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Comment Most US Scientists are Not American (Score 1) 694

At least that is certainly true in the University / National Lab sectors. Just count them. And then count the Germans, British, Chinese, Indians ... The US has always imported its scientific talent. True, the Americans who do choose to become scientists often excel - but most US science graduates go into the more profitable fields of business, medicine or industry.
Software

Software Finds Plagiarism In Research 111

shmG writes "Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have created a seek-and-destroy program — for plagiarism. Called ET Blast, it's designed to find plagiarism in scientific papers. It does a full-text analysis, and then looks for similar publications in several databases. 'We have better literature,' Garner said. 'There are abstracts and full papers, and a database called Crisp, where you compare stuff to every grant the NIH gets. It's compared to any research that's been funded.'"

Comment Re:FORTRAN, COBOL etc. (Score 1) 565

I absolutely agree with your point about attention to detail.

I find that there are a number of owners of legacy code - engineers and so forth - who want to update their code - often FORTRAN - to a modern GUI and implement features like calculations in real-time response to changes in the GUI.

However, they do NOT want to rework the FORTRAN code itself. These programs are often thousands of lines of dense calculations which were started back in the 60s or 70s and are known to be efficient and essentially bug-free.

They also want the GUI in something that they more or less understand - which means C or C++.

Hence the problem is one of understanding and modifying the original FORTRAN command line interface and the platform it was written for (remember VMS?), working with the engineers to design an appropriate GUI and then implement it in a mixed-language (C++ or C and FORTRAN) environment. These days I tend to use a cross-platform framework like Qt or wxWidgets.

That's how I live anyway ...

Comment Re:Big problem on various levels (Score 1) 230

Absolutely the NIH should stop funding OSU.

$5 million is significantly less than the NIH funding that OSU has received. From the NIH site it seems that OSU at its various sites gets between $3.4 million (2008) to $10 million (2006) each YEAR from the NIH. Clearly the University has more to loose from upsetting the NIH than the Boone-Pickens family. Unless, of course, there is something we don't yet know about.

Alternatively, the President should grow some balls.

Source: http://report.nih.gov/award/trends/State_Congressional/StateDetail.cfm?State=OKLAHOMA

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