The Accounting Profession

A fellow American Certified Public Accountant posted this on “Facebook” today:

A message to young people who are thinking of being public accountants and that sort of thing. Something you should know. Accountants/auditors are despised almost as much as lawyers. Very early on you will find yourself between a Bull$hitter and the truth.

Problem for you is that you are in the spot of proving them wrong. Like a lawyer you cannot afford to take almost anything at face value. Should you do so you will at some point be a scapegoat or accused of being inco...mpetent. And by being an accountant you have joined the group that cannot ever say "I didn't know."

It is your job "to know". That is why, in my old age, I will prepare taxes for some friends for free, but will never sign those returns or accept money. The IRS/DOR will come after me if a person does not give me all the information . It was my job to know. Oh, and another thing, you won't be liked. You are coming between unscrupulous people if you do your job. BTW, there are more accountants in witness protection programs than there are hitmen in those same programs. I have just recently learned that wherever you are, that you will never escape being an accountant.

You will be accused of being untrusting, cynical. No, you won't be liked, unless you are corrupt or incompetent and can be manipulated. They would never want me to teach accounting because the class would clear out after the first session. LOL

Ancient RNA and Life

New Study Hints at Spontaneous
Appearance of Primordial DNA
April 6, 2015, University of Colorado, Boulder

The self-organization properties of DNA-like molecular fragments four billion years ago may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough to act as a basis for primitive life, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Milan.

While studies of ancient mineral formations contain evidence for the evolution of bacteria from 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago -- just half a billion years after the stabilization of Earth's crust -- what might have preceded the formation of such unicellular organisms is still a mystery. The new findings suggest a novel scenario for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms, said CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark, a study co-author.

A paper on the subject led by Tommaso Bellini of the University of Milan was published in a recent issue of Nature Communications. Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study include Professor David Walba, Research Associate Yougwooo Yi and Research Assistant Gregory P. Smith. The study was funded by the Grant PRIN Program of the Italian Ministries of Education, Universities and Research and by the U.S. National Science Foundation. 

The discovery in the 1980’s of the ability of RNA to chemically alter its own structure by CU-Boulder Nobel laureate and Distinguished Professor Tom Cech and his research team led to the development of the concept of an “RNA world” in which primordial life was a pool of RNA chains capable of synthesizing other chains from simpler molecules available in the environment. While there now is consensus among origin-of-life researchers that RNA chains are too specialized to have been created as a product of random chemical reactions, the new findings suggest a viable alternative, said Clark.

The new research demonstrates that the spontaneous self-assembly of DNA fragments just a few nanometers in length into ordered liquid crystal phases has the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds that connect together short DNA chains to form long ones, without the aid of biological mechanisms. Liquid crystals are a form of matter that has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of a solid crystal -- a liquid crystal may flow like a liquid, for example, but its molecules may be oriented more like a crystal.

“Our observations are suggestive of what may have happened on the early Earth when the first DNA-like molecular fragments appeared,” said Clark.

For several years the research group has been exploring the hypothesis that the way in which DNA emerged in the early Earth lies in its structural properties and its ability to self-organize. In the pre-RNA world, the spontaneous self-assembly of fragments of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) may have acted as a template for their chemical joining into polymers, which are substances composed of a large number of repeating units.

“The new findings show that in the presence of appropriate chemical conditions, the spontaneous self assembly of small DNA fragments into stacks of short duplexes greatly favors their binding into longer polymers, thereby providing a pre-RNA route to the RNA world,” said Clark.

http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2015/04/06/new-study-hints-spontaneous-appearance-primordial-dna

Unreliable Reseach Is Booming

Science and Medicine Have ‘Publication Pollution’ Problem, according to Medical Ethicist

Date:  April 3, 2015

Source:  NYU Langone Medical Center – via Science Daily
Summary:  The scientific community is facing a ‘pollution problem’ in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the “trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine,” according to one of the country’s leading medical ethicists.

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center, shares these and other observations in a commentary publishing April 3 in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

"The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy."

In his commentary, Dr. Caplan describes several causes of publication pollution:

• The proliferation of journals that recruit authors who pay to get their articles published. Despite having substandard or no peer view, these "predatory publishers" now comprise an estimated 25 percent of all open-access journals. "Not only do they provide opportunities for the unscrupulous in academia and industry to pad their curriculum vitaes and bibliographies with bogus articles and editorial appointments, they also make it difficult for those involved in the assessment and promotion of scholars to discern value from junk," writes Dr. Caplan.

• Research misconduct, like falsifying or fabricating data or concealing serious violations. Fourteen percent of scientists report that their colleagues falsify data, and 72 percent report other questionable practices, according to one 2009 study published in PLoS One.

• Plagiarism, which, according to a 2010 Nature article was "staggering," requiring editors to spend "inordinate amounts of time" checking submissions they receive.

According to Dr. Caplan: "All these polluting factors detract from the ability of scientists and physicians to trust what they read, devalue legitimate science, undermine the ability to reproduce legitimate findings, impose huge costs on the publication process, and take a toll in terms of disability and death when tests, treatments, and interventions are founded on faulty claims."

Dr. Caplan proposes a national meeting of leaders in science and medicine to lead a sustained challenge to proactively and aggressively go after this pollution problem.

"The currency of science is fragile, and allowing counterfeiters, fraudsters, bunko artists, scammers, and cheats to continue to operate with abandon in the publishing realm is unacceptable," he asserts.

 

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by NYU Langone Medical Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150403073439.htm

Positive Quiddity: Falsifiability

Falsifiability or refutability of a statement, hypothesis, or theory is an inherent possibility to prove it to be false. A statement is called falsifiable if it is possible to conceive an observation or an argument which proves the statement in question to be false. In this sense, falsify is synonymous with nullify, meaning not "to commit fraud" but "show to be false". Some philosophers argue that science must be falsifiable.

For example, by the problem of induction, no number of confirming observations can verify a universal generalization, such as All swans are white, yet it is logically possible to falsify it by observing a single black swan. Thus, the term falsifiability is sometimes synonymous to testability. Some statements, such as It will be raining here in one million years, are falsifiable in principle, but not in practice.

The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper’s scientific epistemology “falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. This is often epitomized in Wolfgang Pauli famously saying, of an argument that fails to be scientific because it cannot be falsified by experiment, "it is not only not right, it is not even wrong!"

Overview

The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to prove hypotheses like "All swans are white" or to induce them from observational data. Popper argued that this would require the inference of a general rule from a number of individual cases, which is inadmissible in deductive logic. However, if one finds one single black swan, deductive logic admits the conclusion that the statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of proving them.

For a statement to be questioned using observation, it needs to be at least theoretically possible that it can come in conflict with observation. A key observation of falsificiationism is thus that a criterion of demarcation is needed to distinguish those statements that can come in conflict with observation and those that cannot (Chorlton, 2012). Popper chose falsifiability as the name of this criterion.

My proposal is based upon an asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability; an asymmetry which results from the logical form of universal statements. For these are never derivable from singular statements, but can be contradicted by singular statements.

—Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 19

Popper stressed that unfalsifiable statements are important in science. Contrary to intuition, unfalsifiable statements can be embedded in — and deductively entailed by — falsifiable theories. For example, while "all men are mortal" is unfalsifiable, it is a logical consequence of the falsifiable theory that "every man dies before he reaches the age of 150 years".  Similarly, the ancient metaphysical and unfalsifiable idea of the existence of atoms has led to corresponding falsifiable modern theories. Popper invented the notion of metaphysical research programs to name such unfalsifiable ideas.  In contrast to Positivism, which held that statements are meaningless if they cannot be verified or falsified, Popper claimed that falsifiability is merely a special case of the more general notion of criticizability, even though he admitted that empirical refutation is one of the most effective methods by which theories can be criticized. Criticizability, in contrast to falsifiability, and thus rationality, may be comprehensive (i.e., have no logical limits), though this claim is controversial even among proponents of Popper's philosophy and critical rationalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Toward Cancer Vaccines

Personal Cancer Vaccine Research

'Exciting' Say Experts
By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website, April 3, 2015

Tailor-made cancer vaccines that target unique genetic errors in a patient's tumor have been developed in the US.

Safety tests on three people, published in the journal Science, showed the immune system could be trained to fight skin cancers.

The American team say the early results mark a "significant step" towards personalized cancer vaccines.

The charity Cancer Research UK called the tests an "exciting but very early-stage trial".

UV light can transform healthy skin cells into deadly melanomas by damaging the DNA.

The tumors are a genetic mess, containing hundreds of random mutations that are different in every patient.

Neoantigens

The mutations can change the proteins that stick out from the surface of cells and act like identifying flags.

The team, mainly based in St Louis and Oklahoma City, analysed the genetic mutations to predict the new and unique flags that would be flown by the cancer cells.

A computer algorithm then analysed the new flags, known as neoantigens, to decide which would be the best targets for a vaccine.

Personalized vaccines were given to three patients with advanced tumors in 2013. All had already been treated with another therapy - ipilimumab.

One was in remission and has stayed cancer-free; another still has stable tumors; and the third patient's tumor shrank in the months after the vaccine before returning to its original size and remaining stable.

The team are, at this stage, testing just the safety of the vaccine and whether it provokes an immune response.

They say it was successful on both counts.

Hurdles

One of the researchers, Dr Gerald Linette, said: "Our team is very encouraged by the quality of the immune response directed against the melanoma neoantigens in all three patients.

"Our results are preliminary, but we think the vaccines have therapeutic potential."

His colleague, Dr Beatriz Carreno, added: "These findings represent a significant step toward more personalized immunotherapies."

The personalized vaccine approach has a number of hurdles to clear.

For a start, proper clinical trials are needed to prove that the immune boost actually makes a difference to controlling the tumor.

There are also questions about cost and the time it takes - currently three months - to develop each person's vaccine.

However, if the approach proves successful it could be useful in other highly mutated cancers such as those found in the lung.

'Promising'

They may also have a role in breast and ovarian cancers in women with BRCA mutations, such as the Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie, which also tend to be very mutated.

Dr Alan Worsley, of Cancer Research UK, said: "This exciting but very early-stage trial shows that it may be possible to create vaccines that are tailored to the specific genetic mistakes in a patient's cancer.

"At the moment it's not clear how effective this immunotherapy would be at killing cancer cells in the body and improving survival, but this promising study sets the stage for creating vaccines that are designed to target each patient's individual tumor in the future."

Prof Caroline Springer, who works on new drugs for melanoma at the Institute for Cancer Research, told the BBC News website: "I think it's very interesting.

"It's a very positive results and it's good that it's safe, but it's quite early days.

"Ipilimumab can have long-lasting effects on its own. The vaccine has mounted an immune response but it is difficult to tell if that amounts to an anti-tumor response if it is already responding to ipilimumab."

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32162799

The Father of Subatomic Physics

Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM< FRS; (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was an English physicist. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London and appointed to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in 1884.

In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large value for their charge-to-mass ratio. Thus he is credited with the discovery and identification of the electron; and with the discovery of the first subatomic particle. Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis Willianm Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph.

Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases.

Thomson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 12 June 1884 and served as President of the Royal Society from 1915 to 1920.

Biography

On 22 December 1884 Thomson was chosen to become Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge. The appointment caused considerable surprise, given that candidates such as Richard Glazebrook were older and more experienced in laboratory work. Thomson was known for his work as a mathematician, where he was recognized as an exceptional talent.

One of Thomson's greatest contributions to modern science was in his role as a highly gifted teacher. One of his students was Ernest Rutherford, who later succeeded him as Cavendish Professor of Physics. In addition to Thomson himself, seven of his research assistants and his son won Nobel Prizes in physics. His son won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for proving the wavelike properties of electrons.

He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906, "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases." He was knighted in 1908 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1912. In 1914 he gave the Romanes Lecture in Oxford on "The atomic theory". In 1918 he became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained until his death. Joseph John Thomson died on 30 August 1940 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Sir Isaac Newton.

Discovery of the Electron

Several scientists, such as William Prout and Norman Lockyer, had suggested that atoms were built up from a more fundamental unit, but they envisioned this unit to be the size of the smallest atom, hydrogen. Thomson, in 1897, was the first to suggest that the fundamental unit was more than 1,000 times smaller than an atom, suggesting the subatomic particle now known as the electron. Thomson discovered this through his explorations on the properties of cathode rays. Thomson made his suggestion on 30 April 1897 following his discovery that Lenard rays could travel much further through air than expected for an atom-sized particle. He estimated the mass of cathode rays by measuring the heat generated when the rays hit a thermal junction and comparing this with the magnetic deflection of the rays. His experiments suggested not only that cathode rays were over 1,000 times lighter than the hydrogen atom, but also that their mass was the same in whichever type of atom they came from. He concluded that the rays were composed of very light, negatively charged particles which were a universal building block of atoms. He called the particles "corpuscles", but later scientists preferred the name electron which had been suggested by George Johnstone Stoney in 1891, prior to Thomson's actual discovery.

In April 1897, Thomson had only early indications that the cathode rays could be deflected electrically (previous investigators such as Heinrich Hertz had thought they could not be). A month after Thomson's announcement of the corpuscle he found that he could reliably deflect the rays by an electric field if he evacuated the discharge tube to a very low pressure. By comparing the deflection of a beam of cathode rays by electric and magnetic fields he obtained more robust measurements of the mass to charge ratio that confirmed his previous estimates. This became the classic means of measuring the charge and mass of the electron.

Thomson believed that the corpuscles emerged from the atoms of the trace gas inside his cathode ray tubes. He thus concluded that atoms were divisible, and that the corpuscles were their building blocks. In 1904 Thomson suggested a model of the atom, hypothesizing that it was a sphere of positive matter within which electrostatic forces determined the positioning of the corpuscles. To explain the overall neutral charge of the atom, he proposed that the corpuscles were distributed in a uniform sea of positive charge. In this "plum pudding" model the electrons were seen as embedded in the positive charge like plums in a plum pudding (although in Thomson's model they were not stationary, but orbiting rapidly).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson

Ten Great Film Directors

Best Film Directors of All Time

By Wendy Adams, Screen Junkies

Hollywood has produced the best film directors of all time who made American films famous throughout the world. Each director’s genius is found in the titles of their most memorable films that have delighted and engrossed audiences for decades.

1. John Ford The tenth child of Irish immigrants, Ford followed his brother Frank to Hollywood where he began his career as an actor before breaking into directing. Ford directed some of the most famous westerns like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” Ford won four Best Director Oscars for “The Quiet Man,” “How Green Was My Valley,” The Grapes of Wrath” and “Stagecoach.”
2. William Wyler His directing career lasted 45 years and began with silent films. Wyler had a reputation for being a difficult task master, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest actors. He was nominated 12 times for an Academy Award and won the Oscar for Best Director for "Mrs. Miniver," "The Best Years of Our Lives" and “Ben Hur.” Among his best films are “Funny Girl,” “Friendly Persuasion” and “Roman Holiday.”
3. Frank Capra An immigrant from Sicily, Capra settled in California with his family. He began his film career as an extra in movies and later worked as a gag writer for several years before being promoted to director for short films. His first serious directing job came from Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures. Capra won three Best Directors Oscars for “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It with You” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
4. John Huston In addition to directing, Huston was also a screenwriter and a character actor like his father, Walter Huston. His film career became serious when he began collaborating on scripts and directing for Warner Brothers. His most memorable films are “The African Queen,” “Chinatown” and “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.”
5. Alfred Hitchcock The Master of Suspense began his film career as a title designer at a studio in London. He got his first chance at directing when he replaced a director who became ill. He worked as an assistant director at Gainsborough Pictures. His directing career was launched when he directed “The Pleasure Garden” in 1925. A few of his best known films are “Vertigo,” “Psycho” and “The Birds.”
6. Howard Hawks In college he studied engineering but was enticed by Hollywood. Hawks began his film career as a production assistant for Cecil B. DeMille and other major Hollywood film directors as he worked his way up to director. A few of his most memorable films are “His Girl Friday,” “Bringing Up Baby” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
7. George Cukor Cukor starting his directing career on Broadway in New York City before moving to Hollywood to direct films. He was hired to direct “Gone With The Wind” but constant battles with producer David O’Selznick got him fired. In “The Women” he amazed audiences by filming the fashion show scenes in brilliant color during the black and white film era. A few films he directed are “The Philadelphia Story Story,” “Adam’s Rib” and “The Corn is Green.”
8. Orson Welles A jack of all trades in the world of entertainment, Welles was a successful radio personality, actor, screenwriter and director who started a panic with his broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” when listeners believed the attack of aliens was real. Among his best films are “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
9. Billy Wilder Wilder began his professional career as a lawyer, a foreign correspondent and finally entered Hollywood as a screenwriter with greats like “The Apartment” and “Sabrina.” His best direction included “The Lost Weekend,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Some Like It Hot.”
10. Stephen Spielberg He is of the most prominent writers, producers and directors in Hollywood. What makes him stand out is the number of powerful films he has directed. His resume includes “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.,” “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.”

http://www.screenjunkies.com/movies/actors-directors/best-film-directors-of-all-time/