Your story reminds me of this segment from Mr. Wizard that I saw as a child. This kid eats an apple while doing a hand stand, and I remember being amazed by it.
A large issue is that PIs have no training on how to manage people nor is there much protection for grad students (and practically none for postdocs). It is surprisingly common to hear stories of sexual harassment, or international researchers essentially being held captive by their advisors. The universities are motivated to maintain their public appearance, and so cases of harassment and mistreatment are either entirely ignored or dealt with quietly. This, in addition to pay issues, is also playing a significant role in the unionization efforts that are taking place across US universities.
Interestingly, this employment of algal cells to deliver drugs is far more in keeping with the original meaning of the word which became "robot" - namely, "robota", which in many languages refers to forced work or slavery. So, in a very real sense, these are robots.
These are robots in the sense that the origin of the word has this meaning, but in contemporary English use "robot" refers to some kind of electromechanical machine, or sometimes a piece of software. But in my mind engineered algal cells don't really fit with contemporary English use of the word.
Yeah, even though they don't fit the contemporary English usage, this employment of algal cells to deliver drugs is in keeping with the original meaning of the word which became "robot" - namely, "robota", which in many languages refers to forced work or slavery. So, in a very real sense, these are robots.
Using 'robot' to denote just any "worker" seems to make no (terminologically) decisional sense, not theoretical nor practical - you could find better options.
It is, in this case, like tying cleaning rags on the paws of a household cat, and saying "There, I have a robot".
This very odd "employment" (well) of the term 'robot' just had me check for the meaning a bit more deeply:
it appears that "robota" is related to work after the subject was forced to work, with limited choice, by a "predicament", a "change of condition", namely chiefly by being orphaned (cpr. related latin 'orbus').
That seems to be the field in which the word should move.
(It also seems that some people in wiktionary.org are doing a very good job.)
Know of a few people that have gotten dismissive comments to review better the work from X paper of Y author... when the person submitting is that same one.
It was interesting but not as good as I expected given that Herzog is quite brilliant. I think he got less of Gorbachev's time than he expected when he started.
Funny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.
I agree, there are a variety of plotting library options in Julia but they aren't nearly as developed/robust as matlab (e.g. quiver plots). There are a number of plotting functions that have completely changed how they work across versions and generally lack descriptive documentation. There have been several occasions where I had to give up and export my data into matlab to generate a plot. I also think the image analysis libraries are underdeveloped.
It is striking to me that this article doesn't discuss the negative impact such a technology will have on actors and translators. In fact, the author makes the surprising claim that there is a shortage of translators and voice actors, which is very hard to believe.
I am curious to hear what HN thinks of calling these things robots. These are frog embryos that have been surgically reshaped and had muscle cells implanted in them.
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