Strange, isn't it. Almost as if governments and corporations are not the exact same thing.

Austerity makes zero sense when applied to governments. How many times does this need to be proven? How many gutted middle classes and depressions does it take? "Tightening the belt" on a countrywide scale is a feel good, self flagellating piece of fiction that simply does not work.

But don't let me take away your smug sense of superiority over nearly all of Europe. Romney 2012!

College has become far more about the degree than the experience, sadly. You can meet scores of graduates that have shining transcripts and dismal educations. And this is one of the reason the cost is so obscene -- as Thomas Frank said, "An annual pass to Disneyland would also cost $54,000 if society believed that what it took to make you eligible for success was a great many hours spent absorbing the subtle lessons of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage."

Until there is prestige associated with online learning, an online education will never be as valuable or acceptable as a brick-and-mortar degree mill experience. However, to those who actually want to learn and to do, access to high quality education experiences from anywhere in the world is fantastic and will only continue to improve with better technology and pedagogy. Though it's no surprising that the breakthrough course was in a geeky subject that attracts genuine curiosity.

My university's model is to attract as many international students as possible and charge them 3x the 'domestic' tuition rate, which is already high for Canada. Better yet is a privately-owned college they've licensed our 'brand' to, which allows them to do the same but with dirt-low entrance requirements and higher yet tuition!

Even my previous institute, a very small liberal arts university on the opposite coast, was showing shades of the same. What else do we expect with burgeoning human resources departments and shrinking public funding?

I'm midway through a graduate program and here are the things I wish I was told before I started:

• -- Your supervisor choice is of prime importance. They will dictate your research projects, your lifestyle, and most importantly, your opportunities to continue on. They write your reference letter, after all, and decide your approach to publishing. Pick a good one! Visit several, talk to their students (over beer preferably) - really, you cannot investigate this question too much.
• -- Be ambitious about learning about different school's grad-payment policies. Do they require you to TA? Do you want to? Do they have minimum funding guarantees? If you bring in an external scholarship, do they dock your pay or match the funds? Of course it's not about the money but in Canada, I know firsthand that some graduate students will make fully twice what other students make and neither are well compensated.
• -- Pick a school for its department rather than overall reputation. The supervisor choice is first priority but the second criterion should be the department, as departmental policy and reputation will shape your life in many ways.
• -- Wherever you go, adopt the following policy: If I feel productive, I work. If I don't feel productive, I do not try to. There will be pressure to always be in the lab or in front of your computer, but the reality is that no human can work eighteen hour days for weeks on an end. So if you can't focus or your research is at an impasse, get out there and do something fun. It won't set you back academically and in the longterm, you'll be happier and healthier!

• • With that said, don't let the naysayers get you down. There are good people in academia and always room for a few more. Good luck!

That's great work, you've shown that complex, data-based mathematical modelling by NASA scientists is just like someone drawing a line between points and cheering when it later turns out to match some data. And you did so with a cartoon!

I'm sure NASA will be pleased to learn that they can forget all that tiresome building of models and instead base all future rocketry on connecting-the-dots. I thank you, good sir.

While that may be true, consider the approach this paper used, roughly:

• --Warming up to that point was modelled and divided into sources, including effects of aerosols, solar activity, CO2 increases, etc.
• --Specific events were used to compare predictions to reality, for example the Mount Agung eruption in 1963, and those results were used to refine the model.
• --Energy usage and CO2 emission rates, among other factors, were predicted for coming decades.
• --Based on those predictions, the effects of the resultant CO2 were fed into the model and surface temperature increases were predicted (having to base predictions upon other predictions).

It's a given that any reasonable model is designed to agree well with previous known events, as this one absolutely did. The fact that it further agrees well with over 30 years of future results makes the list of past and future successful predictions so large that clearly the model has at least something going for it. In other words, this is certainly not one erratic research study that got lucky.

What's really scary is how so much of the talking points that are put forth by denialists today are addressed in this paper - from over three decades ago. Volcanoes, solar flares, natural temperature cycles, etc etc. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence for humankind's ability to collectively discuss, understand, and address complex problems!

• --There is no global DDT ban - it's perfectly legal in Africa, and if it's use was reduced there it's due to other reasons (see below).
• --Less use in DDT is largely attributed to it's diminishing effects, not Silent Spring. Not only that, it can give rise to cross-resistance and render other insecticides less efficacious.
• --DDT was increasingly being linked to health problems in humans.

The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!

This seems to be a common notion on slashdot, maybe due to a mix of disdain for the softer sciences and some arrogance about the ability of intelligence to triumph over everything else.

I'll just point out that there exists an entire industry dedicated to 'affect you' by what you see (or otherwise sense). It's called 'marketing' and it's extremely effective and therefore extremely profitable. Would we really be so incredibly saturated in advertisements 24/7 if human beings could easily be unaffected by it?

And PS - That bit about letting 'them' die for some sort of evolutionary goal is despicable.

Specially designed to inspire shareholder confidence if you're a believer, or to lower his tax bracket if you're a cynic.

Make sure you distinguish between the claims that are made by the researchers and the claims that are made by human resources/technology transfer/publicity departments. Anyone who has ever seen that particular machine in action will attest to its ability to transform modest scientific claims into ones would make a late-night infomercial host blush.

Which is not a bad strategy when you consider the alternative: absurdly high entrance requirements. That's the strategy that medical schools have adopted, at least up here in Canada, and it's pretty clear that trying to separate the top 1% from the top 10% for admissions doesn't make for more successful students. If anything, it selects for the hyper-competitive, the resume-builders, and/or the lucky.

Better to let in as many as possible and let the actual material decide who really has the needed ability and passion.

Well, so what? You could say something similar about music, film, and literature. Fine - that doesn't mean that the increasingly focus-tested, mass-appeal garbage we're getting in all of these media isn't worse than it used to be.

Find me any 1950's equivalents to Justin Bieber, like Elvis for example, and I will guarantee they will have more artistic merit than the Biebs.

This is amazing and one more nail in the coffin of our long-held dogma of genes being passed down from two parents, expressed but otherwise unaltered, then passed down to our children, all with just a little bit of mixing and mutation. From epigenetic modifications, to massive variances of stomach flora even between relatives, now to food's ability to affect our very gene expression... we've got some serious reconsidering to do about what makes us who we are.

Very cool.

Maybe you or the average geek can't be expected to know this, but this idea is not at at all new. The concept that an author is not the authority on his/her own work has been common, even accepted, in literary analysis for decades. It's sometimes called the 'intentional fallacy'. Calling the author a 'medium' is just the article's way of making an old idea seem new and sexy.

But even if you wouldn't go as far as saying that the interpretor sets the meaning, maybe we could all agree that going back and modifying a work that you've made is a shitty thing to do if that work already holds meaning for millions of people. As is pointed out in TFA, this is exactly what Lucas did that started this debate

Side note - literary analysis can have practical ramifications after all! Who knew?