing a program?

Look first at the careers the program will enable for you. Look at the area that you may be making connections in. Look at both the individual labs and the program itself. I picked my school because the program itself seemed more invested in the students. The other school I was looking at felt like it had less organization and less of a community, which turned out to be incredibly important when I decided that the three candidate labs I had were all bad fits. Both had a great neighboring industry presence and I would not have considered them otherwise. Graduate school is partially about passion, but you have also got to be realistic about what it will give you.

Ask the students in the program and in the labs what they really think about it. You'd be surprised how many world-class PIs have students who hate working for them. Ask the officials what the average time to graduation is. If they don't tell you, it's probably above 6 years. Computer / soft-science work tends to be a bit quicker / less time per week, but lab work is much slower. Most time-to-graduation averages do not partition by computer vs. lab work, so keep that in mind.

How on earth am I supposed to generate income while simultaneously committing enough hours to my studies? During the school year in undergrad I worked usually less than 10 hours a week.

If you are in a PhD program, you will make a small but decent amount of money. It's not enough to go out and buy fancy cars or have a family, but it is usually enough to support yourself. Some schools match their stipend to the cost of living in the area, some don't. Some provide graduate housing that students can afford, some don't. Don't ever pick a program that you think will send you into debt. And graduate school is usually a poor choice if you are already having money troubles.

Expect to commit to the program as a full time job while you are in it. I work 40-80 hours / week and would not be able to handle any extra work outside of maybe selling hobby items online or maybe part-time tutoring / consulting in later years. This time goes to teaching, classes, and research year-round, with free time going first and foremost to activity that take care of my health.

Masters are a different beast that I can't really comment on.

I wouldn't let it get you riled up, I think that sort of thinking has just become a bit of a phase among college-aged people these days. Most people I know who have swung that way have tended to relax back within a year or two. Staying uber-judgemental and politically correct is just a difficult thing to keep up once the regular stresses of life compete for mental energy.

All these "scandals" are scientists examining the work of other scientists and pointing out their biases, errors, and scams.

Open access journals that are free to the public sound great. Until you remember that literally anybody can set them up and profit on the publication fees. Suddenly openness must be balanced with reputability. The result? PLOS / eLife / open-access options on traditional journals.

Meta-analysis of many clinical trials sounds great. Until you remember that garbage in == garbage out and small trials with small biases that turn into large biases upon aggregation. Suddenly trial number must be balanced with trial size and power.

Statistical analysis of quantitative data sounds great. Until you remember those functions are built on a rigid framework of mathematical assumptions. Suddenly significance must be balanced with human behavior and uncertainty in newly developed methods or untrained researchers.

I would argue that in addition to being "harder than we give it credit for", the challenges brought up here are partially one of size. Science has grown into a massive sector full of universities, institutes, private labs, etc. And as the number of people involved goes up, you get: (1) a greater chance of any one researcher committing fraud, and (2) a greater chance that a bias will be uncovered by any one scientist with extra time or significant concern with some issue.

Can I suggest a DEFCON system? Whereby DEFCON 1 blocks all PMs, replies to comments / posts, replies to replies to your comments, etc. all the way up to DEFCON 5, where users may only be filtered from view in feed / global / chatter / globalchat?

On the spectrum of "control given to the user", it removes a lot of the customizability of how I block / ignore someone. But I think it would be safe to say that if I don't want someone PM'ing me, then I probably don't want them replying to my threads nor do I want to see their posts.

It might also simplify the current system, as I think a few people have noted that "filter" / "hush" / "mute" are not quite as intuitive in meaning as we might hope...

I can only hope that the Steinbeck quote holds true and this is only the nadir of a multi-decade water cycle...

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

-- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Also, it's OK if you think less of me, it's a pretty selfish and first-world activity, in my opinion.

It's good that you still have humility in a world dominated by testosterone, but I think you'll find that what you said is true of almost every comment in this thread. Hobbies are meant to be self-fulfilling, nothing wrong with that.

I was considering doing this myself the other day, but a friend's words came to mind that by discussing an idea socially, people tend to feel a bit of reward that they otherwise would have to wait until completion to obtain. Talking up a project can make one lose the motivation to actually complete it.

Still, that's all on the submitter of said goals/progress/plans to consider.

At Meriadoc's suggestion, I have started infinite jest and now I feel like I'm par of some cult every time I say DFW'S full now. Gotta say though, some of these depictions of psychological addiction are spot on.

I was originally going to write my in my other comment, but I ended up deleting it because it had too many unfounded assertions and I couldn't quite figure out how to phrase things without denying the obvious reality...

The same goes for the women as heads of state argument. It's fine and dandy that you can find some mitigating circumstances in a lot of the cases, but does this same nepotism and political pandering not occur in states that aren't Muslim majority?

This gets to the heart of what troubles me between the three voices. If Hillary Clinton was to be elected president, would we condemn her accomplishment as only due to the fact that her husband was in office before her? Do we ignore the landmark of the first (half) black president because he also happened to make it through Harvard Law School, an institution that historically is associated with empowering primarily white males? Or do we mark each situation as nuanced but let them still stand as a milestone for each social group?

But I deleted the comment because it is still the classic stereotype of many countries in the Middle East and those neighboring that there is in fact a power imbalance across genders, and in spite of any symbolic officials, it's hard to deny this asymmetry if you've (impersonal you from here on) had any personal associations with people from these countries. They simply aren't in agreement with the western views of empowerment for all peoples.

And you know what? We've been fucking with their politics since before many of us in the US were even a twinkle in our fathers' eyes, so from what high ground are we to tell them how to lead their lives? We should criticize genital mutilation, but if you think for a minute that anyone in Iraq or Egypt is going to listen to any of the tirades that Maher spouts about how they should structure their social hierarchy, you should re-examine the last few decades of who has been paying who to murder who.

And really this article is side-stepping the point that Reza makes: you can't generalize these things, nor should you blame Islam as the sole force in what are much more complex political and social situations. Keep in mind this is all coming from someone whose family left one of those countries because they knew what religious control of the government would do to it. I don't believe that any government should be manipulated by the church, but we're still fighting to keep creationism out of schools in our own country.

I don't want to make light of some of these issues, and I wholeheartedly condemn on taking the knife to women's genitals, it's a dangerous and scaring practice that is incomparable to male circumcision as practiced in the west, but when the conversation turns to, say, the hijab, I would much rather Americans listen to those of other countries, rather than tell them what to do.

I thought the iPad was going to flop and it didn't. Yet arrogance tells me that the watch will fail, too. Practically, it's a convenient interface to your phone... and a watch... and maybe a GPS... but there's not really room for interface, nor any benefit to adding computing power when you already have a phone.

So that just leaves espionage

#2, this one hit close to home:

Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.

The Year of the Flood

Cn1cnc2c1c(=O)n(c(=O)n2C)C

It makes me a little sad that "off the grid" has come to mean: "without a cell phone".

When I first read your post, I thought to myself: "Hell no, I don't know how to deal with a septic tank, I can't sew my own cloths, I won't give up the internet."

But a phone? I misplace it all the time anyways. Facebook? Don't have one. Twitter? Don't want one.

Yet I still use RSS, I still hang out on IRC, I still read Hubski posts. I'm a technophile by any standard.

When says you have to secure a single node? In silk road's wake, there are dummy sites popping up all over. But at the end of the day, it's just a communication problem, putting sellers with buyers over a secure channel.

You don't need one millionaire and one website to do that. Just a distributed and secure communication network in which it's not worth the effort to track down each and every person involved.

I don't buy it...but having just recently deleted all forms of private social media, I'll comment only on the technical challenges in securing information.

Indeed, if your current social network has no obligation to respect the obscurity of your information, what justifies believing other companies will continue to be trustworthy over time?

The easy answer is nothing. So cut out the middle man. I wouldn't communicate my personal life through a human I don't know, so why the hell would it make sense to send it, in an easily readable form, through a company that stands to benefit from selling my information?

Now, one might be tempted to build a technical solution to this problem. I wouldn't mind a service built around end-to-end secure communication, open source, and easily distributable to multiple servers. One where I could generate a public and private key, and share photos and messages with friends knowing that only those marked as recipients could ever read them.

This already exists in the form of PGP + email, but there is room for tools on top. Perhaps move the storage and transfer elsewhere, since most emails cap the size of individual messages as well as long term archives and generally frowned upon for blanket-sharing. Then just add pretty interfaces and wide-platform support. Let me group my friends' public keys as Google+ manages circles.

If information can be leaked, at least let it require a violation of trust from someone I know personally.

So don't use a credit card. Don't have cable. Don't use the Internet. Don't use the phone. Don't have a bank account. Don't go to the hospital. Don't have a job. Don't rent an apartment. Don't subscribe to any magazine or newspapers. Don't do anything that creates a record. In other words, go live like a hermit in a mountain or cabin.

I wouldn't do any of those things if I could stay functional without them. But the benefits of using a credit card outweigh the costs of being another row in a database collecting statistics on my life. And the difference is that I am perfectly happy living in a world sans Facebook.

In fact, I'd say I'm happier now that I focus solely on my own life without any services reminding me about how others life their's. But that's getting into the psychological side of social networks, which I'll refrain from discussing any further, in this comment at least.

I'm not normally one to actively hate on religion.

But people might be more inclined to leave them alone if they left others alone. In 2008, California had a bill to repeal same-sex marriage, proposition 8. 33% of donations (About $13 million) in support of it came from the Mormon church[1][2], a group not even based in the state. Coupled with that, the campaign put out downright insulting and lying videos[3][4].

And that shit passed.

So yeah...we're still bitter here.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8#Campa... [2]: http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PgjcgqFYP4 [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-jc4ujp9Ok

There ain't a 1 in kleinbl00's name, and I say we tax these men of their followers for all they're worth! Spread the shares around!