The question now becomes what is the perfect Disney song to troll a tiktoker with? What song screams "I'm the main character! Look at me!" the loudest?

Yeah, like I said, far too hopeful. That and I think I'd probably remove the entire last "is this how you want to spend your life" from the remix too. ;-)

As satisfying a fantasy as retributive violence may be, I have to agree with the parent poster here; and to take it further, it's a wasted opportunity.

I would be very tempted - if I were quick enough thinking on my feet and in a situation where I could make it work - to respond with the following:

I figure either you get the message our there, or the annoyance who is recording you will edit you out as a boring NPC. Either works. Of course, I am likely being far too hopeful here.

Specialized training for neuroscience is basically "Do a PhD in neuroscience". For those who don't know; that translates to having done a 3+ year degree in a relevant subject, then doing what amounts to a 3+ year apprenticeship with someone who is already working in the field, and that's just to get started.

The thing is, these days there's a significant part of neuroscience - the bit that uses fMRI - which is pretty much applied machine learning. It turns out that is wildly transferable to things like data science consultancy. And when you get tired of academia, and want to do something else... well.

From the article:

As a former neuroscientist, I can say that most of the studies in the field avoid the dead salmon problem by actually using correction for multiple comparisons.

See: Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson

*laughs*
*sobs*
It's sad because it's true.

If I could vote this up, I would. Alas I have already posted.

as someone who does the work.

I've worked at a number of companies over the years, and found that there are organisations which know how to have meetings, and those who do not.

When you are in an organisation which does not know how to run a meeting... you're lucky to get an average of two hours a day of useful work done. Your days get gradually taken over by meetings with no clear purpose, attended by people who have been invited for no clear reason. Typically the person with the least information talks the most, and after wasting an hour (or two) no useful outcome is reached. This is where projects go to die. Any successful projects are usually due to someone getting sufficiently annoyed and skunk-works-ing the project, presenting it as a fait acompli. Alternatively, by someone on the project team sacrificing them selves to the meetings to shield the rest of their team.

When you're in an organisation which knows how to run meetings, then you get stuff done. Meetings are limited, and when they happen they have a clear purpose; typically either to share information, or to agree on a decision. There is this marvelous thing called an agenda, which gets circulated in advance to all attendees, along with what the desired outputs of the meeting are, and any preparation you need to do before attending. This lets people decide whether they need to attend or not. The person who has the information to share is the one to do the talking. The more important you are, the more of your time is spent listening to gather information to make the required decisions.

So, to fulfill the promise in this posts title:

1. Avoid meetings: If you're in a good organisation, they'll understand. If you are not, then do whatever you have to;
   • - Draw straws in your team to see which one of you to sacrifice
   • - Block out time when you are unavailable, e.g.: due to prior commitments (work is a prior commitment, right?)
   • - Collate all the meetings you can't avoid into one or two chunks to minimise lost time.
   • - Make people aware of how much time is wasted in meetings, and how much it threatens the success of the project.
   • - Try to turn it into a one-on-one call; these are much easier to make useful.
   • - Try to take it to email.
2. Make meetings useful: If you can't avoid a meeting, or worse yet, you have to schedule one, then make sure it is at least going to be useful.
   • - Make sure meetings have an Agenda, clearly listing the topics you need to discuss.
   • - Make sure meetings have a clear expected outcome.
   • - Make sure all the required information readily at hand.
   • - Send all that information out to people before hand. Sometimes you may be able to resolve things without the meeting this way.
   • - Make sure the absolute minimum number of people are involved.
   • - Run the meeting like a tyrant if you have to.
     • If people start to ramble, cut them off. This saves time, and also serves as a way to make sure that everyone who needs to talk has chance to. (Particularly those who would otherwise have trouble speaking up, inclusivity bonus!).
     • If people get off topic, tell them to take it to another meeting. You are here to achieve the expected outcomes and that is it.
     • Be polite about it if you can, but do remember: they're being incredibly rude wasting every ones time, don't let that go unchallenged. Nice and good are not the same thing.

   That is what I've figured out so far. If you've got ideas on how to survive in meeting land, please post them; I'm always looking to learn.

I would suggest, unless you have a pressing need to convert them, that you should store the documents in the formats they are uploaded in.

Whenever you convert a document you run the risk of completely messing up the layout, style, etc.

So, as with many of the bodies abilities; it's just a case of use that distance vision, or lose it when your eyes adapt to shorter ranges.

Just like muscle strength, flexibility, cognitive function, etc.

The beautiful thing about this is that while such certification and testing may be required of manufacturers and distributors of such products, there is nothing that can be done to stop you from building one yourself or with a few friends.

There are others who have also traveled this path, and a number of open source designs available for anyone to have a go at: Robohand @ Thingiverse, Prosthetics @ Thingiverse

Whenever I hear the 'free money from taxpayers' argument, I feel compelled to point to the following: The true cost of the Royal family explained. Regardless of whether the stuff the article at the end of that link says about how much money they bring in for the UK is true or not, I'd still be quite happy paying the 65p per year to have a monarchy.

Brit here.

To answer this, let us first consider what the American President does: on the one hand there is a bunch of PR work and flag waving, on the other a bunch of keeping up with what's going on in the country,authorizing things and politicing.

In essence, the Queen handles most of the PR and flag waving, while the Prime Minister (a simplification in this case) handles most of the keeping up on things, authorizing and politicing.

Of course, the PM also does a bunch of flag waving and PR. The Queen also spends hours every day keeping up on what's going on in the country (and has done so for the past 60 years or so) so that she can discuss this with the PM in their weekly meetings. While the Queen may not have much recognized power anymore, a discrete comment of 'do you really think that is such a good idea?' from her will carry considerable weight.

Naturally, this is an over-simplification which glosses over things, and applies mostly to the UK rather than the other countries of which she is Queen.

More along the lines of "Hi Dr Barash, I'm Dr. Smith. We met at that conference in Florida on terrifyingly deadly diseases last year... No, my colleague Dr Jones was the one who fell in the pool. Anyway, I saw your article on Clostridium botulinum in J. Infect Dis. and have a few ideas; would you be willing to meet and discuss a possible collaboration?".