Very often, much of the introductory and methodology sections may be recycled or adapted from previous publications and only the results and conclusions are scientifically novel.
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
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
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
