Slashdot Mirror

You forgot also to account for the screening effect of piling the coal ash as well.

This isn't relevant anyway, since most are not talking about living on top of a pile of coal ash. The issue is more general, uncontained release in the form of small percentage not removed by scrubbers or by leaching of daughter products from ash, neither of which is solved by piling (and can be made worse in the leaching case depending on the exact chemistry of the ash in consideration).

You may also be confusing permil with percent.

No, those previous figures were percentages, not from per mil. Estimates of the Suess effect from tree rings varies from 3-25%, because there are a lot of factors involved and it is not a straightforward measurement, and can be quite regional too. The C14 from nuclear testing is nearly gone now, but the global C14 levels are settling at a point a couple percent higher than they were before nuclear testing, and a lot of modeling has been struggling to explain this.

We really only care about the atmosphere since that is where the carbon in our food comes from.

The atmosphere is a very small fraction of the carbon cycle, and exchanges at least 20% of the carbon each year with other parts of the cycle. This is why you can see very short term region effects where percent change in CO2 equals percent change in C14, but longer term trends are much more complicated. This source covers some of the mess. The annual production of carbon dioxide by humans is quite small compared to the total carbon reservoir accessible to the carbon cycle, and while a lot piles up in the atmosphere, it does exchange. And this isn't even getting into that the low energy emissions from C14 have a much lower biological impact that other sources, despite being part of things like DNA, resulting in a much lower amount of exposure from C14 than from other sources.

Remember this [slashdot.org] story from ages ago? Remember how well that returned on its promises of creating a real brain? That was spike-timing dependent plasticity as well, and unsurprisingly it never did anything resembling thought.

The only place where the FACETS European project promised to create a real brain was on /. The project goal

was to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems

, according to its website [1].

As a matter of fact, this project has been a success, and led to the BrainScaleS European project, which

aims at understanding function and interaction of multiple spatial and temporal scales in brain information processing.

[2]. Again, there is no unrealistic/journalistic promises here.

[1] http://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/public/goals/index.html [2] http://brainscales.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/

Remember this [slashdot.org] story from ages ago? Remember how well that returned on its promises of creating a real brain? That was spike-timing dependent plasticity as well, and unsurprisingly it never did anything resembling thought.

The only place where the FACETS European project promised to create a real brain was on /. The project goal

was to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems

, according to its website [1].

As a matter of fact, this project has been a success, and led to the BrainScaleS European project, which

aims at understanding function and interaction of multiple spatial and temporal scales in brain information processing.

[2]. Again, there is no unrealistic/journalistic promises here.

[1] http://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/public/goals/index.html [2] http://brainscales.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/

The first poll is crap. The popularity of a university's web page have no bearing on the quality of its education and research performed. Until recently most German universities added their web pages as an afterthought and they were maintained by some IT admin sitting in a basement. I know that from first hand source having a friend working as IT admin at the University of Heidelberg. Having graduated there I always found its abysmally bad web presence a constant source of embarrassment.

There are some objective polls measuring research effectiveness using solid and well defined measures. And as one would expect the top tier well funded US research universities have a strong showing.

Yet, there is no strict correlation between good research and good education. Scanning the rankings listed in the related wikipedia entry does not show anything equivalent to the PISA effort for college level education.

The US does dismal in the PISA rankings despite of course the existence of some outstanding private and public high schools. In the same vein the fact that the US hosts a good dozen of the best research universities tells us little to nothing of how the gross of the US colleges are holding up in international comparison. The only thing we can be certain off is that it costs much more than in many other places to get an advanced degree (i.e. Canada, Europe).

• Inveneo. They are helping setting up a terrestrial wireless network. Because that is one of the things they do. http://www.inveneo.org/?q=haiti-response
• ushahidi is setting up and managing their crisis-reporting application here http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ more of what they do is here: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/15/haiti-update/
• The missing persons registry is here: http://www.haitianquake.com/ (google took that one over, it seems)
• There is a CrisisCamp for techies going on in DC today. They need GIS experts & programmers specifically. If you are in the area, here are the details: http://ow.ly/WQDD
• The university of heidelberg (yup, not a company) has put up a routing service based on Openstreetmap data: http://openls.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/osm-haiti/
• There is more on what the OSM community has done here: http://www.opengeodata.org/2010/01/14/haiti-openstreetmap-response/

In short, you don't even have to go to Haiti to be a helpful techie.

Wrong. In Germany as well as in Austria 'Mein Kampf' is an illegal book prohibited under laws against glorifying and identifying with the National Socialist German Workers Party.

It may or may not be subject to the laws you've mentioned, but you're talking bollocks if you suggesting that that's the reason that only versions with a commentary are available. Oh look! Here's a copy of a 1939 edition of Mein Kampf being held legally in Germany.

The main reason you can't get it in other forms is simply that it's under copyright. In the library catalogue link above, notice the line saying "Keine Kopien möglich"? In Germany and Austria, as elsewhere in the EU, the copyright term on a book is life-plus-70 years. Therefore, it becomes public domain in 2015, and you will then be entitled to reproduce it and sell it in whatever form you damn well please. (Though at the time Hitler died I believe it was life-plus-80 years; I'm not sure if the change to life-plus-70 is retroactive or not.)

The copyright on the English translation has lapsed, which is why it's more readily available in English. A quick search shows that German bookshops don't carry the English translation either, but there's hardly much reason why they would.

I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it. :)

A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.

His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.

Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.

Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.

The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think. :)

So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.

A neutron star farting out gas, which caught fire from a tiny spark created by a neighboring EM field, lasting one hundred days?

I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it. :)

A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.

His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.

Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.

Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.

The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think. :)

So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.

...TiO2 is basically poison.

Titanium dioxide is commonly in sunscreen and paints. A minority (including someone I know) have a allergic reaction to topical application.

As long as the paint doesn't secrete titanium dioxide into the air, the only problem I see is that allergic people have to where gloves when they paint.

I should have said "TiO2 nanoparticles are basically poison.

...TiO2 is basically poison.

My university is in the US, but how is this handled in other parts of the world?"

This subject is actually quite up my alley. Siemens Medical Solutions are offering a combined proton and carbon therapy facility. They use a synchrotron based accelerator that can accelerate protons and carbon (and also oxygen). The accelerator part is made by the Danish company Danfysik - where I'm employed as an accelerator physicist - based on a heavily modified version of the Heidelberger Ionenstrahl-Therapie (HIT) facility.

Most proton therapy machines are cyclotron based, making them cheaper than synchrotron based accelerators. However, they cannot produce beams of different energies (corresponding to different penetration depths), and one has to use energy degraders to obtain lower energies, which unfortunately also degrades the beam quality (increases its emittance).

Being a physicist and not a medical doctor this is not my area of expertise, but as I see it carbon is increasingly interesting and believed more effective than protons because the mean free path for carbon is around the distance between the two DNA spirals increasing the likelihood of a double-strand break - almost certainly killing the cancer cell.

3.02 A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is possible too.
Lugwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The question is how to let thoughts seem to be reality, though.

CC.

A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as without a practical use. However there is method to the seemed madness of making ever-bigger nuclei. Elements tend to be either stable or unstable - carbon is stable, uranium is not. This stability is caused by the arangement of protons/neutrons in the atoms' nucleii. I'm not exactly sure why this occurs - I'm a biologist, I'm not really meant to know - but whether or not a nulceus is stable or not follows a pattern determined by "shell-model" calculations (see here for the science bit).

So although making 3 atoms of 118 doesn't seem to amount to much, especially as it instantly falls apart, it's another step on the way to making th first of the synthetic heavy elements in a "stability island". It's thought that such a material could have strange and useful properties. Or it could be a complete waste of money and be boring as hell. I don't know, but that's the point of research at the end of the day...

The reason why all your ideas have not been realised is economical: It makes sense to develop a very expensive piece of technology that can help a lot of people, thereby bringing the price per treatment into an acceptable range. However, it doesn't make sense (yet) to use such complicated technologies to clean windshields because nobody is prepared to pay 200 k$ for a windshield cleaner (while a specialised ophthalmologist would certainly be prepared to pay as much for such a machine).

This technology is certainly no "pie in the sky". It's actually quite close to the market. I'd send you to this site, but it seems they spend more time on developing their machines than updating their site. :-) It's even more a pity that this press release is available in German only. Believe me, this is serious business.

Actually P~2*Q. Also, there are tweaks to Quicksort which guarantees O(nlogn) behaviour. If you need an efficient but somewhat general purpose quicksort I strongly recommend Jörg Schön's collection of C programs which include a simple include file that creates a very efficient sortinf routine, and coding takes seconds!!

Erm. Probably, if you promised not to make money off it, or promised to donate any money you made to charity.

There's a german effort underway to convert Lords & Ladies into a movie (this was previously covered on Slashdot). TP gave his blessing to that. All proceeds go to charity.

The project has already wrapped shooting and is in post production.

This is a fan created movie, so don't expect this to be in the Legend class...

Wierd Systers

From the making of:

During the film making process I got to know Catskind and David Hodges. They introduced me to the "Wadfest Bunch" and I learned there is a real and really working international Discworld Fandom. I also learned you can not just make a film out of every book you like even if it is just (and only) for fun and for your own private use. So I signed the contract with Terry Pratchett and... ...now the film is for everyone!

Some of the other "hot" spots visible in the larger version of the map correspond to Hong Kong (China), Seoul (Korea), Tokyo (Japan), Bangkok (Thailand), Delhi (India), Qatar (Qatar), Riyadh & Mecca (Saudia Arabia), Jerusalem (Israel), Moscow (Russia), Johannesburg/Pretoria (S.Africa), Venice/Milan/Genoa (Italy), Amsterdam/Brussels/Bonn (Netherland/Belgium/Germany), London (England), the DC-to-NYC region, Montreal & Toronto (Canada), Chicago, Minneapolis/St.Paul, Mexico City (guess), Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake, Phoenix, Vegas, and of course LA and San Francisco (all un-specified cities being in the U.S.A. of course).

I noticed a few interesting things on it. One being the Alberta oir industry, as you noticed. The other is the ripples over the Himalayas.

The Uni of Heidelberg Satellite site.

BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resources I've yet to see it equalled for other protocols.

Other now-obscure technologies from the same era:

• ph
• fsp
• wais
• archie
• z39.50
• veronica
• prospero

here

Yes. At the University of Heidelberg, Germany, Physicists have developed a log-response CCD chip (covering 6 decades of intensity). They want to use it as the frontend sensor for their "tactile vision substitution system" (a machine enabling blind people to "see" with their fingers). The Log response is achieved by operating the sensor transistors in their non-linear range (very crude description, it's been a long time ago since I attended a talk about that project). Links to publications can be found following the above link.

--

An other mirror...

Do you know that if you work at a university, and you find something suspicious (or want to repeat the research, or need it for your research, or are just curious) in a published article, you have a right to demand exact informations from the scientist who published it, including getting the original clones / organisms he used for the research? Of course, if the author works for a public institution. This is the major difference between them and such institutions like CELERA / TIGR.

Let me give you an example. This year an article appeared in Nature on a mutagenesis study of the small bacterium I'm working with. It was performed by associated scientists of one of those big commercial research centers. The article and information published on the web did not give you exact details as to where the reported mutations were placed on the genome, only -- which genes have been knocked out. A professor I know, who also works with these bacteria, wrote to the author to get the details of the study -- and never received any answer. This couldn't happen with an academic institution.

There is a book of a polish writer and Nobel prize winner, Sienkiewicz. It tells the story of the Swedish-Polish war from the XVII century. In one of the scenes, the king of Sweden offers to one of local polish princes that he will give this prince a certain polish teritory, which is occupied by the swedish army, if he agrees to colaborate. The prince answers -- "All right, and I will give you Netherlands".

What I want to say, they are giving away Netherlands: making an offer which is of no value just for the sake of telling it -- because it's not their science and because *of course* it will be released to the public. HELLO! This is not CELERA/ Perkin Elmer, for God's sake!

I will repeat myself, because I consider this matter very important: sequencing projects like HUGEP, payed by academic institutions do publish they data. Take a look at the Mycoplasma pneumoniae homepage -- the group I've been working in sequenced the genome and published it, and you can of course download all the data. Only on-going research projects, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, are not public - yet.

Speaking of which: publishing the HUGEP data before the project is ready is giving a helpful hand to the privat counterpart of HUGEP - namely, Celera Research. And those are the "patent guys" in this case -- I would really like to see HUGEP ready before Celera is.

Regards,

January

From london Financial Times Thursday Feb 24,article on Egg, a UK internet bank which is loosing money fast by enticing depositors with rates it cannot support (cant a city full of bond traders tell this is screwed?) says :

"In the short term no doubt, the Pru [Prudential, Egg's owners, a British insurer] will ensure Egg's stock flies. An engineered stock squeeze would certainly help, and predictably, Prudential is planning to list just 15 - 25% of the capital"

After the US saw its whole people belittled (and a world economy brought to its knees) by such machinations, simple manipulations such as those employed by Fisk were outlawed. Previous to Fisks demise, Vanderbuilt had been hailed as building a great empire upon such tricks. People will be in awe at such money - this is the nature of money. It has power over people who work for it. However it seems that we are no longer awake in vigilance against even the most puerile of deceptions.

I think I know what the problem is: unless you are into a certain field, something like "scientists found now a way of switching genes on and off" sounds like a sensation, and "it seems that leptine plays an important role also in lizard metabolic regulation" does not - even though the first one is, roughly speaking, nothing but journalistic bullshit, and the second a real revelation.

In spite of my miserable English knowledge I keep submitting to slashdot articles from Nature science update and some other sites that are providing good scientific information. Unfortunatelly, they do not sound as interesting and enthusiastic as what you can read about biology in "XXN news for housewifes".

By the way, I work at ZMBH, Bujard, who developed the tet-system (which seems to work quite fine in many applications) also works here.

Regards,

January

Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".

Regards,

January

Mycoplasma genitalium, sequenced by Fraser and Venter, is in principle a deletion mutant of Mycoplasma pneumoniae, sequenced by people from the group I'm in. That means, it lacks a few genes M. pneumoniae still considers interesting for general survival, but all in all those two species are highly similar, with the same genetic apparatus etc.

Both species can be subjected to random transposon mutagenesis - you shot at the genome with a tiny little thingie called "transposone", which randomly destroyes some gene. If the gene destroyed is important, such a cell will not grow and reproduce. Therefore in the mix you have only mycoplasmas, whos important genes are preserved, will grow. You can then use the Polymerase Chain Reaction to amplify and examine what genes specifically got destroyed - that means, which genes are not necessary to grow ...under laboratory conditions, of course. And ceteris paribus, that means - all other conditions being equall. Especially, other genes being intact.

Venter tries to a) make the impression that he did the work b) he's got a strain with xxx genes "switched off", which is not true. We only know that all of this 150+ genes are not needed for mycoplasmas to grow if other genes are intact. The way to constructing the "minimal cell" is long, if you want, I can get into details.

By the way, this information has three to four years, and Venter started talking about his "custom-made" M. genitalium about two years ago.

The whole project will make huge publicity and a very little contribution to science. First, "essence of life", my foot. A piece of RNA with a couple of molecules surrounding it is perfectly capable of proliferating, evolving and making you deathly sick, providing it finds enough cells to proliferate within. Intact mycoplasmas need a lot of organic substances in their growth medium - you have to add bovine serum. Essentially, the border between something quite inanimated like virus and a living cell is smooth. Next, this "crucial genes" will be different for different systems and assemblies. Finally, you have assembly this living cell out of "living" molecules - it needs polymerases, ATP, lipids, synthetised DNAs and RNAs and so on just to start living. Ian Wilmut put dead DNA into a "dead" (unable to proliferate, without genetic material) cell, so did he created new, artificial life? Bulls..cience. Artificial life will be when you start with natural, inorganic and simple molecules. Assembling existing parts has not much in common of finding an existing formula of life, especially because it will not help you understand how those parts work! And this is a different research (proteomics/transcriptomics) and it is really a way to go before there will be an appriopriate article on /.. By the way, /. publishes lately a lot of cheap sensations. Sorry to say it.

Regards,

January

(from the JanKatz-Falls-For-Every-Commercial-Trick-Dpt.)

First issue: could distributed computing help? My answer is a brief "no". First, the bottleneck is on the experimental side - getting the sequences, and not putting them all together. Second, although you need quite a lot of computing power to do so, much of the job must be revised and checked by humans, i.e. there is a lot of skilled manual work to do - you have to have "an eye" for the sequences. But the first point is more important.

Now, TIGR, the commercial alternative to the Humane Genome Project has sequenced more organisms then any other scientific group in the world. Craigg J. Venter seems to be very efficient and hard working guy. Even if you don't like the idea of making money with patents in this area the scientific community owes him a lot - he was the one to sequence the first organism, to sequence Helicobacter pylori and many, many others. On the other side... you know, when M. pneumoniae sequence was about to be published, it was supposed to be the first Mycoplasma sequence. But Venter was faster with Mycoplasma genitalium - and he kept it quiet, so noone involved in sequencing those organisms actually knew there is a race. Now Venter claimed to be able to complete the human genome with much less effort and much less $$, and considerably faster then the HuGeP. I'm not sure whether he is able to do so or not, because it depends chiefly on the "hardware" side - the new Perkin Elmer automatized sequencers they are supposed to use.

Anyway, the question is, whether it is good or bad if Venter sequences the human genome. In my opinion - it's OK. The Hugep is somewhot different in its purely scientific interest, and I'm convinced that they will produce data of much higher quality. On the other hand, human genome has a considerable variation, so two genomes are better then one. I would not be very concerned about the patent issue, because it will come anyway (because of **!'*%$! american and international patent law) - even if TIGR would not sequence the genome, someone takes the output of the HUGEP project and will patent the same sequences Venter would. Venter just wants to gain a little time for evaluating the sequence before releasing it to the public.

And of course, not the _sequences_ are patented - what is patented, is the usage of modification of a certain sequence for medical purposes, or a certain enzyme as an aim in medical treatment.

Regards,

January

Second, BEWARE. This page is lame - all gifs on a single page, and they are HUGE. For my own purposes I downloaded them with wget, converted to ps and finally produced one single PDF file. You can download it here. This is my student account, and in Germany, so if someone can put it for all the slashdotters in USA on an american server and notify me I would be grateful.

Regards,

January

The Biogeek page. Well, if anybody is interested, I might get on with the idea... although... I really don't know... What do you think?

Regards,

January

The clue about this system is that you can bind to your glassware an immense number of different probes, and so probe for different genes or regions of the genome (in fact, we are using this system to detect mRNAs - to see how an organisms expresses its genes).

But this system has one major disadvantage: it is not nearly as sensitive as other methods - the PCR / RT-PCR, for example. That means, to identify the MT strain you have first to raise it on a culture medium, because direct patient isolates will not provide enough genetic material to acomplish the task. And rasing MT is not easy.

It seems to me, someone wants desperatly to make the news: biochips have made the news a couple of years ago; right now commercial systems for many different tasks are available since many years. Check an issue of "Nature" for advertisments :) you can have the whole yeast genome on a small piece of glass for a couple of $$.

What's more, the system described is very, very expensive, and I doubt that it is therefore suitable for diagnostics in Russia. PCR-based systems are much cheaper - though not allowing to check a couple of thousands genes with a single reaction - but much better suitable for cheap and quick MT diagnosis.

It is, of course, quite possible that the EETimes got everything wrong and it does make sense after all. Journalists ;-)

Regards,

January

Gimp
X-Accountant (Quicken Clone)
Quicken for linux?
Flight Gear

One educational program:
Nightfall

look before you speak, this took my 3 minutes to find. :)