Mokele

AFAIK, all of the 'Nature' spinoffs are considered excellent and high visibility. However, I'd caution against overly relying on impact factor: if you have a choice of two journals, one clearly in your field and widely read, the other on the margin of your field but with an even higher impact factor, go for the former rather than trying to shoehorn your paper into the latter.

Or, in the exact opposite direction, bury it in the Canadian Shield, a vast stretch of stable, ancient rock with no serious instabilities and extremely sparse population. We'd have to pay Canada, but if we're looking for "middle of nowhere"...

I'm with Pangloss, iNow, and apparently the majority of voters - I'm worried about all of the above. I think what Obama is doing is the most likely thing to succeed, but economics is such a voodoo discipline and is so complex that I'd be worried about the effectiveness, timing, etc of *any* plan. If I was in the water with a hungry shark, knowing that a firm blow to the nose is likely to discourage an attack, I'd *still* be worried, because of the consequences of what could happen if it doesn't work. That doesn't mean I don't think hitting it isn't a good plan, just that I'm aware of what could happen if it doesn't work.

Yucca Mountain: because the perfect place to store toxic nuclear waste is over an active volcanic fault system.

Good luck with that. I tried it about 3 pages back, and all it got me was jackson's silly mastrubtations about how socialism will kill us all in our sleep and rape our puppies.

Honestly, I just don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be to begin drawing real conclusions. To be cynical, we're trying to estimate the heritability of a poorly-defined trait probably controlled by many, many genes and regulatory regions using fairly small sample sizes. No part of that is conducive to getting answers.

they are indeed plants; one of the botanists here works on them. Google around and you should find what you need; Wikipedia has some decent pages on them too.

Well, that was everything I've come to expect from you.

To borrow an old engineering joke: How do you know God is a civil engineer? Because when designing the body, only a civil engineer would put a playground next to a sewage outflow.

Wow, your willful ignorance is staggering. That is the WORST analogy I've ever heard for this. You really have no idea about this topic, do you? Here's a better analogy: I'm walking to school fully clothed, when a stray wire from a nearby chainlink fence catches my pants and they tear off. Should I be arrested for indecent exposure, even though I took every precaution (wearing pants), or is it my fault for daring to go out in public. It is well established from impartial statistical research that many women do NOT know all the options available, either due to never being told or due to willful and active misinformation by certain groups. More intellectual dishonesty, how surprising. I'll be blunt: were you a virgin until marriage? Keeping in one's pants requires *two* people. You cannot possibly be this stupid. Find me this mythical surplus of adopters. Go on, find them. You're made the stupid mistake of conflating the lag time in processing adoption with a scarcity. The screening process is long and arduous, but there are WAY more kids in foster care than there are adoptive parents. Show me one place in this thread where I've bashed religion. Show me a point in this thread where I do anything *other* than call you on your poor logic, biased reasoning, and worthless analogies. Oh noes, we can't *offend* people by insisting their ideas hold up to logical scrutiny! It's obvious yours don't, so why don't you go cry into your pillow about how much of a big meanie I am and let the grown-ups talk.

Your intellectual dishonesty is staggering. Try reading the thread. You presented a scenerio, I pointed out numerous, MASSIVE flaws in your scenario. Rather than actually address these flaws, like any rational human being, you insisted that your flawed analogy be given consideration, and flounced off in a huff when I was honest about the total lack of merit of your suggestion. You want respect, earn it. Show me you're more than a bias ideologue who cannot stand having his beliefs scrutinized.

Yes, pretend you have the moral highground, in spite of your failure to address any of the many, MANY flaws I pointed out in your drasticly oversimplified and frankly borderline misogynistic scenario. If poor analogies and selective reasoning are your MO, I cringe to think of the quality of your science.

My MS advisor had a course like that, and the students *hated* it. In fairness, he *did* ask way too much from them in terms of work output and such, but a large part of the problem was that the students themselves were simply unprepared to do anything more demanding than cookbook labs with fill-in-the-blank lab reports. Yeah, it was. But they were hired exclusively for this course, and didn't have any other responsibilities, so that was easier. Plus there was plenty of recycling of material between years. The lecture exams really put it in perspective - a *huge*, stadium-seating lecture hall, and the combined body heat and nervousness of all those students taking the test would overwhelm the AC and heat the room to uncomfortable temperatures.

Translation: Waaa, I can't support my anti-woman views, so I'm going to pretend to be all persecuted! How can you have the gall to actually *challenge* the flaws of my views? Isn't this UnquestioningAcceptanceForum?

I was under the impression, however, that an LCD wouldn't be able to do it - we actually have that system here for 3D work, but have to use an old CRT monitor because the refresh rate isn't high enough on an LCD.

Yeah, basic classes are a nightmare. I remember the A&P freshman course at the last school I was at - 800 students. It had 2 dedicated faculty members, and consumed ~40% of the TAs. Intro to Bio was about the same. As a result, lecture tests were all multiple-regurgitation. I'm tempted to try it, though I might wait until I'm tenured before taking a chance. The good news is that some schools are starting to change that over here. A former lab-mate just got hired at a school that places a *large* emphasis on teaching effectiveness, which even says "It's not that teaching performance is part of tenure review, it's that if you don't teach well, you won't even make it to tenure review."

Your scenario is so divorced from reality as to be worthless.

Very true on both counts. Countering cheating is a constant pain, it's hard to know what to do. I have wondered about the feasability of subjecting them to mini-orals - have them prepare a report or proposal on something, then grill them about it, much like a PhD candidacy exam. I've also tried to figure out an idea I had for "uneven grading", where the points you lose from getting a question wrong are not the same as the number you get if you get them right. For instance, a very basic question would be worth only a few points if they get it right, but has a large penalty if they get it wrong (because getting it wrong indicates they are utterly clueless), while a very difficult question has a large reward for those few who get it right, but not much of a penalty for those who get it wrong. It's the fundamental problem of education - how do you actually figure out what a student knows?

I actually favor take-home exams - time isn't *really* a factor, and they'll look up whatever they want to, so you can ditch the memorization and focus on the important, conceptual questions. My favorites are ones where there *is* no known answer, and you ask them to hypothesize then grade their grasp of the subject matter. One of the profs in my dept doesn't even give tests anymore. It's all take-home writing assignments intended to see how well they actually understand the concept of the week.

Dr. DNA, you forgot something - what if the voluntary act would *not* lead to the creation of the Prince is certain precautions were followed, but there was a small and noticable failure rate? What if 54% of all kings who wanted to get rid of the prince had taken these precautions? Yes, those are the real numbers. What if not all kings had access to these precautions, or even knew of their existence? What if the "voluntary" activity was the single deepest, strongest urge the kings had, and the urge was hard-wired into their nervous system? What if most of the 'kings' were too poor to care for the prince?

We already have a topic on that here

The focus on testing is fairly straightforward to explain: If I make a speculation, I can then make another speculation based on that, then another, then another, then another, and so on. But if *any* of those speculations are wrong, the whole house of cards comes crashing down, and all that effort was for naught. By testing at each step, you greatly reduce the chances that subsequent steps will be based on false ideas/information. In actual science, hypotheses are wrong more often than not, so given that track record, chains of speculation are almost inevitably going to be wrong. If there's a 50% chance of being wrong (it should probably be more like 90%, but I'm being charitable), if you have 5 speculations in a row, that's a mere 3% chance that you're actually right. At 10 speculations, you have less than a 0.1% chance, less than one in a thousand. That's why we test. It's difficult, but it's also the only way to ensure anything resembling accuracy.

You're correct that there are no saltwater amphibians, but the important thing to realize is that the modern amphibians are *very* different from the first tetrapods. Imagine how people would puzzle over mammals if rodents were the only remaining lineage; that's pretty much how it is with amphibians. The very first amphibians probably lived in brackish water, but had scales and retained gills even as adults. Even once they became completely terrestrial, they likely retained scales for a long while, which is where reptile scales come from. The loss of scales and the gain of poison glands happened only in one particular group of amphibians, and unfortunately, that's the only group which survives today. So basically, there are no modern saltwater amphibians, because of their permeable skin, but their ancestors had scales and at least some are *definitely* known from brackish or salt water. Sort of. Arthropods, including crustaceans, originated in the ocean, and diversified *very* rapidly. Eventually, one lineage made its way onto land and became the insects. They haven't returned to the ocean much in part because their crustacean and other cousins would out-compete them, but also because it would 'waste' the adaptation behind most of their success, namely their wings.

I disagree - the market reacts to how a small, highly biased, poorly representative portion of this and other countries *think* the stimulus plan will do. The inability of that self-same group to effectively judge good vs bad investments is precisely what got us into this mess to begin with, so forgive me if I don't trust their judgement. How is that actually determined? How do you know which rise in the graph is due to the stimulus, and which to other factors? I mean, it's not like you can run a controlled experiment. And doesn't that depend upon the exact nature of the economic downturn and nature and timing of the stimulus?

That's probably the most superficial, poorly-reasoned point of view yet posted in this thread. Fail.