The idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", something like "debates" about evolution or vaccine injuries.
Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.
Is your comment based on the body of the article, or the title? The article explains right near the top that it was ruling on it being classed as an occupational disease:
> Sophie Lainault...sought to have her cancer recognised as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work.
> This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling...which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. The other two were passive smoking and prolonged night work.
Why is it decreasing when the economy is growing? That's the real question. Maybe it's something to do with austerity and wealth concentration in the hands of rich investors?
"Common names simply don’t work on a large scale. One common name (ie “cedar”) can refer to 8 different totally unrelated plants, where as Cedrus refers specifically to the genus which contains the species C. libani, C. deodara, and C. atlantica."
Actually, those 8 different plants are hardly "totally unrelated". They are quite closely related in the evolutionary scheme of things (plants have been around for 1.6 billion years). Red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Cedrus (Cedrus atlantica) are both plants, but also Pinidae (conifers), and diverged about 250 Million years ago (time tree.org), so more distantly related that mammals (~80 y), but midway between humans/platypus (200 My) and humans/ducks (320 My). Hardly unrelated.
Minor:
"Why is it [taxonomy] cool? Because we now group things according to how evolutionarily related are, and how they evolved."
Yes, we group things by how closely related they are, but not necessarily by how distantly related they are in time. Taxonomy is about branch order, not distance in evolutionary time. The same species in a genus may include organisms that diverged several million years ago, but other species may have diverged much more recently. Taxonomy is a kind of evolutionary history that need not have a very regular clock.
To nit 1: "totally unrelated" could reasonably mean "not in the same genus", but even relaxing that to "not in the same family" holds true for the word "cedars". The author's point about "common names" seems pretty salient
To nit 2: I fail to see what you're actually nitpicking here... How evolutionary related things are and how they evolved _are_ pretty well illustrated by taxonomic ranking. Some organisms (in a stable ecology) don't change much over time and some things do, and taxonomy gives us a good way to discuss that.
I suppose "totally unrelated" might mean not in the same genus to some set of taxonomists, but for the larger audience to which this essay was directed, unrelated might mean "is not related in any way" (as in, does not share a common ancestor).
Yes, they are "totally unrelated" in the sense that I am likely totally unrelated to you, but this not a very evolutionary sense of the word "related".
> Yes, they are "totally unrelated" in the sense that I am likely totally unrelated to you
Why would you assume that the "larger audience" would assume that "unrelated" means that these species of trees came from independent origins of life on earth instead of this totally normal and common sense of the phrase that you use here?
> If looking at screens makes you car sick, you might want to try the iPhone dots. Or – stop me if this sounds crazy – you could just put your phone down and enjoy the ride.
It's difficult to enjoy the ride with motion sickness. So yes, it does sound crazy, most likely written by someone who isn't affected by motion sickness.
My experience is that it helps with being able to look at screens, but not that it is better than not looking at screens while riding. I needed to occasionally leave the screen and close my eyes or look outside (depending position in the vehicle) for a bit to calm down. But otherwise I cannot look at screens on rides for more than a few minutes, so it is better in this sense.
So yeah, as somebody with (moderate) motion sickness, this advise resonates with me to some extent.
It's not for general motion sickness. Most people only experience motion sickness when they're moving but their eyes aren't seeing any movement, such as looking down at a something. That type can be prevented by simply putting down the phone/book/whathaveyou, and looking out the window. I said prevented, not cured, because once it sets in, no amount of looking out the window will cure it.
In 1998-1999, I was the organizer for a Bioinformatics course in Sao Paulo Brazil, funded in some indirect way by the National Academy of Sciences (as I recall). In addition to paying for the faculty (about 6 people) to spend a week teaching, the budget also paid to purchase an SGI server, which was a standard machine to run the bioinformatics software. The course ran for a week in January, 1999, and we had ordered (and paid for) the machine by July, 1998.
A group of us arrived in Sao Paulo on Thursday (before the course was scheduled to start on Monday) to begin configuring the machine -- downloading/transferring software and databases. We did not trust the internet, so we brought the stuff we needed on a laptop.
We got there thursday, to find out that despite a 6 month lead-time, the machine had not been delivered. Not only that, the weekend we planned to configure the machine, the power to the campus was scheduled to be shut off so that some of the 60+ year old infrastructure could be replaced (our host got a special dispensation to keep the power on in the building we were using). After many frantic calls, the machine was delivered around 5:00 pm on Friday. We worked frantically through the weekend, and managed to get a few things working, a few hours before our first computer lab. Fun times.
This is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
There are no un-funded graduate (PhD) students in the sciences and engineering at MIT (or any other top-ranked graduate program). The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding. If the faculty do not have the grants, their departments cannot admit students.
Isn't that what the article is saying? Less research funding == Fewer admissions.
> The number of graduate student admissions is directly tied to the amount of external funding.
Minor quibble: It's not merely external funding. In many sciences (math, physics, chemistry), it's common for the department to promise funding through non-research means for a number of years. In my top school, I think physics students were guaranteed TA funding for 2 years (until they pass the qualifying exams and find a professor). Math students are almost always funded as TAs (the department guaranteed 6 years).
It's mostly engineering departments that don't do this.
While it is true that departments often fund their graduate students for the first year (or possibly 2) out of their own budgets, their budgets are largely determined by the generosity of their Deans (who got the money from indirect costs from grants) or their own indirect costs. And they will not be admitting students if they do not see a clear path for them to be externally funded after their first year or two.
Oh yes. As I said, the math department guaranteed 6 years. If they can't guarantee it, they won't admit the student.
The engineering departments, however, admitted students regardless of funding as long as they met the bar. On the application they'd ask the candidate if they wanted the admission to be contingent on funding.
Universities like MIT that admit only if they have funding for engineering are the outliers. Usually they're private universities.
Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.