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His idea that everything should always remain linked to its original context is impossible to implement. Whose responsibility would it be to maintain the space and accessibility of those originals? Would I have to store and serve a copy of everything quoted by my work, and everything quoted by each of those, and so forth ad infinatum? Who would enforce this?

It's all a matter of scale. One of the projects I'm currently working on is to build a thesaurus -- we have to capture phrases/terms/concepts, and try to reconcile them all -- deal with homonyms (same phrase, different concepts), spelling variations (different phrases, same term), and equivalent terms (different terms, same concept), and it's a whole lot of doing exactly what he described -- trying to track relations between different records.

If we merge down records, we need to track the provenance of the new record, so that should there be confusion later, we can determine what the original input was, to get clarfication.

Other instances where this could be useful are defect tracking systems (correlate error reports to known defects, to source code, to unit tests) -- with the reciprocal link, you could look through the source code, and find out why it's written the way it is. It's also useful in scholarly articles, as some projects have to justify their funding by showing how many peer-reviewed articles are being pubished using the project's data.

On a small scale, I think this is completely realistic to want, and to implement. On a larger scale, there are projects such as DOI to deal with refering to other project's documents, but there's no easy way currently to query who might have linked to a given DOI.

"Coeliac Disease has to be considered a main food related affliction, with life long consequences for the people having the disease. Coeliac Disease patients suffer from adverse effects that can be related to specific gluten peptide sequences that trigger a sequence of immune related reactions leading to damage of the intestine and related malabsorption symptoms."

I'm actually corresponding over email with Dr. Jofu Mishima, one of the scientists who failed to detect UO3 and uranyl nitrate in safety studies he did for the Army in the 70s, 80s, and as recently as this one:

Parkhurst, M.A., J.R. Johnson, J. Mishima, and J.L. Pierce, "Evaluation of DU Aerosol Data: Its Adequacy for Inhalation Modeling," PNL-10903, Richland, WA: Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, December 1995.

I'm apparently the first person to have pointed out to him the fact that uranium is reactive with nitrogen gas at 700 deg. C., far below the temperature at which it burns in air.

I'm totally untrained in this field, but as a taxpayer, I feel like demanding a refund.

I do research in motor skill learning at Johns Hopkins University. I recently talked to the very prominent "handedness" researcher Bob Sainburg http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=Sain burg+RL+handedness&btnG=Search/ about this very subject. He mentioned that monkeys tend to display handedness when throwing over-hand, but don't have hand preference when throwing under-hand. He said this may have something to do with the fact that monkeys fling poo almost exclusively with their under-hand throws. This paper is also fairly on-topic. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3932(00)00056-7 Wonderful use of science knowledge...

To quote:

"We didn't disprove the vibration theory. We just didn't find anything to support it," says assistant professor Leslie B. Vosshall, Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. "All of our data are consistent with the shape theory, but don't prove the shape theory."

Perhaps more interesting is work showing dogs, fish, and even insects can identify isotopes. This research is not consistent with shape theory and seems to support a vibrational explanation of smell.

You can read the abstract here out of Nature Magazine.

Try to get mentally naked for a second and strip off your political hat and think with me. How do you measure the temperature of the earth? Take a measurement of the air? Or, take enough measurements from the ocean's bottom, away from geothermal zones, to create an overall picture of the ocean's temperature.

We might be spicing things up with the atmosphere, don't mistake me about that, but we are not substantively warming the planet. If you want to talk air pollution, think back to the fires in 2003 in California, or 2002 in Colorado/Arizona. Or, my personal favorite, one kick-bang volcanic eruption. I had the distinct pleasure of discussing this very topic with a park ranger (the unforgettable, effervescent Ranger Chet, or something like that) at Mt. St. Helens last year. As a species, we cannot compete with the pollution of a catastrophic volcanic eruption.

I have thought for a long time that global warming was bunk. The only reason to get off of oil (in America) is that it isn't exactly renewable. I suppose the same argument could be made for nuclear energy, except for the fact that we can manufacture the fissive material. Hydroelectric (dam kind, not ocean current kind) is clearly an environmental disaster, and solar still uses noxious chemicals in its production, and is about as unfriendly as a traditional circuit board to the environment. If we can get energy efficiently from biology, then that's the way to go, because it is renewable and scalable. I am left to wonder how efficient this 80% via turkey fat really is, though. They heat and pump, heat and pump, but what is the energy intake to energy output here?

I thought the Lense-Thirring effect was already measured (abstract of the Science article here)... but it seems that GP-B is designed to do exactly that. I'm trying to RTFA anyway.

Furthermore, a model is exactly what it is-- an approximation of your actual complex system. There would be some details that would be left out to simplify the model while keeping the interesting phenomena intact.

Using an actual system like the ping-pong experiment would still be an approximation to an actual avalanche but it provides a reasonably controllable situation and a level of detail that would be accessible to the investigators. And it generally would proceed much faster than simulating it in a computer.

We were in a similar situation in a research involving escape panic dynamics where the behaviour of agents (read: people) moving out of an enclosure were looked into. This would be akin to looking at the exit dynamics of people in a fire or in a football stadium in a a riot.

We did simulate escape panic but later on we used mice to look at the models in a real system. It turns out that the model reasonably gets some of the features of the dynamics but would miss out on things not explicitly included in the model, like herding behavior.

An abstract in Physical Review D of a paper written by these guys (not necessarily dealing with "gravastars"). A Spin Web search showed more papers.

Cheers...

These sites are working on making the vision of 100 percent document control a reality:

http://www.doi.org/

http://www.handle.net/

Looks to me this proposal is another way of uniquely tagging digital content.
Could someone explain if and how this proposal is somehow similar to (or different from) the Digital Object Identifier standard (DOI)? DOI, although proprietary (like EAN, UPC, etc) is gaining momentum; for example, here in Italy is going to be adopted as a general standard for the public administration documents.

For those interested in getting to the heart of the story, check out the original research paper from Nature magazine. If you're not at a university or other institute with site-wide access you'll need to subscribe or pay to see it, though.

It shows that the stock market had effectively decided which shuttle contractor was responsible for the Challenger disaster within minutes of seeing the explosion come across the news wire.

Here's the citation:

Michael T. Maloney and J. Harold Mulherin.
The complexity of price discovery in an efficient market: the stock market reaction to the Challenger crash, Journal of Corporate Finance, Volume 9, Issue 4, September 2003, Pages 453-479.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0929-1199(02)00055-X

There IS something impressive about this research. Sure, they started with some very tiny protein fragments that are biologically hardly interesting. But as the nature article (subscription probably required) shows, these tiny fragments can be synthesised and can be investigated. Once agreement between simulation and experiment is proven (which they claim), it is time to move on to the more interesting stuff.

In the beginning they will probably investigate small proteins that are interesting to biophysics people (the fundamentals behind folding). Later on, when enough people switch over from SETI, they might be able to simulate real big proteins that are interesting to biologists.

Don't worry, the Association of American Publishers and others are working closing up those annoying loopholes in the Net, too... check out the Digital Object Initiative and the Handle System for two nice examples of the misuse of the word "open," unless your idea of "open" includes a $30,000 per year fee for membership.