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I attended a presentation once where one of the admins (Bob Beck) at UAlberta showed off his pf-based system to yank DHCP leases from machines that met their criteria for zombie traffic (typically a sudden blast of SMTP traffic). Actually, I think it was a little more complicated than that, but the end result is that desktops are redirected to a "You are zombied, contact the IT department" webpage. Pretty cool.

Dr. Gunnlaugsson and his group at the Aarhus University did most of the development and design of the telltale as a space qualified instrument, including building and testing of prototypes and the final flight model.

The original concept was proposed by my group at the University of Alberta. We also ran simulated experiments with various early prototypes as a proof-of-concept that demonstrated to the rest of the Science Team that such a simple instrument would work on Mars. I say simulated experiment, because we don't have a Mars Wind Tunnel at the UofA, as AarhusU does. So, we ran our wind tunnel at speeds that produced the same drag as expected on Mars. After the initial proof-of-concept work, AarhusU took over the development, manufacture and testing, but we continued to support the work of characterization of the instrument with our CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations, which you can see briefly described in the CFD-Lab website:
http://www.mece.ualberta.ca/~clange/phoenix/
under Projects.

In summary, the Phoenix Telltale was conceived at the University of Alberta, but its gestation and birth happened at Aarhus University.

Lange

This was actually developed by Carlos Lange from the University of Alberta. It was constructed in Denmark at the University of Aarhus. And of course the project is run from the University of Arizona.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=5de7e220-b9d3-4540-8c02-f9369339c52c
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=25509
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=9360
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/620268/The-Telltale-Wind-Experiment-for-the-NASA-Phoenix-Mars-Lander-2008

One thing for certain.. it's definitely a U of A project.

It's been pointed out recently to me (at least here in Alberta, Canada), that university enrollment drops when the economy's strong, and picks up when the economy slows. There's at least a couple factors here. One, when the economy's not doing great, a university campus is a relatively secure place to be while you wait out a temporary drought. Secondly, while the economy's doing good, it's generally easy to get a well-paying job, which presents a stronger competition vs the academic route. On that note, the economy's looking pretty rosy up here right now, so we're definitely looking for potential students at the University of Alberta's Computing Science department!

The original poster is asking for a solution without providing all of the requirements. The original request is for a database program to replace a Notepad based text file, and yet most of the responses on the 6+ pages of comments have been around which programming language has bindings to which database, or discussions on SQL syntax. It would be helpful if the OP could elaborate a little on whether (s)he even has programming skills.

I read the request as looking for an application to replace the Notepad system. If the OP was just using a text editor, then it doesn't really sound as though (s)he needs SQL. A flat file of records with the ability to do straight text search sounds like an option. The question then is what type of tool can be used to manipulate that system?

Following the text editor/file model, one option, though larger than the 800kb discussion around SQLite could be Emacs with Forms Mode. This is also a (very big) text editor, but allows you to view a file of records in a nice editable form, but you can still open the record file directly and use all the searching capability of an editor. Of course this is probably very much overkill for someone used to using Notepad, but I suggest it merely to point out a type of option.

Another potential option might be to use one of the wiki-on-a-stick systems. Tiddlywiki and Stickwiki would allow the OP to use a browser with a wiki interface to record the data into a single transportable file. (S)He could organize how ever desired, though if the OP wants to be able to extract the data for loading elsewhere, that could be a little problematic as these tools tend to store the text in the generated HTML page in little division blocks. Some may offer export capability though.

So, the question is what are the full requirements, what skills does the OP have, how much configuration and/or system administration is (s)he wanting to do to have this simple system, and how do you wish to manipulate the data that is captured?

If you want to hand edit it, then some tool that saves records in a flat structure (one per row or one per file) that can be manipulated by a text editor is needed. If all you want is some way to record information and search it, then there may be other options. Many PIM tools also offer limited record management systems that you might look into.

The site has been slashdotted apparently but no fear, it does not contain anything useful information about the research anyways. You could download the original draft submitted to the journal at http://www.business.ualberta.ca/tcc/documents/TII_3_OMahoney_Ferraro_final.pdf
[quote]
The following is the quote from google's cached version:
Scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization

André Felipe Machado

TerÃa-Feira, 27 de Novembro de 2007

Two academic management researchers performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective.

The study analyzed 13 years of Debian Project history, interviewed some Project participants and previous Leaders, and carefully observed patterns.

The open nature of history, registered at discussion lists archives and irc logs, meetings reports, helped a lot during the data collection phase.

The study is VERY interesting as scientific analyzed HOW an open source project survived, evolved and flourished during 13 years, overcoming many troubles only challenged by long term BIG communities, reaching a solid institutional foundations to resolve disputes.

The previously releasead version of the text can be found here.

The latest revised version, published at the Academy of Management Journal, Oct 2007, Vol. 50 Issue 5, p1079-1106, 28p; (AN 27169153), is copyrighted and can not be published here.

The authors are SiobhÃn O'Mahony , Assistant Professor at the University of California's Graduate School of Management, and Fabrizio Ferraro , General Management Professor at IESE

Versão para impressão

Baixar PDF Baixar a versão PDF desta pÃgina

[/quote]

This reminds me of this fascinating Lisp interpreter which is run based on templates during compile time as it seems.

http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:Hc_Bsm4QjkAJ:www.prakinf.tu-ilmenau.de/~czarn/meta/metalisp.cpp+metalisp&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6

Unfortunately people seem to have lost interest in it and the code is now only in the google cache. This was mentioned in the boost paper:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~graphics/software/boost/libs/mpl/doc/paper/mpl_paper.pdf

I find this totally interesting even though it seems like C++ has been stretched beyond its limits. I think this is a good example for the complexity you complain about. People are producing useful code and even libraries based on obscure features of the compiler which the inventors never thought about. If you need compile time functionality to support programmable code generation you would expect some more explicit language features to be available for this task.

Also I always feel that I must learn about these advanced template mechanisms I have no clue about, to really understand C++. Then I notice that the rest of the world thinks that C++ is outdated and Java or something else sluggish is the language of the future. You can't write high performance code in Java (digital signal processing, image processing, real time stuff, ...) however, so I will continue with C/C++. The DSP and uC environments also never support Java and rarely will they have a good C++ compiler. So I feel a bit left behind. Especially since I don't know what the next best high performance programming language will be.

Q: What is the difference between a Ph.D. in mathematics and a large pizza?
A: A large pizza can feed a family of four...

Please continue fighting for who thought the solution first.

More at http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~runde/jokes.html

Yeah but what if we took all the water flowing out of hydroelectric dams... or hell all the water flowing EVERYWHERE... through pipes... in storm drains... anywhere water flows... and use a technology like this: http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=5117 ... to "exploit the natural electrokinetic properties of a liquid such as ordinary tap water".

Energy consumption is a non-issue. We don't pay much for electricity.

Even if that were true, if you have 4000 computers that don't shut down at night, that's enough money to pay several people's salaries. 4000 computers * 12 hours * $0.015 per hour = $720 per night = $262,000 per year.

Fix that problem, and your boss might even give you a raise.

In which case, the entire reason for powering down at night is to save electricity, which is far more valuable than you would think. Especially when you have 8000 computers! By the University of Alberta's estimation each desktop costs about 1.5 cents per hour to run. Multiply that by 4000 (the rough estimate of the original poster of the PCs that are on at night), and multiply that by 12 hours, and you get $720 per night! At that rate, you can pay someone to go around and turn off all the PCs manually and still save money.

More about SLOWPOKE:

• University of Toronto
• Dalhouise University
• University of Alberta
• Ecole Polytechnique (Montreal)
• Royal Military College
• CANDU
• Research Reactors Canadian Nuclear FAQ

Okay, all I see on here is negative comments, what ever happened to the concept of "the right tool for the job"? Ruby on Rails is a gem (excuse the pun) in the realm of bioinformatics and chemical informatics. I don't need to be concerned with "scaling" when I am building a site with a maximum of 10 users. For labs and small companies everywhere needing to create and support small or large databases, RoR is fast and easy. It also has major industry backing from the likes of IBM and Apple. It may be a bigger problem for high-volume sites, but I have found it extremely useful. I am using it on the backend (for data management - the data is exported from the database to the legacy perl system daily) for sites like http://www.drugbank.ca/ http://www.hmdb.ca/ and on the frontend for sites like http://hmdb.med.ualberta.ca/foodb/.

I think a better example of something that causes lost sovereignty is some of the trade agreements such as NAFTA. One example I think of specifically is the dispute between Ethyl Corporation and Canada, in which Canada was basically forced to remove a ban on a fuel additive despite evidence of it being harmful to humans, and to pay to Ethyl corporation 13 million dollars in legal fees and lost profits. (I am aware that the link I gave is quite biased, but I just wanted to point out the result of the legal battle I am speaking of). Further down, the article reads "... Canada remains one of the few countries in the world where MMT is blended into automotive fuel.". If that is not an example of lost sovereignty, I don't know what is.

Have you ever seen a Universal Turing Machine implemented in Conway's Game of Life?
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~bulitko/F02/papers/tm_words.pdf
Constructing such a thing in cellular automata can take a while.

The University of Alberta poker program "Polaris" played evenly with two professional players in a highly publicized match last July. It lost narrowly over the four sessions, winning one, drawing one, and losing two, but there was no meaningful difference in the overall quality of play.

http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/

However, for multi-player ring games, your comments are mostly correct -- for now.

There is no 'algorithm' that plays good poker yet, that I know of. It's not trivial.

Here's one that does a decent job: Polaris

From here:
Janice Kim pro 1-Dan beat Handtalk giving 25 stones handicap "by only a few points". David Mechner reports that it was an interesting game, but the game record could not be rescued from the organizer who quickly quit the program.
Interesting...

Since you haven't made much effort to persuade me otherwise, I maintain that there exists a design philosophy difference between Apple and the rest of the cell phone industry, and that this philosophy is a carry over from their PC design philosophy. Honestly, I didn't really expect the address book example to be contentious. Programmers (like bjourne) who understand the relative horse power requirements of different storage and search solutions should know that most phones on the market in the past several years had enough horse power to solve this problem, and there has been plenty of time. For crying out loud, iPhone was in development for three years. Apple designed a new phone from scratch. Surely Nokia or Motorola could have built a decent address book in all that time? The fact that they did not should tell you something. Furthermore, you don't need to be a programmer to get this. Anybody who has ever filled up their address book should know the frustration of being forced to pick which ones to carry with you on your phone. I chose this example, rather than others, because quite honestly it's not really controversial and it's pretty easy to understand.

There are counter examples, of course, perhaps there will soon be another, ring tones, which we are likely to discover next week will be absurdly restricted on iPhone: you'll be able to pay to use any section of a song you like as a ringtone, but you might not be able to use your own audio files as ringtones. If that happens, it will be an interesting counter example to my argument. Note, however, other music related restrictions that people didn't like about iTunes (e.g. DRM) turned out to be due to the requirements of industry partners, and Apple has been quietly working in the background to move the industry away from excessively restrictive DRM, at signifiant risk to Apple's own business model, I might add, as evidenced by today's announcement regarding NBC Universal. (DRM is only one factor in that negotiation, of course, but it is a factor.)

It would be amusing to run style (1) comparing a large sample of Anonymous Coward postings to those by logged in users. If you really think the words I use are too big, please consider that you came to Slashdot, not ZDNet, and presumably nobody forced you. Didn't you know that Paul Murphy uncovered the astounding truth that Slashdot posts have an average reading grade level higher than some other tech industry rag forums (see: Are Mac Users Smarter Than PC Users? )? The Macintouch crowd put us Slashdot geeks to shame, though, so we can't get too smug. Yeah, I'm perhaps a bit of a geek, since I really do read the dictionary for fun sometimes. And Dude... uh... like, did you fail to notice that I'm posting a series of connected statements intended to establish a proposition, logged in using my real true name no less, while you are calling me names as an anonymous coward? I'm definitely not worried about being perceived as the friendless geek with no social skills in this conversation. Since I don't care what you think, try calling me a sociopath next. You'll still be wrong, but you'll get to use a big word and I won't be much affected by your tantrum. Heck, maybe you're not a pedant, you only play one on Slashdot. Perhaps I give you insufficient credit for a fine sarcastic wit.

--
For kicks, I ran

There used to be a javascript page that could beat any human player in rock paper scissors at (Broken link), but that link doesn't work anymore. There are still 4 hits for "emin/writings/lz_rps/index.html" on google though. Anyway, the basic idea used LZ compression to figure out the player's internal "random" play style, and it could easily beat most people every throw after as few as 20 rounds.

It looks like the latest crop of rock paper scissors programs can beat the naive LZ implementation at The Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition.

Well, it may be that your opinion is that poker is "easier to compute" (whatever that means) than chess.

However, as justification for this opinion you give completely irrelevant comparisons.

I can go into the technical details if you insist as to _why_ it is the case, or you could go to to http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/ and read around there (and contemplate why the University of Alberta considers their chess research a "previous project", while the Poker research is ongoing), or perhaps you'd like to actually implement either a chess engine or a poker bot or both, and then see how far you can get. Or you could read one of the actual scientific papers on Poker AI, where there's usually a justification why they think Poker research is more fruitful nowadays than chess research.

Alternatively, you could just trust me when I say:

The techniques used in writing a chess engine that can beat an average human player are so established that even beginning programmers can quickly implement them (drop by the forums at http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=7 for some non-academic discussions on chess engine writing). Essentially, just searching as many positions as possible as quickly as possible (and using the latest hardware) has been the most successful approach.

For Poker, just the fact that parts of the game are hidden makes it harder by orders of magnitude, and research is very active.

The number of combinations you can make with a deck of cards vs. the number of moves in a chess game is a completely invalid comparison. I'd suggest that any such comparison attempted would be more or less meaningless.

Just the fact that endless numbers of games playable with a standard deck of cards of a complexity ranging from the trivial to the extremely complicated should suggest to you that perhaps that the number of comparisons is perhaps not a very meaningful metric.

I'll pick out just one small factor to perhaps illustrate the huge differences involved:
Judging the strength of a chess engine properly is hard enough despite the fact that in principle the results are very easy to analyse: There is only either a win, a loss or a draw. Even with this superficial simplicity thousands of games have to be played before chess engine A can be confidently judged to be stronger than engine B. And this in a game where there's supposedly no random factor!

In Poker, even just determining whether one player was simply lucky or actually better is a research programme in its own right.
In the FA, a very limited variant of Poker was used: One-on-One Limit Texas Hold-em. It gets much more complicated once you add more players, and more complicated again when you go from Limit to No-Limit Poker.

Your "opinion" is wrong on so many levels that it takes real effort for me to stay on-topic and not flame you personally for it (I apologize if my effort was not sufficient).

Look at the first entry (bottom of page) on the Polaris team's blog for the second day. The day that the humans started winning:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machine /Live/Day2Session1/

The U of A team gave the humans the logs of the first two games!

Perhaps after the entire match they could have reviewed the game logs, however this give the humans an unfair advantage during the second day. I can't believe that this isn't getting more attention -- they bascially gave the human team a huge insight into the inner workings, strategy, and tendencies of their opponent. Something that Polaris definitely did not have.

In my opinion this sours the competition and completely invalidates the final two matches. The human likely found a weakness (or two or three) and exploited it, and we can't know for sure that they would have found the weakness without those logs.

That was a huge mistake by the U of A team, and they have apparently got away with it without anyone noticing.

For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here.

For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here.

For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here.

Already Done

http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/cgi-bin/statu s.cgi?14

In this game DixxyCupp (dixxycupp@yahoo.com) has Chinook stating it has lost -- 66 moves in each has two Kings, Dixxy also has a single left as well.

LOL look at this:

http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/cgi-bin/statu s.cgi?05

Someone put:

Spectator comments about this game:

Hitler: This kind of reminds me of Poland, in '39.

The 'proof' page leads you to a game. That's not a proof, it's a telephone directory.

Somebody call me when computers have proved the Four Colo(u)r Theorem. Until then I'll be off playing CounterStrike (so I can work on my winning algorithm).

http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/cgi-bin/statu s.cgi

GAME 17:
Opponent: Cmdr Taco (cmdrtaco@slashdot.org)
Chinook color: White
Level: Novice
Move number: 3
Game analysis: Chinook has a small advantage.

Why did I have the impression this is a well established fact? In addition, mitochondria not signalling the cell to die is the main reason that cancer cells don't die. It's many months now that research into dichloroacetate (DCA), which has been used for other purposes too, causes cancer-cell mitochondria to resume their operation and cause the cells to eventually die. See an example of a similar report.

As much as you don't like George W Bush, you might want to rethink that. If Kim Jong Il won and became the President of the USA:

a) Anyone that criticized the Great Leader, via Internet, Phone, or even in a Public Place, or around a family member that supported him, would find themselves in a concentration camp and gradually worked to death.

b) The economy of the United States would completely collapse to a failed agrarian state. There would be no electricity, transportation, or food. Millions of people would starve. There would be no private companies. Instead of Apple vs Microsoft, there would be a single Kim Jong Il Glorious Operating System.

c) Adjusted for comparitive GDP, the US Military would have a budget of around 2 trillion dollars a year. Oh, and we would all be drafted up, yielding a standing army of around 10 to 20 million men under arms. What we do with that army? Well, forget about a war to liberate Iraq from Saddam, the USA would, under Kim Jong Il, have created an empire by conquering Canada and Mexico and probably into the south.

d) Pictures of Kim Jong Il would be on the currency and all documents. There would be no hollywood stars, or media or celebrity watch, becuase there could only be one celebrity, the Great Leader.

e) We would be in year 90, or something like that, as the calendar would be based on the anniversary of North Korea's original leader.

After that, it only gets worse.

http://www.stat.ualberta.ca/people/schmu/nk.html

Take the time to have some understanding of what real dictators are, before you start comparing US Presidents to them.

I invite you to have a look at:

Hey, guess what, all narratives can be classified if you abstract it enough; there's the 36 Dramatic Situations, and a lot of games follow the Monomyth to some extent. Should all games go away? Maybe. To say that there's a lack of originality in storywriting for games is an unfortunate truth, but it by no means is limited to the Final Fantasy series. In fact, the situation you described applies to a whole host of console RPG's, churned out because a lot of people love it and (more importantly) will pay for it. The Final Fantasy series, however, has at least made strides towards improving (or at least varying) their gameplay mechanics--just look at Final Fantasy XII.

In my opinion, better storywriting is the future of games. Chris Crawford talks about this in a somewhat old Gamasutra interview. *Shameless plug alert* I'm also involved in a project that aims to tailor stories to the player.

The Mr. Vegetable Story

Bruno Wiskel, Mr. V's major share holder was born in 1960 in Edmonton where he was raised pretty well as a city boy until the passing of his grandfather in 1974. As a young man Bruno's love for farming began when he started helping his father Stan on weekends and summer holidays to build Wiskel Farms into a progressive grain farm.

As with many father/son partnerships, a disagreement arose as to the direction the farm should move in. Son - more conservation minded and intensive; father larger and more extensive.

Bruno settled the dispute by attending the U of A and obtaining a degree in geology specializing in groundwater geology, followed by 2.5 years as an exploration geologist for a small oil company in Calgary. When oil dropped to below $10 per barrel, the entire exploration department was laid off, Bruno included.

For his next job he worked that summer as a pipeline inspector on the Trans Canada Pipeline from Gretna (at the US border)to Brandon Manitoba. Although he learned nothing about pipelining, he did learn about growing the various "alternative" crops of fruit and vegetables from farmers who owned the fields through which the pipeline ran.

I agree with everyone else above. That was the best post on slashdot I've read in quite a long time. It was so good, I took a couple of minutes and made a prettified version, and uploaded it here. If you feel that's inappropriate, please, message me and I'll take it down. But thank you very much.

The prettified version lives Here.

Without that mail forward bug, I'd never have been able to get root when I wanted it.

I agree on the fascinating subjects of research from games, however No game development house will allow any kind of research. They already have to spend 8 day weeks in order to produce games, they do not have time for research.

As for the Computer Games as a tool for research, I know about AI (it is my field of research for my PhD). Take a look at ORTS, the Excalibur project and SOAR. All of them are research projects from Universities using computer games (virtual environments, etc) to research some Artificial Intelligence subject.

It's great to hear that game makers are taking story more seriously than in the past. Personally, I've never been satisfied by a 'branching' storyline; too often, it's just the illusion of choice. I remember reading in Nintendo Power a year or so before Final Fantasy 6 (then dubbed 3) came out that there were "3 separate storylines to explore!" with a screenshot of a black backdrop with 3 characters to choose from (I think it was Terra, Locke and Edgar? I'm not positive about that though). When I got to that point in the game, I was so excited to choose something in a game and have my choice matter. I was excited by the prospect of getting to play the game three times and have three different stories. When I discovered you only got to choose the order in which you played those sections of the game, I was quite disappointed. It's still one of my favourite games of all time, and perhaps in retrospect, as an adult, I might not want to play the game three times through to feel as if I've 'beaten' it. Still, that was the one criticism I had on the game as a kid.

There will always be a market for the linear game model, but I believe that the future of RPG's (and other genre of game) includes dynamically generated storylines. Research into interactive storytelling has been going on for a long time. A research project at the University of Alberta that I will be working on this summer deals with player-specific storylines in an RPG domain. I believe these games have great potential to be incredibly immersive and fun, and fun is what it's all about!

Take a look at these sites for influences that are not well understood by most. For instance, there is good evidence that the greenhouse anomaly has been growing for about 8000 years as a result of human activity. http://courses.eas.ualberta.ca/eas457/Ruddiman2003 .pdf
The course of events would have resulted in a cooling climate and a return to an ice age in the near future without the effect of the greenhouse gases from farming and land clearing. In addition, the undisputed effect of the rapid rise in greenhouse gases recently has been largely responsible for the warming so grnerally reported. There are other effects that moderate and perturb the result of such warming. The high level of solar activity in recent years is suggested as being responsible for the more rapid warming of the polar regions, while moderating the tropical heating effects. This would result from a proposed connection between sunspots and cloud formation. Clouds would retain winter heat in the polar regions where long periods of low or no light usually results in rapid cooling. Similarly, tropical areas would be reflecting more light and thus not heating as rapidly. http://www.dsri.dk/~hsv/Noter/solsys99.html
There are other inputs that are potential wild cards in the equation, such as the decomposition of organic matter currently held in permafrost. This input could result in a doubling or even tripling of atmospheric CO2, but the time frame would be long and require the continued melting of the permafrost, and it neglects binding of CO2 in new forest growth etc.

Yes, I'm sure Merck is doing this for the health of women and the good of humanity. Eventhough they are a corporation and their #1 goal is profit over anything else so their board members and execs can make even more millions per year, I'm sure that has nothing to do with it and they are providing their product and services for free. Of course, any study that shows complications and harmful side-effects from this vaccine are all publicly accessible and not covered up by the company either.

Merck is such a nice corporate entity I'm sure it has started mass producing that non-patentable cancer fighting drug mentioned in the news a few days ago. They will make a fraction of the $$ they would off a less effective patentable drug, but remember Merck has such a big heart and will do this for us.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/0 6/0624253&from=rss/
http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca//

Maybe I am just too dumb, is this compound similar to the news out of the University of Alberta?
Small molecule offers big hope against cancer

Open Source Biology is the wave of the future. As Bruce Sterling says, the future is already here, but unequally dsitributed.

Example (kind of Ribopunk) of the great new Human Metabolome Database and how it can be mashed-up:

The Human Metabolome Database is an extremely important new comprehensive searchable online resource. It is a central encyclopedia about chemicals, embedded in us.

See the home page at:
http://www.hmdb.ca/

"The Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) is a freely available electronic
database containing detailed information about small molecule
metabolites found in the human body. It is intended to be used for
applications in metabolomics, clinical chemistry, biomarker discovery
and general education. The database is designed to contain or link
three kinds of data: 1) chemical data, 2) clinical data, and 3)
molecular biology/biochemistry data...."

or the browsable Metabolomics Toolbox at:
http://redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca/hmdb/HMDB/scri pts/browse.cgi?hits=20&browsn=1&pag=1&acco=11

Dark Bands in the Human Spectrum
by
Jonathan Vos Post
1 Feb 2007

What is the human body made of? An odd way to answer this is with the inverse question: What is the human body NOT made of? I can give an answer in the following sense: for what natural numbers (i.e. positive integers) is there no ion or molecule found in significant quantities in a human being, which has that number as the average atomic or molecular weight, rounded down?

Humans have lots of water, and thus lots of hydrogen atoms and hydrogen ions, both of whose molecular weights (1.00783) round down to the integer 1. Heavy water (Deuterium oxide) has already been figured in by our using an average molecular weight, which this considers both protium (hydrogen with no neutron) and deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron, molecular weight averaged down to 2). There is not going to be a measurable amount of radioactive tritium (hydrogen with two neutrons) whose atomic weight rounds down to 3. The human body has essentially no helium (atomic
weight rounded down to 3 for the rare light isotope, rounded down to 4 for the rare light isotope). The human body, assuming this is not a person taking lithium as treatment for depression, has nothing of molecular weight 5, 6, or 7. Beryllium is rare, and a poison. So there is a gap in the average molecular weight mass spectrum of a human which is covered by the integers 2 through 10. There should be no atomic
carbon in a human body, not counting gunshot residue or charcoal from grilling or sketching, hence no 12 or 13. Carbon is in humans, but bound up in organic molecules.

In summary, the integers representing mass gaps in the
human spectrum include: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 49, 52, 53, 56, 64, 66, 69, 70, 82, 91, 95, 98, 99.

We'll look higher, but these "dark bands" will become rare...

Source of data: the Human Metabolome Data Base

On 1/31/07, Jonathan Post wrote:
Sorted (by hand) by molecular weight

HMDB02106 1.00783 Hydrogen ion
HMDB01362 1.00783 Hydrogen
HMDB02386 11.00930 Boron
HMDB02714 16.03130 Methane
HMDB01039 17.00274 Hydroxide
HMDB00051 17.02655 Ammonia
HMDB02111 18.01060 Water
HMDB00662 18.99840 Fluorine
HMDB00588 22.98980 Sodium
HMDB00547 23.98504 Magnesium
HMDB02084 26.00307 Cyanide
HMDB02175 27.97690 Silicon
HMDB01361 27.99490 Carbon
HMDB01371 28.00610 Nitrogen
HMDB03378 29.99799 Nitric oxide

Crap, I forgot to include the summary:

The unique metabolic profile of cancer (aerobic glycolysis) might confer apoptosis resistance and be
therapeutically targeted. Compared to normal cells, several human cancers have high mitochondrial
membrane potential (DJm) and low expression of the K+ channel Kv1.5, both contributing to apoptosis
resistance. Dichloroacetate (DCA) inhibits mitochondrial pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK),
shifts metabolism from glycolysis to glucose oxidation, decreases DJm, increases mitochondrial
H2O2, and activates Kv channels in all cancer, but not normal, cells; DCA upregulates Kv1.5 by an
NFAT1-dependent mechanism. DCA induces apoptosis, decreases proliferation, and inhibits tumor
growth, without apparent toxicity.Molecular inhibition of PDK2 by siRNA mimics DCA. The mitochondria-
NFAT-Kv axis and PDK are important therapeutic targets in cancer; the orally available DCA is
a promising selective anticancer agent.

I won't claim to understand what it means, but there it is.

There's a direct link to download it, in case you understand that sort of thing, here:
http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/cancer_cell.pdf

I'm a student at the University of Alberta. The student newspaper is called "The Gateway" and at the end of the winter term there is a joke issue called "The Getaway." In THIS YEAR'S December joke issue the cover story way "U of A Scientists Cure Cancer." Five issues later they broke the real story here: http://www.gateway.ualberta.ca/index.php?iid=247. No one believed the real story...

Here is your scientific biweekly peer reviewed journal with an article on the topic. Those "I'll wait until the peer-reviewed journal" rehearsed responses are getting annoying.

This seems to be a trend; the most exciting oncology news I've recently seen came out of Alberta.

Is cancer research a major industry in Canada, or is this an abnormally productive period for their universities? It seems like a lot of recent discoveries in that field have come from my Frozen Northern Neighbor.