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| Boston University Credit: @chemtoolman |
The American Historical Association last week released a comprehensive snapshot of the entire discipline’s Ph.D. recipients. The project, Where Historians Work, tries to track where all of the 8,500 people who earned a doctorate from 2004 to 2013 landed jobs. About 7 percent of the recipients could not be found....
...Critics of the value of a history Ph.D. may find fodder in the history association’s project. Hover over some of the tiniest bubbles on an interactive slide, those representing just a single person, and you’ll see examples of people who may not have needed their Ph.D. for their current jobs: a rental-car clerk. A maintenance worker. An actor. A postal worker.
But the biggest bubbles tell a more hopeful story about the utility of a history Ph.D. The data show that those who earned history Ph.D.s in that time include 174 chief executives, 363 higher-education administrators, 320 nonprofessors doing history, 57 curators, and 82 editors. The point: History Ph.D.s don’t just stay in academe. They are everywhere.I admire this survey, and I encourage each field to do more of them. However, I find this trope of "they are everywhere" to be completely useless. Rather than saying "this is what you can do" or worse yet, "here is a story of one history Ph.D. who succeeded", I think it's far more useful to tell students and potential students "this is what you are likeliest to do, and here are the statistics to back that up."
1. Your firm failed to thoroughly investigate any unexplained discrepancy or failure of a batch or any of its components to meet any of its specifications, whether or not the batch has already been distributed (21 CFR 211.192).
Your firm invalidated out-of-specification (OOS) results without adequate investigation and scientific justification. Examples include:
....In March, 2017, you obtained OOS results for the [redacted] impurity during stability testing of [redacted] injection batches [redacted]. You suspected the analyst may have incorrectly rinsed the HPLC vials. New samples prepared and tested by a second analyst using both the original column and a new column, as well as old and new vials, also yielded OOS results. Although you lacked sufficient evidence, your investigation concluded that the OOS results were due to sample vial contamination. You invalidated the OOS results after obtaining passing results from testing retain samples.Rinsing HPLC vials??!?!?
The life sciences journal eLife is trying out a radical approach to peer review. Rather than deciding whether to publish a paper after peer review, an editor’s decision to send a paper for peer review will be a commitment to eventually publish it. The trial is optional and aims to recruit 300 papers. In the trial, the editor and referees will agree on what they want authors to address.
The authors can then make revisions, including more experiments; respond to criticisms; or withdraw the paper completely. The referee reports, editor’s decision letter, and authors’ response will be published alongside the final article. Reviewers can choose whether to remain anonymous.
The aim is to give more power to authors, say eLife editors Mark Patterson and Randy Schekman in an editorial. They also hope it will strengthen the review process, with referees gaining a reputation for the advice they give. Observers welcome the trial with caution. Raghuveer Parthasarathy, a physicist from the University of Oregon, worries that journal editors sifting through initial submissions are given more power. “It may bias the system further towards flashy papers from well-connected authors,” he says.This is a pretty interesting experiment, and it will be interesting to see if it produces anything sustainable...
BEIJING — At least 19 people have been killed and a dozen injured after a chemical plant exploded in southwest China, engulfing the plant in flames and throwing a thick plume of smoke into the sky.
The explosion erupted in an industrial park in Jiangan County, Sichuan Province, at about 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, the China News Service reported. Intense fires gutted a new-looking, three-story production building belonging to the Yibin Hengda Science and Technology Company, and windows of nearby buildings were shattered, a Sichuan news service said.
“I heard an enormous explosion, enormous, and felt tremors,” Liu Ping, an official in charge of the industrial park, told a Chinese news website. “We’re now checking DNA to confirm the list of fatalities.”
China’s grim record of accidents in factories and mines has improved in recent years, according to government statistics. They showed that 38,000 people died in work-related accidents last year, a fall of 12 percent from 2016.Sounds like it was a methanol plant, which would offer plenty of risk of explosion. Best wishes to those involved.
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| "Finally, we have found the Lost City of Acrolein!" Credit: cageclub.me |
