Many of the comments so far revolve around whether graduate students are students or not, as if being a student and an employee are somehow mutually exclusive or the fact that graduate students also take classes mean they must be equivalent to undergrads and ought to be given the same treatment. Clearly this is not the case. Acquiring the specialized knowledge that a PhD entails requires tremendous sacrifice (and, in the case of PhDs hoping to become professors, it often ends in tremendous disappointment). Universities have two primary functions - conducting research and teaching. This is the job of the university. Undergraduates don't have the specialized knowledge required to teach or to contribute substantially to research. Graduate students, however, do both of these jobs. Indeed, they are absolutely essential to the functioning of the university. And while the average time to completion for science and engineering doctorates hovers around 5 years, it's not uncommon to find humanities PhDs who take 8 years or more to complete their dissertations. This isn't because they're lazy. This is because the competition for academic posts is brutal, the expertise expected of them is vast, and, more to the point, because they're busy working. Universities are subjecting students to increasingly unjustifiable tuitions and pocketing massive profits couched as expanded endowments. Pretending like graduate students are just really smart, really old, really slow-to-catch-on interns and not a part of their extremely lucrative business operations just adds insult to injury.
>Undergraduates don't have the specialized knowledge required to teach or to contribute substantially to research. Graduate students, however, do both of these jobs.
I don't think grad/undergrad is the right distinction here. I was employed by my undergrad-only liberal arts alma-mater as a teaching assistant and research assistant. And the college employed many of my classmates in other positions. We weren't exploited like many graduated students are, but another institution could have treated us worse.
To this point and the point below about undergrads and specialized knowledge: yes, you're absolutely right. I should not have said that undergrads don't have the specialized knowledge to teach. Plenty of undergrads make great TAs, and teaching assistants are a critical part of the learning process at most universities. What I should have said is that courses are not taught by (the role of the teacher is held by) undergraduates but by professors and graduate students, who are responsible for the planning, content, and instruction, and for the TAs that assist them. The only point I'm trying to make is that graduate students are given substantial full-time-equivalent jobs and that there place and role in the university ought to reflect this.
> college employed many of my classmates in other positions
And how many classmates were not employed? Far more. So yes, the grad/undergrad distinction is valid. Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.
> Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.
I agree paid less, but disagree about "boring" research jobs. It probably depends on your school and your major. Nuclear Engineering at NC State got me to research molecular dynamics GPU techniques (this was around 2010) to simulate rare events (such as radiation-resistant material interactions) in order to get real-world simulation times to the order of milliseconds, which is a whopping 1000x speedup from the usual microseconds. I got access to the school's supercomputers just like any other physics grad.
My work later moved to the CASL (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs[0]) umbrella, and I was not the only one. None of the topics were boring, and the general impression I got from the department head was that undergrads were as capable but just requiring slightly more guidance.
It was a great funnel for getting undergrads to continue their research to grad school and ultimately to a PhD. I did not continue, but still have several friends that are pursuing their PhDs.
In University of Washington it is fairly common for advanced undergrads to be employed as TAs/RAs. They are considered Academic Student Employees just like grad students and are represented by the union.
Agreed. My friends who were at Brown University about 50 years ago were undergraduate TAs in computer science. It was a prestigious position, and they still exist in every course there.
I worry about breaking Stack Overflow into pieces - I think it functions extremely well as the be-all and end-all for copy-paste code bandaging. But AI is a perfect place to draw a dividing line and create a question and answer culture uniquely appropriate to AI. As Stack Exchange continues to look for ways to expand the brand by fragmenting their own universe I can only hope they'll choose as wisely as they did this time.
I don't mind the OOP-functional debate. I think that encouraging developers to try out radically different approaches to programming and to regularly reconsider their implications is extremely healthy for the ecosystem as a whole even if there is a tendency to pendulum-swing too far in one direction before swinging too far in the other with only brief pause in a reasonable center. What I think isn't particularly helpful is reducing OOP to inheritance. I hardly ever have the chance to program in Ruby anymore (though I think it's quite a beautiful language and love the Ruby community), but I still find Sandy Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby to be an incredibly insightful look into "the good parts" of OOP. And for some really thoughtful OOP and functional discussions, watch Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software (check out, for example, "Functional core, imperative shell". I wish he was still producing screencasts every week. Even his parody talks elevate the programming conversation to levels that it's hardly ever able to reach otherwise.
Wow. If the "critical" temperature for superconductivity really does turn out to be determined by the density of electron pairs, as it now seems, I absolutely cannot wait to see what kind of theoretical frameworks end up coming out of this discovery.
This response is precisely what has made insecticides so incredibly dangerous for world agriculture. Documentaries like "The Vanishing of the Bees" and "More than Honey" do a great job highlighting just how criminally negligent the agriculture industry as a whole has been to bees. What I haven't seen is an analysis of how devastating the large-scale destruction of insect populations is to the world's ecosystem. We are essentially decimating the most productive food-producing species in the world and expecting not to have to pay for it in spades down the road.
Could you be more specific as to how pesticides have been criminally negligent to bees? This specific article is about neonicotinoids, which were introduced to replace pesticides with far worse impacts on the environment. Is there a source you can find that shows neonicotinoids as used in the wild being calamitous for bees?
I can find sources for you with commercial beekeepers pollinating canola crops seed-treated with neonicotinoids seeing no change in their colony survival at all.
No, I cited canola because it's the crop most widely treated with clothianidin --- virtually all North American canola is treated with neonicotinoids of some sort.
Also, your argument would be a bit stronger if canola wasn't the crop referred to in the study the BBC post is talking about.
Bees need some diversity in their diets. They consume nectar and pollen true, but that doesn't go far enough. If I offered you a diet of only Sugar cubes, Soya protein extract and Olive Oil you'd quickly die. Why? That diet has Carbs, Protein and Fat. That's everything a person needs!
It's a known issue that colonies cannot survive long term on substitutes. Why this is isn't clearly known yet but the assumption is that they are missing some dietary analogue to vitamin C.
Once again: I am not discussing bee diets. I brought up canola because (a) it's the crop discussed in the study we're commenting on, and (b) it's the worst-case scenario for bee exposure to neonicotinoids (virtually all canola crops are treated).
In fact: the idea that bee colonies would be stressed by a diet solely of oil rape nectar (note: no commercial bee colonies have such a diet, because they're moved around to take advantage of growing seasons elsewhere) favors my argument: it's another way in which bees working canola crops should do far worse, given neonic exposure, than they actually do.
> Is there a source you can find that shows neonicotinoids as used in the wild being calamitous for bees
The Swedish Board of Agriculture recently released a systematic review of scientific literature [0].
Bumblebees are more sensitive to subletal effects of neonicotinoids than honey bees [1][2]. There's a great variation in sociality, seasonality and living for various species of bees, which means the effects of neonicotinoids will vary between species [3][4][5].
A big issue is also that most studies only look for residue of neonicotinoids in plants or in the bee to figure out how calamitous they are. Even though many of the most used neonicotinoids have a high LD50 in bees [6], there are very few studies that look at the effects of the bees of the exposure. Instead of just looking at the individual level, more studies are needed that look at effects on sub-individual, hive and population level.
In rapeseed, there has been negative effects on the growth and reproduction of the bumblebee Bombus Terrestris linked to neonicotinoids [7][8]. And in [8] they also showed that Osmia Bicornis failed to create hives by rapeseed fields where clothianidin were used, but in average created 2.88 hives by non-treated fields.
[1] Cresswell JE, Page CJ, Uygun MB, Holmbergh M, Li Y et al. (2012b) Differential sensitivity of honey bees and bumble bees to a dietary insecticide (imidacloprid). Zoology 115: 365-371.
[2] Cutler GC, Scott-Dupree CD (2014) A field study examining the effects of exposure to neonicotinoid seed-treated corn on commercial bumble bee colonies. Ecotoxicology 23: 1755-1763.
[3] Thompson HM, Hunt LV (1999) Extrapolating from honeybees to bumblebees in pesticide risk assessment. Ecotoxicology 8: 147-166.
[4] Williams NM, Crone EE, Minckley RL, Packer L, Potts SG (2010) Ecological and life-history traits predict bee species responses to environmental disturbances. Biological Conservation 143: 2280-2291.
[5] Brittain C, Potts SG (2011) The potential impacts of insecticides on the life-history traits of bees and the consequences for pollination. Basic and Applied Ecology 12: 321-331.
[6] LD50 for imidacloprid, thiamethoxam and clothianidin for the honey bee Apis Mellifera is 0.02-0.08 μg per bee. For acetamiprid and thiacloprid it's 8.1-39 μg per bee. EFSA 2012.
[7] Goulson D (2015) Neonicotinoids impact bumblebee colony fitness in the field; a reanalysis of the UK’s Food & Environment Research Agency 2012 experiment. PeerJ 3: e854.
[8] Rundlöf M, Andersson GK, Bommarco R, Fries I, Hederström V et al. (2015) Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees. Nature 521: 77-80.
I believe the assertion is that in order to maintain the bee population at the level necessary to meet demands on agriculture given the extraordinary rise in the death rate of both individual bees and entire colonies, the beekeeping industry has had to import far more colonies per year.
If you have signed a pollination contract to provide 100 beehives for a commercial orchard and your colonies keep dying then in order to be sure you can perform your contract and not incur damages, you will make sure you have more than 100 beehives in order to allow for colony collapse.
Similarly if you are making honey. If you have the right to make honey over an area that will support 100 beehives but you know that 20 of them are going to die, ten you will put in 120 beehives.
Commercial beekeepers know how to create new colonies by artificially triggering the split/swarming process. Thus, the logical response of commercial beekeepers to the colony collapse disorder is to keep extra colonies around. It makes complete sense.
Unfortunately, I doubt a similar adaptation is happening in the wild. We are losing wild pollinators and that may have all kinds of negative effects on the ecosystem.
Active colonies != total bee population.
If the mortality rate is high, then you need more colonies with reproducing bees in them to maintain the population at a certain level.
Cite the whole context of that quote! They're referring to trends since the 1940s.
The varroa mite literally wiped out the feral honeybee population in the US. There are no more North American feral honeybees! Of course the long-term population trend is downward!
I'm not an academic researcher so I don't have the raw data that you want, but I think it's worth not missing the forest for the trees.
Bee populations have been demonstrably stressed for a very long time, and CCD and other more recent developments are yet another sign.
The need for beekeepers to aggressively split hives is a sign that things are going very badly for them, even if we manage to raise the number of colonies in the short term.
Note that there are plenty of other parts of our ecosystem that show signs of severe stress as well (e.g. amphibians, coral reefs, etc.); we may very well reach a tipping point where large swaths of various food chains catastrophically collapse.
I'm sorry, but respectfully, you've provided neither forest nor trees. I'm not an academic researcher either, but I feel as if I'm one of the few people on this thread that has heard of a varroa mite, or knows apis mellifera's actual role in the North American ecosystem. All I did was look stuff up. Can't everyone else do the same thing?
The 2006 date cited for CCD isn't the government acknowledging CCD. It's the first published reports of CCD in commercial colonies. It's not a giant conspiracy.
It's also worth knowing that overwintering losses stabilized after 2006, and commercial populations hit record numbers afterwards.
Clearly, there are bee stressors other than "colony collapse disorder". But beepocolypse advocates use the term "CCD" as a cudgel in any discussion about stressors or population losses. No, can't do that.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for this topic, but, respectfully, you are not an expert either and you're spreading a lot of incorrect information. It's clear you have little understanding other than what you can quickly google. Yes, we know about varroa. Many of us are beekeepers and have seen this firsthand and are plugged into local communities where we share data on hive populations and research.
Honeybee populations have not stabilized, although it is true that wintering losses have stabilized a lot in the last several years. Summer losses have been horrible in a worrying way, and we just don't understand why - this was unheard of in decades past. CCD specifically has been observed less in recent years but overall annual losses are not stabilizing and are far higher than economically acceptable. My data is from the USDA.
The overall message is that something (not all varroa) is still changing things now, and we don't quite understand it yet. Yes, the introduction of neonics also corresponds heavily to the worst of the varroa period and that should be taken into account. It doesn't mean varroa explains away every other problem.
The linked BBC article is only about non-honeybee species.
I'm not sure who your complaint is addressed to, honestly, and I don't see what you would prefer people be doing differently.
It seems like data collection in the US has always been at the colony count + mortality level, which has obvious limitations, such as not looking at the colony health. I'd presume that people are looking at getting better information, but rolling that out will take a lot of time.
OTOH, there are lots of other signs that bees, other pollinators, and many other parts of our ecosystem are under enormous stress. I think we should rightfully be alarmed, not because of the bee's direct effect on us, but because it is also a relatively well-measured bellwether for the status of other natural services that other species provide.
Are you saying we don't have enough data to warrant taking any action, or are you just unhappy at how this is being presented in the media? Note that action also includes finding more data.
I am objecting to arguing about honeybee population with people who believe that there is a large-scale endangered native apis mellifera population in the US, but can't cite sources backing that (surprising) assertion up.
Any actual statistic I find, I'm sure someone can come up with a Calvinball objection to. I wouldn't mind if those objections came with their own data, but they tend to take the form of "no data is available to support this argument, ergo it should instead be supportable from first-principles reasoning". And then you find out 6 comments into the thread that the assumed first principles include things like "there are gazillions of wild honeybees in the US and they're all dying due to neonicotinoids".
I like this response. It seems like jamwt is actually trying pretty hard not to be biased. If I were at Dropbox, I'd probably also want to point out that just about every competitor that's been listed here is a Dropbox copycat. On the other hand, we all know that great copycats come along all the time and do something new much better than the original. The real question about the value proposition for Dropbox is how its value proposition stacks up against competitors. I can't speak to Box and I don't think OneDrive has much going for it beyond being attached to the Microsoft ecosystem (which makes it the default winner for a whole bunch of Microsoft-oriented people and companies and the opposite for just about everyone else). On the other hand, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, etc., gives Google Drive a really strong position for eating into Dropbox. I haven't made up my mind yet - I've found a lot I don't like about Dropbox, but I've also found Google Drive to be riddled with problems, both from a UX standpoint and in terms of the basic architectural layout. If Dropbox does the right things over time, they can continue to offer the best value in the market - I'm just not sure I've seen them doing that recently.
I expected to hate this but I love it already. I'm not on the all-functional all-the-time bandwagon. I go functional when it suits what I'm building. But working with CSS is broken for many of the reasons that chibicode outlines - semantic css encourages specializes classes that end up duplicating lots of css properties. The functional CSS proposed here obviously isn't a complete solution - although it may be the case that "If you use functional CSS, when you add something new to a page, you'll rarely write any new CSS", you have to pay for it in all of the classes that you write. I've seen really well-structured SASS files that end up keeping duplication and class names to a minimum, but it's hard to do. I'm anxious to try this for myself and see how the tradeoffs play out in a real codebase.
