If he casts the same actors then comparing the two movies will be a pretty fair test of which franchise is better.

The false-positive/false-negative (false alarm/miss) tradeoff is going to depend on what the criterion for detection is set at. The measurement you want to look at really is how well this scanner can segregate "individual with dangerous explosive chemical" from background noise. These sorts of measures are considered secret, and I imagine the company publishing them for this device would be a great way to have nobody able to buy it.

That wouldn't work. Where do you draw the line? Do you not count citations from papers with the same first-author? If you do that then savvy scientists will rotate authorship on papers from their lab. Do you make it so that no citations count when there are any common authors between the citer and citee paper? That's even more unworkable considering how much scientists move around and collaborate across institutions. The only smart thing for a scientist to do then would be to strategically omit authors off a paper so that they can then cite it in the future. Even if you implemented this harshest rule, scientists would still pressure their friends to cite their papers when even vaguely related to the friends' research.

Not all research is clinical research. We gained a lot of knowledge about how the visual system works in the brain from neurophysiology experiments performed on cats (check out Colin Blakemore's work for that, and you can have a look at some of his explanation for animal research at the same time).

It's college students who fund themselves by stripping, not professors.

That doesn't make sense. Couldn't your competitors just subscribe to the journal that you publish in? (thus negating the justification you give for the paywall)

Thank you for being one of the few people who has noticed that this is not actually good news.

Unfortunately this is more of a case of the government facilitating matters for the publishers. It is frustrating to see well-intentioned people (with sufficient knowledge ONLY to see that something called "Open Access" would be a good idea) rejoicing over this. The Finch report has completely discounted the Green OA strategy in favour of Gold OA. Rather than allowing publishers to adjust to modern reality by reducing their role in the dissemination of research, they are instead going to be paid big stacks of public money to carry on with their exorbitantly-priced open access options .

Finch's open-access cure may be 'worse than the disease' - Times Higher Education http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420392&c=1

Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report - Stevan Harnad http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/

Matlab mobile is a remote interface for interacting with a session running on another computer.

Fiction is for making you think, not for telling you what to think.

The big question for me is: Are the jokes still going to be funny?

Because of who gets the money that the government spends.

This is amusing because the Slashdot sterotype totally applies (a virgin who is very opinionated regarding things he knows nothing about).

It is much more motivating to be learning to program with a particular project in mind. I'd argue it also teaches you to program better because you can't avoid the bits of the task that you find difficult or tedious. I'm a scientist but I spend a lot of my time programming experiments, models or analysis code.

I teach a research methods module to undergraduate life sciences students. The vast majority of these people have never programmed and never expect to. This is a bit strange when so much of being a professional scientist in my field involves programming. Recently, we changed the research assignment they have to do so that it now involves some very basic programming. Mostly GUI stuff where they build a timeline and a "flow" out of blocks, but there are a few lines of code they need to write too.

I was expecting there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the content being too difficult, and a rebellion against being made to program. In reality, nobody complained and most of the students seemed to enjoy it. Some of them got very excited about writing a program that made a computer do what they wanted it to do. They also got quite competitive about writing their programs better than their colleagues (to the point of argument, but it was still encouraging to see). These people were not nerds, and talking to them I got the impression some thought computers were just "magic". One student didn't even understand that computer programmers existed who wrote software to make computers do things.

Looks like you might benefit from the Khan Academy video on First Degree Price Discrimination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0wg9ZPyL38