Drugs are approved for specific indications, doses, and delivery mechanisms. You generally need to run a separate group of clinical trials if the same drug that's approved for a particular disease is being considered for use with a different disease (of course, let's not get into the mess that is off-label prescriptions).
I work in pharma, and I should point out that for generics sold in the United States, the manufacturer *always* has to deal with the FDA in terms of running one or more bioequivalency ("generic version works just as well as the brand name version") clinical trials, labeling and marketing issues, and so on. I suspect that Barr's regulatory affairs department is huge.
There were a number of browser plugins that did just that in the mid-90s, including one from Microsoft. IIRC, none of them caught on because they did the job extremely poorly.
One of the more prominent deaths from virally-mediate gene therapy was Jesse Gelsinger. You are probably thinking of him. That page is pretty comprehensive in terms of describing why he died, and the metabolic defect that they were trying to correct.
The clinical trial that he was taking part in was immediately halted, and there was some soul-searching in the scientific community for a while. But a quick search on gene therapy indicates that it's still quite an active area of research (look here, sort by date).
A while ago, gene therapy was discussed on Slashdot. I found a couple of good articles on the future and hazards of using viruses to deliver corrective DNA to diseased tissue. Follow the link to them from my Web site, unless you're the copyright police! Hope they are helpful.
Er, that exceptional case about placing the rubber band on the doughnut off to one side of the hole is the point.
For a sphere, you could start wrapping the rubber band around any part of the sphere, and be able to converge it to a point.
This is always the case, and that's simple connectedness. They're asking for proof of this concept.
This is not always the case for a doughnut. There are exceptional cases where you can converge the rubber band to a point without breaking contact, like wrapping the rubber band around the doughnut off to the side of the hole. But there are also cases where this can't be done because of the doughnut hole. The doughnut shape isn't simply connected.
The way I'm thinking about the problem, is this. Given the condition that no point on the rubber band can ever break contact with the surface of the object it's wrapped around (sphere or doughnut -- I think that's a torus):
You could move the rubber band towards an arbitrary apex of a sphere until the rubber band condenses to a single point at the apex. This applies to other volumes such as cubes and cones or even a randomly squeezed bit of toothpaste.
On the other hand, this can't be done for a torus when you've stretched a rubber band around the wide way, because dealing with the hole in the doughnut would mean having to break contact with the surface of the dougnut.
They're asking for topological proof that this is the case. Don't ask me to describe simple connectedness in plain English; it's an intuitive thing for me -- someone whose last math course was calculus 101.
What I don't get is why you can't cheat when initially placing the rubber band on the doughnut, and stick it to one side of the hole so that the shrinking process never has to cross the chasm, as it were. Or is that besides the point?
Also, what are the real world applications of this proof?
The primary reason why retroviruses are a big deal in gene therapy is that they integrate their genome into host DNA in the normal course of infection.
Retroviruses carry their genome around as RNA. Once they infect a host cell, reverse transcriptase converts its RNA genome into DNA. Then the DNA gets inserted into the host genome, by other proteins that the virus carries around ready-made.
Adenovirus does this as well, and is also a good vector for gene therapy.
The ability to insert viral genome (or modified viral genome) into host cells is the big deal here.
That's just one of the problems with gene therapy.
The other major problem is that we still don't know enough about how viruses (or other vectors for gene insertion) interact with biological systems to ensure efficacy, or safety either. Several gene therapy clinical trials involving viral vectors have been abandoned, simply because the body responded (normally) to the presence of virus in the body.
You may be interested in looking through these articles on gene therapy from Real Scientific Journals; at the risk of pissing off the copyright police, I've linked to two good, readable review articles on the topic at my web site. I hope these can dispel some of the myths about GT.
People normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Of those chromosomes, only 1 is an X chromosome, and one a Y chromosome in boys. Girls have 2 X chromosomes.
The other 22 pairs of chromosomes may be X-shaped, but they most assuredly not what biologists refer to as X chromosomes; they're referred to by pair number 1 through 22.
Furthermore, having an abnormal number of chromosomes (aneuploidy) can cause congenital disease. In the case of sex chromosomes, I refer you to Klinefelter's and Turner's syndrome. In the case of other chromosomes, Down's syndrome (extra copy of chromosome 21), trisomy 13 and 18 (extra copies of chromosome 13 or 18).
It strikes me as ironic that the Slashdot crowd complains about feature bloat on PC software, all the while extolling the virtues of having a gazillion switches for a single command line program.
I'm aware that I've just made a vague, sweeping generalization about just who would complain about Windows bloatware, and that I'm being slightly inflammatory. But bear with me.
My point is that both complaints really amount to criticizing the other side's mental model of How Software Should Work. Bloatware on the one hand, and having a gazillion command line switches on the other, are software developers' different approches to dealing with the same issue: meeting the needs of the user. It's just that the user they have in mind has a different profile in terms of how they expect computers should work. Strange that I should ever agree with Spolsky 100% on this.
So I stand by my characterization of the "by geeks for geeks". Switch that phrase to "by lusers for lusers", and hey presto, you're criticizing Windblows.
And that's the problem I have with this vague non-declared goal of OSS taking over the desktkop, and it's why I think losing NAI PGP is such a big deal.
You -- the Slashdot crowd "you", not the "einhverfr" you -- extol the virtues of "anyone" being able to put together a front end on top of the actual encrypt/decrypt model. Well, that's not what Joe in accounting is willing or able to do. You -- again, the Slashdot crowd "you" -- talk about the importance of encryption evangelization. Well, Joe in accounting thinks it's a pretty good idea, but can't for the life of him figure out what he needs to do to sign his Eudora-sent email in the first place.
In the end, I don't think at all that the UNIX mentality is broken, nor is Winblows' (well, not fundamentally broken, anyway).
I do think that there's a huge userbase demanding (in the economics sense) a package that will fill the gap caused by the loss of NAI PGP, or a non-MS product, or what have you.
It's just a question of whether those with the so-called UNIX mentality are willing to approach the problem from the other point of view. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Re:Sure, I'll sign up
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Oh, c'mon. Having no equipment or not being in Houston / NYC is no excuse for not working out.
I used to be in decent shape back in the day; I could run a four and a half minute mile. I had a 32 inch waist.
Then I started a Web development company and ran it for five years. A lot of time was spent sitting behind a computer, eating badly and drinking obscene amounts of Coca Cola, or in airports, eating crappy airport food. At the end of my five year run, most my muscle mass had turned to flab. I could barely run a mile in any amount of time, and had a 38" waist.
I finally left the company last spring. I got off my ass, started doing 20 to 30 minutes of calisthetics every other day, ate healthier, and was back down to a 32" waist in about 6 months. The only thing left to do is work on my cardiovascular conditioning, which should take about an hour of jogging or swimming three days a week, and to quit smoking.
If you can't find the motivation to do a sum total of five hours of exercise a week, you've got bigger problems. Like dying prematurely from heart disease.
You don't need to be able to take that class, or build your treadmill torture machine. You already have all you need to get into reasonable shape.
Remember, sales and marketing types are the ones that are not fired.
I'm not disputing the benefit of broadening your horizons by getting a business degree. In fact, I'm a big proponent of including business breadth requirements in technical fields, especially CS and the life sciences.
But sales and marketing drones are inevitably the first to be fired, in every recession that I or my parents have lived through.
The article made me cringe, because it reflects my situation and the situation of some of my friends here in Montreal.
After twenty-odd years of a moribund economy, primarily due to the provincial government's questionable separatist agenda, things started picking up towards the beginning of the dot-com era.
Now, things are still pretty good ostensibly, but from what I've seen from being out of a job since May, things are looking quite bad under the surface.
We're still seeing a boom in construction, but it's mainly due to the completion of condo projects planned in the late-90s. The glut of condo construction is creating problems for an weakening economy; many were conversions and virtually no rental construction took place. This decreased the amount of rental space available and drove up rent. We're seeing 0.5% vacancy rates in a place that has traditionally been a renter's paradise.
In fact, things look kind of grim now. I'm not the only one amongst my acquaintances to be still looking after almost a year out of a job, and these include marketing people, managers, front-end people (you know, the JavaScript-and-HTML folks Slashdot readers seem to revile so much) as well as hardcore coders.
Part of the city's boom was due to the provincial mandate to bring in high tech jobs by encouraging companies to set up shop here, or to start up here. From government subsidies (we'll give you almost free money if we like you and you become our political friends) which brought Infogrames (of Civilization 3 fame) here to questionable projects like the Cité du Multimédia -- intended to be centres of excellence -- the high tech boom here really parallels that of the so-called New Economy": the ups and the downs.
A lot of companies that shouldn't have started up in the first place were sustained by government money. Or international companies set up huge programming shops here for the subsidies and tax breaks, and close up shop when they run out. We are well into the downside the Americans experienced several months ago.
What does that mean? Personally, it meant working at a record store, and living on savings to go back to school to finish my degree. It may mean more working at a minimum-wage job until things pick up some more. It's not that bad (well maybe it was; the record store, a country-wide chain with a great deal of fame, ended up going out of business this fall due to crappy dot-com style mismanagement), but it certainly is underemployment in the vein of the guy now working as a USPS employee.
I'm hoping things pick up this summer when I start looking for a job.
CNet talks about acquiring a desktop OS as a tool to keep Microsoft at bay. But they point out, as I did earlier, that Linux is a non-starter for the desktop in most of the world, but may make sense for AOL in developing countries.
Kind of makes you wonder if AOL considered purchasing Be instead. It certainly would have been a cheaper buy.
It also would give them a more user friendly operating system with a familiar, functioning, and coherent/unified WIMP interface (yes, Linux with KDE or Gnome is IMHO still not ready for the average user's desktop).
And finally, it would give them an OS that is certainly cutting edge multimedia-wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Drugs are approved for specific indications, doses, and delivery mechanisms. You generally need to run a separate group of clinical trials if the same drug that's approved for a particular disease is being considered for use with a different disease (of course, let's not get into the mess that is off-label prescriptions).
I work in pharma, and I should point out that for generics sold in the United States, the manufacturer *always* has to deal with the FDA in terms of running one or more bioequivalency ("generic version works just as well as the brand name version") clinical trials, labeling and marketing issues, and so on. I suspect that Barr's regulatory affairs department is huge.
There were a number of browser plugins that did just that in the mid-90s, including one from Microsoft. IIRC, none of them caught on because they did the job extremely poorly.
One of the more prominent deaths from virally-mediate gene therapy was Jesse Gelsinger. You are probably thinking of him. That page is pretty comprehensive in terms of describing why he died, and the metabolic defect that they were trying to correct.
The clinical trial that he was taking part in was immediately halted, and there was some soul-searching in the scientific community for a while. But a quick search on gene therapy indicates that it's still quite an active area of research (look here, sort by date).
A while ago, gene therapy was discussed on Slashdot. I found a couple of good articles on the future and hazards of using viruses to deliver corrective DNA to diseased tissue. Follow the link to them from my Web site, unless you're the copyright police! Hope they are helpful.
Er, that exceptional case about placing the rubber band on the doughnut off to one side of the hole is the point.
For a sphere, you could start wrapping the rubber band around any part of the sphere, and be able to converge it to a point.
This is always the case, and that's simple connectedness. They're asking for proof of this concept.
This is not always the case for a doughnut. There are exceptional cases where you can converge the rubber band to a point without breaking contact, like wrapping the rubber band around the doughnut off to the side of the hole. But there are also cases where this can't be done because of the doughnut hole. The doughnut shape isn't simply connected.
The way I'm thinking about the problem, is this. Given the condition that no point on the rubber band can ever break contact with the surface of the object it's wrapped around (sphere or doughnut -- I think that's a torus):
You could move the rubber band towards an arbitrary apex of a sphere until the rubber band condenses to a single point at the apex. This applies to other volumes such as cubes and cones or even a randomly squeezed bit of toothpaste.
On the other hand, this can't be done for a torus when you've stretched a rubber band around the wide way, because dealing with the hole in the doughnut would mean having to break contact with the surface of the dougnut.
They're asking for topological proof that this is the case. Don't ask me to describe simple connectedness in plain English; it's an intuitive thing for me -- someone whose last math course was calculus 101.
What I don't get is why you can't cheat when initially placing the rubber band on the doughnut, and stick it to one side of the hole so that the shrinking process never has to cross the chasm, as it were. Or is that besides the point?
Also, what are the real world applications of this proof?
The primary reason why retroviruses are a big deal in gene therapy is that they integrate their genome into host DNA in the normal course of infection.
Retroviruses carry their genome around as RNA. Once they infect a host cell, reverse transcriptase converts its RNA genome into DNA. Then the DNA gets inserted into the host genome, by other proteins that the virus carries around ready-made.
Adenovirus does this as well, and is also a good vector for gene therapy.
The ability to insert viral genome (or modified viral genome) into host cells is the big deal here.
That's just one of the problems with gene therapy.
The other major problem is that we still don't know enough about how viruses (or other vectors for gene insertion) interact with biological systems to ensure efficacy, or safety either. Several gene therapy clinical trials involving viral vectors have been abandoned, simply because the body responded (normally) to the presence of virus in the body.
You may be interested in looking through these articles on gene therapy from Real Scientific Journals; at the risk of pissing off the copyright police, I've linked to two good, readable review articles on the topic at my web site. I hope these can dispel some of the myths about GT.
I should hope not.
People normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Of those chromosomes, only 1 is an X chromosome, and one a Y chromosome in boys. Girls have 2 X chromosomes.
The other 22 pairs of chromosomes may be X-shaped, but they most assuredly not what biologists refer to as X chromosomes; they're referred to by pair number 1 through 22.
Furthermore, having an abnormal number of chromosomes (aneuploidy) can cause congenital disease. In the case of sex chromosomes, I refer you to Klinefelter's and Turner's syndrome. In the case of other chromosomes, Down's syndrome (extra copy of chromosome 21), trisomy 13 and 18 (extra copies of chromosome 13 or 18).
Sheesh.
extol the virtues of "anyone" being able to put together a front end on top of the actual encrypt/decrypt model
Er, that should be "encrypt/decrypt module." So much for previewing before posting.
It strikes me as ironic that the Slashdot crowd complains about feature bloat on PC software, all the while extolling the virtues of having a gazillion switches for a single command line program.
I'm aware that I've just made a vague, sweeping generalization about just who would complain about Windows bloatware, and that I'm being slightly inflammatory. But bear with me.
My point is that both complaints really amount to criticizing the other side's mental model of How Software Should Work. Bloatware on the one hand, and having a gazillion command line switches on the other, are software developers' different approches to dealing with the same issue: meeting the needs of the user. It's just that the user they have in mind has a different profile in terms of how they expect computers should work. Strange that I should ever agree with Spolsky 100% on this.
So I stand by my characterization of the "by geeks for geeks". Switch that phrase to "by lusers for lusers", and hey presto, you're criticizing Windblows.
And that's the problem I have with this vague non-declared goal of OSS taking over the desktkop, and it's why I think losing NAI PGP is such a big deal.
You -- the Slashdot crowd "you", not the "einhverfr" you -- extol the virtues of "anyone" being able to put together a front end on top of the actual encrypt/decrypt model. Well, that's not what Joe in accounting is willing or able to do. You -- again, the Slashdot crowd "you" -- talk about the importance of encryption evangelization. Well, Joe in accounting thinks it's a pretty good idea, but can't for the life of him figure out what he needs to do to sign his Eudora-sent email in the first place.
In the end, I don't think at all that the UNIX mentality is broken, nor is Winblows' (well, not fundamentally broken, anyway).
I do think that there's a huge userbase demanding (in the economics sense) a package that will fill the gap caused by the loss of NAI PGP, or a non-MS product, or what have you.
It's just a question of whether those with the so-called UNIX mentality are willing to approach the problem from the other point of view. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Oh, c'mon. Having no equipment or not being in Houston / NYC is no excuse for not working out.
I used to be in decent shape back in the day; I could run a four and a half minute mile. I had a 32 inch waist.
Then I started a Web development company and ran it for five years. A lot of time was spent sitting behind a computer, eating badly and drinking obscene amounts of Coca Cola, or in airports, eating crappy airport food. At the end of my five year run, most my muscle mass had turned to flab. I could barely run a mile in any amount of time, and had a 38" waist.
I finally left the company last spring. I got off my ass, started doing 20 to 30 minutes of calisthetics every other day, ate healthier, and was back down to a 32" waist in about 6 months. The only thing left to do is work on my cardiovascular conditioning, which should take about an hour of jogging or swimming three days a week, and to quit smoking.
If you can't find the motivation to do a sum total of five hours of exercise a week, you've got bigger problems. Like dying prematurely from heart disease.
You don't need to be able to take that class, or build your treadmill torture machine. You already have all you need to get into reasonable shape.
At the time, Shankman worked (scroll down) for himself (PDF CV).
Remember, sales and marketing types are the ones that are not fired.
I'm not disputing the benefit of broadening your horizons by getting a business degree. In fact, I'm a big proponent of including business breadth requirements in technical fields, especially CS and the life sciences.
But sales and marketing drones are inevitably the first to be fired, in every recession that I or my parents have lived through.
The article made me cringe, because it reflects my situation and the situation of some of my friends here in Montreal.
After twenty-odd years of a moribund economy, primarily due to the provincial government's questionable separatist agenda, things started picking up towards the beginning of the dot-com era.
Now, things are still pretty good ostensibly, but from what I've seen from being out of a job since May, things are looking quite bad under the surface.
We're still seeing a boom in construction, but it's mainly due to the completion of condo projects planned in the late-90s. The glut of condo construction is creating problems for an weakening economy; many were conversions and virtually no rental construction took place. This decreased the amount of rental space available and drove up rent. We're seeing 0.5% vacancy rates in a place that has traditionally been a renter's paradise.
In fact, things look kind of grim now. I'm not the only one amongst my acquaintances to be still looking after almost a year out of a job, and these include marketing people, managers, front-end people (you know, the JavaScript-and-HTML folks Slashdot readers seem to revile so much) as well as hardcore coders.
Part of the city's boom was due to the provincial mandate to bring in high tech jobs by encouraging companies to set up shop here, or to start up here. From government subsidies (we'll give you almost free money if we like you and you become our political friends) which brought Infogrames (of Civilization 3 fame) here to questionable projects like the Cité du Multimédia -- intended to be centres of excellence -- the high tech boom here really parallels that of the so-called New Economy": the ups and the downs.
A lot of companies that shouldn't have started up in the first place were sustained by government money. Or international companies set up huge programming shops here for the subsidies and tax breaks, and close up shop when they run out. We are well into the downside the Americans experienced several months ago.
What does that mean? Personally, it meant working at a record store, and living on savings to go back to school to finish my degree. It may mean more working at a minimum-wage job until things pick up some more. It's not that bad (well maybe it was; the record store, a country-wide chain with a great deal of fame, ended up going out of business this fall due to crappy dot-com style mismanagement), but it certainly is underemployment in the vein of the guy now working as a USPS employee.
I'm hoping things pick up this summer when I start looking for a job.
And now, AOL is denying rumours that they are eyeing Red Hat. Hrm.
CNet talks about acquiring a desktop OS as a tool to keep Microsoft at bay. But they point out, as I did earlier, that Linux is a non-starter for the desktop in most of the world, but may make sense for AOL in developing countries.
Kind of makes you wonder if AOL considered purchasing Be instead. It certainly would have been a cheaper buy.
It also would give them a more user friendly operating system with a familiar, functioning, and coherent/unified WIMP interface (yes, Linux with KDE or Gnome is IMHO still not ready for the average user's desktop).
And finally, it would give them an OS that is certainly cutting edge multimedia-wise.
Julian
> how OSS contributes to "Homeland defense"
Just how does OSS contribute to Homeland defense? Are we talking about the various milspec Linuxes that are under development?
some Japanese researchers who have developed eyes biologically
Forget Steve Austin. Anyone think of Blade Runner when they saw this?
"Japan's contribution is the Kibo, a laboratory to be launched and assembled on the ISS starting in September of 2004."
The name of that module is unfortunate on so many levels.