I bought a copy of Office 2007 for $20 bucks (our campus has a volume license) to try it out. It is without a doubt the worst piece of crapware I have ever had the misfortune to try, not even taking into account file compatibility issues. The very worst bit is that there is no way for you to customize the ribbons unless you learn how to code XML. If you look up online help for the ribbon, Microsoft explicitly states this. One of the things I always liked about earlier versions of Office is the ability to customize the toolbars to optimize your own personal workflow; you add buttons you use more, and take away ones you don't. Now with Office 2007 you are pretty much stuck with what they decide are the "key" tools. Some functions are hidden in the contextual menu, which is the ONLY place they are accessible. I am switching back to Office 2003, which is actually pretty decent.
Clear Type (sub pixel rendering) was the killer app that made me switch from 2k to xp. I suppose the display technology also counts as interface design.
that's not strange at all, especially if you don't know the pharmacological target of an anesthetic. Many lipids are used as chemical second messengers. There are many membrane bound proteins that might be a target.
BTW, IAANS (I am a neuroscientist). Here is another link to their earlier research on this. While PNAS is certainly a reputable journal, I made some interesting observations while reading their paper:
(1) It's very physics- and modeling-heavy. While I don't like to generalize, my impression has always been that physicists are not very good biologists. I've been to many a "cross-disciplinary" seminars where physicists try to model biological processes, and inevitably they make very little biological sense.
(2) They cite mostly old papers from the literature (1960s) that point out deficiencies in the Hudgkin-Huxley model (although it's true that the HH model of action potential propagation may have become dogmatic).
(3) It was published via track I in PNAS, wherein a Member of the National Academy of Sciences can directly accept the paper for publication, bypassing peer review. The purpose of this mechanism is so that controversial works have a chance to be published; historically, it has been used to dole out favors and/or to publish crackpot theories.
Ultimately, while what they are proposing is not as crazy as TFA makes it out to be, the paper sounds to me that they are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Neuroscientists today have a very detailed understanding of how axonal neurotransmission works. The authors claim that the solitons (sound waves) in their model explain how nerve propagation in myelinated axons can be much faster than in equivalent non-myelinated axons, but again, neuroscientists are fairly sure they understand myelination in the context of the HH model. Even if axons go through soliton mediated pulses on the membrane that are in phase with action potentials (which is what they claim to observe), I seriously doubt that it has any physiological relevance, since just about everything neurons can do can be explained by ion flux through channels.
IAAANS (I am also a neuroscientist) and I'm with you on this. TFA sounds pretty crackpot to me. If they really had strong evidence for this it would be published in Nature, not Biophysical Journal.
besides their social behavior, there is a lot known about how the navigation system of honeybees works (i.e., how they find the hive after foraging). Understanding honeybee genetics could have an impact on understanding and designing autonomous systems for robotics.
IAACES (I am a C. elegans scientist) and have had the opportunity to interact with both Craig Mello and Andy Fire (albeit briefly) during and after seminars. An interesting study in contrast.
Craig looks more like a rock star than a Nobel Prize winning scientist in person; he's got the faded blue jeans/shirt hanging out look down pat. He's also ~6'5 and has great hair. Looks aside, Craig is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Some of the science he has done is simply mind-blowing (not necesarily the RNAi stuff). Back in the late 90's when Craig was just beginning to work on RNAi I remember going to a seminar of his and thinking "wow, this stuff will win the Nobel Prize one day."
Andy on the other hand looks exactly like the egghead stereotype of an absent-minded professor. Balding, wears thick round glasses, sweater and khakis. While not as physically imposing as Craig, Andy has this incredibly modest demeanor that really demonstrates what it means to be a *top notch* academic. No pretenciousness at all. As a "worm person", I will be eternally grateful for Andy for providing a vector kit for the C. elegans research community essentially free of charge. Even without the RNAi and other research accomplishments the worm community has much to thank Andy for.
"The credit bureaus offer a toll-free number that enables you to "opt-out" of having pre-approved credit offers sent to you for two years. Call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (567-8688) for more information. When you call, you'll be asked for personal information, including your home telephone number, your name and your Social Security number. The information you provide is confidential and will be used only to process your request to opt out of receiving pre-screened offers of credit."
Who runs 1-888-5-OPTOUT? I sure as heck don't want to give my SSN and telephone number to anyone just because the FTC says so!
I am not a cardiovacular research, but my wife is. excessive growth of the heart is the least of your worries. Adult cardiomyocytes are nortoriously hard to get to proliferate. Getting them to growth at all, even just a little bit, is a big deal.
Mod parent way up. As a newly minter asst. prof., my biggest gripe with Blackboard is the same as the parent post. I don't necessarily mind the lousy UI, it looks ugly but it gets the job done. From an instructor's point of view, it provides a reasonably simple interface to upload course documents and annoucements to students (very useful if you have a large class). But I could care less if students not registered in my course want to download course material (heck, I could care less about (and even encourage) students who want to audit my course). If I had the time, html skills, and funds for a separate server for my course materials, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but alas I lack all three.
I wonder, if my willingness for non-enrolled students to freely obtain course material/audit is a function of being science (biology) faculty? do faculty in arts and letters/humanities have a bigger issue with this?
the reason I think this stuff happens is that the "publish or perish" pressure is just too insane at top universities. It's not just publishing in any archival journal; to maintain funding, to get tenured, high quality publications in high profile journals are a must. I can't speak for other fields, but in the biological sciences, not only is the pressure to publish in quality AND quantity getting greater each year, the field has exploded to such a degree that the burden of proof for one's hypotheses is increasingly heavier. Exploratory studies cannot be carried out; the emphasis is almost entirely on what can be completed and published in a reasonably short period of time. Experiments are hard to do. If a grant deadline/tenure review is coming up and the data is not quite what it needs to be, people might be tempted to fudge it a tiny bit.
None of what I just said excuses scientific misconduct. But I think why it happens is just a symptom of a bigger problem (at least in biology). There are too many Ph.D. level scientists! The incessant cranking out of these highly educated people is creating an oversupply of researchers. Every Ph.D. who gets a tenure-track research position (these positions are highly competitive; typically 50-100 highly qualified individuals who have equally impressive CVs compete for one spot) has to stake out their little project and protect it like a lioness protects her cubs. If they're not careful and blink the wrong way, they could be scooped by competitors (i.e. beaten to publication); a good chunk of their career just went down the drain. This after a completely unreasonable length of postgraduate training (6-7 years for a Ph.D. and 4-5 years postdoctoral training after that is quite typical), poor pay and lousy hours. All because IMO there are too many people working on the same shit.
I think that to fix the problem, something fundamental needs to change in the way scientists are produced. I don't pretend to know what the best solution would be, but one idea I've been throwing around is to train more M.S. level people than Ph.D. level people. These would be employed as staff scientists rather than independent principal investigators, such that there would be enough of a labor pool to actually do the work, but without having one's career constantly in jeopardy.
it's simple, but...
on
Just a Phone?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it also has a large form factor, not unlike cell phones of yore (ala a Motorola V60). Not attractive.
you are completely correct. I fact, depending on how easy it is to design and make the custom zinc finger enzyme, I see this technology having far more use in research and engineering than in medicine. Many human diseases are recessive, which means both copies of a gene are defective, in which case getting a "normal" DNA template from which to repair from into a patient's cells is still a problem.
Nobrega et al. made 2 knockout mice, deleting 2 Mb and 1 Mb (Mb= 10e6 basepairs of DNA) regions, respectively, of the genome called "deserts", i.e., gene poor regions that nonetheless are highly conserved between humans and mice, but not humans and fish. The authors believed that since this sequence was conserved, it must not be junk, and therefore likely contains cis-acting regulatory sequences that important for gene regulation. When these regions were deleted, however, the mice developed normally and had no apparent defects or pathologies. In other words, what was once thought to be junk, then thought to not be junk, turns out to be junk again (sounds like a Fark cliche).
Here is another link that is informative. One possibility that is mentioned in this blurb is that the knockout mice are just defective in a non-obvious way.
it's also good to see the/. community respect Hormel's trademark by changing the old SPAM icon (a tin of SPAM(tm)) some time ago to the more recent... umm, SPAM meat carved into a pig? not quite sure what the new icon actually is, now that I think about it.
some of us happen to like windows xp for home applications. windows xp + cheap commodity x86 hardware = inexpensive, easy to set up and use home computer. Sure I am paying for my copy of xp, but I think it's worth it in terms of not having to deal with the hassle of installing linux. To qualify my opinion, I happen to use linux in a work environment because of certain features, but for (let's face it) linux is a pain in the ass to set up. Is it doable? Sure. Is it worth my effort? Probably not. Last time I tried to run linux at home and play mp3s I had to chmod 777/dev/dsp so that the mp3 player could talk to the sound driver. Linux is a hacker's system and it's very good for what it is. It is not yet fully mature as a home system. I just plop my xp home system behind a simple router/firewall, install firefox, and I'm ready to websurf/play GTAIII/listen to mp3s.
actually, all cells in a female have the same genotype (with the exception of differentiated B and T cells, possibly). The fact that only one set of genes from a particular X chromosome is being expressed is irrelevant to the genotype. An organ recipient is a chimera, because the donor has a different genome as the recipient. As you pointed out, engineered animals who were made by fusing embryonic stem cells from different sources are chimeras, for the same reason. A female mammal is *not* a chimera; all cells have the samme identical DNA.
moderators: please go take a genetics course. Barr bodies are formed not to make females chimeras, but to balance out X chromosome gene expression. humans are obligate diploids, and so by definition all humans, male and females are hybrids of their parents. it has nothing to do with X chromosome inactivation.
winamp used to rock. Then for some unfathomable reason someone decided that winamp needed a built-in webbrowser. A WEB BROWSER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! As soon as I learned about foobar2000 I ditched winamp for good. foobar2000 is also Unicode compliant; winamp won't do unicode without really ugly kludges. That makes foobar2000 perfect for mp3 files with east asian language file names/ID3 tags.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a copy of Office 2007 for $20 bucks (our campus has a volume license) to try it out. It is without a doubt the worst piece of crapware I have ever had the misfortune to try, not even taking into account file compatibility issues. The very worst bit is that there is no way for you to customize the ribbons unless you learn how to code XML. If you look up online help for the ribbon, Microsoft explicitly states this. One of the things I always liked about earlier versions of Office is the ability to customize the toolbars to optimize your own personal workflow; you add buttons you use more, and take away ones you don't. Now with Office 2007 you are pretty much stuck with what they decide are the "key" tools. Some functions are hidden in the contextual menu, which is the ONLY place they are accessible. I am switching back to Office 2003, which is actually pretty decent.
MOD UP!! MOD UP!!
Clear Type (sub pixel rendering) was the killer app that made me switch from 2k to xp. I suppose the display technology also counts as interface design.
that's not strange at all, especially if you don't know the pharmacological target of an anesthetic. Many lipids are used as chemical second messengers. There are many membrane bound proteins that might be a target.
BTW, IAANS (I am a neuroscientist). Here is another link to their earlier research on this. While PNAS is certainly a reputable journal, I made some interesting observations while reading their paper:
(1) It's very physics- and modeling-heavy. While I don't like to generalize, my impression has always been that physicists are not very good biologists. I've been to many a "cross-disciplinary" seminars where physicists try to model biological processes, and inevitably they make very little biological sense.
(2) They cite mostly old papers from the literature (1960s) that point out deficiencies in the Hudgkin-Huxley model (although it's true that the HH model of action potential propagation may have become dogmatic).
(3) It was published via track I in PNAS, wherein a Member of the National Academy of Sciences can directly accept the paper for publication, bypassing peer review. The purpose of this mechanism is so that controversial works have a chance to be published; historically, it has been used to dole out favors and/or to publish crackpot theories.
Ultimately, while what they are proposing is not as crazy as TFA makes it out to be, the paper sounds to me that they are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Neuroscientists today have a very detailed understanding of how axonal neurotransmission works. The authors claim that the solitons (sound waves) in their model explain how nerve propagation in myelinated axons can be much faster than in equivalent non-myelinated axons, but again, neuroscientists are fairly sure they understand myelination in the context of the HH model. Even if axons go through soliton mediated pulses on the membrane that are in phase with action potentials (which is what they claim to observe), I seriously doubt that it has any physiological relevance, since just about everything neurons can do can be explained by ion flux through channels.
IAAANS (I am also a neuroscientist) and I'm with you on this. TFA sounds pretty crackpot to me. If they really had strong evidence for this it would be published in Nature, not Biophysical Journal.
besides their social behavior, there is a lot known about how the navigation system of honeybees works (i.e., how they find the hive after foraging). Understanding honeybee genetics could have an impact on understanding and designing autonomous systems for robotics.
IAACES (I am a C. elegans scientist) and have had the opportunity to interact with both Craig Mello and Andy Fire (albeit briefly) during and after seminars. An interesting study in contrast.
Craig looks more like a rock star than a Nobel Prize winning scientist in person; he's got the faded blue jeans/shirt hanging out look down pat. He's also ~6'5 and has great hair. Looks aside, Craig is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Some of the science he has done is simply mind-blowing (not necesarily the RNAi stuff). Back in the late 90's when Craig was just beginning to work on RNAi I remember going to a seminar of his and thinking "wow, this stuff will win the Nobel Prize one day."
Andy on the other hand looks exactly like the egghead stereotype of an absent-minded professor. Balding, wears thick round glasses, sweater and khakis. While not as physically imposing as Craig, Andy has this incredibly modest demeanor that really demonstrates what it means to be a *top notch* academic. No pretenciousness at all. As a "worm person", I will be eternally grateful for Andy for providing a vector kit for the C. elegans research community essentially free of charge. Even without the RNAi and other research accomplishments the worm community has much to thank Andy for.
from the FTC website:
"The credit bureaus offer a toll-free number that enables you to "opt-out" of having pre-approved credit offers sent to you for two years. Call 1-888-5-OPTOUT (567-8688) for more information. When you call, you'll be asked for personal information, including your home telephone number, your name and your Social Security number. The information you provide is confidential and will be used only to process your request to opt out of receiving pre-screened offers of credit."
Who runs 1-888-5-OPTOUT? I sure as heck don't want to give my SSN and telephone number to anyone just because the FTC says so!
I am not a cardiovacular research, but my wife is. excessive growth of the heart is the least of your worries. Adult cardiomyocytes are nortoriously hard to get to proliferate. Getting them to growth at all, even just a little bit, is a big deal.
Mod parent way up. As a newly minter asst. prof., my biggest gripe with Blackboard is the same as the parent post. I don't necessarily mind the lousy UI, it looks ugly but it gets the job done. From an instructor's point of view, it provides a reasonably simple interface to upload course documents and annoucements to students (very useful if you have a large class). But I could care less if students not registered in my course want to download course material (heck, I could care less about (and even encourage) students who want to audit my course). If I had the time, html skills, and funds for a separate server for my course materials, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but alas I lack all three.
I wonder, if my willingness for non-enrolled students to freely obtain course material/audit is a function of being science (biology) faculty? do faculty in arts and letters/humanities have a bigger issue with this?
Julian Delphiki unavailable for comment.
Speaking of which (sorry to threadjack), anyone have any comments on the new Orson Scott Card "Bean" novel?
Continental's WAPs are unsecured; just sit outside the door to the President's Club and get instant WiFi.
I actually found this out trying to get WiFi at an airport Starbuck's, and finding that there was an SSID obviously belonging to Continental.
the reason I think this stuff happens is that the "publish or perish" pressure is just too insane at top universities. It's not just publishing in any archival journal; to maintain funding, to get tenured, high quality publications in high profile journals are a must. I can't speak for other fields, but in the biological sciences, not only is the pressure to publish in quality AND quantity getting greater each year, the field has exploded to such a degree that the burden of proof for one's hypotheses is increasingly heavier. Exploratory studies cannot be carried out; the emphasis is almost entirely on what can be completed and published in a reasonably short period of time. Experiments are hard to do. If a grant deadline/tenure review is coming up and the data is not quite what it needs to be, people might be tempted to fudge it a tiny bit.
None of what I just said excuses scientific misconduct. But I think why it happens is just a symptom of a bigger problem (at least in biology). There are too many Ph.D. level scientists! The incessant cranking out of these highly educated people is creating an oversupply of researchers. Every Ph.D. who gets a tenure-track research position (these positions are highly competitive; typically 50-100 highly qualified individuals who have equally impressive CVs compete for one spot) has to stake out their little project and protect it like a lioness protects her cubs. If they're not careful and blink the wrong way, they could be scooped by competitors (i.e. beaten to publication); a good chunk of their career just went down the drain. This after a completely unreasonable length of postgraduate training (6-7 years for a Ph.D. and 4-5 years postdoctoral training after that is quite typical), poor pay and lousy hours. All because IMO there are too many people working on the same shit.
I think that to fix the problem, something fundamental needs to change in the way scientists are produced. I don't pretend to know what the best solution would be, but one idea I've been throwing around is to train more M.S. level people than Ph.D. level people. These would be employed as staff scientists rather than independent principal investigators, such that there would be enough of a labor pool to actually do the work, but without having one's career constantly in jeopardy.
it also has a large form factor, not unlike cell phones of yore (ala a Motorola V60). Not attractive.
you are completely correct. I fact, depending on how easy it is to design and make the custom zinc finger enzyme, I see this technology having far more use in research and engineering than in medicine. Many human diseases are recessive, which means both copies of a gene are defective, in which case getting a "normal" DNA template from which to repair from into a patient's cells is still a problem.
it's free, and it's Free. Who cares if one browser is milliseconds faster or slower?
Here is a reference from the primary literature:
Nobrega et al. Science 302:413- (2003).
Nobrega et al. made 2 knockout mice, deleting 2 Mb and 1 Mb (Mb= 10e6 basepairs of DNA) regions, respectively, of the genome called "deserts", i.e., gene poor regions that nonetheless are highly conserved between humans and mice, but not humans and fish. The authors believed that since this sequence was conserved, it must not be junk, and therefore likely contains cis-acting regulatory sequences that important for gene regulation. When these regions were deleted, however, the mice developed normally and had no apparent defects or pathologies. In other words, what was once thought to be junk, then thought to not be junk, turns out to be junk again (sounds like a Fark cliche).
Here is another link that is informative. One possibility that is mentioned in this blurb is that the knockout mice are just defective in a non-obvious way.
it's also good to see the /. community respect Hormel's trademark by changing the old SPAM icon (a tin of SPAM(tm)) some time ago to the more recent... umm, SPAM meat carved into a pig? not quite sure what the new icon actually is, now that I think about it.
some of us happen to like windows xp for home applications. windows xp + cheap commodity x86 hardware = inexpensive, easy to set up and use home computer. Sure I am paying for my copy of xp, but I think it's worth it in terms of not having to deal with the hassle of installing linux. To qualify my opinion, I happen to use linux in a work environment because of certain features, but for (let's face it) linux is a pain in the ass to set up. Is it doable? Sure. Is it worth my effort? Probably not. Last time I tried to run linux at home and play mp3s I had to chmod 777 /dev/dsp so that the mp3 player could talk to the sound driver. Linux is a hacker's system and it's very good for what it is. It is not yet fully mature as a home system. I just plop my xp home system behind a simple router/firewall, install firefox, and I'm ready to websurf/play GTAIII/listen to mp3s.
actually, all cells in a female have the same genotype (with the exception of differentiated B and T cells, possibly). The fact that only one set of genes from a particular X chromosome is being expressed is irrelevant to the genotype. An organ recipient is a chimera, because the donor has a different genome as the recipient. As you pointed out, engineered animals who were made by fusing embryonic stem cells from different sources are chimeras, for the same reason. A female mammal is *not* a chimera; all cells have the samme identical DNA.
I was going to flame you, but the +3 funny mod was good enough for me. comedy gold!
moderators: please go take a genetics course. Barr bodies are formed not to make females chimeras, but to balance out X chromosome gene expression. humans are obligate diploids, and so by definition all humans, male and females are hybrids of their parents. it has nothing to do with X chromosome inactivation.
winamp used to rock. Then for some unfathomable reason someone decided that winamp needed a built-in webbrowser. A WEB BROWSER FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! As soon as I learned about foobar2000 I ditched winamp for good. foobar2000 is also Unicode compliant; winamp won't do unicode without really ugly kludges. That makes foobar2000 perfect for mp3 files with east asian language file names/ID3 tags.
I never get tired of Chatterbox, my car radio is stuck on that station.
"Liberty City Cocks Rule!"
"Freddie needs a nanny, because Freddie's been a very naughty boy."
"C.R.A.P.??? Your organization is called C.R.A.P.?? What kind of moron are you??"
"You're listening to Chatterbox, where your opinion matters, or that's what we say anyway."
"You're listening to Chatterbox with me, Lazlow, with open ears and a closed mind."
"WHAT?? Not another one! The Australian-American war was the biggest war since the Big One."
"You know, that's a really good point. Countries that don't have guns are not American. If we had more guns, there would be less shootings."
"I work MIRACLES, senor!"
good times, good times!