Arete

So I had a little old lady pull out in front of me in her car while I was rifing my Ducati 916. I t-boned her front passenger door, struck my head on the roof/door fold and flipped over the roof. I was doing about 80km/h, wearing a helmet, jacket, Dainese back protector, gloves, pants and boots. My laundry list: open fracture of right radius and ulna (i.e. both bones broke at the elbow and stuck out through the skin) "unhappy triad" of the right knee broken left thumb metacarpal (ask me how much it sucks to have both arms in casts at the same time) hangman fracture of my c2 vertebrae She suffered a bad fright. Just to add to the empirical data out there.

I disagree - given this is what you said: and that is what I responded to. Of course not. Just because someone wants to climb mount Everest so he can boast about it at dinner parties doesn't mean he won't get to the top and back down fine - but the motivation may concern his mountain guide, who is worried about how he might react if a storm hits the mountain while they are climbing. Ultimately you're welcome to take my advice or leave it - just trying to provide you some perspective on how a professor who actually sits on a graduate admission committee might think and view your application.

We have students starting PhDs in their 40s, so I don't agree that age is necessarily an impediment. This, however would be a deal breaker for me. A) A PhD is a long, sometimes arduous task that gets you to a starting point, rather than an end point. If a person doesn't have a clear idea of why they want to start that journey, then there's a good chance they won't finish it. As such, I generally carefully scrutinize a potential students motivation as a part of the application process. B) If the response someone has to being questioned about their motivation to go to grad school is "F**k you" I'd say they didn't have the temperament required for a PhD program. You'll be constantly questioned throughout your scientific career, frequently rejected and often wrong. Being able to take on board criticism and modify one's position in response to it is critically important to a successful career in science - say your committee failed you at your quals two years into your program - would you tell them to "go f*** themselves" and quit, or would you improve your knowledge, revise your proposal and try again six months later? If I had any inkling that a student would do the former I wouldn't take them on. As such, I'd think a bit about why you want to go to grad school, get some research experience under your belt so you know it's something that is definitely for you, and consider how your attitude might be perceived by others before applying. Best of luck.

So, I sit on the graduate admissions committee for my department. Our base requirements are set by the UC system - a minimum of a bachelor's degree, an undergraduate/graduate GPA of 3.0 or higher, a minimum GRE quantitative score of 155, and a minimum GRE analytical score of 4. Exceptions to this can be made by an individual PI, but usually aren't due to funding restrictions and an oversupply of qualified students. After that, it it is down to a) the "soft" elements of the application. Does the student have a Masters degree? Research experience? Publications? Grants and Awards? b) The applicant's direction - do they have a clear idea of why they want to do a PhD and what they want to do it in? and c) The intangibles - do the statements indicate that the student would be a good "fit" for the university? The money or passion question is relevant - in many fields a PhD doesn't actually increase your earning potential much, and if your primary motivation was increasing your earning potential, I'd steer you in a different direction - plus 5+ years of living on a PhD stipend would put you financially much worse off than a Bachelor's degree and 5 years of industry experience. That said, there aren't many unemployed PhD graduates, although most aren't working in academia, or their field of training.

Russia hacked and leaked the DNC server in order to swing the election towards the GOP. It's not really a secret that Russia would like to see Trump win the US election. I highly doubt Putin thinks Clinton would start a war with Russia. What I think Putin is really opposed to, is the fact that Clinton would actively work towards a strong EU and a strong NATO, thus weakening Russia's regional economic and military dominance. The annexation of Crimea, for example and similar actions would be far more difficult in the face of strong opposition from an economically strong and militarily well supported Western Europe, which Clinton would actively pursue. Trump, on the other hand proposes the US engage in isolationist economic policy, and withdrawal from NATO. This would lead to considerably reduced ability of NATO and the Euro zone to oppose any aggressive regional military or economic moves by Russia. TL;DR Putin's motives for supporting Trump have to do with what he sees as good for Russia and its regional interests.

Both journals are Nature group journals and have the same confidentiality and editorial policies. Nat Physics specifies an unreferenced abstract of approximately 150 words, Sci Rep specifies an abstract of no more than 200 words - so all relevant policies are virtually identical. Regardless, the purpose of an abstract is universal - from the Nat Physics author guidelines: "Abstract. Provide a general introduction to the topic and a brief nontechnical summary of your main results and their implication." Your abstract does not do this.

The abstract I posted as an example contains all these key features and is 172 words. The entire point of an abstract is to summarize what you did, what you found and why it's relevant.

Aside from the issues with grammar and sentence structure, this abstract does not actually say what the proceeding paper is actually about, what specific methodology you used or developed, or what your result is. Does your method improve radiotherapy? How and by how much? You need these details in the abstract. As an example, here is an abstract from a paper I am an author on that we published in Nature Scientific Reports: The highlighted phrases indicate that we explicitly state our methods, main result and main conclusion. These are the critical components of an abstract, and all are missing from yours.

3) Neither.

When more are leaving than arriving, would a physical barrier not result in more illegal immigrants in the US, rather than less?

I should also add that the comments I've seen you get in this forum are considerably more friendly and polite than some of the comments I've gotten and seen through the process of peer review. If a reviewer finds your paper difficult to review due to poor English, they'll probably be annoyed and say some very mean things about your work. I was once told I should go back to freshman year and learn the difference between ecology and evolution for accidentally using the incorrect term by a reviewer, even though I had meant to use the correct one and it was simply a typo. If I get a really terribly written paper sent to me to review, my annoyance is generally directed at the editor for sending me the paper in the first place. Ergo, poor writing is almost certainly going to lead to desk rejection, which means that with out decent proof reading you won't even get to the point where your science is assessed.

Does this mean that Nat Physics also desk rejected the manuscript? "Manuscript under submission" generally means that the paper is being assessed by editorial staff to make sure you meet the submission requirements, as outlined in the author guidelines, before being assessed for suitability for peer review and subsequent publication. Based on you posts here, I would strongly suspect that without proof reading, your paper would be exceptionally difficult to read, and full of grammatical errors. This will almost guarantee desk rejection at high impact journals. I'd strongly suggest having it proof read before proceeding - your actual science cannot be evaluated until your paper is clearly written.

Why do you need a physical barrier between the US and Mexico when net immigration is negative?

All of these questions are covered by the journal's author guidelines. Going by your other thread, what you got from Nat Methods was a desk reject, with a standard form letter rejection. In short, the editor rejected your manuscript outright based on a cursory examination (title and abstract, if you're lucky). They don't want to see your paper again, in any form. They have a 10% acceptance rate, with about a 50% rate once you've been accepted for review, so ~80% of manuscripts sent to them get desk rejected. Nature physics is similar.

I was born in 1982, which technically makes me a millennial, so I'll be expecting a prize for participating in the poll.

Your questions are a little hard to interpret but I will try. I generally attend between 1-3 conferences per year. Societies often publish a journal and hold meetings, e.g. The Society for the Study of Evolution publishes the journal Evolution, and also participates in the annual joint Evolution meetings. Members of societies usually get discounted registration to meetings. I've never heard of a conference asking for a TOEFL score before. Conference presentations are not subject to peer review. If the number of talks is limited, you will generally be expected to submit an abstract of your talk at the time you register. Based on this abstract, you may, or may not be selected to present at the meeting. There will generally be a period in which members of the audience can ask the presenter questions. Also, if you've permitted the conference organizers to record your talk, it may be uploaded for other people to view (although you can request for your talk NOT to be recorded also). In some fields, conference abstracts are put together into a publication after the meeting, although generally not in my field. You can list other authors on your talk, but it is perfectly acceptable to present as a sole author also.

If your initial purpose is to promote intelligent design, why lie and make up nonsense about "atomic biology"? The deception to disguise your ulterior motive removes any credibility your position may have had, and the terrible misconstruction of science provides it with none in the first place. You're ultimately just making yourself and unfortunately other theists here for legitimate reasons look bad. That, and the hypocrisy of course.

Trump appears to both be setting himself up a post election loss narrative that the election was "rigged" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/15/donald-trump/donald-trumps-baseless-claims-about-election-being/ While the claims appear completely baseless, and have all the hallmarks of a spoiled child who's losing at Monopoly and about to accuse everyone of cheating, flip the board and storm off to sulk, I don't think it's a stretch that the folk who jumped on the Obama birther narrative would have any problems jumping on the 'crooked Hillary cheated' bandwagon with no proof either.

To get to the crux of your proposal, you're really pitching a a fairly poorly thought out version of intelligent design. Intelligent design fails to be scientific on many levels. This is a repost from another ID thread, but relevant here also: Intelligent design, as it relates to evolution, is essentially the claim that natural processes are insufficient to explain the diversity of life on earth, and a creator of some kind is necessary to explain our observations. It is fatally flawed on many levels: 1) It uses a supposed absence of evidence for evolutionary processes to assert the existence of this creator - a logically fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam position. 2) It proceeds in a logically backwards fashion, starting with the conclusion that such a creator exists, and then attempting to fit the evidence to that conclusion. A scientific investigation is compelled to proceed in the opposite direction, allowing the observations to determine the conclusion. 3)The arguments for the lack of evidence for evolution to explain the diversity of life are largely based on either further logical fallacy, misunderstandings of evolutionary theory, or both. E.g. the argument for irreducible complexity is both an argument from ignorance, and ignores the fact that selectively neutral processes can lead to the fixation of novel traits. As a result, it is trivially dismissible in a scientific context. As for the current proposal, why do you expect atoms and molecules to be fundamentally different when in a living cell than otherwise? In the absence of evidence to suggest that they are, "atomic biology" would simply be "chemistry" and "physics".

His defense has been that he was suggesting that gun rights supporters should vote in a bloc against her: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0 Only, he posed the insinuation in the future tense, after Clinton had already hypothetically won the election. So at "hold the situation at arms length and go cross eyed trying to see the positive image" best case scenario, is he gaffed and accidentally insinuated that his supporters should shoot Hillary Clinton. Or he more likely did it deliberately. In either scenario I would imagine it's nigh on impossible to argue that he makes a suitable president.

If evolution is a religion, then there's some pretty miraculous shit going down right now in some tubes of bacteria and phage in my lab.

Intelligent design, as it relates to evolution, is essentially the claim that natural processes are insufficient to explain the diversity of life on earth, and a creator of some kind is necessary to explain our observations. It is fatally flawed on many levels: 1) It uses a supposed absence of evidence for evolutionary processes to assert the existence of this creator - a logically fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam position. 2) It proceeds in a logically backwards fashion, starting with the conclusion that such a creator exists, and then attempting to fit the evidence to that conclusion. A scientific investigation is compelled to proceed in the opposite direction, allowing the observations to determine the conclusion. 3)The arguments for the lack of evidence for evolution to explain the diversity of life are largely based on either further logical fallacy, misunderstandings of evolutionary theory, or both. E.g. the argument for irreducible complexity is both an argument from ignorance, and ignores the fact that selectively neutral processes can lead to the fixation of novel traits. As a result, it is trivially dismissible in a scientific context.

How do you feel about Trump's propsed total ban on Muslims entering the US, given it rather thoroughly violates the first amendment?

76% of Trumps statements are false or mostly false, compared to 27% for Clinton. While neither candidate has a monopoly on fibbing, Trump is a clear market leader in bullshit.