This is the most mercenary discussion I've seen on Slashdot, ever.

If your employer isn't loyal to you (within reason) then you don't want to be there. Most of the organizations I have worked for - including some very big ones - actually do try to avoid laying people off in a downturn, at least skilled white-collar workers. In a knowledge industry if you burn your workers every knows and it gets tougher to hire in the future.

You already know whats right for you - the other job. That means you need to leave - but doesn't mean leaving the current company (& coworkers!) in the lurch. Ask the new employer if they will give you a couple of months before you start; if so, get an offer letter with those terms. Seriously - I just hired a programmer and a project manager on these terms (2 months and 3 months respectively). They needed the time to close out projects, train new hires etc. I was impressed that they were loyal to their old employer - and presume they will leave me one day with the same grace and style. Their old employers (who couldn't match my offer) were pleased that they were willing to stay that long, and will in the future give them glowing recommendations - and might hire them back. Co-workers don't feel shafted etc. Did I want them sooner? Of course - but they were the right people and I'm willing to wait.

Now, your current employer might tell you to stuff it, and to clear out your desk. Or that they will hire someone and they only want 2 weeks and then your out. Fine - you have been loyal and done your part, and the new employer presumably will take you sooner.

Loyalty means doing your best in a hard situation, not picking between 2 weeks notice and staying forever.

Spear phishing is phishing targeted at a single individual. Since its in Wikipedia and all over the Interwebs and all those black hatted types talk about I'm guessing the poster didn't make it up. Then again maybe he is one of those black hatty, Wikipedia writing trolls making s***t up in a conspiratorial way. You never know ...

Jindal said: "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.â

He never said the problem was it didn't create jobs, nor that it was working fine and didn't need additional funds. Instead he mocked it ("something called 'volcano monitoring'") and said flat out that the Federal government shouldn't be doing it.

I'm sure there's pork in the bill. Jindal's failure wasn't trying to point out pork. Jindal's failure was in being ignorant and hypocritical. He is the governor of a state already receiving the largest stimulus package since Reconstruction and one that depends on federal funding for "something called hurricane monitoring." Only a fool would think the rest of American had forgotten Katrina so quickly.

Yes, early administration of IV beta blockers caused more heart failure. It also caused people have fewer additional heart attacks and to drop into nasty rhythms requiring painful shocks.

The take home of the big study wasn't not to give beta blockers - it clearly showed they worked for the reason we had always given them - but to be judicious. Don't push them IV at the first sign of a heart attack. Give them to people who seem to have enough cardiac output to spare. In essence, think - don't just give them because a) the study protocol says the get it, or b) the hospital guidelines says to give them.

Thompson (EndNote's publisher) sucks. Its a monopoly that control's the three dominant packages, and because of network effects (ie, "because of collaboration ...") they can market crap and people have to buy it.

Eventually someone will come out with a cross-platform product that leapfrog's EndNote and will make a killing. Until then ...

Few, and if they are present then its usually a single, short equation with a derivation etc. Word does just fine for these purposes. Any paper that required a more sophisticated equation editor than Word provides wouldn't be appropriate for your average medical journal readership. While you can argue that this is soft science, NIH's funding and the sheer volume of publications is mind-boggling.

But more to the point, all of the talk about formatting etc is a bit irrelevant. Most of journals in my field require final submissions to be in MS Word format as they perform the formatting. We can submit a draft for review as a PDF (double spaced, please), but the final version is expected to be in Word so they can make it fit their own standards.

Biochemistry and the bench science journals may be different, but at the general medical and public health level, it would be difficult to get a LatEx manuscript through the peer and final submission process without hiccups.

In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex. Perhaps it is the standard in engineering & CS or other fields where researchers use Unix on their workstations, but Word and EndNote remain the lingua franca elsewhere.

The fact that the medical system has struggled to implement evidence (ie, science) based medicine over the past 20 years is not evidence that physicians hate science. Its evidence that the science is poor, the process is hard and there are tremendous incentives against it. Its just damn difficult.

Think physicians hate "science"? Try explaining to a patient why they should take the drug that is 10% less effective than the competitor but half the price. Or explain why the diagnostic procedure that saved their best friends life is unlikely to find anything in their case, wouldn't hurt them -- but is "worthless" from a cost efficacy perspective. We all struggle with cost efficacy - no one wants to get something less than the best, patients even less than physicians.

Besides which, "doctor" means teacher, not medical practitioner. So exactly why does this journalist think that teachers hate science? And how does citing a Senator help? Yes, Coburn is a physician (albeit an obstetrician which is one of the fields that has struggled the most to integrate hard science appropriately due to the overwhelming malpractice issues), but Coburn doesn't believe in science in the first place - famously calling global warming a "bunch of crap."

Garbage.