“It’s not that the undergraduate education is better at Ivies than at other private universities. (In fact, Ivies almost certainly provide a worse education than many obscure liberal arts colleges that may have loose admissions standards but provide very intensive and personal instruction.) It does mean that, in the current budget situation, pretty much any private college will provide a much, much better education in the liberal arts and social sciences than any public university — except the rare ones that operate like liberal arts colleges, like William & Mary or SUNY-New Paltz.

This wasn’t always true. (In 1970, Berkeley spent 70 percent as much per student, from all funding sources, as Stanford. As of a few years ago the figure was 30 percent and now I bet it’s more like 20 percent. With those numbers, there’s no way that the private-public distinction is a matter of fancy gyms and climbing walls.) I wish it weren’t true now. And none of this necessarily means you’re wrong about how to fund higher education: subsidizing students to attend the Ivies in some ways may widen the gap I’ve just mentioned.”

Public vs. Private Universities: A Reply From the Trenches – Mother Jones

(As an aside, I was also playing with a new operating system called Linux, which Linus Torvalds had announced on the comp.os.minix newsgroup with one of those throwaway phrases that have gone down in history: “I’m doing a (free) operating system — just a hobby, won’t be big and professional…”.)

Play works!

Old News | Status-Q

There’s a great line in Beckett,” she says, searching for a quote to capture this equipoise of light and dark. “I can’t remember who says it. ‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.’ There’s as much common sense in that as in all of Sophocles or Socrates or anyone else.”

Feels like it too.

Novelist Edna O’Brien on sex, books and a lifetime of defiance

One thing about trying to put the Internet and computing in context, is that you are forced to look back at the history of other communication revolutions (pace Tim Wu, John Naughton etc). It is now a well trodden path, but one I still find fascinating. Even down to the details of how the cost of distributing images or 3D moulages had an effect on my own specialty. The following caught my eye — or maybe my nose.

“When paper was embraced in Europe, it became arguably the continent’s earliest heavy industry. Fast-flowing streams (first in Fabriano, Italy, and then across the continent) powered massive drop-hammers that pounded cotton rags, which were being broken down by the ammonia from urine. The paper mills of Europe reeked, as dirty garments were pulped in a bath of human piss.”

Link

“Physical exam skills are eroding fairly significantly. We see that year after year. The masters who taught us are gone, and we’re not teaching the people below us well enough, for all the reasons we talked about.

At the same time, we grossly overestimated the average clinician’s ability to do an extremely good physical exam and to make all of the relevant physical findings. It has been documented over and over again that the average person’s ability to use a stethoscope and document a murmur accurately is a coin flip. The ability of the average house officer to do volume assessment based on a physical exam is terribly low.”

Here.

“Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Psychological Science – Pam A. Mueller, Daniel M. Oppenheimer.

Oh dear….

This is from an article in Nature. And the problem is resolving differences in experimental results between labs.

But subtle disparities were endless. In one particularly painful teleconference, we spent an hour debating the proper procedure for picking up worms and placing them on new agar plates. Some batches of worms lived a full day longer with gentler technicians. Because a worm’s lifespan is only about 20 days, this is a big deal. Hundreds of e-mails and many teleconferences later, we converged on a technique but still had a stupendous three-day difference in lifespan between labs. The problem, it turned out, was notation — one lab determined age on the basis of when an egg hatched, others on when it was laid.

Now my title is from Blake:

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

And yet, I think I am using the quote in a way he would have strongly disagreed with. Some of the time ‘Minute particulars’ are not the place to be if you want to change the world. Especially in biology.

So, you are interested in medical education? Discuss.

No, still not finished but useable.

If you are interested in the history of science. Or put another way, how science can work when it is allowed to, check out this wonderful site: ‘Molecular Tinkering: How Edinburgh changed the face of molecular biology’.

I first became aware of ‘Edinburgh’ and its role in molecular biology by accident. In the late 1970’s I spent three months here doing a psychiatry elective, on the unit of Prof Bob Kendell. I stayed in self-catering University accommodation through the summer, knowing nobody, spending most of my free time tramping around the city on foot. Not always bored. There was a motley crew of people staying in the small hall, and one was a biologist from China. I had never met anybody from this far away and mysterious place. Of course, mostly I asked about barefoot doctors and the like, and questions that you would not now use your mobile phone to ask. No Alexa then. But I wondered why he was here. Molecular biology, he explained. Now, I could recite the story Jim Watson told about Watson and Crick, and even mention a few names who followed. But no more than a handful. ‘Recombinant DNA’ might have passed my lips, but please do not ask me to explain it. But from him, I learned something special has awoken. And for me it was literally a couple more years before the waves of this second revolution broke on the shores of MRC Clinical Training Fellowship applications.

A sample:

Throughout the 20th century film editors worked by identifying key scenes in their film reels, snipping precise frames and re-joining them to create a new narrative. This is exactly how the Murrays wanted to work with the long molecules of DNA. Restriction enzymes would be the editor’s scissors, making the cuts. As well as doing the cutting, the enzymes would be the editor’s eyes: recognising the precise frame at which to snip.

Or if you ever doubt that the space for discovery is infinite, listen to this from Noreen Murray:

“Looking back, it is amazing that Ken and I were the only people in the UK in the late 60s and early 70s to notice the potential of restriction enzymes.”

Or this, for a definition of what research leadership is all about:

Waddington had a real knack for selecting and recruiting interesting but often unproven biologists.