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Colony collapse disorder is likely due to mites on the bees more than pesticides https://ipm.missouri.edu/MPG/2013/7/Colony-Collapse-Disorder-the-Varroa-Mite-and-Resources-for-Beekeepers/, and bee hives are generally recovering from colony collapse disorder https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-01/good-news-for-bees-as-numbers-recover-while-mystery-malady-wanes. It is true that pesticide use can be a problem, but that's probably not the primary cause of most of the bee population problems, even as neonicotinoids are separately creating problems for bees. It is also in this context, important to focus on specific pesticides like neonicotinoids rather than "pesticides" as a general category, many of which are harmless to bees. And for this reason, reducing or eliminating neonicotinoid use makes sense.

That's not to say that all other pesticides are perfect. While they are a major aspect of what has allowed humans to drastically reduce food costs and effectively escape the Malthusian trap, many neurotoxic pesticides are harmful to humans, and there's a strong correlation between general pesticide exposure and developing certain neurological diseases later in life such as Parkinson's https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parkinsons-disease-and-pesticides-whats-the-connection/. There's good reason to reduce our use of pesticides when possible, but fearmongering about bee collapse is not on them.

Don't tell me what I'm talking about.

Hello Anonymous Coward. I said that in reply to him.

You said that about our discussion. You were wrong.

The actual person who speaks the words is the speaker.

No. The "speaker" in the sense of "freedom of speech" is the person whose words are being "spoken", whether that is in print, audio, or any other medium. When you hire a voice-over artist to record your political ad, the "speaker" of the words, the person to whom the freedom of speech applies, is YOU. To assume your interpretation would result in the government being able to write laws preventing you from hiring a voice-over artist to convey your political or other message. Where is the "freedom of speech" for someone who is mute and wants to air a radio spot, if he can be prohibited from hiring a voice to speak his words for him? Does the First Amendment not apply to people who cannot speak, because they could never "speak the words" which the First Amendment would protect?

Overly lengthy, illogical drivel that continues to conflate the content of the message and the act of publishing or speaking it. There can be two speakers, the original author and the person or entity that publishes the message ("cable system operators are "speakers" for First Amendment purposes"). Your counter example is fundamentally flawed -- as if speech is limited to vocalization and not considered in the law to include any form of message, whether spoken, written, sculpted, signed, or the like.

Where is the author of a pamphlet like Common Sense if he can be arrested and prohibited from passing his material to the publisher who would print and distribute it (your version of "speak")?

He can. The easiest example is when the material discloses the existence of an NSL. There are several other bases as well, so long as they pass strict scrutiny and are a least restrictive means of accomplishing a compelling national interest.

No, I'm sorry. The person who originates the content is the "speaker" when applying the First Amendment freedoms of speech. Note that copyright law would be unconstitutional on its face were your interpretation to be valid. The government would be prohibited from making any law abridging my right to take your words and reprint them as my own, because under your interpretation I would be the "speaker" of those words and the person to whom the freedom of speech would attach. You would have no protection because I would be the "person who spoke the words" (i.e. published the text), not you, even if you had previously "spoken" them in some other form. And, I might add, your freedom of speech is not abridged when I can steal your work and publish it as my own because I did not prevent you from speaking your own words, so you would have no First Amendment claims.

It's cute that you think that the First Amendment is absolute, as well as that it doesn't have to be interpreted in view of the fact that the Constitution expressly authorizes copyrights and thus copyright law. But you remain deeply, fundamentally wrong.

The Communications Decency Act had to provide a specific immunity stating that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" precisely because everywhere else in the law, the publisher is a speaker.

Not in the sense of the first amendment, where it is the CONTENT and not the specific utterer of sounds that matters. The Communications Decency Act supports this when it makes it clear that the originator of the speech is the "information content provider" who is responsible fo

Regulation causes more cost, more cost is offset to the customer... ergo, regulation causes prices to raise... If that's extrapolation from a false premise, we can trash all of economics.

Worse still, it's more work that won't improve outcomes as there's a lack of good evidence to support that individualizing learning styles does any good. There are studies that have found negative results.

This is just like the programs to give students a laptop, a tablet, or something else that's supposed to be great for education but won't result in any significant changes. It's made to sound nice and fancy so that schools will spend millions of dollars on it and who would want to question funding something to improve education?

Check out the numerous studies of monozygotic twins reared apart. For example, Bouchard 1990

Thank goodness for all the studies of monozygotic twins reared apart. For example: Bouchard 1990. "The maximum contribution to... trait correlations that could be explained by measured similarity of the adoptive rearing environments... is about 0.03. The absence of any significant effect due to... environmental measures on the IQ scores of these adult adopted twins is consistent with the findings of other investigators."

It turns out that in practice, the smaller units of government are far more corrupt than the larger ones, because there's less oversight. Sure, corruption at the federal level gets news coverage, and it should. But if you knew what was going on at the state and local levels, you'd be horrified. But they usually get away with it, because the press has been nearly wiped out at the local and regional level, and the police aren't going to challenge the politically powerful most of the time. Look at, for example, NJ, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania - a series of amazingly corrupt schemes that made individual politicians, police, etc., rich but destroyed the victim's lives. And there's almost no enforcement of anti-corruption laws except at the federal level - according to http://web.missouri.edu/~milyo... 95% of corruption arrests are made by federal prosecutors (NB: often of state or local officials), meaning that local corruption can fly "under the radar" much more easily than federal corruption.

There a lot of serious problems with doing risk assessment for endocrine disruptors.

The first is that there is no known mechanism for most of the effects reported in the literature. Without this mechanism a real science based approach is impossible.

The second issue (and a general problem for that matter) is that many of the studies reported turn out not to be reproducible.

The following articles give some insight into this, relative to BPA which has been (possibly without justification a cause celebre):

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0102-previous-studies-on-toxic-effects-of-bpa-couldn%E2%80%99t-be-reproduced-says-mu-research-team/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21438738

Johnsongrass is a good example. Except, since this wheat is GMO, it'll be a lot harder to control.

At face value, I would favor regulation only allowing GMOs to be grown within a dome.

In soap really there isn't any evidence that it has a positive effect. Soap itself is a disinfectant, and triclosan isn't known to improve the effect. There is no reason to have triclosan in soap.

However triclosan in toothpaste really does prevent gingivitis.

The question is whether or not there are unintended consequences. I'm skeptical - too many of these studies are not reproducible, such as in the case of bisphenol-a.

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2013/0102-previous-studies-on-toxic-effects-of-bpa-couldn%E2%80%99t-be-reproduced-says-mu-research-team/

I think the author of the story hasn't completely understood. The phenomenon exists, that's quite clear.

Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor for Research University of Missouri: "There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18. The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and roughly one thousand times larger than can be attributed to a chemical process." http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/welcome.php

Dennis Bushnell, NASA: "The current situation is that we now have over two decades of hundreds of experiments worldwide indicating heat and transmutations with minimal radiation and low energy input. By any rational measure, this evidence indicates something real is occurring. So, is LENR "Real?" Evidently, from the now long standing and diverse experimental evidence. And, yes - with effects occurring from using diverse materials, methods of energy addition etc. This is far from a "Narrow Band" set of physical phenomena. " http://futureinnovation.larc.nasa.gov/view/articles/futurism/bushnell/low-energy-nuclear-reactions.html

President of the Italian National Agency For Energy (ENEA): "In other words, two government programs – carried out in close interaction and with check of results – have proved the existence of this phenomenon in terms that are not ascribable to a chemical process." http://old.enea.it/produzione_scientifica/volumi/V2008_16_ColdFusion.html (foreword of the book)

What the phenomenon is, that is still unknown.

thanks. I hope that you feel that reading this was a waste of your time when I tell you that this topic is also known as Low energy nuclear reactions, which after a short google you will find out is a synonym for cold fusion.

After all most people will tell you that cold fusion is crackpot, right ? That is can be dismissed without review.

Very interesting topic, I can tell you.
University of Missouri will be hosting the ICCF-18 conference in July, together with Purdue University.
http://research.missouri.edu/iccf18/

well it was reproduced, by Toyota and Osaka University. And it is repeatable. So not an artifact. Whether it will scale and whether other "host" materials can be used needs to be answered. If they could throw $120M at that question they would certainly find the answer.

I am happy that you find this interesting, I wish more people would know about it. This is slashdot, stuff that matters, but nobody knows about it and I can tell why that is so.

This topic is also known as Low energy nuclear reactions, if you google that you'll find that it is also known as cold fusion. Now everybody _knows_ cold fusion is crackpot and can be dismissed without review. Yet, many reliable labs have presented compelling evidence that something anomalous is definitely going on. http://research.missouri.edu/iccf18/

Curious, I read it. It demonstrated nothing about inflation, in fact it said "I’ll consider the inflation objection at length in my next post".

However, I don't need a Interwebs wacko to tell me that you can dry water and drink it. If you produce money with no actual wealth to back it up, be it old-style gold reserve or economic worth of the issuing country, it will cause inflation the moment it hits the economic system. Of course if you kept the quadrillion-dollar coin under your bed and told no one, it would cause no inflation as no one would know it existed; but if you use to pay the US government's debts, you have more currency around and no wealth to back it up; by simple supply and demand, value of currency will plummet (there is less than a trillion dollar circulating worldwide), i.e. inflation will boom so much it will make Zimbabwe look like Switzerland.

Even if the quadrillion-dollar coin would not start inflation, it would tell the rest of the world that the US are ready to issue fiat currency to pay their debt: that would start a bank run to get rid of their petrodollars (guess what, there is no fiat fuel, and you would not be able to buy much oil with those petrodollars). See the link above, according to the Fed most dollars are outside the US, a lot of them in the coffers of countries that need to buy oil.

What the US need is not "more" or "less" spending, it is more of the right spending and less of the wrong spending. The US have humongous military spending, which is by definition unproductive (in fact, destructive by its very nature, though the destruction is usually externalised to other countries). Yes, the military also finances R&D, but that R&D would be better aimed for the US economy if it were financed by universities or the private sector with governmental financial support, instead of being trickle-down adaptations of military technology.

The US have too low welfare, with insane amounts of poverty rampaging across the country; these people have no opportunity of becoming productive citizens because they never receive appropriate education. The point is not giving the poor food and shelter (which is of course still necessary), but giving their children good public schools that give them an alternative to crime as the best option for gaining wealth.

Also, there is a disproportionate amount of inmates in US jails. US prisons house more inmates than China, not just per capita— in absolute numbers . All these have to be fed, clothed and guarded, and this is expensive. It is way cheaper to institute education programs to make sure they don't recidivate, but then again some politicians would not look though on crime, which seems to be more important than to be smart on crime. Also, several states outsourced jail management to privates, who are paid by the inmate and have thereby no interest in re-educating their inmates (in fact, they do want their customers to come back!). More government, less market here.

Conventional records:

World record soybeans, 2010, 160.6 bu/acre * 60 lbs/bu = 9,636 lbs/acre
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4636574.htm

World record rice, 2011, 13.5 tons/hectare = 10,927 lbs/acre
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-09/20/content_13737437.htm

World record corn, 2002, 442 bu/acre * 70 lbs/bu = 30,940 lbs/acre (being generous, assuming ear corn)
burkstractor.com/eq_brochures/Case.../SeedNewsMar292006.pdf
(granted, not as good a source. find a better one)

World record wheat
World record wheat, 2010, 15.637 tons/hectare = 12,656 lbs/acre
http://www.meattradenewsdaily.co.uk/news/190310/nz___record_wheat_yield_.aspx

(lbs/bushel figures taken from http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G4020)

Now compare with the Dervaes family, doing permaculture in Pasadena on 1/10 of an acre. All years from 2003-2009 inclusive (newer data isn't posted) are between 4,000 lbs and 6,000 lbs on 1/10 of an acre. So 40K - 60K lbs/acre annually. That's better than world record yields on a regular basis.

in fact here is a link to a great opinion piece that best describes my opinion:

http://solberg.snr.missouri.edu/gcc/LupoMOMed.pdf

You are citing an article from a magazine that celebrates its bias as evidence performance related pay doesn't work? Here let me fix your hypocrisy for you, http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/papers_presentations/reports/Podgursky%20and%20Springer.pdf is a peer reviewed overview of studies in to performance related pay. You know, real evidence instead of a magazine and newspaper.

Next time you decide to attempt to make a point about sources perhaps cite some real sources asshole.

If by Computational Intelligence you mean Neural networks, Evolutionary Computation or Fuzzy Logic, you should look for GPU use. You can achieve at least 10x, generally 100x performance gain easily without making your code so more cumbersome or difficult to understand. Check this implementation of a neural network in C# and Cuda or some Fuzzy Logic. For portability, in the worst case where the computer can't have NVidia video cards, you still have MCUDA that will translate CUDA GPU processing into normal CPU processing.

Don't be blind. Yes it was more complex and cumbersome some years ago, but now with CUDA, you CPU and GPU code are mixing very well without so much difficulties or complexity.

Where is the news release? http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2011/0516-new-solar-product-captures-up-to-95-percent-of-light-energy/

An actual study here http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2007/1115-hamilton-inactivity.php explaining why standing is important. ...and I've been standing at my desk for a while now. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonsphotos/2255538445/

Wal-Mart ... dominates by offering affordable prices to Middle America... while Amazon ... caters mostly to affluent urbanites

Because we all know how there are no Wal-Marts along the East or West Coasts, and those backward "middle Americans" don't have the Internet.

The words you yourself are quoting literally say "dominates by" and "mostly". Why is it that you can't make perfectly accurate demographic statements without somebody feeling the need to refute claims about "all" and "no" which have never been made? It is a good thing not to attribute a demographic average to every member of the group, but rejecting the average trend itself is just silly, and not insightful at all.

A one minute search on google revealed this paper that shows negative income elasticity for Wal-Mart shoppers. I would be shocked if further search would not give more statistical support to the orginal claim.

http://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2008/WP0805_basker.pdf

Just curious. I had a quick look at the University website but couldn't find anything. This article gives a bit more info on it, http://engineering.missouri.edu/news/stories/2009/nuclear-battery-outstanding-at-conference/index.php.

"ullshit. Show me one citation that says that natural fertilizers such as animal dung have any connection to acid rain. I dare you."

Ok-

"Manure spread on the surface and not worked into the soil may lose most of the volatile nitrogen compounds as ammonia gas to the atmosphere. This lost nitrogen is not available for plant growth, and has been identified as a possible air quality contaminant contributing to acid rain." Source

More, and more.

Not great citations, but there were quite a few more that I could not read/reference due to not being publicly available. What it all seems to suggest is, that in those circles (farmers/biologists/whoever else does that sort of thing), there is really not question of the relation. And that solves your "any connection to acid rain" in any case.

First off, the article says 1 billion hectares, not 10 billion. That does make your 10,000,000 km^2 number correct, though.

Let's run some numbers.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture, wheat production for 2004 was 627 milion metric tons. Wheat yields seem to be in the 50-150 bushel per acre range (see http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/climate/GCremote5.html and http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_yield_of_wheat_per_acre). A bushel of wheat is generally taken to be 60 pounds (see http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G4020).

So per acre we get (50-150)*60/(2.2*1000) == 1.4-4.2 tons.

Given the 627 million ton production figure, that comes out to somewhere between 150 million and 450 million acres devoted to wheat cultivation. An acre is about 4047 square meters, so that gives us somewhere between 600,000 and 1,800,000 square kilometers devoted to wheat cultivation right now.

Borlaug's work raised yields by a factor of 3 or so, right? Therefore without his work achieving similar wheat production would have required an additional 1,200,000 to 3,600,000 square kilometers (120 million to 360 million hectares) devoted to wheat cultivation.

Similar methods have been applied to other cereal crops, of course. From the same Wikipedia article on Agriculture, maize production is 721 million metric tons. World-average yields are in the 4 tons per hectare range (http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/ad452e/ad452e0m.htm). That gives about 180 million hectares. Again, assuming yields rose 3x or so due to Borlaug's work that would have meant 360 million additional hectares of maize.

We haven't even looked at rice (which has total worldwide production similar to wheat and maize) or barley (about 4x less) yet.

These are all ballpark numbers of course, but 1 billion hectares isn't sounding all that implausible to me based on the above.

Within the genera, a fair number are doing tomato, potato, eggplant, tobacco combinations:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/gardening/grafting-tomatoes-wild-tobacco.html

Different genera:

http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G6971

quote: "Plants of different genera are less successfully grafted, although there are some cases where this is possible. For example, quince, genus Cydonia, may be used as a dwarfing rootstock for pear, genus Pyrus."

It's clear and undeniable that different families have different physical attributes. It's clear and undeniable that different families have differing level of susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. Is one really to believe that everything is heritable EXCEPT for anything to do with the brain...really? What makes the brain exempt from evolution and heritability?

Nice straw man. I never claimed the brain is exempt from these. My claims are that intelligence is a culturally biased concept, that intelligence tests consequently have an inherent cultural bias, and that "race" is irrelevant in determining intelligence, its correlation with culture being mere coincidence. Not a word you said has done anything to refute these claims, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted.

But the death blow to your argument is that there are no races. Individual/familial genetic variation is so much greater than genetic variation between races that the latter is insignificant, making any "racial" distinction on the basis of superficial appearances such as skin colour meaningless. That makes race a purely cultural concept.

How about this--if you had said the SAT was culturally biased, you MIGHT have a point. Brainpower is brainpower.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I think you might be implying that brainpower is purely genetically or "racially" determined. If so, that's wrong; environmental factors including culture have everything to do with it (ref.: Nature, Nurture and Early Brain Development). It starts right in babyhood where interaction with the baby is an important factor in determining brain development. How this interaction is done is culturally determined to a high degree.

It continues through adulthood where our mode of interacting with the environment is culturally determined and determines which brain parts are stimulated and strengthened and which are not. For example, London taxi drives have enlarged hippocampuses because they have memorized the entire London street map. More generally, our visual processing capacity has been massively increased for the recent few generations due to television and the image culture; simultaneously, most of us now have the attention span of a gnat and have become impaired in our ability to read a book or otherwise stay on the same task for hours on end. Conversely, our ancestors would have considered MTV a form of visual torture; their brains couldn't possibly handle it. These are all very real aspects of biological brain development that are culturally determined. (Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains is a good social commentary on that phenomenon.)

More proof? The Flynn effect: average IQ scores worldwide tends to increase about 3 points per decade, reflecting improvement in education standards worldwide. They have to periodically recalibrate IQ tests because of that. In a more extreme example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982 (see the wiki article for the reference). There is no way for any of this to be caused by genetics. Genes don't change that fast.

In short, denying cultural influence on brain development is just as silly as denying genetic influence on the same. And "race" is a genetically insignificant factor compared to individual and familial genetic variation, which puts any and all nonsense about Africans being stupid due to genetic inferiority in the rubbish bin where it belongs.

but show one schlong or some boobies, and that makes the movie off limits.

OTOH, we don't even start to become sexual beings until the early teen years. (Later, in cultures that aren't so sex-saturated as the US.)

Depends what you mean by "sexual being." Normal children under the age of 12 definitely exhibit sexual behaviours.

Start here: http://engineering.missouri.edu/

Question: Isn't 'girls' a sufficient and valid reason to select between two Universities (other things being equal).

laying down fertilizer on their lawn, and shipping cut grass to landfills - leaving grass where it is provides the new grass with its own fertilizer.

Kinda, sorta. Mostly leaving cut grass where it is leaves you with a lawn choked with decaying grass. It takes a fairly thick layer to actually compost.

No, you really do want to leave it there. According to that link, leaving your grass clippings there actually helps to decompose thatch. I read in the Scott's lawn care book that mulching doesn't contribute to thatch and is recommended.

writing that nitrates can be worse than NOx (NO, NO2 and others)

What's wrong with writing the truth? Nitrates are poisonous in quantity, and even below toxic levels can cause algal and bacterial blooms in water and soil - blooms which can and do crowd out other organisms from the ecosystem.

No, nitrates have nothing to do with algal blooms

Google hit #1 for "Missouri University copyright quiz"
is
From http://mizzouit.missouri.edu/security/dmca-quiz.html

which states:

"If you have downloaded copyright-protected files without paying for them then, quite simply, you have broken the law."

No, quite simply, that statement is bullshit as well as many other statements on that page. It is under-informed fear mongering and spreading the big-media meme that downloading and sharing is somehow bad.

There are many options (including our site) for people who own copyrights to distribute creative works, get financial sponsorship, or distribute their works for free if they choose to - and furthermore to allow others to distribute their works for them if they license their work in away to enable it. While these issues (downloading, payment, redistribution, illegal actions) are all closely connected to the copyright on the content, making such a blanket statement is irresponsible.

Paying for content rarely enables sharing today. It is the *licensing* and the actual laws are the important part for users to understand when they download or redistribute content. People need to read and understand the licenses and the law to know if they are breaking them.

Slow down there cowboy....I realize that it looks pretty cool linking to a paper hosted at a university, but this website was written by a systems analyst that works in the math sciences department at the university. Whether you intended to or not, this looks like you were citing a paper prepared by an authoritative source, not a guy who's hobby is leading a charge against the practice of circumcision. If there's such a wealth of information available to support your argument, you should have not trouble finding something from the medical profession, or can Yar refute this with a paragraph written on a napkin by his local mechanic?

Give me something to click.

The long term psychological impact of birth-related trauma is also relevant to the issue of MGM. Recent studies have found striking connections between birth trauma and adult post traumatic stress and suicide, [93, 94, 95, 96, 75, 67, 78, 97] and adult victims of infant MGM often exhibit a spectrum of symptoms including: * a sense of personal powerlessness

        * lack of trust in others and life

        * a sense of vulnerability to violent attack by others

        * irrational rage reactions

        * addictions and dependencies

        * difficulties in establishing intimate relationships

        * decreased ability to communicate

        * emotional numbing

        * reluctance to be in relationships with women

        * anger and violence toward women [98]

Neurologically speaking, the life-long sexual sensory deprivation which results from circumcision has a profound effect on the neural organization of the brain, similar to that found in any amputee: corresponding neurons associated with states of sexual and emotional ecstasy die, and adjacent neural regions grow chaotically into the dead zone. [99] Furthermore, childhood victims of traumatic abuse tend to have a variety of brain abnormalities, reflecting a generalized rewiring of the brain to adapt to a hostile environment. [100] The psychological impact of such brain damage is likely to be far reaching.

How would you define harm?

For many years the mainstream medical orthodoxy, put forth after it was no longer acceptable to torture children in the name of "moral hygiene," was that babies don't feel pain. It wasn't until 1978 that researchers even suggested using anesthetic during circumcision, and even today, most medical circumcisions are performed without anesthesia, according to the AMA. [73] This is in stark contrast to what is known about infant pain perception and its profound and lasting effects on the victim, as well as the plainly obvious reaction of the infant boy, who forcefully communicates his torment to anyone who will look and listen. Choking and breathing problems arise due to the continuous screaming. Surges in adrenaline and cortisol and large increases in heart rate, all established physiological indicators of torture, have been measured. [74] Some babies appear to go into shock. [75] Later, problems with sleep, mother-child bonding and breastfeeding, and increased sensitivity to stress and pain are all commonly seen after MGM. [76, 77, 78] To all appearances, the infant is left in a state of post-traumatic stress. Sometimes older boys have recurring flashbacks of their circumcision, a classic sign of PTS. Impaired bonding at this critical stage is well correlated with social dysfunction and even criminality later in life, [79], while breast feeding is known to have many health and psychological benefits for both the mother and the baby, [80, 81, 82, 67, 83] contrary to American medical doctrine of only a few years ago.

1984, & "The Symphony of Destruction"...

"Perhaps you should try focussing your efforts on fixing the real problem?" - by dave420 (699308) on Saturday August 04, @07:29AM (#20112179)

Yea, the Orwellian world... &, it's here (albeit 23 years late)... & Dave Mustaine of MegaDeath said it best:

"You take a mortal man, & put him in control (watch him become a God - watch people's heads a roll). Just like pied piper, led rats thru the streets: Dance like marionettes, swaying to the symphony (of destruction!)"

Fear... & ANY life insurance salesman can tell you? It SELLS, like NO tomorrow... & in this case? Can get abused to no end, think about it.

Everytime I see things like this? I just think of the potential for abuses, FIRST, before I think of how its going to "defend me"!

How's it going to do that, from a knife or bullet: IT'S NOT!

( ... & there is always potential for abuse of it, especially to keep us "nice, silent, sheep".

E.G.-> Let's say, you decide to protest against Mr. Bush's "fine war" (which SHOULD have gotten us cheap gasoline prices for SOMEKIND of "ROI" for our taxes paying for it, but, has done ANYTHING but, alongside our soldiers dying & their families in grief for it, & more etc. et al)?

It probably will be abused for things like this, FIRST, before it's used to "protects your freedoms":

Protesting? Atlanta Police Department is watching

http://foi.missouri.edu/firstamendment/protesting. html

WTF! &, I am SURE this is NOT isolated to Atlanta, Ga. (my former home for years thru the 90's), either...

People, I think, have forgotten, that 'freedom' (for whatever that word means, today)? Is NOT a right, you have to earn it AND defend it, starting with yourself first & in your IMMEDIATELY surrounding environment because face it: NOBODY, not even law enforcement, gives a shit about YOU personally, sad to say, even though we PAY them for it... &, to especially NOT live in fear & expect others to fight for you!

(Because face it: One day, you're going to end up in a pine box, like it or not, so about dying? Man, it's going to happen, surveillance cameras or not).

APK

P.S.=> Yea, ok... "stay the course" alright... right into being caged, little BY little, eroding away your freedoms, & privacy (what little IS left) away! Keep dancing folks, to "the symphony of destruction" & waste, and erosion of your freedoms, Mr. Bush & Mr. Cheney are selling you, YOU, for your tax dollars, so he & his "oil baron" (& no-bid on the job Haliburton bullshit) pals can rob you blind, & enslave you... apk

I'm majoring in both engineering and journalism (EE and newspaper, respectively), and both of those have additional per-credit-hour surcharges. I'm an in-state student, so on top of my $235.90 per credit hour, I end up paying an additional 22% per hour ($52.40) for my engineering courses or 16% more per hour ($38.70) for my journalism courses. It adds up rather quickly...

Corn growers intend to plant 90.5 million acres of corn for all purposes in 2007, up 15 percent from 2006 and 11 percent higher than 2005. If realized this would be the highest acreage since 1944, when 95.5 million acres were planted for all purposes.

"There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.; there is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 05, @06:43PM (#19760099)

I agree, & call "B.S." alongside you... needless to say, this time? Microsoft has actually pissed me off some (& they wrote me to take the word "Windows" out of some wares I wrote years ago for the shareware/freeware circuit no less, & that meant recompiling for resources (.exe's are where I do this, but I ought to consider it in .DLL's for easier updates) & taking my time to do it, to avoid a legal confrontation with they (this did NOT tick me off as bad as hearing this though)...

Why am I pissed off? Because I make less now, than I did back in 1999-2000 & beforehand, per year (I live in the 12th worst city economically there in in the U.S.A., & with that comes nearest the highest amount in violent crime as well along for the ride), & the poster I am replying to has it right... wtf is wrong with our businesses & more importantly, our gov't.??

You take our jobs, GOOD PAYING JOBS, not "hand-to-mouth" ones (plenty of those abound, minimum wage or near to it ones literally) that just keep you in a subsistence form of living?

Who the heck will have the 'disposable income' for the VISTA OS, & a new PC (or other things of larger values, all the way up to automobiles & homes, typically the second largest & largest purchase most folks ever typically make)?

I mean, Ronald Reagan the republican hit the air-traffic controllers unions HARD decades ago, & why don't these republicans in office now, do the same to ANY business that outsources? Sure, let them have their "laissez faire" & all that, but TAX THE SHIT OUT OF THEM for it, absorbing ANY gains made & then hit them with fines for doing it ontop of that... it'd discourage outsourcing for sure.

BUT, the fact remains, that it is TRULY now, "Corporate America" & our unalienable rights are being subverted such as free speech (what with all this "political correctness" bullshit) & if you protest against this war built on LIES (saying there were WMD's, & none were found, & THEN TRYING TO "OLLIE NORTH" the CIA, who only provides information, it is up to our leaders to have it TRIPLE verified, if not more, before acting on it)?

They surveil your home, your phone, etc. for using one of your inalienable rights, to freedom of speech, & terrorize us into silence via "homeland security" bullshit. Think I am kidding? Take a look:

http://foi.missouri.edu/firstamendment/protesting. html ... & it's NOT isolated to JUST Atlanta, Ga. U.S.A. either...

No, the world's fucked up, & our gov't. is @ the helm of it... helping things just "death spiral" more, imo!

A sad APK

"American Spirit is all but dead." - by db32 (862117) on Tuesday July 03, @09:21AM (#19729519)

My man, God Bless you, for speaking your mind here... because most ALL of the U.S.A. IS WITH YOU, but in fear for their lives (via their jobs etc. et al being put @ risk, by speaking their minds).

E.G.-> Do you know, that in Atlanta Ga. U.S.A. for instance, IF you are a war protestor? They will surveil your phone & home??

That's right... see here:

http://foi.missouri.edu/firstamendment/protesting. html

Jesus Christ (pardon me Lord, but I am not using your name in vain on this one, FAR FROM IT)...

Our "inalienable rights" are being alienated... our ability to SPEAK OUR MINDS, without fear of retribution!

(And, that's ONLY A SINGLE EXAMPLE!)

WTF!

Well, not everyone is afraid to stick up for themselves (and I have never been in the past, & came out ontop of the city I live in, for Police Brutality, no less in court)... & I am doing so again, vs. some cyberstalker creeps named Jeremy Reimer, & Jay Little, here:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?art icleid=41095&cpage=211#feedbackAnchor

Most people just give up... I never do, especially IF/WHEN I KNOW, I AM RIGHT!

APK

P.S.=> I can understand though, when/why folks do - they are worried about this "homeland security" that is just a way to keep US, the U.S. Citizenry, in fear for our lives & those of our kids (keep your mouth shut, hold onto your job, etc. et al being the line of thinking I think that prevails amongst most folks today, because of the stuff from Atlanta I noted above (which is NOT isolated to Atlanta Ga. only))... apk

Vat-grown, or printed, meat products are produced using the same basic techniques as other forms of printed tissue culture. Tissue engineering of this type was first developed for medical use in the production of autologous tissue for organ replacement. However this sort of tissue culture was soon found to be useful for the direct production of meat for food on spacecraft and habitats in deep space. See bioforgery.

To achieve the goal of meat production, muscle and other flesh cells are grown on a specially constructed biopolymer scaffold, which replicates the natural extracellular matrix found in living animals. This scaffold is generally printed using a rapid 3d printer device, although several other related techniques such as foaming and self-assembly are also used. Cultured cells are then implanted into the scaffolding, and these cells are induced to bind together into muscle-like or vascular tissue. Once the meat block, known as `slab', is established, the tissue is supplied with nutrients and allowed to grow by as much as 400% by volume before harvesting. To ensure the slab has a healthy texture it is stimulated into regular contractions, simulating exercise; the slab is attached at each end to strain gauges to measure the force of contraction. Each slab is connected to a generous supply of nutrient fluid often closely resembling blood.

Matter compilers in meat factories to produce foods. So, this looks like an interesting area of thought to explore further. Starting with cell culture techniques would be the smart thing to do, then confirming that we can identify particularly nutritious cells, and then working on some tissue growth techniques. Maybe this will start with burn victims?

Artificial cells, tissues, organs compilation,
Background notes on tissue engineering,
Engineering human tissue (paper),
An odd government website,
Obligatory Wikipedia article linkage,
Organ printing,
This source is claiming lab-grown meat in five years,
Fetal farming (what?),
New-Harvest.org for bringing cultivated meat closer to reality,

It's called a Series HEV.

Parallel HEV:
Both the Electric Motor & ICE operate torque on the same drive shaft

Series HEV:
Only the Electric motor operates torque on the drive shaft, the ICE is designed to recharge batteries for the motor.

A series HEV is DESIGNED to be plugged in, but the ICE can be used to extend the range, because of its general small size, and hopefully static (at least more than what we have now) output.

http://web.missouri.edu/~suppesg/Technology.htm#_T oc90965829

300 bars of compressed air stored on board the vehicle, Is this dangerous for the passengers?

Compressed air tanks have already been proven safe by one of our partners EADS(AIRBUS). This company's reputation in the aeronautical field is unprecedented, given the reliability of its tanks. What's more, the compressed air does not present any risk of explosion. Countless test have been carried out in the most extreme conditions (gun shoots, resistance to fire...) to guarantee passenger safety in every possible condition. The high pressure tanks have been developed using a similar technology to those used in natural gas vehicles and by firefighters. All are produced with carbon fiber over plastic.

The tanks that MDI puts in its vehicles are similar to those already in use in natural gas busses in Germany and other countries.

Here are the stats for my school's official computer labs, the University of Missouri

Total machines = 1121

1. Linux-only machines: 38
2. Linux/Windows dual-boot: 23
3. Apple-only machines: 168
4. Apple/Windows dual-boot: 3
5. Windows-only machines: 889

Percentage of machines with MacOS installed: 15.25%
Percentage of machines with Windows installed: 81.62%
Percentage of machines with Linux installed: 5.44%

Percentage of machines with ONLY MacOS installed: 14.99%
Percentage of machines with ONLY Linux installed: 2.05%>br> Percentage of machines with ONLY Windows installed: 79.30%

If you look at the distribution of machines in the different labs as seen here you'll notice that there are only two sites without any Windows computers- A&S #41, which is filled with Macintosh G5s and then Neff Hall, which is in the Macintosh-heavy journalism school. Every other site has at least some Windows computers, even in the CS department where almost all classes use Linux. (The students not in the one classroom full of Linux machines SSH into the local file server which uses Linux using a terminal client.) In the labs that have the dual-boot machines, I rarely if ever see anybody boot them into Linux except for a biochemistry class that uses SYBYL, which only runs on x86 Linux or SGI IRIX.

There are a few other non-IATS labs that are not included in these tallies. My academic building happens to have two of these. One is the student lab for the building and consists of 32 Windows-only machines. The other lab is a 10-computer Linux lab that a professor of mine put together himself for use in his classes. There are a few Macintosh machines sitting around in the biology building as the entire department is Mac-only. But then there are also a boatload of departmental labs that only use Windows, like mine did, too, so I think the official stats are indicative of the population as a whole.

And as far as student computer use...there was a survey done by Residential Life of freshman dorm dwellers (can't find the link, sorry.) It stated that Mac laptops were about 20% of the total computers on the network and about 65% were Windows laptops. There were a few Windows desktops and 3 Mac desktops. No mention of Linux as it's not supported by IATS and thus not "supposed" to be used, but IATS does not seem to care much. I was the only person on my floor who'd even heard of Linux my freshman year and I'd just started to dabble in it at that point- had a dial-up line at home, you know. So we're an Apple and Windows campus, that's for sure.

Google scholar gives some good starting points. A couple quick results:

DC Geary, SJ Saults, F Liu, MK Hoard, Sex differences in spatial cognition, computational fluency, and arithmetical reasoning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2000.

This paper:

ES Spelke, Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review. American Psychologist, 2005.

criticizes studies that conclude any general disparity in skills, and argues that gender disparity seen in such fields does not have a biological basis (or that any biological influence is trivially small), but even it acknowledges that there are several differences in how and how efficiently males/females process certain tasks on a very fine scale. The argument is that these differences generally cancel each other out when you look at aptitude for mathematics as a whole.

Here is the source... The "ALL-CRAFT" of the University of Missouri. http://all-craft.missouri.edu/

Here's a neat poster (pdf link) about how these briquettes are made.

It looks ultra simple to do. This poster references only 120:1 storage ratio, so maybe there have been process changes that have improved storage capacity. Maybe this will also help with fuel cells that run on methane to provide portable electrical power too. I think this could be an exciting development.

And Municipal Broadband seems unpopular with states.

There is faint hope for an opportunity in the Senate Communications Act of 2006 on page 184 of which I find:

''(c) LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROVISION OF ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS CAPABILITY AND SERVICES.--No State statute, regulation, or other State legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such public provider.

There is no way the communications giants would let that pass.

"We didn't declare war, they did."

So what about all the US (and other western countries) meddling in the middle east over the last 50 years. In 1953 the US and UK helped to overthrow the democratically elected governemnt of Iran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax which was threatening their oil interests.

Then you have the US arming insurgents in Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_A fghanistan) before the USSR actually invaded. Many of those they armed are today's "terrorists".

Then the US sold Iraq a load of chemical weapons that they used on their own people and on the Iranian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_A fghanistan).

hmmm, I wonder why people in the middle east hate the west so much. If it had happened the other way round we'd feel justified in declarinig war.

Since you asked...

The paper he mentioned in the talk: http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=20516096

An IEEE publication on a related topic: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arn umber=1495587

And finally a recent PhD thesis on a related subject: http://edt.missouri.edu/Fall2004/Thesis/MeyerR-120 904-T282/research.pdf

But then again, this is slashdot so we're all free to discuss without watching the video, reading the paper or otherwise knowing what were talking about.

Very correct. Remember that totalarian goverments with dense networks to spy on people existed for a long time, and it's also not new that your local 'democratic government' uses undemocratic means. The only scary thing is that current technology would actually enable a very efficient of way of total control, and manipulation of all historic events (if we would start to depend only on electronic format, and who keeps all his newpapers nowadays). This was unthinkable in the time that 1984 was written. Maybe the question is, what kind of society-critical SF story would someone like george orwell write if he did it now?

Well, not that I'm a good sample size when it comes to statistics, but I lift weights regularly and most people consider me in excellent physical shape (6 foot, 185 lbs). I'm vegetarian, not vegan, so I do end up drinking milk, though not much cheese. I have a master's degree in biology and while you can find dietary experts claiming completely opposite things, I'd like to think that I've thought about things carefully over the last fifteen years or so.

Processed foods are very much a problem. That includes meat - people who eat large amounts of processed meat appear to have increased cancer risks. I would rather see people replacing them with fruits, vegetables, and grain, however. They cost less, it's better for the environment, and it's better for your health.

Land in America isn't a problem (though you're ignoring the rest of the world wanting beef), but other issues are. Fresh water is being used up faster than it's being stored. Beef requires a lot of grain, and grain requires fresh water. Plus remember that around 20% of our beef is imported, around 3.2 billion pounds in 2002. That requires land and other resources in other countries as well (mostly Canada and Australia).

I'm not saying eating meat is inherently evil. There's lots of other sources of protein in the world that appear to be healthier and use less resources. I see meat being used as a seasoning for dishes, not the main meal at every sitting. Toss in some chicken for your salad, have some slices of turkey on your sandwich. Just don't go out for steak and burgers every meal.