Help the National Academies out:
What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most to you? The National Academies are interested in developing useful and engaging print and web-based educational materials on the topics that you’d like to learn more about. They invite you to participate in a brief survey. You can find that survey here.
In the 2-minute survey you’ll be presented with a list of topics and asked to select the five that matter most to you. At the end, you can see how your answers compare with the results so far. And you can enter a drawing to receive a National Academies tote bag!
Let the National Academies know what topics you think they should focus on so they can be sure to provide you with materials that are informative and useful. Your participation is greatly appreciated.
Where’s the “None Of The Above” selection?
Oh, all right… I’ll muster some concern from the dusty corners of my cold, misanthropic mind.
[X] Energy
[X] Stem Cells
[X] Starting L4 and L5 colonies for people like me who can’t stand the stink and stupidity of his fellow humans anymore.
[X] How to get the gaming industry to produce more awesome open world games like Fallout 3, and stop the casual gaming threat represented by the Wii
[X] Determining how to get me to retirement and early as possible, and which overseas retirement destination has the best housing, hookers, gambling and weakest extradition agreements
Seriously, The experts are *not* spending enough time on that last one. There should be entire think tanks devoted to that.
I voted for the health topics and animal extinction.
QD,
sometimes you worry me…..
Any reason to care that the URL contains this little ditty:
& notice=DO_NOT_DISTRIBUTE_THIS_LINK
?
I’d have to say aging is the most important to me. But I am working on getting my Masters of Social Work and want to specifically work with the senior citizens in my country (USA). I also picked climate change, stem cell research, biodiversity, and ocean health.
I chose energy, climate change, biodiversity, education and learning, and ocean health. I’m really quite surprised that “ocean health” is not rated higher.
The oceans have been neglected for far too long, and are in bad shape. We seriously need more awareness about ocean health issues.
sometimes you worry me…..
Then my work is done. :-) Or something. I think. Wait, what?
That graph of responses was really interesting. My top five lined up with the (most-chosen) five of the graph. I have conservative friends whose graphs would be nearly inverted – national defense as #1 and so forth.
Quiet_Desperation:
Locking yourself into an airtight space in a vacuum to avoid the stink of your fellows might not be a winning strategy. But it might let you avoid a certain degree of stupidity, especially if jabbering “I’ll pray for you” is considered a legitimate reason to frogmarch the pious one right out the airlock.
Piffle. In a closed system like a space station you can process and clean the air to any level of purity you desire. It can smell like roses all the time if you like.
Why waste good biomass? Into the fertilizer heap with them after we remove the transplantable organs. All except for the brain, which will be put in the mass driver and ejected into into a sun-intersecting orbit.
mus wrote:
Those are exactly what I picked. It was really hard to limit myself to just 5, though. I expected ocean health to rank higher as well.
…
I also suggested computer technology and robotics. I don’t know if they are the most important topics, but they certainly have wide appeal and obvious practical application. Like sex bots for Quiet_Desperation, for one. I can see the add campaign for it now: Easier than emigrating!
Quiet_Desperation:
I suppose, if you believe the L5-as-paradise-in-vacuo scenario, where you have an essentially infinite budget and a sensible government. Others have argued that it would probably be a resource-starved fascist hellhole.
What do you put for the political stuff if your an anarchist, or a libertarian, or a green party member, or something else entirely.
Sorry, I posted in the wrong thread. I’ll be a little more careful
That’s there because that particular URL contains your personal session ID, which is automatically generated for you when you click the link PZ provided (which, you’ll notice, doesn’t contain that).
Using someone else’s session ID will fuck things up, if your web developer doesn’t know what he’s doing. Most don’t.