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I worked at CDB for a number of years, but I ended up quitting a couple of years ago, in large part due the fraud becoming a bit too much of a daily obstacle to actually getting any work done.

Rather than go on a (very) long rant about the various problems with RIKEN, let me just give my insider opinion for now. If anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer.

IMHO:

1) Academic misconduct is considerably more widespread in Japan than in the Anglosphere. I've gotten tired of speculating on reasons why that is the case, but Google will probably have something to say on the matter.

2) Shutting down CDB is actually a rather clever PR stunt on RIKEN's part. As anyone who has spent a long time (10+ years) in Japan can tell you, a large part of Japanese culture, in both the corporate and academic spheres, involves what might be called 'constant renewal'. RIKEN is no exception, where this constant renewal manifests itself in three major ways:

2a) Non-academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs annually or bianually, including (incredibly) the "compliance unit" charged with investigating academic misconduct, commercial fraud, etc. This shuffling is, especially for more senior non-academic staff, generally between units rather than within units. The pretext is that this allows staff to become "generalists" so that RIKEN offices can easily continue running even if a few staff happen to leave all at once for whatever reason. For junior non-academic staff, what this means is that a secretary one year might be a health+safety officer the year after that, and work in the PR department the year after that. Maybe that's suboptimal, but if that was where it ended, I think that would be fair enough.

Where the real problems start is when more senior staff, such as "deputy lab director", "head of legal" or "compliance officer" start shuffling. In practice this means that an investigation into the purchase of a $50,000 Dell server that should have cost $5,000, the publication of fraudulent research, or even sexual harrassment had better start and finish before April 1st, or the shuffling happens, the new guy says "I know nothing" and the old guy says "sorry, that's not my job any more, talk to the new guy." As you can imagine, RIKEN (like any organization struggling to survive) is not really in any great hurry to investigate itself, so these aborted investigations are essentially all that ever occurs.

2b) Academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs in a rather interesting way; essentially all researchers at RIKEN (including new employees such as Postdocs, but excluding postgraduate interns) have multiple, concurrent positions. A Postdoc with 3+ simultaneous appointments is normal, and even mid-career researchers at RIKEN typically have 7 or so simultaneous appointments, mostly in different research centers. In this way, researchers' employment is effectively made permanent and can easily withstand the elimination of an entire research centre or two. Conversely, one common way for RIKEN employees to be constructively dismissed is to have the number of appointments reduced to one or two, so that when a given RIKEN center is "renewed", the old center ceases to exist and any employees belonging only to that center become redundant.

2c) RIKEN research centers themselves are continually renewed. In this case, CDB might be shut down, and that's going to get a good deal of press. What is going to get less press, I imagine, is that a new center, QBiC has recently been opened. While QBiC is currently based in Osaka, 30 miles away, my understanding is that a new QBiC center is being constructed literally across the road from CDB. Should CDB actually be closed, expect the majority of CDB researchers to suddenly find themselves with QBiC appointments (many already have such!) and all this closure will amount to is, quite literally, moving into brand new offices a stone's throw from the existing site.

3) I think that comme

I worked at CDB for a number of years, but I ended up quitting a couple of years ago, in large part due the fraud becoming a bit too much of a daily obstacle to actually getting any work done.

Rather than go on a (very) long rant about the various problems with RIKEN, let me just give my insider opinion for now. If anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer.

IMHO:

1) Academic misconduct is considerably more widespread in Japan than in the Anglosphere. I've gotten tired of speculating on reasons why that is the case, but Google will probably have something to say on the matter.

2) Shutting down CDB is actually a rather clever PR stunt on RIKEN's part. As anyone who has spent a long time (10+ years) in Japan can tell you, a large part of Japanese culture, in both the corporate and academic spheres, involves what might be called 'constant renewal'. RIKEN is no exception, where this constant renewal manifests itself in three major ways:

2a) Non-academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs annually or bianually, including (incredibly) the "compliance unit" charged with investigating academic misconduct, commercial fraud, etc. This shuffling is, especially for more senior non-academic staff, generally between units rather than within units. The pretext is that this allows staff to become "generalists" so that RIKEN offices can easily continue running even if a few staff happen to leave all at once for whatever reason. For junior non-academic staff, what this means is that a secretary one year might be a health+safety officer the year after that, and work in the PR department the year after that. Maybe that's suboptimal, but if that was where it ended, I think that would be fair enough.

Where the real problems start is when more senior staff, such as "deputy lab director", "head of legal" or "compliance officer" start shuffling. In practice this means that an investigation into the purchase of a $50,000 Dell server that should have cost $5,000, the publication of fraudulent research, or even sexual harrassment had better start and finish before April 1st, or the shuffling happens, the new guy says "I know nothing" and the old guy says "sorry, that's not my job any more, talk to the new guy." As you can imagine, RIKEN (like any organization struggling to survive) is not really in any great hurry to investigate itself, so these aborted investigations are essentially all that ever occurs.

2b) Academic staff at RIKEN shuffle jobs in a rather interesting way; essentially all researchers at RIKEN (including new employees such as Postdocs, but excluding postgraduate interns) have multiple, concurrent positions. A Postdoc with 3+ simultaneous appointments is normal, and even mid-career researchers at RIKEN typically have 7 or so simultaneous appointments, mostly in different research centers. In this way, researchers' employment is effectively made permanent and can easily withstand the elimination of an entire research centre or two. Conversely, one common way for RIKEN employees to be constructively dismissed is to have the number of appointments reduced to one or two, so that when a given RIKEN center is "renewed", the old center ceases to exist and any employees belonging only to that center become redundant.

2c) RIKEN research centers themselves are continually renewed. In this case, CDB might be shut down, and that's going to get a good deal of press. What is going to get less press, I imagine, is that a new center, QBiC has recently been opened. While QBiC is currently based in Osaka, 30 miles away, my understanding is that a new QBiC center is being constructed literally across the road from CDB. Should CDB actually be closed, expect the majority of CDB researchers to suddenly find themselves with QBiC appointments (many already have such!) and all this closure will amount to is, quite literally, moving into brand new offices a stone's throw from the existing site.

3) I think that comme

Once there are a few semi-self-sustaining outposts on asteroids

Supported by *what*?

Instead think of advanced materials that currently are in labs or in theoretical calculations only

All that high-tech wizardry needs a serious support infrastructure, which they won't have.

Not only that, but it appears that mammalian embryos need gravity to develop, and there's not enough gravity on any of the asteroids.

What you mean "supported by what"? Supported by local production of essentials, probably mostly using solar energy and locally available matter.

I was talking about advanced materials that are needed in small enough amounts to be brought from earth, or simple enough to produce so they don't need "serious support infrastructure". I mean, that's kind of a given, materials that can't be used aren't worth wasting much thought on... Besides, it's not far fetched to speculate that mass production of fullerenes (or some other advanced material) using asteroid material and taking advantage of microgravity and hard vacuum might actually be a profitable business at some point in future.

Why would semi-self-sufficient outposts be concerned with reproduction, other than making sure it doesn't happen? Sounds rather like a useful extra layer of birth control to me... However, from your linked article, it sounds very much like gravity isn't needed for a very long time, just for a few crucial first divisions. Providing enough gravity for that amount of time would be trivial for in-vitro fertilization, and doesn't take a very large rotating structure to provide it even for natural fertilization.

However, semi-self-sufficient by definition will get supply ships from earth. There's no point in trying to raise children in space until there are real colonies, as there would be a long queue of qualified, experienced people wanting to go.

Once there are a few semi-self-sustaining outposts on asteroids

Supported by *what*?

Instead think of advanced materials that currently are in labs or in theoretical calculations only

All that high-tech wizardry needs a serious support infrastructure, which they won't have.

Not only that, but it appears that mammalian embryos need gravity to develop, and there's not enough gravity on any of the asteroids.

The ISO file supposed to be over 4 GB but I got less than 200 MB !!

This is the link I got http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/iso/openSUSE-11.3-DVD-x86_64.iso

An alternative link also got me an ISO that is less than 200 MB

http://ftp.riken.jp/Linux/opensuse/distribution/11.3/iso/openSUSE-11.3-DVD-x86_64.iso

Can someone please tell me what I have done wrong??

That is actually also what the article states - 100.000 times smaller then nano-technology...

Theres already several facilities in the world that create "designer"-nuclei at different energies, the major ones at low energy are ISOLDE@CERN and Triumph in Vancover while eg RIKEN in Tokyo produces excotic nuclei at higher energies...

But this is of course good coverage for MSU :)

Is this really such a huge achievement when you consider that the Riken MDGRAPE-3 achieved 1 petaflops this time last year? Yes it is a special purpose machine, but it still reached the petaflops mlestone.

Tech specs for MDGRAPE-3

This is far from a general purpose supercomputer. If you read the more technical article at http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.p hp you will see that this thing is designed from the ground up to do molecular dynamics. So while folding@home might be able to make some use out of it, none of the other distributed projects would.

The following figure shows the block diagram of the MDGRAPE-3 chip. It consists of 20 force calculation pipelines, a j-particle memory unit, a cell-index controller, a master controller, and a force summation unit. The force calculation pipeline is the most important part of the chip which performs calculations of two-body forces such as Coulomb and van der Waals forces. Each pipeline performs 33 equivalent floating point operations per cycle when it calculates Coulomb force. Thus, when it operates at 250 MHz its performance will reach 165 Gflops with 20 pipelines. The chip also has the j-particle memory unit, which corresponds to the main memory of the CPU. Therefore, no extra memory is needed to attached with the chip.

http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.p hp ...MDGRAPE-3 (aka `Protein Explorer'), a petaflops special-purpose computer system for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins and the other biomolecules/complexes. It will become the first Petaflops machine in the world when it will be finished in 2006. This project is a part of `Protein 3000 project', supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.

This article here from Riken themselves has some more technical details:

http://mdgrape.gsc.riken.jp/modules/tinyd0/index.p hp

Funny. I posted both the jp page and us page. Damn filter erased the second link!

http://www.bmc.riken.jp/~RI-MAN/index_jp.html

your explanation about Dr. Mukai's name is wrong.

here's Dr. Mukais' webpage, and as you see the his name in Kanji, he is "Muka" "i". The leteral meaning is "approaching" and "well"(water hole). There are many theories about the actual meaning.

http://www.bmc.riken.jp/~tosh/index.html

Details, details.

He's called RI-MAN, Robot Interacting with huMAN. No word on his pushing or shoving capabilities, vis-a-vis a stair-rich environment.