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But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"?

Then what's the incentive to spend billions of dollars on medical research if once you find a cure anybody can create it? Once the chemical formula for a drug is known, it can be replicated rather trivially (as opposed to finding out what it is).

Unlike free software where developers can hack code in thier free time on free operating systems while holding down a dayjob, medical research is very expensive and cannot be relegated to a hobby or leisure time filler. Equipment is expensive, doctors usually have six digit student loans (like my brother) and cannot afford to work for free, while expenses of having drugs tested and the process of having them approved by the FDA are also daunting.

It would be nice if drugs were not patented but this would result in less expensive medical research being done, and this would benefit no one.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT

But they do! Yes, I am serious! There's a condition often called 'lazy eye'. Where by one eye cannot focus and/or be controlled as finely as the other. One treatment for this is to cover the 'good eye' with a patch, forcing the 'bad eye' to 'practice'. Now here's the 'videogame treatment' angle; 20 minutes of viewing PONG is worth approximately 8 hours of 'normal' viewing on average. (yes, some videogames have more value in the matter than others) This is scientifically supported but I can also provide personal anecdotal evidence. My niece had a 'lazy eye' and the doctor said the condition was so progressed that it would probably take three years of wearing the eye patch to correct it. But in only 4 months with at least one hour a day of various videogames the doctor pronounced the condition cured. And yes, this 'videogame treatment' was done with the doctors full support.

Videogames to treat ADD/ADHD
Diffamblyopia (lazy eye)
Videogames and Parkinson's Disease
Videogames to treat inflammatory bowel disease and juvenile diabetes
National Institutes of Health and Videogames
Amblyopia (advice from another doctor)
more amblyopia advice
yet another doctor's opinion)
Reduce risk of getting Lyme Disease
Healthy anger management for kids
Avoiding/dealing with Nebulizer side-effects
still more amblyopia advice
Super Nintendo treatment for asthma (Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus)
Super Nintendo treatment for Diabetes (Packy & Marlon)
Super Nintendo anti-smoking (Rex Ronan)

Actually .. check it out .. it is Johns Hopkins Johns Hopkins homepage Johns Hopkins was named after his grandmother whose last name was Johns.

It seems that more and more Anime title are beign accepted into the American mainstream. While I do like to see this, I am worried about how people are going to be affected by all the English dubbing. There have always been pros and cons with subtitles and English dubbing, but I truly didn't feel the impact of this until this recent year when I joined the Anime Club at my college. Luckily Tenchi's dub is one of the better ones I have heard, however this is not the case. For those of you watching Tenchi on the Cartoon Network, you've probably also seen clips of Gundam Wing, if not the series. About five months before the Cartoon network started airing Gundam we were watching the subbed version in the club. Well, I can say this much. The voices just do not seem to match the character's .. and some of the characters don't even act the same. At this point I am ignoring how overboard the censorship went for the episodes shown at 5:30 on the channel. (i.e. changing "I will kill you" to "I will destroy you" to be a kinder and gentler space mercinary) This has particularly frightened me now that Rurouni Kenshin has been licensed in the US. To many people Kenshin is as popular as Tenchi and Fushigi Yuugi, however, there was a small distribution of test dubs to small stations a few months ago unde the title "Samurai X." I have seen some clips of this and the voices were horrifing. I know there are many people who would rather have dubs then subs, so ... I am wondering... if an anime channel is made, which there has been talk about, wouldn't it be an interesting idea if the closed caption transmitied the subtitles and the spanish audio channel transmited the japanese version of the soundtrack? I am not sure how viable this is ... but I would certainly like to see this. And now a shameless plug as we are always seeking memebers JHAC

Post natal gene therapy doesn't work

Cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy are two of the hot favourites for post natal gene therapy.

>>Um, where will the criminals get their guns when they are not for sale any more?

Let's see...

1) a piece of 1/2" plumbing pipe with end cap
2) drill hole for fuse
3) make Gunpowder
4) small ball bearings or marbles

Oops... so much for criminals not having guns.

The big problem is that it's not just the dumb Outlook users who are being shut down by this. JHU's email server stopped sending outgoing messages early this morning. Now it's 6 hours later, and not only is send mail still down, but the mail receiver is dead too. So my Powerbook with Eudora is taking collateral damage from those tightly integrated bastards in Redmond.

VME, or Volunteers for Medical Engineering, has been helping disabled persons for years now. One of their earliest projects, built by senior undergraduates of the JHU Mechanical Engineering Dept. was a curved keyboard that was activated with a "puffer" stick. The stick fit in the mouth like a traditional mouth stylus, but kicked a pulse of IR light onto a IR-sensitive keyboard. This allowed the user to greatly reduce neck strain and increase typing speed.

My guess is that an inquiry to the Mech.E. Dept. or VME will get you a load of useful info.

And, yes, I'm an undergrad there, and I'm doing my senior design project for VME, also. I'm working under the supervision of the keyboard's inventor. E-mail me with any serious inquiries.

--Jurph

Here at my school, Johns Hopkins, the Physics and Astronomy department is developing the Hubble Advanced Camera. The AdCam will increase the power of the Hubble by 10x.

http://adcam.pha.jhu.edu is the link for more info.

We use Linux to teach the Operating Systems class now at Johns Hopkins. This is new for last semester and it went rather well. Of course VMware wasn't nice enough to GIVE us licenses. I think we made a good impact on students and our projects were very good examples of how to learn kernel internals and operating system fundamentals.

Check it out at CS318/CS418 class projects.

I designed the assignments (the second was the hardest and needs revision or replacement), but I think it went very well and we had a positive response from students. I hope we do it the same way next year!

Lots of people have criticized the study on the social effects of Net use without looking at the study itself. That's understandable, given the overwhelming amount of press coverage it's gotten. But since a few people have asked for more substantial analysis, here are a few of my thoughts. Some of the most important flaws in the study.

(The study can be found here:
ht tp://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/februa ry16/internetsurvey-216.html.)

(1) Know the researchers. Norman Nie, the study's lead author, is a Stanford political science professor who has a vested interest in proving that people are uninterested in one another: he has substantially based his career on showing how Americans are detached from civil society. He has done several studies on voter participation - with the understanding that low voter turnout is a bad thing (instead of a sign of voter contentedness). Look at the list of his publications for yourself - it is rife with his belief that Americans are forgetting what "citizenship" is all about.

Nie's work is reminiscent of the work of Robert Putnam, who argued that American society was in steep decline because more people are - get this - bowling alone. These goofy, academic simpering simpletons believe that there is always a cloud to every silver lining, and if they took a few moments to bring their heads out of the oxygen-deprived ivory tower, they would see how wrong they are - and they would be laughed to death.

(2) The question is suspect. From the outset, the study intends to frame the question inappropriately, asking whether we will "live in a better informed and connected, more engaged and participatory society" (the sort of society Nie would prefer, based on his previous leanings), or will live in a society "of lonely ex-couch potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated."

Whoa! Why is that framed in black or white, one or zero, with nothing between? Are citizenship and society simple on-or-off characteristics, which you've either got or you haven't? From the very first page, the study betrays its authors' intent: to show that anything less than ideal citizenship is dangerous.

(3) Is a quantitative study the best way to answer these questions? The study is a product of Stanford's "Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society." The study reflects their juvenile belief that human society, in all its complexity, can be summed up in numbers: "For answers to these questions, we must move from ideological claims to empirical evidence."

Again, false! Empirical evidence - putting numbers on human social behavior - does not answer the underlying questions at all. As the discussions on Slashdot have shown, the important questions here are ideological. It is not enough to say that people have gone from spending X hours with friends to spending Y hours with friends. Knowing the simple numbers tells you bubkus - you still need to know whether and why spending time with your friends is good, and which aspects are being preserved as technology changes our society.

(4) Extreme conclusions are reached with minimal data. The study says that the people who have used the Internet the longest report that they spend more time online. The authors conclude that the data therefore, "strongly suggest a model of social change with not only a growing number of Internet users, but with web users doing more and more things on the internet in the future."

O, the surprise! People who have done something for a while may want to do more of it? That seems pretty natural - but where is the evidence for "a model of social change"? The only way to squeeze significant "social change" out of these data is by extrapolating - and that is dangerous with data so sparse, and especially with data of a developing scenario. My favorite example of a misguided extrapolation is this: At the time of Elvis's death, there were under 300 Elvis impersonators. By 1996, there were over 7,000. By extrapolating that rate of increase, we can know that one out of every four humans on the planet will be Elvis impersonators by 2020.

(5) So What? The study's conclusions are hardly alarming.

Look at the chart that purports to show that "Social Isolation Increases" as Net use increases.

The first flaw in this chart is that "social isolation" supposedly is what happens when you don't talk on the phone, or talk to your family, or attend events outside the home. If, however, you go shopping regularly, e-mail your family, and go to school or work every day, you are considered "socially isolated." Huh?

The second obvious flaw is in the dotted lines, which don't actually represent anything. The only real data are the dark, plotted points; lines representing trends really shouldn't be drawn with so little data. It's just a sloppy representation of the data.

Finally, so what? Less than one out of six people who use the Internet more than ten hours a week (the highest category on the chart) said they spend less time with their family or their friends, or spend less time at events outside of the house. Those are hardly numbers to cry about? Come on, now! I'd be concerned if, say, 60 percent of the people who use the Net that often report that they occasionally kill their neighbors' pets, but staying off the phone is hardly an apocalyptic signal.

(6) Human behavior doesn't fit into neat little check boxes. The professors conclude vehemently (they wrote it in bold and italics) that, "Clearly the media are competing... You can't surf the web and watch TV at the same time."

What silliness. As James Gleick showed in his brilliant Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, we are animals especially able to multi-task. We absorb media from wherever we can, and can successfully navigate between television, radio and the Web simultaneously - because we can mentally tune between them during commercials, or during those painful minutes as we wait for the X-Men trailer to download. Claiming that we cannot concurrently absorb input from multiple media is plain silly! We adapt easily - we can watch television, carry on phone conversations and flip through Playboy all at once - so why pretend we are handicapped when it comes to newer media?

(7) The study relies on people's perceptions, not facts. A typical flaw in quantitative studies is that they purport to show facts about behavior - while they only really show facts through the filter of people's perceptions.

So does the study actually show that people spend the same amount of time in traffic, or more time at work? No, the study's authors didn't follow people around to measure time spent at home and time spent in the office - they asked people to report on themselves. Everybody knows how difficult self-assessment is; how accurate can these results be?

What's more, we should be suspicious about this "Internet is making us work more" claim. Is it true that time spent "at work" is the same as time spent working? Hasn't everybody who has access to the Web at work used some of that time (a lot of time, for some of us) fooling around online? We don't need a study to prove it - just look at all the companies that are spying on employees' computer use and even firing them because of "inappropriate" Net visits while on the job.

(8) Surveys can give you any answer you want. It is well known in political circles that polls can be tweaked to elicit any desired answers from respondents. In particular, the placing of key questions in a long list can affect the responses.

Here's a silly example of what I mean. Try it on a friend or coworker (if you still interact with friends or coworkers, which might surprise these academics). Ask the following questions. What color is grass? What color is money? What color do people supposedly turn when they are envious? What color is a cucumber? What color is at the top of a streetlight?

If the questions follow in rapid succesion, the answerer will be so accustomed to the pattern - all the answers would seem to be green - that they would probably mindlessly answer "green," for the last question, although the correct answer to the last question is red.

That is an oversimplified way of representing a serious problem with quantitative research that depends on answering questions. When you look at the questions (here) asked in the study, you get a similar feeling - the questions could be tweaked to get alternative results. In particular, Question 19, the question which has generated all the grand debate here on Slashdot and elsewhere, is a question that, perhaps accidentally, makes respondents feel self-pity and guilt. It asks respondents to rate whether using the Internet has affected each of these behaviors:

Working at the office
Working at home
Shopping in stores
Commuting in traffic
Reading newspapers
Watching television
Spending time with your family
Spending time with your friends
Watching television
Attending events

Imagine if the questions were framed in the way that the authors of this study are framing the results now. Imagine if the question asked: "Do you feel that using the Internet has isolated you socially?" or "Do you feel lonely because of the Internet?" or "Do you contribute less well to society because of the Internet?" or "Do you feel like your life is missing something, and you are now a pawn of corporations that pour their crass commercialization into your cranium over the Net without the buffering effects of friends and family?"

Conclusion: If you out to prove something statistically, you'll succeed. This study, which got hundreds of hours and thousands of column-inches of press coverage, is not serious or significant: it is an attempt by supposedly impartial professors to prove an ideological point while ostentatiously disdaining ideology.

I would be delighted to hear others' further criticism of the study itself - its aims and methodolgy.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Think of a simple system, like a round-bottomed bowl turned curved side up. Put a marble on the top and record its path. The get the marble and put it close to the original starting point. It could, if you're sufficiently close to the centre of the bowl, end up going in any direction. That's the butterfly effect.

Since measuring instruments can't measure every contributing factor to the weather (temperature, pressure, moisture, wind) to arbitrary levels at a sufficient number of points to form an accurate and complete initial condition from which to predict the weather, it'll go close for a while (the better the measurements, the closer), but within a couple of weeks the values just diverge.

If people are interested in reading a bit more about this stuff, there are a few good books of introduction, like "Chaos" by James Gleich or "Does God play dice?" by an author I can't remember. A good article as a lead-in is here.

Dave Neary.

If anybody is looking for a great hosting company look into Voxel.net . I don't work for them but I do have an host with them. Their support is amazing!! I asked them about setting up a domain and told them the horror stories we all hear from CIHost. The next thing I know is I have one of their sales guys calling me because they thought my domain crashed (with CIHost) and I needed to be up ASAP. All their systems are Linux and have PHP3, MySql, Java, Java Servlets, and Perl. Also whenever I do a top on their system they always have 99% free. They don't overload boxes with too many domains. This makes them a bit pricer but for the service and support(they get back to usually in less than four hours) it's worth it. They also claim to be on one of the internet backbones so they are fast as hell. If you have any question feel free to e-mail me.

See this link or this one for a terrific discussion of all this. The Encylopædia Britannica also has a long article. Here's a less technical bit on monotremes in general plus specific links for the echidnas and platypus. Lastly, here's a brief write-up on the sleep of the platypus.

Informatively yours, :-)

There is an article about it in the latest issue of the alumni magazine from Johns Hopkins (my alma mater :-) Doesn't mention Stevie though...

I was going to submit it, but this guy beat me to it. Sounds very star-trekky, doesn't it?

-m.

• Beowulf is one of a family of parallel programming API tools. Programs must use the API to accomplish parallel programming.
• SCI is fast hardware with support for distributed shared memory, messaging, and data transfers. Again, if you don't use the API then no gain.
• DIPC is distributed System V IPC. Programs which use the IPC API can be converted to DIPC easily, such as just by adding the DIPC flag to the IPC call.
• MOSIX is the most general-purpose. Processes are scattered across a cluster automatically without having to modify the programs. No API needed other than usual Unix-level process use. Allows parallel execution of any program, although full use requires a parallel program design.

> Viewing source is viewing art and can inspire.
> Search engines such as google are also good at
> bringing up the home pages of those in question.

And indeed, I have been using search engines to fill out my list at http://www.math.jhu.edu/~martind/fsfl ist.html. It just seems it would be nice to have that information collected somewhere so that not everyone had to hunt these names down.

Hey, anyone who has a copy of the Be operating system should check out a program I whipped up which will convert any image (for which a translator is installed on your system) into the png format. You can easily convert an entire folder of many image types to png in one easy move.

available at BeBits under graphics utilites

or here

Source is included and is in the public domain.

If you like Apache, check out mod_backhand. It is a module load-balancer that is under development (but works well now) over at The Center for Networks and Distributed Systems at Johns Hopkins.

It is a module that incurs almost NO overhead. You can mark directories or locations with Load Balancing policies and BOOM. That is it. It communicates with other Apache servers via multicast and handles the rest. You can even plug in your own decision making algorithms. It is super simple to load balance cgi-scripts to some machines, mod_perl database script to another set and images based on a completely different policy. Or just use our default ;)

It curently runs under Linux and Solaris, but the next release will support BSDI as well.

It is a software solution that can be combined with any hardware solution you choose (if you need that too). You can't loose with this. The install process and set up time combined is very minimal.

Of course, I am a little biased ;)

-- Theo Schlossnagle

Puh-leeze. I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security here on /. Even people who would likely be comfortable with cranial cyberjack implants get all frightened by anything with the word "genetic". How disappointing.

So of course, the thread starts with the worst case scenario: "what if rich people engineered their kids to be 7 foot tall, buff, beautiful Aryan supermen who scorn and subjugate all lower forms of life..." Gee, is anyone going to say that's a good idea? Duh. The only response is "no, that's not how it will happen", which is sheer speculation. Just like the premise.

Now let's try some facts on for size. My wife is a medical doctor, and at dinner we trade tech talk -- computation for biomed. Here's a real-life scenario: "what if doctors engineered an embryo in utero to counteract the gene for Cystic Fibrosis, so that as the child grows older she isn't slowly suffocating to death on her own defective DNA..." So what do you think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because this project is already underway.

And there are quite a few other congenital diseases now being studied to varying degrees -- here's the American Society for Gene Therapy. Should we condemn children to CF, Muscular Dystrophy, Down's Syndrome, etc, just because you got scared by a mediocre movie?

Yes, there's the slippery slope problem. Things like nearsightedness, intelligence, or height are partly genetic. Don't forget the effects of nutrition, education, exercise, etc. But those genes are being studied too, and they will be found eventually. Do we draw a line on what should be treated/altered? If so, where? Who decides?

And how to enforce it? Once it becomes safe and effective (let's say 50 years from now), can you stop a billionaire from giving his children all the best genes? Can you even stop a middle class professional couple? Some people are already smuggling Pituitary Growth Hormone injections so their kids will be taller. The world you are afraid of is neither Brave nor New.

I went to Johns Hopkins, where they offered business and scientific french classes, and probably spanish as well (I don't remember, since I took French). I wonder if it would be possible to ask students taking those classes to translate the documentation and work on maintaining it. I mean, if you look at the sheer number of language students out there, there are sure to be enough that have the aptitude to translate technical documents, as well as the time to either volunteer to do it, or maybe do it for credit that they can get out of their departments.

For those of you still in college, this is something worth investigating. It would give them a great way to practice learning the language while helping the Linux community out.

Of course, this could just be a dumb idea, which I'm sure you'll let me know soon enough. :-)

Sujal

OK, so run MOSIX so processes will the automatically scattered across the cluster.

By the way, I found this nifty link on Bletchley Park's site. It's a Java simulation of the Enigma machine (the rotor cipher scheme used by Germans in WW2.) It's really cool and educative.

http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rus sell/classes/enigma/

I think I'm gonna devote some time to this... Have a friend encipher a few messages, then try a few modern attacks. It's nice to see how far we've come in crypto since WW2. Though I bet Enigma is still a pain to break on your own.

"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

Actually, multicast is not the greatest solution if you are talking about teleconferencing. If you are talking about sending it to thousands of people, sure, but there are better tools out there for 10-20.
Check out the SPREAD group communication toolkit from The Center for Networks and Distributed Systems at JHU. It is pretty powerful and simple to develope around.

-- my slashdot for your jesus

Actually, multicast is not the greatest solution if you are talking about teleconferencing. If you are talking about sending it to thousands of people, sure, but there are better tools out there for 10-20.
Check out the SPREAD group communication toolkit from The Center for Networks and Distributed Systems at JHU. It is pretty powerful and simple to develope around.

-- my slashdot for your jesus