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Not that I'm surprised -- women will navigate first by landmarks and familiarity, and if that fails they fall back on maps. Men, on the other hand, rarely use anything but a map.

[Citation needed]

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1090513897001074

As with all generalizations, it's just that: a generalization. There are lots of members of both sexes that follow the trend to one degree or another, but in general, if you had to guess a strategy used and were only given their sex for information, you can do better than chance.

Given that it can mutate that rapidly,

How rapidly? Got a cite? I can't find any citation that it mutates any faster or slower than any other influenza virus, or any other virus in general.

The best I can find was

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0168170293900885

Genetic and antigenic analyses of influenza A (H1N1) viruses, 1986-1991

Xu Xiyana, Elisabet P. Rocha, Helen L. Regenery, Alan P. Kendal, and Nancy J. Cox

Influenza Branch, Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA

"(4) Although there has been little detectable antigenic variability, the HA genes of human epidemic influenza A (H1N1) viruses have continued to evolve at an evolutionary rate similar to that for the H1N1 and H3N2 viruses analyzed previously."

So, nothing interesting about H1N1's mutation rate in the recent past... I can find plenty of fear mongering of "what if it mutates, it'll destroy us all", of course so could a mutation of any virus...

IBM had the SHARE organisation since 1955.

In other words, the open source philosophy has been part of IBM's DNA since before most of us were born.

Haha. Not quite.

He says he's been homeless for over three years. But has a publication as recent as last year

The reason why he deletes his journal entries is to cover up the numerous anonymous postings showing that he isn't homeless. Not to mention several people have called the library where he supposedly posts at to send him money: no one has heard of him.

MODS: Mod homelessinlajolla down. He's a well known troll here. Seems like every so often he'll go on a posting hiatus and a new round of mods come in not realizing he's a fake.

Here's a link for the 2%...

http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/anti_social_personality_disorder/stats.htm

This reference shows 46-48% of the sample having ASPD. Not quite the same 70% that my past reference shows, but still quite large and understandable in the context to which I had presented the information.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673602077401 .... now lick that spoon and thank your daddy.

I can see an argument of humans vs space probes, but the idea of putting the humans in orbit to release the space probes seems to be the worst of both worlds.

If we are going to send humans out there, they should be landing on something, otherwise send probes.

It turns out that the last 200 kilometers, getting from orbit to the surface and back, is vastly, completely, incredibly the hardest part. It is much, much simpler to get humans into orbit than to land them on the surface of Mars. Among other things, to land on the surface, you need design, build, test, quality, and fly two additional vehicles, a lander vehicle and a launch vehicle, both of which are flying in regimes that are hard to engineer for. Not to mention a long-duration habitat for the Mars surface, and spacesuits that will survive for hundreds of EVAs on the Mars surface-- not easy.

Orbiting Mars is vastly simpler than landing on it.

Of course, I've talked and written on that subject many times before-- Teleoperation from Mars Orbit: A proposal for human exploration, Footsteps to Mars, etc.

(I agree, however, that L-1 is silly-- nothing there to explore.)

1. Yearbook attractiveness in 50s women reflects effort and hence priority they place on finding a husband/reproducing.
2. Attractiveness is correlated to health/nutrition which correlates with more/easier births.
3. Attractiveness is correlated to grooming habits learned in households with better socioeconomic status. This leads to more marriages.
4. People tend to find people who look like their parents attractive so those sub-ethnic groups who have more kids tend to get rated higher
5. Random correlations from a bunch of other factors (race etc..)

One could go on but what's the point. The study just doesn't say what this ridiculous piece of science 'journalism' claims it does.


However, that isn't grounds to reject the claim that humans have been evolving to be more attractive or even that physical attractiveness in women undergoes stronger selection pressure than it does in men. Presumably, one should think that at least the first claim was true (at least before birth control). Hell, it's pretty much a tautology (by definition more attractive means ceterus parabus people find you more sexually attractive). The second claim is less clear. After all in most animals it is the male which undergoes the greater pressure to look attractive. However, in humans there are plausible reasons to think that other forms of status for men take the place of purely physical status while the need for healthy births retains that pressure for females. Of course there are probably real papers on this with real evidence and who knows what that means in the modern enviornment.

The transplant thing has been observed, but so far I think it's only anecdotal evidence (maybe a bunch of people made stuff up, but so far I'll accept the reports on face value). Not aware of big research going on about it.

But I won't be surprised if scientists finally find out that your organs (or transplanted organs) can influence what sort of foods/drinks you'd want to consume[1], or even who you want to mate with. It does make some sense from an evolutionary advantage point of view.

[1] Like fried chicken and beer: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1096219000000135

And if your entire immune system can change after a liver transplant, it means you're not just getting a liver - it's not quite so "neat and clean" as that.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/teen-changes-immune-system/story-e6frf00r-1111115390103

So if the donor's stem cells manage to leak out and help form neurons in the recipient's brain or "stomach brain"[2], why shouldn't there be changes?

[2] The Enteric Nervous System:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199905/our-second-brain-the-stomach
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system

Who is the boss? From the point of view of the ENS, the "central nervous system" (aka brain/CNS) might just be a means to keeping the ENS satisfied.

ENS to CNS: "Hey CNS go eat a double cheese burger!".
CNS: "Hmm, I feel like eating a double cheese burger, lets do a lot of complicated stuff like driving, walking etc so that I can eat that".

Of course the CNS could say, "Must resist, have to stick to diet".

SIMPLE, LOW-COST ELECTRONICS PROJECTS
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/677563/description#description

There are two standard academic journals where the specialized stuff in Environmental Economics is published: Land Economics and The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Carlin has published only a single article in Land Econ and none in JEEM during his entire career dating back to the mid-1960s. Furthermore, he only began publishing on the economics of global warming in 2007. Finally, anyone who is first rate coming out of a Ph.D. Econ program in MIT gets a Prof job at Berkeley, Harvard, Chicago, etc. The second raters get placements at Nebraska, Auburn, Oregon State, etc. It is only the dregs that end up as civil servants in places like the EPA. I would almost completely dismiss him except that I did notice that he had co-authored a couple of papers 15 years ago with Kip Viscusi who is certainly not a lightwieght in the field of risk assessment but who has also happily accepted money from Exxon for studying the economics of punitive damages resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill case.

Bottom line: Carlin is a 60 year-old fart who has done no significant research in his entire career and has a political viewpoint that is coloring what little work he has done.

Not quite. In addition to several STDs, neonatal circumcision significantly lowers the (already low) risk of penile cancer and (the somewhat more common) balanitis. Then there are many recent studies indicating that it's protective against HIV, Chancroid and Syphilis, Herpes, and HPV (although I should point out that the previous two studies overlap and arrive at somewhat different conclusions, as the protective effect against Herpes was only borderline significant in the first).

And not only does it protect the male, but it reduces the risk of male-to-female transmission too.

Granted, there are other studies that arrive at opposite conclusions, though I haven't seen any on HIV in particular in quite some time. But it would be grossly inaccurate to claim that this link has been "long since disproven". At best, the jury is still out.

> electric-cosmos.org is a proponent of the "electric universe" "theory" -- which has been thoroughly rejected over and over

NASA begs to differ...

The TSS-1R electrodynamic tether experiment: Scientific and technological results

N. H. Stonea, W. J. Raittb and K. H. Wright, Jr. c
a Space Sciences Laboratory, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35812, USA
b Center for Atmospheric and Space Science, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322, USA
c Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville, AL 35899, USA

Available online 25 July 2003.

Abstract

The Tethered Satellite System program was designed to provide the opportunity to explore certain space plasma-electrodynamic processes (associated with high-voltage bodies and electrical currents in space) and the orbital mechanics of a gravity-gradient stabilized system of two satellites linked by a long conducting tether. A unique data set was obtained during the TSS-1R mission in which the tether electromotive force and current reached values in excess of 3500 volts and 1 amp, respectively. The insight this has allowed into the current collection process and the physics of high-voltage plasma sheaths is significant. Previous theoretical models of current collection were electrostatic--assuming that the orbital motion of the system, which is highly subsonic with respect to electron thermal motion, was unimportant. This may still be acceptable for the case of relatively slow-moving sounding rockets. However, the TSS-1R results show that motion relative to the plasma does affect current collection and must be accounted for in orbiting systems.

But I guess its easier to believe in scientific dogma, then keep an open mind.

This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy.

It sure does. Especially since Elseiver has explicitly made that argument. Here's an official Elsevier position paper on open access: "By introducing an author-pays model, Open Access risks undermining public trust in the integrity and quality of scientific publications that has been established over hundreds of years. The subscription model, where the users pay ... ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish. This critical control measure would be rmeoved in a system where the author - or indeed his/her sponsoring institution - pays."

That gives the open access movement a big boost..

They're already slipping. I try to avoid Elsevier when I publish my articles. Look at this journal, for instance :

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623042/description#description

As the world's leading publisher of science and health information, Elsevier serves more than 30 million scientists, students, and health and information professionals worldwide.

We are proud to play an essential role in the global science and health communities and to contribute to the advancement of these critical fields. By delivering world-class information and innovative tools to researchers, students, educators and practitioners worldwide, we help them increase their productivity and effectiveness.

And from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/mission:

That's why Elsevier partners with leading experts to publish the most authoritative and reliable information so scientists and health professionals can make critical decisions that advance scientific discovery and save lives.

At best, they were duped into lending any credibility they have to a sham. At worst, they knew that the thing was fake and went against their mission statement, yet published anyway because the money was too good to pass up.

As the world's leading publisher of science and health information, Elsevier serves more than 30 million scientists, students, and health and information professionals worldwide.

We are proud to play an essential role in the global science and health communities and to contribute to the advancement of these critical fields. By delivering world-class information and innovative tools to researchers, students, educators and practitioners worldwide, we help them increase their productivity and effectiveness.

And from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/mission:

That's why Elsevier partners with leading experts to publish the most authoritative and reliable information so scientists and health professionals can make critical decisions that advance scientific discovery and save lives.

At best, they were duped into lending any credibility they have to a sham. At worst, they knew that the thing was fake and went against their mission statement, yet published anyway because the money was too good to pass up.

My university network has fulltext access to the journal. The journal article doesn't seem to be available yet, but the publisher's press release is. From the Dread Publisher Elsevier:

San Diego, CA, 14 April 2009 - Frequent Mental Distress (FMD), defined as having 14 or more days in the previous month when stress, depression and emotional problems were not good , is not evenly distributed across the United States. In fact, certain geographic areas have consistently high or consistently low FMD incidence, as shown in a study published in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Combining data from annual large-scale surveys in 1993-2001 and 2003-2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that the adult prevalence of FMD was 9.4% overall, ranging from 6.6% in Hawaii to 14.4% in Kentucky. FMD prevalence varied both over time and by geographic area within states. From the earlier period to the later period, the mean prevalence of FMD increased by at least 1 percentage point in 27 states and by more than 4 percentage points in Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The Appalachian and the Mississippi Valley regions had high and increasing FMD prevalence, and the upper Midwest had low and decreasing FMD prevalence.

The state-based Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) has asked questions about mental health since 1993 and collects data from random telephone surveys of adult residents across the U.S. More than 1.2 million people were surveyed in each of the two periods. FMD prevalence was determined by county, and the results were smoothed to reduce variation from random sampling due to small sample sizes in less populous counties.

For the 1993-2001 period, the smoothed FMD prevalence was less than 8% in 31.8% of the 3112 counties analyzed and was 12.0% in 4.8% of the counties. For the 2003-2006 period, the smoothed FMD prevalence was "Because FMD often indicates potentially unmet health and social service needs, programs for public health, community mental health and social services whose jurisdictions include areas with high FMD levels should collaborate to identify and eliminate the specific preventable sources of this distress," said Dr. Matthew M. Zack, the study's lead investigator. "With the growing scientific literature linking FMD to treatable mental illnesses and preventable mental health problems, the increased use of these surveillance data in community mental health decision making is especially warranted. The continued surveillance of mental distress may help these programs to identify unmet needs and disparities, to focus their policies and interventions and to evaluate their performance over time."

The article is "Geographic Patterns of Frequent Mental Distress: U.S. Adults, 1993-2001 and 2003-2006" by David G. Moriarty, BS, Matthew M. Zack, MD, MPH, James B. Holt, PhD, Daniel P. Chapman, PhD, MSc and Marc A. Safran, MD, MPA, DFAPA, FACPM. It appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 36, Issue 6 (June 2009) published by Elsevier.

You want to talk about the facts? Ok. Here's some insight for you: the temperature at which coffee is brewed is not the temperature at which it should be served or consumed. Coffee should be brewed at approximately 96 to 98 degrees Celsius. Drinking it at that temperature would, however, be incredibly stupid.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0305417907002550

The burn model shows the standard exponential dependence of injury level on temperature. The preferred drinking temperature of coffee is specified in the literature as 140 +/- 15 deg F (60 +/- 8.3 deg C) for a population of 300 subjects. A linear (with respect to temperature) figure of merit merged the two effects to identify an optimal drinking temperature of approximately 136 deg F (57.8 deg C).

Still don't believe me? Well, find some sources, because all the ones I find indicate that water at temperatures of 150 degrees and upward can cause serious burns in a mere 2 seconds.

http://www.texaschildrenspediatrics.org/healthlibrary/pa_hotwatr_hhg.aspx
  http://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/HealthAZ/Burn-Safety-Hot-Water-Temperature.aspx?articleID=8652&categoryID=AZ6d
  http://www.cpnonline.org/CRS/CRS/pa_hotwatr_pep.htm
  http://www.ct.gov/dds/cwp/view.asp?a=12&q=379294
  http://www.tap-water-burn.com/pamphlet/water_use.htm

Wow, thanks for the extreme FUD. May I spoil it a little with some bona fide facts? Just two, if it's alright with you:

1) You don't need to get involved with the mildly difficult TeX syntax; you can just use lyx (free in both senses) or Scientific Word (free in neither).

2) Elsevier do accept LaTeX submissions, or at least PDF printouts, for all their journals, because they even have pages *on their own website* dedicated specifically to LaTeX, at http://www.elsevier.com/latex. Other publishers (including Springer!) who accept LaTeX submissions can be found here: http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html#tex-latex_publishers

I won't bother to discuss the irrelevance of the ubiquity of Microsoft Word that you mention nor that -- gosh! -- Word allows for templating and referencing, which as you well know LaTeX can handle much more gracefully.

You write pompously without the requisite backing of facts which would make it acceptable. No-one will deny that LaTeX has a steeper learning curve than Microsoft Word, at least initially, but your whole post reeks of trollness with its misrepresentation of the facts.

2. Format your document Format your LaTeX document Ensure your text is properly formatted

Isn't this about LaTex?

On the Chaos, Solitons & Fractals web site http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaleditorialboard.cws_home/967/editorialboard#editorialboard it says Associate Editors: Nonlinear Dynamics Engineering Applications: S.R. Bishop University College London, London, UK. So one of the editors is in the same department (the Department of Mathematics, UCL) as Alan Sokal of the Sokal hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It is a small world!

How did El Naschie game the system?

According to Elsevier, his impact factor is 3.025, which does seem high compared to Elsevier titles like Advances in Applied Mathematics (founded by Gian-Carlo Rota, who was a respectable mathematician).

It's clear from the samples that El Naschie's articles are complete garbage, and I'm sure no respectable mathematician would want to publish in what's effectively a crackpot's vanity press. This is obviously the scientific journal version of Googlebombing.

So how did he pull this off? Is he citing himself, and if so, where?

The placebo effect is a short term 'feeling better' from some mild problem.

I suggest you google for placebo surgery. Placebo techniques have given individual patients relief from angina pectoris, Parkinson's disease, and osteoarthritis of the knee. One patient in the Parkinson's study had not been physically active for years before surgery, but following placebo surgery she resumed hiking and ice skating.

It's clear that you are the one here who does not know what a placebo is. I suggest you start here.

Massage does no more then if you spent a quite hour reading a good book.

I love reading a good book, but I don't think that it can reduce depression and hostility and increase NK cells and lymphocytes in cancer patients, or help with migraines.

Acupuncture doesn't work. It has been tested in blinded tests.

As I've been pointing out, if you apply that same set of criteria to surgery, then surgery doesn't work.

As for these "blinded tests" of acupuncture, many used acupressure as their control, which is as ridiculous as using morphine as the control in your test of heroin. Others did not test acupuncture as it is actually applied, but used fixed point prescriptions that did not take into account the diagnostic methods of Chinese medicine - rather like testing if an antibiotic can treat sinus congestion without regard to whether the congestion is caused by an infection or not.

Better blinding, such as that used by John J.B. Allen et. al., compares two geninue treatments, one for the condition in question, the other for an unrelated complaint. This study of major depression found acupuncture more effective than the control.

You kill people. That's right, people like you lead people away from proven treatments until it's too late.

Look, jerkwad, I always suggest that clients see a physician at the very first sign that they might have a serious condition. It's right there on my website: "Shiatsu can also be a beneficial form of supportive care for people facing serious illness, such as cancer; it can help relieve stress and some of the side effects of invasive treatments. Shiatsu does not cure disease, but helps support and stimulate the body's own healing potential. It is not a substitute for conventional medical treatment."

Indeed, since I spend a lot more time listening to clients than a physician does, I may be able to spot early warning signs that would otherwise be missed.

The only time I would lead someone away from a treatment would be that if the condition is not life-threatening and is not going to degrade, I would suggest trying a less invasive therapy first - so yes, I will suggest trying bodywork to relieve chronic pain before going under the knife.

Of course, that's not leading anyone away from a proven treatment.

While American Pediatrics is opposed to co-sleeping, this is in direct contradiction of all evidence. The explanation is straightforward: the infant will follow the breathing/sleep patterns of the parents, and is kept from falling into the extremely deep sleep at which SIDS occurred. Also the parents are right there to notice as soon as anything is wrong.

http://www.babyreference.com/Cosleeping&SIDSFactSheet.htm

(subscription required)
Why babies should never sleep alone: A review of the co-sleeping controversy in relation to SIDS, bedsharing and breast feeding .
Paediatric Respiratory Reviews , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Pages 134 - 152
J . McKenna , T . McDade

I just finished taking a course at MIT on multiprocessor programming. It was taught by the authors of The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit. I highly recommend their book, their classes, their expertise. They are now focused on transactional memory, which may make things a bit easier to program in the multiprocessor universe. Of course we can stick with course-grained locking, but as they pointed out early on, Amdahl's Law shows that throwing hardware at a problem may not be successful in upping performance by the amount you expect if the system's scheduler has no hopes of keeping the cores busy due to how you've written your code.

When these landlubbers mix up terms. For instance, "The ship is docked..." or "Tied up..." when it's really MOORED.

But, FTA, what caught my eye was:

"They call it scrambling"

BZZZT! Get ur stuff right, reporters. It's SCRAM, as in Safety Control Rod Activation Mechanism. I frackin' knew this back in 80, as a 15-year old. WTF is wrong with these well-funded reporting arms out there? So, the text probably ought have said, "They call it SCRAMing"..., that is, unless something changed that i didn't know about in the past decade or so...

If the reporter wants to discuss "reactors" and "scrambling", then maybe the story should cover intra-molecular scrambling....

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1381116996002701

But, the reporter should have done some basic patent and process checking:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4337118.html

"APRM 40 transmits a scram signal to the rod drive system 6 to scram the reactor. Scramming takes place when the power level reaches about 120% of the ..."

I read through all the replies to your post, and I'm surprised nobody seems to be aware of anthocyanin research, especially cyanidin-3-rutinoside:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0304383505004647
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/M610616200v2
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jafcau/2001/49/i03/abs/jf001246q.html

Sorry about the first URL - it was the only way I could quickly figure out to get a link to the article. Just click on the Science Direct link on that page to view it (maybe the other link also works, but I didn't test it).

Of course, this research is only in its infancy and could turn out to be a dead end, but I'm surprised nobody here seems to be aware of it. And I'm late to the discussion, so nobody will read this anyway....

- T

Any acoustician will tell you he is correct. I am an acoustician who specializes in structural acoustics, and completely agree with his comments.

If you want a reference go here...
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622899/description#description
and search for "damped vibration". You will see you obtained many references containing that phrase. Now search the same for "dampened vibration". You will find references, but none of them contain the word "dampened". Want more proof?

I searched but found no statistics on tasers. Nevertheless, it'd be an unfair comparison as we have no way of tracking their numbers, usage and other critical details since tasers are relatively new in comparison. In terms of their adoption I have no idea for sure but doubt it was because they're less lethal. A baton alone is highly unlikely to be lethal when used properly; you don't hit someone in the knee and they die. A taser on the other hand can kill even when used as intended. If used properly there is almost zero chance for death in standard take-down maneauvers with a baton. A taser on the other hand can kill even at low voltage, regardless of physical condition, location of strike, etc. It's literally a crap shoot that you'll kill the person and we're still studying the long-term effects it has on some people. To me it's just another one of those cases where we're working in absolutes... it's not immediately harming me long-term so I guess it's ok. The little research that has gone into it is government-funded and thus biases IMHO. Quotes like "None of the taser victims had serious long-term effects, whereas 50% of those with bullet wounds did." are hilarious... who compares tasers to guns? http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673601059505

I was making a point about law enforcement devices themselves and thus it's under the assumption they're being used properly. That's also why chokeholds are irrelevant to my point. If a cop or any person actually wants to kill someone they can and will irrespective of the device. However, why would we want devices in law enforcement that are guaranteed to introduce a probability of death, usable by any person, require almost no effort... it's scary to me as it's almost like a compromise between a baton and a gun but that everyone can quickly and easily use. This especially makes sense in light of research studies (e.g. they're often compared that way.) The problem is law enforcement is often under too much pressure and this "apparent" easy way out is being misued.

Sorry to scare you with the caps.

Bingo! One guy comes out with a paper in which he says that the majority of scientific studies have flawed methodologies, and the /. crowd jumps on the bandwagon saying: "See, you can't really believe scientists on anything." It may be that many scientists use flawed methodologies or make calculation errors and whatever else he is alleging. However, as I have been a peer reviewer and know the time it takes to properly review a single paper in a field that I know, his claim to have somehow critically viewed most of the scientific literature out there strikes me as singularly ludicrous. Perhaps he used sampling methods. Still, we're talking about a butt-load of fields (See Elsevier.com if you want a glimpse of what just one publisher offers.

Yes, I know. I have just said that a scientific study is wrong thus supporting this guy's claim (Catch 22). But there's a difference between saying one guy is wrong, and the majority of millions of papers are wrong.

The BBC is not the only group who tried to replicate the results - it was done by traditional science groups too, who used an almost identical model, and identified a specific factor in the protocol which they found led to a significant increase in false positives. I think this is the relevent paper, but I don't have access to the journal from here, so I'm not totally sure. If you have access, dig through the papers who cite Ennis, it's there smewhee.

> I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.

I'm a cardiologist - we get this question a lot, and I've been in many, um, discussions, about this issue.

In general, hospital equipment does not malfunction with any FCC approved wireless interference, especially from a consumer device. The trouble is, there are some anecdotes:

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0196064405007110

that demonstrate equipment malfunction with close proximity of cellphones / radios, etc. This 2005 report was widely publicized, (sorry, system demands that you purchase the article if you want to read it) but it was a cellphone left on top an IV infusion pump that apparently malfunctioned, and was reproducible (move the phone near the pump -> malfunction, move it away and returns to normal.)

I tell people that as long as they have a digital phone, they are ok to use it in the hospital. In truth, I think that if a nurse tells you to move to another area they are probably wanting you to stop yapping in common areas, which is a much bigger problem IMHO.

As with anything that deals with life or death, physicians and health care staff are quite risk averse. If there is a very, very small chance of interference, then we err on the side of caution. Your cellphone is designed to not interfere with things, but I'm sure we have all heard our computer speakers chatter *before* a call comes in, or seen your old CRT monitor jump due to an incoming call on a nearby phone. This is interference -- making all medical equipment so that they are totally oblivious to all outside fields would make them inconceivably heavy. Don't bother with the "faraday cage" argument -- most cases are metal, but as anybody with engineering experience would tell you it is imperfect (as I've stated before, you can use your cellphone in a metal plane, also a "faraday cage.")

So, no, hospital equipment is generally ok, but generally we tell people to not use cellphones in the intensive care unit or operating rooms, where things are most sensitive and potentially could have lethal consequences. We allow answering the phone and moving to an appropriate area, and allow cellphone use throughout the hospital otherwise (the doctors do this too). If it were a big risk, equipment would be malfunctioning left and right. However, it is prudent to minimize risks, especially for nonessential communication, hence the policies.

Really? Then
why is technical
and industrial know-how
locked up in
pay-to-view websites
in the US?

anyone who wants to can go and read about finite element analysis; there's no secrets there.

Great. Now where are the directions for extracting stigmasterol from soybeans and using it to make corticosteroids?

>> Solar, once it is cheaply manufactured, involves placing the panels.

> That's a big if. We can't count on everything ramping up like computer chips.

It's working well thus far. From 1976 to 2001, the cost of shipping a given unit of solar capacity (read: PVs) has fallen by a factor of 16 (four halvings) [src], and thus far it's been following an exponential trend.

> Heck, look at how far we've come with cars. A model T got around the same gas milage as most of today's cars. Sure, today's cars are more efficient, but they're also heavier. It was a generational improvement rather than a exponential improvement.

Lots of people these days expect everything to follow an exponential curve. Battery size, energy efficiency, material strength, lots of things. Lots of them don't, but we've been raised to believe in the march of progress. So you're right to be skeptical.

Nevertheless, in the case of PV panels, it really does appear to be following an exponential trend, just as related silicon technologies have been.

Yes. Each synapse has a wide range of activation (see for example: Fusi, S and Senn, W, Eluding oblivion with smart stochastic selection of synaptic updates, Chaos. http://link.aip.org/link/?CHAOEH/16/026112/1 ). The binary simplification is just the result of early models made to run on limited computer resources.

By the way neuronal networks as known in computer science have little to do with natural neuronal networks. To begin with, a natural NN in the human cortex have an average connectivity per neuron of 10.000 with its immediate neighbors (see DB Chklovskii - Neuron, 2004 at http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S08966 27304004982 ).

Albert Cardona

This book. Its companion site. SPIM.

If he's trying to clear his name, he's doing a bad job of it.

I found an article by him in which I hoped to hear his logic and reasoning against global warming.

He claims it is just a natural cycle. That he's seen two of these in his career and he'll see one more before he dies. If his "death threat" was someone saying that he won't see temperature returning to normal before he dies, I don't think it was a death threat.

I can't find a formal report of his research but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If this is his argument, he leaves out a lot of things that need to be explained to me before I let it go. Like, why are polar bears suddenly on the endangered species list? What's happening to all the snow on the tops of mountains? Where are the ice glaciers (with ice that has been around for thousands if not millions of years) going? What is his retort to the CO2 levels being their highest ever--even after looking at ice core samples?

His article only mentions a professor from MIT but not what his criticisms are.

If their work is being derided, I want to know what their work is. I'm a skeptic also, if these people are being published in newspapers, you would think that they wouldn't waste their time on death threats and counter-counter-criticisms but would instead try to get the truths they have been finding in their research out to the public. If you're conducting good science that, in and of itself, will clear your name in the end.

The more I search for information on Timothy Ball, the more he seems like he's playing just as dirty as the people he's fighting. Check out his lawsuit for a journal publishing a letter. I feel we're not hearing the full story here.

When I'm at work and I enter situations in which someone is decrying someone else and vice versa, I just present everyone with facts. If I had done research and I received death threats, I would submit to major newspapers two things: my research published with permission to reprint it & the death threats in their original form. Nothing could boost my efforts to get the truth out there more. The fact that I see a PhD and scientist spending more time saying his life is in danger than presenting me with his findings tells me a lot about what his motives are.

He was published, I guess in Ecological Complexity which I do not have access to. If anyone has papers from his work, I would love to see it--otherwise I'm going to tune this soap opera out as emotional noise in what should be a stoic process.

Question everything. Question both sides. And if you have something that is true, present it. I'm not calling him a liar, I just can't call him anything right now because all I can find are stories about who called who what.

All the reasons made for the continuation of the status quo are just excuses that benefit only the owners of the journals. One justification for the high cost of the journals is printing. But who really needs to go to the library to read the Journal of Biological Chemistry or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in their dead tree format anyway? If a library really needs a paper copy, perhaps they can just send out the PDFs to a third-party printer to print and bind it. I don't think we need Elsevier to do the printing and distribution. The internet already performs the distribution process very efficiently. So the traditional for-profit scientific journal publishers need to go the way of blacksmiths and scabbard makers. As for the world's premier science journal, Nature, perhaps Google or the Gates Foundation or Warren Buffet can just ask them what is their projected profit from the sales of subscriptions and archived articles for the next 10 years, pay them twice that amount, secure the copyright to past articles and future publication the journal and hire the entire editorial board. I don't think it would cost a lot. Now that would be a service to mankind.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you've never actually maintained a large application that supported more than one database. It's not the most difficult problem to solve in the world, but it's pretty far from trivial at times. SQL may be standardized, but no one implements the standard.

Sometimes, you end up having to have a different schema for the different databases because of optimizations that one supports and the other doesn't. For example, modeling trees in Oracle can be done with the CONNECT BY clause, which very few (any?) other databases have, so instead you choose whatever your database can deal with (there are many representations for trees; there's a whole book on the subject, actually: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.c ws_home/702605/description#description).

Often you can choose something that works reasonably well on all the platforms you need to support, but if it ends up being a bottleneck (I've seen it happen more than once), you end up making different schemas and having to deal with all the headaches that come with it.

an example of a prestigious journal published by a for-profit company?

Well, you might start here for a start on one publisher. Quite a number of them are the "prestige" journals in their field, and are in those cases at least, stringently peer-reviewed.

What you not know is that these articles are subject to a publication fee. So, it's actually a multi-profit system for them. They get money from the researchers, and they get money from subscriptions.

What this is, is simply a new variation on the theme we've been through with RIAA, MPAA, and others. "OMG!!! Our profits are in danger from this Internet thing! We must DO something!" From a researcher's standpoint, it actually is a better thing if they don't have to deal with the for-profit publishers. They get their work out to the community, and they don't have to pay "reprint charges," etc. It works for other researchers and libraries, since they're not shelling out several hundred dollars each for subscriptions, and the works are easily searchable. So, of course the publishers are panicking! Their gravy train is threatened! It's FUD time!

Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia , the medical journal publishing this study, is still incapable of clearly distinguishing between causality and correlation, after 40 years of publishing scientific research.

I myself notice a link between Slashdot readers who read about a study claiming something that they don't want to believe, and those readers then attempting to dismiss them through trite posts about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.

I advise you to buy this book now!

Ecohouse2 - A design Guide.

http://books.elsevier.com/uk/architecturalpress/uk /subindex.asp?isbn=9780750657341&country=United+Ki ngdom&community=architecturalpress&ref=&mscssid=ME J825X2A5M08HHFFWHR0L2NDV0W0GU0

I have had a copy since 2004 and would not be without it.

Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.

"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.

At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.

Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.

You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...

See the difference? Probably not...

• At a very low level, how a computer works. What goes on inside the CPU, what a "bus" is, what memory paging is. Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum, Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson.
• Programming Languages, should know enough about computers to be able to write a simple program in assembly, and then learn a couple "simple" high level languages e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby, followed by C, then Java (or C++), and then a not so common language (aka "languages that make you think") like Haskell, ML, Lisp, or Scheme. Plus a basic/general history of programming languages. Suggested reading: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Software engineering. From making sure programs work, correctly, to programming in the large (not everything can be written as a 1000 line Perl script), and software development as a profession (ethics, legalities, future). Two good references are Code Complete by Steven McConnell, and The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
• Basic electronics. Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims or Lessons In Electric Circuits - Just the basics, Ohms Law and some basic ideas such as logic gates and flip flops.
  
• Enough math to be dangerous

Currently some journals (especially the very prestigious ones like Nature) want to have complete control of the paper. At the start this means they won't take anything the public has seen before -- that's part of their take on only publishing "original research" [hence the reasonable six-month delay in the proposed law]. But they also insist on having the copyright in the article assigned to them [they mostly need some form of this so they can disseminate the article in new ways that didn't exist when it was written]. Unfortunately, sometime they take these ideas too far (as in preventing people from publishing the papers on their own websites).

The internet is slowly forcing the journals to change. This law will make them chagne faster. They will have to accept that their function will be limited to providing reputation (via peer-review and editorial policy), and in some cases providing the first view of a paper. However, they will no longer be the only way to get the paper so the value of a journal subscription will go down.

In math and physics the researches are already annoyed by the system. Essentially it works like this: we do the research, often being paid by the public via a government grant. Then we write the papers. Then we referee papers for journals for free, and serve as journal editors for free -- no scientist gets paid by the journal for either writing the paper or checking that it's correct. Then the journal turns around and charges the community money to read the papers. Of course this is untenable and open-access journals are beginning to flourish. Moreover all journals live with people posting the paper to their website (either the preprint or the journal version) as well as having preprints freely available from the arXiV. Still some journals are expensive beyond belief (given that they get the content for free and all the editing is done for free and all they are giving is reputation). Many researchers will have nothign to do with an Elsevier journal because of this kind of behaviour.

They actually are probably a huge contributor to the rate of research since they have enable researchers to more quickly find information.

No.

Looking for research information on Google is like looking using Wikipedia to quote information for a paper.

We researchers use the following (between other) places to do serious research:
Scirus
Citeseer
ACM digital library
JStor
PubMed

There are some other specialized catalogues for Economics (Jstor is quite good) or other non computer science related even directly Elsevier.

Of course your University library may be useful and proceedings tend to help too.

JAIR is a great journal. But I believe the flagship journal in AI is still Artificial Intelligence.