I was born in Beantown and remember the site before construction (“Scollay Square”) as being pretty seedy and a place to avoid (still least for an eight year old). The new City Hall and Government Center were a huge improvement, and occurred during a period of rejuvenation for the city (addition to Boston Public Library, Copley Square expansion, final renewal of the city's red light district, aka the Combat Zone). I do remember the controversy of the design and public reaction — yes, it's not for everyone, but I've always had a fondness for the building.
I'd always placed the city's nadir when I was a kid, in the 70s-80s, during white flight, and figured the upswing started with the central artery project changes in the late 90s. I guess I really have no idea how bad it was before the 70s when you're talking about. My parents and friends parents definitely seemed to think it was better then, though.
In general, that's probably considered around the nadir of a lot of US cities. When I graduated from grad school in about the mid-80s, aside from some finance people in Manhattan, my classmates mostly didn't move into cities. I'm not sure anyone I knew went to live in Boston in spite of quite a few getting jobs in the area--but pretty much all the computer companies were in the suburbs/exurbs. Boston was losing population until the very late 90s or so.
The trend for many new college grads to strongly prefer cities is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In Boston's case specifically, the Big Dig did improve the living experience--after a fairly long period of time. (And there were some incremental public transit improvements.) But many US cities also had reduced crime rates and other quality of living improvements, the exact reasons for which are still debated and which led to many employment opportunities returning to cities.
My former company opened a relatively large near-downtown office and, while they're keeping a suburban office, it will be much reduced from its earlier main location.
I think partially it was because it was so cheap. In the late 90s I had an apartment a block from the lake in the Lakeview neighborhood in the Chicago north side and it cost $400 a month. Before that I lived out in the Chicago suburbs and my apartment was $800 a month.
That was a steal. I lived in Lakeview from 1995 to 2000 (with a brief detour in San Francisco) and every place we rented was north of $1500, nowhere near the lake.
That whole area of town, aside from maybe tourist-land on the harbor, was a combination of big finance buildings and all the seed along Washington Street. Basically never went there when I was a student in the area.
> Quite sure that is the schools job. At least where I live the schools tend to assume several of the rights and responsibilities that normally fall on the parents.
Yes. The school is responsible for their safety and whereabouts. US K-12 public schools, if the child is missing from school, parents are contacted immediately. Teachers are responsible for attendance. All this is accomplished without device tracking. Federal law explicitly defines the school's responsibilities with regard to privacy rights of children in school. If parents wish to contact their child during school hours, they are asked to call the school, and school personnel will contact the child.
Device use is an enormous problem in schools. Talk to any teacher / admin: they will tell you allowing devices into schools has been a disaster.
> For example, Nature is so kind as to accept final submissions in latex, but they'll convert it to Word. So it's completely pointless.
There is large gulf between submitting a paper (typically limited to a few journal pages) to a well-equipped organization like Springer Nature, and submitting a manuscript hundreds of even thousands of pages in length to a university dissertation office, when that document must adhere scrupulously to various formatting requirements in terms of tables, figures, pagination, citation, appendices, cross-referencing, etc. Word is fine for memos, briefs, letters, and other fairly short documents. But its capabilities for creating complex documents that must include cross-referencing, strict placement of tables, figures, and other floats, citations, referencing, etc. frankly suck. Students can't afford expensive typesetting software: TeX and friends are high quality, stable, have a large and knowledgeable user community, and most importantly, are free. You can bet that publishing houses aren't using Word and PowerPoint to produce anything beyond email. They accept Word documents because of Microsoft's market dominance, which is unrelated to the quality of software they publish.
Yeah, I don't know about that. Most people for whom I know that, myself included, wrote their dissertations in Word. It's fine.
Yes, float placement in Word can be tricky. It can be tricky in latex too.
I'm not saying it's the ultimate tool for the job. I'm just saying it's fine. There are some things to look out for, particularly with figure placement. As there are with latex.
On the upside, you can use EndNote which is quite good, you can use comments and tracked changes, and wysiwyg is ultimately just the superior paradigm.
If you're telling some unsuspecting grad student that they need to write their thesis in latex, and they don't yet have experience in it and they don't have a massive amount of formulas to write, you're doing them a massive disservice.
Moreover, there’s a more fundamental point being neglected: the PhD thesis should be the worst thing one ever will write as no one is ever going to read it. The published papers based on it will be read instead, and if there are no published papers based on the thesis, it’s because your PhD work was shit.
Taking the time to beautifully format a thesis is at best a waste of time and at worst an exercise in vanity.
My experience is that Word (and Office products in general) have worsened over decades, favoring and indulging the least adroit user to maximize their user base, cloying the product with showy gimmicks of marginal utility or worse, whose primary purpose seems to be to keep you glued to the machine for as long as possible.
I used to support MS products way back when, when they were largely a language company. No more. Life is short, and my patience with their products has come to an end. Sure, LaTeX can be a bear, a supremely frustrating one whose learning curve is more like a wall, but at least it's a bear that sits still, and for which there are authoritative sources when you get into a real bind. With Word, PowerPoint, or Windows itself, there are few such resources, relegating you to spend hours wading through the post swamp of self-declared Microsoft MVP “experts”, where your only comfort is that “3332 also have this problem”. No thanks.
Really glad to see this work and result. My PhD dissertation 25 years ago (pub cited in group's Science paper) focused on laboratory synthesis of dolomite at lower temperatures (less than hydrothermal), but since then focused on virtual (kinetic Monte Carlo simulations) experiments as a means of understanding crystal growth. Really happy to see this fundamental progress.
The chemical composition of the world ocean reflects the balance of inputs from the continents (as described, from riverine input as well groundwater), atmospheric cycling, and outputs: extraction via evaporite minerals in marginal environments, weathering at the seafloor, exchange over a range of temperatures with mid-ocean ridge basalt, and precipitation of minerals (mostly in the form of biogenic carbonates such as CaCO3, biogenic silica, etc.), as well as their subsequent dissolution, and lastly the biological processes of CO2 fixation and respiration of organic carbon (including electron acceptors other than O2, such as iron, sulfate, etc.).
It is the solubility of sparingly soluble phases such as CaCO3 that controls much of the seawater composition: surface seawater is close to saturation with respect to CaCO3 (calcite, aragonite). Because halite (rock salt, NaCl) is highly soluble, seawater is, conversely, fairly concentrated with respect to these ions. Seawater must be extensively evaporated to remove the far more soluble (evaporite) minerals. Over geologic time, the composition of seawater has changed, reflecting the relative pace of the various processes listed above that deliver and remove components from solution.
