cwhittle

Very cool. I can't wait for a more generic data device pairings to these interfaces. I would love them for paragliding, where we have a variometer to track metrics that impact decision making (ascent/descent rate, air/ground speed, altitude, etc) and weight/deck space are a big factor.

Someone needs to write a compelling article on "Why to work hard". Just because you should isn't a good enough.

All of these big research universities in CA are on major and active fault lines. My old lab at Cal sat mere hundreds of feet from the Hayward fault that runs through campus. This is a proactive power shutdown when you know it's coming. If they can't an event with advanced warning, what will happen to hundreds of millions of dollars of frozen samples and research instruments when the unexpected earthquake hits any of these universities, not only disrupting power, but also disrupting structures? Incredibly foolish not to have at least reliable power backups and containments irrespective of what PGE is doing.

I think we all hoped it wouldn't happen but knew it would.

Try Monterey Market for produce. Really good quality and generally less expensive than Berkeley Bowl, especially for seasonal stuff. But only buy produce.

This is the basic science that pays off in the long run. You can't just turn biomedical science projects on and off. It takes time and investment to develop the techniques and technologies to do this work, to gather the samples, and ensure data quality across the project labs. During the time that the ENCODE project was funded, the technology for doing the types of experiments to get this kind of data advanced many times. We are now talking realistically about personal genomics and the $1000 genome; at the project start we were still celebrating the 3-billion-dollar genome sequence.

Most of the people interviewed in that video are program officers/administrators at the NHGRI (an institute of the NIH) who oversaw the ENCODE project. They weren't researchers who did the work. The mission of the NIH is human health, so anything funded by them has to have a biomedical implication somewhere down the line.

I guarantee that the real impetus for the project in the researchers' eyes is to understand how an identical* instruction manual (ie., genome sequence) in every cell can give rise to a plethora of cells that do very different things to make a functioning dynamic human. In other words, for the most part, it appears that there's the sequence information and then there's how you use it. ENCODE (and modENCODE) are about how you use it.

fyi: I'm a researcher in the modENCODE consortium, a sister project to ENCODE, aimed at characterizing functional regions of DNA in two model organisms, a small worm and the fly. My PhD advisor was funded by ENCODE as well. I obviously find this stuff fascinating and important.

I think that she was referring to the idea that, while many aspects of parenting can (and perhaps should) be equalized between the parents, the fact is that current culture places child-related responsibilities more heavily on the mother than the father.

This is to the detriment of fathers as well, because a father who wants to shoulder the responsibilities of raising a child, will also be assumed to have a partner who takes primary care of that.

While learning Hadoop is a good idea, if you're bored in grad school, you're doing it wrong.

self-determination (maybe this falls under your excluded values, character traits, or philosophies), but its a rather important skill in my opinion.

a second language - doesn't matter which one really, but it has clear cognitive and practical benefits. Bonus points for spending time in another culture for a different perspective.

edited to add: Really many of these skills can be learned as needed, but the desire and skills to learn new things are an important skill to have. If you're successful in teaching them the fundamental ones, like critical thinking, then they have the tools to learn what's needed.

The new courses are great, but there's something I don't understand about these course websites. I'm doing probabilistic graphical models, but I just want the content to learn, and I don't really care much about some certificate. I also don't have a lot of time this particular month. I'm guessing that this is true for the majority of people taking the course (I'd be interested to see how many people who signed up actually kept up). What is the point in making time limited offerings for an online, recorded course?