Domain: wustl.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wustl.edu.
Comments · 467
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Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
The clearest discussion of the logic of probability reasoning I know of is E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. (Cambridge University Press). Many of Jaynes' excellent papers on statistics are downloadable from http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/etj.html.
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Re:What about the remaining 94%?
From the University's own press release:
"“If we put bare nanoparticles into your body,” says Xia, “proteins would deposit on the particles, and they would be captured by the immune system and dragged out of the bloodstream into the liver or spleen.”
To prevent this, the lab coated the nanocages with a layer of PEG, a nontoxic chemical most people have encountered in the form of the laxatives GoLyTELY or MiraLAX. PEG resists the adsorption of proteins, in effect disguising the nanoparticles so that the immune system cannot recognize them.
Instead of being swept from the bloodstream, the disguised particles circulate long enough to accumulate in tumors."
They keep calling it "passive" targeting so I take it there's no specific mechanism: cells generally take up the particles (somehow) but because tumours try to maximise the blood flow they receive they get a bigger dose of blood-borne gold. So the other 94% could have still been floating around in the blood.
(I can't get at the actual article, but if anyone has a subscription to Small and can read it here feel free to enlighten us if they mention where the rest went)
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Looks like....
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Looks like....
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Mars DEMs are available too
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Mars DEMs are available too
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Re:Pthreads
pthreads-win32 is excellent, but regrettably, LGPL licensed. It's interesting to note how complex it has to be to give you POSIX semantics --- pre-Vista win32 threading primitives are fundamentally flawed.
Vista, on the other hand, gives us brand-new innovative 21st-century Microsoft technologies like condition variables.
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MAGMA software info and some ideas
Here are some links I found to papers describing the software used.
FWIW I am also intrigued about what is happening at this planet. I could imagine:
- tremendous storms at the twilight zone, perhaps mixing in elements from the cold side, or maybe just spreading ash worldwide?
- With the solar winds above and heat from below, it might be like a fluidized bed reactor with all kinds of things being created - all kinds of compounds. Falling gems indeed!
- Solar wind buffeting the silica and other things in the atmosphere, could perhaps create spongy material, aerogels, glassy wings that whirl toward ground like maple seeds.
- life possible? Maybe somewhere in the world..Okay. Use of the MAGMA software is described briefly in Fractional Vaporization of Hot Earth-like Exoplanets and a description of the algorithms and data used in the program are provided in
L. Schaefer and B. Fegley. A Thermodynamic Model of High Temperature Lava Vaporization on Io, Icarus, 169, 216-241.Note that according to the abstract of Schaefer and Fegley's Vaporization of High Temperature Magmas on Io "Galileo NIMS observations indicate magmas with temperatures of 1700-2100K on Io. Vaporization of rock-forming oxides should occur at such temperatures. "
Also Exploring the Environment of Volcanoes gives for Earth: 2000 degrees C: Iron-Rich Rock (i.e. still rock even while under tremendous pressure 500 miles underground), and 5000 degrees C: liquid iron
(2900 miles underground).You may also be interested in Heavy Metal Frost on Venus
and an overview of some of their research here.There is another program called CONDOR that Fegley and Lodders made, which is described on their site. (See condor2.html for algorithm info.) This program is for gaseous atmospheres.
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MAGMA software info and some ideas
Here are some links I found to papers describing the software used.
FWIW I am also intrigued about what is happening at this planet. I could imagine:
- tremendous storms at the twilight zone, perhaps mixing in elements from the cold side, or maybe just spreading ash worldwide?
- With the solar winds above and heat from below, it might be like a fluidized bed reactor with all kinds of things being created - all kinds of compounds. Falling gems indeed!
- Solar wind buffeting the silica and other things in the atmosphere, could perhaps create spongy material, aerogels, glassy wings that whirl toward ground like maple seeds.
- life possible? Maybe somewhere in the world..Okay. Use of the MAGMA software is described briefly in Fractional Vaporization of Hot Earth-like Exoplanets and a description of the algorithms and data used in the program are provided in
L. Schaefer and B. Fegley. A Thermodynamic Model of High Temperature Lava Vaporization on Io, Icarus, 169, 216-241.Note that according to the abstract of Schaefer and Fegley's Vaporization of High Temperature Magmas on Io "Galileo NIMS observations indicate magmas with temperatures of 1700-2100K on Io. Vaporization of rock-forming oxides should occur at such temperatures. "
Also Exploring the Environment of Volcanoes gives for Earth: 2000 degrees C: Iron-Rich Rock (i.e. still rock even while under tremendous pressure 500 miles underground), and 5000 degrees C: liquid iron
(2900 miles underground).You may also be interested in Heavy Metal Frost on Venus
and an overview of some of their research here.There is another program called CONDOR that Fegley and Lodders made, which is described on their site. (See condor2.html for algorithm info.) This program is for gaseous atmospheres.
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MAGMA software info and some ideas
Here are some links I found to papers describing the software used.
FWIW I am also intrigued about what is happening at this planet. I could imagine:
- tremendous storms at the twilight zone, perhaps mixing in elements from the cold side, or maybe just spreading ash worldwide?
- With the solar winds above and heat from below, it might be like a fluidized bed reactor with all kinds of things being created - all kinds of compounds. Falling gems indeed!
- Solar wind buffeting the silica and other things in the atmosphere, could perhaps create spongy material, aerogels, glassy wings that whirl toward ground like maple seeds.
- life possible? Maybe somewhere in the world..Okay. Use of the MAGMA software is described briefly in Fractional Vaporization of Hot Earth-like Exoplanets and a description of the algorithms and data used in the program are provided in
L. Schaefer and B. Fegley. A Thermodynamic Model of High Temperature Lava Vaporization on Io, Icarus, 169, 216-241.Note that according to the abstract of Schaefer and Fegley's Vaporization of High Temperature Magmas on Io "Galileo NIMS observations indicate magmas with temperatures of 1700-2100K on Io. Vaporization of rock-forming oxides should occur at such temperatures. "
Also Exploring the Environment of Volcanoes gives for Earth: 2000 degrees C: Iron-Rich Rock (i.e. still rock even while under tremendous pressure 500 miles underground), and 5000 degrees C: liquid iron
(2900 miles underground).You may also be interested in Heavy Metal Frost on Venus
and an overview of some of their research here.There is another program called CONDOR that Fegley and Lodders made, which is described on their site. (See condor2.html for algorithm info.) This program is for gaseous atmospheres.
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MAGMA software info and some ideas
Here are some links I found to papers describing the software used.
FWIW I am also intrigued about what is happening at this planet. I could imagine:
- tremendous storms at the twilight zone, perhaps mixing in elements from the cold side, or maybe just spreading ash worldwide?
- With the solar winds above and heat from below, it might be like a fluidized bed reactor with all kinds of things being created - all kinds of compounds. Falling gems indeed!
- Solar wind buffeting the silica and other things in the atmosphere, could perhaps create spongy material, aerogels, glassy wings that whirl toward ground like maple seeds.
- life possible? Maybe somewhere in the world..Okay. Use of the MAGMA software is described briefly in Fractional Vaporization of Hot Earth-like Exoplanets and a description of the algorithms and data used in the program are provided in
L. Schaefer and B. Fegley. A Thermodynamic Model of High Temperature Lava Vaporization on Io, Icarus, 169, 216-241.Note that according to the abstract of Schaefer and Fegley's Vaporization of High Temperature Magmas on Io "Galileo NIMS observations indicate magmas with temperatures of 1700-2100K on Io. Vaporization of rock-forming oxides should occur at such temperatures. "
Also Exploring the Environment of Volcanoes gives for Earth: 2000 degrees C: Iron-Rich Rock (i.e. still rock even while under tremendous pressure 500 miles underground), and 5000 degrees C: liquid iron
(2900 miles underground).You may also be interested in Heavy Metal Frost on Venus
and an overview of some of their research here.There is another program called CONDOR that Fegley and Lodders made, which is described on their site. (See condor2.html for algorithm info.) This program is for gaseous atmospheres.
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Re:Wow
The planet is tidally locked. Just stay on the dark side of the planet. The equilibrium temperature there is 59F -- not bad at all.
One thing that occurs to me is that if the mass transfer rate is as high as they're suggesting -- and I have no reason to suspect otherwise -- it seems to me that this planet would be *highly* tectonically active. Unlike rain, which just runs off, the pebbles will stick around where they fall. This means that the crust will have a lot of weight bearing down on it on the cold side, sinking into the mantle and likely leading to heavy volcanism and tectonic activity. And the erosion of the hot side should lead to an upwelling of exposed mantle material as the planet tries to relax into a sphere.
The awesome thing is, with such a reasonable temperature on the cool side, it could actually be habitable to LAWKI -- except for that likely lack of water thing, (unless there's been heavy cometary activity since the planet became tidally locked).
This planet must have an incredible range of minerals, way unlike anything on Earth -- the star basically mining the crust and even mantle on one side and depositing it after chemical vapor deposition onto the other side. If we ever go interstellar as a species, I wouldn't be surprised to see heavy mining activity on planets like that.
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Re:Important to have a news media
> Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our
> ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant
> watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance
> against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best
> interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research,
> investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.I hereby charge you with attempted murder. I almost died laughing after reading that. You're talking about the same left-wing rags that...
* pounded Sarah Palin about someone else's (her daughter's) indiscretions, but kept mum about John Edwards' love child while he was still a potential candidate.
* hounded Palin about her wardrobe (paid out of her own pockets), while avoiding real issues
* whined about how CitiBank's sub-prime lending helped cause a financial crisis crisis while not mentioning that CitiBank *WAS FORCED TO LEND TO SUBPRIME BORROWERS* due to a lawsuit where a certain up-and-coming Chicago lawyer by the name of Obama was co-counsel on the plaintiff's side http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/detail.php?id=10112
Die, left-wing rags, die. I will dance on your grave.
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Re:Kind of Ironic
The whole point of the article is to tell what he did with linux when he first installed it.
OK, you want real life events. What I did was to try to port Mallinckrodt CTN software (Central Test Node - DICOM software) - see http://erl.wustl.edu/research/dicom/ctn.html if you're into that sort of thing.
Around 1994, early Slackware IIRC. I got enough pieces of it to work for my immediate needs, which was to start testing DICOM software my company was writing. In those days it was only running on Solaris, maybe Irix, HP-UX... don't recall, it was a while ago.
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Re:Why invest so much in brain research?
Oh, I've got a MUCH better question than THAT!
;-)Seems scientists are having one heck of a time just trying to figure out the entire nervous system of C. elegans (a worm), which consists of precisely 302 neurons...and about 7,000 synapses, and perhaps 5 neurotransmitters.
http://thalamus.wustl.edu/nonetlab/ResearchF/elegans.html
And you think they'll have the slightest clue about the 100,000,000,000 neurons of a human brain/nervous system!?!!
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...not a chance for several centuries yet...
Oh, and ah...I'm a science teacher...;-)
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Re:I thought I did.
Use the --quota option with the url in a file for input. Did you submit that upstream or just dive straight into the source without reading the manual?
:) From the wget manual:
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be
specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or
megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if
you specify wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz , all of
the ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several
URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will
be aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota. -
Re:Qt bindings
Same here. The language looks fairly nice, but right now with ACE, Boost and Qt in my C++ toolbox, I'm doing alright. And I already develop, test, and deploy code that runs on MacOSX, Linux, Solaris, and supposedly Windows -- I have not actually tried there, but ACE, Boost, and Qt have abstractions that attempt to isolate developers from the OS. I'm curious if my Qt OpenGL stuff would work. I love using my Apple laptop for development. I'm more of an GNU Emacs fanboy than Apple (though I did buy a chunk of Apple back at $18 pre-split), so I do everything there, including having multiple shells open in it for command-line use. I even have a Platypus script that I can drag files onto and edit in GNU Emacs. I just take my GNU Emacs customization files to other platforms so I always have the same editing environment.
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Re:No.
Usually those advocating a more liberal system are the wealthier.
Not true:
http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/6885.htmlWhat is true is that libertarians tend to be rural, while liberals tend to be urban. In some ways there's a logical reason for that: in a city the conditions of your neighbors affect you a lot more directly than in rural areas.
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Re:That is not what you think :-)
Some of the world's leading authorities on Neanderthals disagree with your "no."
In particular, they point to the Lagar Velho skeleton.
"the analysis has revealed that the child exhibits distinctive characteristics of both contemporaneous European early modern humans and preceding Neandertals. It therefore provides evidence of previous admixture between Neandertals and early modern humans in southwestern Europe."
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Re:Not news
True. But the thought was that every human would have a core microbime, at least in the gut. Even if there were variances between people, and within the same person over time. But it appears to be that there is no set of core species.
Actually, if you look at the Human Gut Microbiome Initiative, there are core set of species that seem to be very important. Bacteriodes thetaiotaomicron is a very big player in must everybody's gut.
The real thrust of the research is how the ratios between the different species is different for everyone. These ratios are measured by targeted 16s RNA reading (it's part of the mechanism that turns RNA into Amino acid chains, so essential to life). This data can infer species. But it has no real linkage to the actual function characteristics of a microbe, its just one gene.
But because of all the gene swapping (either by lateral transfer of phages moving random genes with their own replication mechanism) what is really going on in a particular cell may be quite different then previously catalogued members of that species.
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Re:Moral of the story?
"Stray signals causing loss of altitude control is some serious crapola."
Yes it is, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
The power required to overcome the distance to the
aircraft makes any 'death ray' problematic.Far easier to get a SAM.
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse574-06/ftp/aircraft_wireless.pdf
http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html
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Re:Wireless?
Well good, you go on believing that becasue we don't want people making decisions on facts and studies~
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse574-06/ftp/aircraft_wireless.pdf
http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html
There are many results..if only you were interested enough to spend 90 seconds using google.
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Re:Wireless?
Yes.
A) Consumer device PEDs are not design or rated for air travel.B) You can't completly harden against all EMR
C) the shape of Aircraft can cause you signal to change.
http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html
http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200012/000020001200A0261018.php
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse574-06/ftp/aircraft_wireless.pdf
While they due do 'bench test' with equipment Avionic equipment against devices that are done as individual units, not as the whole Avionics package. Adding to this, the same devices manufactured in two different locations may bleed AMI differently due to manufacturing difference.
For example someone decides to use cheaper capacitors. This results in 'spurious' EMI. -
How unfortunate
I'm all for scientific progress, but I can't help but find it unfortunate that the key element to making this new microscope is helium
seems like my voice will not sound like a chipmunk's even sooner if this becomes a popular standard
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Re:Demux != routing
Optical networks nowadays are not simple point-to-point fiber links. What researchers are forever working on, are ways to move more and more of the network (including switching and routing like functionality) into the optical domain. We are not talking about simply mux/demux of multiple wavelengths on a single link. We are talking about optical routers and switches.
See this tutorial on all-optical networks.
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Re:News...
Way to go, you two.
Now some fancy-fangled search engine is going to ingest your two posts here on Slashdot, and infer the ridiculous notion that Isaac Asimov was a contributing scholar in the field of Chemistry.
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Don't Become a Scientist!
Perhaps publicizing this article will help. I have a female cousin witha PhD in Engineering. I won't say which branch that would narrow it down too much, but rest assured it is one of the hard sciences. She does OK, ok she does very well, but I wouldn't say science needs quotas.
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Re:initialisms
Here's some footage of the culprits in action.
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Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People
We need more ways to get the wealthy to spend money, because that money supports jobs for us peons.
We need them to buy as many (domestically produced) toys and services as possible and should encourage them instead of envying their good fortune.
If every wealthy person that could afford a Biltmore would buy one, it would feed, cloth, and house thousands of workers.
The waste of helium is stupid though:
http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/10754.html [wustl.edu] -
Helium supply
Article on industrial helium. Abundant in the universe, but only a few practical supply points on the globe. http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/10754.html
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Re:Building powerful and robust DRUPAL sites
Well, first of all, modules in Drupal are code plugins. The stuff you move from one side of the page to another is a "block".
:-)
Drupal is great for getting something out quickly, but yes, for any serious site you are going to be using numerous "contrib" modules (the add-on systems you mention). Drupal's architecture is built around letting add-on modules do the powerful stuff, while core is an engine to enable them to do powerful stuff.
For instance, if you're building a complex site without the CCK and Views modules, you're missing 2/3 of what Drupal has to offer. You can build sites that look and function nothing like "normal Drupal" without touching core code if you know where to "bend" it, and there are a large number of places where Drupal is designed to bend. No, you can't crank out the NYTimes web site in a weekend, but you can't do that with any CMS, and any CMS vendor that claims they can is lying to you. :-)
A small sampling of Drupal sites launched in the last year or two:
http://www.imamuseum.org/
http://artsci.wustl.edu/
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections
http://www.motogp.com/
http://gigaom.com/
http://donna.be/
http://www.fastcompany.com/
http://www.flipkowlier.be/
http://popsci.com/
http://rockband.com/
And several dozen from SonyBMG Music, such as:
http://www.pinkspage.com/
http://www.avrillavigne.com/
http://jenniferlopez.com/
http://britney.com/
You can do very non-Drupaly sites with Drupal if you learn to embrace contrib modules. :-)
(Disclaimer: I worked on several of the sites listed above.) -
Re:Parallel tools are still pretty weakOr, use a library that already exists with tons of man-hours behind it. The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE(TM))
IIRC the latest version supports atomic operations on several platforms (including windows, AIX, solaris and linux, I believe). Commercial support agreements are also available, if you need that sort of thing.
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Re:Don't be silly
Nitrogen doesn't contribute to explosive power. Many explosives are nitrates, but it's the Oxygen in the compound that makes them explosive, not the Nitrogen.
Your car's air bag would like a word with you. -
Re:So?
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Re:So?We've sequenced the genome of something we eat. This helps us why? Go sequence a mouse. We have already sequenced the mouse.
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Remember AT&T UnixBack in the days before Linux and FreeBSD, back when AT&T Bell Lab Unix ruled the earth. 70's and 80's
AT&T Unix source code was somehow put in some national security list. Basically if you were caught with a copy of the source without having had paid or part of some University that paid the $60,000 source license, the Secret Service would come with guns drawn and seize every piece of electronics equipment on the premises.
There is little documentation that this had even happened and almost none of the victims ever received there hardware back.
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/crack2l.html the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code. &
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/cs/cs/archive/CS142_SP96/notes16.html
This finally ended with Steve Jackson Games that managed to sue them for a similar seizure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service -
Re:Inverse square
The mechanism that makes cell phones harmful is that they inject comparatively high amounts of RF energy into cells, which damages the DNA.
Ionizing radiation damages DNA. Non-ionizing radiation (which is what cell phones and wifi networks use) can only damage cells by adding heat. Cell phones don't put out enough energy to raise the temperature by even 1o C.
It's possible that a yet-unknown mechanism exists for non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer. However, we've been dealing with energy in these frequencies for a long time, many of them in far more powerful amounts than cell phones (radar, microwave communication towers, etc.). Additionally, many of those sources are staffed by union workers, which are notorious for looking for any minor safety factor to justify a wage increase. If you want to prove a new mechanism in a mature area of physics, you're going to need very good proof.
Anecdotal evidence of "many brain tumors on that side of the head" is no replacement for a good scientific study; after all, 50% of brain tumors would happen on that side of the head, anyway. Actual studies on this matter have more than adaquately disproven. Studies in support of a link are often shown to have problems.
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Software RAID FUD
Software RAID is certainly not slower, and has in several instances been shown to outperform all but the best of dedicated RAID controllers.
There is a CPU hit, that's true. There's also the issue of scalability, with hardware obviously scaling far beyond what software can do, depending upon what interesting RAID hardware you stock up on. Then there's the additional features of some hardware, which is just plain cool if you ever get to play with them. -
Re:Likely result
I can only assume you don't know how chromosomes are configured and processed for duplication during mitosis. For two chromosomes to merge, it only takes a few base pair changes in the chromosome that used to code a stop/end sequence (called a telomere) but now code for the chromosome to continue. Basically, the marker that signals the end of the chromosome gets corrupted. The fact that this scrambling occurred isn't that rare - the amazing part of this is that the organism that this mutation produced was likely better adapted than the original one. By their unguided nature, most mutations result in either no changes (because they happen in the unused "junk" DNA) or more poorly adapted (or dead!) organisms, but a few mutations actually help the species, and those organisms survive preferentially (i.e natural selection). If you are interested in the scientific details, feel free to have a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8FfMBYCkk
http://mednews.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/5045.html
From the above information, you'll find that there are large parts of those merged chromosomes inside you and I that are largely junk/unused DNA in us, but still survive fairly unscathed and continue to mirror those of the original primate chromosomes. -
Re:Waiting for...
It may suck, but somebody's got benchmarks saying that it's faster...
Link from 2004, but still relevant, I'd think.
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Re:I wish I could join the ACLU
They're wrong. The Second Amendment is about defending ourselves from our own government, they're dead-on about that. I disagree that it is solely about States being the only entities in need of protection from an errant central government. The reality is, we individual citizens might just as well find ourselves in conflict with our State governments. What makes them so especially trustworthy, compared to the Federal Government? That's a fiction in itself. The Founders wanted us, the Citizens of these United States, to be something more than sheep.
We like to think our governments (any of them) will never need replacing, and that we'll never need violent defense from them, but history is against us on that score. This article outlines how a proper defensive posture made by a well-armed civilian population can deter violence and save lives. That's something else that was very clearly understood by the people who fought the War for Independence, and eventually created our system of government.
This dangerous idea that individual citizens (who, are a collective in their own right, regardless of any State's desire to formally organize them into some Militia) have no legitimate use for deadly force is disingenuous at best. That's not even counting the value of firearms when it comes to defending ourselves from each other! No, the Second Amendment is in need of no polish or other adjustments. It serves the purpose for which it was intended very well, and truly our need of it is greater now than at any point in our history. Our government is rapidly extending its powers without much regard for the checks and balances the Founders put in place for us, and at some point, it may go too far. If we allow ourselves to be made defenseless by believing that it can't happen here, we may well come to regret our complacency.
Very little of the Founding Father's wisdom is as anachronistic as people think (we believe we are somehow fundamentally superior to our forebears but we're not) and if you look at many of the failings of our culture and legal system today, it is usually because we decided to ignore that wisdom. -
Re:Is this a win?
Free Software breeds more Free Software. It's not 'viral', as Microsoft likes to say - it's addictive.
That's not the same. Free software in itself is not 'viral'. The GNU (and similar licenses) could be viewed as viral though.
In working for a corporation, I've seen the "why not use open source?" question asked a few times, and the answers are the same everytime:
free open source is fine
stay away from GNU
I don't know, let us see the license .
We (for example) use the ACE framework with no problems, but the managers and the legal department around here are terrified that if GNU code entered our codebase someone would scream "show us the sourcecode!" for everything.
Because of this, I tend to agree with you that OSS is addictive, but can be viral for corporations if it comes with attached conditions (at least for corporations drawing their profit from closed source).
I don't mean to troll here, but "free with conditions" is not actually free after all (at least not for some).
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Re:I Think I Do Understand These Kind of Decisions
It's this simple, people are afraid of change, many people will not do change because it puts the testing of their reputation on the line. (many CEO's, CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, and the likes) Even though it is very evident the cost savings and the possibilities of re-allocating money to other projects that have never been touched because of current issues with M$ products or incompatibilities with others. These people are not comfortable with change and they do not want to put any effort or time in to making a significant change (they would rather deal with what they have been dealing with because of the possibilities of not having a job tomorrow, if they were wrong). Even if of it is evident that the benefits out weigh the eventual cost, productivity, time and effort of another product that they don't have now.
No one is willing to take risks anymore. They would rather agree with one another that it will not work out in the end. Even though I don't agree with these peoples though process, I do agree that it can be a task to get everyone to buy in to the change that would take place with the sagnificant change switching to OSS or Linux, but it is not impossible if you spend time to outline, plan and prepare for this type of rollout.
There are many success stories of people switching to OSS and Linux for their small, meduim and large size companies, who have taken the plunge to save money and troubles.
Ask the following companies - (I will kill two FUD's with one stone here - the use of OSS and Linux)
NASA - http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Projects/Columbia/co lumbia.html
- http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
DELL - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/pow er/en/ps1q03_insights?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
Walmart - http://www.wirespring.com/ (firecast runs on Linux andfirecast is and OSS)
Sony - http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int &id=2804
- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/media_companies/sony3 .html
Google - Summer of Coders (need I say more?)
- http://code.google.com/
IBM - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource
Boeing - http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO-boeing.html
- http://www.zdnetasia.com/toolkits/0,39047352,39379 125-39094247p,00.htm
Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, ETrade, TowerGroup, Shahrawat (even as far back as 2002 - they must be Linux and OSS giants now!)
- http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html
- http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/lin ux/story/0,10801,75271,00.html
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other to name Remax, People Soft, Byte, Cisco, Credit Suisse
For a much longer lists.. and why enjoy the following!
- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/
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Re:Nope. It's 105 billion pounds.
I remember GP being 2 years, but apparently not so:
Here ya go.
http://residency.wustl.edu/medadmin/resweb.nsf/WV/ 3EDD4E91945F8A2B86256F850071AE49?OpenDocument
So the spectrum seems to be 3-6.
So it would appear that I was inadvertently exaggerating. :) Be that as it may, 3 years of not earning pay during the early part of your life is a sacrifice. Supply and demand and what not. I'd be curious how socialized medicine handles doctor pay for specialties. I would suppose some forms of specialties are extrinsic to the system (e.g., elective plastic surgery).
One thing that many people miss is that we already have a socialized medical system in the US (of a sort), it's just royally fucked up. Show up at any ER without health insurance: they'll treat you (for some things). The consequences of this forced donation of the hospital are inconsistent and penalize hospitals in poor communities particularly severely. It's capricious, unjust, confiscatory, and inequal. The state should pay, not force hospitals to pay. That's honest, and frankly more transparent. As is, there is a positive cost to "hidden" socialized medicine in the US that is quite difficult to quantify... hell, it's almost socially invisible. Not good.
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aclu vs. police vs. the residents
Ok, so will the "residents" of North City (they did say high crime areas of St. Louis) record actual crimes too?
I'm sorry, you should drive around North City. It's sad. If you cant, pull up http://64.218.68.50/slmpdweb/crimestats/ or http://64.218.68.50/slmpdweb/safecity/index.htm and see the sad nature of these neighborhoods. Police actually admit to not patrolling certain parts of District 9 (a specific area of North City) late at night, for officer safety [sorry, no citation, just actual conversations with police].
I in no way defend the police acting poorly, but I feel the ACLU is off here.
I guess that's why I moved out of the city too.
This is just how downtown, the police fear dealing with any of the homeless because they will get sued by a local reverend. http://www.aclu-em.org/legal/legaldocket/recentcas es/johnsonetalvstlouispoliced.htm -- Oh, look, the ALCU again. http://law.wustl.edu/news/index.asp?id=4339 feel free to google "st louis police homeless" for more info. It's amazing how much you can get away with here. -
In-sample tests give a lower bound on prediction
First, this sort of exercise is done all of the time in quantitative political science; the main difference is that most universities don't issue press releases on it. Check out http://polmeth.wustl.edu/ to get a sense of what is currently being done.
Second, the zillion comments that an in-sample test is not a forecast are correct but the field has been aware of this for, oh, maybe a century or two. Sorry guys, prior art. That said, what an in-sample tests does provide is a lower bound on the possible accuracy: no statistical model is going to provide 80% accuracy predicting a table of random numbers, for example. As a rule-of-thumb in these things, the out-of-sample forecast will be about 10% to 20% less accurate than the in-sample -- no theoretical reason this should be true, but I've seen it a lot.
War does change and yes, we have noticed that there has been a shift to fourth generation warfare, asymmetrical warfare, whatever you want to call it, and much of the current professional literature reflects this. However, this has to be balanced by institutional inertia, which is huge, particularly among major powers (witness the very slow rate of adaptation by the US in Iraq versus the very rapid rate of innovation by the insurgency). That still gives you predictability.
Finally, $age Publications are friggin' parasites; you can be darn sure that the author is not making a penny off of this, and the sooner we shift to open-access models for government-financed publications, the better
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OK, I'll Byte
As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism.
As a programmer, I already have abstractions such as Active Objects. While this may make it easier for compiler writers or kernel hackers, what benefits does it bring to us ordinary mortals? -
Re:Linux, RAID 5, mdSoftware RAID just as fast? Please. Next you're going to tell me a software firewall is just as good as a hardware firewall, right? Are you aware that a CHEAP Linux server using only mid-range off-the-shelf consumer hardware can leave a lot of hardware appliances for dead when it comes to performance (and even reliability)?
Benchmarks of hardware vs software RAID (results: mostly software > hardware raid):
http://www.chemistry.wustl.edu/~gelb/castle_raid.h tml
http://milek.blogspot.com/2006/08/hw-raid-vs-zfs-s oftware-raid.html
http://milek.blogspot.com/2006/08/hw-raid-vs-zfs-s oftware-raid-part-ii.html
http://milek.blogspot.com/2007/04/hw-raid-vs-zfs-s oftware-raid-part-iii.html
http://stoilis.blogspot.com/2005/09/linux-software -raid-vs-promise-raid.html
Benchmarks/info of Linux IP Routing (more than capable of gigabit routing):
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 25/1744218
http://freedomhec.pbwiki.com/f/linux_ip_routers.pd f
http://docs.rodecker.nl/10-GE_Routing_on_Linux.pdf
Of course a Linux machine isn't going to be all that much help to you if are doing supercomputing work with 10 gigabit routing (but as we start seeing more dual quad core machines with 4 PCI Express x16 slots, this is bound to change).
So if you're not working with high-end ("giga" prefix) storage/networking for large systems, you're wasting your money on hardware appliances. Cheap hardware firewalls are a scaled down PC in a fancy box. Cheap RAID cards don't have their own ASIC offload engines. Cheap hardware routers are a joke compared to Linux PC routers.
Unless it is a 10 gigabit router with everyone done in specially designed high performance ASIC chips, you will see better performance on a PC than in a hardware appliance. The same for hardware raid where we're mostly only talking about 5 gigabit read/write speeds to/from the array. -
Re:bloody browser.. the url!
This page on meteorite identification might help you (and/or make you sad)as well.
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The perfect position title...
"Shirley J. Dyke, Ph.D., the Edward C. Dicke Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the Washington University Structural Control and Earthquake Engineering Laboratory" http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/8961.
h tml