Corporate Greed. What the shit?

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There has been a lot of talk lately using the term “corporate greed”. I would like to point out that corporations don’t have feelings. Obviously. So the term ‘corporate greed’ is somewhat of a misnomer. Corporations have one goal, to maximize the return on its shareholders investment. I’m fine with that. The middle class has the opportunity to own stock in a company they think has a promising future; the corporation should play the game for them just the same. What about personal greed? I think that is somewhat silly too. We are all greedy in the sense that nobody would pass on the opportunity to make easy money. Thus we should be more concerned with how easy it is to compile individual wealth, given the current financial status of a particular person. Here’s what I think, it should be somewhat easy to become a millionaire, but it should be extremely difficult to become a billionaire. Thus, the income and property tax bracketing structure between million dollar and billion dollar wealth should increase exponentially. Why? Capitalism is based on the idea that people are willing to work hard, given the right incentives. One of the greatest incentives is a realistic opportunity to better yourself financially, and maybe even become wealthy. But it should be a fair fight. With a flat-ish income tax system, who is going to have an easier time making a million dollars — someone who already has 5 million dollars or someone who has 5 thousand dollars? I think it should be equally difficult for both parties to put that million dollars in their pocket. Get it?

Spell or Die!

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If you are a grad student (I don’t pretend faculty read my blog) at a research-based university, it’s likely that you have heard the adage “Publish or die.” Well, the precept isn’t entirely true. After all, a “good” student will still be granted a PhD, published or not. The unpublished won’t be getting those top tier post-doc positions, but there are plenty of opportunities for a PhD student from a respectable university. What’s more detrimental for an aspiring doctoral student is the mastery of vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. Straight up, if you don’t get a reasonable score on the GRE (where over half the test is based on those factors), you die. Let’s face it, if your bachelors degree wasn’t in engineering, it amounts to shit.

I say you this — what the hell? If I was in charge of recruitment and acceptance for a graduate program, let’s say a neuroscience PhD program, I’d want the incoming students to have an exceptional understanding of …(get this)… neuroscience. Call me crazy. I would poll my faculty, and ask each of them to produce a list of 10 questions they’d want an incoming student to know. Then I would test potential students based on this pool of questions.

That’s just not how we roll here in the US. Esoteric vocabulary and impeccable grammar, that’s what separates grad students from undergraduates. Though, I’ve never quite understood the point of knowing a word that only 10 percent of aspiring graduate students know. Which means it is a word that nobody fuckin knows. But that’s how the GRE works. If everybody knew the word, then how can we tell if you’re smart!

Here’s the thing, devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression. Correct English is the slang of prigs who wrote history and essays. A man would be a fool if he couldn’t produce and understand words spelled more than one way. It’s a uniquely human phenomenon, the capacity to deduce meaning from cmopeltyl scarbmeled wrods as if spelling is a footnote to an afterthought. But as long as you can looks smart by stealing quotes, substitute big words, and watch those split infinitives, you will do alright my friend. All others will die.

The Perfect Programming Language (for a scientific researcher)

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There are probably a lot of people out there like myself that want to master a programming language, but don’t know where to start in choosing that perfect language. Getting started with a new language can be both challenging and time consuming. Being a busy person, I want to know that this time investment will pay off in big ways. Deep down, anyone with a penchant for scientific research knows that the mastery of the ‘right’ programming language will prove to be an essential skill in the near future (if not aready!). So I’m going to crack an egg of knowledge on ya’ll, and share what I’ve learned over the past few months in my search for the perfect language.

programming language compairison

list of programming languages

First, no matter which language is chosen, master it! All programming languages share a set of core attributes. If you have a solid understanding these core features and how to use them — a mastery of the programming language — you’ll probably find a way to code 95% of your needs in any language. Also, I’ve gleaned that once you master one language, any other language is infinitely easier to understand. You’ll find that all languages have logical operators (true, false decision makers), loops (if-then-else), advanced mathematical and computational libraries, text manipulation (search and scrape, rearrange), arrays (data in the form of matrices), and methods (a way to call up prefabricated scripts, send a piece of data through the script to manipulate it in some way, and return a new value).

That said, there is still the task of choosing the language best suited for your needs. Even though most languages are cut from the same stone, it will prove to be incalculably beneficial to master a language that makes it easy to do the things you don’t want to do by hand. At the end of the day you don’t want to be a programmer, you want to be a scientist that knows how to program. Writing the code is just a means to deploy your innovative earth-shattering algorithm.

So the first thing I asked myself was “What do I want to be able to do with with the programming language?” These are the things I came up with off hand:

+ Write applications.
+ Write small scripts that can interact with other tools (matlab or excel).
+ The ability to scrape web content and turn the information into data.
+ The ability to launch programs from a web browser.
+ The ability to have other people interact with the programs from a web browser.
+ The ability to interact with a dynamic data set, and choose my database.
+ Developer tools for Unix/Linux which makes for easy development on Mac OS X
+ Open source programming language!

Each point above will be addressed in some fashion in the next few paragraphs.

When I first set out to find a language that could do all of those things, I was skeptical that one language suffice. However, with so many languages to choose from, I had a good chance to find one that meets most of my criteria. But there are so many! It was time to initiate operation — process of elimination.

I knew a good chunk of languages were developed prior to the internet explosion. And if they can’t run in a web browser, it’s out! A web-deployable language is important because I want the option (when relevant) to allow other people to utilize the final product without having to install the language environment onto their own personal computer. Furthermore, I don’t want to worry about cross-operating system compatibility (mac OSX darwin vs unix vs linux vs windows). Certainly none of the pre-compiled languages were going to cut it (C++, PASCAL, cLISP) because they are nearly impossible to deploy in a web environment. Thus, it would have to be a scripting language with a just in time (JIT) compiler. With this in mind, and a little research I narrowed it down to the 5 most popular scripting languages: PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, and Python. All of these are full-blown programming languages, but also have a ways to be deployed by a web browser.

Java was the first language I considered. I took a few courses at SDSU in Java, so I was already somewhat familiar with the language. Java is user friendly, and is becoming the de facto language for teaching introductory computer programming courses. Sun (now owned by Oracle) relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GNU General Public License, so it’s free to use and deploy. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine regardless of the users operating system. Java was built to give programmers the ability code some pretty gnarly dynamic web applications. Overall it’s a great language with lots of financial support for future development. For me, the only flaw with Java is that it doesn’t have strong integration with databases. This is a deal-breaker.

You may be asking, what is a database and why is it important? Essentially a database is exactly what it sounds like — a place to store data. This data can be the entire content of a webpage (like it is on Wikipedia), it could store user-unique content (like the Facebook and WordPress web blog databases), it could hold user preferences (like on Amazon or Pandora), or any other type of dataset you want to manage and manipulate. As a researcher, I have little use for a programming language that cannot interact with a large dataset. That is why Java is out of the race. I’ve discovered that Perl and Python are both extremely robust scripting languages in their own right, and meet most of my criteria listed above, the two languages with the best database integration seem to be PHP and Ruby.

PHP probably has the best database integration of the two. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find anyone developing PHP code not intended for use with a database (specifically mySQL or PostGreSQL databases). PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. As a little nugget for you, PHP was created by a developer to tally the number of visits or ‘hits’ to his webpage, and display this content as a little counter at the bottom of the page. (if you never seen a ‘hit counter’ you are too young to be reading this). The down side to PHP is that the language was originally implemented as an interpreter; and while several compilers have been developed to decouple the PHP language from the interpreter, its still very lacking in the stand-alone application development department. While PHP has great database integration, it’s not really intended for programming non-web content (thus it’s pros and cons are essentially the opposite of Perl and Python).

Ruby on Rails Programming Language

Ruby on Rails

So through the process of elimination, we have but one programming language left — Ruby. Does Ruby have what it takes to be my language of choice? Yes! Ruby is a fully supported, dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl and has JIT compilation abilities. Ruby is available on many operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and most flavors of Unix. Ruby on Rails is specifically designed to let Ruby interact with multiple types of databases including SQLite and mySQL. And last but not least, I’ve read a lot of articles where the programmers say it is “fun to program in Ruby”! Needless to say, I’ll be mastering Ruby over the next year. I hope you do too!

Why Kill, Why not capture Bin Laden?

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Two days ago, May 1st 2011, almost 10 years since 9-11, the US finally stormed in and killed Osama Bin Laden; the founder of the al-Qaeda organization we were led to believe orchestrated the September 11 attacks on the World Trade towers in New York City.

On May 1, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized a raid on bin Laden’s suspected location in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The operation was successfully carried out by United States Navy SEALs, with intelligence support from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During the 40-minute raid, bin Laden was fatally shot in the head. After intelligence searches of the compound were conducted, his body was taken into custody at which point genetic and facial recognition tests were performed. After positive identification, and within 24 hours of his death, bin Laden’s body was taken out to sea for burial.

Two questions. Why was he killed and not captured? Why was he immediately buried at sea?

I can make a convincing argument

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Jeff Smitt:
Smaller government = less need for taxes and smaller government = no interest from corporations to manipulate tax systems and government influence on open market

A truly open market = might actually lead to a situation where consumers decide if they want to shop from a huge super corporation that outsources all their work to other countries or if they want to buy from companies that invest in their more localized economies with jobs and such. It seems almost impossible, at this point, to make the needed changes from the top down. the system needs to implode on itself and force people to reconcile with reality. that seems to be happening

The political-media side-show is manipulating people’s minds and distracting people from the seriously f$3*ed shit that is going on

Bradley Monk:
Hi there Jeff, I agree with you that in a smaller government there would be less federal employees to pay. For instance if we were to do away with the Federal Board of Education, which has 5000 employees that make a mean annual salary of 60k, we could add $300 million dollars to the fedral budget. That would make the budget go from $3.8 trillion dollars to $3.8003 trillion dollars, or simply $3.8 trillion dollars. Should we decided to just keep that tax money in our own pockets, every American would have an extra 95 cents a year! Personally I’ll pay 95 cents to have a Department of Education. You suggest that a smaller government would mean that corporations would have NO interest in influencing public policy. Riiiight. Sarcsim aside, we both want the same thing – for corporations and the extremely wealthy to be kept in check when trying to manipulate policy. If there is no Department of Education or Department of Pubic Health in Washington protecting those interests there would be a corporate shit storm, I assure you. I can think of a million situations of how this could be terrible (e.g. imagine if corporations like Pfizer no longer had to answer to the FDA). What needs to happen is less military spending. Currently around one fourth of that $3.8 trillion dollars ($900 billion) is to combat terrorism. Is that what it takes, really! Almost a trillion dollars to be safe from terrorism? Canada has a 20 billion dollar annual defense budget. Ask Canada how many terrorists attacks they’ve had lately. Bro, Canada spends 880 billion dollars less than us on Defense. They also don’t have a co-pay for a doctors visit, and don’t have to pay for private health insurance.

Jeff Smitt:
If i got to pick which branch or department to drop first, it would be military. I am with you all the way.

Prenatal choline supplementation mitigates behavioral alterations associated with prenatal alcohol exposure in rats.

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Prenatal Alcohol Choline Publication Monk

Prenatal alcohol exposure can alter physical and behavioral development, leading to a range of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Despite warning labels, pregnant women continue to drink alcohol, creating a need to identify effective interventions to reduce the severity of alcohol’s teratogenic effects. Choline is an essential nutrient that influences brain and behavioral development. Recent studies indicate that choline supplementation can reduce the teratogenic effects of developmental alcohol exposure. The present study examined whether choline supplementation during prenatal ethanol treatment could mitigate the adverse effects of ethanol on behavioral development.

The Evolution Deceit by Harun Yahya is Blind Ignorance

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This blog post is going to be bias, despite my best efforts to remain impartial. So my qualifying remarks are that I am not an evolutionary biologist, but I am a neuroscience graduate student who has a contention that nothing in biology makes sense until you put it in the context of evolution. The power of evolution stems from the eloquent way it connects all creatures, tissues, and molecules on this earth. It also provides a window into the past and allows us to make predictions about how organisms will change in the future.

So why does “The Evolution Deceit” by Harun Yahya (real name Adnan Oktar) concern me whatsoever? There are two main reasons. First, every so often I come across a forum conversation that sorely misinterprets what is meant by evolution. Most of these misconceptions are summed up in The Evolution Deceit. Second, many of literary works I’ve read that take a stance against the “theory” of evolution are laden with logical fallacies; but none more so than this book by Oktar.

Lets begin.

I’ll start by clarifying just what is meant by evolution, something Oktar decided was not the best way to proceed. What is evolution. Of the various definitions that one might formulate about it’s exact meaning, evolution can basically be described as the change of inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations. This change is the product of two opposing forces: processes that constantly introduce variation in traits, and biological/environmental circumstances that make particular trait variations become more common or rare.

It is also important to note what is not meant by evolution. I assure you that evolution does not preclude the existence of a god; likewise, its axioms make no attempt at disproving a deity. In a related idea, evolution does not endeavor to describe the original formation of life on earth, which is left for those who do research in a scientific paradigm called abiogenesis (i.e. the study of how life on Earth could have arisen from inanimate matter).

So if this is true of evolution, then where do Oktar and I digress? I conclude that if there is a god, there is a greater likelihood that this deity created what scientifically appears to be evolution, than the likelihood organisms were created in their current state. Harun Yahya does not share this position in his writings.

One does not have to look much farther than the back cover of his book, “The Evolution Deceit” to begin to understand Yahya’s position on evolution. It reads:

For some people the theory of evolution or Darwinisim has only scientific connotations, with seemingly no direct implications in their daily lives. This is, of course, a common misunderstanding. Far beyond just being an issue within the framework of the biological sciences, the theory of evolution constitutes the underpinning of a deceptive philosophy that has held sway over a large number of people: Materialism… It is our hope that The Evolution Deceit will for a long time continue its contribution towards the refutation of materialist-Darwinist dogma which has been misleading humanity since the 19th century. And it will remind people of the crucial facts of our lives, such as how we came into being and what our duties to our Creator are.

Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

[I will continue to add to this post throughout the week]

Actually I won’t. Pretty much everything I could possibly bring to light can be found on the wikipedia article titled: Creation-evolution controversy

World Cup 2010 Players to Watch

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You’re scrambling to get your world cup bracket done, look down at the page, and realize you don’t know half these countries, and have no idea what country your favorite club team player is on (Fill out a Bracket Here)


Lets kick things off with:

Christiano Ronaldo, Portugul, Real Madrid
vs.
Joe Cole, England, Chelsea

There is a special moment at 2:05 into the clip

Lionel Messi, Argentina, Barcelona

Whats the hype about Messi? See for yourself, but you are gunna want to skip to about 1:45 in this video (to whoever made this vid, the 2 minute buildup, wtf? seriously?)


Kaka, Brazil, Real Madrid

He’s fast as fuck. It’s not bad enough he could just run right by the defense, but he’s also got foot skills and a deadly shot. Also this video starts off with Sandstorm by Darude!


Xavi, Spain, Barcelona

While you have Ronaldo and Kaka playing for Real Madrid, you have another talented duo at Barcelona, with Messi and Xavi. Unfortunately, Xavi will not have Messi when he’s on the pitch for Spain in South Africa.

Didier Drogba, Ivory Coast, Chelsea

Drogba, The King of Goals.

Andres Iniesta, Spain, Barcelona

I just have one clip of Iniesta, but for those of you who don’t know how well Spain is going to do as a team. Watch this clip.

ESPN says these are the 50 best players in the world

Liberal Education in the USA

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I graduated from San Diego State University with a BS Bachelors of Arts degree in Psychology. The SDSU psychology program has only several classes that are actually practical, but one of them is statistics. Here’s an example of what I learned: The median income of a new CSU student graduating with a psychology degree is $34,095 [1]; whereas, the 2000 National Census found that individuals with only a GED earning on average $32500 [2](so suck on that GEDrs!).

But really, I’m on a quest to uncover the rational for the psychology degree. It didn’t take me long to discover my first piece of evidence. According to this [3] (somewhat dated but still relevant as ever) Daily Aztec article republished in HighBeam Research: San Diego State U. statistics say career choices aren’t about cash.
“ SAN DIEGO — Money — does it draw students to their future careers?

The answer is no, according to statistics and students at San Diego State University. These days, it seems that money is not the top priority when choosing a career.
”

And man are they right. Psychology is the lowest on the totem when it comes to raking in the bucks, right below – Sociology $35,434 — Visual and Performing Arts $35,073 — and English $35,453 you will find Psychology $34,095 students with an average loan debt around $14,245 [4]. However, it’s true, it shouldn’t always be about the money. There needs to be a balance between job satisfaction and a competitive wage. Thus, it is my contention that a description of what a University should provide to its students can be formulated in one sentence: it’s the duty of a University to provide an education that instills the knowledge and tools that valued by employers within the particular job market the student had in mind when choosing their major. For instance, if a student is thinking they would perhaps like to one day work in the rent-a-car industry, they should choose psychology as a major, because Enterprise is one of the biggest employers of psychology graduates. Universities have done a great job providing psychology majors the knowledge and tools that are appealing to the car rental industry.

(stay tuned – more updates will follow!)

Updates:

1. Now anyone can go to M.I.T. for free [5]