Thanks for the various explanations. I really like technology. I last touched a flask at the end of the last millennium, and it looks like the science has really progressed. I was more into GC mass-spectrometry, and I do not care what they say about it being the gold standard (then). At the part per billion level, it was prone to false positives. We just loved finding co-metabolites to confirm the diagnosis and reduce our paranoia. (It was a regulatory lab.)
So very sensitive pattern matching was a dream, seldom achieved. This is cool stuff.
As for the specific application. Not to worry. It is simply sufficient that there be an excellent potential. When I was an undergrad (late 60s), lasers were talked about as a billion dollar solution to a problem no-one had found yet. 5 years later, they were making optical cables to shine them down. This is just another use for them. Way to go.
Thanks again for the info. Cheers from latitude 45 south.
The article is vague on how it works, but as a once upon a time chemical analyst (way way back), this sounds like it is doing the equivalent of an infra red scan, using rapid chopping the frequency the vibrations. Dunno. I just used the machines, I'm not a physicist. It may be a better way of doing it.
But the concept of detecting for a whole bunch of compounds at once has been around for many decades, as is the idea that you can detect health and sickness states with it. The ideas all seemed to bog down in reality. Pattern detection relies an a massive reliable database. In the article, they focussed on asthma. As a (once) chemist, I noted that hydrogen peroxide was now hydro-peroxide, and the nitrite and nitrate ions were somehow volatile. Not show stoppers, but cause for questioning what they actually were detecting. And rather hi-tech compared to a cardboard peak flow meter.
The social impact if it works is rather similar to gene scanning. If an employer tests applicants for jobs, then not only being a smoker can be detected. Maybe a whole bunch of disease risks. The individual risk increases may not be enough to diagnose a specific disease (so no use to a clinician), but a doubled risk of asthma, heart conditions etc would all ad up to a statistical bad risk. Life insurers also might like the idea.
So you may find it threatening. On the other had, if you are healthy, why have high insurance premiums. Oh well. Definitive tests for disease have been invented before. And people very sharply fall into the Want-to know or Don't-tell-me camps. Having the info acquired under a form of blackmail makes for problems.
I am not stupid (most days), but I do lack expertise in many IT areas including this. If there is a $.20 fee, why would anyone be silly enough to generate millions of scripts, which cost $200,000 per million. It is not an accidental action. You might do it to sink a company that is about to fire you, but you had better have a really good way of beating the law. So expand your logic please. What is the practice that would end overnight. Writing such scripts? Charging for tasting? Tasting? (I have a slug of Celt in me. Ambiguity comes easy. Stupid no. Easily confused yes.)
I'd go with a $1 charge. That is, very roughly, a 1 minute of your time charge. Pay for your typos. The fee is likely to stay constant for a decade, so it needs some substance to it.
A more practical problem is the cost of charging the $1. I do not see this as a biggie. The name should only be formally registered if you have an account - with credit in it. For people without accounts, register the name though an intermediary who is also supplying you with some other service, such as somewhere to put your site. That occurs already.
It does appear tenuous, but science gets sucked in the same way a bank gets sucked in if you have to pay for the abortion.
Why abort a fetus? (1) Because you didn't want to be pregnant. S&T produce the pregnancy kits. Not the only way of knowing you are pregnant, but one of the surest early ways. (2) Because there are genetic abnormalities. S&T again produce the evidence
Why not keep the fetus? Well, S&T have nothing to say. Not in an emotional sense. If the test says you are not pregnant, then there is no abortion, but S&T testing gets no credit for that. And if there are no abnormalities, again no-one is going to be saying, 'Thanks to the lab, we don't have to abort'. No, they say, we have a lovely baby and don't give a stuff about the lab. That's quite natural.
And when it comes to issues like 'does the fetus have a soul?', S&T are useless, and get blamed for it. I don't know why. Pilots and doctors and firemen and cops are equally useless, but do not get blamed. I suspect S&T is given a Realm of the Gods status, capable of creating miracles, and equally to blame for any Act of God.
But the real bottom line is, people do not welcome having an abortion. Any more than they welcome having a tooth extracted. That means, reasons have to be produced, and ideally someone or thing gets the blame. It's scapegoat time. My dentist shows me the x-ray, talks in dark tones about the meaning of some insubstantial but definitely visible shadow, and I get resentful at the x-ray. This is a good thing. I like my dentist, think she does a good job, and trust her. I do not want a scapegoat messing with my teeth.
Incidentally, this scapegoat feature is not new, and not confined to science. He who brought news of defeat to the king was likely to be killed. It is a valuable managerial survival technique. If you cock-up, get some outsider group to present the details of the failure (no mention of who made the decisions), then focus immediately on the minions who executed the cock-up, and sack them. Plenty more technicians where they came from, but managers with vision and a willingness to take risks have to be treasured. Think of it this way, only half the message is heard: Sire, we have suffered a grievous defeat. *sound of head being chopped off* We need to prepare our castle defenses.
So when it comes to abortion, science makes for a really good scapegoat. It provides the evidence to justify abortions. It also provides evidence not to have abortions, but that is not to be discussed.
Abortions are emotive. Scapegoats are a great way of getting rid of bad emotions. And scientists make great scapegoats. Faced with nasty emotive situations, the stupid buggers will start to quote facts and other irrelevancies.
I bought a laptop for my daughter for University. It came with Vista installed, which was only a few months old then.
Her main bitch is that Nero does not work properly. This was a version downloaded and paid for about 6 months ago, so it should work.
I've just assumed that MS have hidden DRM watchdogs in place and the Redmont Inquisition is just doing their job: killing anything that just might being illegal, contrary to the profits. The next edition to burn DVDs etc will be called Auto-de-fe.
This is contrary to my general philosophy. I believe that of the two main explanations for human endeavor, the cock-up explanation wins over conspiracy every time. But I do allow a bit of slack for greed, and that readily allows both conspiracy and ineptitude.
So what do I tell her. It doesn't work because Vista is a Zeppelin for which the word 'burn' is an afterthought, or that a bunch of sales managers conspired to define the operating system.
Nice article. Positives and negatives, with the mum worried by her sons who do not call.
The effect of cell phones is to allow a village to remain much the same village, despite the children dispersing. Over time, the kids will marry away, but the blow gets softened, and the children are stabilized by contact with home.
So it is a good thing over all. The interesting bit is: who pays for the village phones. Just the children. When you think that this is a force for stability, and how cheap phones are compared to machine guns, it is a pity that some military dollars didn't go into these phones.
The technology does seem useful. At present, all they are doing is cooking the cells. But if you can coat a nanotube with various compounds, you can coat it with toxins tied by a heat labile bond. Cook to release, and poison the cancer cell.
Red lining ( a motoring term) comes from tiping too fast, typing to fist, typing two farst, um, using more than one finger per hand.
The key is to never type faster than your brains alpha rhythm. Otherwise, you slide into a meditative zone known as 'T-pool bimbo limbo'. On the other hand, I've generally found typists to be saner than managers, so maybe the mediative zone is a defense mechanism. The frontal cortex contemplates what's for dinner tonight while some low reptilian region recognizes scrawled letters and types them.
Which leads back to the main topic. What is the lowest animal life that could be trained to log into Yahoo?
Interesting to read the US point of view (which is strongly entrenched in my country too). Gimme cheap petrol. End of story.
Hasn't global warming sunk in yet? I know it's only been 2 years since it's been allowed to be freely discussed, but hey guys. wake up!
I'm a cynical aging chemist. I expect this research to be mostly hype with some mod of the bacteria approach being pushed. But they have two important claims. (1) They are converting junk carbon (not food carbon) into a petrol replacement. (2)That carbon is atmospheric carbon.
So more power to their elbow as the saying goes. To turn research into a product, you need a lot of hype.
I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business. (With a board of directors with a weird agenda.) So the completed system should be useful to a lot of people. I expect a BIG contribution from Microsoft to the Presidential runners to make sure the software never is allowed to be released to the wider community. "For Security Reasons". Given that the sensitive military code is going to be in its own well protected sandbox, it would probably take 10 seconds to create a public domain version, and about a century to release it.
In a really noisy street, with large trucks and SUVs crushing you round, the noise is terrible. But with new 'Liposuk' the words are sucked right out of your mouth onto the memory stick. Now with 'frequent phrase conversion', we can highlight in red, great last liners such as:
He didn't indicate. Arrgh. Ice. Arrgh. Lemme think about thisarrgh. Arseharrgh. Arrgh.
Another great bin Laden product, brought to you by Darwinware Inc.
The mole is worth talking about, mainly to allow moderators to hit us with an off topic fine.
According to Wikipedia, the mole is due to become extinct. The definition is depends on the gram, which in turn is based on a lump of metal the French have hidden in Paris. This is plain unscientific and I think the current plan is to define the mole as a particular number (preferably incorporating Paris Hilton's birth date to keep the French connection), and from that define a sphere of silicon that weighs a kilogram.
The difficult bit in all this is to get Paris (Hilton) to understand what a sphere is. Before long, someone says 'balls' and well, she has a brand image to uphold, doesn't she.
In the meantime, us chemists can happily use the mole as a unit of conversation. A nanomole is the smallest amount of fur that will glint in strong sunlight. And so on. The object is to drive away the boozy slobs and leave at least one interesting person to talk to. A difficult problem, but if you bungle it, you can always join the diminishing circle round the physicist explaining why 'vacuum cleaner' is an oxymoron. As a chemist, you can point out that an oxymoron is someone who destroys the ozone layer.
All these prefixes get messy. 'Atto-' at one billionth of a billionth is difficult to comprehend. But an 'attobuoy' is about the smallest thing that can float, and and is consequently the unit of measure for scum, when mentioning one to several scum. And the attomole is the musty smell in a molehole.
But my preference is for the guacamole. It uses a Mexican meaning of mole, and is made form avocado. Which is Spanish for lawyer, but derived form an Aztec (or thereabouts) word that means testicle. Amazingly, the word testify also refers to testicles. At which stage, you should have narrowed to conversation down to a monologue, or be talking to Paris Hilton (or similar).
An immune response can be that rapid. The typical example is the rapid immune response to a bee sting. You can die getting from your garden to the house where the epinephrine injection is conveniently stored. Dead in 90 seconds. But that is only true if you have had previous episodes that have predisposed you to anaphylactic shock.
Your objection is true to quite some extent. Antibody response to a new threat, (eg, an old bug, now evolved to be unfamiliar), takes weeks. Usually it is a race between antibody response and bug growth. If bugs did not evolve, we would indeed be all incredibly healthy. In fact, the last 2 generations have lived through a one-off magic time when antibiotics have worked. Bugs are evolving and future generations will quite rightly curse our stupid misuse of them. Then, mankind should be back to dying from disease as per usual.
To mount an immediate response, you need a high level of antibody present in the body. As my first post pointed out, the amount of antibody to cope with a gram of cocaine is impossibly high. Let's ignore that for now. Let us suppose you have been inoculated with a special vaccine, typically twice, say 2 and 4 weeks before you are deemed protected. Even that protection is a lottery. The body has billions of randomly created antibodies. You may lack the right initial template that can be mass produced into an effective immune response. Or you can and I lose out. Generally speaking, some sort of response will be mounted, but the effectiveness will easily vary 10 fold between individuals. (Yeah, you can see the researchers focusing on the few successes can't you, and claiming that this is indicative of eventual total success.) The immune response then fades down to a maintenance level, which would not cope with a sudden cocaine rush. So yes, again you are right, the inoculation is only valid if the timing can be guaranteed. Ok if you are treated in a sanatorium (aka prison), and released in the expectation that you will immediately toddle off to you local pusher. But not ok in the usual run of events, such as a reformed druggie who suddenly relapses. Again, a research program can show apparent success, but the approvals committee is unlikely to have weary cynics from drug rehabilitation clinics on the committee.
In short, your objection is initially invalid (immune responses can be very fast indeed), but in fact I'd say it contains a good slug of truth in it. Timing can be set up to make for a falsely hopeful success report on the research.
I'd expect that the research approvals committee would have experienced clinicians (or vets) who would know all this. In short, a bunch of old farts (like me, but more competent) would once again turn down promising research. Well, I've grown sick of promises. Given a badly cut hand, I'll opt for a run of the mill clean-and-stitch-the-silly-bastard-up approach over the promise of a plastic surgeon if I'm lucky. So I have scarred hands. Tough. They remind me not to be so stupid. Same goes for evaluating research. I like a little bit of pie in the sky to keep my hopes up, but the main delivery is from all those boring gradual improvement people.
This research is not new, and likely to succeed only because of the way it screws around the metabolism that produces cocaine receptors. Real lottery stuff. Roll out the prison volunteers for cocaine trials. Don't expect them to be truthful. All great fun if it is someone else's money, and it comes out of a military budget that would otherwise have been spent on a really dopey new fantasy weapon. Not a likely scenario, is it. Make for an interesting movie. Especially if you get some good advice on potential side effects.
I worked as an immunochemist from 1973 to 1985 on a very similar idea, trying to get a vaccine against a fungal toxin. Making the antigen was what my doctorate was about. Getting an immune response was easy. Getting it to be useful was difficult, and in the end, not funded.
The key problem is effectiveness. The immune response relies on immunoglobulins, proteins which have about 600 residues per binding site. The immune system evolved to take out large molecules, and the bacteria or whatever hanging off them. Most drugs are small. The rule of thumb is they all weigh 250 amu, call it 2 residues. (That is, equivalent in weight to 2 amino acids). So to mop up a gram of cocaine, you need 300 grams of antibodies in the body devoted solely to the cocaine problem. Forget it. Too big a problem.
Our fungus was more effective, so we were out to mop up only a few milligrams. We did get a biological response. We made the disease worse. That leads to the next problem. Antibodies do not do anything nasty themselves. They just bind and signal to a macrophage to come and eat the problem. So binding a drug does not get rid of it, but turns the drug from a short term compound, maybe readily metabolized, into a slowly released compound. That can make some diseases worse.
So even if the cocaine could get mopped up, all you would achieve is a slow release drug. This could be metabolically effective, as the body may adapt and up or down regulate the cocaine receptors. Don't ask me what would happen. I was an organic chemist, not a vet. So a cocaine high would initially occur, but subsequent weeks-long cocaine release could mess with the cocaine receptors.
Of more interest to us was the next step - modifying antibodies to act as enzymes. In the end, this was never funded. The up-coming DNA revolution swept up all funds, and rightly so.
There is no point in worrying much about not being able to take your daily cocaine hit. I do not expect the vaccine to work as reported. The side effects of the treatment could be interesting, especially if you are on death row, and are given favorable treatment in return for taking cocaine. Even if purely passive, such vaccines could have one judicial use; retaining cocaine or any other drug in the body for weeks would be of use in proving a relapse into drug use, and a parole violation. I cannot see any great cheering from the sidelines for that idea either.
The article referred to is just a report on a newspaper report. My pessimism may be unjustified. I do not have good access to the original. Anyone interested can request further comments or an email. It was all a long time ago.
No, that's calculus. Engineering is about welding things together. They just pretend to do calculus because managerial clients relate well to minutiae. As they say, 'wire frames for chicken-shit brains'.
Agree. I installed CS3 on Boxing day. Christmas present, to finally update my Paintshop pro 7. I was annoyed to find some hours later that it was 200 megs into a 370 meg download. It may have subtly asked my permission, but it did not flag the size of the download.
Mind you, keeping size a secret seems to be standard for most updates even where permission is asked for. First the language is bungled. They ask for permission to 'install' updates as if it had already been downloaded. Then when you think, "Ok, may as well be up to date, since it's got the data now. It's a small patch to block a security hole.", it goes off to get 70 megs or so of update for some damn media player I don't use. (I have teenage children. Media players spontaneously generate inside my computer.)
I did not notice the article. But there are two types of reviews.
In "peer reviewing", scientists (or doctors or lawyers or whoever) get unpublished papers, which they comment on. They can opt to let the person getting the comments know who they are. The comments are not published. The editor requires all critical comments have to be answered before the paper can be published. Such papers are far more trustworthy that opinion pieces.
In addition, a person can write a 'Literature Review' that has no original research in it, but it is required to be an excellent review of the literature to date. It is a summary paper. It typically has over a hundred references, maybe several hundred, and this is the 'cross-referencing' advantage you speak of. These papers are also "peer reviewed" before publication.
To be promoted or get tenure, it pays to be a frequently published and also a frequently cited author. It's the academic equivalent of getting your business a high Google ranking.
In terms of our discussion here, the Literature Review should especially be in the public domain, but I would still grant it one year before being in the public domain. The downside is that reviews age quite quickly. New research can make them obsolete.
Delayed access is not my preference. I would rather that they were commissioned as for original research, that publication was part of the contract, and it immediately went into the public domain. Those commissions would be lucrative, career enhancing, and open to political bias. A drug company could commission a review of the proven health effects of a class of drugs, and the reviewer is their poodle. Well, please bear in mind that scientists are no more intrinsically honest than lawyers. The difference is that they are paid to be unbiased. Reviews are more of a grey area.
I'm an greying ex-scientist these days. I'd rather leave further comment to others with a personal stake. Given the state of funding, that stake is often sharpened and fatal.
I would agree with the evaluation that it is the routine costs of production that are the unavoidable cost, that it has to be paid, and that paying for early access should cover that. "How long" is the key. I'd further agree with a year. Newspapers are old within a day, but research doesn't age that fast.
So much of the cost of research is gifted that I find it horrible that parasites can then treat it as a cash cow. Web publishing will help, but there are problems with longevity. You have to have a feed back mechanism that allows good stuff to be propagated. And some will be lost. Well, a lot of research is useless, and maybe it is more effective to re-invent it than keep the chaff forever.
These are peer reviewed papers. A paid editor has to find competent reviewers in the same specialised field, who are not known enemies of the writer, and get their consent to review. Reviewing is unpaid work, and all the reviewer gets is a preview of a paper in return for some professional risk. It takes some hours at a minimum to read, check out the oddities, and write back ones conclusions. There are two reviewers minimum. Conflicts have to be resolved, either by the writer(s) modifying the paper or the reviewers having something explained. Then an accepted paper has to be put into published format. Even web publishing costs.
It cannot be a free process. It could be a taxpayer paid process. So I can re-interpret your objection to mean: "If we paid for the research, why cannot the publication also be paid for?"
Perfectly reasonable. But you would need a policy on non-US research submitted for publication. Somewhat similar to entry into US universities. It's messy but feasible.
That is, the green idea that was a *medical breakthrough* and became a man made disaster.
If you go to the Times top Man-made disaster, you see global warming, and a picture of a shrunken Arctic ice cap. But even cursory examination shows the truth. It is actually South America totally covered in cocaine. SA was subject to a horrendous experiment by the Columbian-CIA industrial complex, which wanted to create cocaine using GM yeast in a vat. (The CIA were out to undermine the Teleban poppy growers.) The vat broke, the yeast blew on the wind, and all of SA became covered in cocaine.
So the Pentagon towed SA up to the Arctic to hide the fiasco until after the Presidential elections. It's the usual story. What people think is SA now is just a polystyrene simulacrum made by Weta workshops during filming of King Kong. It's better than the original, and the polystyrene acts as a carbon sink.
But don't tell anyone, or else Weta will have to give up making films and concentrate on making Atlantis or something similar.
Those 4 pick-of-the-crop patents are no dawn of a new era stuff.
1. The kidney idea seems to be theoretical. As foobsr commented, not a working model. 2. The hydrogen pump is an absorber, so it gets clogged unlike thin platinum tubes. 3. Digesting in a bug soup is standard. One bug instead of many is no miracle. 4. Buckyballs seem to do no more than plug holes. Would any small rigid molecule work.
This seems to be university rubbish ideas. The patentees do not have to survive off their ideas, and probably are doing no more that having a patent on their CV to help with self promotion. The downside is that anyone who can make a related idea work now has them providing fuel to patent trolls.
In computing terms, the computer is to be run electricity from a bank of frog legs. The CPU degrades and the clock speed winds down. The software only runs one language, which is unproven but greatly hyped by the one person who has used it. Debugging is to be done by 1960's code, but the variables are to be given cool new millenium names.
I hope my old age doesn't depend on this level of practical technology .
Can herbivores distinguish humans. Yes. Horses do it. They tend to have a one-on-one relationship with humans. Probably camels are similar.
I did think the news article was particularly bad. We have a pet bunny which thumps if a cat is nearby. Any cat, even new ones, any shadings. (Bunnies are colour blind.) So it has an abstract concept of a medium sized threat that it can afford to watch and warn. Birds, humans, trees, etc are ignored. The cat can be crouched behind a tree or moving, and at any angle. Programming that capacity into a computer would be a nasty problem.
The research might make sense if they worked for a TV company, and were working towards selling toys to rich owners. Then you get Negreponte to design a drool proof screen with chewable edges. Sell them in pairs, one for the owner.
Ee Lad, tha were luxury. When I were still 3, da would belt me if I hadn't read another volume of t' Encyclopedia Britannica before breakfast. Then it were down into Yorkshire coal mines as usual.
Life were good compared to my younger sister. As 10 week embryo, she had to read t' engravings on t' needle used to check out if she had genetic deformities such as leanings toward Lancaster.
What's with the 'in the future' bit. It seems to me that human PC users are rats.
: Strong preference for an urban environment : Operate at night : Pink eyes : Sexually promiscuous : Tunnel vision : Socially organised into rat packs. : Cautious omnivores, who warn fellow rats of toxins : Proud champions of Darwin : Those who work in labs have white coats. : Worried about drain brains, etc...
It's all going to turn to custard when humans who venture outdoors have better PC capability on their mobile phones. Those tree hugging ozone breathers will be the death knell of current software.
I watched the video. It does show moving water. Then leaps into theory again about ice and things going bump in the night. It adds evidence, but is not conclusive. Most posts seem to quote pre-millenium data, and the emperiments are passive. They observe and do not intervene. With cheap GPS available these days, how about adding some large rocks with GPS and temperature recorders attached to them. I assume that this is a nature reserve where permanently gluing gadgets to local rocks is forbidden. That means importing rocks, and later taking them away. Camoflage the recorders or some local troll will just move the rocks for fun. See if movement occurs when cold. Ideally, wind and rain is being measured as well.
Of course, an intelligent rock knows to move only while a glib explanation is valid, so excellent data never rules out a good conspiracy theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the various explanations. I really like technology. I last touched a flask at the end of the last millennium, and it looks like the science has really progressed. I was more into GC mass-spectrometry, and I do not care what they say about it being the gold standard (then). At the part per billion level, it was prone to false positives. We just loved finding co-metabolites to confirm the diagnosis and reduce our paranoia. (It was a regulatory lab.)
So very sensitive pattern matching was a dream, seldom achieved. This is cool stuff.
As for the specific application. Not to worry. It is simply sufficient that there be an excellent potential. When I was an undergrad (late 60s), lasers were talked about as a billion dollar solution to a problem no-one had found yet. 5 years later, they were making optical cables to shine them down. This is just another use for them. Way to go.
Thanks again for the info. Cheers from latitude 45 south.
The article is vague on how it works, but as a once upon a time chemical analyst (way way back), this sounds like it is doing the equivalent of an infra red scan, using rapid chopping the frequency the vibrations. Dunno. I just used the machines, I'm not a physicist. It may be a better way of doing it.
But the concept of detecting for a whole bunch of compounds at once has been around for many decades, as is the idea that you can detect health and sickness states with it. The ideas all seemed to bog down in reality. Pattern detection relies an a massive reliable database. In the article, they focussed on asthma. As a (once) chemist, I noted that hydrogen peroxide was now hydro-peroxide, and the nitrite and nitrate ions were somehow volatile. Not show stoppers, but cause for questioning what they actually were detecting. And rather hi-tech compared to a cardboard peak flow meter.
The social impact if it works is rather similar to gene scanning. If an employer tests applicants for jobs, then not only being a smoker can be detected. Maybe a whole bunch of disease risks. The individual risk increases may not be enough to diagnose a specific disease (so no use to a clinician), but a doubled risk of asthma, heart conditions etc would all ad up to a statistical bad risk. Life insurers also might like the idea.
So you may find it threatening. On the other had, if you are healthy, why have high insurance premiums. Oh well. Definitive tests for disease have been invented before. And people very sharply fall into the Want-to know or Don't-tell-me camps. Having the info acquired under a form of blackmail makes for problems.
I am not stupid (most days), but I do lack expertise in many IT areas including this. If there is a $.20 fee, why would anyone be silly enough to generate millions of scripts, which cost $200,000 per million. It is not an accidental action. You might do it to sink a company that is about to fire you, but you had better have a really good way of beating the law. So expand your logic please. What is the practice that would end overnight. Writing such scripts? Charging for tasting? Tasting? (I have a slug of Celt in me. Ambiguity comes easy. Stupid no. Easily confused yes.)
I'd go with a $1 charge. That is, very roughly, a 1 minute of your time charge. Pay for your typos. The fee is likely to stay constant for a decade, so it needs some substance to it.
A more practical problem is the cost of charging the $1. I do not see this as a biggie. The name should only be formally registered if you have an account - with credit in it. For people without accounts, register the name though an intermediary who is also supplying you with some other service, such as somewhere to put your site. That occurs already.
It does appear tenuous, but science gets sucked in the same way a bank gets sucked in if you have to pay for the abortion.
Why abort a fetus?
(1) Because you didn't want to be pregnant. S&T produce the pregnancy kits. Not the only way of knowing you are pregnant, but one of the surest early ways.
(2) Because there are genetic abnormalities. S&T again produce the evidence
Why not keep the fetus?
Well, S&T have nothing to say. Not in an emotional sense. If the test says you are not pregnant, then there is no abortion, but S&T testing gets no credit for that. And if there are no abnormalities, again no-one is going to be saying, 'Thanks to the lab, we don't have to abort'. No, they say, we have a lovely baby and don't give a stuff about the lab. That's quite natural.
And when it comes to issues like 'does the fetus have a soul?', S&T are useless, and get blamed for it. I don't know why. Pilots and doctors and firemen and cops are equally useless, but do not get blamed. I suspect S&T is given a Realm of the Gods status, capable of creating miracles, and equally to blame for any Act of God.
But the real bottom line is, people do not welcome having an abortion. Any more than they welcome having a tooth extracted. That means, reasons have to be produced, and ideally someone or thing gets the blame. It's scapegoat time. My dentist shows me the x-ray, talks in dark tones about the meaning of some insubstantial but definitely visible shadow, and I get resentful at the x-ray. This is a good thing. I like my dentist, think she does a good job, and trust her. I do not want a scapegoat messing with my teeth.
Incidentally, this scapegoat feature is not new, and not confined to science. He who brought news of defeat to the king was likely to be killed. It is a valuable managerial survival technique. If you cock-up, get some outsider group to present the details of the failure (no mention of who made the decisions), then focus immediately on the minions who executed the cock-up, and sack them. Plenty more technicians where they came from, but managers with vision and a willingness to take risks have to be treasured.
Think of it this way, only half the message is heard:
Sire, we have suffered a grievous defeat. *sound of head being chopped off* We need to prepare our castle defenses.
So when it comes to abortion, science makes for a really good scapegoat. It provides the evidence to justify abortions. It also provides evidence not to have abortions, but that is not to be discussed.
Abortions are emotive. Scapegoats are a great way of getting rid of bad emotions. And scientists make great scapegoats. Faced with nasty emotive situations, the stupid buggers will start to quote facts and other irrelevancies.
I bought a laptop for my daughter for University. It came with Vista installed, which was only a few months old then.
Her main bitch is that Nero does not work properly. This was a version downloaded and paid for about 6 months ago, so it should work.
I've just assumed that MS have hidden DRM watchdogs in place and the Redmont Inquisition is just doing their job: killing anything that just might being illegal, contrary to the profits. The next edition to burn DVDs etc will be called Auto-de-fe.
This is contrary to my general philosophy. I believe that of the two main explanations for human endeavor, the cock-up explanation wins over conspiracy every time. But I do allow a bit of slack for greed, and that readily allows both conspiracy and ineptitude.
So what do I tell her. It doesn't work because Vista is a Zeppelin for which the word 'burn' is an afterthought, or that a bunch of sales managers conspired to define the operating system.
Nice article. Positives and negatives, with the mum worried by her sons who do not call.
The effect of cell phones is to allow a village to remain much the same village, despite the children dispersing. Over time, the kids will marry away, but the blow gets softened, and the children are stabilized by contact with home.
So it is a good thing over all. The interesting bit is: who pays for the village phones. Just the children. When you think that this is a force for stability, and how cheap phones are compared to machine guns, it is a pity that some military dollars didn't go into these phones.
The technology does seem useful. At present, all they are doing is cooking the cells. But if you can coat a nanotube with various compounds, you can coat it with toxins tied by a heat labile bond. Cook to release, and poison the cancer cell.
Red lining ( a motoring term) comes from tiping too fast, typing to fist, typing two farst, um, using more than one finger per hand.
The key is to never type faster than your brains alpha rhythm. Otherwise, you slide into a meditative zone known as 'T-pool bimbo limbo'. On the other hand, I've generally found typists to be saner than managers, so maybe the mediative zone is a defense mechanism. The frontal cortex contemplates what's for dinner tonight while some low reptilian region recognizes scrawled letters and types them.
Which leads back to the main topic.
What is the lowest animal life that could be trained to log into Yahoo?
Interesting to read the US point of view (which is strongly entrenched in my country too). Gimme cheap petrol. End of story.
Hasn't global warming sunk in yet? I know it's only been 2 years since it's been allowed to be freely discussed, but hey guys. wake up!
I'm a cynical aging chemist. I expect this research to be mostly hype with some mod of the bacteria approach being pushed. But they have two important claims. (1) They are converting junk carbon (not food carbon) into a petrol replacement. (2)That carbon is atmospheric carbon.
So more power to their elbow as the saying goes. To turn research into a product, you need a lot of hype.
I've been hoping for some insightful comments, not being a Linux geek. Can anyone say anything about the wider implications. I'm not US competent. I guess the US Military is essentially a model of a well run business. (With a board of directors with a weird agenda.) So the completed system should be useful to a lot of people. I expect a BIG contribution from Microsoft to the Presidential runners to make sure the software never is allowed to be released to the wider community. "For Security Reasons". Given that the sensitive military code is going to be in its own well protected sandbox, it would probably take 10 seconds to create a public domain version, and about a century to release it.
As the intro said, dashboard dictation.
In a really noisy street, with large trucks and SUVs crushing you round, the noise is terrible. But with new 'Liposuk' the words are sucked right out of your mouth onto the memory stick. Now with 'frequent phrase conversion', we can highlight in red, great last liners such as:
He didn't indicate. Arrgh.
Ice. Arrgh.
Lemme think about thisarrgh.
Arseharrgh.
Arrgh.
Another great bin Laden product, brought to you by Darwinware Inc.
The mole is worth talking about, mainly to allow moderators to hit us with an off topic fine.
According to Wikipedia, the mole is due to become extinct. The definition is depends on the gram, which in turn is based on a lump of metal the French have hidden in Paris. This is plain unscientific and I think the current plan is to define the mole as a particular number (preferably incorporating Paris Hilton's birth date to keep the French connection), and from that define a sphere of silicon that weighs a kilogram.
The difficult bit in all this is to get Paris (Hilton) to understand what a sphere is. Before long, someone says 'balls' and well, she has a brand image to uphold, doesn't she.
In the meantime, us chemists can happily use the mole as a unit of conversation. A nanomole is the smallest amount of fur that will glint in strong sunlight. And so on. The object is to drive away the boozy slobs and leave at least one interesting person to talk to. A difficult problem, but if you bungle it, you can always join the diminishing circle round the physicist explaining why 'vacuum cleaner' is an oxymoron. As a chemist, you can point out that an oxymoron is someone who destroys the ozone layer.
All these prefixes get messy. 'Atto-' at one billionth of a billionth is difficult to comprehend. But an 'attobuoy' is about the smallest thing that can float, and and is consequently the unit of measure for scum, when mentioning one to several scum. And the attomole is the musty smell in a molehole.
But my preference is for the guacamole. It uses a Mexican meaning of mole, and is made form avocado. Which is Spanish for lawyer, but derived form an Aztec (or thereabouts) word that means testicle. Amazingly, the word testify also refers to testicles. At which stage, you should have narrowed to conversation down to a monologue, or be talking to Paris Hilton (or similar).
There, off topic enough for you?
An immune response can be that rapid. The typical example is the rapid immune response to a bee sting. You can die getting from your garden to the house where the epinephrine injection is conveniently stored. Dead in 90 seconds. But that is only true if you have had previous episodes that have predisposed you to anaphylactic shock.
Your objection is true to quite some extent. Antibody response to a new threat, (eg, an old bug, now evolved to be unfamiliar), takes weeks. Usually it is a race between antibody response and bug growth. If bugs did not evolve, we would indeed be all incredibly healthy. In fact, the last 2 generations have lived through a one-off magic time when antibiotics have worked. Bugs are evolving and future generations will quite rightly curse our stupid misuse of them. Then, mankind should be back to dying from disease as per usual.
To mount an immediate response, you need a high level of antibody present in the body. As my first post pointed out, the amount of antibody to cope with a gram of cocaine is impossibly high. Let's ignore that for now. Let us suppose you have been inoculated with a special vaccine, typically twice, say 2 and 4 weeks before you are deemed protected. Even that protection is a lottery. The body has billions of randomly created antibodies. You may lack the right initial template that can be mass produced into an effective immune response. Or you can and I lose out. Generally speaking, some sort of response will be mounted, but the effectiveness will easily vary 10 fold between individuals. (Yeah, you can see the researchers focusing on the few successes can't you, and claiming that this is indicative of eventual total success.) The immune response then fades down to a maintenance level, which would not cope with a sudden cocaine rush. So yes, again you are right, the inoculation is only valid if the timing can be guaranteed. Ok if you are treated in a sanatorium (aka prison), and released in the expectation that you will immediately toddle off to you local pusher. But not ok in the usual run of events, such as a reformed druggie who suddenly relapses. Again, a research program can show apparent success, but the approvals committee is unlikely to have weary cynics from drug rehabilitation clinics on the committee.
In short, your objection is initially invalid (immune responses can be very fast indeed), but in fact I'd say it contains a good slug of truth in it. Timing can be set up to make for a falsely hopeful success report on the research.
I'd expect that the research approvals committee would have experienced clinicians (or vets) who would know all this. In short, a bunch of old farts (like me, but more competent) would once again turn down promising research. Well, I've grown sick of promises. Given a badly cut hand, I'll opt for a run of the mill clean-and-stitch-the-silly-bastard-up approach over the promise of a plastic surgeon if I'm lucky. So I have scarred hands. Tough. They remind me not to be so stupid. Same goes for evaluating research. I like a little bit of pie in the sky to keep my hopes up, but the main delivery is from all those boring gradual improvement people.
This research is not new, and likely to succeed only because of the way it screws around the metabolism that produces cocaine receptors. Real lottery stuff. Roll out the prison volunteers for cocaine trials. Don't expect them to be truthful. All great fun if it is someone else's money, and it comes out of a military budget that would otherwise have been spent on a really dopey new fantasy weapon. Not a likely scenario, is it. Make for an interesting movie. Especially if you get some good advice on potential side effects.
I worked as an immunochemist from 1973 to 1985 on a very similar idea, trying to get a vaccine against a fungal toxin. Making the antigen was what my doctorate was about. Getting an immune response was easy. Getting it to be useful was difficult, and in the end, not funded.
The key problem is effectiveness. The immune response relies on immunoglobulins, proteins which have about 600 residues per binding site. The immune system evolved to take out large molecules, and the bacteria or whatever hanging off them. Most drugs are small. The rule of thumb is they all weigh 250 amu, call it 2 residues. (That is, equivalent in weight to 2 amino acids). So to mop up a gram of cocaine, you need 300 grams of antibodies in the body devoted solely to the cocaine problem. Forget it. Too big a problem.
Our fungus was more effective, so we were out to mop up only a few milligrams. We did get a biological response. We made the disease worse. That leads to the next problem. Antibodies do not do anything nasty themselves. They just bind and signal to a macrophage to come and eat the problem. So binding a drug does not get rid of it, but turns the drug from a short term compound, maybe readily metabolized, into a slowly released compound. That can make some diseases worse.
So even if the cocaine could get mopped up, all you would achieve is a slow release drug. This could be metabolically effective, as the body may adapt and up or down regulate the cocaine receptors. Don't ask me what would happen. I was an organic chemist, not a vet. So a cocaine high would initially occur, but subsequent weeks-long cocaine release could mess with the cocaine receptors.
Of more interest to us was the next step - modifying antibodies to act as enzymes. In the end, this was never funded. The up-coming DNA revolution swept up all funds, and rightly so.
There is no point in worrying much about not being able to take your daily cocaine hit. I do not expect the vaccine to work as reported. The side effects of the treatment could be interesting, especially if you are on death row, and are given favorable treatment in return for taking cocaine. Even if purely passive, such vaccines could have one judicial use; retaining cocaine or any other drug in the body for weeks would be of use in proving a relapse into drug use, and a parole violation. I cannot see any great cheering from the sidelines for that idea either.
The article referred to is just a report on a newspaper report. My pessimism may be unjustified. I do not have good access to the original. Anyone interested can request further comments or an email. It was all a long time ago.
No, that's calculus. Engineering is about welding things together. They just pretend to do calculus because managerial clients relate well to minutiae. As they say, 'wire frames for chicken-shit brains'.
Agree. I installed CS3 on Boxing day. Christmas present, to finally update my Paintshop pro 7. I was annoyed to find some hours later that it was 200 megs into a 370 meg download. It may have subtly asked my permission, but it did not flag the size of the download.
Mind you, keeping size a secret seems to be standard for most updates even where permission is asked for. First the language is bungled. They ask for permission to 'install' updates as if it had already been downloaded. Then when you think, "Ok, may as well be up to date, since it's got the data now. It's a small patch to block a security hole.", it goes off to get 70 megs or so of update for some damn media player I don't use. (I have teenage children. Media players spontaneously generate inside my computer.)
I did not notice the article. But there are two types of reviews.
In "peer reviewing", scientists (or doctors or lawyers or whoever) get unpublished papers, which they comment on. They can opt to let the person getting the comments know who they are. The comments are not published. The editor requires all critical comments have to be answered before the paper can be published. Such papers are far more trustworthy that opinion pieces.
In addition, a person can write a 'Literature Review' that has no original research in it, but it is required to be an excellent review of the literature to date. It is a summary paper. It typically has over a hundred references, maybe several hundred, and this is the 'cross-referencing' advantage you speak of. These papers are also "peer reviewed" before publication.
To be promoted or get tenure, it pays to be a frequently published and also a frequently cited author. It's the academic equivalent of getting your business a high Google ranking.
In terms of our discussion here, the Literature Review should especially be in the public domain, but I would still grant it one year before being in the public domain. The downside is that reviews age quite quickly. New research can make them obsolete.
Delayed access is not my preference. I would rather that they were commissioned as for original research, that publication was part of the contract, and it immediately went into the public domain. Those commissions would be lucrative, career enhancing, and open to political bias. A drug company could commission a review of the proven health effects of a class of drugs, and the reviewer is their poodle. Well, please bear in mind that scientists are no more intrinsically honest than lawyers. The difference is that they are paid to be unbiased. Reviews are more of a grey area.
I'm an greying ex-scientist these days. I'd rather leave further comment to others with a personal stake. Given the state of funding, that stake is often sharpened and fatal.
I would agree with the evaluation that it is the routine costs of production that are the unavoidable cost, that it has to be paid, and that paying for early access should cover that. "How long" is the key. I'd further agree with a year. Newspapers are old within a day, but research doesn't age that fast.
So much of the cost of research is gifted that I find it horrible that parasites can then treat it as a cash cow. Web publishing will help, but there are problems with longevity. You have to have a feed back mechanism that allows good stuff to be propagated. And some will be lost. Well, a lot of research is useless, and maybe it is more effective to re-invent it than keep the chaff forever.
These are peer reviewed papers. A paid editor has to find competent reviewers in the same specialised field, who are not known enemies of the writer, and get their consent to review. Reviewing is unpaid work, and all the reviewer gets is a preview of a paper in return for some professional risk. It takes some hours at a minimum to read, check out the oddities, and write back ones conclusions. There are two reviewers minimum. Conflicts have to be resolved, either by the writer(s) modifying the paper or the reviewers having something explained. Then an accepted paper has to be put into published format. Even web publishing costs.
It cannot be a free process. It could be a taxpayer paid process. So I can re-interpret your objection to mean: "If we paid for the research, why cannot the publication also be paid for?"
Perfectly reasonable. But you would need a policy on non-US research submitted for publication. Somewhat similar to entry into US universities. It's messy but feasible.
That is, the green idea that was a *medical breakthrough* and became a man made disaster.
If you go to the Times top Man-made disaster, you see global warming, and a picture of a shrunken Arctic ice cap. But even cursory examination shows the truth. It is actually South America totally covered in cocaine. SA was subject to a horrendous experiment by the Columbian-CIA industrial complex, which wanted to create cocaine using GM yeast in a vat. (The CIA were out to undermine the Teleban poppy growers.) The vat broke, the yeast blew on the wind, and all of SA became covered in cocaine.
So the Pentagon towed SA up to the Arctic to hide the fiasco until after the Presidential elections. It's the usual story. What people think is SA now is just a polystyrene simulacrum made by Weta workshops during filming of King Kong. It's better than the original, and the polystyrene acts as a carbon sink.
But don't tell anyone, or else Weta will have to give up making films and concentrate on making Atlantis or something similar.
Those 4 pick-of-the-crop patents are no dawn of a new era stuff.
1. The kidney idea seems to be theoretical. As foobsr commented, not a working model.
2. The hydrogen pump is an absorber, so it gets clogged unlike thin platinum tubes.
3. Digesting in a bug soup is standard. One bug instead of many is no miracle.
4. Buckyballs seem to do no more than plug holes. Would any small rigid molecule work.
This seems to be university rubbish ideas. The patentees do not have to survive off their ideas, and probably are doing no more that having a patent on their CV to help with self promotion. The downside is that anyone who can make a related idea work now has them providing fuel to patent trolls.
In computing terms, the computer is to be run electricity from a bank of frog legs. The CPU degrades and the clock speed winds down. The software only runs one language, which is unproven but greatly hyped by the one person who has used it. Debugging is to be done by 1960's code, but the variables are to be given cool new millenium names.
I hope my old age doesn't depend on this level of practical technology .
Can herbivores distinguish humans. Yes. Horses do it. They tend to have a one-on-one relationship with humans. Probably camels are similar.
I did think the news article was particularly bad. We have a pet bunny which thumps if a cat is nearby. Any cat, even new ones, any shadings. (Bunnies are colour blind.) So it has an abstract concept of a medium sized threat that it can afford to watch and warn. Birds, humans, trees, etc are ignored. The cat can be crouched behind a tree or moving, and at any angle. Programming that capacity into a computer would be a nasty problem.
The research might make sense if they worked for a TV company, and were working towards selling toys to rich owners. Then you get Negreponte to design a drool proof screen with chewable edges. Sell them in pairs, one for the owner.
Ee Lad, tha were luxury. When I were still 3, da would belt me if I hadn't read another volume of t' Encyclopedia Britannica before breakfast. Then it were down into Yorkshire coal mines as usual.
Life were good compared to my younger sister. As 10 week embryo, she had to read t' engravings on t' needle used to check out if she had genetic deformities such as leanings toward Lancaster.
What's with the 'in the future' bit. It seems to me that human PC users are rats.
: Strong preference for an urban environment
: Operate at night
: Pink eyes
: Sexually promiscuous
: Tunnel vision
: Socially organised into rat packs.
: Cautious omnivores, who warn fellow rats of toxins
: Proud champions of Darwin
: Those who work in labs have white coats.
: Worried about drain brains, etc...
It's all going to turn to custard when humans who venture outdoors have better PC capability on their mobile phones. Those tree hugging ozone breathers will be the death knell of current software.
I watched the video. It does show moving water. Then leaps into theory again about ice and things going bump in the night. It adds evidence, but is not conclusive. Most posts seem to quote pre-millenium data, and the emperiments are passive. They observe and do not intervene. With cheap GPS available these days, how about adding some large rocks with GPS and temperature recorders attached to them. I assume that this is a nature reserve where permanently gluing gadgets to local rocks is forbidden. That means importing rocks, and later taking them away. Camoflage the recorders or some local troll will just move the rocks for fun. See if movement occurs when cold. Ideally, wind and rain is being measured as well.
Of course, an intelligent rock knows to move only while a glib explanation is valid, so excellent data never rules out a good conspiracy theory.