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Assuming you are reporting a zone of inhibition, depending on journal you would at minimum report the radius (or diameter) of the inhibition zone with a some measure of variation (e.g. standard deviation) from replicates. Often a representative image is also requested for the supplement at least, showing that there was even diffusion and/or that inhibition war properly assessed. It depends on what you want to express and where you want to submit it, though. If e.g. the compound is to be tested against established antimicrobial substances, it would make sense to follow the scheme outlined by clinical lab standard initiatives (e.g. https://clsi.org/standards/products/microbiology/documents/m02/ , CDC standards etc.). For more technical work one can follow guidelines and protocols from societies like the ASM: https://asm.org/getattachment/2594ce26-bd44-47f6-8287-0657aa9185ad/Kirby-Bauer-Disk-Diffusion-Susceptibility-Test-Protocol-pdf.pdf I.e. if you want to publish in those journals.

I think it is impossible not to use the brain. But it is a matter of for what? I do think that reading ability has changed, on average. But not because folks are not reading, but rather what they are reading. The trend seems to go toward a lot but short texts, so folks may be very good in following many disparate threads, but struggle with more complex, in-depth texts, for example. I also have little doubt that basic arithmetic skills have degraded (getting the average student to calculate the molarity of a solution is a rather painful exercise). With age, things become less flexible, in part because our brain has been exercised in certain patterns. But thinking a bit more regarding habits of the newest generation (i.e. growing up with cellphones and the internet) there is of course always the risk that the older generation just doesn't "get" the changes and extrapolate things needlessly. It has happened with all new technologies, for example. On the other hand, looking at the generations of college students, I do think that I see several shifts, some probably accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

So far there is not even an inkling that this would work for biological systems. Critical reactions that we commonly associate with life happen at membranes. There are quite a few reasons for that. The most simple one is to counter diffusion. Molecules need to be in sufficient proximity for anything to happen and if important metabolites diffuse out of range, you are out of luck. In addition, gradients created with membranes are critical to create energy. Early life does not have the luxury of high-energy containing organic molecules. The formation of some sort of compartment is almost certainly a prerequisite to life as joigus mentioned.

I am not sure which article you are referring, to regardless of whether there are specific pushes, the general system nudges folks toward polarization in a self-perpetuating manner. The flavor of the week can change, but that does not change the system as a whole. Here is an article on that topic https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/ Here is a paper outlining how social media algorithms limit exposure to information to users: Levy, Ro'ee. 2021. "Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment." American Economic Review, 111 (3): 831-70.DOI: 10.1257/aer.20191777 And another specifically talking about polarization. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.07.013 In other words, conflict and polarization are in-built into the system. While actors can manipulate certain messages, it works based on the already manipulative backbone of the system. The papers might not be freely available, though. Also, due to the way social media works, it is difficult to really separate external from organic interactions to some degree. There is a whole system of influences whose role is basically doing barely disguised commercials and it is easy to assume that political influencing is part of the game, too. Of course, for a given country one might complain about undue influences originating elsewhere, but in an increasing globalized world and especially on the internet borders do not mean much. There are folks in different countries demanding "first amendment" rights, for example. Conversely, in the USA the GOP has weaponized the concept of wokeness, which originally referred to the awareness of systemic injustice. So even if external actors are pushing this conflict, it is not as if it was designed by foreign entities. The clearest and most obvious issue is probably data harvesting and use. But then the horse appears to have left the barn, and established its own ranch with blackjack and hookers and its own megacorporation (though I acknowledge that its abuse by an authoritarian state is more worrisome than by a company- at this point at least) .

I am not sure whether user preference is a any better, though. User engagement is the business model for almost all social media, so things that provoke and outrage are high on the list of content being pushed. These alone are enough to destabilize and radicalize, without the need of an external agenda.

That is something I am actually uncertain about. I.e. whether the response can be modulated in strength. The response tends to be on mild side with various release of e.g. dopamins, cannabinoids, opioids and so on. For some of them, we know that there is a release even from simple pleasurable interactions (e.g. talking to a friend). While the perceived effect might change in strength, I am not sure whether the measurable biomarkers respond in kind. Of similar interest are nocebo effects

The placebo effect is quite interesting, but suffers to some degree from bad data. It generally does not work well for extreme or acute conditions, but the effect is more pronounced (as expected) when it comes to chronic and more subjective measures (i.e. chronic rather than acute pain, for example). In some cases, it is not the placebo itself that has a positive affect, but the mere enrolment into a controlled trial (e.g. heightened interactions with medical professionals). Some neuroimaging strategies indicate that there are certain changes in the brain and it has been speculated that there is a connection to the immune and inflammation pathways. Animal studies have shown that deception might not be necessary for certain types of outcome (though in some cases it is the experimentator/pet owners that are deceived).

Well, you would not need knowledge of the DNA, just something containing the DNA. Yes, gene therapy is still something that is not widely available. Though once methods are more streamlined there is the a good chance that certain treatments will become more widely available (provided that the health care system is working somewhat). The rationale is that certain ongoing treatments that could be replaced by gene therapy treatment could over someone's lifetime be more expensive.

Not exactly my field, but the neutral theories of evolution have more or less become the base model. From my perspective it is largely driven by the observation that most mutations have little to no phenotypical impact on the molecular level. The functional sites (i.e. parts that are essential to the function) are much sparser and those are the parts that are usually conserved (i.e. there is selective pressure to maintain them).

This sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

In that case why not have a genetic algorithm create an AI-driven curriculum and finance system that incorporates sustainable efficiency optimization using big data ecosystems that drill down toward a holistic education with resilient feedback logistics that minimizes pain points and provides an optimized customer journey that synergizes with hyperlocal strategies, aligns with global retargeting and moves the needle towards fully realized returns on investments?

I will also add that Nobel Prices are not a good indicator of the quality of education, but rather of research and the ability to attract researchers.

Public schools publish their budgets. I have not idea why blockchains would be relevant here. You have noted issues of students getting loans for higher education, now you are proposing the same thing, just with the added volatility of crypto? Sorry this seems like a typically tech-bro approach. I.e. doing the same stuff but just at some trendy stuff and call it disruptive. Similar as with any complex topic one cannot just start with a proposed solution and try to make the problem fit the solution. The first step is to fully diagnose the issue. And there is a lot if literature out there to dig through. But that takes time and effort. Again, something that many proponents of fast solutions do not want to invest.

No one said that it should be. The question is only who is paying and what is the consequence of it. I think I have explained why having students shouldering the cost will drive down education quality. At this point you seem to have a certain thing in mind and keep arguing against that. I.e. you do not seem to follow the arguments being made, I am afraid. You are missing the point. In economic models, salaries increase naturally with productivity. However, in teaching there is a cap. I.e. each teacher can only deal with so many students. Your "perfect" student/teacher ratio would be a hard cap, for example. So let's say there is a linear correlation between productivity and salary. And let's say in the past a teacher teaches 30 students and the worker can produce 100 items. Now moving forward let's say new instruments allow the worker to produce 200 items in the same time. So the worker basically replaces another worker and doubles the salary. Meanwhile the teacher continues to teach 30 students (stagnant productivity) and does not get a raise. Now in yet another decade new technology doubles worker productivity again to 400. Now workers make 4x the salary, but the teachers keeps the same salary. Now, this might not appear to be a big problem, but if many sectors increase productivity (which is a general trend, due to e.g. automation), and therefore most folks make more money, then cost also tend to increase due to overall higher consumption (i.e. inflation). So either teacher wages will have to increase, too (though they tend to trail behind) or they will need to find another job to survive. In Universities professors are usually quite competitive in other job markets (to some degree) due to the skill sets they have. So either universities pay decent salaries (though they have been overall stagnant when inflation-adjusted in many places) or they just take different jobs. The reliance on faculty to teach and the restriction on how many folks can be taught (especially hands-on in applied fields) drives costs up. The one way to deal with it are things like online courses. But as it turns out, the outcomes with this type of learning is usually of low quality.

I remember now, it was called "cost disease" or the Baumol effect. Effectively it is because salaries in sectors without productivity gains see salary increases, because they are competing with jobs which do. That being said, there are ideological reasons (and stupidity) which maintains professor salaries still relatively low to their industrial counterparts. Though increasing dissatisfaction seems to drive more folks to seek industrial jobs, even among tenured folks.

Here you show a very narrow definition of education: a fiscal exchange for a career. However, education also has the role of broaden horizons, create thinkers, develop a space to solve problems that folks have not thought about, or things that one cannot monetize. I refer back to the competing goals I mentioned a couple of times. Realistically, if a shortcut to a job is all that is needed, the solution is simple. Get rid of education altogether and have corporations set up their own little education enclaves. That way, they can train folks to do exactly what they want. That, however, does not sound much like education to me. That sounds to me like yet another goal. Not only be suitable for a career, but better than another. So you are talking about competitiveness, which creates other incentives. To me a good education is supposed to make the student a better version of themselves and not just better than Dave. INow and I mentioned the complexity of the issue. It is not straightforward in terms of what education is supposed to achieve and therefore metrics are are often imperfect and create incentives that are counterproductive, as I mentioned in my previous post. Just because you measure something, does not mean that you understood the gist of the problem. Finding the right measure is a science in itself. Public funding of universities tend to keep cost down. I can throw a whole slate of data at it showing how private schools are more expensive and how tuition focused universities (even with partial public funding) are usually more wasteful than publicly funded universities. One of the reasons is simple and I mentioned those before. There is only a weak incentive to put or keeps bums on a bench (up to a certain degree). Therefore publicly funded universities have much less overhead in terms of recruitment, student services amenities and so on. In countries like USA and Canada which heavily rely on tuition, the ratio between faculty spending (i.e. cost for professors) relative to administration and support services is roughly 60 vs 40% (and typically worse in private schools). Conversely in public funded universities that ratio is about 70% profs to 30% overhead. In other words, you get more teaching per buck if spend publicly. While there is a "waste" as unsuitable student get into public funded universities, you then have the mentioned weed-out courses which drops the student count over the semesters. In tuition-dependent universities the incentive is to keep the around as long possible regardless of suitability so that they can pay tuition + dorm+ food +gym membership. In other words, it creates incentives that run counter to what folks might consider a good education. I do not think that loans are a good way to go, but instead I believe that universities should have a steady base-funding that focuses on its core mission, rather than just making students (or their parents) happy in order to get their money. Edit: Another piece of information with regard to cost of higher education: The cost will increase over time relative to regular products as there is a cap on how productivity can be increase in teaching relative to product costs. Having a lower ratio between students and teachers is therefore going to disproportionately increase cost, even if overhead is kept down. There is a specific economic term for this phenomenon that eludes me presently. Especially STEM education is therefore expensive and if paid out of pocket, will be prohibitive to low to mid-income families. Public funding is pretty much the only reason why we have an education system rather than education enclaves in the first place.

A bit about this one here. I am a bit uncertain what your precise point is, but the University administration tends to be reactive. I.e. when politics changes the situation, they need to adapt to it. Reducing public spending effectively makes them operate more like companies. And at least for faculty it the outcome is obvious: more financial constraints on students, and a shift towards getting more students in, keep them happy and often that goes at cost of teaching quality. In the old system in Germany (which has changed in the last decades, but still remains free), students had only a limited number of tries to pass tests (which were often applied). So it was not unusual that mandatory chemistry classes would result in >60% of biology students to drop or switch degrees within the first two semesters, which more being weeded out in the subsequent ones. These types of failure rates would be considered inacceptable in paid systems, especially nowadays. I am not that familiar with the UK system, but looking at funding trends, I suspect the same issues as in North America. Compared to that, in other European countries 80-90% of the funds are from public sources. The impact of private spending on quality is actually somewhat well documented. The study is a few years old, but the trend has accelerated: Studies have shown that grade inflation is not only tied to marketizing teaching, but it is also related to monitoring teaching itself. I.e. when teaching outcome is tied to teaching evaluation, it provides incentives for teachers to make their lives easier by simply giving out higher grades. Depending on job security and overall system (i.e. pressure from board, administration, students, parents etc.) the outcome may be more or less pronounced. As a consequence, in Germany grade inflation is also observed, but at a lower degree. The suggestions made by OP do appear to try to introduce similar mechanisms into K12 (though, to be fair, they are already on the way) and I just simply cannot see how emphasizing the bad parts of a system is somehow going to end up beneficial. It is mostly disruptive to the few parts that keep the system limping along.

I have worked in universities in three different countries with rather vastly different systems. And compared to public funded universities it is harder to find a "good" crop of students when there are financial constraints. Ivy league's are a bit of an exception, but they do have more leverage over their students than other institutions. Which to a large degree is deceptive as it is more an indicator of job situation than the quality of school. Based on which data then? What are the right folks? For that matter, what would be the wrong folks? So learning for exams again. Full circle, I guess.

I think you are unaware of the fact that the system is already changing, just not in a good direction. And that the proposed changes are quite similar to what is currently causing issues. I will also add that in recent times, there is a strong urge to be disruptive basically just for its own sake. The tech industry has been leading in that, often without much thought on the consequences, nor measurement of the outcomes. I think there is an overall trend towards superficial but seemingly "cool" solutions, something that I have been also seeing in the science world. Slow, methodical and thorough approaches do not fit the fast-paced trends anymore. And I think that is a problem as the these fast changes also create something like learning amnesia. Same solutions are presented again and again in just fancier packages, but without any substantial improvements. Rather unfortunately, I do see that with students, too. Complex research questions are of low interest, a quick fixes and instant gratification is what folks want.

That is at the core of the problem, I think. Education is highly complex and with often competing goals. For example, this is actually the result of treating students as "customers". You see, in systems where Universities increasingly rely on tuition fees, there is also the push from administration to treat students as clients, rather than trainees. As a consequence, higher weight will be given to student evaluations, as the administration wants to have happy clients. The big issue is that students (and parents) do not actually know much about effective knowledge transfer and learning. This is a prime example. Realistically only few students actually get to that point in university, and the rate is dropping. K12 has a lot guardrails which to some degree are needed, otherwise students will be completely lost, but theoretically in university they are supposed to learn to learn without them. Thinking that this is easy, clearly shows a lack of insight into the difficulty of this process. Going back to putting power to the customers: what students really hate are courses that are considered hard and which require applying knowledge as well as working on gaining new ones. What they love are classes that can be passed by memorizing power point slides. There is a clear correlation between grades and ease of course and the resulting evaluation (i.e. how popular a course is). In other words, given the choice, folks will take the easy way. The administration reacts to these desires and force faculty to make things easier to pass more students. And now folks are saying that the degree is not worth anything. Well that is what you get if you do not allow faculty to keep certain standards. Putting even more power to the customers will just accelerate this process. Given the option to work hard in order to gain complex skills and have an easy time but get high grades, you will see most folks choosing the latter and especially over the pandemic, the proportion of the first group (the ones that make teaching fun) are dropping rapidly.

Well they might be more careful, but it only means that they are spending money to make money, but not necessarily to educate. Private universities spend relatively more on administration than faculty in private institutions. They spend more on extra-curricular things like recruitment and retention compared to teaching and training. There is a lot of incentive to upsell with amenities (dorms, food court etc.), which bloats the budget for making money. That is not to say that universities are not starting that trend, too (at least in North America, and I believe UK). A big reason is that the governments are either cutting or maintaining educational funds (which, with inflation is the equivalent of cuts), but at the same time try to encourage enrolment. This creates perverse financial incentives for the universities to reclaim the money from students. In contrast, in systems where there are virtually no tuition fees (i.e. state-funded, like in Germany), administrative bloat and waste is minimal and in many ways the educational outcome is better, as students have to do more work themselves.

This comment actually demonstrates what I have been talking about. The role of education is fuzzy, with sometimes contradictory goals. Let's start with self-sufficient: what is required to be self-sufficient in a given role? Clearly, the required skill set is very different depending on the job. But especially for young folks, how and when do you know what career they will get into? Careers are unpredictable and often young folks need time well into adulthood to find their path and discover their interests where they want to hone their skills. How does it work if early on a parent decides that certain subjects should not be presented? The second part is universal, but again this is something that many folks do not want. The reasons is that the ability to learn is not easily quizzable and those excelling at it tend to be in the minority. However, parents often think that better grades equal better careers. So it is better for students to only have subjects where they can be easily trained to perform in tests. I.e. there is a desire to remove more complex topics (where you are forced to learn). This is a trend we now start to see in universities, where students have an increasing input on how they want to be taught. Having students/parent pre-determine what they want to learn is similarly bad as having patients determine their treatment. Most do not know what they need or what style of teaching works with them. As such diverse exposure is critical for young minds to find their path. The narrower educations gets, the more likely folks it is that folks will miss their mark. Specialization can only come after folks have a good idea of the the range that is out there. Moreover, learning to learn is the opposite of focused skill learning and it requires the broad exposure as you need to learn to integrate various forms and systems of knowledge, rather than excel in the application of a specialized form. Again, there are contradictory desires and with a presented pathway that is likely to fulfil neither.

Not really. You have not addressed what ultimately education should be about. You are saying that practical skills should be taught. Fine, but that is not necessarily what parents want. Right now, in the US there is a movement driven by teachers trying to dumb down students, by limiting their academic exposure to a very narrow view that is in line with their beliefs, but does not really have to have a foothold in reality. It may be something what certain parents want, but it will limit the intellectual capabilities of pupils. Moreover, parents are also likely not competent enough to determine a proper curriculum (which is one of the reasons why some of the demands are questionable). Funding of schools in the US is kind of screwy and compared other countries show more inequity in terms of funding and access to resources. I do not see how any of the suggestions made here would improve that. I will re-iterate that no one really knows what the "product" is supposed to be. Training folks to excel in certain types of tests is too narrow a view. Often the strength and weaknesses of a particular educational journey will only show up years later in life. It is therefore important to open up as many doors as possible for young folks, as no one can predict the path (and it is certainly not deterministic nor can we blame genes for the outcome). At best, the system would create hyperspecialized individuals based on what their parents might have thought to be worthwhile, potentially based on their limited perspective. And I think that this is the opposite of what an effective education should be (whatever we might think of effective). You need to have a broad basis while specialization starts later in University. I would avoid putting young folks on specific trajectories if we do not really know what would benefit them in the future. Adding random indices might provide the illusion of having some sort of objective measure, but if one is not sure what one should be measuring, it is rather useless in the end.

Also, in education the desired outcome is not well defined and sometimes contradictory (high grades vs education vs developing skillsets vs developing interests, universality vs elite, etc.). Focus on grades has in many ways resulted in training for tests and grade inflation and folks seem to get stuck on the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy.

Well, the issue that separate system have been in use specifically to avoid overflow, where contaminated sewage can overflow. In areas where weather patterns are shifting, this might become an increasing issue. Essentially what is the best solution really depends on the specific region.